A Left-Wing Case for Conspiracy Theory

In February 2010, the controversial Fox News host Glenn Beck devoted a segment of his show to a little-known tract entitled The Coming Insurrection, which had first appeared in France five years earlier and was just about to appear in English translation. For Beck, the message of the text, collectively authored by a French ultraleftist group calling itself the Invisible Committee, was clear and terrifying. “People on the extreme left are calling people to arms,” he warned. “It’s about to play out in the streets.” The manifesto’s presumed authors, he noted, had been arrested for sabotaging electricity lines in France two years earlier.