THE CONSPIRASPHERE
RUSSIAGATE REVISITED
hen Richard Hofstadter wrote about the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics, he attributed this mode of thinking to the more marginal groups in the political landscape. Jesse Walker, in the magisterial , showed that the paranoid style was by no means confined to the lunatic fringes of American politics; governments, and the major parties, are equally prone to seeing shadowy forces at work in the darker recesses of history. Curiously, it is Hofstadter’s narrower, more biased definition that has held the foreground in studies of conspiracy theory, and
