Jews are at the roots of most of the major conspiracy theories. A secret cabal who runs the government? That may be a QAnon tenet these days, but it’s originally from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a made-up pamphlet purporting to detail the Jewish plan for global domination. Bloodsucking lizard people? That one…
No one looks to porn for its great morals and upstanding behavior; even ethically-made porn, which ensures respect, safety and good pay for everyone on set, can depict BDSM scenes that (consensually!) hurt or humiliate the participants, which many people find troubling. Mainstream porn sites, meanwhile, struggle to regulate revenge porn and underage porn, and…
Spike Lee’s searching curiosity makes him one of our best and most eclectic filmmakers. But sometimes he may be asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. As Jeremy Stahl reported Tuesday in Slate, in an advanced cut of the final episode of Lee’s new documentary miniseries on HBO, “NYC Epicenters 9/11–2021½,” the director devoted…
For a while now, Sacha Baron Cohen has had an issue with juggling multiple personas. On the one hand, as Borat, Bruno and his coterie of characters on “Who is America,” he is a cartoonish sounding board for America’s worst qualities. On the other, he is an increasingly serious out-of-character activist, a full-throated opponent of…
The meme that sent Melissa Rein Lively fully into the universe of QAnon was about the Holocaust. “I’ll never forget the image,” she said in a recent interview. “The meme that I saw that changed everything for me was a picture of Jews basically being put on a boxcar with masks, saying, ‘First they put…
The Hasidic doctor behind an unsubstantiated treatment for coronavirus espoused anti-vaccine and conspiracist views in a video circulating on WhatsApp among Haredi, or Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, the man behind a treatment regimen involving the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine adopted by President Donald Trump, said in an undated interview with an Israeli rabbinical leader that…
This weekend, in another totally normal development, President Donald Trump floated the idea of absconding to another country. Facing dire polling and debtsand court cases set to activate should he lose a second term, he wondered aloud what he’d do if Joe Biden emerges victorious in November. “I’m not gonna feel so good,” Trump said…
An essay written by a former national security adviser to President Trump about an impending Democratic coup tied to George Soros has swept online spaces popular with conspiracy theorists and QAnon believers, and also penetrated more mainstream publications over the last two weeks. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank that studies extremism,…
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