The coming of ‘critical religion theory’
Anyone paying attention the past year has surely noticed a surge in online conspiratorial narratives. It seems as though every week the usual suspects—Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Ian Carroll—connect new dots to uncover secret conspiracies. Public exposure of this major trend began when Tucker Carlson hosted a revisionist history session with Darryl Cooper (whom Carlson deemed “the most honest and august historian in America”) in September 2024. In that episode, Cooper said that “Churchill was the chief villain of World War II” and that the concentration camps responsible for the death of 6 million Jews were the result of poor planning.
At the time, it seemed as though this was just an isolated discussion about incorrect history, thoroughly debunked by historians. But soon, what started as a historical debate became a movement itself. Podcasters began relitigating Jewish history, Zionism, 9/11, the Iraq War, drug crises, and the moon landing.
Since then, writers and thinkers have been trying to understand this phenomenon, with many theories being offered. For some, those on the “woke right” are staunch isolationists, born in the post-Iraq world, and they’ve gone too far, with theories of neocons used to bludgeon any desire for intervention, no matter how small. A more cynical read is that the true motivation is profit, and the most profitable tactic is by way of incendiary claims sure to go viral. A third possibility is that these actors have always had antiestablishment skepticism, and it is President Trump who has changed course.
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Josh Appel is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
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