There used to be a kind of conspiracy theory that, however wrong, at least tried. It marshaled evidence, connected dots, named the shadowy operators. The new conspiracism is something else entirely: no proofs, no patterns, no operators — just innuendo and bare assertion. A lot of people are saying.

In this episode, we chat with Mert Can Bayar — political scientist, postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, and one of the first scholars to take seriously what conspiracism is doing to democracies, not just to individuals. His dissertation, The Politics of Good and Evil, traces partisan conspiracy theories through the parallel democratic erosions of Turkey and the United States.

Why those two countries? What does it mean that Turkish political culture has been "built on conspiracism" since the Tanzimat era — and what changes when an entire nation comes to embody itself in a single paranoid spokesperson? Why did Erdoğan grow into conspiracism while Trump arrived already fluent? And — Mert Can's most counterintuitive finding — what do we make of the fact that partisan conspiracy theories actually increase political participation? Is that good news? Or is it precisely the trap?

We also spend some time with the question Bruno Latour kept asking before he died: where exactly is the line between the paranoid fantasy and the popularized version of social critique we teach our students?

More on Mert Can Bayar: LinkedIn · CIP profile · personal site

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In 2014, a year after Gezi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan moved into a 1,100-room palace built on Atatürk's protected forest farm — in defiance of court orders that ruled it illegal. In October 2025, Trump's crews demolished the East Wing of the White House to break ground on a $400 million ballroom, financed by anonymous corporate donors with active business before the federal government; this spring, he unveiled plans for a 250-foot triumphal arch across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial. When asked whom the arch was meant to honor, Trump replied: "Me."

This week on It All Happened Before, we sit with the strange, telling pattern of leaders who build colossal monuments to themselves at the precise moment they believe the institutional resistance is broken. Both projects are bunkered — Erdoğan's against biological and nuclear attack, Trump's housing a classified military complex underneath the ballroom floor. Both involved demolitions that overwrote an older symbolic order: Çankaya, where every Turkish president since Atatürk had worked; the East Wing, the traditional working space of First Ladies. Both bypassed the courts and the planning bodies meant to constrain them, often with the courts then being remade in the leader's image. And both, in different ways, are being normalized.

We trace the comparative pattern — from Ceaușescu's Casa Poporului to Hitler's Reichskanzlei, Tito's bunker at Konjic — and ask the question that should unsettle American listeners: a decade ago, Erdoğan's palace generated discussion and outrage. Today, it's just where the president lives. How long does that normalization take?

Building on our conversations about institutions, personalities, and the “strongman myth,” we examine how political dynasties are constructed—not just in the U.S. and Turkey, but across the world. From the Bush family to the Trudeaus, this isn’t new. But the scale, stakes, and consequences may be different. What happens when (very)underqualified relatives are handed extraordinary power? How do these networks shape economies, foreign policy, and democratic norms? And what are the real-world consequences—from economic crises to global conflict?

This episode asks a simple but urgent question: when power stays in the family, how do we pay the price?

Matt Powers is a Professor of Communication at the University of Washington and Co-Director of its Center for Journalism, Media and Democracy. He is the author of The Journalist's Predicament: Difficult Choices in a Declining Profession (Columbia University Press, 2023) and NGOs as Newsmakers: The Changing Landscape of International News (Columbia University Press, 2018). In his recent article with Ozan Asik, An Ethics of Suppression: How Professional Values Silence Critical Journalism in Turkey, he takes us inside Turkish newsrooms to show how journalists navigate — and survive — under authoritarian pressure. (He also has a (very) close connection to one of our hosts!)

What he found is unsettling: editors suppressing critical reporting while genuinely believing they are protecting the space for journalism to survive. At what point does maintaining the appearance of a functioning newsroom become indistinguishable from providing cover for its capture?

And the question Turkish journalists learned the hard way: most people can't just leave. So what does staying and continuing to do the work actually look like — inside a system that is increasingly hostile to the journalism you came to do?

Dr. Bilge Yesil is a Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island and affiliate faculty in Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State and, most recently, Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order — and she knows this terrain better than almost anyone.

In this conversation, we ask her to walk us through both sides of how capture actually works: the coercive moves — arrests, closures, the blunt instruments — and the quieter, more durable ones: advertising leverage, debt dependencies, ownership consolidation. (Sound familiar? We talk about the Demirören family. We talk about Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post.)

And then we ask the question we really wanted answered: for Americans watching declining ad revenues, shuttered newsrooms, and leaders who call journalists the enemy — what does Turkey's experience tell you about where to look? And what are you probably still not seeing?

In this episode of It All Happened Before, Ekin and Burcu explore what elections look like inside a competitive authoritarian system: formally intact, fiercely contested, and deeply uncertain. With Americans worried about whether the 2026 midterms will even be held, Turkey's story offers a sobering reframing — the greater danger isn't that elections stop. It's that they become fragile enough to doubt, confusing enough to suppress participation, and contested enough to be dismissed whenever the results are inconvenient.

It All Happened Before is a conversation between two people who grew up watching democracy erode in Turkey — and who now see the patterns repeating in the country they also call home.

In our first episode, we talk about why we started this project, what firsthand experience with authoritarianism actually teaches you, and how we hold onto ourselves while living across two countries in two different stages of a similar story.