Deep State Conspiracism and/as Disinformation: A Journey to the Heart of Democracy’s Truth Crisis

Abstract

This article explores deep state (DS) conspiracism’s ambiguous relationship with disinformation. Applying cross-cultural discourse analysis and genealogical methods to the divergent valorizations of DS narratives, the study shows how they portray it variously as disinformation, misinformation, sinister actuality, mythological truth, and conceptual tool, arguing this inconsistency impels us to relocate disinformation from a universalist realm of false content to a contingent world of reciprocal political meaning making and outlining a more epistemologically robust approach to the truth-democracy relationship.