Category: Opinions

What happens when a political movement convinced of its widespread support suffers an electoral defeat?

In my latest article for The Cult Following, I examine the conspiracy theories that circulated among Alberta separatist supporters following the October 19 referendum results.

Drawing on examples from Facebook, Telegram, and X, the article explores allegations involving electoral fraud, Dominion voting machines, political interference, and ineligible voters. It also considers how online echo chambers can create distorted perceptions of political support.

Central to the analysis is the concept of constructed victimhood: the process through which perceived grievances and political setbacks become evidence of persecution, reinforcing collective identity and sustaining political mobilization.`

The article situates these responses within broader patterns of conspiracy belief, anti-immigration rhetoric, institutional distrust, and far-right political movements in Canada.

In my latest Substack essay, “What Happens When Propaganda Talks Back?”I examine how conversational artificial intelligence may change the ways extremist ideologies and conspiracy theories are communicated and experienced.

Drawing on reporting about the neo-Nazi chatbot MechaHitler, research into human AI relationships and political persuasion, and my own exploratory experience with AI-generated conspiracy content, I consider how personalization, apparent companionship, and ideological validation could alter the relationship between extremist messaging and its audiences.

The essay also connects these developments to my ongoing research into conspiracy theories and enchantment, asking whether the appeal of hidden knowledge might increasingly become intertwined with the relationship users develop with an artificial conversational partner.

While existing research does not establish that extremist AI chatbots cause radicalization, the essay identifies important questions about the future of propaganda, technological intimacy, and ideological influence.

Far-right movements do not operate on activism and political grievance alone. Behind their public demonstrations, online messaging, and organizing efforts is an intellectual infrastructure that helps preserve, circulate, and legitimize extremist ideas.

In my latest Substack article, Informing the Activists: The Intellectual Infrastructure of the Far Right, I examine the role of publishers, books, and ideological networks in sustaining contemporary far-right movements.

Drawing on examples including Vauban Books and the continued circulation of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, the article explores how older ideological texts are preserved, translated, repackaged, and introduced to new audiences.

The central question is not simply what far-right activists believe, but how those beliefs are maintained, transmitted, and given intellectual legitimacy across generations and national boundaries.

Understanding the far right requires examining not only the people organizing in public, but also those producing and circulating the ideas that inform their activism.

What if human suffering isn’t random, but something otherworldly beings deliberately manufacture and harvest?

Welcome to Prison Planet, loosh, and the dark enchantment of conspiracy theory.

My latest rabbit hole explores how conspiracies make suffering meaningful.

My latest piece examines the Senate Leadership Fund’s anti-transgender advertising campaign targeting Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

The substack examines how the campaign constructs narratives of childhood victimhood, threat, grievance, and protection, placing the advertisements within a broader political strategy in which transgender people are positioned as a danger to children and Republican candidates as their protectors.

It also explores the unusual legal environment surrounding false and misleading political advertising in the United States and connects the contemporary campaign to a warning made by Arthur Larson in 1963: American law could regulate false claims about something as mundane as the contents of a can of beans more readily than political falsehoods involving claims of existential national danger.

More than sixty years later, the paradox remains. When political power is the product being sold, protections against falsehood can be considerably weaker than those governing ordinary consumer products.

Days before the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, masked men appearing to be associated with Second Sons Canada displayed a “Got bones?” banner in Kamloops.

I looked at the response from Derek Harrison, DerekRants online, who identifies with Second Sons online, and his earlier posts about residential school burials. My new piece examines how denialism moves from online posts into public acts of intimidation and why the response matters.

Fear is trending.

Not just on X, but in our politics, our conspiracy theories, and increasingly in how we understand the world around us.

Who gets to decide which fears are “rational”? Who profits from keeping us afraid? And what happens when fear overwhelms critical thinking?

I wrote about fear, Trump, Carney, conspiracy theories, echo chambers—and the people making bank from our anxiety.

Grocery bills. Gas prices. Angry truckers. A rumoured October 1 strike. And a whole lot of fear circulating online.

This week I look at what happens when very real economic anxiety collides with social media, conspiracy theories and disinformation, and why a sense of helplessness can make simple explanations and promises of control so powerful.

Also, naturally, there’s a cocktail. 🍸

A senior U.S. official reportedly worried that a bull statue at an American exhibition could evoke Baal: the ancient deity who has recently acquired a very strange second life in online conspiracy culture.

That headline is funny.

What’s underneath it is much more interesting.

This week the unofficial Allison Inquiry was held in Ottawa, for those who were harmed by Covid Vaccines. Instead of stories, we find a complex web of conspiracies, sowing distrust of media, and what one organizers explains as a “Freedom Bubble”