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President Donald Trump acknowledged for the first time on Sunday that Joe Biden won the presidential election, but the President refused to concede and blamed his loss on a string of conspiracy theories.

Most news networks declared Biden the victor more than a week ago. Since the call was made, Biden has given a victory speech and gotten his transition team up and running.

"He won because the Election was Rigged," Trump said in one Sunday morning tweet.

About one-quarter of Republicans, 23%, agree with a set of conspiratorial beliefs linked to the QAnon movement, according to a PRRI report released Thursday. These believers said they mostly or completely agreed that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation," that "there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders," and, finally, that "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country."

A majority of Republicans, 56%, say they believe that the 2020 election was the result of illegal voting or election rigging, per an Ipsos/Reuters poll released last week, with about 6 in 10 agreeing with the statement that "the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump."

Attempting to quantify the precise share of the public who subscribe to a particular theory is often challenging -- the depth and intensity of people's beliefs vary, making it rarely as simple as a yes or no question. That's especially true in the case of QAnon, which the PRRI report describes as a "loosely connected belief system" that "involves a constantly evolving web of schemes."

At a pivotal moment on January 6, the veteran United States Capitol Police officer single-handedly prevented untold bloodshed. Staring down an angry, advancing mob, he retreated up a marble staircase, calmly wielding his baton to delay his pursuers while calling out their position to his fellow officers. At the top of the steps, still alone and standing just a few yards from the chamber where senators and Vice President Mike Pence had been certifying the Electoral College’s vote,

f the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls, we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies.

The anger being directed today at major internet platforms—Twitter, Facebook, and Google, especially—is, in part, a consequence of the fading of traditional political authority. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently, Americans have outsourced key parts of political life to Silicon Valley behemoths that were not designed to, and are not competent to, execute functions traditionally in the province of the government. The failure of our traditional political institutions and our traditional media to function as spaces for genuine political conversation has created a vacuum now filled by the social-media giants—who are even worse at the job.

virtually every speaker at Trump’s marathon rally. One after another, they looked at a seething, conspiracy-addled crowd and indulged, fed, and stoked every element of their furious worldview. I didn’t see a single true leader on Trump’s stage, not even Trump himself. I saw a collection of followers, each vying for the affection of the real power in Waco, the coddled populist mob.

To understand the social and political dynamic on the modern right, you have to understand how millions of Americans became inoculated against the truth

every time Trump faced pushback, he and his allies called critics “elitist” or “fake news” or “weak” or “cowards.” It was much easier to say the Trump skeptics had “Trump derangement syndrome,” or were “just establishment stooges,” than to engage with substantive critique

The Washington Post issued a correction 15 months after alleging Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was peddling a "debunked" "conspiracy theory" about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. 

"Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus," the correction read at the top of the report. "The term 'debunked' and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus."

Associated Press White House reporter Jonathan Lemire accused former President Trump and his allies of "practicing revisionist history," while New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman blamed him and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for casting doubt within the media for withholding evidence to back their claims. 

The first of my many blessings,” she told the Senate this week, “is the fact that I was born in this great nation.”

She is not an advocate of critical race theory or other progressive ideas about education. She has never taken a public position on hot-button school issues like whether young children should be taught about gender identity.

She has often praised law enforcement, including her proud mention this week that her brother and two of her uncles worked as police officers.

We’ve long known that Trump is so petty and insecure that he can’t stop himself from lashing out at anyone who criticizes him.

But now we have to seriously ask how long it’s going to be before his vindictiveness gets somebody killed.

as soon as Trump sent those missives out to his millions of followers, Jones’ phone started to ring with threats against him and his family.

Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.

And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?

Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.

Today, President Trump accused his predecessor, Bill Clinton—or possibly his 2016 campaign opponent, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—of complicity in the death of the accused sex-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.

Reactions to actions by Trump are always filtered through the prism of the ever-more-widely accepted view—within his administration, within Congress, within the United States and around the world—that the 45th president is a reckless buffoon, a conspiratorial racist moron, whose weird comments should be disregarded by sensible people

By now, Trump’s party in Congress, the members of his Cabinet, and even his White House entourage all tacitly agree that Trump’s occupancy of the office held by Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Eisenhower must be a bizarre cosmic joke, not to be taken seriously.

“All traitors must die miserable deaths,” a man from Michigan allegedly wrote in an email to Mark Zaid, the lawyer for the whistleblower who got the scandal rolling that ultimately resulted in President Trump’s impeachment. The man added: “We will hunt you down and bleed you out like the pigs you are.”

House Democrats didn’t seek the whistleblower’s testimony for a reason: not just to keep him safe, but also because the case against Trump had been broadly bolstered by a tremendous wealth of evidence on the public record.

despite this, Trump and his allies have kept up the attacks on the whistleblower and have engaged in transparent efforts to place him in danger. House Republicans kept insisting that the whistleblower testify, and even as late as Trump’s trial, Senate Republicans were threatening to haul him in.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Monday issued a tacit rebuke of controversial Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, slamming the Georgia Republican's "loony lies and conspiracy theories" as a "cancer" for the party.

"Somebody who's suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.'s airplane is not living in reality. This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party."

While McConnell did not name Greene directly, his statement stands as a scathing rebuke of the freshman Republican House member.

“Those people like Ebola. They’re becoming famous and successful from it,” hollers a middle-aged male parishioner wearing a black suit, near the end of an 8-minute ramble. “They can keep it. Ebola will never reach this church,”

Mention Ebola in Goma and you’ll hear a riot of rumors, half-truths, and conspiracy theories about the disease: that it doesn’t exist; that it’s been imported for financial gain; that it’s being used to kill people as part of an organ theft plot. A study published in September in the journal PLOS One found that 72% of respondents were dissatisfied with or mistrustful of the Ebola response and 12% believed that the disease “was fabricated and did not exist in the area.” Misinformation is a key factor in making the outbreak so difficult to stamp out

Long an incurable disease, Ebola may someday be preventable and treatable thanks to recent drug advances. Still, with an almost 70% fatality rate during this current outbreak, Ebola continues to be obscenely lethal. To survive it, early medical intervention is key. But Pastor Jules Mulindwa, a compact man with a receding hairline and a thin mustache, has his own protocol. While he doesn’t discount medical science, he doesn’t believe it’s necessary.

On Aug. 29, during a demonstration in Berlin against government restrictions to rein in the spread of the coronavirus, several hundred protesters climbed over fences around the Reichstag, the seat of Germany’s national Parliament, and ran toward the entrance. They were met by a handful of police officers, who pushed the crowd back and secured the entrance.

Still, even if the German protesters weren’t able to enter the building, the shock was similar: an assault on a democratically elected legislature. Some of the German protesters were far-right activists; several waved the “Reichsflagge,” the black, white and red flag of the German Empire, the colors of which were later adopted by the Nazis.

Was it a sign that our democracy was under threat? Or was this just a bunch of extremist rioters exploiting a blind spot in the police’s strategy?

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality

Many people point to the interne

One of the most lethal leadership failures in modern times unfolded in South Africa in the early 2000s as AIDS spread there under President Thabo Mbeki.Mbeki scorned science, embraced conspiracy theories, dithered as the disease spread and rejected lifesaving treatments. His denialism cost about 330,000 lives, a Harvard study found

“We’re unfortunately in the same place,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “Mbeki surrounded himself with sycophants and cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives by ignoring science, and we’re suffering the same fate.”

“I see it as a colossal failure of leadership,” said Larry Brilliant, a veteran epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox in the 1970s. “Of the more than 200,000 people who have died as of today, I don’t think that 50,000 would have died if it hadn’t been for the incompetence.”

I say you’re a pedophile not because I think you’re actually a pedophile but because it is an attack. Because it hurts you.

It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s a form of aggression. Things like the Q phenomenon are just this aggression writ large. I say you’re a pedophile because it is itself an act of aggression but also because it dehumanizes you. It’s a storyline that makes hurting you or killing you make more sense and be more exciting.

Trump doesn’t believe or not believe as you or I likely do. In fact, if you could sit Trump down sedated or under some kind of truth serum and ask why he was lying about some particular claim I think he would find the question almost bewildering. Someone like Trump finds what would be helpful to his needs or claims or interest in the particular moment and then says those things

By now, with worldwide infections at thirty-five million and counting, and with near-total silence on the part of the Chinese government, the market has become a kind of petri dish for the imagination.

One common Chinese conspiracy theory claims that the U.S. Army deliberately seeded the virus during the 2019 Military World Games, which were held in Wuhan that October. On the other side of the world, a number of Americans believe that the virus was released, whether accidentally or otherwise, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose research includes work on coronaviruses.

There’s no evidence to support these theories, and even the prevalent animal-market connection is unclear. There weren’t many wildlife dealers in the market—about a dozen stalls, according to most published reports—and Wuhan natives have little appetite for exotic animals.

The founder of the Oath Keepers militia had a 97-second phone call with a senior member of the group who minutes later took part in a military-style "stack" formation with other Oath Keepers to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to federal prosecutors.

The allegation emerged in court papers the Justice Department filed overnight in the case against 10 alleged members or associates of the Oath Keepers facing conspiracy and other charges in connection with the Capitol riot.

Prosecutors allege that the call, along with a series of text messages in an encrypted chat group called "DC OP: Jan 6 21," amount to "substantial evidence" of a conspiracy to try to stop Congress' certification of the Electoral College count.

The most popular link on Facebook about the Johnson & Johnson news was shared by a conspiracy theorist and self-described "news analyst & hip-hop artist" named An0maly who thinks the pandemic is a cover for government control. It's a stark example of what experts warn could be a coming deluge of false or misleading information related to the one-shot vaccine.

In the case of the post by An0maly, a Facebook representative said the company has taken action against previous posts of his that have broken the social media platform's rules. It broadly removed more than 16 million pieces of content over the past year related to COVID-19 misinformation, but because this specific post did not contain any factually incorrect information, it would stay up.

But that story shifted on Tuesday after federal health officials recommended a temporary halt in the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after a handful of reports about blood clots surfaced among the millions who have received the shot.