Anna Merlan has been the senior reporter at Jezebel for the last several years, consistently producing some of their most widely-read and buzzed-about work. She’s also been researching, reporting, and thinking deeply on conspiracy theories for years – their import, their varied manifestations, and their roots and their roles in American life. Conspiracy theories have long been a force in American life. But now we have– remarkably — an American President who is a devoted conspiracy theorist, a spreader and benefactor of conspiracies, and deeply entwined with the previously somewhat marginalized conspiracy culture and its main figures.

There are profound international elements included as well, whether those have to do with the roles that conspiracies play in citizen’s lives in autocratic or opaque regimes throughout the world, or with figures like England’s David Icke and his popular and durable beliefs that “reptilian humanoids” are controlling the planet. Conspiracies have shifted in form and content, and recent events should have reminded us all of the seriousness with which they should be treated. With FALSE TIMES, she will deliver a narrative blend of analysis, history, and investigation of the worlds of conspiracy theorists, and will bring vividly alive for readers the followers and the leaders of the anti-Vaccine movement, Sovereign Citizens, those who deny the reality of Sandy Hook, Holocaust deniers, Flat-Earthers, those who await alien visits, and more.