COLUMBIA
JOURNALISM
REVIEW
SPRING
2021:
H aley
M lotek 7 7
Looks Authentic The aesthetics of conspiracy
by Haley Mlotek Illustration by Richard A. Chance
1. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter, writing about what he called the “Paranoid Style in American Politics,” observed that its distinguishing trait was a “curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events.” On January 6, as I watched the Capitol riot unfolding, I knew that I was seeing as much as I reasonably could and also nothing close to the full picture. For weeks, I had been touring the websites and social platforms of far-right extremists, noticing how recollection lends itself to flourish, and how certainty, in the same way, tends toward oversimplification. The violence of the day—five people died—made widely visible what had, for years, metastasized across online forums.
Right-wing extremist media—the fractured, disparate representation of communities with various degrees of fascist sympathies—has an essentially reactionary aesthetic, in that it presents a distorted reflection of mainstream outlets, which are held up as a standard to be subverted, a threat to be eradicated. “I think the people who are attracted to these sources very often believe their legitimacy comes from what they are not,” Matt Goerzen, a researcher at Data & Society, a research nonprofit, told me. Theories and “information” appear in a discussion thread, where they proliferate anonymously and are disseminated atmospherically, negating credit and creation. This encourages a reading that tries to reconcile contradictions: the
