The Conspiracy Zone

THEY DON’T ACTUALLY WANT YOU TO BELIEVE THEIR CONSPIRACY THEORIES! That’s not the point at all…

A few decades back, it used to be great, harmless fun arguing with Moon landing deniers, drama queen ghost hunters, alien autopsy disciples, or hippy homeopaths: an experience peppered with loads of nutritious opportunities for explaining some basic science and critical thinking, cheerfully surfing on the waves created by figures like Sagan and Dawkins. We sceptics got to be at our smug, mocking worst, a few people actually changed their minds about such nonsense, and everyone had lots of fun.

Hell, even David Icke and his credulous middle-class admirers were an annoying but delightful toffee to chew on, despite his endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion pulling out a few fillings.

And then… two separate social explosions happened.

The twin towers burst into flames and fell, and social media blew away the concept of society having a shared (if often lazily biased) collective, fact-checked source of news.

Conspiracy theories became sinister. We entered a dark new era where paranoia was celebrated and amplified, with each new theory—chemtrails, vaccine mind control, climate change denial, even flat Earth—flushing people down into an ever more sinister and rancid cesspit.

‘9/11 Trutherism’ began with a vaguely left, anti-war aroma around it: a kind of extension of the loathing liberals had for George W. Bush, but soon the stench of antisemitism came to the fore, with accusations that ‘they’ warned each other, ‘they’ controlled the mainstream media narrative about it, and that ‘they’ had also faked the Holocaust…

Conspiracy theories began skewing more and more to the right, and no claim seemed too absurd or grotesque to be taboo: the parents of children gunned down in school shootings were crisis actors, the Democrats were abusing children and drinking their blood in the basement of a pizza parlour (a devious repackaging of the old racist ‘blood libel’ trope).

Sceptics, lazily accustomed to a rational, level playing field of debate, were rendered impotent, utterly baffled that anyone could ‘actually believe such nonsense’. They mistakenly saw it all as being caused by the fringe mental addictions of a minority and interpreted the motivations of people like Alex Jones as being purely profit-driven.

But we’d all totally missed the point.

Conspiracy theories had become a political weapon, and movements like the Tea Party, MAGA, and QAnon, and, much more, the highly manipulative figures lurking behind those spectacularly gullible movements, were happy to load up the ammo and pull the trigger. NOT in the hope of getting people to really, seriously believe such outlandish claims, but because such bizarre, outlandish concepts served a quite different, darker objective—to corrode any sense that there might be such a thing as a verifiable, objective reality.

The more confused, disoriented, and untrusting people become, the easier they are to manipulate and control. Make them doubt everything, and they’re rendered easier to drag in a preferred political direction by shrewd, populist demagogues with the right level of grotesque charm.

This became crystal clear to me the moment I heard Trump aide Kellyanne Conway claim in 2017 that demonstrable lies were simply ‘alternative facts’, followed by ‘punch the screen’ icon Steve Bannon smirking as he openly admitted and celebrated his policy of undermining any media attempts to report the truth by ‘flooding the zone with shit’.

The phenomenon of chaotic ‘social media as news’ has vigorously facilitated such an approach: in fact, it would be impossible without it. This is why attacks on ‘legacy’ media are so fundamental to such a plan. Folding claims that traditional news sources are a sinister propaganda tool (controlled by ‘them’) into these paranoid conspiracy world views is crucial to the strategy of undermining all trust in verifiable news. Even when low-level, attention-seeking, jittery conspiracy theorists are innocent of this strategy, they’re still cheerfully playing the role of Satan’s little helpers in the game.

This isn’t happening by accident. No honest, benign political party or regime benefits from this kind of chaos surrounding the fundamental issue of what is or isn’t objectively true. Only those with a sinister agenda would incorporate such strategies into their political narratives, which is why it isn’t really that shocking for former Fox News clown Tucker Carlson to announce he was open to the idea of a flat Earth.

We can see this tactic playing out all the time. Consider the recent FBI raids to obtain documentation related to the 2020 election results, which cannot rationally or legally overturn the certified results themselves, let alone the multiple court rulings which have already investigated the infamous conspiracy claim that the outcome was rigged and found it to be false. So why is the Trump regime so enthusiastically emphasising the significance of these raids, knowing they can’t reverse the facts? Answer: to sow ‘smoke and fire’ confusion and doubt as a prelude to undermining confidence in the November 2026 midterm elections—elections he knows may render him a lame duck.

This is perhaps the appropriate moment to remember that the Third Reich was a regime steeped in and reliant upon a mass-scale conspiracy theory, and that many of the contemporary rabbit hole gurus promote Holocaust denial, or even try to rehabilitate Hitler as a misunderstood martyr. (The leading flat Earth guru, Eric Dubay, is a big fan of the man.)

The fun days of cheerfully mocking harmless nonsense from the moral high ground are gone.

It is no longer viable to hope this torrent of internet disinformation can be fixed by forcing the ‘tech bros’ to be more responsible with their algorithms or through community notes. The sheer scale of billions of people having a printing press in their pockets renders social media beyond any central control, particularly if we also, quite rightly, want to protect free speech.

I suggest it’s time we all descend from the ‘tut-tutting’ ideological high ground and get down into the muddy, filthy digital trenches to confront the rumour-mongers in their own spaces. We are now the news. We are now the fact checkers. Help is not coming from above. It has become our job as citizens to take responsibility, sign up, and fight hand to hand, challenging every lie or twisted truth we see sticking its head over the parapet, every day if needs be.

Here’s a metaphor of scale: if sinister players in the village are spreading gossip about witches, the local lord or priest is not going to come and put things straight. We have to counter those whispers ourselves, face to face, before the burnings begin.

We need to flood the zone with robust evidence and facts: ideally delivered without a sour ‘I went to university’ tone and with an appealing panache of patience and humour—a style that might actually persuade.

Happy hunting!

Images from the author’s furious and deranged new mini comic book THE CONSPIRACY ZONE. Available here.