Boycotts, mockery, and leaders under attack: On the uses of “conspiracy”in political and journalistic discourse

This chapter focuses on everyday and ordinary public talk about conspiracy in the Italian political and journalistic field. Overall, it analyzes how conspiracy, explicitly mentioned or evoked, is normally used in interactions and disputes between political parties, and it reconstructs some of the events and discursive junctures that, over the past three decades, have shaped the conspiracy theories currently predominant in the political arena. After a brief outline of the origins of such normality in public talk about conspiracy as a device for both accusation and defense, it describes a chain of discursive events where the trivialization of conspiracy, and especially the derision of some politicians, backfire on their creators. It then analyzes the conspiracy theories that have shrouded accounts of the neo-fascist assault on the headquarters of the CGIL national labor union; an assault which some have called Italy's Capitol Hill. Finally, the chapter turns to conspiracy evocations in the current government (as of 2022) and their implications for policies and strategies seemingly intended to change the constitutional balance of power.