In the week after Gone Girl opened at the top of the box office with a robust $37 million, Naomi Wolf, the author of The Beauty Myth and onetime political advisor most famous for questioning Al Gore’s alpha-maleness, posted a series of, to say the least, questionable conspiratorial rantings on Facebook. The Isis beheading videos, she suggested, were fakes; the bereft parents of the victims, featured so often on the news, were actors, and by the way, Obama was sending American troops to Africa to bring back Ebola as a pretense to institute martial law. Wolf’s theories were disarmingly similar, in form if not in content, to the kind of “false flag” narratives perpetrated by commentators like the radio host Alex Jones and, once upon a time, Glenn Beck: tales of Fema camps, black helicopters, and shadow governments. In fact, Wolf’s suggestions follow the rough outline of several persistent and,...