"Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum... write at the beginning of “A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy”... it’s been out-of-power groups that have been drawn to tales of secret plots. Today, it’s those in power who insist the game is rigged, and no one more insistently than the so-called leader of the free world... As government agencies “lose competence and capacity, they will come to look more and more illegitimate to more and more people,” The Internet revolution “has displaced the gatekeepers, the producers, editors, and scholars who decided what was worthy of dissemination,” Is it possible to make a rigorous study of conspiracy theories? ...Research into conspiracy theories “has been hampered by a lack of long-term systematic data,” Uscinski and Parent, political scientists at the University of Miami and the University of Notre Dame, respectively, write in “American Conspiracy Theories.” Fortunately, “methods are now available to better scrutinize what we think we know.”"