Conspiracy theories are stories. Yet while scholars have studied their spread and their believers extensively, we still only have a rudimentary sense of how conspiracy theories themselves function. This book investigates the common structure of conspiracy theories; how they are built, why they spread, and why they are so resilient to contradiction. I begin with the examples of blood libel and the criminal charge of conspiracy that proliferated in the 12th-14th centuries to argue that medieval conspiracy theories set the rules and expectations for the genre that persist into the present. The majority of the book is transhistorical, investigating the narrative principles that emerge from a genre designed to provoke racial violence.

This book arose out of my sense that treating conspiracy theorists as duped believers misses the mark. If conspiracy theories only appeal to the gullible or mentally unstable, how have they entered mainstream discourse? Why do self-proclaimed apolitical theories like alien abduction often provoke political violence? And how do we reconcile a theory’s insatiable demand for evidence (no one loves physics like a Flat Earther does) with its resilience to counterevidence? In Evidence as Style, I trace the internal logic of conspiracy theories to demonstrate that their core is political radicalization, a core to which they are more loyal than any evidence.