Conspiracy Theorists Quotes

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren't hiding anything.

The populace fell for this trick every time because they didn’t believe the Masters existed, or that anyone could be that evil. The Masters made sure to assign the label of being a conspiracy theorist to those smart and observant enough to have figured it out and were trying to warn others. The populace would then disregard and ridicule the whistleblower because the Masters had programmed the populace to react harshly to individuals who this label was applied to. The population had been programmed to negatively react to many ideas and labels, but the conspiracy-theorist label was one of the most heavily programmed because it was paramount for the Masters to stay hidden behind the curtains. You can’t dethrone a king if you don’t know they exist.

The media have the ability to attract the craziest people to call in perfectly absurd tips. Every newsroom in the world gets updates from UFOlogists, graphologists, scientologists, paranoiacs, and every sort of conspiracy theorist.

They kept saying cows watched sunsets. At that point I wished I’d used the fucking conspiracy theorists instead of the cows. Nobody would’ve cared if I’d turned people inside-out who think vaccines have nanites in them that mine cryptocurrency. But cows watch sunsets, man!

Conspiracy theorists like to claim NASA’s moon landing was faked. Well of course it was! But the biggest conspiracy of all is the Columbus landed in the new world in the late 15th century. There is no new world. It simply doesn’t exist. And Amerigo Vespucci? He was a character out of Walt Disney’s diary.


Some conspiracy theorists thought the princess had survived and was still alive somewhere, waiting for the right time to reclaim her crown and end Levana’s rule of tyranny, but Cinder knew it was only desperation that fueled these rumors. After all, they’d found traces of the child’s flesh in the ashes.

I've been back less than two weeks, and already I've turned the sweetest girl on Embassy Row into a thief and a conspiracy theorist. Even for me, it is an impressively quick act of corruption.

New Rule: Conspiracy theorists who are claiming that we didn't really kill Bin Laden must be reminded that they didn't think he did the crime in the first place. Come on, nutjobs, keep your bullshit straight: The towers were brought down in a controlled demolition by George W. Bush to distract attention from Hawaii, where CIA operatives were planting phony birth records so that a Kenyan named Barack Obama could someday rise to power and pretend to take out the guy we pretended took out the Towers. And I know that's true because I just got it in an e-mail from Trump.

Like my doppelganger projecting all of our surveillance fears on a vaccine app, conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right

One of the most surreal aspects of the NSA stories based on the Snowden documents is how they made even the most paranoid conspiracy theorists seem like paragons of reason and common sense.

In the mid 1980's I was asked by an american legal institution known as the Christic Legal Institute to compile a comic book that would detail the murky history of the C.I.A., from the end of the second world war, to the present day. Covering such things as the heroin smuggling during the Vietnam war, the cocaine smuggling during the war in Central America, the Kennedy assasination and other highlights. What I learned during the frankly horrifying research that I had to slog through in order to accomplish this, was that yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists, and ham fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the C.I.A., you really have nothing to worry about. If however you have a name similar to someone on a list targeted by the C.I.A., then you are dead? The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening. Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless...

And this, of course, is the central problem with conspiracy theorists — once you inflexibly accept that something is a conspiracy, any contrary evidence has the paradoxical effect of making your case stronger. Every contradiction deepens the conspiracy.

I can't shake the feeling that all these conspiracy theorists are in on it.

All conspiracy theories are the product of the subconscious attempt of an ignorant yet creative mind to counteract the fear of the unknown with tales of fantasy.

They said she’d killed her niece, her only threat to the throne. Princess Selene had only been three years old when a fire caught in her nursery, killing her and her nanny. Some conspiracy theorists thought the princess had survived and was still alive somewhere, waiting for the right time to reclaim her crown and end Levana’s rule of tyranny, but Cinder knew it was only desperation that fueled these rumors. After all, they’d found traces of the child’s flesh in the ashes.

Paranoia -- because why should the conspiracy theorists get to have all the fun?

And so, feeling the line between "researcher" and "conspiracy theorist" blurring before me, I hunkered down in the library to read about the many ways our government has deceived us.

Let’s face it,” my Deep Throat had said to me, “nobody rules the world anymore. The markets rule the world. Maybe that’s why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything.

Remember that the crazy people are not always to be found on the outside. Sometimes the crazy people are deeply embedded on the inside. Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist has ever thought to invent a scenario in which a crack team of Special Forces soldiers and major generals secretly try to walk through their walls and stare goats to death.

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Today's conspiracy theorist is tomorrow's prophet!

It was beginning to seem like the world might be about to end. Enjoy August, she read on a site she'd only opened to read a book review: conspiracy theorists say it might be your last month on Earth.

Yes, there is a conspiracy, indeed there are a great number of conspiracies, all tripping each other up... The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in the conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no-one is in control, the world is rudderless.

it’s especially hard to change a conspiracy theorist’s mind, because their theories are “self-sealing,” in that even absence of evidence for the theory becomes evidence for the theory. That is, the reason there’s no proof of the conspiracy, the thinking goes, is because the conspirators did such a good job of covering it up.

Truth and fact-checking travel along the same paths that conspiracies do. But the truth is often complicated, shaded and demanding, and there's no denying that it often lacks the powerful, emotional, gut level appeal of a conspiracy.

Conspiracy theorists, she knew, were paranoid by definition, and usually with good reason – they were indeed being watched, largely because they were standing on an upturned bucket, haranguing the sheeple about their wingnut delusions.

The conspiracy theorists claimed that a Nazi sub left Germany just before the fall of the Third Reich, carrying away the highest ranking Nazis and the entire treasury, including priceless artifacts that had been looted and top-secret technology.

One key difference between a conspiracy theorist and an activist, for lack of a better word, is that the conspiracy theorist holds that the best defense is more and better knowledge (read my website, listen to my explanation, investigate what you know) and the activist holds that the best defense is creating another world.

In a world of full of manipulation, half-truths and lies, the conspiracy theory is often a safer bet than the official story.

The conspiracy theorist’s dream, the cabal of the mighty getting together to obliterate the bulk of humanity just so they could be kings of what remained

Paranoia—because why should the conspiracy theorists get to have all the fun?

prize. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’m a human nature realist.

My heart is the expert, my head, the conspiracy theorist. Neither one is always right, but I know which one I’ll be listening to.

conspiracy theorist: (n.) marginalized thinker with a better than average chance of being right on the money.

There is a Yiddish expression offered as a reality check to malcontents and conspiracy theorists: The whole world isn’t crazy.

The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others. The lies of conspiracy theorists raise doubts about the honesty of whistle-blowers, even when they are telling the truth.17 Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.

A conspiracy theorist is a critical thinker playing out-of-bounds; although, and this is clear and obvious enough, free-thinking still does not automatically ensure accurate thinking.

GamerGate wasn’t really about video games at all so much as it was a flash point for radicalized online hatred that had a long list of targets before, and after, my name was added to it. The movement helped solidify the growing connections between online white supremacist movements, misogynist nerds, conspiracy theorists, and dispassionate hoaxers who derive a sense of power from disseminating disinformation. This patchwork of Thanksgiving-ruining racist uncles might look and sound like a bad joke, but they became a real force behind giving Donald Trump the keys to the White House.

Never forget” is the collective plea of Holocaust survivors. And in the first few decades after WW2 ended, it really did seem as if humanity would always remember, and perhaps even learn from, the Nazi genocide so that future atrocities may be prevented. Unfortunately, the historicity of the Holocaust has been undermined and chipped away at by the exact same sinister forces that created the genocide in the first place: racists, religious bigots and the most paranoid type of conspiracy theorists who, together, are uniting – often unwittingly – to form a new wave of anti-Semitism that will not willingly accept the obvious facts of the past. This chipping away (at the truth) began slowly and insidiously – much like the Holocaust itself – but sadly, and worryingly, it is gathering pace.

There's a big overlap between conspiracy theorists, racists, gun nuts, doomsday preppers, fans of the rapture and poor white Republicans. They all have one thing in common: They feel like the oppressed underdogs.

That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portant and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren't hiding anything.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.

In the end, one detail is unarguable: There will always be those searching for treasure. Never forget: We are a country founded on legends and myths. We love them, especially legends of treasure. Looking for treasure isn't just part of being an American, it is America.

Drawing on the best modern scholarship, this book seeks to rescue the history of networks from the clutches of the conspiracy theorists, and to show that historical change often can and should be understood in terms of precisely such network-based challenges to hierarchical orders

To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of

conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden.

I’d learned that Holtzer Point was a top secret facility in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’d gathered that much already, but it was nice to have it confirmed by a series of websites that appeared to have been composed by middle-school-aged conspiracy theorists with a passion for stupid-looking animated graphics.

Conspiracy theorists and fringe groups may hold individually coherent theories, but there is no true consensus, just the assumption of consensus. If they hung out together, they might catch on to that, but since they rarely do, they can each keep their individual theories and still assume they have the backing of a tribe.

Conspiracy theories—feverishly creative, lovingly plotted—are in fact fictional stories that some people believe. Conspiracy theorists connect real data points and imagined data points into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality. Conspiracy theories exert a powerful hold on the human imagination—yes, perhaps even your imagination—not despite structural parallels with fiction, but in large part because of them. They fascinate us because they are ripping good yarns, showcasing classic problem structure and sharply defined good guys and villains. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment.

think we are all conspiracy theorists when it comes to God. We find ourselves doubting His intentions when the story lines don’t make sense. When it comes to deciphering the world, our culture relies on logic and emotion, not on tradition or authority. Perhaps the most radical thing God could require of us is to believe what He says.

Arguing at length with a conspiracy theorist is not only fruitless but sometimes dangerous, and I do not recommend it. It’s a treadmill of nonsense that can exhaust even the most tenacious teacher. Such theories are the ultimate bulwark against expertise, because of course every expert who contradicts the theory is ipso facto part of the conspiracy.

They only let us live in millions for the sake of the economy. I don't know what will happen by the time they figure out how to run the economy without the people

Shoddy explanations that yield correct predictions are two a penny, as UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy-theorists and pseudo-scientists of every variety should (but never do) bear in mind.

Jim studied her without saying a word. He had a friend who said that arguing with conspiracy theorists was like playing chess with a pigeon, in that it knocks the pieces over, shits all over the board, and still struts around as though it was victorious. He groaned at the idea of his career going down the pan because of a conspiracy theory. — The Smoking Gunners, short story

The yogurt man went back to threading the needle through his cheek. I thanked him for sharing his perspective about evolution, the existence of an alternate universe, and the physical science of hijacking a plane, and then asked him once again for directions, wondering what kind of directions I was likely to get from a self-identified conspiracy theorist with an exceptionally high pain tolerance.

To those who accuse catch phrases, like pseudoscience, conspiracy theorist, and now fake news that is not an argument but an excuse to continue on the wrong path without conscience bothering them, if you actually read Velikovsky's work he makes complete sense and they know they cannot beat him with facts he uses their own sources and connects the dots,so instead they use terms to slander, it's all they have

Conspiracy theorists manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as even stronger confirmation. After all, what better sign of a really effective conspiracy is there than a complete lack of any trace that the conspiracy exists? Facts, the absence of facts, contradictory facts: everything is proof. Nothing can ever challenge the underlying belief. These

Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.

That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything.

A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer. A blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group... While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth; they are trying to antagonize liberals and to display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.

That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything. Peter

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is that it is not the Jewish Banking Conspiracy or the Gray Aliens or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is far more frightening: Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless. —ALAN MOORE, THE MINDSCAPE OF ALAN MOORE (2003)

One question can determine whether you are dealing with either a conspiracy theorist or someone who may be able to explain some questionable phenomena: “What evidence would prove this isn’t true?” If the answer is nothing, back away slowly. You’re dealing with a full-blown conspiracy theorist! There’s no use in the conversation aside from the entertainment value. If you take it seriously, you’ll only spin around in dizzying logic circles until you fall flat on your face.

Racists and conspiracy theorists are taking succor from Trump’s nomination. His fans are frequently caught on camera at his rallies yelling at protesters, “Go back to Africa” and “Allah is a whore” and “Go to fucking Auschwitz” and “Go make my fucking tortilla, motherfucker.” They hang effigies of Hillary Clinton from nooses. At a high school basketball game in Indiana in March, white students chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at Latino students. Everyone knew what that meant: It was a new way to be racist.

Trump’s falsehoods connect with longstanding American Nativist and Know-Nothing movements, and with totalistic contemporary Republican assertions. He in fact draws upon the voices of right-wing extremism, what Todd Gitlin calls “The Vortex” of “the Birthers, Whitewater, ‘Travelgate,’ and Vince Foster conspiracy theorists, ‘death panel’ enthusiasts, ‘Lock her up!’ chanters, scientist-haters and other Flat Earth factions.” In other words Trump’s solipsism can connect with a sea of mostly right-wing exaggeration, misinformation, conspiracism, falsehood, and lies.

Criminal wealth is reinvested, which makes criminals richer and more potent adversaries, while companies in the City poach law enforcement officers to work in their compliance departments. It’s like expecting the army to fight a war against an adversary that gets stronger all the time, while its service men and women are continually lured away to work as private security contractors or, worse still, as mercenaries for their former adversaries. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to start wondering if there isn’t something going on, because this is a system that is not working at all.

Sonnet of Conspiracy Perhaps there's a monster under the bed, Perhaps there's a boogeyman in the closet. Perhaps they're sterilizing kids with vaccine, Perhaps they're controlling all with a radio set. Yes our science is well advanced, But not advanced enough to control minds. Besides mind-control needs no fancy tech, When people are run by smartphone chimes. Tales like these are good for entertainment, Amongst a bunch of kindergarteners. But being adult requires the use of reason, Without submitting to prehistoric fears. Treating insecurities with common sense, Anyone can manifest civilized sentience.

In 2010, RT was helping American conspiracy theorists spread the false idea that President Barack Obama had not been born in the United States. This fiction, designed to appeal to the weaknesses of racist Americans who wished to imagine away their elected president, invited them to live in an alternative reality. In 2011, Trump became the spokesman of this fantasy campaign. He only had a platform to do so because Americans associated him with the successful businessman he played on television, a role which in turn was only possible because Russians had bailed him out. Fiction rested on fiction rested on fiction

Indeed, a culture of scientism helps produce a culture that also rejects genuine scientific authority. The scientism studied in these pages, by falsely trading on an authority it does not wield, helps to sow a wider skepticism and cynicism about the 'elite' voices of scientists as such. A disturbing increase in science denial (e.g. conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers) is in a mutually supporting dialectic with the absolute scientism of a Pinker or a Dawkins. Although they have not yet realized it, figures like Pinker and Dawkins, far from defending science, undermine it by overpromising and exaggerating its authority. Ultra-Darwinists and biblical literalists are dance partners

What’s going on is that these people are sharing blue lies. A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers).19 While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.20 Anyone can say that rocks fall down rather than up, but only a person who is truly committed to the brethren has a reason to say that God is three persons but also one person, or that the Democratic Party ran a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria.

Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM's Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on the phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them. There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we'll call factalnoia. Like the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP. It's not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That's why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic.

To understand President Obama’s second term, however, all you need to know are the following three: First, the Country Clubbers. Guardians of the GOP’s upper-crust traditions, they believed in lower taxes, less regulation, and being polite. They were led in Congress by Speaker John Boehner. They held out hope for the resurrection of Mitt Romney. Their fortunes were not on the rise. Second, the Flat Earth Society, with Sarah Palin as its patron saint. These were the hard-core conspiracy theorists. They insisted that President Obama had faked his long-form birth certificate. They were certain that bike-share programs were a world-domination plot fostered by the UN. Finally, the Holy Warriors. Some of these crusaders were, in fact, religious. Others were more likely to quote The Lord of the Rings than Matthew or Luke. But regardless of where they spent their Sundays, what they shared was a worldview. Where traditional Republicans saw a debate between liberal and conservative, Holy Warriors saw an existential battle between good and evil. They warned endlessly of appeasement. They spoke of “defeating the Left” as though Satan’s minions were amassed along the Pacific coast. The Holy Warriors pursued Romneyite goals with Palinite fervor. For this reason, they were ascendant in 2013.

By definition, conspiracy theories imply a coordinated plot by a hostile group. But the most successful conspiracy theories also imply the existence of another group: victims. Theorists become more devout when they identify as part of population under attack, the researchers noted. The more a person identifies with a persecuted "ingroup," the more likely they are to suspect evil deeds by a threatening "outgroup" with which they do not identify. In a 2015 study, for example, Indonesian students were more likely to believe conspiracy theories about Western countries staging terror attacks if researchers first emphasized the students' Muslim faith and described the West as a threat to Muslims. Americans are no more immune than Indonesians. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union's KGB spread rumors throughout the United States that the CIA had engineered the HIV virus to wipe out the country's Black and gay populations. Often, groups that have been dealt a bad hand can be more likely to perceive the world in a conspiratorial light due to past suffering, be it the result of a deliberate conspiracy or passive societal failings. So while the anti-Black HIV rumors were false, the theory took off with some Black Americans who remembered the country's history of documented medical plots against people of color.

Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled by sustained lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption--even murder and genocide--generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie. Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship. By lying, we deny others our view of the world. And our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they *can* make--in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to. By lying to one person, we potentially spread falsehoods to many others--even to whole societies. We also force upon ourselves subsequent choices--to maintain the deception or not--than can complicate our lives. In this way, every lie haunts our future. We can't tell when or how it might collide with reality, requiring further maintenance. The truth never needs to be tended like this. It can simply be reiterated. The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others. The lies of conspiracy theorists raise doubts about the honesty of whistle-blowers, even when they are telling the truth. Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.

The scientific project starts by rejecting the fantasy of infallibility and proceeding to construct an information network that takes error to be inescapable. Sure, there is much talk about the genius of Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, but none of them is considered faultless. They all made mistakes, and even the most celebrated scientific tracts are sure to contain errors and lacunae. Since even geniuses suffer from confirmation bias, you cannot trust them to correct their own errors. Science is a team effort, relying on institutional collaboration rather than on individual scientists or, say, a single infallible book. Of course, institutions too are prone to error. Scientific institutions are nevertheless different from religious institutions, inasmuch as they reward skepticism and innovation rather than conformity. Scientific institutions are also different from conspiracy theories, inasmuch as they reward self-skepticism. Conspiracy theorists tend to be extremely skeptical regarding the existing consensus, but when it comes to their own beliefs, they lose all their skepticism and fall prey to confirmation bias. The trademark of science is not merely skepticism but self-skepticism, and at the heart of every scientific institution we find a strong self-correcting mechanism. Scientific institutions do reach a broad consensus about the accuracy of certain theories—such as quantum mechanics or the theory of evolution—but only because these theories have managed to survive intense efforts to disprove them, launched not only by outsiders but by members of the institution itself.

Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

Most of the information on this topic is crap.” “What do you mean by that?” Crade demanded. We all looked at him, because in an instant he had become markedly defensive. Sammann raised his eyes from the screen of the jeejah and gazed interestedly at Crade. He let a few moments go by, then responded in a calm and matter-of-fact tone: “Anyone can post information on any topic. The vast majority of what’s on the Reticulum is, therefore, crap. It has to be filtered. The filtering systems are ancient. My people have been improving them, and their interfaces, since the time of the Reconstitution. They are to us what the Mynster is to Fraa Erasmas and his kind. When I look at a given topic I don’t just see information about that topic. I see meta-information that tells me what the filtering systems learned when they were conducting the search. If I look up analemma, the filtering system tells me that only a few sources have provided information about this and that they are mostly of high repute—they are avout. If I look up the name of a popular music star who just broke up with her boyfriend,” Sammann continued, nodding at a tearful female on the speely, “the filtering system tells me that a vast amount of data has been posted on this topic quite recently, mostly of very low repute. When I look up the excavation of the Temple of Orithena on the Island of Ecba, the filtering system informs me that people of very high and very low repute have been posting on this topic, slowly but steadily, for seven centuries.” Sammann’s explanation had failed if its purpose had been to settle Crade down. “What’s an example of a person of high repute? Some fraa sitting in a concent?” “Yes,” Sammann said. “And what would a low-repute source be?” “A conspiracy theorist. Or anyone who makes a lot of long rambling posts that are only read by like-minded sorts.

Getting its target audience to conclude that facts and truth are “unknowable” is the true objective of any disinformation campaign. Climate change deniers aren’t trying to convince people that surveys they commissioned are better than those agreed upon by the vast majority of scientists. Antigovernment conspiracy theorists aren’t really trying to convince people that some towns in the Midwest are governed under Sharia law, or that Jade Helm was an attempt by Obama to come for their guns. If someone actually believes the falsehood, that’s a bonus, but the primary objective is to get readers or viewers to throw their hands up and give up on “facts.” Do vaccines cause autism? Maybe. Was Senator Ted Cruz’s father involved with President Kennedy’s assassination? Anything’s possible. Is Hillary Clinton running a child-sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor? Who knows?

Page upon page, Shelden proceeds with the dauntless pluck of a conspiracy theorist out to show that Elvis killed Kennedy.

Yes, we are all conspiracy theorists with our own stories, constantly filling in data gaps with our fears and insecurities.

The world in which Alex is a leading voice — a loose collection of internet conspiracy theorists and nationalists and some racists — suddenly had a name: the “alt-right movement.

But it was really the then-popular right-wing demagogue Glenn Beck who gave Republicans a taste of what was to come as the recession deepened. Beck was an apocalyptic yet strangely ebullient conspiracy theorist who on his daily Fox News broadcasts filled blackboard after blackboard with crazy Venn diagrams exposing the hidden links between 1960s radicals and Barack Obama. But he also broke with many Republican dogmas, particularly on economics and foreign policy, writing in one of his books, “Under President Bush, politics and global corporations dictated much of our economic and border policy. Nation building and internationalism also played a huge role in our move away from the founding principles.” Beck’s economic nationalism and isolationism struck a chord with the public, and many flocked to his sold-out rallies to hear him denounce phantom leftists but also Wall Street and the big banks. He even wrote a bestselling thriller in which all these evil forces join hands to squelch American liberty. For all his bombast, Beck was among the first on the right to report the truth that the American middle class was being hollowed out and that its children faced drastically reduced prospects. That a small class of highly educated people was benefiting from the new global economy and becoming fantastically wealthy. And that vast sections of the country had become deserted, heartbroken . . . and angry. Mainstream Republicans never got the message. Donald Trump did.

They’d left nothing behind but thoroughly empty dishes and—this would be one for the conspiracy theorists—several long blue hairs

Conspiracy theories, by contrast, are frustrating precisely because they are so intricate. Each rejoinder or contradiction only produces a more complicated theory. Conspiracy theorists manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as even stronger confirmation. After all, what better sign of a really effective conspiracy is there than a complete lack of any trace that the conspiracy exists? Facts, the absence of facts, contradictory facts: everything is proof. Nothing can ever challenge the underlying belief.

Crazy rumors swirled about Barack: that he’d been schooled in a radical Muslim madrassa and sworn into the Senate on a Koran. That he refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. That he wouldn’t put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. That he had a close friend who was a domestic terrorist from the 1970s. The falsehoods were routinely debunked by reputable news sources but still blazed through anonymous email chains, forwarded not just by basement conspiracy theorists but also by uncles and colleagues and neighbors who couldn’t separate fact from fiction online.

At the request of Rep. Steven Schiff (R-N.M.), Congress’s investigative branch has launched a study to determine whether the government covered up a story alleging that the bodies of alien space voyagers were removed from a crashed flying saucer found near Roswell, N.M., in 1947. After the purported crash of the spacecraft, the bodies of the extraterrestrial visitors were said by a local undertaker and other conspiracy theorists to have been autopsied and secretly flown to an Air Force base in Ohio. Even though the ‘Roswell Incident’ has been

Do you have to do that?" "Do what?" "Talk with your mouth open." "That's how talking works dumbass." "I meant chew with your mouth open. This is a Chinese joint not a seafood joint." "Yeah, well, you snore and you show no signs of stopping. So I guess neither of us is getting what we want today." "Jesus Christ, will you two get a room already? The sexual tension is thicker than the sweet and sour sauce." Both agents turned to see a man carrying several takeout boxes from the cash register to the door, shoving it open with one shoulder and holding it as some sort of aquatic or amphibious monster in a business suit made its way inside. Agent Black turned to his partner. "Wasn't that the conspiracy theorist guy?" Agent Brown raised both eyebrows. "That was what you thought was most important there? Not the whole sexual tension comment?

The greatest trick that powerful interest groups ever pulled was convincing the world that everyone who detects and reports their activities is a conspiracy theorist.

Irma made landfall soon after, creating a path of chaos and destruction that was all too real.

Ortega’s friends traced his troubles to about a year earlier, when he had become agitated watching an antigovernment film. The movie, called The Obama Deception, was written and produced by Alex Jones, a Texas-based conspiracy theorist and talk show host. It claimed that a cluster of wealthy families were engaged in a conspiracy with President Obama and had installed him in the White House to use the government to surveil and hurt the interests of most Americans. Soon Ortega bought a powerful rifle and began practicing his aim.

She’s the biggest conspiracy theorist I’ve ever met, but even I can admit that the shit she finds is disturbing and has too much evidence to be considered a theory anymore.

Chigger finally nodded and backed down, but he didn’t look convinced. “Okay, if you say so. But I know that the truth is out there.” Boone wadded up a piece of paper that had been left on the counter and threw it at him. “You should join The X-Files cast then, conspiracy theorist.

Trump wove together a vivid racialized and gendered conspiracy theory that links immigration, Islam, crime, socialism, and the Democratic Party in one associative chain. This demonization was not new. It fit squarely within what the late political theorist Michael Rogin called the “countersubversive tradition” in the United States—a persecutory fantasy centered on the imagined destructive power of women, immigrants, communists, and people of color that has been used to justify extraordinary violence and repression.31

False flag theories are the refuge of the most weak-minded and uncreative conspiracy theorists. They’re the lowest-hanging fruit. False flags, unlike so much else of what’s in the fever swamps, actually have some basis in reality. Historically, the term “false flag” refers to a ship or armed force misrepresenting themselves by flying the flag of their enemy. This subterfuge can have political purposes, such as drumming up support for a cause or creating a pretext for a more justifiable military strike. False flag attacks are illegal under the commonly adopted conventions of international law. They’re also fairly rare. I could point to a few international examples of such operations since World War II, but the fact is, the handful of authentic false flags are far outnumbered by the countless double-agent scenarios that conspiracy theorists incessantly dream up. False flags are one of the most common tropes of the misinformation and disinformation space. They’re easy and politically expedient. Does something look bad for your side, an event that went sideways into violence or illegality? It must have been the work of the enemy; surely things must be the exact opposite of what they seem. Even if your false flag claim gets debunked, you can still hold your ground because of the shadow of doubt you’ve cast. Deflect. Delay. Deny.

Conspiracy theorists have long been ridiculed for their claims that the Great Depression was manufactured by globalist bankers.

exactly where he wanted it. Decades of dumbing down the education system had produced a couple of generations largely incapable of free thought. They believed what they were told because that’s all they knew growing up. Listen, repeat, accept as true. When the news outlets spun a story the way Langton wanted it to be told, few people doubted the veracity. Those that did were blasted as conspiracy theorists, ironically labeled too dumb to know the truth when they heard it.

Challenging a conspiracy theorist, even with evidence that appears empirical, will only embolden them.

you know who the news is controlled by,” I remind him. “You’re better off believing conspiracy theorists at this point. At least there’s some merit there.” “So, Tupac is alive and well and living in Cuba?” Jeremy snarks. “You know better because they exterminate all the truth tellers.