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In both popular culture and academe, renewed interest in conspiracy theories (CTs) has followed in the wake of the recent global rise of far-right extremism. Examples abound: allegations that Hilary Clinton ran a child-trafficking ring from a Washington pizza parlour gained momentum during the 2016 US elections; survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 have been portrayed as crisis actors hired to advance gun-prohibition policies; QAnon supporters aver that Donald Trump has defended US democracy against the ‘deep state’, namely political and economic elites that supposedly control democratically elected governments from behind the scenes; more recently, voter fraud accusations were raised to counter Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election; and during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has furthered theories that the virus was created in a laboratory in China to advance its plans of economic domination, while in Brazil Jair Bolsonaro has championed smear campaigns against health authorities and the media, undermining their recommendations for masks and physical distancing. This overlap between CTs and far-right extremism is not that surprising for at least two reasons. On the one hand, CTs flourish in moments of stark social change because they serve as explanatory devices to make sense of events that threaten existing worldviews (Douglas et al, 2019). On the other, studies seem to suggest that right-wingers (and authoritarian ones at that) are more prone to foster conspiracy thinking due to their need to manage uncertainty which, in turn, provides grounds for extremism (Richey, 2017).
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Bergman, E. (2020) Neo-nationalism: The Rise of Nativist Populism, London: Palgrave.
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Borba, R. (2021) Disgusting politics: circuits of affects and the making of Bolsonaro, Social Semiotics, https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2020.1810554.
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Douglas, K.M., Uscinski, J.E., Sutton, R.M., Cichocka, A., Nefes, T., Ang, C.S. and Deravi, F. (2019) Understanding conspiracy theories, Political Psychology, 40(1): 3–35. doi: 10.1111/pops.12568
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Kalil, I., Silveira, S., Pinheiro, W., Kalil, A., Pereira, J.V., Azarias, W. and Amparo, A. (2021) Politics of fear in Brazil: Far-right conspiracy theories on COVID-19, Global Discourse, 11(3): 409–425. doi:10.1332/204378921X16193452552605
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Mbembe, A. (2019) Necropolitics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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McIntosh, J. (2020) Crybabies and snowflakes, in J. McIntosh and N. Mendoza-Denton (eds) Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 74–87.
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McIntosh, J. and Mendoza-Denton, N. (2020) Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Oliver, E. and Wood, T. (2014) Medical conspiracy theories and health behaviors in the United States, JAMA International Medicine, 174(5): 817–18. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.190
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Pechim, L. (2020) Negros morrem mais pela Covid-19. Faculdade de Medicina da UFMG, 24 November, www.medicina.ufmg.br/negros-morrem-mais-pela-covid-19/.
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Procházka, O. and Blommaert, J. (2021) Ergoic framing in new right online groups: Q, the MAGA kid, and the Deep State theory, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1): 4–33.
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Ribeiro, M. (2021) Brasil, 200 mil mortes por Covid: 200 frases de Bolsonaro minimizando a pandemia, Yahoo! Notícias, 7 January, https://br.noticias.yahoo.com/200-frases-de-bolsonaro-minimizando-a-pandemia-do-coronavirus-203647435.html.
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Richey, S. (2017) A birther and a truther: the influence of the authoritarian personality on conspiracy beliefs, Politics & Policy, 45(3): 465–85.
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Silva, D. (2020) The pragmatics of chaos: parsing Bolsonaro’s undemocratic language, Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 59(1): 507–37.
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Wodak, R. (2021) Crisis communication and crisis management during COVID-19, Global Discourse, 11(3): 329–353. doi:10.1332/204378921X16100431230102
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Wood, M. and Douglas, K.M. (2013) ‘What about building 7?’ A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories, Frontiers in Psychology, 4(409): 1–9. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00409
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