It's the Algorithm, Stupid!

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• It's the Algorithm, Stupid!
• Clare Birchall (bio) and Peter Knight (bio)

alt-america: the rise of the radical right in the age of trump
David Neiwert
Verso
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2801-alt-america
464 pages; Print, $19.95 red pill, blue pill: how to counteract the conspiracy theories that are killing us
David Neiwert
Rowman & Littlefield
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781633886261/Red-Pill-Blue-Pill-How-to-Counteract-the-Conspiracy-Theories-That-Are-Killing-Us
232 pages; Print, $28.95 social warming: the dangerous and polarising effects of social media
Charles Arthur
Oneworld Publications
https://oneworld-publications.com/work/social-warming/
352 pages; Print, $18.95 the chaos machine: the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world
Max Fisher
Quercus Publishing
https://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/titles/max-fisher/the-chaos-machine/9781529416367/
352 pages; Print, $29.00 they knew: how a culture of conspiracy keeps america complacent
Sarah Kendzior
Flatiron Books
https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/sarah-kendzior/
256 pages; Print, $29.99

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What drives the visibility and the virality of conspiracy theories in the United States and elsewhere today, especially in the online world? In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of QAnon, and the storming of the Capitol, many writers—both academics and journalists—have addressed this question in a flood of books. Some have focused on the increasing political polarization and the lurch to right-wing populism. Others have argued that our innate psychological weakness is now being exploited by manipulators both domestic and foreign. Some have suggested that the rise of conspiracism is an inevitable consequence of the financial incentives, technological affordances, and the libertarian ethos of social media companies. Some have even insisted that these conspiracy theories—no matter how seemingly bizarre—are an understandable response to the normalization of corruption and conspiracy in US political life.

The journalist David Neiwert has been covering right-wing violent extremism in the United States for over two decades. In Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (2017) and Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us (2022) he charts the history of how the alt-right and its ideology of white nationalism came to influence contemporary American politics, becoming not only mainstream but, with Trump as the conspiracy-monger-in-chief in the White House, no longer stigmatized. He traces the story from the rise of the militias and Patriot groups in the 1990s, through the Tea Party movement in the 2010s, and then onto the age of Trump. (The two books overlap, with the first focused more on detailing the backstory, the latter on strategies for tackling conspiracism.) In Alt-America Neiwert argues that this "alternative America" is "largely the creation of an increasingly entrenched conspiracy industry [End Page 11] that generates one theory after another about the truth that lies behind the public narrative generated in the mainstream media." This conspiracism relies on a populist ideology of producerism, in which the freedom of honest, hardworking Americans is being eroded by shadowy, globalist elites above (the New World Order) and un-American scroungers below, which is often inflected through forms of white nationalism, white supremacism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and misogyny. As Neiwert shows (and Frida Beckman's recent book The Paranoid Chronotope explores at greater length), an imagined loss of status is central to these forms of white, masculine paranoia: "Conspiracy theories offer explanations as to why the country is no longer what they wish it to be, why it has become unrecognizable. These narratives come to represent deeper truths about their world, while repeatedly reinforcing their long-held prejudices."

This constellation of radical right-wing fears first came to prominence with the militia movement in the 1990s, fueled in part by an increasingly partisan—and deregulated—media landscape, including talk radio and Fox News. But that upsurge faded away with the acts of domestic terrorism such as the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. However, Neiwert identifies 9/11 as the moment when the radical right returned and went mainstream, with the groundswell of Islamophobia. He documents how the...