America's urban systems of conspirituality

Millions of Americans believe Donald Trump's claim that the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was ‘rigged’. This commentary presents evidence of the remarkably diverse acceptance of this claim in the American population. For nearly half a century, ever since Reagan, right-wing operatives have been working to capture and return fire with the most advanced analytical tools of the post-structuralist academic Left. In the last dozen years these strategies have been ruthlessly effective in the complex algorithmic spaces of media and communications that reproduce dynamic hierarchies of the legendary ‘urban systems’ paradigm of linguistics and cybernetics that once dominated urban research. Today these systems are evolving into cognitive infrastructures that accelerate the production and circulation of conspiracy and faith, producing bizarre intersectional configurations of the sort that culminates in the 2025 re-inauguration of a revanchist, eschatological American anti-urbanism nurtured on hatred of transnational cultural evolution.