TITLE:
The Racial Politics of Misinformation: How Nostalgia Narratives Enable Conspiracy Receptivity in Political Discourse
AUTHORS:
Zara Zaidi, Ridley Sendow
KEYWORDS:
Nostalgia, Conspiracy Theories, Racial Resentment, Social Identity Theory, Misinformation, American Politics
JOURNAL NAME:
Sociology Mind,
Vol.16 No.4,
October
23,
2026
ABSTRACT: American political rhetoric often invokes a lost national golden age, a period of prosperity and security to be restored. This paper argues that such nostalgia is rarely neutral: it tends to glorify a period when a particular group held a secure, dominant position, while remaining silent about whose subjugation made that golden age possible for others. Drawing on Social Identity Theory and research on collective nostalgia, it proposes that this selective remembrance manufactures a sense of outgroup threat, and that this threat is hypothesized to supply the conditions under which conspiracy explanations become appealing, a path it calls the racialized-nostalgia gateway. Three cases illustrate the pattern at rising scales: the birther movement, which questioned the legitimacy of the nation’s first Black president; the Great Replacement theory, which imagines the nation’s demographic future as a plot against it; and the 2020 “Big Lie,” which recast a national election as a theft. The paper states the conditions under which the pattern should not hold. It addresses the leading counterargument that these patterns reflect partisanship and the psychology of political loss rather than race. It closes by considering what the argument implies for the work of countering misinformation.