However, because of the journey taken by the latter, the book becomes a serendipitous tale of our times – the viral proliferation of conspiracist narratives and memes largely through the virus carriers of social media outlets. It is another testament to the arrival of the moment of the what the author Anna Merlan terms “The Conspiracy Singularity”.[2] This tract was written at the height of the Covid-19 global pandemic, the nature of which and the response of governments to it (which as well as necessarily coercive measures such as lockdowns, vaccine passports and social distancing measures was also characterised by communicative dysfunction in the early stages of the pandemic) helped to cement fantastical but, unfortunately, popular in some quarters, theories of Covid-19 being either a hoax or a deliberately engineered virus to enable a global reset of the economy and society at the behest of tyrannical “globalist” agencies such as the World Economic Forum or malevolent corporate titans such as Bill Gates or totalitarian public health figures such as Anthony Fauci, the former US Federal Director of Public Health.
It can hardly escape one’s attention that to hold the simultaneous belief that Covid was a hoax, and a manufactured virus is a contradiction in terms. However, such seeming irrational and illogical thinking comprises a large part of the idiom of such movements as I shall explain later. In their essay on the coming together of pan-global mobilisations, such “diagnolist” movements, William Callison and Quinn Slobidian point to the central shared tenet of these new movements – that all power is conspiracy.[3]
Before launching into an investigation of the core components, pathologies and the amoebic shape shifting qualities of conspiracism, some knowledge of the back story concerning the double trouble in Naomi Klein’s relationship to Naomi Wolf. Both have written seminal works in radical progressive thought. Naomi Klein wrote about the colonisation of the inner and outer lives of humans by corporations in No Wolf in 2000. Naomi Wolf wrote about the commodification and straightjacketing of femininity by late capitalist imperatives in The Beauty Myth in 1990. Klein wrote about the rapaciousness of market forces and opportunities presented to it by Wolf wrote about the almost terminal dysfunctions in the contemporary US in The End of America; Klein sounded a clarion call to action over climate change in This Changes Everything; Wolf about the colonisation of the female body in Vagina[4] Wolf has also theorised about a more aspiration type of “power feminism” in Fire with Fire in 1993.
Klein then describes the descent of Wolf into the conspiracy underworld and how she attracted the ire of those aghast at that descent who accused her of being the author of Wolf’s works. Over a decade ago, Other Naomi had begun taking and writing about power grabs under covers of states of emergency.[5] On the surface, this is a valid warning about the enlargement of executive powers in democracies at times of crises, be they those of the economy or national security. The abuse of judicial processes and the mission creep of civil liberties diminution in the US and UK throughout the War on Terror prove that such calls need not by examples of “crying wolf” (no pun intended or not!).
However, the once strict demarcation lines between those lanes began to blur. For by early 2021, Other Naomi was casting nearly every public health measure summoned to control the Covid pandemic as a covert plan by the Chinese Communist Party, the World Economic Forum and Anthony Fauci to usher in a sinister new world order.[6] She released a video claiming that vaccine-verification apps represented a plot to institute “slavery for ever”. For the apps would usher in a “CCP-style social credit score system” in “the West” – a reference to China’s all-encompassing surveillance net that enables Beijing to rank citizens for their perceived virtue and obedience and which determines access to social facilities such as access to schools and eligibility for loans and to pinpoint location of dissidents for arrest. The “vaccine passports” represented for her a system that “enslaves a billion people”. For the apps would listen to private conversations, track gatherings of people and inform the authorities – all to be brought to the US by Joe Biden, using Covid as the cover study.[7]
Through her espousal of such apocalyptic, anti-statist fulminations, this one-time Democrat and feminist poster girl became a go to figure in the alt-right media landscape. She done the rounds of outlets such as Fox ‘s (now cancelled Tucker Carlson Tonight), Steve Bannon’s War Room, the podcast hosted by James Delingpole, the British far right provocateur and vocal climate-change denier and many others. On one of these, a right-wing podcast carried by something called Today’s News Talk, she shared her “latest thinking” on the effects of vaccination. She observed that in New York City that where the vast majority of the population had been vaccinated,” the people felt. different … like holograms in that you cannot pick up human energy in the same way” and that “People [who are vaccinated] have no scent anymore”.[8]
This she attributed to the “lipid nanoparticles” in the mRNA vaccines, since they “go into the brain, they go into the heart, and they kind of gum it up.” Perhaps even the “wavelength which is love” was experiencing this “gumming up … dialling down its ability to transmit.” She concluded “That’s how these lipid nanoparticles work.”[9]
To call such wackery “pseudoscience” or New Age “wellness woo” hardly speaks to the monstrosity of such claims, although the loud assertion by other anti-vaxxers that the spike protein component of mRNA vaccines is the cause of myocardiopathy in vaccine recipients is a close challenger to such preposterousness. It should be hardly necessary to point out that other Naomi does not have a patina of scientific knowledge or expertise. The nadir of her descent into the rabbit hole of Covid conspiracism was, of course, her equation between the necessity of getting a vaccine with Jews in Nazi Germany having to wear yellow stars.
Naomi Klein writes of the discombobulatory experience of being taken for Other Naomi from being condemned by Jordan Peterson for writing The Beauty Myth, for offence caused to a famous Australian novelist for supposedly failing to remember a prior encounter at a Christmas party hosted by their “shared publisher” (Wolf’s publisher not Klein’s) to denunciations and excommunication (“I cannot believe I used to respect Naomi Klein. WTF has happened”), glib expressions of sympathy (“The real victim in all this here is Naomi Klein”) or being tweeted after the vaccine-yellow star comparison) that she “had been losing (her) mind for years”.[10]
After delving into the rabbit hole of Other Naomi’s rabbit hole in order to divine some insight into and find some explanation for her journey beyond the boundaries of rationality into the nexus of conspiracism and the vortex of Matrices that sustains she rationalised that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and spreaders of misinformation and disinformation about many of our current crises and the inspiration of so many street protests against an almost wholly hallucinated “tyranny”, is at the epicentre of several forces, which, for all their ridiculousness, matter greatly because the confusion they sow and the oxygen they suck from genuinely cooperative and transformative projects for humanity[11]. How then to make sense of them and to counteract their narrative in a world where rationality and the values of the Enlightenment may alarmingly be losing their purchasing power?
Conspiracism: Theories And Effect
A conspiracy is a secret plot between two or more individuals for some kind of nefarious purpose.[12] Conspiracies range from plans by two people to rob local business premises to large scale deceptions by states, corporate organisations, and public authorities to hide the truth of malpractice by these bodies. Examples are legion including the wilful suppression of evidence as to the harmful impacts of the drug thalidomide by its manufacturer; the covering up by Exxon Mobil in the 1970s of its own research showing the link between fossil fuel generation and climate change[13]; that of tobacco companies of the link between smoking and cancer, the cover ups by law enforcement and security agencies of the events surrounding Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough, the scandals in the NHS concerning fatal lack of care in the Mid Staffordshire and Shrewsbury and Telford Maternity Trusts and, probably most famously as it involved interference with the democratic process at the highest levels in the world’s most powerful democracy, the Watergate scandal and the Trump inspired insurgency on Capitol Hill on 6th January 2021 to (unsuccessfully) prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election. Such events can generate greater vigilance among the citizenry about the power and lack of accountability and clamour for the upholding of democratic norms and greater candour from both public and private corporate bodies. That is a healthy response. However, they can also exacerbate cynicism about the entire conduct of politics (“Politicians are all the same”. “All politicians lie) and public affairs and so corrode belief in the legitimacy of liberal democracies. This erosion of trust in authority can then push people (whether predisposed or not) into the netherworld of conspiracy theories or conspiracism.
Theorising Conspiracy Theories
In his seminal book A Culture of Conspiracy Michael Barkun identifies three core components of nearly all conspiracy theories: nothing happens by accident; nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected. For example, throughout the Covid 19 pandemic and its aftermath, anti-vaccination activists have sought to blame the deaths of any vaccinated person on the vaccine no matter what the cause of death. Gallagher notes how the sudden deaths of young people in Ireland were blamed on the vaccine by the Covid-19 conspiracy communities. She cites one person in a group chat on the messaging app Telegram commenting on a supposed increase in RTAs in Ireland since the roll out of the Covid vaccines and asking ‘Anyone else joining these dots’[14]
Barkun explains the dynamic of conspiracism thus: conspiracists assert that as the conspiracy is so powerful, it controls virtually all the channels through which information is disseminated . . . Hence information that appears to put a conspiracy theory in doubt must have been planted by the conspirators themselves in order to mislead’.[15] Such circular and non-falsifiable reasoning explains why debate with die-hard conspiracist is so often futile and it is why agencies who exist to rebut disinformation and hate speech such as the Centre for Counteracting Digital Hate advise no online engagement with, for example, anti-vaxxers, in order to starve them of the oxygen of publicity.
It is important to remember that not all conspiracy theories involve the elevation of bad actors to a position of global omnipotence as in the QAnon narratives of child trafficking by liberal globalist elitists like Hillary Clinton or, maybe the most infamous of all conspiracy narratives, the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Some are curious like the ongoing debate over the existence of UFOs; others are harmless while completely false such as the continuing existence of Elvis Presley and the theory that the singer Avril Lavigne died in 2003 and was replaced by a body double.[16] Others such as the fake landing on the Moon in 1969 and the suggestion that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole participant in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 persist but without the pernicious nature of more modern theories such as that 9/11 was “an inside job” or perpetrated by Mossad and the calumny that the Syrian volunteer civil defence body The White Knights was a joint venture of NATO and Al-Qaeda terrorists.
Conspiracy theories are intrinsically speculative. Political scientist Joseph Uscinski defines a conspiracy theory as a way to explain a certain event or phenomenon by invoking a sinister plot orchestrated by powerful actors, who are acting in secret for their own benefit and against the common good.[17]. As mentioned, real life conspiracies have occurred with lasting impacts e.g., Watergate, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on two generations of African American subjects 1932-72 and the cover ups surrounding Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough. However, fantasies such as 9/11 trutherism are easily rebutted by sold forensic and engineering evidence. Likewise, the ludicrous claims that the Covid 19 pandemic and/or vaccination programme constitute a Great Reset whereby global rule by the World Economic Forum facilitated by a microchipped, technologically compliant human race are easily debunked by epidemiological fact. Much the same can be said about The Great Replacement Theory whereby global elites have sought to dilute the White, Christian character of Europe through the migration of mainly brown skinned, Muslim populations. However, a tragedy of our age is that rational, evidence-based rebuttals of such bunkum is by no means universally accepted. Why?
The conspiracy theories that so many (in the online world anyway) appear to gravitate towards can be logically refuted on the basis of their sheer implausibility. They are in the words of Michael Butter in his book The Nature of Conspiracy Theories “inconsistent with reality” He argues that it the US President, supposedly the most powerful man in the world, could not even successfully spy on his political opponents, then how could “anyone be capable of getting away with faking the moon landing, 9/11 and the refugee crisis and keeping it secret for years and decades”.[18]
It is beyond tautologist to state that conspiracies involving elaborate and skilled coordination and cooperation between world governments, corporations and all sorts of global institutions are implausible. Thousands if not millions of people either prepared to shed their moral compass to facilitate tyranny or to be so incompetent as to be ignorant of their involvement would have to be involved. Where is the paper trail? Where is the digital footprint? How could law enforcement agencies be unaware? (The standard ripostes to all these queries are, of course, “they are all in it” or “they have been bought”). Most importantly, how could such far-fetched plots be kept secret?[19]
Unfortunately, rational enquiry can never penetrate or shift believers in conspiracy narratives as they reside in parallel realities to the “unenlightened”. In the conspiracist mind-set, critical thinking and common sense and are replaced with overwhelming suspicion often leading to paranoia and disassociation from everyday life. Those caught up in such webs of untruth and alternative facts base their beliefs on a combination of speculation, illogical and spurious reasoning, cognitive biases and seeing patterns where they do not exist.[20] Evidence that a conspiracy theory is false is routinely turned on its head by self-sealing beliefs that those providing the evidence are part of the “establishment/elite”. Tempting though it is to pathologise believers in conspiracy narratives, it is more important to enquire into why they make these journeys in the first place.
The Slow Descent into the Rabbit Hole
Many people with deep conspiratorial beliefs have lost trust in everything regarded as mainstream: the media, healthcare, universities, fact-checkers. They believe that all those information sources are controlled or pushing a certain narrative or agenda. Instead, they claim only to trust their own intuition. They do their own research.[21]
How are people attracted to conspiracy theories in the first place? Professor Jan-Willem van Prooijen[22], a behavioural expert and expert in the psychology of radicalisation, extremism and conspiracy thinking, explains feelings of fear and uncertainty. Such emotions lead people to ruminate, to try to identify the cause of their negative feelings and make sense of their situation. This survival instinct is a likely part of our evolutionary psychology of self-preservation, he asserts.
Such catastrophic events such as 9/11, the global financial crash of 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic do generate the anxieties that become the wellspring of conspiracy thinking. Legitimate concerns over violation of our privacy by Big Data or technological developments leading to, for example, digital apartheid and health concerns over medical interventions, and yes, the behaviour of Big Pharma is easily highjacked and manipulated by conspiracy theorists.[23]
The experience of, in particular, women in navigating and being continually rebuffed by institutionally sexist obstetrics & gynaecology services, the historical memory of some ethnic minority communities of vaccine mandates and the high costs of medical treatment in the USA has created ready markets for wellness and anti-vaccine influencers in the USA especially who have so effectively monetised the fears and anxieties of their clients/customers.
Professor Karen Douglas discusses three psychological needs which those who turn to conspiracy theories are searching for. The first is the need for knowledge. She explains that since people want certainty and want to know the truth, if these needs aren’t being satisfied regularly then they are vulnerable to the lure of conspiracism.[24] The mixed messages being conveyed by public health authorities in the UK at any rate at the start of the Covid pandemic and during other epidemics in other parts of the world and the apparent lack of clarity as to the nature and origins of the disease certainly contributed to Covid scepticism and denialism.
Science related conspiracies are very good at exploiting the layperson’s lack of knowledge as to how science is conducted as was demonstrated by the cynicism felt by some as to the speed of the Covid vaccine clinical trials and roll out. The unwillingness of major pharmaceutical companies to share their Covid patents globally hardly increased their reputational capital.
The second unfulfilled need which conspiracists feed on is the need for people to feel safe and secure in the world and feel autonomy in their decisions. This need can be particularly acute at times of loss of trust in institutions which events such as the economic crash of 2007-08, the Iraq war and the expenses scandal involving UK parliamentarians in 2009. Aoife Gallagher relates how those in the Republic of Ireland who had lost businesses and livelihoods in the 2008 recession (when the villains namely the major banks were bailed out at taxpayers’ expense) subsequently fell into Covid conspiracy theories. Since their personal losses had led to a deep-seated mistrust of authorities, the advice by the self-authorities to stay at home and close businesses during the pandemic fell on a very unresponsive audience. The conspiratorial narrative that the authorities were lying about Covid and that they were using the pandemic as a pretext to introduce an authoritarian regime seemed a plausible fit with their past experiences.[25]
The third unmet need explored by Professor Douglas are social needs. People need to feel good about themselves and the social circles they belong to. A particular self-esteem booster in this context is the possession of secret knowledge which only they as “The Awakened” have access to. She explains that when people feel they know what is going on, they develop a superiority complex in relation to the “sheep” i.e., the rest of humanity who are enslaved to the Matrix. Conversations with such people can thus feel like dialogues with religious fundamentalists or ideological dogmatists; distressingly so if the Awakening adherents happen to be close relatives or friends. Social media has of course enabled the satisfaction of this need to the power of infinity.
A fourth human need can be added; the need to blame. The sheer complexity of the Covid virus; its differential impacts on population groups, the pressure on health services and its stressful and often traumatic impact on everyone led many to blame the entire situation on elite groups trying to control the population. The intoxicating elixir of such beliefs felt empowering for those “in the know” and gave a purpose to them: to fight back against perceived injustices.
Towards a Unified Theory of Conspiracism: Singularity
The strains of living in a pandemic era on top of the various identarian conflicts raging throughout the world accelerated what Anna Marlan describes as the “conspiracy singularity”: the place where many conspiracy communities are suddenly meeting and merging. In the USA, UFO conspiracy theorists and QAnon fans advocate for drinking a bleach solution promoted by antivaxxers. Many diverse groups joined anti-lockdown protests borrowing language from the Patriot movement. They called stay-at-home orders “tyranny”, addressed their followers as “Patriots”, and positioning themselves as “a new civil rights movement”.[26]
The coalescence into this singular movement was headed by the hashtag #Covid911, backed by many powerful players in both anti-vaccine and QAnon movements. It holds that the crises which rocked the United States in the summer of 2020 – the pandemic and Black Lives Matter led protests against police brutality in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd – were a massive hoax, designed to sway not just the 2020 Presidential elections but usher in a New World Order (not surprisingly Trump’s “stolen election” lies have since become part of the conspiracy singularity credo). According to one video released by one prominent QAnon promoter and which remained on multiple platforms despite “false information” warnings, called the pandemic, protests and the push for nationwide mail-in voting part of a coordinated irregular warfare insurgency with multiple aims”, perpetrated by the Deep State. Among the smorgasbord of conspiracies it claimed, were that the murder of George Floyd was “mysterious” and not what it seemed, that social distancing was perhaps a pretext to halt grand juries so that President Obama couldn’t be investigated for spying on the Trump campaign and that “violent paramilitary group Antifa” had been given free rein by Democratic mayors to wreak havoc on city streets.[27]
These and even more deranged theories such as that the coronavirus pandemic was both a hoax and a dangerous bioweapon released by China and that the actor Tom Hanks is dead – executed for being part of the paedophile Deep State – and alive in witness protection; that he is dead and replaced by a body double illustrates another defining characteristic of conspiracist thinking – the ability to believe two things at once – even contradictory things. Such dualistic belief is based on an underlying level of “higher order” thinking, an overriding belief that can make even conflicting ideas make sense. Since the cornerstone of conspiracist thinking is the idea that authorities are engaged in motivated deception of the public, new conspiracy theories seem more plausible to believers in that light. But the forcing by the pandemic of many people into a set of universalising circumstances seemed to, in the words of Merlan, create a kind of grand unified theory of suspicion. And with the Internet serving as a seeming central clearinghouse of conspiracy theories, the individual contours of them are becoming harder to distinguish.[28]
Diagnolism
Beyond the United States, Callison and Slobodian in their overview of the global mobilisations against the pandemic restrictions call the strategy behind these diverse movements “diagonal thinking” and the broader phenomenon they represent “diagonalism”. Taking their cue from the Querdenken movement in Germany they develop the idea of “diagonalism from beyond its German context of out-of-the-box thinking towards contestation of traditional left-right divisions (while generally nudging in the direction of far-right beliefs), expression of ambivalence if not cynicism towards parliamentary politics, and the blending of convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.[29]
The term Quer, most often translated as “lateral” or “transverse”, also means “diagonal” or “across”; a Querschnitt of the population. For decades, Querdenken has circulated in C-Suite Powerpoint argot alongside cognates like “disruption”, thinking outside the box” or “think different”. Representing as they so “the revolt of the Mittelstand" the etiology of the term aptly describes the sociological complexion of freelance media hustlers, IT start-up entrepreneurs, small business owners and contrarians comprising the movement.[30]
The first academic study of the “coronaskeptic” movement in Germany, Austria and Switzerland did not reveal a predominance of right wingers or hostility to foreigners or Muslims. Nor did they deny climate change or the Holocaust. What they did believe were that the media and the state were working to create excessive fear in the population, conceal the truth, and deceive the people. Nearly two thirds believed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation want a forced vaccination for the whole world. Movement participants mostly self-identified as middle class and were disproportionately self-employed (25 percent compared to 9.6 percent in Germany overall).[31]
It is hardly surprising that globally anti-lockdown protests were led by small business owners and the self-employed as compensatory measures tended to favour large corporations, which reaped gains – and access to credit from both private and public sources as smaller enterprises suffered, particularly providers of in-person services such as hairdressing and gyms. These occupational strata also traditionally lack the social ties of trade union membership and have less job security than civil servants of employees of larger businesses permitted to work from home.[32]
In August 2020 two “anti-covid” protests were held, the first with 20,000 participants and the second with 38,000. Speaking on stage in Berling at the first rally on 1st August was Michael Ballweg, a Stuttgart-based entrepreneur and IT developer with several start-ups to his name. Proclaiming that “I am here today because I dislike the world the federal government presents to me”, he did not deny the existence of the virus, he insisted that “there is no pandemic” and so no need for allegedly unconstitutional state interventions, “Querdenken comes from the English letter Q for question, he explained, meaning “second-guess the source”. Ballweg the proceeded to copyright Querdenken which describes itself as an “initiative” rather than a “foundation” which enables it to avoid taxes on donations and became its full-time movement hustler. More controversially, the group requests monetary contributions, by PayPal or bank transfer, flowing directly into Ballweg’s account. It has developed a “basis democracy” structure of self-organised groups (like Bochum #234 or Oldenburg #441) which purchase their campaigning merchandise from Stuttgart (#711).[33]
Self-portrayal as minoritarian resistance is a defining feature of Diagnolism, and one that makes diagnolists willing allies of right-wing media voices who articulate contrarian positions on issues from vaccination to climate change to immigration to race science, which they seek to portray as the true voice of the people. Among the celebrity ranks of Germany’s coronaskeptic community are Xavier Naidoo (the former winner of Germany’s equivalent of American Idol), Attila Hildman (the vegan chief turned ultranationalist antisemite), Eva Herman (the former news anchor and best-selling anti-feminist libertarian and the youthful provocateur Naomi Seibt (the so-called “anti-Greta” fostered by climate denialists at the Heartland Institute).[34]
Querdenken’s movement hustlers embrace a minoritarian conception of “the people” with its roots in the far-right underworld of esotericism and alternative medicine. A central figure in this milieu is Michael Friedrich Vogt who was sacked from his media lecturing post at the University of Leipzig for making a revisionist documentary film about Rudolf Hess. In the early 2010s Vogt founded a web-financed site called Quer-denken.tv, “a free platform for free spirits” featuring “non-conforming diagonal minds”. Part of the self-described “truther scene”, Querdenken.tv produced conspiratorial articles and videos on topics like chemtrails, vaccines, pandemic, including a 2014 piece called “Is the Ebola Pandemic a Lie?”. He organised the annual Querdenken Congress; the 2015 meeting under the title “Everything is Connected”, mixed a cocktail of “conspiracy theories, resentment, and esotericism, featuring right wing celebrities like Nigel Farage, Eva Herman, and Andreas Popp causing protests from unions, churches and political parties which necessitated the booking of subsequent annual events just days before the actual event and the informing of attendees of the location by email to forestall any attempt to pressure venues to cancel their contracts.[35]
Other luminaries include the esoteric Heiko Schrang who has built a massive following on Telegram, You Tube and other platforms and has refused to pay the government “TV tax” since 2016. Schrang is the founder of a press called Macht-steurt-Wissen (Power-controls-Knowledge) which has released books like Cultural Marxism: An Idea Poisons the World, and Germany Out of Control: Between the Loss of Values, Political (In)Correctness, and Illegal Migration. Another Querdenken leader is Samuel Eckert, a former lay preacher expelled from bis Seventh Day Adventist Church for sermons containing antisemitic and coronaskeptic elements. Thus, typical of diagonal or contrarian entrepreneurs (or grifters) worldwide, the Querdenken cohort battles the “Corana Dictatorship” on behalf of the “Truth Movement” while making a buck on the side.[36]
Postscript
It is tempting to hope that with the electoral defeats of the two major Conspiracists-in-Chief, Donald Trump and Jair Bolisanario and the receding of the Covid-19 pandemic that the worst is over regarding the toxic impacts of both the pandemic and the symbiotic conspiracism associated with it. However, just as epidemiologists warn about the near certainty that the virus will mutate into current and future variants so conspiracy narratives will continue to shape shift to as a response to the next “globalist” or “Deep State” threat to the imaginary freedoms of the Sovereign Citizen. Just as national governments and supranational institutions are having to deal with the real time impact of climate change, the same networks of conspiracy theorists, grifters and right-wing libertarians are using the deep or dark spaces of the internet to rally the “people” against “tyrannical” impositions such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Ultra Low Emission Zones and the Net Zero agenda at large. The consequences for human life and security of another concerted global campaign to deny science and spread another tsunami of disinformation against another existential threat to the planet are simply too dreadful to contemplate. The overlap between Covid denialist adherents and the believers in Trump’s stolen election Big Lie is stark as is that between vaccine opponents and pro-Russian narratives over the Ukraine War and racist discourse such as the Great Replacement Theory. At the micro-level the Matrix control narratives allied to the toxic masculinity of disgraced celebrities such as Andrew Tate and Russell Brand and their ability to flee the gatekeepers of social media to unmediated right-wing sites bodes ill for behavioural standards in society.
In an era where all that’s solid appears to be melting into a poorly regulated ether, eternal vigilance must be the watchwords for democrats of both the analogue and digital worlds.
[1] Naomi Klein Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, to be published by Allen Lane on 12th September 2023
[2] Anna Merlan The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived. Vice News 17th July 2020
[3] William Callison and Quinn Slobidian, Coronopolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol Boston Review 12th January 2021
[4] Smoke and Mirrors. Extract from Doppelganger in The Guardian 26th August 2003.
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Aoife Gallagher (2022) Web of Lies. The Lure and Danger of Conspiracy Theories. Dublin: Gill Books.
[13] Ibid, p.13
[14] Ibid, pp.29-31
[15] Ibid, p.17
[16] Ibid, p.18
[17] Ibid, p.14
[18] Ibid, p.15
[19] Ibid, p.15
[20] Ibid, p.16
[21] Ibid, p.24
[22] Ibid, p.21
[23] Ibid, p.21
[24] Ibid, p.22
[25] Ibid, pp.23-24
[26] Anna Merlin, The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived. Vice News 17th July 2020 pp.3-4
[27] Ibid, p.4
[28] Ibid, pp.4-7
[29] Willian Callison and Quinn Slobidian, Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol. Boston Review 12th January 2021 p.2
[30] Ibid, p.5
[31]Ibid, p.4
[32] Ibid, p.4
[33] Ibid pp.6-7
[34] Ibid, p.9
[35] Ibid, p.10
[36] Ibid, pp.10-11
Before launching into an investigation of the core components, pathologies and the amoebic shape shifting qualities of conspiracism, some knowledge of the back story concerning the double trouble in Naomi Klein’s relationship to Naomi Wolf. Both have written seminal works in radical progressive thought. Naomi Klein wrote about the colonisation of the inner and outer lives of humans by corporations in No Wolf in 2000. Naomi Wolf wrote about the commodification and straightjacketing of femininity by late capitalist imperatives in The Beauty Myth in 1990. Klein wrote about the rapaciousness of market forces and opportunities presented to it by Wolf wrote about the almost terminal dysfunctions in the contemporary US in The End of America; Klein sounded a clarion call to action over climate change in This Changes Everything; Wolf about the colonisation of the female body in Vagina[4] Wolf has also theorised about a more aspiration type of “power feminism” in Fire with Fire in 1993.
Klein then describes the descent of Wolf into the conspiracy underworld and how she attracted the ire of those aghast at that descent who accused her of being the author of Wolf’s works. Over a decade ago, Other Naomi had begun taking and writing about power grabs under covers of states of emergency.[5] On the surface, this is a valid warning about the enlargement of executive powers in democracies at times of crises, be they those of the economy or national security. The abuse of judicial processes and the mission creep of civil liberties diminution in the US and UK throughout the War on Terror prove that such calls need not by examples of “crying wolf” (no pun intended or not!).
However, the once strict demarcation lines between those lanes began to blur. For by early 2021, Other Naomi was casting nearly every public health measure summoned to control the Covid pandemic as a covert plan by the Chinese Communist Party, the World Economic Forum and Anthony Fauci to usher in a sinister new world order.[6] She released a video claiming that vaccine-verification apps represented a plot to institute “slavery for ever”. For the apps would usher in a “CCP-style social credit score system” in “the West” – a reference to China’s all-encompassing surveillance net that enables Beijing to rank citizens for their perceived virtue and obedience and which determines access to social facilities such as access to schools and eligibility for loans and to pinpoint location of dissidents for arrest. The “vaccine passports” represented for her a system that “enslaves a billion people”. For the apps would listen to private conversations, track gatherings of people and inform the authorities – all to be brought to the US by Joe Biden, using Covid as the cover study.[7]
Through her espousal of such apocalyptic, anti-statist fulminations, this one-time Democrat and feminist poster girl became a go to figure in the alt-right media landscape. She done the rounds of outlets such as Fox ‘s (now cancelled Tucker Carlson Tonight), Steve Bannon’s War Room, the podcast hosted by James Delingpole, the British far right provocateur and vocal climate-change denier and many others. On one of these, a right-wing podcast carried by something called Today’s News Talk, she shared her “latest thinking” on the effects of vaccination. She observed that in New York City that where the vast majority of the population had been vaccinated,” the people felt. different … like holograms in that you cannot pick up human energy in the same way” and that “People [who are vaccinated] have no scent anymore”.[8]
This she attributed to the “lipid nanoparticles” in the mRNA vaccines, since they “go into the brain, they go into the heart, and they kind of gum it up.” Perhaps even the “wavelength which is love” was experiencing this “gumming up … dialling down its ability to transmit.” She concluded “That’s how these lipid nanoparticles work.”[9]
To call such wackery “pseudoscience” or New Age “wellness woo” hardly speaks to the monstrosity of such claims, although the loud assertion by other anti-vaxxers that the spike protein component of mRNA vaccines is the cause of myocardiopathy in vaccine recipients is a close challenger to such preposterousness. It should be hardly necessary to point out that other Naomi does not have a patina of scientific knowledge or expertise. The nadir of her descent into the rabbit hole of Covid conspiracism was, of course, her equation between the necessity of getting a vaccine with Jews in Nazi Germany having to wear yellow stars.
Naomi Klein writes of the discombobulatory experience of being taken for Other Naomi from being condemned by Jordan Peterson for writing The Beauty Myth, for offence caused to a famous Australian novelist for supposedly failing to remember a prior encounter at a Christmas party hosted by their “shared publisher” (Wolf’s publisher not Klein’s) to denunciations and excommunication (“I cannot believe I used to respect Naomi Klein. WTF has happened”), glib expressions of sympathy (“The real victim in all this here is Naomi Klein”) or being tweeted after the vaccine-yellow star comparison) that she “had been losing (her) mind for years”.[10]
After delving into the rabbit hole of Other Naomi’s rabbit hole in order to divine some insight into and find some explanation for her journey beyond the boundaries of rationality into the nexus of conspiracism and the vortex of Matrices that sustains she rationalised that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and spreaders of misinformation and disinformation about many of our current crises and the inspiration of so many street protests against an almost wholly hallucinated “tyranny”, is at the epicentre of several forces, which, for all their ridiculousness, matter greatly because the confusion they sow and the oxygen they suck from genuinely cooperative and transformative projects for humanity[11]. How then to make sense of them and to counteract their narrative in a world where rationality and the values of the Enlightenment may alarmingly be losing their purchasing power?
Conspiracism: Theories And Effect
A conspiracy is a secret plot between two or more individuals for some kind of nefarious purpose.[12] Conspiracies range from plans by two people to rob local business premises to large scale deceptions by states, corporate organisations, and public authorities to hide the truth of malpractice by these bodies. Examples are legion including the wilful suppression of evidence as to the harmful impacts of the drug thalidomide by its manufacturer; the covering up by Exxon Mobil in the 1970s of its own research showing the link between fossil fuel generation and climate change[13]; that of tobacco companies of the link between smoking and cancer, the cover ups by law enforcement and security agencies of the events surrounding Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough, the scandals in the NHS concerning fatal lack of care in the Mid Staffordshire and Shrewsbury and Telford Maternity Trusts and, probably most famously as it involved interference with the democratic process at the highest levels in the world’s most powerful democracy, the Watergate scandal and the Trump inspired insurgency on Capitol Hill on 6th January 2021 to (unsuccessfully) prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election. Such events can generate greater vigilance among the citizenry about the power and lack of accountability and clamour for the upholding of democratic norms and greater candour from both public and private corporate bodies. That is a healthy response. However, they can also exacerbate cynicism about the entire conduct of politics (“Politicians are all the same”. “All politicians lie) and public affairs and so corrode belief in the legitimacy of liberal democracies. This erosion of trust in authority can then push people (whether predisposed or not) into the netherworld of conspiracy theories or conspiracism.
Theorising Conspiracy Theories
In his seminal book A Culture of Conspiracy Michael Barkun identifies three core components of nearly all conspiracy theories: nothing happens by accident; nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected. For example, throughout the Covid 19 pandemic and its aftermath, anti-vaccination activists have sought to blame the deaths of any vaccinated person on the vaccine no matter what the cause of death. Gallagher notes how the sudden deaths of young people in Ireland were blamed on the vaccine by the Covid-19 conspiracy communities. She cites one person in a group chat on the messaging app Telegram commenting on a supposed increase in RTAs in Ireland since the roll out of the Covid vaccines and asking ‘Anyone else joining these dots’[14]
Barkun explains the dynamic of conspiracism thus: conspiracists assert that as the conspiracy is so powerful, it controls virtually all the channels through which information is disseminated . . . Hence information that appears to put a conspiracy theory in doubt must have been planted by the conspirators themselves in order to mislead’.[15] Such circular and non-falsifiable reasoning explains why debate with die-hard conspiracist is so often futile and it is why agencies who exist to rebut disinformation and hate speech such as the Centre for Counteracting Digital Hate advise no online engagement with, for example, anti-vaxxers, in order to starve them of the oxygen of publicity.
It is important to remember that not all conspiracy theories involve the elevation of bad actors to a position of global omnipotence as in the QAnon narratives of child trafficking by liberal globalist elitists like Hillary Clinton or, maybe the most infamous of all conspiracy narratives, the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Some are curious like the ongoing debate over the existence of UFOs; others are harmless while completely false such as the continuing existence of Elvis Presley and the theory that the singer Avril Lavigne died in 2003 and was replaced by a body double.[16] Others such as the fake landing on the Moon in 1969 and the suggestion that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole participant in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 persist but without the pernicious nature of more modern theories such as that 9/11 was “an inside job” or perpetrated by Mossad and the calumny that the Syrian volunteer civil defence body The White Knights was a joint venture of NATO and Al-Qaeda terrorists.
Conspiracy theories are intrinsically speculative. Political scientist Joseph Uscinski defines a conspiracy theory as a way to explain a certain event or phenomenon by invoking a sinister plot orchestrated by powerful actors, who are acting in secret for their own benefit and against the common good.[17]. As mentioned, real life conspiracies have occurred with lasting impacts e.g., Watergate, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on two generations of African American subjects 1932-72 and the cover ups surrounding Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough. However, fantasies such as 9/11 trutherism are easily rebutted by sold forensic and engineering evidence. Likewise, the ludicrous claims that the Covid 19 pandemic and/or vaccination programme constitute a Great Reset whereby global rule by the World Economic Forum facilitated by a microchipped, technologically compliant human race are easily debunked by epidemiological fact. Much the same can be said about The Great Replacement Theory whereby global elites have sought to dilute the White, Christian character of Europe through the migration of mainly brown skinned, Muslim populations. However, a tragedy of our age is that rational, evidence-based rebuttals of such bunkum is by no means universally accepted. Why?
The conspiracy theories that so many (in the online world anyway) appear to gravitate towards can be logically refuted on the basis of their sheer implausibility. They are in the words of Michael Butter in his book The Nature of Conspiracy Theories “inconsistent with reality” He argues that it the US President, supposedly the most powerful man in the world, could not even successfully spy on his political opponents, then how could “anyone be capable of getting away with faking the moon landing, 9/11 and the refugee crisis and keeping it secret for years and decades”.[18]
It is beyond tautologist to state that conspiracies involving elaborate and skilled coordination and cooperation between world governments, corporations and all sorts of global institutions are implausible. Thousands if not millions of people either prepared to shed their moral compass to facilitate tyranny or to be so incompetent as to be ignorant of their involvement would have to be involved. Where is the paper trail? Where is the digital footprint? How could law enforcement agencies be unaware? (The standard ripostes to all these queries are, of course, “they are all in it” or “they have been bought”). Most importantly, how could such far-fetched plots be kept secret?[19]
Unfortunately, rational enquiry can never penetrate or shift believers in conspiracy narratives as they reside in parallel realities to the “unenlightened”. In the conspiracist mind-set, critical thinking and common sense and are replaced with overwhelming suspicion often leading to paranoia and disassociation from everyday life. Those caught up in such webs of untruth and alternative facts base their beliefs on a combination of speculation, illogical and spurious reasoning, cognitive biases and seeing patterns where they do not exist.[20] Evidence that a conspiracy theory is false is routinely turned on its head by self-sealing beliefs that those providing the evidence are part of the “establishment/elite”. Tempting though it is to pathologise believers in conspiracy narratives, it is more important to enquire into why they make these journeys in the first place.
The Slow Descent into the Rabbit Hole
Many people with deep conspiratorial beliefs have lost trust in everything regarded as mainstream: the media, healthcare, universities, fact-checkers. They believe that all those information sources are controlled or pushing a certain narrative or agenda. Instead, they claim only to trust their own intuition. They do their own research.[21]
How are people attracted to conspiracy theories in the first place? Professor Jan-Willem van Prooijen[22], a behavioural expert and expert in the psychology of radicalisation, extremism and conspiracy thinking, explains feelings of fear and uncertainty. Such emotions lead people to ruminate, to try to identify the cause of their negative feelings and make sense of their situation. This survival instinct is a likely part of our evolutionary psychology of self-preservation, he asserts.
Such catastrophic events such as 9/11, the global financial crash of 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic do generate the anxieties that become the wellspring of conspiracy thinking. Legitimate concerns over violation of our privacy by Big Data or technological developments leading to, for example, digital apartheid and health concerns over medical interventions, and yes, the behaviour of Big Pharma is easily highjacked and manipulated by conspiracy theorists.[23]
The experience of, in particular, women in navigating and being continually rebuffed by institutionally sexist obstetrics & gynaecology services, the historical memory of some ethnic minority communities of vaccine mandates and the high costs of medical treatment in the USA has created ready markets for wellness and anti-vaccine influencers in the USA especially who have so effectively monetised the fears and anxieties of their clients/customers.
Professor Karen Douglas discusses three psychological needs which those who turn to conspiracy theories are searching for. The first is the need for knowledge. She explains that since people want certainty and want to know the truth, if these needs aren’t being satisfied regularly then they are vulnerable to the lure of conspiracism.[24] The mixed messages being conveyed by public health authorities in the UK at any rate at the start of the Covid pandemic and during other epidemics in other parts of the world and the apparent lack of clarity as to the nature and origins of the disease certainly contributed to Covid scepticism and denialism.
Science related conspiracies are very good at exploiting the layperson’s lack of knowledge as to how science is conducted as was demonstrated by the cynicism felt by some as to the speed of the Covid vaccine clinical trials and roll out. The unwillingness of major pharmaceutical companies to share their Covid patents globally hardly increased their reputational capital.
The second unfulfilled need which conspiracists feed on is the need for people to feel safe and secure in the world and feel autonomy in their decisions. This need can be particularly acute at times of loss of trust in institutions which events such as the economic crash of 2007-08, the Iraq war and the expenses scandal involving UK parliamentarians in 2009. Aoife Gallagher relates how those in the Republic of Ireland who had lost businesses and livelihoods in the 2008 recession (when the villains namely the major banks were bailed out at taxpayers’ expense) subsequently fell into Covid conspiracy theories. Since their personal losses had led to a deep-seated mistrust of authorities, the advice by the self-authorities to stay at home and close businesses during the pandemic fell on a very unresponsive audience. The conspiratorial narrative that the authorities were lying about Covid and that they were using the pandemic as a pretext to introduce an authoritarian regime seemed a plausible fit with their past experiences.[25]
The third unmet need explored by Professor Douglas are social needs. People need to feel good about themselves and the social circles they belong to. A particular self-esteem booster in this context is the possession of secret knowledge which only they as “The Awakened” have access to. She explains that when people feel they know what is going on, they develop a superiority complex in relation to the “sheep” i.e., the rest of humanity who are enslaved to the Matrix. Conversations with such people can thus feel like dialogues with religious fundamentalists or ideological dogmatists; distressingly so if the Awakening adherents happen to be close relatives or friends. Social media has of course enabled the satisfaction of this need to the power of infinity.
A fourth human need can be added; the need to blame. The sheer complexity of the Covid virus; its differential impacts on population groups, the pressure on health services and its stressful and often traumatic impact on everyone led many to blame the entire situation on elite groups trying to control the population. The intoxicating elixir of such beliefs felt empowering for those “in the know” and gave a purpose to them: to fight back against perceived injustices.
Towards a Unified Theory of Conspiracism: Singularity
The strains of living in a pandemic era on top of the various identarian conflicts raging throughout the world accelerated what Anna Marlan describes as the “conspiracy singularity”: the place where many conspiracy communities are suddenly meeting and merging. In the USA, UFO conspiracy theorists and QAnon fans advocate for drinking a bleach solution promoted by antivaxxers. Many diverse groups joined anti-lockdown protests borrowing language from the Patriot movement. They called stay-at-home orders “tyranny”, addressed their followers as “Patriots”, and positioning themselves as “a new civil rights movement”.[26]
The coalescence into this singular movement was headed by the hashtag #Covid911, backed by many powerful players in both anti-vaccine and QAnon movements. It holds that the crises which rocked the United States in the summer of 2020 – the pandemic and Black Lives Matter led protests against police brutality in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd – were a massive hoax, designed to sway not just the 2020 Presidential elections but usher in a New World Order (not surprisingly Trump’s “stolen election” lies have since become part of the conspiracy singularity credo). According to one video released by one prominent QAnon promoter and which remained on multiple platforms despite “false information” warnings, called the pandemic, protests and the push for nationwide mail-in voting part of a coordinated irregular warfare insurgency with multiple aims”, perpetrated by the Deep State. Among the smorgasbord of conspiracies it claimed, were that the murder of George Floyd was “mysterious” and not what it seemed, that social distancing was perhaps a pretext to halt grand juries so that President Obama couldn’t be investigated for spying on the Trump campaign and that “violent paramilitary group Antifa” had been given free rein by Democratic mayors to wreak havoc on city streets.[27]
These and even more deranged theories such as that the coronavirus pandemic was both a hoax and a dangerous bioweapon released by China and that the actor Tom Hanks is dead – executed for being part of the paedophile Deep State – and alive in witness protection; that he is dead and replaced by a body double illustrates another defining characteristic of conspiracist thinking – the ability to believe two things at once – even contradictory things. Such dualistic belief is based on an underlying level of “higher order” thinking, an overriding belief that can make even conflicting ideas make sense. Since the cornerstone of conspiracist thinking is the idea that authorities are engaged in motivated deception of the public, new conspiracy theories seem more plausible to believers in that light. But the forcing by the pandemic of many people into a set of universalising circumstances seemed to, in the words of Merlan, create a kind of grand unified theory of suspicion. And with the Internet serving as a seeming central clearinghouse of conspiracy theories, the individual contours of them are becoming harder to distinguish.[28]
Diagnolism
Beyond the United States, Callison and Slobodian in their overview of the global mobilisations against the pandemic restrictions call the strategy behind these diverse movements “diagonal thinking” and the broader phenomenon they represent “diagonalism”. Taking their cue from the Querdenken movement in Germany they develop the idea of “diagonalism from beyond its German context of out-of-the-box thinking towards contestation of traditional left-right divisions (while generally nudging in the direction of far-right beliefs), expression of ambivalence if not cynicism towards parliamentary politics, and the blending of convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.[29]
The term Quer, most often translated as “lateral” or “transverse”, also means “diagonal” or “across”; a Querschnitt of the population. For decades, Querdenken has circulated in C-Suite Powerpoint argot alongside cognates like “disruption”, thinking outside the box” or “think different”. Representing as they so “the revolt of the Mittelstand" the etiology of the term aptly describes the sociological complexion of freelance media hustlers, IT start-up entrepreneurs, small business owners and contrarians comprising the movement.[30]
The first academic study of the “coronaskeptic” movement in Germany, Austria and Switzerland did not reveal a predominance of right wingers or hostility to foreigners or Muslims. Nor did they deny climate change or the Holocaust. What they did believe were that the media and the state were working to create excessive fear in the population, conceal the truth, and deceive the people. Nearly two thirds believed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation want a forced vaccination for the whole world. Movement participants mostly self-identified as middle class and were disproportionately self-employed (25 percent compared to 9.6 percent in Germany overall).[31]
It is hardly surprising that globally anti-lockdown protests were led by small business owners and the self-employed as compensatory measures tended to favour large corporations, which reaped gains – and access to credit from both private and public sources as smaller enterprises suffered, particularly providers of in-person services such as hairdressing and gyms. These occupational strata also traditionally lack the social ties of trade union membership and have less job security than civil servants of employees of larger businesses permitted to work from home.[32]
In August 2020 two “anti-covid” protests were held, the first with 20,000 participants and the second with 38,000. Speaking on stage in Berling at the first rally on 1st August was Michael Ballweg, a Stuttgart-based entrepreneur and IT developer with several start-ups to his name. Proclaiming that “I am here today because I dislike the world the federal government presents to me”, he did not deny the existence of the virus, he insisted that “there is no pandemic” and so no need for allegedly unconstitutional state interventions, “Querdenken comes from the English letter Q for question, he explained, meaning “second-guess the source”. Ballweg the proceeded to copyright Querdenken which describes itself as an “initiative” rather than a “foundation” which enables it to avoid taxes on donations and became its full-time movement hustler. More controversially, the group requests monetary contributions, by PayPal or bank transfer, flowing directly into Ballweg’s account. It has developed a “basis democracy” structure of self-organised groups (like Bochum #234 or Oldenburg #441) which purchase their campaigning merchandise from Stuttgart (#711).[33]
Self-portrayal as minoritarian resistance is a defining feature of Diagnolism, and one that makes diagnolists willing allies of right-wing media voices who articulate contrarian positions on issues from vaccination to climate change to immigration to race science, which they seek to portray as the true voice of the people. Among the celebrity ranks of Germany’s coronaskeptic community are Xavier Naidoo (the former winner of Germany’s equivalent of American Idol), Attila Hildman (the vegan chief turned ultranationalist antisemite), Eva Herman (the former news anchor and best-selling anti-feminist libertarian and the youthful provocateur Naomi Seibt (the so-called “anti-Greta” fostered by climate denialists at the Heartland Institute).[34]
Querdenken’s movement hustlers embrace a minoritarian conception of “the people” with its roots in the far-right underworld of esotericism and alternative medicine. A central figure in this milieu is Michael Friedrich Vogt who was sacked from his media lecturing post at the University of Leipzig for making a revisionist documentary film about Rudolf Hess. In the early 2010s Vogt founded a web-financed site called Quer-denken.tv, “a free platform for free spirits” featuring “non-conforming diagonal minds”. Part of the self-described “truther scene”, Querdenken.tv produced conspiratorial articles and videos on topics like chemtrails, vaccines, pandemic, including a 2014 piece called “Is the Ebola Pandemic a Lie?”. He organised the annual Querdenken Congress; the 2015 meeting under the title “Everything is Connected”, mixed a cocktail of “conspiracy theories, resentment, and esotericism, featuring right wing celebrities like Nigel Farage, Eva Herman, and Andreas Popp causing protests from unions, churches and political parties which necessitated the booking of subsequent annual events just days before the actual event and the informing of attendees of the location by email to forestall any attempt to pressure venues to cancel their contracts.[35]
Other luminaries include the esoteric Heiko Schrang who has built a massive following on Telegram, You Tube and other platforms and has refused to pay the government “TV tax” since 2016. Schrang is the founder of a press called Macht-steurt-Wissen (Power-controls-Knowledge) which has released books like Cultural Marxism: An Idea Poisons the World, and Germany Out of Control: Between the Loss of Values, Political (In)Correctness, and Illegal Migration. Another Querdenken leader is Samuel Eckert, a former lay preacher expelled from bis Seventh Day Adventist Church for sermons containing antisemitic and coronaskeptic elements. Thus, typical of diagonal or contrarian entrepreneurs (or grifters) worldwide, the Querdenken cohort battles the “Corana Dictatorship” on behalf of the “Truth Movement” while making a buck on the side.[36]
Postscript
It is tempting to hope that with the electoral defeats of the two major Conspiracists-in-Chief, Donald Trump and Jair Bolisanario and the receding of the Covid-19 pandemic that the worst is over regarding the toxic impacts of both the pandemic and the symbiotic conspiracism associated with it. However, just as epidemiologists warn about the near certainty that the virus will mutate into current and future variants so conspiracy narratives will continue to shape shift to as a response to the next “globalist” or “Deep State” threat to the imaginary freedoms of the Sovereign Citizen. Just as national governments and supranational institutions are having to deal with the real time impact of climate change, the same networks of conspiracy theorists, grifters and right-wing libertarians are using the deep or dark spaces of the internet to rally the “people” against “tyrannical” impositions such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Ultra Low Emission Zones and the Net Zero agenda at large. The consequences for human life and security of another concerted global campaign to deny science and spread another tsunami of disinformation against another existential threat to the planet are simply too dreadful to contemplate. The overlap between Covid denialist adherents and the believers in Trump’s stolen election Big Lie is stark as is that between vaccine opponents and pro-Russian narratives over the Ukraine War and racist discourse such as the Great Replacement Theory. At the micro-level the Matrix control narratives allied to the toxic masculinity of disgraced celebrities such as Andrew Tate and Russell Brand and their ability to flee the gatekeepers of social media to unmediated right-wing sites bodes ill for behavioural standards in society.
In an era where all that’s solid appears to be melting into a poorly regulated ether, eternal vigilance must be the watchwords for democrats of both the analogue and digital worlds.
[1] Naomi Klein Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, to be published by Allen Lane on 12th September 2023
[2] Anna Merlan The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived. Vice News 17th July 2020
[3] William Callison and Quinn Slobidian, Coronopolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol Boston Review 12th January 2021
[4] Smoke and Mirrors. Extract from Doppelganger in The Guardian 26th August 2003.
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Aoife Gallagher (2022) Web of Lies. The Lure and Danger of Conspiracy Theories. Dublin: Gill Books.
[13] Ibid, p.13
[14] Ibid, pp.29-31
[15] Ibid, p.17
[16] Ibid, p.18
[17] Ibid, p.14
[18] Ibid, p.15
[19] Ibid, p.15
[20] Ibid, p.16
[21] Ibid, p.24
[22] Ibid, p.21
[23] Ibid, p.21
[24] Ibid, p.22
[25] Ibid, pp.23-24
[26] Anna Merlin, The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived. Vice News 17th July 2020 pp.3-4
[27] Ibid, p.4
[28] Ibid, pp.4-7
[29] Willian Callison and Quinn Slobidian, Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol. Boston Review 12th January 2021 p.2
[30] Ibid, p.5
[31]Ibid, p.4
[32] Ibid, p.4
[33] Ibid pp.6-7
[34] Ibid, p.9
[35] Ibid, p.10
[36] Ibid, pp.10-11
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
A well argued piece Barry - they even had conspiracy theories about the Repeal referendum. Then David Icke and the Lizard People - even though he proclaimed himself God there were still people who bought into the nonsense about Lizard People. A lot of good points on the psychology behind much of it, including the superiority complex. In my view there isn't a lot to choose between the Awakened and the Woke. Actually ordered two books on the back of this piece.
ReplyDeleteThis article, as well reasoned as it is, can be a bit unnecessarily jargon-y and technical -and therein lies 'a' distinction of sorts between realists and conspiracists. Conspiracies can be catchy, bumber sticker simple to understand, and fun to indulge in to some extent. They can provide escapism that create a social media feeding frenzy. Professor Karen Douglas' three psychological needs and Barry wisely added a forth -need to blame. The need to blame has fueled many wars and holocausts throughout history -and mixed with modern social media algorithms that need has been an extremely lucrative need to be exploited regardless of the consequences to civil society or democracy. Conspiracies need not always be harmful or even wrong ways of thinking --how many brilliant books or movies have been made involving riveting conspiracies? I think the power of algorithms are too often overlooked -like the addition of addictive ingredients in cigarettes or Tesco ready made meals --algorithms are the fuel or harmful addictive substances to what realists often see as funny or outlandish conspiracies -and scratch our heads wondering how anyone could take them seriously.
ReplyDeleteI think a significant factor is missing
I think that is a good point - conspiracy theories can be like a bumper sticker and therefore make good use of messaging. It is an instant hit whereas this type of article requires a lot more attention.
DeleteThere are plenty of conspiracies going on everywhere and at all times. What makes a conspiracy theory different from a conspiracy is the outlandish nature of their construction. Conspiracies are never at odds with the facts - conspiracies are fact. Conspiracy theories fly in the face of facts.