The storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a true epiphany of radical Right mobilization. There is little doubt now that conspiracy theories have the potential to radicalize their believers to translate ideas into action. We have seen the pattern before: terrorist manifestos from so-called ‘lone wolf’ perpetrators, like those of the Oslo, Christchurch, Halle and Hanau attacks, are saturated with conspiratorial imagination that made their lethal violence possible.
But while these perpetrators were portrayed as social outcasts and individual exceptions lacking support communities (which, of course, is essentially wrong), the mob attack against US democracy can best be explained by the general affinity between conspiracy beliefs and radical Right populism.
Conspiracy theories are not the ghost light guiding those single ‘lunatic’ perpetrators (i.e terrorists), but floodlights blinding the masses to subscribe to alternative realities. But why is populism so prone to conspiratorial imagination?
