The words “eery” and “eerily” used to mean strange and mysterious; now they mean the writing process has failed. For example, here “eerily” means “management is nervous about this statement.”
Conventional wisdom says that periods of political instability fuel popular interest in irrational ideas — conspiratorial thought, paranormal theories, etc — but that’s just a gloss. It sorta proposes a why but skips over how these tendencies disseminate, as if they were a vital force rather than the result of identifiable discursive habiits. This is an interesting example: the NYT was reluctant to plainly state as fact that whitist and jihadist terror are cut from the same cloth, so it tossed in “eerily” to mystify the relation.