Conspiracy theorists aren't gullible. Alice in Wonderland/Walt Disney

On June 28 2001, the notorious conspiracy writer and broadcaster Milton William Cooper gave a broadcast from his hilltop Arizona studio. “Can you believe what you’re seeing on CNN today, ladies and gentlemen?” he asked.
Wasn’t it strange, he suggested, that after the CIA had failed for years to find Osama bin Laden, somehow a regular camera crew had found his secret hideout and conducted an interview? Bin Laden was a US intelligence asset, Cooper asserted, and something was now afoot. “I’m telling you to be prepared for a major attack!” he declared.
This attack, Cooper asserted, would be blamed on bin Laden. Two and a half months later, two planes flew into the Twin Towers. On that day, Cooper made a number of further predictions: the US would respond with bombs, somewhere or other; and shortly after that, new laws would impose draconian restrictions on the rights of American citizens.
Cooper later made one further forecast: “They’re going to kill me, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. Less than two months later, it happened. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Or perhaps it really was just a case of a far-Right nutjob resisting arrest for fraud. Cooper was certainly eccentric: among many other things, his 1991 book, Behold A Pale Horse — reportedly one of the most shoplifted titles in America, as well as one of the most commonly read in prison — claimed JFK was assassinated to prevent a secret pact with space aliens.
But whether or not his death really was a political assassination, the paranoid, colourful mindset inaugurated by his book is no longer unusual. In the course of what Venkatesh Rao calls “The Great Weirding”, the triumph of digital over print media has brought a sense of reality coming somehow unstuck. In its wake, conspiracy discourse has become so common it barely registers as such. Recent headlines on train derailments in Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina, for example, swiftly coalesced online with the Chinese spy balloon and three other mysterious “lying objects” shot down recently to become a lively new thread in the ever-evolving conspiracy narrative.
And this mindset isn’t confined to America: according to UnHerd Britain polling this week, 38% of Britons agree that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite”. This rising tide of feral hermeneutics has prompted a great deal of anxious commentary in recent years, as well as a growing corpus of (often themselves highly politicised) censorship regimes and self-appointed organisations dedicated to “fighting disinformation”. But it is a mistake to imagine that myth-making can be always “debunked”, no matter how superficially absurd its claims. And pointing out that conspiracy stories aren’t literally true misses the important sense in which, very often, they are.
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