Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Have you heard the one about Isis and the ‘Ebola bomb’?

Isis has the Ebola bomb. So be very, very afraid.

If you’re a nutjob, that is. The conspiracy website Before It’s News reports that ‘whistleblower and former police officer’ Greg Evensen has discovered that ‘Isis now has the weaponised Ebola virus, here in America!’

Evensen also reveals who’s pulling the strings of Isis. Yup: Barack Obama. Surprisingly, the website omitted the President’s middle name, but I imagine its readers are pretty familiar with it anyway.

This is a conspiracy theory of (mostly) angry rednecks. But we shouldn’t’ be surprised if it pops up in African-American and Muslim communities – both, in their different ways, hungry markets for these fantasies.

Articles about young British Muslims volunteering to join Isis focus too much on the supposed apocalyptic logic of Islamism and too little on the circulation of what I call counterknowledge – ‘deviant’ information that’s rejected by intellectual orthodoxy but seized upon by society’s fringes.

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