Conspiracy Theories

On this month's subscriber-only podcast I explain my criticisms of 21st Century Wire and Patrick Henningsen in particular.

-by NoahYou know how Trump voters all think that reality is all fake news just because it gets in the way of their paranoid and hate-filled fantasies? Their fake news thing is so bad that they think Hillary Clinton runs a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza shop in suburban Washington. They think Obama was born in a place they can't even find on a map.

The Trumpist forces of authoritarianism are circling the wagons. Trump and his allies have no intention of going down quietly and care not a whit of what damages they do to a constitutional democracy— which they abhor anyway— in the process of preserving their own grasp on power.

Pearse invited me onto PPR to talk 2017: the highs, the lows, the overrated, the underrated, and Trump.  We discuss our favourite film and TV of the year, the most overblown news stories, the most important news that didn’t get the attention it deserves and reflect on why this has been a good year for […](Read more...)

What is fake news? Where did it come from and why is it so profitable? In this week’s episode I consider whether fake news is a new thing, or simply a newly-popular name for methods of deceit that have existed for centuries. I explore the idea that it is simply a popular recognition of an […](Read more...)

Of all the US intelligence agencies, the FBI has the longest-running relationship with Hollywood. From spying on A-listers as to helping blacklist screenwriters, through to manipulating scripts for PR and propaganda purposes, the Bureau’s influence on Tinseltown is very broad. Using documents from throughout the FBI’s history, today we’re going to look at this relationship and ask: whatever happened about that Sony hack?(Read more...)

Arthur Ransome was a well-known children’s author, best known for his series of adventure books beginning with Swallows and Amazons. He was also close friends with the Bolshevik leadership and married Trotsky’s secretary. Meanwhile, he was spying for British intelligence, and being spied on by British intelligence as a suspected Communist.

Today I am joined by old friend Pearse Redmond to review and discuss the Netflix TV series American Vandal, a mockumentary that satirises the true crime genre. Pete Maldonado is a student at a high school in California who starts making a documentary about a fellow student, Dylan Maxwell, who was expelled for graffitti-ing dicks on 27 teachers cars. He soon finds that Dylan is probably innocent, and he and his co-producer Sam set out to find the true culprits and figure out what is really going on.

In this month's subscriber podcast I look at recent spate of allegations - and in some cases more than allegations - against a string of Hollywood bigwigs and media celebrities. I examine the selective media dialogue around these events, and how it poisons everything it touches and is deeply sexist in all directions at once.

Mainstream and online media outlets have been pouring over the release of thousands of documents pertaining to the JFK assassination. But the result, near as I can tell, appears to be that we’ve learnt a great deal – and nothing at all. And this was probably how it was meant to be. Although the files […]