In Defense of Conspiracy Theories

What are conspiracy theories, why do people like them, elite paranoia, why people are afraid of them, and how to think about them

This is a topic I’ve written about before (and also spent several years teaching to undergrads). The first part of this post is a direct rehashing of an article I wrote for a now defunct magazine called Asylum in 2022. The second half is more about why conspiracy theories—especially those about Epstein and Jews broadly—are increasingly prominent, and throws some cold water on the overheated reactions to this trend.

1. What are conspiracy theories?

To begin with, I do not like the term conspiracy theories. Not because it was invented by the CIA—it wasn’t—but because the term, much like its cousin-term “misinformation,” once you attempt to define it, reveals itself to be meaningless. Whatever definition one can come up with will either be much too vague and end up including ideas that are not commonly understood to be conspiracy theories, or much too narrow and exclude those that are.

Instead these terms operate as rhetorical cudgels to delegitimize whatever ideas and speakers the person leveling the accusation does not like. That is all. Richard Weaver called this kind of language “devil terms.” If you drill down on what is meant by “conspiracy theory,” its distinct elements as a category of belief, how conspiracy theories are functionally different from other kinds of narratives that attempt to explain the causes of various events and circumstances, you will find nothing there. The edges bleed out; the center is empty.

And yet, surely, the term must mean… something. In a somewhat new semantic twist, people espousing “conspiracy theories” have begun to self-consciously refer to themselves as “conspiracy theorists.” For example, on a recent episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast (which has received a A LOT of attention since it aired last week, and which is the reason I decided to write this post), he and his guest, Ian Carroll, open the podcast by calling themselves conspiracy theorists and riffing on why they find conspiracy theories so compelling.

What do they mean by this? They are not committing themselves to specific claims—that the moon landing was fake, or 9/11 was an inside job (though they might believe these things)—so much as they are using the term as one would apply an ideological label:

I am a conservative.

I am liberal.

I am a conspiracy theorist.

Yes, to self-identify as a “conspiracy theorist” aligns you to a constellation of loosely held claims, but moreso it indicates a preferred style of thinking, a kind of directional starting point and mode of arriving at answers. When Richard Hofstadter wrote his famous essay about conspiracy theories (though his essay predates the widespread use of the term) “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” he got a lot wrong, but he got this part right: conspiracy theories are a genre of sociopolitical analysis—just as science-fiction or high-fantasy are distinct genres of storytelling—rather than a discrete set of truth claims.

Still, to go any further we need something more concrete. We need some precision, however inadequate. Let’s stipulate for the sake of this discussion that conspiracy theories are a type of narrative that you know when you see it. They posit shadowy forces lurking behind the scenes, choreographing the grand spectacle of geopolitical life toward malevolent ends. They deal in cover-ups, misdirection, false-flags, and covert coordination among “special” interests. They almost always assert that you, dear reader, are being lied to. Conspiracy theories assign intentionality to what may seem on the surface to be random or spontaneous. They are often inflected by a schizo-autistic kind of inductive reasoning, Hofstadter’s “paranoid style,” the apophenia of the conspiracist’s corkboard of intricately connected threads. Conspiracy theories also may have an eschatological or revolutionary bent, and sometimes overlap with apolitical folk beliefs about the supernatural and the occult. None of which has anything at all to do with whether any given conspiracy theory is true, partially true, directionally true, or entirely false.

Those genre elements aside, the principle feature of conspiracy theories, above all else, is that they reject mainstream consensus. There is an official version of events, supported by the evidence as interpreted by “credible” experts, and then there are conspiracy theories. That’s the basic dichotomy.

Take for example 9/11, and the two conflicting theories about what happened that day. In both versions a cabal of covert agents planned and executed an unprecedented attack on the United States requiring prolonged secrecy and improbable logistical complexity. At the center of one conspiracy is George W. Bush. At the center of the other conspiracy is Osama bin Laden. Both versions of events are—literally—theories about a conspiracy. But what makes the narrative of George W. Bush and his cabal of aligned agents—including elements within Israeli intelligence—blowing up the towers, (or, in the less maximalist version, allowing the towers to be blown up) a “conspiracy theory,” is that it is not the explanation of events favored by officialdom, of the broad set of people and institutions we might call “epistemic authorities.” It is not the version supported by the preponderance of known and verifiable¹ evidence. It is not supported by the 9/11 Commission Report, or NIST’s peer-reviewed report about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. I do not mean for this to be a debate about whether 9/11 Trutherism has merit or not (of certain particulars and of certain “directional” implications, these theories definitely do have merit²), I mean only to say that it is not the official explanation. Therefore, it is a “conspiracy theory.”

Conspiracy theories, to the extent they form a coherent category at all, exist outside the Overton Window. But their significance goes beyond mere exclusion from mainstream discourse. In recent years, “epistemic authorities”—governments, media institutions, and expert classes—have repeatedly discredited themselves, whether through their handling of COVID, the shifting narratives around its origins, lies about BLM and trans issues, the politically motivated distortions of Russiagate, or the transparent fabrications about Joe Biden’s health. Since conspiracy theories define themselves in opposition to mainstream narratives, as mainstream narratives become less and less credible, the probability that so-called conspiracy theories at the very least contain important truths has axiomatically increased. Conspiracy theories are not just a playpen of misfit, fringe beliefs, but a necessary consideration for anyone who cares about the truth.

However, this is not to say that conspiracy theories, or conspiratorial thinking are all together positive. Eugyppius, who has done a lot of very good writing about the pandemic and the strain of deranged thinking that has arisen from it, has rightfully warned about the danger of conspiratorial fantasies that presume our elites to be smart enough and competent enough to bend the world to their will. Too often, conspiracy theories are indistinguishable from religious beliefs in the omnipotence they assign to their subjects (and in fact conspiracy theories often overlap with theology, casting conspirators as literal demons). But perhaps nothing has been made more plain over the last several years than the fact that the elites are conspicuously incompetent. Again, it is the very fact of their incompetence—their inability to manage the pandemic, or take down Trump, try as they might—that has made conspiracy theories so worthy of our attention. It cannot both be true that the conspirators are supernaturally capable, but also so inept as to leave an easily searchable Wikipedia trail for you to uncover everything you need to know in order to expose their plans.

I have long said there is no one at the wheel and this is borne out over and over again in the many failures and desperate measures these elites have been forced to take in order to prop up their increasingly fragile hold on power. Of course, this also cuts the other way. Their desperation may also lead to factionalism, a general atmosphere of distrust, and a willingness to conspire among themselves to shore up whatever resources and spheres of influence one faction may have over another. One problem we face is that a world of conspiratorial omnipotence looks indistinguishable from a world of perfect stupidity.

In any case, conspiracism, taken too far, is a totalizing belief system that is both obviously false and also reduces the field of potential action to zero. It enfeebles the believer to a state of passive submission. It is cope. It also reveals the believer to be incapable of formulating skepticism proportionate to the middling ability and cunning we know these would-be conspiratorial overlords actually possess. Consider the meme of the slick CIA field agent you know from spy movies juxtaposed with the image of Evan McMullin with his sweaty Gap shirt and moron smile. This is the same basic idea. The elites are in reality farcical imitations of the genius Masters of the Universe they believe themselves to be and how they exist in the imagination of the Reddit conspiranoid.

2. What is the value and purpose of conspiracy theories?

If it is true that conspiracy theories are not a set of truth claims, but a style of analysis, then it follows that they should not be evaluated on the basis of whether they are true in any simple or final sense, but on whether they are interesting. In a great essay on this topic called “The Art of Conspiracy Theories,” Sarah Perry argues that conspiracy theories are a valuable insofar as they dislodge us from dead-end (and often unexamined) assumptions and then lead us into new ways of thinking about a particular subject or set of ideas. This is what it means for something to be interesting.

Moreover, conspiracy theories exist in the difficult to parse middle-ground between genuine belief, absurdist humor, and folk storytelling that is critical for discussing taboo topics. They operate as a kind of playful esotericism in this way. Some may resent the need for esotericism, or look down on people who engage in it, but it is nonetheless an important tactic to confound and expose outsiders while also allowing the exchange and testing of ideas in a liminal, non-committal space.

When Alex Jones laments the interdimensional globalist reptiloids feeding off adrenochrome in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, or forum posters posit that Hitler is alive and plotting his next campaign in a secret still-operational Nazi base in Antarctica, these claims are simultaneously metaphorical and literal, at least for those who know how to decode them. The uninitiated—whether mainstream journalists, institutional skeptics, or those lacking the cultural fluency to engage in the play—cannot comprehend how such claims are either funny or true, and never both. They are left outside the circle of participatory, bottom-up storytelling and humor through which beliefs and attitudes about the world are given space to breathe. Maybe it is helpful to think of this as a form of encryption, for which only insiders have the key.

To see this more clearly, one need only look at mainstream paranoia, which deploys these same tactics from the other side of the ledger. If conspiracy theorists are guilty of assigning excessive agency and coordination to hidden forces, so too are the epistemic authorities who reflexively attempt to pathologize and discredit them. The institutions we rely on for “sense-making” have spent basically the last decade hyperventilating over Russiagate (and to this day use this Russia paranoia as a pretext for political action), or diagnosing an unseeable and non-falsifiable social disease of “systemic racism” to explain racial disparities, or the notion of omnipresent right-wing domestic terror networks, or any number of establishment-endorsed conspiracy theories that remain impervious to disconfirmation. This kind of narrative construction is useful. It works for them, both as a tribal signal and mechanism for discovering a kind of narrative equilibrium for what constitutes “mainstream” belief. The “officialness” of these ideas do not make them any less conspiratorial in structure. The key difference is simply that they do not suffer from the rhetorical vulnerability of being labeled “conspiracy theories.”

A great book about this is Jesse Walker’s United States of Paranoia, which points out that conspiratorial thinking is not the exclusive province of outsiders or the dispossessed. The establishment is deeply invested in their own conspiracism, their own frequent media-driven panics that compel them to assert (if not earnestly believe) that January 6th was a coordinated coup attempt instigated by a vast network of Q-anon militia members, or that we need to erect a massive “disinformation” industrial complex to thwart the efforts of foreign agents and their domestic accomplices—a sophisticated hidden network of propagandists—twirling their mustaches as they post democracy destabilizing memes. The same psychological scaffolding that drives fringe conspiracism is fully present within official discourse; it’s simply cloaked in the language of expertise and objectivity.

3. Self defeating and stupid reactions to conspiracy theories

Maybe the greatest of all self-owns in this department, and what highlights the confused thinking around this topic more than anything else, is Cass Sunstein and Adrein Vermuele’s famous paper from 2008 “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures.” This really is a must read for anyone who wants to see where the early rationale for the disinformation/censorship regime of the last decade came from.³ In short, the paper establishes that conspiracy theories are an expression of “crippled epistemology," are uniquely dangerous, and therefore proposes that in order to confront these ideas the government should:

(1) Government might ban “conspiracy theories,” somehow defined. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. Our main policy claim here is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4), and (5).

This suggestion—that the government should covertly infiltrate these groups—of course perfectly articulates the very logic of the conspiratorial thinking in the first place: a hidden, coordinated effort by elites to covertly manipulate discourse and suppress dissent. It is, in effect, a state-sanctioned conspiracy to neutralize conspiracy theorists.

Putting something like this forward as a policy prescription—authored by the most cited legal scholar in America, no less—boggles the mind. Its clumsy misunderstanding of its subject aside, the kind of paranoid thinking motivating this overreaction to “trutherism” turns the conspiracy theorist’s skepticism of elite narratives into a more specific and urgent fear that intelligence agencies and bureaucratic operatives are directly interfering in public discourse—a belief that, as it turns out (!), is entirely justified. How else is a neutral observer supposed to interpret the revelations of the “Twitter Files,” for example, except as the FBI and intelligence agencies coordinating hand-in-glove with mainstream media companies to infiltrate and distort the information environment to their liking?

But, wait, there’s more!

It’s even stupider than that. The paper doesn’t just fail on its own terms (since it actively creates, rather than suppresses conspiratorial thinking), it rests on the assumption that state actors and “elite human capital,” like the authors themselves, are competent, neutral arbiters of what is and isn’t true. What we observe instead—and again, what’s proven out by the very existence of this paper—is that elites are participants in their own forms of paranoid deception and selective narrative management. There is simply no class of elites—not currently, anyway—equipped to make these judgments. The presumption that government officials, intelligence agencies, or credentialed academics have a uniquely clear-eyed perspective on truth and falsehood is not just naive; it is actively contradicted by their own behavior. Again, these are the same people that insisted Russiagate was an open-and-shut case, that lab-leak theories were dangerous misinformation, and that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a foreign psy-op. Time and again, the so-called “neutral arbiters” have not only been wrong but have actively propagated their own brand of conspiracism.

So what to do then? How should these ideas be integrated into the full range of discourse?

4. Treating ideas like normal, level-headed adults

Back to Ian Carroll on Joe Rogan. I’ve found the response to this to be overheated and genuinely bizarre (if not altogether surprising). Carroll’s speculations about Jeffrey Epstein—which, let’s be candid here, is the thing that really matters—and Epstein’s ties to Israel or at least aspects of Israeli intelligence are not particularly unique within the larger landscape of conspiracy theorizing, and frankly seem indisputable at this point. The idea that Israel or Jewish elites play a central role in global conspiracies is neither a modern invention nor an outlier within the genre. These are the wages of being in positions of cultural, financial, and political prominence grossly out of proportion with one’s share of the population. This naturally leads to inquiry, and requires reasoned and honest explanation.

Carroll’s discussion of Jewish influence in elite networks is treated as uniquely dangerous, not because it is structurally different from other conspiracy theories, but because it violates particular taboos. A more productive approach would be to recognize that conspiracy theories, including those involving Jewish power, are not self-evidently irrational or uniquely malevolent. They emerge from the same basic instinct that drives all historical inquiry: the attempt to make sense of patterns of influence, hidden coordination, and otherwise inexplicable social phenomena. Carroll’s arguments are not particularly rigorous or sophisticated, fine. By his own admission, he’s just recently come to these ideas and appears to have aggregated most of his “OSINT” from Wikipedia. It’s a kind of free-associative skepticism rather than a structured case-building exercise. This is not necessarily a flaw; it is precisely this looseness, this casual willingness to entertain possibilities without committing to formal conclusions, that makes him appealing to people.

But really, this is not about Carroll either. If not Carroll, it would be someone else. Carroll is the one who just happens to be talking about these questions in a way that satisfies a whole bunch of rhetorical demands related to his personality that allow him to sneak in just across the line where others can’t. This is about Epstein. This is about the way that mainstream narrative makers have failed the obligations of disclosure and torpedoed their credibility. The Epstein case is a perfect case-study in why conspiracy theories thrive: every element of the story—his connections to intelligence agencies, his role as a high-level fixer for the global elite, the murkiness surrounding his wealth, the well-documented abuse network, and most of all, his highly suspicious death—points to something far larger than what we are being told.

And yes, compounding this is the fact that the Epstein case touches on the role of Jewish elites and Israeli intelligence in global power structures. Epstein’s ties to figures like Ehud Barak, his connections to Mossad-linked operatives such as Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, and the strong circumstantial evidence that his operation may have served as a blackmail operation make this an area that mainstream institutions are particularly unwilling to probe. The mere act of asking these questions risks crossing into territory that, no matter how well-founded, is immediately met with accusations of antisemitism. It’s the same difficulty in being honest about the influence of George Soros. This boundary around certain lines of inquiry of course only intensifies suspicion and gives credence to the very people being unduly suppressed. The conspicuous lack of interest in Epstein’s network, the dismissal of his powerful associates, and the slow-rolling, if not blackboxing of further revelations create the exact conditions in which conspiratorial thinking becomes not just reasonable, but necessary. When the people charged with disclosing what happened, instead obscure it, they forfeit their legitimacy.

The antidote to all of this—the paranoia, the schizobabble, the speculative excess, and the institutional gaslighting—is simple: tell the truth. People sense (correctly) that they are being lied to or denied a full accounting of reality and their (reasonable) response is to gravitate toward whatever most expediently fills in the narrative gaps. This leads to a lot of bad thinking and epistemic traps since there is a lot of complexity and counterintuitive facts about the world and for which Wikipedia is not an adequate bridge. But the solution to bad thinking is not to suppress inquiry or dismiss conspiracy theorists as uniquely bad; it is to create conditions where people do not need to rely on speculative narratives to make sense of the world because they’re actually taught things—rather than fed potted, ideologically motivated histories. People need to be allowed to ask politically insensitive questions and get honest, good-faith answers in return.

And in case it needs to be said, a higher tolerance for conspiracy theories does not mean embracing every theory or every theorist uncritically. The problem of cynical actors is a real one. People say things all the time that they do not themselves believe—even aside from the context of “honest lying”—exploiting our condition of epistemic breakdown because of some combination of audience capture or to muddy the waters around related political questions they are invested in. But again, the way to deal with this is not through censorship or institutional policing but by cultivating a low tolerance for lying and a low tolerance for stupidity.

In other words, you don’t need special rules for conspiracy theories. Preventing people from becoming consumed by bad ideas is a worthwhile goal. A world where the only alternatives to mainstream deceptions are equally dishonest counter narratives and paranoid free association is not a healthy one. The tendency of some people to get lost in esoteric rabbit holes, constructing grand unifying theories out of scraps of circumstantial evidence, or meme-content they receive through third hand accounting from pundits in a gamer chair, is regrettable. The psychic casualties are piling up. But you can’t and shouldn’t expect the arena of ideas to only be filled with ideas and styles of narrative that you prefer. Conspiracy theories are an integral part of how people navigate a world that increasingly feels opaque and manipulated (which it is).

Don’t expect conspiracy theories to go away anytime soon. And the louder you yell about them, the louder they are going to yell back.

1. “Verifiable” evidence is of course its own recursive epistemic problem, since “verifying” what is and is not legitimate evidence is contingent on shared trust in the institutions and methods that establish standards of verification. An example of this problem is the claim that traces of the explosive material nano-thermite were found in the dust of the WTC debris. These findings, authored by a number of credentialed experts, were published in the peer-reviewed The Open Chemical Physics Journal, but were later dismissed by NIST because the chain of custody for the material could not be properly established, and also because the chemical compounds in thermite would have been incidentally present from various building materials anyway. So is this “verifiable evidence” or not? Don’t ask me.

2. Laying my cards on the table, and having looked at the issue pretty closely over the years, I do not believe that 9/11 was an “inside job,” a false flag, or the result of a deliberate conspiracy by any government or intelligence agency. The fundamental account—that Osama bin Laden planned and directed the attacks—is almost certainly true. However, I find it likely that elements within American, Israeli, and Saudi intelligence were guilty of at least negligence, if not tacit collusion. I find it very likely that aspects of the official story are outright lies meant to obscure certain compromising details (perhaps for legitimate reasons). Moreover, in the aftermath, various parties—including those mentioned—exploited the attacks for their own interests, severely undermining their credibility to investigate and report on the event honestly. Finally, there are certain inexplicable details that my better judgment tells me to ignore, but I just can’t. “Pull it.” What did Larry Silverstein mean by this?

3. Another one of Sunstein’s books from this period, Republic 2.0, addresses directly his insistence that free speech and the internet are incompatible. Some of the arguments are compelling, but you can see pretty clearly from this where the winds are blowing.