Two phenomena marked 2020 as a summer unlike any other: the global surge of COVID-19 and widespread demonstrations against police killings of unarmed African Americans. In the United States, the federal government’s responses to the pandemic and protest have been intimately related. The White House manufactures and amplifies groundless accusations against scientists, activists, medical professionals, teachers, ordinary citizens, and anyone who contests the official version of the truth. Few Republican Party leaders are willing to challenge even the most outlandish suggestions or to accept responsibility for the spread of preventable death and suffering. A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum’s critical assessment of the “new conspiracism,” makes an invaluable intervention by clearly identifying the roots and likely consequences of this assault on democratic practices and norms. Written with remarkable economy, A Lot of People Are Saying traces the ascendance of the new conspiracism, identifies its distinctive threat to political parties and knowledge-producing institutions, and calls for the vigorous defense of truth and shared decision-making.

Conspiracist thinking is a long-standing feature of US political life, but Muirhead and Rosenblum demonstrate the particular dangers of today’s “conspiracy without the theory.” Offering neither a positive political vision nor an explanation for claims ranging from attacks on climate science to the idea that Barack Obama is not a US citizen, it “not only is averse to the mundane workings of democratic politics but assaults its institutions and practices wholesale” (p. 45). With the election of Donald Trump, furthermore, conspiracists have been empowered to stifle opposition and delegitimize core elements of democratic discourse, including a free press, expert knowledge, and skepticism.

Reading A Lot of People Are Saying in the midst of a global health crisis is illuminating. Although the book was published before the emergence of COVID-19, Muirhead and Rosenblum anticipate the astonishing degree to which medical authority has been sidelined or co-opted during the pandemic. That the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently revised its caution about reopening schools in the face of political pressure is disorienting in precisely the ways that Muirhead and Rosenblum describe. Their argument is also (modestly) heartening insofar as it insists that the defense of the truth and of practices of shared decision-making does not require heroism, only a willingness to “speak truth to conspiracism and pay attention to the pedagogical moments built into the everyday political life” (p. 165).

For all of its insight, however, A Lot of People Are Saying largely sidesteps a key dimension of the Trumpian worldview and the conspiracism it both feeds and feeds on. So many of the book’s examples—Trump’s claims about the immigration of “rapists” from Mexico or his Islamophobic travel policies or his response to the bloodshed in Charlottesville—depend, explicitly or tacitly, on asserting the prerogatives of whiteness. Not every new conspiracist claim reveals racial animus. Still, there is a striking through line from the “classic conspiracism” of the Declaration of Independence to contemporary assertions that supporters of Black Lives Matter are linked to ISIS. Where Muirhead and Rosenblum offer a compelling account of the differences between today’s conspiracist attacks and the colonists’ grievances against the crown, the Declaration’s complaint about “domestic insurrections” and the threat of “merciless Indian Savages” reflects a political culture that defines itself, and regularly defines truth, in opposition to the racialized others it both oppresses and fears. As thinkers as varied as Alexis de Tocqueville, Michael Rogin, and Toni Morrison have discerned, white Americans’ democratic commitments have long been predicated on differentiation from or the demonization of nonwhite life. From this angle, there is no “normal” operation of democratic political institutions or practices to which we might return, and the “common sense” that Muirhead and Rosenblum invoke invites further scrutiny.

Indeed, one of the striking features of the new conspiracism is its kinship with discursive practices that have legitimized and sustained anti-Black violence across US history. Ida B. Wells’s campaign against lynching at the turn of the twentieth century contended with many of the forces that Muirhead and Rosenblum’s book identifies. The idea of Black male criminality that served as pretense for the murder of African American men (and women and girls) constituted an “assault on reality” that sought “to replace evidence, argument, and a shared ground of understanding with convoluted conjurings and bare assertions” (p. 9). Indeed, Wells’s Southern Horrors (1892) and Red Record (1895) catalog the shifting, often trivial, justifications for individual acts of murder and note that white southerners only settled on the charge of interracial rape—“the old threadbare lie”—after floating claims about Black insurrection and voting power. If the specific aim was to delegitimize Black citizenship and disorient critics of white supremacy, the effect was to undermine the very possibility of constitutional democracy for all. Wells’s critique thus poses a question, echoed in today’s insistence that Black Lives Matter, about whether our current predicament is really so different from earlier attacks on the truth of human equality or the value of shared governance and the rule of law.

A Lot of People Are Saying makes a bracing and important contribution to our understanding of the peril of this political moment. Muirhead’s and Rosenblum’s diagnosis of the new conspiracism is most trenchant when it cuts through outrageous statements and baffling attacks on democratic norms to offer a sober account of their origins and effects. At the same time, Wells’s example indicates the urgency of studying and opposing the new-old conspiracism. It is this hybrid form, in which recently empowered nihilism is grafted onto long-standing white supremacist accusations and fantasies, that is poised to destroy democratic values and institutions in the United States. Insofar as the newly awful is not entirely unprecedented, finally, we ought to look to the work of Wells and other critics of the conspiracist thinking that fueled settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, and nativist repression of many kinds as models of what it means to bear witness when truth is on the run.