The Church of the Algorithm: when conspiracy theory becomes faith online

Steven Monacelli

I'm Steven Monacelli. I'm an award winning investigative journalist in Dallas, Texas, where I primarily focus on extremism, disinformation, social movements, political astroturfing, and the influence of dark money in politics. I am a Special Investigative Correspondent for the Texas Observer, a Columnist for The Barbed Wire, and a contributor to the Cool Zone Media podcast network. My reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Nieman Lab, WIRED, Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, The Daily Dot, and more. My journalistic work has been cited in national and international publications such as USA Today, Bloomberg, The Independent, Le Monde, and others. I've also appeared on CNN, Democracy Now, Law & Crime News, Texas Public Radio, The New Abnormal, and other programs and podcasts to discuss my reporting. You can see a consolidated list of my articles at my Authory page. You can directly support journalistic my work by becoming a member at my Patreon. I'm also an active nonprofit leader. I am the founding publisher of Protean Magazine, a nonprofit literary magazine; the co-founder of Apprentice Creative Space, a nonprofit creative community space in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Texas; and a board member of the Retrograde, an independently run student newspaper at the University of Texas at Dallas. I grew up in Colleyville, Texas, and attended Colleyville Heritage High School. I am an alumnus of Northwestern University, where I graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor's of Arts in Communications. Before becoming a journalist, I worked in corporate strategy and operations roles at Deloitte Consulting and Google. My investigative reporting has drawn accolades. In 2025, I won the The Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award for revealing the identities of far-right extremists, including government employees, and was named Best Reporter of 2025 by D Magazine. I have also been subject to false accusations, harassment, and well-funded attempts to discredit my reporting. Most notably, hotelier and Republican megadonor Monty Bennett and his publication, the Dallas Express, sued me for defamation for describing the Dallas Express as right-wing propaganda and reporting that it has utilized the same fake authors and technology stack as Metric Media, a network of bogus partisan news sites. Bennett lost that case and I continued my reporting, which revealed that Bennett paid Crowds on Demand, a company that offers protestors-for-hire, to create a network of astroturf groups in Dallas that were regularly and often exclusively amplified in articles published by the Dallas Express. Among those groups was Dallas Justice Now, a hoax Black Lives Matter organization that created national controversy in an attempt to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement. After I uncovered evidence that proved Dallas Justice Now was linked to a Republican political firm, Dallas Justice Now retaliated by effectively defaming me, claiming without basis that I have committed racist harassment and domestic abuse in articles in the Dallas Express. In other words, Bennett created a propaganda website that has utilized fake authors to push a specific political agenda, contracted a company to hire actors to pretend to be local activists, and published articles quoting those bogus activists to attack Bennett's critics and make false accusations against a journalist who uncovered the scheme — all of which amounts to a full scale disinformation campaign.