Conspiracy theories

For the first three days after Veruca Salt brought her baby son Cash home from the hospital, she couldn’t sleep. She just couldn’t stop staring at him.  “ I was so scared to just be alone with him. I have this baby and I didn’t have to do a quiz or anything? They’ve just given me this baby?” Salt, an Australian OnlyFans model and influencer, tells Rolling Stone. “But after that first hour alone with him, all that fear that I was going to do something wrong or that he wouldn’t like me, all of that was just gone. I…

Obsession works like an addiction. You feed it and feed it, falling down rabbit holes, pursuing your prey with single-minded intensity. You chase the dragon, until you are indistinguishable from the beast itself and the rest of the world slowly becomes a blurry background. The new Netflix docuseries American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders is about a great many things: a journalist who either committed suicide or was murdered; a government surveillance software program that the Department of Justice might have…

Parents are furious at a man who charged them as much as £35 (around $44) per ticket for a Willy Wonka-themed family event in Glasgow, Scotland this weekend. That’s because the “immersive” experience sold to them by a sketchy company called House of Illuminati turned out to be little more than a few set props and unprepared actors in a mostly barren warehouse — with no chocolate whatsoever. Customers, some of whom traveled from afar and waited in a long line with their children, were incensed enough to call the…

Taylor Swift has shattered virtually every major record in the music industry, and as she lives her best life supporting her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, she’s also breaking the brains of right-wingers.  For months now, the digital fever swamps have been fuming over everything and anything Swift-related. Her popularity, the success of the Eras Tour, her relationship, her appearances at NFL games, and especially her politics. The Chiefs won the AFC final on Sunday, punching the team’s (and…

“I believe wholeheartedly that I captured, that night, an angel on film,” Colette Reynolds said in a recent TikTok shared with her 2.2 million followers. Behind her was a photograph of a tree, at night, with a gauzy white shape visible on a branch. Reynolds, a professional-looking woman with glasses and curled blonde hair in a black turtleneck sweater, identified it as a seraphim, the highest order of angel in Christendom. She had taken the picture years ago, she said, at a low point in her life, explaining that…

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears Aaron Rodgers, who’s taken a grand total of four snaps as quarterback of the New York Jets, has lost his mind.  This week, during his weekly appearance on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show (or if a WWE wrestler on bath salts hosted a sports program), he sorta accused Jimmy Kimmel of associating with Jeffrey Epstein — exacting revenge against Kimmel for ragging on Rodgers and his public Covid vaccine skepticism in his late-night monologues. This latest outbursts follows a string of recent…

The Miami police showed up in force to respond to a disturbance at a downtown open-air mall on New Year’s Day after reports of teens brawling and setting off fireworks, ultimately arresting four individuals between the ages of 14 and 16. But with footage of the chaos and dozens of cop cars lined up alongside Bayside Market making the rounds online in the following days, it wasn’t long before a cohort of conspiracists had invented a very different story befitting The X-Files.…

Prominent conspiracy theorists — including Gen. Michael Flynn — are promoting an unfounded theory that pedophiles have been using Etsy to distribute child porn, sold under the guise of wildly expensive digital downloads of images of pizza. This new conspiracy theory has emerged from the fecund muck of QAnon and Pizzagate — both of which hold that the world is run by an unaccountable cabal of satanic child sex traffickers, and both of which thrive on decoding of supposed secret messages. The fixation with pizza…

In the recent chronicles of Elon Musk’s bizarre behavior, his tweets reviving the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory have been overshadowed by his endorsement of an antisemitic post, and the billionaire’s subsequent call for corporations that have pulled advertising from the X platform to “go fuck yourself.” But Musk’s Pizzagate tweets had an astonishing effect, according to a new paper from researchers at Montclair State University in New Jersey. The academics charted a more-than 9,500 percent increase in Pizzagate…

This recent spate of antisemitic content on X, and the juxtaposition of big-brand ads next to it, only underscores to advertisers that X is a risky bet, experts argue. “Even with those tools, if you’re an advertiser right now you’re thinking, there’s quite literally nothing I can do on this platform to improve my experience,” Carusone says.“The problem with X is not only that there's misinformation and antisemitic content on the platform and other hateful content as well, but that it's being spread by Musk himself,” says…