In both popular culture and academe, renewed interest in conspiracy theories (CTs) has followed in the wake of the recent global rise of far- right extremism. Examples abound: allegations that Hilary Clinton ran a childtrafficking ring from a Washington pizza parlour gained momentum during the 2016 US elections; survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 have been portrayed as crisis actors hired to advance gun- prohibition policies; QAnon supporters aver that Donald Trump has defended US democracy against the ‘deep state’, namely political and economic elites that supposedly control democratically elected governments from behind the scenes; more recently, voter fraud accusations were raised to counter Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election; and during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has furthered theories that the virus was created in a laboratory in China to advance its plans of economic domination, while in Brazil Jair Bolsonaro has championed smear campaigns against health authorities and the media, undermining their recommendations for masks and physical distancing.

This overlap between CTs and far- right extremism is not that surprising for at least two reasons. On the one hand, CTs flourish in moments of stark social change because they serve as explanatory devices to make sense of events that threaten existing worldviews (Douglas et al, 2019). On the other, studies seem to suggest that right- wingers (and authoritarian ones at that) are more prone to foster conspiracy thinking due to their need to manage uncertainty which, in turn, provides grounds for extremism (Richey, 2017). Defined as ‘allegations that powerful people and organizations are plotting together in secret to achieve sinister ends through deception of the public’ (Wood and Douglas, 2013:1), CTs offer right- wing authoritarian populists the discursive and affective grounds for pitting ‘the people’ against a cunning progressive elite that plans to destroy the status quo. The internet has catapulted this dangerous coupling to unprecedented levels (Prochazka and Blommaert, 2021). Nowadays, there is no shortage of CTs online, and far- right populists in the US and elsewhere have capitalised on them for political gain.