There was once a time—perhaps you recall it—when the village idiot stayed in the village, gently muttering to his goats and scrawling apocalyptic prophecies in chalk on the bus stop. Alas, those halcyon days are behind us: now we have the conspiracy theorist.
Thanks to the internet, he now has 40,000 followers on Telegram, a podcast on alternative medicine and geopolitics, and a suspiciously high number of PayPal donations from people called “WolfSpirit88” and “TruthSeeker1972”.
Conspiracy theorists are everywhere now. They walk among us, smiling benignly while secretly believing that the Moon landing was filmed in a warehouse just off the M25, that Greta Thunberg is a hologram generated by the Rothschild banking dynasty, and that Bill Gates is hiding inside your central heating system, collecting your biometric data every time you boil an egg.
It’s not that the modern conspiracy theorist is wrong about everything. No, the problem is that they’re right about nothing—but deeply, profoundly confident about it. Certainty, you see, is their chief commodity. It’s the only currency accepted in their parallel universe, where logic is elitist, facts are fascist, and evidence is what you feel in your waters at 3am after half a bottle of gin and a YouTube binge.
Take climate change. Now, to you and me, the notion that pumping billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for two centuries might just be warming the planet is not terribly controversial. But to the conspiracy theorist, this is merely another facet of the Great Lie. The Earth, they say, has always gone through “natural cycles”—though strangely, these cycles now include wildfires in Sweden and beachfront properties in Sheffield.
The climate change denier is a curious beast. He will confidently tell you, between puffs on his diesel-powered vape, (why do conspiracy theorists all seem to smoke vapes? ) that global warming is a hoax cooked up by Al Gore and lizard people to sell solar panels and vegan yoghurt. He is often the same man who believes George W. Bush personally detonated the Twin Towers using thermite, WiFi, and a remote control shaped like Dick Cheney’s reproductive organ.
Indeed, there seems to be a remarkable overlap in conspiracy circles. One moment you’re reading a blog post titled “Chemtrails and the Cabbalistic Agenda of the Illuminati”, and the next it’s a twelve-page screed explaining how Covid-19 was “a psy-op orchestrated by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum to force us all to drink cricket smoothies and submit to compulsory yoga”.
According to this crowd, the pandemic didn’t really happen. The dead bodies were crisis actors. The hospitals were empty. The footage of overwhelmed Italian ICUs was staged—possibly by Stanley Kubrick’s ghost. And the vaccines? Ah, those were clearly designed to sterilise the population, implant nanobots, or possibly just make you slightly more left-wing.
Of course, they’ll say, “I’m just asking questions.” Which is conspiracy-speak for “I watched four hours of TikTok videos and now I have a PhD in virology, atmospheric science, and the globalist occult.” Asking questions is the sacred rite of the conspiracy theorist. But they never ask the one that matters: “What if I’m completely wrong and mildly unhinged?”
Another sure giveaway is the use of capital letters where none are needed. “WAKE UP SHEEPLE!” they bellow in comment sections. “THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE! OPEN YOUR EYES!” It’s as though they’ve confused political awareness with being trapped in a malfunctioning Caps Lock key.
And then, of course, there’s the “New World Order”—the all-purpose bogeyman of the paranoid imagination. To hear them tell it, a cabal of billionaire paedophiles meets every Thursday in a Swiss bunker to decide everything from interest rates to the colour of your socks. The EU, naturally, is their local franchise. And who’s the regional manager? None other than the world’s worst defence minister, Ursula von der Leyen.
Yes, her.
To suggest that Ursula von der Leyen is competent at her job is, to the conspiracy theorist, the ultimate shibboleth. Only they, the enlightened ones, understand that she’s not a beleaguered bureaucrat wrestling with 27 bickering member states and a terminal shortage of talent. No, she is the High Priestess of the Euro-Soros-LGBT-Woke-Techno-Malthusian cult that secretly runs everything, including your local recycling rota.
It’s difficult to say how these ideas persist. You’d think, after 23 years of waiting for the “Deep State purge” promised by anonymous online accounts and guys called Dave with shaved heads and GoPros, they’d be a little chastened. But no. The beauty of the conspiracy mindset is its immunity to time, disproof and reality. Like a medieval plague cart, it trundles on regardless, ringing its bell and spreading a miasma of absolute nonsense.
You try to reason with them, of course. You point out that the Earth is round, vaccines work, and that if the world really were run by a secret elite, we’d at least have functioning trains. But they just smile, that knowing smile that says, “You’re still asleep, my friend. Still clinging to your Newtonian physics and your parliamentary democracy.”
Meanwhile, they continue their research—by which they mean watching an unshaven man in a caravan explain why 5G is turning us all into hummingbirds. Their definition of a “source” is “someone I agree with,” and their measure of truth is whether something “feels off”. Which is how we ended up with people earnestly claiming that Prince Philip faked his own death to return as a sentient cryptocurrency.
Some of this might be funny if it weren’t occasionally tragic. There are people who have lost friends, jobs, and even custody of their children because they genuinely believed they were resisting a global plot to enslave humanity via QR codes and oat milk. Conspiracy theories used to be fringe entertainment for stoners and shut-ins. Now they’re public policy in parts of the internet, and occasionally, regrettably, Parliament.
So what do we do? Ban them? Debate them? Build giant nets and lure them into humane captivity with leaflets about free energy and Area 51?
No. Like bad manners and flatulence, conspiracy theories are probably with us to stay. They fulfil a deep psychological need: to impose meaning on chaos, to find patterns where there are none, and to feel secretly superior to all the dupes and drones who still think Tony Blair is human.
But we can mock them. And mock them we must.
Because satire, unlike the internet, has not yet been monetised by lizards. And because the best disinfectant is not sunlight—it’s ridicule.
So the next time someone corners you at a barbecue to explain how a secret cabal of climate scientists faked 150 years of temperature data in order to tax your wood burner, take a deep breath, smile, and ask them gently: “If they’re so powerful, why haven’t they stopped you from talking?”
And then offer them a drink. Something strong. They’ll need it when the next full moon rises, and the pigeons start broadcasting 6G brainwaves again.
Main Image: Michael Foran via Wikipedia
