Now, I’m as sceptical of conspiracy theories as anyone. As I often say, reading the Illuminatus! trilogy in my early teens inoculated me against the undoubted attraction of conspiratorial thinking. But I might need a booster, after the last few years.
Because, if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that yesterday’s conspiracy theory is too often today’s news.
That doesn’t make every conspiracy theory ipso facto true, of course. But it does mean that “conspiracy theory” is not the blanket argument the legacy media would like you to think.
In fact, here’s a conspiracy theory for you: the pejorative “conspiracy theory” is itself a conspiracy, to obscure what “they” are really up to.
I don’t mean that entirely seriously, of course. Not entirely. But, it is obvious that lazy journalism and groupthink are being used to hand-wave away some stuff certain powerful people don’t want us to notice.
Consider this listicle of The Most Infamous American Conspiracy Theories of All Time. By throwing in a bunch of obviously nutty conspiracy theories, the writer conspires (see what I did there?) to smear some at least semi-plausible theories, and some just plain facts, by association.
First, the semi-plausible theories.
QAnon […] believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Trump by current President Joe Biden, despite numerous audits and court cases disproving the allegations. Their organizing principle is that the highest levels of Democratic leadership, including the Clintons and Obamas, are part of a secret cabal of Satan worshippers and pedophiles organized by Jews and funded by philanthropist investor George Soros.
OK, some of that is plainly nutty — and some of it is pure journalistic invention. Blaming George Soros, a Jew, is not the same as blaming “da Joos” and throwing those idiotic “echo quotes” around the word “Them”. In fact, even Jewish organisations admit that “its core anti-Semitism [is] hard to detect or track”. Which sounds pretty much like an admission that “We can’t prove it, but we just knows it”.
Sure, there’s an overlap on the fringe right between people who are likely to believe QAnon’s wackier claims and people who believe wacky shit like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but that doesn’t mean that the one is necessarily dependent on the other.
But is the idea that political and business elites are joining in elite paedophile rings and using their considerable power to cover it up really so crazy? Do the words “Jeffrey Epstein” not ring a bell? Despite it being well-established that Epstein peddled underage totty to a roster of politicians, billionaires and celebrities, only his madam and one client have ever been charged. Epstein himself got let off on a sweetheart deal the first time, and mysteriously “suicided” the second.
That sorta sounds like a cover-up, to me.
The hit Netflix series “Stranger Things” was inspired by a decommissioned military base at the far eastern end of Long Island, New York, known as Camp Hero […] Theories about government activities there range from horrible experiments conducted on kidnapped children in subterranean bunkers — a la “Stranger Things” — to electromagnetic mind-control and time travel.
Again, have they never of MKUltra?
When the CIA admit that they set up a network of secret camps in order to illegally conduct mind control experiments on human subjects, using hypnotism and heavy-duty drugs like LSD — experiments which led to several known deaths — is it really so crazy to wonder what else they got up to that they’re not telling us?
False Flags
At least here they admit that some false flags are real enough — the Gulf of Tonkin incident, for instance, was used as a pretext for the Vietnam War. It’s also true that some supposed “false flags”, such as Sandy Hook, very much are not.
But to proceed from that to the sweeping generalisation that all alleged false flags must therefore be false is simply not logically justified. Nor is hand-waving away the claimed motive behind the conspiracy theory:
Virtually every major mass shooting in the last two decades was followed by a conspiracy theory claiming that the act was staged. The logic is virtually always the same — the government wants a reason to confiscate guns, abolish the Second Amendment, and disarm the U.S. population.
Well, we know that a great many on the left of US politics, including powerful politicians, want to confiscate guns and disarm the U.S. population — because they’ve been telling us precisely that. And while there is no evidence that, say, Sandy Hook was staged — more than enough evidence otherwise — there is plenty of reason to be suspicious about something like the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting. No motive was ever announced and the whole investigation vanished like a stone.
For every obviously nutty conspiracy theory, there’s one that’s at least semi-plausible, in a garbled kind of way. Covid cooked in a lab? Implanting microchips? Both real enough, even if the conspiracy details are crazily garbled.
But then we proceed to “conspiracy theories” which aren’t even conspiracy theories, no matter how desperately they try to frame them as such. They’re conspiracy facts: the Deep State and Globalism.
The Deep State theory […] revolves around a shadowy network of high-ranking elected officials, military leaders, media moguls, financiers, and other powerful and well-connected elites who are secretly conspiring to overthrow — or at least manipulate and commandeer — the U.S. government and social structure […]
Globalism […] the globalist theory commonly cites the Clintons, the Obamas, and Soros as villains. Distinctly unique from the very real concept of “globalization,” globalism is based on the idea that high-ranking left-wing elites and their co-conspirators in easy-to-blame but hard-to-quantify entities like “the media,” “the banks,” and “the government” are conspiring to end America’s status as a sovereign power. The goal is to subjugate the country and the world under a singular autocratic ruling entity controlled by the Deep State.
MSN
In both cases, it might be dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory… if they weren’t telling us, plainly and unambiguously, that it’s exactly what they’re doing.
The media constantly reported on how unnamed, unelected officials conspired to thwart the Trump administration. Time magazine writes glowing pieces, describing at length how a cabal of politicians, Big Tech and mainstream media collaborated in 2020 to “save” the election. Klaus Schwab publishes an entire book on The Great Reset.
They’re not even hiding it.
