Conspiracy theories

Is there any defence against the tidal wave of online disinformation?

12 August 2023 9:00 am

Grotesque conspiracy theories merge and snowball, with serious global consequences. James Ball proposes a Digital Health System to counter the ‘pathogens’

Incoherent and conspiracy-fuelled: Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head reviewed

13 February 2021 9:00 am

‘History,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In…

tiktok

The useful idiots of TikTok

19 December 2020 4:03 am

Tyrants have always had useful idiots to whitewash their crimes but few have proven as useful and idiotic as those…

cuck

Am I a cuck?

16 December 2020 1:24 am

‘You’re a cuck, Tobes, an absolute cuck.’ My friend James Delingpole was furious. ‘Honestly, I thought I could depend on…

chinese twitter china

Twitter is in China’s pocket

3 December 2020 6:01 am

Twitter has been quick on the draw when responding to tweets by President Trump in the last month, as he…

trump 2024

The inevitability of Trump 2024

17 November 2020 1:15 am

Donald Trump’s increasingly outrageous attempts to contest the results of the US presidential election were given their absurd symbol early…

fake news

What Trump can learn from Boris in fighting fake news

31 October 2020 2:14 am

The US election has, once again, been plagued by a tide of disinformation and fake news. But don’t point the…

paranoid

The paranoid style in left-wing politics

19 October 2020 6:33 am

Did Donald Trump fake his battle with coronavirus to boost his standing in the polls? No, obviously not. He spent…

qanon

Liberals don’t need their own QAnon

15 October 2020 7:27 am

A general rule of thumb: when something seems too good to be true, it typically is. That often doesn’t stop…

qanon

Cuckoo Q: are the QAnon crowd as crazy as they seem?

21 August 2020 3:54 am

‘Have you guys been following 4Chan?’ asks Marjorie Taylor Greene in a 2017 video. A mysterious ‘patriot’ named ‘Q’, Greene…

Beware the super-spreaders of coronavirus conspiracy theories

2 March 2020 2:28 am

When a new virus is discovered, conspiracy theories often spread faster than the disease. I’ve been following the debate in…

Fairfax fools join the birther brigade

18 July 2017 8:30 pm

What else were they ever going to do? Two Green senators were forced to resign because they’re better at self-righteousness than…

What Hillary Clinton won’t find in Area 51

2 April 2016 9:00 am

Area of doubt Hillary Clinton has said that if she is elected she will open files on the US military…

The secret life of Sir John Major

23 January 2016 9:00 am

Putting old or contaminated petrol in a car needn’t be catastrophic, but in the Golf’s case it was. With 37,000…

Carl Jung meets David Icke (and writes a book of bonkers business-speak)

25 April 2015 9:00 am

What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question…

Reading the comments on my Ukip columns, I finally understand the Nazis

18 October 2014 9:00 am

Like many, I’ve always been a bit baffled by the story of the rise of Nazism. The Germans I’ve met…

The Annals of Unsolved Crime, by Edward Jay Epstein - review

27 July 2013 9:00 am

Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a…

Dark Actors, by Robert Lewis - review

6 July 2013 9:00 am

No book about Dr David Kelly could start anywhere other than at the end. Kelly is found, dead, in a…