Yet the event didn’t bring the American Right together. Rather, it triggered infighting that persists to this day. To understand why, we have to be willing to honestly reassess the legacy left behind by the departed. We must even speak ill of the dead (for if we don’t, as Christopher Hitchens asked, who will?). The truth is, Charlie Kirk helped build up the culture of conspiracism that would come to haunt his own death.

Initially, Trump administration figures like Stephen Miller and JD Vance pledged vengeance against the hard-Left militancy that inspired the murder, as well as investigations into whether anyone else was behind the deed. Yet soon, a different narrative emerged on social media and in the podcast realm. The conspiracy theories suggested that perhaps Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of murdering Kirk over his political views, wasn’t the killer at all. Maybe it was the Israelis or the Egyptian security apparatus; or Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA; or Kirk’s widow, Erika, who in the eyes of her critics seemed a little too eager to seek the spotlight in the aftermath.

The divisions marred even Kirk’s memorial service, which brought a reported 90,000 attendees to the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., and overflow venues in the area, on Sept. 21, 2025. Three speeches at the event captured a split that was already emerging on the Right.

First came Stephen Miller’s theme: vengeance. “You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” the hard-line Trump consigliere thundered. “You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization.” Days later, Miller would vow to deploy all the resources of the federal government to go after the Left-wing networks he held responsible for Kirk’s death.

This was followed by the Christian message of forgiveness. Speaking through her tears, Erika announced that she forgave the young man who’d taken her husband’s life and left her children fatherless. It was a stirring piece of oratory, moving even to many nonbelievers and drawing a sharp contrast with Miller’s ferocious, almost-bloody rhetoric.

Finally, there was Tucker Carlson, who brought in the spirit of conspiracy. The former Fox News host eulogized Kirk by recounting the passion of Jesus. Carlson presented the biblical narrative as a story of powerful people in Jerusalem “sitting around eating hummus,” adding that “there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let me just kill him.’” 

While Carlson’s defenders tried to refute the notion that he was implying a Jewish hand in Kirk’s murder, even the arch-Groyper and unabashed Jew-hater Nick Fuentes was taken aback: “They say I’m the No. 1 antisemite. That was a little intense.” Carlson would, of course, go on to prove Fuentes correct and make a fool of his apologists, not for the first or last time.

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Over the following weeks and months, these three forces battled it out. Yet Miller’s promise to crack down on Left-wing activists was perhaps never realistic without evidence that Tyler Robinson had acted in concert with others — and no such evidence ever came to light. The only vengeance on offer was the firing of schoolteachers and grocery clerks for being disrespectful toward Kirk’s memory or insufficiently mournful over his death. As for forgiveness, it never really had a chance in today’s MAGA climate.

It was thus the conspiracy impulse that won the hearts and minds of Right-wing audiences. The day after Kirk’s memorial, podcast host Candace Owens opened her show by mocking Erika and declaring that her husband had been “betrayed” by some within TPUSA. Owens would soon release texts from Kirk complaining about pressure from Jewish donors. In February, Owens launched a docuseries titled Bride of Charlie, in which she questioned everything from Erika’s family background to her finances, and suggested she may have been involved in human trafficking. According to a Washington Examiner count, by April 2026, Owens had devoted no fewer than 84 podcast episodes to Kirk’s killing, weaving a web that included “‘German mystical Jews,’ the CIA and Mitt Romney, Egyptian planes, and, naturally, Jeffrey Epstein.”

Not to be outdone, Carlson declared in June that Kirk “was most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel.” This came after months of Carlson’s platforming of people promoting similar ideas, including the anti-Semitic crank Ian Carroll.

Those who preferred vengeance came to express deep frustration about the turn toward conspiracy. In December, the conservative Media Research Center released a poll showing that only 24% of likely voters identified Kirk’s killer as Left-wing, a result attributable in part to public personalities like Owens and Carlson muddying the waters. 

Blake Neff, one of the current hosts of The Charlie Kirk Show, decried what was happening, charging figures like Owens with causing confusion about an issue that could have been a conservative slam-dunk. “They took something where a radical Leftist, for very legible, specific, Left-wing reasons, did something, and they have pivoted it to, ‘Actually, it was people in our own movement who did it, whom you should now distrust.’”

The far-Right writer and publisher Jonathan Keeperman, known online as l0m3z, had high hopes that something productive might come out of the tragedy of Kirk’s murder. On the day after the killing, Keeperman called for the creation of a Charlie Kirk National Park and a “Smithsonian exhibit on the Woke Era (2012–2024).” In addition to these symbolic steps, he demanded a legal crackdown against the political enemies of MAGA: “Laws will be written. Extremist organizations will be dismantled. Assets will be seized. Individuals and institutions that cultivated the conditions for this climate of violence will face criminal liability. These are necessary measures of statecraft that will in large part determine whether we get another Red reign of terror, or whether we emerge from this with our nation intact.”

The sweeping crackdown Keeperman envisioned never materialized, even though Trump did launch a federal initiative aimed at investigating and disrupting Left-wing networks and their funders. Keeperman lost the argument and later went on to vent anger at the Kirk truthers. In December, the conservative writer Scott Greer likewise lamented that Kirk’s death had “offered the promise of unifying the Right in a common cause against the Left” — an opportunity wasted by infighting over whether Tyler Robinson was actually responsible for the killing. 

Why did the conspiracists win? Sadly, Kirk himself, it must finally be said, contributed not a little to the atmosphere of epistemic madness and institutional mistrust that now suffocates rational thinking on the Right.

Tucker Carlson, after all, was a regular guest at TPUSA events. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for TPUSA, relayed a hadith from the recently murdered Kirk: “Honestly, people telling me not to have Tucker makes me want to have Tucker” at the organization’s conferences. After Kirk’s death, Carlson guest-hosted an episode of the show alongside Neff and Kolvet, who would both later be hounded by conspiracy theorists. This was only two days before Carlson blamed “hummus eaters” for the assassination. Already at that point, Carlson had for years been pushing pro-Kremlin narratives and conspiracy theories like the claim that the Pentagon was operating secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and the idea that Jan. 6 had been a false flag incited by federal agents.

Then, too, Kirk himself was a key promoter of the most significant political conspiracy theory of our generation: the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. Unlike the conspiracy involving his own death, the #StoptheSteal nonsense Kirk promoted led to actual political violence and a coup attempt that could have proved catastrophic for US democracy had not a brave few — most notably, then-Vice President Mike Pence — acted against it.

In December 2020, Kirk condemned then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for congratulating Joe Biden on his victory, comparing it to congratulating someone who had just robbed a bank. In the topsy-turvy fantasy world Kirk had created for his followers, Biden had obviously stolen the 2020 election.

Two days before Jan. 6, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action was “honored” to be “sending 80-plus buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” This tweet was later deleted. He also told his audience at the time there was “an almost guaranteed way Donald Trump serves four more years.” All it would take was for Pence to refuse to certify the results in the swing states that Trump had lost. As for those who might object on constitutional grounds, Kirk’s answer was to “make them sue.” 

When called before the Jan. 6 committee to discuss his role in challenging the 2020 election results, Charlie Kirk invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. And it wasn’t simply election denial; under Kirk, TPUSA events and shows became gathering points for every kind of crank the Right produced, including anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. In May 2021, TPUSA gave a show to Jack Posobiec, a man best known for having pushed Pizzagate — the theory that Hillary Clinton and her associates operated a child-sex-trafficking ring centered on a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.

Kirk could at times be just as conspiratorial as Carlson or Owens, with the main difference being that his theories always had a reliable partisan tilt. He claimed that Biden had deliberately allowed the Afghan government to collapse in order to import more Democratic voters. He thus compressed the peaceful transition of power or the closing of a two-decade war into MAGA-friendly conspiracy theories. 

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Charlie Kirk spread election denial and other kinds of conspiracy theories for the same reasons that Owens and Carlson would later spread conspiracy theories about his death: money, relevance, and playing to the audience. It was only when his family and the remnants of TPUSA became the targets of the forces Kirk had helped unleash, that those left behind began denouncing others for taking advantage of the ignorant and the misinformed.

What are the broader lessons we can draw for the future of the conservative movement? The bad news is that the human-capital problem has gotten so serious, and the media environment so poisoned, that we can no longer expect a baseline of shared reality across the political spectrum. There will always be assassinations, wars, and shocking news events. And as with Covid, the 2020 election, the Ukraine war, and the death of Charlie Kirk, wide swaths of the Right — and, to be sure, some on the Left — will fall to conspiracism. 

But there is a silver lining. As figures like Greer and Keeperman have noticed, a more conspiratorial Right is a less effective one. Despite there never having been any evidence that Tyler Robinson was part of a wider network, there were demands from the moment of the shooting to indiscriminately round up Leftists, and there were certainly figures in the administration like Miller who seemed ready to implement such plans. Had the American Right remained united behind that project, the Kirk murder could have been the Trump administration’s opportunity to further turn the machinery of government against its enemies. Instead, the energy unleashed went into arguing about Egyptian planes flying around assassins. 

Still, the damage is extensive. For more than a decade, Kirk taught a young audience that institutions always lie, that the official story is a cover, and that anyone telling you to stop asking questions has something to hide — while making a special exception for Donald Trump. He was the filter between the leaders of MAGA and the movement’s raging id in cyberspace. Upon his death, the audience he had developed was still primed to suspect that it wasn’t being told the full truth, and hungry for a hidden explanation. 

The young activist’s very corpse became a prop that others in conservative media used in their fights to claim his audience. It’s a fitting postscript for the life of a man who helped make the Right safe for the very conspiracy theorists who would make a mockery of his death.

After working its way through the conservative press and the online Right, this narrative got a major boost last week, when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the administration was looking into the matter. The next day, President Trump himself informed the media that he had attended a meeting on the issue, and commented that the matter was “very serious,” promising that we will know more in a fortnight.

The GOP’s hysteria apparatus — it’s now almost an official part of how the party operates — went into action. According to Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), for example, the disappearances and deaths are “too coincidental” to have happened by chance. He called on officials to “pay attention to this issue and make sure that our nation’s top scientists are safe and secure.”

Fortunately, this entire narrative appears to be, to put it gently, complete nonsense.

In a country with an estimated 2 million researchers, some of them are bound to fall victim to unfortunate events, possibly even within a short span of time. And there is nothing to indicate that the events that have been linked together in the Right-wing media have any connection to one another. The fact that this narrative has gone so far is both a damning index of low journalistic standards in conservative media — and a revealing sign of where their biases lie.

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Until recently, the number of dead or disappeared scientists stood at 10. Fox News reports that these were “individuals tied to US military, nuclear, and aerospace research.” On Friday, an 11th name was added to the list: Amy Eskridge, a Huntsville, Ala.-based researcher who committed suicide in 2022.

Nearly everything about Eskridge’s background raises red flags about any narrative that might include her in a list of important scientists. She was the co-founder of an organization called the Institute for Exotic Science, where she purported to be working on something called “gravity-modification research,” which isn’t a recognized branch of science. In 2020, she claimed to be ready to present groundbreaking work on “antigravity” but needed approval from NASA.

Eskridge apparently believed that she was facing harassment from shadowy forces, who had fired a “directed-energy weapon” at her. There appear to be no credible scientists who have taken her claims or alleged research seriously. I say “alleged” research because, looking for peer-reviewed papers by an author named Amy Eskridge, I was only able to locate one from 2009, and it is unlikely to have been the same woman because she would have been about 21 years old at the time, and the topic is decidedly unexotic: bridge engineering.

Eskridge’s family placed an obituary for her in The Birmingham News. It noted that “after her graduation from [the University of Alabama in Huntsville] with a double major in chemistry and biology, she became an interdisciplinarian and a master of electrical engineering, chemistry, physics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.” By that standard, Lisa Kudrow is a master of exobiology, nanochemistry, and gravitational waves; the Friends star studied science as a Vassar undergraduate, after all.

Which is more likely: that Eskridge, with a bachelor’s degree and big dreams, was a persecuted genius whom a foreign government recognized as a threat that had to be eliminated? Or that she was simply a crank who committed suicide?

Unlike Eskridge, many of the other 10 names on the list appear to have been more serious scholars. Yet for the most part, they toiled in widely divergent fields, held different positions, had no obvious connections to one another, and lived in different parts of the country. They included a retired Air Force major general, an MIT professor, and a pharmaceutical scientist who apparently only made the list due to having a Pentagon contract.

Two of the names were shot and killed. Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor, was murdered by a former classmate from Portugal. This has led some to speculate that a personal dispute or professional jealousy might have been the motive, though we may never know, since the suspect killed himself. Carl Grillmair was a Caltech astrophysicist whose alleged killer had previously been reported for trespassing on his property. In addition to Grillmair’s murder, the 29-year-old suspect in the case has been charged with carjacking and burglary in separate incidents.

Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez both had been employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and both disappeared within a few months of each other in 2025. This at first glance seems strange. But neither of these individuals was an important scientist doing cutting-edge research. Casias was an administrative assistant. Chavez had once worked at Los Alamos, but he was a 78-year-old man who’d been retired since 2017. It’s much more plausible that he fell off a hiking trail than that he was a prime target for a Kremlin-directed assassination.

One of the individuals on the list, Frank Maiwald, is simply listed by media outlets as a 61-year-old who died, with no public cause of death given. There is nothing particularly unusual about a man of that age passing away, and his inclusion on the standard list just goes to show how far conspiracy theorists need to go in order to build their case that something strange going on.

I could go on. We’re not talking here about, say, the 11 top scientists in the country disappearing in a short period of time. To get the list of 11 people over a four-year period, the conspiracy theorists have had to scour the land for retirees, government contractors, random cranks, and administrators.

Where did this narrative even come from? The earliest article on this topic is dated March 22, and was published in the Daily Mail. It notes five missing scientists. The article quoted Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a man who rarely meets a conspiracy theory that he doesn’t think is worth promoting on social media (unless it implicates Donald Trump).

Two days later, a website called The Liberty Line added another name, expanding the list to six. According to its X account, the website specializes in “Philadelphia sports and whatever else comes to mind.” Right-wing media and influencers kept adding names until we reached Eskridge, with old cases treated as breaking news. Finally, the story made its way to Fox News and the White House briefing room.

What is the lesson here? I’ve written in these pages about the problem of Right-wing influencers proliferating crank information. Yet the disappearing-scientists story came from the more “highbrow” — I use the term relatively — corners of the conservative press. The narrative has been pushed by the New York Post, The Daily Mail, and Fox News. Each of these outlets is a cross between professional journalism and the tabloid press. They report real news, and you can trust that most of the time they aren’t fabricating nonsense. But these outlets also sensationalize stories, engage in celebrity gossip, focus more than the mainstream media on personality over substance when discussing politics, and often play fast and loose with the facts in service of a narrative.

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You can often tell the ideological bias of an outlet by noticing when its reasoning ability breaks down. With the Left-leaning press, we see particular hysteria surrounding men alleged to have engaged in sexual misconduct. A prominent man can be accused of anything from forcible rape to making passes at women, and once it is decided he might have behaved inappropriately, no accusation is too small or too poorly verified to get a hearing. Behold the feeding frenzy over Rep. Eric Swalwell, who has articles written about him in which accusations of drugging and raping women are placed alongside tales of flirtatious text messages. See also Michael Tracey’s coverage of the Epstein Files, and the degree to which the most salacious accusations about human trafficking remain widely believed despite the lack of evidence.

Where does logical reasoning break down in the Right-wing press? First, there is just a general conspiratorial orientation. The narrative about disappeared scientists is linked to excitement over the idea that the government is hiding the truth about UFOs. In early 2024, a Pentagon report determined that most UFO sightings can be explained as ordinary objects, and concluded that there was no evidence that we are being visited by extraterrestrial lifeforms. Yet in the world of Right-wing media, conspiracy theories never die once they take hold. Ignoring previous reports, Trump recently promised a TPUSA crowd “very interesting documents” related to the UFO phenomenon.

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In Trump, conspiracy theorists have the president of their dreams, and the halls of Congress are likewise filled with lawmakers who pander to them. Yet they remain disappointed on topics like UFOs and Jeffrey Epstein. Where are the arrests of all the shadowy pedophiles? Where are the little green men? It can’t be that there is nothing there. Some end up disillusioned with Trump, believing he is no better than the members of the Deep State he supposedly displaced, while others keep trudging to TPUSA events, holding out hope that in another week or two, Trump is going to get to the bottom of things.

For Fox News, however, this isn’t simply a matter of playing to conspiracy theorists. The network is always in search of a narrative involving foreign threats. While the podcast sphere and the online Right have been disappointed with hawkish Trump administration policies like the war with Iran, on Fox News it might as well still be 2005. The story of the 11 dead or missing scientists thus not only scratches a conspiratorial itch, but also has the potential to hype the audience up for hawkish policies abroad.

The online Right lives and breathes exciting fever dreams that appeal to the less educated based on distorted or fabricated information. The mainstream Right-wing press is preferable but still plays footsie with the conspiracy theorists and cranks who compose its audience. Increasingly, members of Congress find it beneficial to play to the same crowd, if they are not conspiracy theorists themselves. All of this is a recipe for a constant stream of false narratives. The story of the disappearing scientists is yet another case proving this point. 

Do not expect anything to come of it. Soon, they will move on to something else.

Yet today, it’s clear that Idiocracy was, if anything, too optimistic. Twenty years hence, American public discourse is cruder and attention spans are shorter; mind-deadening drugs have become more pervasive, and politics is far more tribal and hateful than anything depicted by Judge. All this has taken place on a much faster time scale than Idiocracy predicted, moreover, and the changes are far more the result of ideologies spun up from resentment and hate than the biological degeneration featured in the film. 

Call it the Great Stupidization.

In Idiocracy, set in 2005, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a low-ranking soldier in the US Army, and a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph) are selected to be frozen for a year in a top-secret experiment. But with the general leading the initiative caught in a personal scandal — he gets a little too close to the pimp who procures the prostitute for him —  the program is shut down and forgotten by the feds. Joe and Rita wake up 500 years in the future. 

During those five centuries, the narrator informs us, dysgenic breeding has dramatically dumbed down the American population, leaving Joe and Rita the two smartest people on the planet. In this brave new world, corporations dominate the globe, down to the hospitals and law courts. Massive piles of garbage are everywhere, and agriculture has failed because crops are watered with a branded sports drink (“Brawndo, it’s what plants crave”). Joe, with an IQ of 100 according to the scale of his era, scores off the charts on an intelligence test while in prison, and is then appointed secretary of the interior by President Camacho, a former professional wrestler who governs via spectacle. 

The parallels with our own world are easy enough to spot, from the reality-TV president to the short, declarative sentences that characterize both President Trump’s and Camacho’s manner of speech (“I know everyone’s shit is emotional right now,” Camacho declares amid a looming famine). We even have a form of scientific illiteracy similar to watering crops with sports drinks in the form of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine stance. He’s just using his position to promote Steak ’n Shake instead of Carl’s Jr., the real-life fast-food chain whose advertising motto in the film runs: “Carl’s Jr. — fuck you, I’m eating!” As for cinema, Americans in the film’s distant future relish watching human butts up-close, farting.

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Yet despite its obviously dystopian vision, the film reflects the optimism of the era from approximately the end of the Cold War to the Great Recession. Consider that its stupid people do not engage in racial or ethnic scapegoating. They’re not aggressively misogynistic, and the institutionalized homophobia is limited to a prosecutor telling the court that Joe “talks like a fag.” In Idiocracy, the president is black, and no one comments on it; compare this to either the woke left denigrating speakers for their whiteness, or those on the right who now believe that the value of an individual’s opinions depends on whether he is a “Heritage American.”

In the film’s future America, moreover, conspiracy theories do not seem to play any role, despite the fact that they dominate our own timeline, such as the QAnon theory that liberal elites like Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks kidnap and rape children, with it being Donald Trump’s mission to stop them.  Stupid people in Idiocracy repeat corporate slogans, but they don’t believe that they have discovered secrets about the way society works that have been hidden from them by shadowy elites. Judge couldn’t imagine the toxic spew of hate and paranoia, fueled by fantasies of persecution and revenge, that we generate today.  

We laugh at QAnon, but we don’t fully consider the bloodlust generated in the theory’s adherents, who believe in a horrifying universe of elite Satanic pedophiles and dream of mass executions when the child rapists finally face justice. And the Epstein saga drags on, without proper moral weighing of its consequences for truth and probity. The reality is that not a shred of evidence has emerged for elite pedophile or sex-trafficking rings surrounding Epstein, and the woman who was most responsible for spreading these claims was a confirmed fabulist, with deep mental-health issues. Yet high-school-dropout-turned-congresswoman Lauren Boebert drags the Clintons before Congress in order to ask Hillary about the connection between the Epstein story and Pizzagate. Such accusations are nearly always combined with at least an undertone of violent threat. 

Our era, fueled by this venom, is much darker than that of the film. President Camacho compares favorably with Trump in terms of decency and interest in the common good. He at least wants to address his nation’s crises in a serious way. The fictional president even admits fault, unlike Trump, who blatantly lies about economic and crime data and has an uncanny ability to convince his supporters that up is down. 

As Camacho tells the House of Representatives, “I know shit’s bad right now. With all that starvin’ bullshit. And the dust storms. And we runnin’ out of French fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.” Camacho informs the audience that Joe has the highest IQ of any man alive, and the crowd is impressed. After the speech, Camacho promises Joe a full pardon for a crime he is facing if he fixes the crop situation. That implies public-spiritedness and can be contrasted to Trump’s use of the pardon power for the benefit of those who can help him politically or who contribute to his family’s various crypto scams. 

Dumb people in Idiocracy are relatively harmless: they just want to be entertained. They don’t harbor deep, irrational social grievances, or construct false oppression narratives for themselves. Yes, they will laugh when a guy gets hit in the crotch — the 26th century has an entire TV show dedicated to the concept, Ow My Balls — and they enjoy criminals being eliminated in a spectacle that is a combination of a monster-truck rally and the Roman Colosseum. But there’s none of the ideology-driven moral righteousness that has motivated many of history’s greatest atrocities and now fuels contemporary haters. They’re also much humbler. When told that the smartest man in the world is going to fix their problems, they’re inclined to give him a chance, rather than think that they know better because they “did their own research” on vaccines. 

In Idiocracy, humanity’s IQ drops, but the impact on our moral culture is relatively limited. We still maintain capitalism and democracy, albeit in degraded forms. The achievements of the civil-rights revolution are apparently locked in for good. The morons seem generally happy, comfortable with their place in the universe.

In the real world, we know that intelligence has a strong association with practically every positive trait we might measure. Smart people are more tolerant of others, have more liberal social views, and are less authoritarian. They commit fewer crimes and are more pro-social, which is the main reason why richer communities, where the people are more intelligent, are nicer places to live. Intellectual elites not only have nicer houses, but are also better friends, neighbors, and citizens.

Perhaps the fact that the movie’s stupid people are so much more decent than our own explains why the America of Idiocracy maintains a GDP per capita that is higher than one would expect based on the national IQ. Their society still has advanced technology, such as a machine at the hospital that correctly diagnoses one’s condition by putting tubes into various orifices (the dull health-care workers, of course, manage to screw it up, putting the wrong tubes into the wrong orifices before correcting their errors, to hilarious effect). Rita finds it easier than ever to work as a prostitute: she doesn’t need the protection of a pimp, and the johns are stupid enough to pay without her having to service them. 

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The relative success of Idiocracy’s America — a country where everyone is borderline or fully retarded, yet the streets are safer than modern Honduras or Brazil — is never satisfactorily explained, though the public does appear to be dulled into a much less agentic state. We are told that the English language has deteriorated into a combination of “hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang, and various grunts,” reflecting popular subcultures that exist in modern America, and giving the speech of the masses a comfortable familiarity. But conspiracy theorists were too far below the radar in the mid-aughts to get representation; if Judge made the same film today, he would fail the test of verisimilitude. 

The benevolence of the universe of Idiocracy — and of our former world, or at least the way we perceived it — is also reflected in its omission of international relations. You would think that maybe countries would genetically decline at different rates, allowing one state or a small group of them to establish hegemony over the rest. But 1990s and early-aughts optimism saw the world as such a safe, predictable place, the film fails to even gesture at such possibilities.

The mechanism through which humanity gets stupider in Idiocracy is genetic, while what’s happened to us has been the result of screens melting our brains, demagogic politicians exploiting preexisting ignorance, and the internet and social media removing gatekeepers and democratizing the discourse (yes, healthy public discourse needs intelligent gatekeepers, a fact that was obvious to Western civilization going back to Plato). Moreover, it is at this point difficult to see many scenarios where we get to 2505 without humanity being either destroyed by artificial intelligence, or so transformed by it as to be unrecognizable.

Insofar as this fate is the result of advanced technology, we might say that the real problem has been not too little intelligence, but too much of it, carelessly applied. The confidence of the Idiocracy era contained the seeds of our downfall. We once believed that you can get as dumb as you want and the world would still remain relatively safe; no one would look for reasons to hate; and other human beings, whether foreign adversaries or local criminals, would be unlikely to try to purposely hurt you. The crude genetic determinism of the film likewise obscured the more immediate threats to human cognition; the iPhone was officially announced a mere four months after Idiocracy’s release.  

Luckily, we still have the biological potential to change course. But doing so must begin with a recognition of how bad things have gotten, and a realization that a stupider world is also a much darker and more unsettling one. The political discourse is not simply insignificant chatter providing various forms of entertainment and anxiety to tens of millions of Americans. It reflects the character with which we approach public life and the nature of our existence as political animals. From that perspective, we are in many ways in a more degraded state than the viewers of Ow, My Balls!. 

The phrase “conspiracy theory” was once synonymous with delusional, rationally absurd notions. And yet our executive, intelligence community, and Justice Department have undeniably conspired against Donald Trump and other perceived threats to the state. At the same time, Israel’s Mossad has executed unprecedented operations against its enemies, some of which would be literally unbelievable — exploding pagers? Really? — had they not actually happened. Is it conspiratorial to note that these are beloved tropes of spy fiction?

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Where might Islamic Jihadists have discovered the idea of flying aircraft into iconic structures? In Tom Clancy’s techno-thriller Debt of Honor (1994), a Japanese terrorist flies a 747 into the Capitol, and in Thomas Harris’s Black Sunday (1975), Islamic terrorists rig the Goodyear blimp as a bomb and fly it into the Super Bowl.

Many writers were literally secret agents. Frederick Forsyth, the creator of the techno-thriller, was a spy for the British secret service while working as a journalist. So, too, were Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham. Ian Fleming worked in wartime London as a strategist for Churchill’s saboteurs, the Special Operations Executive. His Bond books, though enjoyable, are neither technically interesting nor especially informative. In Casino Royale, for example, Bond carries a .25 caliber Beretta, a purse pistol, which any shooter will tell you is a “good thing to have if you don’t have a gun”. In his next outing, 007 has upgraded to a .32 caliber Walther, which is not much better.

When enlisted in the War Effort, Fleming’s imagination conjured a plan to capture a German seaplane, fill it with British commandos, then stage an engine-out landing near some Nazi ship or base that needed destruction. It was never implemented.

One of the grandest wartime schemes did become a book: The Man Who Never Was. It concerns Operation Mincemeat, which was a plot whereby a British vagrant, who had died from ingesting rat poison, was dressed and accoutred as an officer in the Royal Marines. His body was carried by submarine to the coast of Spain where it was ejected and swiftly washed ashore. The briefcase handcuffed to his arm carried correspondence indicating that the upcoming British invasion would target Sardinia. The Nazis fell for the ruse, diverting forces from Sicily — the actual Allied objective. One of the authors of the original Operation Mincemeat memo was Commander Ian Fleming, so that’s a horse on me.

Operation Mincemeat was also memorialized in a rather good 1956 film starring Clifton Webb. A lesser-known version is Duff Cooper’s 1950 novel Operation Heartbreak. Not only a novelist, Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich (1890-1954) was also a prominent Tory politician, First Lord of the admiralty, and, after the war, ambassador to France. During the First World War he served in the trenches as a Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. During Churchill’s time in the “Wilderness”, and, in his Prime Ministry, Duff was his closest ally. In his retelling of Mincemeat, he has a British colonel, who just missed combat in the Great War, trapped on desk duty in the Second. After he dies of a heart attack, it is his body used in the ruse.

At least we know Mincemeat definitely happened. We have no such assurances for its prequel, a story that blurs the lines between fact and fiction even if it never ended up on bookshelves.

Richard Meinertzhagen was chief of British military intelligence in East Africa at the outset of the First World War. Transferred to Egypt, he operated in Palestine against the Turks. He’s most famous for the so-called Haversack Ruse, the older brother of Mincemeat. On reconnaissance, Meinertzhagen contrived to get too close to the Ottoman lines — which promptly tried to shoot him. Despite nearly falling off his horse, Meinertzhagen managed to gallop back to safety, though not before dropping a haversack full of (false) information about General Allenby’s plans for the recapture of Jerusalem. It’s a cracking tale, and as its appearance in Mincemeat suggests, a tactic probably as old as warfare. And perhaps it’s even true.

Why should I doubt it? Well, off the field, Meinertzhagen was a colossal fraud. Acclaimed as one of Britain’s premier ornithologists, he sent back undiscovered specimens from his posts around the world. Their pride of place in museums was marred only by the discovery that they were, universally, cut-and-paste assemblages of unrelated birds. Such is the fondness for Meinertzhagen in the Spy Thriller community that a homage was paid him in one of the Smiley books. Smiley has assembled and dispersed his beloved “watchers” to surveil an opponent. He names them, and among them are “the two Meinertzhagen girls”.

As a fellow fraud, John le Carré must have loved the rotter. He was one of the great writers of the 20th century and along with Patrick O’Brien, and our George V. Higgins, he elevated the genre novel to something superior — to the status of “art”. His books, like Joseph Conrad’s spy classics, are suffused with pathos and sadness. He was one of the century’s most successful writers, both artistically and financially.

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Who, then, would indict him as a fraud? Le Carré himself, self-confessed as a hypocrite — not as a writer, but as a spy. All his books concern the fight of the secret service against the Communist threat, even as its agents battle Whitehall corruption and treason. All his work is about disillusionment, none more so than A Perfect Spy (1986), whose hero, like le Carré himself, was raised by a confidence-man father. The protagonist, unlike le Carré, becomes a double-agent, so enamoured of acceptance that he serves two warring powers simultaneously. Upon being discovered, he goes mad and takes his own life.

A fictional soldier of fortune for America was Joe Gall. He featured in 20 thrillers by Philip Atlee. These were yarns featuring sadism and pornography — unsurprisingly attractive to me as an adolescent boy. In each of the books he (like James Bond) falls in love with a new woman who is murdered by the book’s end.

The mythic Gall was a contract agent for a government outfit so secret it even lacked a name. He was notable for his various martial skills, and for an absolute immorality in the service of his country. But more to the point is the author’s pedigree. Philip Atlee was James Atlee Phillips, brother of David Atlee Phillips, who, it seems, was the CIA handler of Lee Harvey Oswald. Now that we are able to peruse the JFK assassination files in which he features, we can not only enjoy the light they shed on conspiracy, but also look forward to the subsequent conclusion that the files themselves have been faked.

No one embodies this paradox better than the world’s richest man.

He who controls Twitter, now X, exercises a vast power over the culture, and the website is now the personal playground of Musk. As a prolific tweeter with some 219 million followers, Musk would have a powerful voice if he were just a regular user who could amplify certain accounts. As it is, he has also changed the tone and ideological tilt of the public square toward his preferred direction through measures like revenue sharing and the algorithmic derogation of links (meaning, if you share a link in an X post, far fewer people are likely to see it).

To say Musk is biased in his posts or that he shows a disregard for the truth doesn’t come close to capturing the constant stream of nonsense he blasts out to the world. This isn’t a matter of being biased or getting things wrong like CNN occasionally does. His feed is more in the neighborhood of InfoWars, where Alex Jones will typically point to a document that actually exists to make wild extrapolations about what Democrats or “globalists” are up to. Musk is somehow more reckless: the things he regularly promotes lack even that kind of nexus to something based in reality.

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He approvingly retweeted a tweet about a story pertaining to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants being on the voter rolls in California, yet the link in the original post he himself shared was to a Snopes article debunking the claim. Musk has also falsely asserted that federal disaster-relief funds meant to help Americans were redirected towards housing illegal immigrants, even though the two are completely different programs. When a pro-Russian account claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had a 4% approval rating in Ukraine — in contradiction to all reputable polling — he was fact-checked via a community note, which caused Musk to flip out and charge that the system was being gamed. These aren’t isolated instances. Things like this happen all the time.

It might be reasonable to suspect that someone as successful as he is must just be playing dumb online, while displaying a hidden command when it comes to policy. Yet even if you are sympathetic to his goal of reducing the size and scope of government — as I am — focusing on firing federal employees is just about the worst possible way to achieve that end. Fewer people working at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, doesn’t mean regulators getting off the backs of pharmaceutical companies trying to bring drugs to market. Instead, it makes drug-approval processes longer and more arduous. Or consider: Republicans have tended to oppose student-loan forgiveness, but now cuts at the Department of Education may lead to there not being enough workers to collect debt. Put another way: Muskian methods may be enacting a de facto version of former President Joe Biden’s policies.

Federal employees are a small part of the budget, and Musk’s assertions that huge savings might come from uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse is not taken seriously by anyone who has looked into the issue. He has spread false claims about dead people collecting Social Security that were based on a misunderstanding of a government database. All of this is even before getting to the question of how much of what he has been doing will hold up in court, with many of his moves already facing legal setbacks.

Musk is not alone. Other members of the tech oligarchy close to the administration have regularly spread false or misleading information, albeit on a much smaller scale. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen went on the Joe Rogan podcast a few months ago and made claims that were somewhere between vastly exaggerated and completely false about the Biden administration “debanking” its enemies. During election season, a prominent VC investor asserted that there was massive voter fraud going on in California based solely on a text message someone sent him.

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All of this means that even for those of us who are true believers in the capitalist system, it has become clear that the traits that make one successful in business do not necessarily transfer into governance. Nor do they equate to having sensible, or even reality-based, views on policy.

Sure, successful entrepreneurs must have a high level of intelligence and a decent work ethic. But if Musk and other tech titans who have come close to the Trump administration are any indication, they seem to have other traits that imply they should be kept as far away from political power as possible.

What is going on here?

In a well-functioning market economy — assuming we are not talking about an exceptional case like a firm that peddles a highly addictive or otherwise harmful product — profit tends to be straightforwardly related to improving social welfare. People pay because they want a good or service, given conditions of scarcity and their own subjective preferences. Markets also take into account how workers are treated, the well-being of suppliers a business deals with, and an endless number of factors and interests that influence how capital and resources are allocated.

Government, in contrast, doesn’t have a similarly crisp measure of success. Sure, there are some metrics that guide policy makers, such as GDP and the unemployment rate. Yet leaders are expected to consider the long-term health and well-being of a society. They are supposed to respect rights and uphold fundamental values, even if we often disagree about what those values are.

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As Musk goes on a firing spree and seeks programs he can kill, we see that, in the absence of a widely agreed upon metric for success, he has decided to choose ones that will serve his private purpose. The fewer government employees and the less money government is spending, the better he thinks he’s doing. Again, even if you are a libertarian, this is a dumb way to go about achieving libertarian goals. DOGE has the word “efficiency” in its name, but efficiency is hard to define and measure, so employees fired and money saved have served as lousy proxies. Note also his influence on the latest congressional budget process, which was focused on reducing the page count in the legislation.

Of course, even in terms of Musk’s chosen metrics, success has been limited, as a government official, even a high-placed one, lacks the freedom of a CEO. Congress won’t let Musk touch the true drivers of government spending — namely, entitlements and defense. Musk appears to know this, but doesn’t seem to care when he is making exaggerated claims about what DOGE can and has accomplished. Grasping for metrics that are as useful as profits and losses in business has clearly led him astray. Note also that even when he finally acknowledged recently how much of government spending goes to entitlements, he felt the need to lie about these programs and say that they are there so the Left can attract illegal immigrants to the country.

Compounding the problem is the information bubble in which Musk has imprisoned himself. On X, his engagement is overwhelmingly with con artists, conspiracy theorists, and grifters. He now follows Catturd, a man who believes in every conspiracy theory from anti-vax to chemtrails, and whose ignorance and sycophancy towards Trump are legendary among regular X users. When the Trump administration tried to stir up social-media influencers by giving them the “Epstein files”, the results were so ridiculous that even many MAGAs felt compelled to say so. Yet Musk was still spreading the narrative that the deep state was thwarting Trump’s attempts to get to the bottom of the issue. Understand that there is a hierarchy in terms of how insane MAGA influencers are, and even among them, Musk pushes narratives that only appeal to the worst.

There is no indication in his prodigious tweeting that he relies on any newspapers, serious books, or credible sources of information. When a data scientist at X once told Musk that he had fallen for a conspiracy theory that would only appeal to a person at the tenth percentile of gullibility, Musk cursed at him. The man seems to have a deep lack of intellectual curiosity not only about the arguments of his political opponents, but even those of informed observers who would be inclined to support his project.

Again, having a kind of tunnel vision actually works well in business. An entrepreneur can afford to ignore the business press and what is happening in other industries and simply go about pursuing his vision of change. Yet a political actor can’t completely discount the views and opinions of those he disagrees with, because they are going to be part of the landscape going forward. And wise leadership requires a broad perspective on legal, economic and political affairs that raw genius can’t compensate for. Having a policy idea, for example, requires not only knowing whether it will work in the narrow sense, but also whether it can get through the courts and the legislative branch. This doesn’t mean that it would be a good use of his time for Musk to be reading case law, as no one can be an expert in everything, but it is necessary to have a grasp of reliable sources of information.

This leads to perhaps a more important difference between business and political success, which comes down to the ability to negotiate with and placate one’s enemies. An entrepreneur or CEO can act like a conqueror, provided his product is innovative enough or his market power overwhelming enough. If he builds a better, cheaper, faster product, society benefits, and he conquers his sector — or even creates an entirely new market. He never has to even be in contact with his competitors, who are free to do something else if they are less talented or lucky.

In contrast, the fundamental question of democratic politics is how to peacefully settle disputes between individuals and parties that disagree with one another. Healthy democracies celebrate leaders who bring us together, or at least take actions that are conducive to long-term peace and stability. Musk regularly spreads completely fabricated conspiracy theories about his political opponents, has repeatedly implied that those he disagrees or has disputes with are sympathetic towards pedophilia, when not referring to them as pedophiles themselves, and recently called Sen. Mark Kelly a traitor after he posted his support for Ukraine. Mean words directed at a business rival hurt feelings but have little social significance. In politics, however, fortunes reverse quickly, and today’s defeated opposition could be tomorrow’s governing party primed for payback. Moreover, truly lasting change is usually a product of bipartisan efforts.

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By Malcom Kyeyune

Finally, successful capitalists often have superhuman levels of optimism. The upside of such an outlook can be huge, and there is nothing wrong with this. If they fail, they simply lose money and distress their investors, who knowingly took on the risk. But public responsibility requires an appreciation for life’s tragic dimension and for the possibility that careless action, combined with bad fortune, can wreck society and millions of lives.

Musk’s reliance on sycophants like Catturd seems related to his overwhelming optimism. There’s little in his past to indicate he has ever sought out people who challenge him intellectually. Again, this trait may not matter in business, where so much depends on taking innovations that exist and bringing them to market. Drive and the ability to inspire a team can be what make the difference between success and failure.

But again, public life is different. Foolish wars are often started because leaders think they’re going to be easy — think George W. Bush’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Say what you will about communist regimes, one thing they have never lacked is optimism about how their plans will turn out.

To be sure, this analysis doesn’t explain everything about Musk’s recent behavior. There may be other dimensions. I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022, whether it was from drug use, social-media addiction, a combination of both, or something else. It’s possible that all his business ventures begin to fail from now, which would indicate a more general decline in his cognition and ability to regulate his emotions. Much reporting has been done on Musk’s drug use, which has been serious enough to worry many around him.

Yet if Musk continues to succeed as a businessman while being this dumb about everything related to public policy, he will end up having given us what was by far history’s greatest demonstration of the non-transferability of insight and skill across domains where wise leadership is necessary for human flourishing.

If there is an infinity of universes, as some scientists speculate, the cosmos may contain an infinite number of Russell Brands. It follows that if there is a God, he must surely be a malevolent one. There is, however, an upside to this nightmare. Several million of these Brands are at this very moment being torn limb from limb on various women-governed planets, while several million others are being hung upside down from lamp-posts.

Doubling has its comic aspects. If a monstrously fat man in pink tights and a sombrero crosses a stage, and a moment later another monstrously fat, similarly dressed man does the same, the audience are likely to laugh. In Freudian terms, they can avoid the mental labour of coping with difference, and by economising on psychical energy in this way they can release it in the form of laughter. Most humour involves a sense of incongruity, and in this case, ironically, it is sameness which is incongruous in the sense of out of step with the way things usually are.

If this were to happen in real life, however, it would probably be more eerie than funny. I was once on a flight to Sydney, waiting for the aircraft to take off, when an enormously tall Japanese man, not a common sight, entered the plane. He was followed almost immediately by another Japanese man well over six foot tall, and he by another, and so on until fifteen or so of them had lumbered down the aisle. This was pretty spooky until I discovered that it was the Japanese basketball team en route to the Australian Olympics.

Pure repetition is unnerving. Exact identities don’t happen in everyday life, which is why Nietzsche thought that words such as “leaf” were fictional because they implied that all leaves are the same. It’s also why identical twins have a sacred status in some cultures, “sacred” meaning both blessed and cursed. The fact that the alien children in John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos all look the same is part of what makes them so sinister. We are speaking of the uncanny, which means something both strange and familiar — familiar because it’s exactly like something else we know, but strange because this repetition is creepy.

One reason we enjoy rhythms and rhymes is that they combine difference and repetition, thus avoiding a monotonous thud on the one hand and a disorientating diversity on the other. “Baa baa black sheep” is fine, but “Baa baa black bull” has a surfeit of sameness. Pure identity is tedious, while pure difference would be unintelligible. Hell is traditionally thought to be less agonising than boring. It has the eternal sameness of shit.

It’s much the same with aliens, who are never very alien. They may have weird eyes, but at least they have eyes. If they were entirely different from us it’s hard to know how we could be aware of them. Perhaps a couple of them are sitting in your lap right now. Aliens may be tiny and greenish and stink of sulphur, but otherwise they look much like Jonathan Ross. More to the point, they bear a remarkable resemblance to both William Hague and Dominic Cummings. In fact, there are people for whom aliens, who touch down on Earth occasionally, are the only acceptable kind of immigrants, given that they presumably don’t intend to take our jobs, houses, primary school places or PhDs.

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Beware the new leviathans

By Terry Eagleton

An interplay of sameness and difference can be found everywhere you look these days, and its technical name is narcissism. To be besotted with yourself is clearly an example of sameness or self-identity, but it also involves treating yourself as though you were someone else, and thus a degree of difference or self-alienation. You treat yourself and your body with exquisite care, as though you were carrying a precious but sickeningly fragile vase in your hands. Putting items in this brittle container, an activity traditionally known as eating, is a particularly fraught affair. There has probably been no civilisation for which food was simply food, but it’s rare to find one like our own where it’s scarcely food at all but invasion, potential poison, crime against non-humanity (eating meat), moral blackmail, emotional manipulation or a slavish surrender to patriarchal demands.

The opposite of treating yourself as Other is treating the Other as oneself. In ancient Greek tragedy, the ultimate other is the monster, some deformed creature which civilisation needs to shut out in order to preserve its sanity and stability. The monster in Sophocles’s plays about Oedipus seems to be the Sphinx, but in the end it turns out to be the blinded, incestuous, parricidal Oedipus himself, the king who is driven out of society and reduced to a homeless beggar. Shakespeare’s Lear is a later version of this tragedy. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, it is the hideous Furies who threaten to subvert social order, while in Euripides’s Bacchae it is the god of orgies and erotic love, Dionysus.

In all these cases, society can only survive if it has the courage to recognise something of itself in the monstrous Other which confronts it. It must acknowledge this thing of darkness as its own, as part of the unspeakable truth about itself, and integrate it into the community. If it can do so, a great power for good will be released. The social order must recognise that its stability rests on the violent repression of these life-giving, death-dealing forces; only then can it be truly secure. When you meet your double, so legend has it, you die; but it might also be the occasion for a transformed existence.

Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is about her double Naomi Wolf, about whom it is not exactly complimentary; and if Wolf reads the work, as of course she will, and runs into Klein with a knife conveniently to hand, one fears that the legend might turn out to be true. Klein is a Left-wing scourge of corporate capitalism, while Wolf was once a liberal feminist and darling of the Democrats who groomed Al Gore in how to give a convincing imitation of a human being.

She is now a conspiracy theorist who has a cavalier way with the facts, has compared Barack Obama to Hitler and thinks that people who are vaccinated against Covid don’t really feel human. She appears regularly on podcasts with Steve Bannon, who is said to have expressed disapproval of his children going to school with Jews (Wolf is Jewish). One of the two Naomis, then, embraces a paranoid form of politics, while the other does not. As Samuel Beckett remarked of one of the two thieves on Calvary being saved, it’s a reasonable percentage.

Nobody’s afraid of Naomi Wolf, but what she stands for these days is deeply alarming. The real Naomi, i.e. Klein, is regularly confused with the unreal Naomi, i.e. Wolf, and her book is among other things an exorcising of this embarrassment. A similar situation used to exist in Britain, where there was a real Stuart Hall, a Left-wing cultural theorist from Jamaica, and an unreal Stuart Hall, a slick TV performer and fawner on royalty who ended up in prison.

Why do so many conspiracy theories originate in the United States? One answer lies in the vast size of the place. This means that Americans are accustomed to a fair amount of personal space, and are particularly sensitive about that space being “invaded”. An American might say “Excuse me” if they come within six feet of you, which is not true of the citizens of Beijing. Smoking is taboo not only because it can kill you, but because smoke represents a contaminating connection between one hygienically sealed body and another. The model of human contact is infection. Rather as smoke becomes invisible but remains all-pervasive, these apparently separate bodies are caught up in some terrifying web of secret powers, and thus by no means as free and autonomous as they think.

Conspiracy theorists, for whom (like the paranoid) nothing happens by accident, are out to give a name to this system, whether you call it the political state or the work of a bunch of paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy. In doing so, you have the satisfaction of ascribing what seem to be random, anonymous forces (the market, for example) to a purposeful agent, so that the world makes some sense, however sinister, and you have someone to blame.

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By Terry Eagleton

You can also combat the sealed-off bodies syndrome with new forms of bonding and brotherhood like the Proud Boys. When a pandemic breaks out in this situation, it isn’t the virus which a lot of citizens regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipresent, but the state which seeks to protect them from it. At a time when bodies need to be hygienically sealed off from each other in order to survive, they cast off their masks, demand liberty or death and sometimes end up with both. They insist on the right to breathe together, which is the literal meaning of the word “conspiracy”.

In Dostoevesky’s chilling tale The Double, a timorous clerk called Golaydkin is persecuted by a smirking, malicious doppelganger whom he finally kisses in a despairing attempt at reconciliation. In doing so, however, he merely seals his doom, as he is driven away in a coach by a fearful coachman who is no less than Death itself. The real Golyadkin is destroyed by his phantom double.

No observer of the current American scene can doubt that this may happen there too. The Left, after all, is accustomed to defeat: our adversaries have more tanks than we do, not to speak of a lot more money and control of the means by which they can propagate their lies. What the big bad Wolf represents may trump what the real Naomi stands for in every sense of the word. But Klein has one monumental advantage: what she says, give or take a bit, is true. So you must either prove her wrong or create a world in which truth doesn’t matter anyway. That project is already far advanced.

Under the leadership of Justin Trudeau, Canadian policy has hewn quite close to the transactivist’s ideal: gender identity has become a protected characteristic under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and gender reassignment surgery is now often covered by the country’s universal healthcare system. Meanwhile, school boards and teachers’ unions have been quick to adopt some of the most extreme tenets of gender ideology — for instance, not telling parents when their children start to socially transition. 

Now, parents are pushing back. Last month, parents marched in almost 100 cities under the banner of #1MillionMarch4Children calling for the removal of material from school curriculums that sexualises children. Trudeau had claimed the protests were being “fuelled by the American right-wing”, but the alliance includes all political stances — from Liberty Coalition Canada, a Christian conservative advocacy group, to Blueprint for Canada, a non-partisan platform advocating “classical liberal” values. Some are issue-based, such as Our Duty Canada, a support network for families struggling with the impact of gender ideology. Plenty are grassroots, springing up in villages and towns in response to specific local events.

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The protests, though they have been criticised for being anti-LGBT, are actually about protecting minors from harmful content in schools. At the protest I attended — in Durham, just outside Toronto — there were marchers of all races and religions. And their motives varied. Two young moms with children going to kindergarten soon held up placards that read “Education, not indoctrination” and “Stop sexualizing our kids”. A young girl sat next to a poster that read, “No boys in my bathroom!” A father of five children under the age of 15 was there with his wife and kids to protest against Ontario’s sex education curriculum, which he felt introduces material on sexual orientation and gender identity to children too young to understand the concepts. And three Pakistani brothers — one in high school and the other two in university — gave an interview to a local media outlet about why they felt they should not be required to partake in pride activities that went against their beliefs as Muslims.

Conservative Muslims have been overrepresented at recent protests, with a noticeable number of women in hijabs or niqabs. And as a result the movement as a whole has received accusations of being motivated by Muslim extremism. Protests against gender ideology in schools took place over the summer in Ottawa and Calgary, organised by local Muslim parents groups, with reports of young Arab boys stomping on rainbow pride flags while others cheered them on. There was a flurry of progressives questioning Muslim values and attitudes that clash with their beliefs in multicultural Canada. Several hundred people were present at the march I attended, and I’d estimate that 60-70% of them were Muslims.

It would not be fair to assume that all these Muslims were marching in opposition to same-sex relationships as well as in support of parents’ rights; but the Canadian Muslim community is known to have more negative views of LGBT rights than the general population. One transgender protestor I spoke to was in Durham because the chapter in her own town — led by conservative Muslims — was advocating not only for parental rights, which she supports, but also for the eradication of all gay and transgender people. So, the accusation that the movement has an anti-LGBT strain is not entirely unfounded.

There was also a conspiratorial minority at the protests. Anti-vaxxers complained about “shot deaths”, and told tales of what “really” happened during the pandemic. One former nurse who lost her job because she wouldn’t get vaccinated, believed that people were getting sick because of radiation poisoning from 5G towers. The trucker Freedom Convey was also present, waving “Fuck Trudeau” flags; one vehicle was covered in news stories about people who died after getting the Covid vaccines. These conspiracists were not representative; most people really were there to protest against the school boards and advocate for reform of the education system. Indeed, some parents were surprised to see people discussing vaccines and lockdowns. One mom told me: “It’s a free country, they can come here and protest too if they like.” But these fringe elements could be undermining a movement that should, in theory, have mainstream support.

The presence of more extreme groups has doubtless contributed to the Conservative Party of Canada keeping its distance from the march. The more Right-wing, less popular People’s Party of Canada did participate — which would have given the Conservatives another reason not to engage. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, sent a memo out to his caucus before the march warning them not to speak publicly about the issue — even though, at the recent convention in Quebec City, delegates voted in favour of a future Conservative government prohibiting “life-altering” medical and surgical interventions for gender-diverse and transgender people under the age of 18.

Poilievre is trying to strike a delicate balance here: he has indicated to his base that he’s on the same page as them about parents’ rights and gender ideology, but he doesn’t want his party to be associated with unsavoury characters. It might threaten his current lead over Trudeau in the polls. Poilievre tweeted in support of parents’ rights without explicitly mentioning the protests, which have continued across cities in Canada. Trudeau meanwhile came out firmly in opposition to the march, claiming it was promoting hate against “2SLGBTQI+ Canadians across the country”. It seems that for now, parents are going to have to fight it out with local governments, teachers’ unions and school boards, without the explicit backing of a national party.

The march, for all its issues and contradictions, has managed to unite a huge range of Canadians to come together in support of a common cause: a right to have a say in their children’s education. Most of the participants are trying to stay laser-focused on this cause, putting aside their differences to help pass legislation that will protect kids from being exposed to what they see as inappropriate content — and, in some places, from irreversible surgeries. Public opinion is on their side, but it remains to be seen whether party politics will catch up.

It wasn’t long after that the disappearance of 25-year-old Alabaman Carlee Russell became an internet sensation. Russell had called 911 to report that she was helping a toddler she had found wandering along the side of a highway. But when officers arrived at the scene, Russell and the child were nowhere to be found. Instead, they found her wig, phone and car. Sparking a 49-hour police search, Russell then turned up at her parents’ home saying she had been blindfolded, kidnapped and forced into a vehicle, where she could hear a baby crying. She claimed she had been held in a home where a woman fed her cheese and crackers, but that she had managed to escape.

In a statement from her lawyer nine days later, Russell admitted that the entire story had been fabricated. Police reported that they had found some “very strange” searches on her phone, including “how to take money from a register without being caught” and “the movie Taken” — in which Liam Neeson tracks down a gang that has kidnapped his daughter in order to sell her into sexual servitude.

Days after Russell’s deceit was revealed, Californian “momfluencer” Katie Sorensen was sentenced to 90 days in jail. Her crime had been to falsely report, in social media videos that had gone viral two years earlier, that a Hispanic couple who “weren’t clean-cut individuals” had attempted to kidnap her two children in a suburban parking lot.

This collection of bizarre and sad stories point to a strange phenomenon. Awareness of human trafficking has curdled to such an extent that an increasing number of women think it feasible that they or their children could be snatched off the streets. Exacerbating their fears, Sound of Freedom was released in cinemas at around the same time Russell came clean. It tells the story of Tim Ballard and his foundation, Operation Underground Railroad, which purports to have rescued around 4,000 children from traffickers and has found a receptive audience.

Earlier this year, a Pew survey on American parenting found that 28% of parents of children under 18 — that figure rising to 35% of mothers — were extremely or very worried about their kids being kidnapped or abducted. The fear ranked third on the list of concerns, behind mental health issues and bullying, and above getting shot, pregnant or addicted to drugs. It appears that America’s long history of stranger danger has been supercharged by very modern forces.

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Is the Catholic Church evading justice?

By Elle Hardy

The period between 1970 and 2000 is known as the “golden age of serial murder”, as the birth of the interstate highway system meant unprecedented numbers of people moved to urban and suburban centres. The resulting loss of community and greater anonymity is thought to be behind the dramatic increase in murders and abductions, with children and young women overwhelmingly the victims.

In the same era, a newly empowered generation of women entered the workforce en masse — which required them to outsource the care of their children to strangers. This contributed to the “daycare panic” of the Eighties — more commonly known as the “satanic panic” — in which thousands of unsubstantiated cases of “ritual satanic abuse” of children were reported around the country. Most of the alleged perpetrators were childcare workers, despite the fact that fewer than 1% of abuses have been found to take place in those settings. This anxiety suggests that America wasn’t ready to accept women leaving their children in the care of others.

While the number of serial killers in the US has decreased decade by decade, the fear remains stubborn. Urban legends about abductions have been around forever, but the internet has made them more widespread. Hoaxes about kidnappings are now clickbait staples on social media, and often find their way into local media. The online fact-checking website Snopes has a database of kidnapping hoaxes dating back to the Nineties, featuring reports of everything from a hook-handed psycho targeting teens making out in parked cars, to attempted abductions of kids from amusement parks being thwarted because the kidnappers forgot to change the child’s shoes.

This is not to say that horrific events don’t happen. When they do, they legitimise the fears behind some of the wilder notions. In 2002, for instance, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped at knifepoint from her home by an itinerant preacher and held captive for nine months before being rescued. Smart has since become an activist who has testified in Congress, addressed conferences and become a film producer turning the stories of famous abductees into daytime television staples. In other words, tragic as it is, her story has had an outsize impact on America’s cultural consciousness.

And where there is fear, there are those waiting to exploit it. The anti-human trafficking cause, while virtuous on its surface, has become a lucrative business, both for groups who exist to raise awareness for it, and for influencer-entrepreneurs.”There is a willingness for a lot of nonprofits to say whatever they need to say to get donations,” says law professor Bridget Carr at the University of Michigan’s Human Trafficking Clinic. More often than not, these organisations are geared towards awareness and training, and not working in the actual field with genuine victims. As Carr notes, “many in the anti-trafficking movement are always willing to use sex trafficking as a synonym for human trafficking”.

Anti-trafficking organisations played a large part in promoting the myth that, each year, the Super Bowl is the largest human trafficking event in the world. As hundreds of thousands of people descend on the host city, the story goes, so too do pimps, prostitutes and unwitting victims. Researchers found that, between 2010 and 2016, 76% of US print media reported a link between the Super Bowl and trafficking for sexual exploitation; the story had also been picked up by outlets such as CNN and Reuters — even though there is no definitive data behind it, and it has been repeatedly debunked.

While media and societal shifts laid the foundations for the abduction panic, the advent of the pandemic brought such issues into the mainstream. Conspiracy was in the air, and lockdowns meant that many turned to online communities for company. In real life, people masking on the streets were suddenly viewed as unrecognisable, suspicious and potentially dangerous.

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It was in this atmosphere that a wannabe rapper, model and cryptocurrency enthusiast Scotty Rojas, aka Scotty the Kid, became radicalised by QAnon. On Instagram, Rojas developed the social media movement #SaveOurChildren, which promised to tackle “the real pandemic”, citing the false statistic that 800,000 children go missing in the United States each year — the equivalent of around 2,000 a day.

Taken up by a broad coalition of people — from wellness influencers to a former high-flying PR executive who went viral for destroying a display of face masks to raise the alarm about elite paedophile rings — the #SaveOurChildren movement began holding mass rallies around the nation. Though they existed in the name of child protection, they quickly became a way to protest against lockdowns and looming vaccine mandates, as well as progressive values in general, safetyism in particular and, on top of everything else, the validity of sex work. This “conspirituality” coalition had been building for some time. But as #SaveOurChildren grew in popularity, many who jumped on board were simply concerned parents who were absorbing disinformation via social media.

And yet, no matter how well-intentioned, online scare campaigns certainly weren’t addressing the real issues behind child sex trafficking, which ultimately require more robust welfare and state intervention. Overwhelmingly, trafficking victims, particularly children, are preyed upon by a close family member, or someone they know and trust. As Bridget Carr told me, during her many years working to advocate for children, she’s “represented hundreds and hundreds of victims and consulted on many more cases, and never, not one time in my case work has a child been snatched by a stranger. Not one time.”

Sensational tales do well on social media, with facts trailing far behind. Katie Sorensen was a failing influencer until her video went viral. As police investigated her claims, she appeared in news bulletins, repeating her story. On TikTok alone, videos tagged “abduction warnings signs” have 245.7 million views.

As with most social media ephemera, the energy behind the #SaveOurChildren movement has since shifted. Hoaxes about women being abducted outside Target stores are currently racking up tens of millions of TikTok views. In a climate where many have terrified themselves into believing that child abductions are happening all around them, it’s not much of a leap to believe women will be snatched too. The #MeToo movement, though it did an enormous amount of good, also led to a heightened sense of vulnerability among women, who were often already fixated on urban legends of abductions.

Behind the abduction panic is an even wider problem, then, than the legitimate crisis of global human trafficking. It is a product of the social isolation of modern America, which was accelerated by the pandemic. As we work from home, have our entertainment beamed to our couches and have food delivered to us, everyday interactions with strangers are becoming rarer and rarer. In turn, we’re becoming increasingly suspicious of everything and everyone. As with many of modern life’s ills, the way out of this new fear may just be spending more time in the real world and less time online.

With fans like these, you might assume I would be supportive of the case currently being made by the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent for stricter regulation of disinformation and hate speech. In an interview and an accompanying feature published this week, Marianna Spring reiterates a narrative about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that she first aired on Panorama a few weeks back. According to Spring, online disinformation and hate speech is getting worse, and it’s the responsibility of social media platforms to regulate it more heavily.

Like me, Spring receives a lot of online misrepresentation and criticism in her professional role. Indeed, she frequently uses such experiences as a superficially compelling peg for many of her stories. Despite our similarities, though, I remain unconvinced by her case for strong regulation. More than that: through observing her output, I’ve become convinced that the BBC should not have a specialist “Disinformation Correspondent” at all.

In this week’s interview, Spring described her job for the BBC as “interrogating how mistruths or trolling or abuse online can affect real people, and then to investigate and hold to account the social media companies, policy makers, law enforcement…”. At face value, this may seem like a fairly standard quest for a journalist, albeit a noble one — a bit like investigating fraudsters or corrupt politicians, in order to bring their misdeeds and lies into the light.

But there’s at least one big difference. A journalist investigating fraud, but who accidentally misidentifies either what fraud is or the people committing it, doesn’t thereby become guilty of the very thing she is investigating. In contrast, a Disinformation Correspondent who misidentifies disinformation, either positively or negatively, runs the risk of disseminating disinformation herself — and is arguably all the more harmful because of the status implied by her position.

Perhaps it could be rejoindered that disinformation is not the same as misinformation. Whereas misinformation consists in the unwitting dissemination of false statements believed to be true at the time, disinformation is the knowing introduction of false statements with the explicit intention to deceive people. In other words, with disinformation, there is an intent to deceive. That’s a reasonable distinction to make as far as it goes; the problem is that it’s utterly useless in helping us analyse the growing problem with conspiratorial and magical thinking in the world. It also has no relevance to most of the things reported on by Spring.

The capacity of human beings to cling to incredible beliefs in a self-serving way, while being blind to blatantly contrary evidence, is well-established. And given this capacity, it’s very hard to know whether conspiratorial thinking has been propagated in the cynical knowledge of its falsehood. For instance, those in charge of Russian botfarms churning out what liberals call “pro-Putin propaganda” probably half-believe their own falsehoods. The originator of the New World Order conspiracy theory almost certainly believed his. Even bonkers theories like the lizard people one were probably started by the mad rather than the bad. Ironically, the persistent belief that there is a lot of disinformation in the world, in the sense of deliberately deceptive lies, is itself a kind of conspiracy theory. For some people, it seems much easier to believe in the organised and deliberate deception of others than in the chaos of accidental human fallibility.

In practice, then, any conception of disinformation as positively requiring intentional deception is going to be of marginal use to society at most. And it certainly seems unlikely that the BBC would ever have put someone in a full-time role to investigate disinformation, had this been the background idea. It’s far too niche.

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In fact, what Spring tends to investigate at least some of the time is disinformation in a broader and potentially more useful sense, meaning something like: widespread false or misleading beliefs, seemingly attractive to people for reasons that have little to do with the amount of good evidence available for them, and which cause significant social dysfunction. Whatever the reason for these beliefs, a neutral approach to evidence has taken a back seat to some other goal, and the process of producing them is no longer what epistemologists call “truth-tracking”. In this broader sense, spreading or believing disinformation is not just about misinterpreting evidence, but rather about ignoring certain inconvenient bits of evidence to fit with prior political, social, or emotional goals.

This is perhaps a more useful conception of disinformation, though admittedly not as snappy. The problem for Spring now is that it seems to apply to some of her own output too. This is understandable, given that, to paraphrase the King James Bible, it’s always easier to notice the motes in other people’s eyes rather than the beams in your own. Nearly everyone is subject to bias, like I said. But given Spring’s job title and growing influence, including a recent expert appearance at a Parliamentary Committee about online speech regulation, I still think it’s a problem.

Take the Panorama documentary. The narrative offered by Spring and the team around her was almost parodically absent of nuance, offering no attempted counterpoint to the extremely simple and obviously partisan fairy-tale it was thrusting upon the viewer. This story goes: a bad and foolish man took over Twitter (Spring barely suppresses her eyerolling as she talks about him); he laid off a lot of people responsible for dealing with “hate speech”; hate speech increased exponentially; regulators therefore need to do more to protect the ordinary people that suffer.

Basic critical questions one might have asked about this narrative were missing in action. The most obvious of these is what counts as hate speech. Throughout her work, Spring’s habitual examples (speech by misogynists, rape apologists, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers) tend to suggest she thinks hate speech is angry, threatening, and/or insulting speech produced by people with the Wrong Politics, causing anxiety and distress in more innocent people who don’t share their persecutors’ dodgy views. I’d be fascinated to know whether Spring assumes that the level of insult and aggression flung by online anti-vaxxers towards epidemiologists, for instance, becomes morally neutralised when directed instead towards radical feminists, Zionists, Tory politicians, or any other folk devils of the contemporary progressive mindset.

A second obvious question unexplored by Spring’s documentary is what negative consequences might follow when you devolve responsibility for what counts as hate speech to people working in Silicon Valley. For instance, gender-critical and radical feminists have been at the sharp end of regulatory decisions by Twitter for years now — many of them banned or censored for talking about the social importance of biological sex, or for saying it cannot be changed.

The crossover between tech bros and people of a transactivist or transhumanist persuasion is high. But in her work, Spring seems uncurious about any potential for political bias or self-interest in their decision-making — quite possibly because, like many others, her compass for what counts as hate speech has been significantly affected by exposure to the values of people working in Silicon Valley. Again, this is hardly a crime. Nobody forms their beliefs in a social vacuum. But as a Disinformation Correspondent, it might be good to have self-awareness about it.

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When it comes to examples of disinformation, meanwhile, Spring has a tendency to roll relatively reasonable cases of political wrongthink together with madly conspiratorial ravings, suggesting that she doesn’t really differentiate between them. If you start off as an anti-vaxxer or lockdown sceptic, she seems to imply, you might easily end up a climate-change denier, or even a believer in a New World order. When talking about QAnon supporters, she clearly feels it’s important to throw in that they are “pro-Trump” as well — as if being a member of QAnon wasn’t quite bad enough. Such clues to what Spring really thinks of them must be quite infuriating to the thousands of anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters who hold those positions for relatively non-conspiratorial reasons. And then there’s Spring’s tendency to turn stories about conspiracy theorists into suspiciously neat cautionary tales propping up preferred social values — such as in her documentary series about a conspiracy theorist called Gary, who didn’t believe in Covid until it killed him, quite conveniently for the triumphalist narrative purposes of many at the time. It’s almost enough to make you believe in the existence of a repressive liberal media elite.

So what should journalism do with the growing phenomenon of disinformation, if not this? In the old days, of course, we used to have lots of disinformation specialists. We called them investigative journalists. They covered stories in some depth, gave voice to a range of counterpoints, and tried to ensure that their personal views weren’t in the driving seat, even if they sometimes failed in the attempt. By their general example, they encouraged readers and viewers to trust them, or at least, not to virulently distrust them — not because they had the “right” political values, but because they had the right journalistic ones.

These days, though, slowburn investigative journalism is often too expensive, and doesn’t get the same clicks as a hot take. So instead, the idea of disinformation gets thematised as if it were a special kind of moral vice only committed by ill-intentioned or delusional others, to be rooted out and exposed by the intrepid journalist-activist on the side of the good. But good and evil are not so straightforward. In the long run, I suspect this vaccine may turn out to cause more epistemic illness than it prevents.

Several experts have tried to answer this question — many of whom are featured in a new three-part Netflix documentary, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. According to the official narrative, outlined by Malaysian and Western authorities, around 40 minutes after take-off, 90 miles off the east coast of Malaysia, someone on the plane — most likely the captain — turned off its electronic communication signals, causing it to disappear from Air Traffic Control (ATC) radars. The plane, they say, then made a U-turn, flew back across the Malay Peninsula, veered north up the Malacca Strait, rounded the Indonesian island of Sumatra, eventually turned south and then flew in a straight path for around six hours — at which point it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia. If this is really what happened, we are talking about one of the slowest, most bizarre mass murder-suicides in history.

There are, however, several problems with this narrative, as the French journalist Florence de Changy, who has been covering the Asia-Pacific for the past 30 years for Le Monde and RFI, explains in the documentary, and in much greater detail in her 2021 book The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370, the result of a seven-year investigation.

The official account hinges on two pieces of evidence: Malaysian military radar data, which tracked the plane deviating westward, and analysis of the automatic communication “pings” between the aircraft and a satellite operated by a British company called Inmarsat, which provides satellite communication services to a wide range of private and institutional clients, including the US government and military. Inmarsat concluded that the plane subsequently flew south until around the time of its last ping (though it couldn’t provide the exact location of the last communication, because the data didn’t have GPS-tracking capabilities).

Both pieces of evidence, however, have been called into question. Firstly, as the Malaysian authorities’ final investigation report acknowledged, the data behind its military radar sighting is inconsistent with the capability of a B777 in terms of speed, altitude and height variations. Moreover, the radar images supposedly showing MH370 flying back over Malaysia were never made public. Likewise, none of the countries that MH370 is claimed to have flown over or close to — Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and Australia — have provided radar evidence of the plane in their airspace. As de Changy writes: “Not a single raw radar image has been shown to support the route taken by MH370 according to the official version” (this piece of information was missing in the documentary).

One may also ask why the Malaysian military didn’t scramble jets at the sight of a rogue plane flying over national airspace, especially considering that MH370 is said to have passed right over the Butterworth Air Force Base in Penang, the headquarters for the Integrated Air Defence system of the Five Power Defence Agreement (FPDA), which includes the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. There was also a massive presence of the US Seventh Fleet — which is based in Japan and has 50-70 ships and submarines, 150 aircraft and 20,000 sailors — in the region at the time of the plane’s disappearance. According to a senior member of the intelligence services de Changy spoke to, there were two US “AWACS” in the area that night: planes mounted with long-range radar systems capable of constantly monitoring the airspace within a radius of more than 250 miles. Yet the Americans weren’t able to provide any evidence of the plane’s alleged U-turn either.

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There’s another problem with the “deliberate act” narrative. As de Changy notes, if someone had turned off the transponder, all flight data related to MH370 would have disappeared from ATC screens at the same time. But it took 37 seconds for it all to go dark. “This sequence of events in itself should have been sufficient to dismiss the ‘someone turned off the transponder’ part of the official narrative,” she writes (this was also missing in the documentary).

As for Inmarsat’s satellites, their data also appears to raise more questions than it answers. When, two weeks after the disappearance, the company concluded that the MH370 had turned south and crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean, the world was expected to just take their word for it — even though Inmarsat’s findings were based on a complex analysis of ping data which had never been attempted before. In fact, right from the start, experts and family members raised doubts about the reliability of the ping-based calculations and asked the company to provide the raw data for independent analysis. For three months, Inmarsat refused, and when they finally did release some of it, several critical details necessary to understand how they did their calculations were missing. Since then, Inmarsat has refused to share its complete set of data with the families and the media.

But the biggest hole in Inmarsat’s story is also the most obvious: the fact that, despite the world’s largest search in history, covering almost two million square miles in the southern Indian Ocean, no remains of the plane have been found in the supposed crash area near Australia — despite the fact that, when a plane crashes into the sea, there is almost always debris. The only debris considered by investigators “almost certainly” or “highly likely” to be linked to MH370 has been discovered around the coast of Africa, thousands of miles away.

Finally, it remains unclear why the plane’s captain — the prime suspect in the “deliberate act” narrative — would have committed such a horrendous act. Over the years, the Western press has questioned Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s mental health, political orientation and even his sexual preferences — all in an attempt to paint him as someone potentially capable of such a crime. However, from extensive interviews with his friends and family, and analysis of the police reports about him, de Changy concludes that Zaharie was unlikely to be suffering from mental health issues. “My research convinced me that Zaharie was of sound mind and a genuinely good man,” she told me last week. “He was also one of the airline’s most experienced pilots.”

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Amid such uncertainty, it’s no wonder that MH370 has become the subject of all sorts of conspiratorial conjecture, involving black holes, insurance scams, North Korea, a meteorite, remote hijacking and even aliens. Most of these theories are so outlandish that they have tended to make all non-official explanations for the disappearance of MH370 seem crazy by association. The Netflix documentary suffers from the same contamination. After covering the official theory in the first episode, the series then explores two alternatives. The first is presented by American journalist and aviation expert Jeff Wise, who suggested in 2015 that a group of Russian hijackers — there were three ethnic Russians on the flight (two held Ukrainian passports) — could have lowered themselves into the plane’s electronics bay and taken control of the aircraft in order to divert it north, possibly to Kazakhstan, while somehow altering the Inmarsat data so it looked like the plane had gone south.

It is such an absurd theory — as Wise himself acknowledges in the documentary — that one cannot help but wonder why the decision was made to dedicate an entire episode to it. It also has the effect of casting its tinfoil hat-shaped shadow over the second alternative theory proposed by Florence de Changy in the third and final episode. She suggests that MH370 didn’t disappear from the screens of ATC  because someone turned off its transponder, but because the plane’s communications system was jammed — possibly by the two US AWACS planes mentioned by the aforementioned intelligence source. De Changy suggests the aim might have been to force the plane to land in order to seize a highly sensitive cargo which the US didn’t want to fall into Chinese hands (she points to a 2.5-ton consignment that was delivered to the airport under escort and was not X-rayed). However, something went wrong and MH370 met its fate somewhere above the South China Sea, possibly as a result of a mid-air collision or a missile strike.

It’s obviously a highly controversial claim, but unlike Wise, de Changy at least has some evidence to back it up, most of which isn’t mentioned in the documentary but is presented in her book. In it, she highlights that there was large US military presence in the South China Sea that day; that progressive loss of signal on the ATC screens is consistent with jamming; that MH370 activated the emergency Tango code, which would indicate the pilots knew something abnormal was going on; that another plane that was flying nearby managed to get a radio contact with MH370 at around 1:30am (10 minutes after the plane disappeared from the radar) but it was brief and muddled (also consistent with progressive jamming); and that MH370 was seen on the primary radar (meaning a target is observed but no identification is received) of Vietnam’s ATC 37 miles after the point at which it is supposed to have made the U-turn.

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Most notably, as de Changy notes, there were initial but unverified reports of a distress signal from MH370 being picked up at 2:43am by a US unit based in Thailand. Finally, we have the dozens of “nodders” (people scanning satellite images on Tomnod, a website that used crowdsourcing to identify objects and places in satellite images) who insist they saw extensive plane debris in the South China Sea; the oil slicks spotted off the coast of Vietnam; the Cathay Pacific pilots flying the next day above the Vietnam coast who reported sighting a “large amount of debris” to the Hong Kong ATC; and the employee working on a rig off the coast of Vietnam who claimed to have seen a fire the night of the disappearance.

I had initially contacted de Changy to ask what it feels like for a respected journalist to be presented as a fringe conspiracist — the conclusion many will reach after watching the film. “Actually, I started with an anti-conspiracy theory approach,” she explains. “I looked very closely at the evidence backing all the theories and scenarios out there including the official narrative. Eventually, I discovered a cluster of corroborating conclusions that point to something incredibly consistent and that did indeed point towards a massive international conspiracy scenario. It’s for the readers to decide whether it’s credible or not.”

De Changy is aware that her theory is mostly speculative, but remains confident that MH370 met its fate in the South China Sea, not in the Indian Ocean. “It’s still more credible than the idea that the plane flew halfway around the world completely undetected,” she told me. “If you think it’s impossible for a plane to disappear into thin air, that is because it is.”

But who? There’s evidence that Ruby was a low-level sidekick of the Mafia, so maybe it was the Mafia who shot Kennedy. But why kill Oswald as well? It’s here that my devilishly ingenious theory comes in. There’s no real evidence that the Mob killed the President, but they might have been incensed that someone else had. Not because they had any love for their leader, but because they had intended to assassinate him themselves. After all, they threatened the lives of both Kennedy brothers several times. Before they could get round to it, however, a private entrepreneur called Oswald stepped in and did it instead. By having Oswald bumped off by a known associate of theirs, the Mafia made it look as though Oswald, had he lived, could have revealed their guilt. My theory, then, is that the Mob bumped Oswald off because they didn’t kill Kennedy. They just wanted people to think they had.

Is this true? Probably not. When it comes to the death of JFK, the hardest question is who didn’t do it. There’s a comically long list of possible candidates: Oswald, the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police, Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s driver or his bodyguard, Right-wing Cubans, the Teamsters Union, perhaps (who knows?) a 21-year-old Harrison Ford. Members of QAnon probably believe they were all in it together. As with equality and diversity programmes, genuine conspiracies must leave nobody out.

One shouldn’t be too cynical about conspiracies. After all, as new UnHerd polling has shown, more people in Britain are conspiratorially-minded than aren’t. But it’s true that there isn’t One Big Conspiracy, largely because there doesn’t need to be; it’s also true that people regularly gather together in private to plot the downfall of their enemies. On the whole, however, liberal capitalist states, like dishwashers, work all by themselves (when they work at all). They don’t depend on people meeting in missile-proof bunkers to plot how to stay in power. Modern societies don’t rely on some kind of collective consciousness to keep themselves afloat, partly because modern citizens are atomised rather than collective. In fact, consciousness or belief hardly comes into it. As long as you don’t try to overthrow the state, you can believe pretty much what you like. This is known as liberalism.

Besides, the more individuals are in the know, the more fragile a conspiracy becomes. One reason why the US moon-landing wasn’t a put-up job is that it would have involved too many people, any one of whom could have blown the gaff. And if the truth (as conspirators see it) had got out, the United States would have suffered the most calamitous loss of credibility in its history. Its reputation would have been trashed beyond repair. Fear of being discovered is a primary reason why some events can’t be faked, just as one reason why most politicians try not to lie is not because they are more angelic beings than the rest of us, but because the consequences of being found out mean that it just isn’t worth it.

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If great masses of people maintain a certain belief over long periods of time, one can be fairly sure that there is something in it. This doesn’t mean that the belief in question is true, but it’s unlikely to be complete nonsense either. Myths tend to have a core of truth. For many centuries, everybody thought that the Sun moved around the Earth, which isn’t true; but it was a rational belief all the same, because the evidence seemed to support it. Much the same goes for paranoia. It isn’t true that creatures from Saturn have placed a secret device in your skull to beam your every thought to a control centre in the Glastonbury Tor, but it’s true that a mighty amount of surveillance goes on, much of it secret. Or to put the point more pithily, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you. No civilisation in history has ever spied on itself so relentlessly.

Those who genuinely go off the deep end are those who imagine that we live our lives in private. The idea that what we do is covertly directed by a cabal of obscenely wealthy paedophiles is a delusion — but if you drop the “covertly” and “paedophiles”, it us not far from the truth. We are indeed governed by an elite, but there’s nothing particularly secretive about it. You can see them strolling around Davos or read about them in the newspapers. The phrase “Masters of the Universe” isn’t just a piece of flashy science fiction. There is a sovereign superpower whose presence can be felt in every nook and cranny of the globe, but its name is capital, not the Knights Templar. Like all power, what it needs to sustain itself is knowledge. Knowledge is no longer just what is conveyed in seminars, but priceless stuff which people are prepared to kill for.

Conspiracy theorists are convinced that everything hangs together, which is indeed a symptom of paranoia. For the paranoid, nothing happens by chance. Even a gust of wind is secretly intended. The fact that the Prime Minister has five letters in both his first name and surname must surely be trying to tell us something. Freud thought that the nearest thing to paranoia was philosophy, because philosophers (he was thinking of the Hegelian type) also see connections between apparently unrelated items. There must be some way in which my left foot and the Vatican are secretly interrelated.

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Once again, this isn’t complete nonsense. Even the most trivial of our actions send ripple effects through the thick mesh of social existence, breeding unexpected consequences in unpredictable places. None of our acts is purely our own. Reading this essay may cause you to tear great clumps of hair from your head, thus making you look too frightful to attend the dinner this evening at which you would have been offered the Governorship of the Bank of England. And don’t just blame me: blame the editors, sub-editors, technical assistants and so on. We all had a hand in tearing your hair out. It was a conspiracy, but not a conscious one.

These ripple effects are random. None of them needed to happen, or to happen in exactly the way they did. And this is where they differ from conspiracies. For the conspiratorial mind, nothing whatsoever is random, any more than it is for the paranoid. This is an alarming thought in one sense but a consoling one in another. A world of chance and contingency is a bewildering one, upending our schemes and thwarting our purposes. Far better to imagine that there’s a plot to it all, in both senses of the word, than accept the fact that a lot of things just happen, without any particular rhyme or reason, and that this is part of the price we pay for freedom. This was presumably what Harold Macmillan had in mind when he remarked to a reporter that the hardest thing about trying to run the country was “events, dear boy, events”.

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Ironically, however, American conspiracy theorists are lovers of freedom. “Liberty or death!” ranks among their slogans, and by refusing to wear masks during the Covid pandemic some of them ended up with both. Among other things, conspiracies are symptoms of the anxiety which comes from freedom — from living in the precarious, unpredictable world of late modernity. They are antidotes to the open-endedness of history. Those who spin these yarns are for the most part on the wrong side of that history — those washed up by so-called modernisation, men and women who need someone to blame for their lousy living conditions but who point an accusing finger at fantasises of their own creation.

Conspiracy theories are also reactions to a diffuse, fractured, conflictive society in which there are just too many competing narratives around, so that falling back on a grand narrative which makes sense of everything is profoundly appealing. For a blessed moment, the whole lot falls neatly into place, as an opaque, impossibly complex world becomes luminously simple, purposeful and transparent. Because these myths spring from insecurity, which in turn breeds hatred, the grand narrative in question is almost always a sinister one. Anyone with an eye to how the world is going will have no quarrel with that, even if they don’t believe that Nancy Pelosi is a North Korean spy. They will have no quarrel either with the central assumption of the QAnonites and their ilk — that behind the surfaces of social life there lurks some exceedingly nasty realities, and that the official story is rarely the whole truth of the matter. What you see is most definitely not what you get. The good news is that no conspiracy can be entirely successful, since if it were we wouldn’t know about it.

It is a useful phrase to measure core beliefs because it takes us beyond the idea of conspiracy theories, with all their distracting details and absurdity, to the underlying intuition that fuels them. In this world view, the “elites” are faraway and malevolent, exercising control in self-serving ways; meanwhile, democratic politics and the mainstream media are regarded as little more than distractions, likely in the service of powerful secret masters.

Whatever people believe about specific conspiracies — and this week offered no shortage of them, from UFOs over North America to hushed-up explosions in Ohio — our findings reveal how widespread the underlying mindset is that propels them. Thanks to our partner Focaldata and a statistical process called MRP, we can now see which constituencies are the most and least conspiratorial in the country. The results shed new light on how these voters should be viewed by the main political parties.

First, it is clear that conspiratorial thinking is not a “Right-wing” phenomenon. Voters who believe in a controlling secretive elite are much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, and much more likely to live in a safe Labour constituency. By this measure, the 10 most conspiratorial constituencies in the country are all safe Labour seats, whereas the 10 least conspiratorial constituencies are all Tory (except Chesham and Amersham, which switched to Lib Dem in the 2021 by-election).

As the above table shows, the “most conspiratorial” list is made up of poor and highly diverse inner-city constituencies, which may explain why people come to feel so alienated and suspicious. In these places, a conspiratorial world view is the norm — in Birmingham Ladywood, for example, only 14% of people disagree with the statement. Meanwhile, in the rolling Chiltern hills of Chesham and Amersham and the affluent enclaves of Henley and Mole Valley, where the elites likely seem less distant and more on your side, few are concerned. It is a useful reminder to politicians of all parties that, while they may find conspiratorial voters troublesome, many come from the most disadvantaged communities.

Second, the results should encourage new anti-establishment parties on both the Left and Right. Thanks to our unusually large sample size of more than 10,000 respondents, we were able to measure the attitudes of voters who chose even the smallest parties in 2019 with a high degree of confidence. More than any of the mainstream parties, including Labour, the voters most prone to a conspiratorial outlook come from the anti-establishment parties: 54% of Brexit Party voters agree with the statement, alongside 45% of Plaid Cymru voters and 43% of SNP voters. So, while the Brexit binary pushed a larger proportion of voters towards the two main parties in 2019, it seems there are millions of voters who remain potentially open to new populist appeals.

There is a specific lesson here for the Labour Party. When I first tested this phrase at YouGov during the Labour leadership election of 2015, the belief that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite” was revealed to be a defining characteristic of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn: 28% of Corbyn’s backers strongly agreed with it, compared to 16% of Yvette Cooper’s and just 7% of Liz Kendall’s. Today, 42% of Labour voters agree with it, of whom 18% strongly agree. Antisemitism may have finally been dealt with in the Labour Party, but the mindset that drove it has not disappeared.

This suggests that, rather than Brexit or the election of Trump, the shock outcome of the 2015 Labour leadership election was the first real marker of the new era of low-trust and high-volatility politics; and the best way to understand it is by looking at the general election that took place immediately before. Today, it seems almost comic to recall, in the context of the eye-watering sums borrowed by successive Conservative governments, that the 2015 election was dominated by technical discussions of exactly what percentage point of austerity was appropriate to cut the deficit. Tory strategist Lynton Crosby calculated — correctly, as it turned out — that if nothing more interesting were discussed, the Tories would win by default. It was a cynical way to treat an electorate, for which he was rewarded with a knighthood. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, meanwhile, frightened of seeming weak on economics, committed a Labour government to “austerity-lite”.

Come the election, the differences between the main parties were marginal; voters sensed a stitch-up in which the Tories and Labour had colluded to starve them of a more meaningful choice. It is hard to say they were wrong: 2015 saw the UK’s highest ever immigration numbers, for example, but this topic was hardly mentioned in the campaign. A rejection of this non-choice sowed the seeds not only for Corbyn’s election but for the Brexit result the following year.

The story of what happened in the years since 2016 is well-known. First came the attempts to frustrate the Brexit vote, which confirmed voters’ worst suspicions about cross-party collusion and elite disregard for the democratic process. And then came the rolling Covid lockdowns, which in turn radicalised a whole new constituency. There has perhaps never been a policy so life-altering and so little-debated, with a cross-party consensus parroted throughout much of the media. In those dystopian months and years, millions of people lost trust in authorities and turned to alternative explanations. These were not Right-wing activists or spotty teenagers in basements: they were mothers, grandparents and people who had never before been political. It’s hardly surprising that Google recorded the all-time high of searches for “conspiracy theory” in March 2020.

The pattern, from the 2015 election through to the pandemic, is that whenever views are suppressed, distrust and alienation follow. It is when the “Overton Window” is too narrow, not too wide, that politics feels fake and conspiracies abound. The distrust that now cuts across society is not the fault of a few small-time cranks and bad-faith opportunists — it is overwhelmingly the creation of elites who consistently tried to deny the electorate real choices.

Fast forward to the past few months, with the ejection of Liz Truss as prime minister and the rehabilitation of pre-2015 figures such as Jeremy Hunt, and many will be hoping that the era of political turbulence is finally coming to an end. It certainly feels it; for the first time since 2015, there are two technocrats at the helm of Britain’s major political parties. Centrists in both parties are hoping that as Corbynism and Brexit recede into history, the “grown-ups” will be back in charge.

But today’s UnHerd Britain data suggests that, beneath the surface, voter distrust and suspicion are more present than ever; and that the currents that propelled both Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit still run right through Labour’s heartlands. If the 2024 election is anything like 2015 — with the mainstream parties becoming harder and harder to tell apart — it could be the beginning of a whole new wave of democratic revolts.

Given the almost cartoonishly elitist nature of this jamboree, it seems only natural that the organisation has become the subject of all sorts of conspiracy theories regarding its supposed malicious intent and secret agendas connected to the notion of the “Great Reset”. In truth, there is nothing conspiratorial about the WEF, to the extent that conspiracies imply secrecy. On the contrary, the WEF — unlike, say, the Bilderberg — is very open about its agenda: you can even follow the live-streamed sessions online.

Founded in 1971 by Schwab himself, the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world through public-private cooperation”, also known as multistakeholder governance. The idea is that global decision-making should not be left to governments and nation-states — as in the post-war multilateralist framework enshrined in the United Nations — but should involve a whole range of non-government stakeholders: civil society bodies, academic experts, media personalities and, most important, multinational corporations. In its own words, the WEF’s project is “to redefine the international system as constituting a wider, multifaceted system of global cooperation in which intergovernmental legal frameworks and institutions are embedded as a core, but not the sole and sometimes not the most crucial, component”.

While this may sound fairly benign, it neatly encapsulates the basic philosophy of globalism: insulating policy from democracy by transferring the decision-making process from the national and international level, where citizens theoretically are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to the supranational level, by placing a self-selected group of unelected, unaccountable “stakeholders” — mainly corporations — in charge of global decisions concerning everything from energy and food production to the media and public health. The underlying undemocratic philosophy is the same one underpinning the philanthrocapitalist approach of people such Bill Gates, himself a long-time partner of the WEF: that non-governmental social and business organisations are best suited to solve the world’s problems than governments and multilateral institutions.

Even though the WEF has increasingly focused its agenda on fashionable topics such as environmental protection and social entrepreneurship, there is little doubt as to which interests Schwab’s brainchild is actually promoting and empowering: the WEF is itself mostly funded by around 1,000 member companies — typically global enterprises with multi-billion dollar turnovers, which include some of the world’s biggest corporations in oil (Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, BP), food (Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé), technology (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna). The composition of the WEF’s board is also very revealing, including Laurence D. Fink, CEO of Blackrock, David M. Rubenstein, co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, and Mark Schneider, CEO of Nestlé. There’s no need to resort to conspiracy theories to posit that the WEF’s agenda is much more likely to be tailored to suit the interests of its funders and board members — the world’s ultra-wealthy and corporate elites — rather than to “improving the state of the world”, as the organisation claims.

Perhaps the most symbolic example of the WEF’s globalist push is the controversial strategic partnership agreement the organisation signed with the UN in 2019, which many view as having drawn the UN into the WEF’s logic of public-private cooperation. According to an open letter signed by more than 400 civil society organisations and 40 international networks, the agreement represents a “disturbing corporate capture of the UN, which moved the world dangerously towards a privatised global governance”. The provisions of the strategic partnership, they note, “effectively provide that corporate leaders will become ‘whisper advisors’ to the heads of UN system departments, using their private access to advocate market-based profit-making ‘solutions’ to global problems while undermining real solutions embedded in public interest and transparent democratic procedures”.

This corporate takeover of the global agenda, aided and abetted by the WEF, became particularly apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic. Global health policy and “epidemic preparedness” have long been a focus of the WEF. In 2017, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) — an initiative aimed at securing vaccine supplies for global emergencies and pandemics, funded by government and private donors, including Gates — was launched in Davos. Then, in October 2019, just two months before the official start of the outbreak in Wuhan, the WEF co-sponsored an exercise called Event 201, which simulated “an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic”. In the event of a pandemic, the organisers noted, national governments, international organisations and the private sector should provide ample resources for the manufacturing and distribution of large quantities of vaccines through “robust forms of public-private cooperation”.

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Why the West should go nuclear

By Thomas Fazi

So, it is safe to say that when the Covid pandemic broke out, the WEF was well-positioned to take a central role in the pandemic response. It was at the 2020 gathering in Davos, on January 21-24 — a few weeks after the novel coronavirus had been identified in China — that CEPI met with the CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, to establish plans for a Covid-19 vaccine, in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US. Later in the year, CEPI was instrumental in setting up Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax), in partnership with the WHO, and in providing funding for several Covid vaccines.

These public-private and corporate-centred coalitions — all with ties to the WEF, and beyond the reach of democratic accountability — played a crucial role in promoting a vaccine-centric and profit-driven response to the pandemic, and then in overseeing the vaccine rollout. In other words, the pandemic brought into stark relief the consequences of the WEF’s decades-long globalist push. Again, it would be wrong to view this as a conspiracy, since the WEF has always been very candid about its objectives: this is simply the inevitable result of a “multistakeholderist” approach in which private and “philanthropic” interests are given greater voice in global affairs than most governments.

What is troubling, however, is that the WEF is now promoting the same top-down corporate-driven approach in a wide range of other domains, from energy to food to global surveillance policies — with equally dramatic consequences. There is a reason governments often seem so willing to go along with these policies, even in the face of widespread societal opposition: which is that the WEF’s strategy, over the years, hasn’t just been to shift power away from governments — but also to infiltrate the latter.

The WEF has largely achieved this through a programme known as the Young Global Leaders (YGL) initiative, aimed at training future global leaders. Launched in 1992 (when it was called Global Leaders for Tomorrow), the initiative has spawned many globalist-aligned heads of states, cabinet ministers and business leaders. Tony Blair, for instance, was a participant in the first event, while Gordon Brown attended in 1993. In fact, its early intake was packed with other future leaders, including Angela Merkel, Victor Orbán, Nicholas Sarkozy, Guy Verhofstadt and José Maria Aznar.

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In 2017, Schwab admitted to having used the Young Global Leaders to “penetrate the cabinets” of several governments, adding that as of 2017, “more than half” of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet had been members of the programme. More recently, following Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s proposal to drastically cut nitrogen emissions in line with WEF-inspired “green” policies, sparking large protests in the country, critics drew attention to the fact that, in addition to Rutte himself having close ties to the WEF, his Minister of Social Affairs and Employment was elected WEF Young Global Leader in 2008, while his Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag is a contributor to the WEF’s agenda. In December 2021, the Dutch government published its past correspondence with representatives of the World Economic Forum, showing extensive interaction between the WEF and the Dutch government.

Elsewhere, the former Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe — who last year was forced to resign following a popular uprising against his decision to ban fertilisers and pesticides in favour of organic, “climate-friendly” alternatives — was also a devoted member and Agenda Contributor of the WEF. In 2018, he published an article on the organisation’s website titled: “This is How I Will Make My Country Rich by 2025”. (Following the protests, the WEF swiftly removed the article from its website.) Once again, it seems clear that the WEF’s role in forming and selecting members of the world’s political elites is not a conspiracy, but rather a very public policy — and one which Schwab is happy to boast about.

Ultimately, there is no denying that the WEF wields immense power, which has cemented the rule of the transnational capitalist class to a degree never before seen in history. But it is important to recognise that its power is simply a manifestation of the power of the “superclass” it represents — a tiny group amounting, according to researchers, to no more than 6,000 or 7,000 people, or 0.0001% of the world’s population, and yet more powerful than any social class the world has ever known. Samuel Huntington, who is credited with inventing the term “Davos man”, argued that members of this global elite “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”. It was only a matter of time before these aspiring cosmocrats developed a tool through which to fully exercise their dominion over the lower classes — and the WEF proved to be the perfect vehicle to do so.

Today, however, the British state’s inability to provide the most basic of functions — stopping crime; providing adequate healthcare, housing and functioning utilities like energy and water — are the central plank of political discussion. We have won the argument, yet there has been very little reflection on what this means, or how we have reached this dismal state of affairs. Worse, the people who brought us here are still in charge.

But what is the alternative? In their 2015 book Inventing the Future, the Left-wing writers Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams used the example of the Seventies crisis, which ushered in our current political and economic model, to examine the way in which one governing ideology can supersede its predecessor as the common-sense frame of political argument, and become hegemonic. The previous, dominant Keynesian framework had no immediate answer to the economic crisis of the time, and thus ceded ground to the free-market ideology of neoliberalism, which had created an ecosystem of think tanks and journalistic popularisers biding their time for a moment of crisis: “The neoliberals… had both a diagnosis of the problem and a solution.” As a result, they observe: “Government officials who were uncertain about what to do in the face of crisis found a plausible story in neoliberalism.”

The fundamental problem facing Britain today is the collapse of this chosen model, the fruit of a previous, lesser era of crisis. Instead of shoring up the state’s resilience to the pressures of an increasingly unstable world, the reliance on market forces has left the Government increasingly unable to impose order, provide functioning healthcare, keep the lights on or put roofs over people’s heads: a state that cannot provide these basic functions is really no state at all. We are witnessing the death spiral of the world created after the Seventies crisis; even conservatives now understand that things cannot continue as they are. To argue in favour of the current system is now the marginal and eccentric position: half the ideological battle has already been won.

And yet, no single viable alternative model is waiting in the wings; both parties are ideologically inflexible, far more so than voters. The most likely outcome is Westminster’s desperate political preservation of a rapidly collapsing system in which no one believes. The model has failed, but the people who imposed it, who genuinely believed in it and somehow still believe in it, remain in power. 

There have been no consequences for their decades of failure, and the detachment of voters from the people who represent them has never been greater. This is a deeply dangerous, unstable situation, which has already given birth to conspiratorial political religions, such as QAnon, Russiagate, and the Great Reset, which will doubtless multiply as living standards continue to plummet and politicians continue to fail. They seek to discern some underlying logic or rationale to events, when there is only incompetence and a dying political system bereft of ideas. At a moment of grave national crisis, we require a statesman of historic stature, with the vision and will to steer us out of disaster. Instead, we’re getting Liz Truss.

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But in reality, it no longer matters whether Truss or Sunak wins the battle to enter No 10. No one believes that either has any answers to the problems facing us, and the paper-thin dividing line between them is merely the narcissism of small differences. Similarly, the increasingly bitter battle over political control of the American state conceals the fact that whichever party wins will find themselves at the mercy of global forces they can no longer control. Across the Western world, the red lights are flashing in the cockpit, but no one knows how to fly the plane. 

Degrowth, the failed totalitarianism of the 20th century, political Islam; these aren’t useful alternatives, just fringe ideologies — more often used rhetorically by the current regime to justify its prolonged existence than sincerely adhered to. Fukuyama may have posited liberal capitalism’s victory because nothing had shown up to replace it; yet its failure looks more like the world we already inhabit, a world of niche micro-ideologies without any grand unifying project. 

To maintain the fiction of progress, we must believe that things are better now than they have ever been, even when they are demonstrably worse than any time in living memory. We are entering a post-progress era, where the achievements of the past decades, even centuries, will be reversed. We will, for the next decade at least, perhaps longer, be forced to live in a simpler, sparer way. The fat will be cut off, now we have entered the lean years. As Macron observed this week, “we are living through… what could seem like the end of abundance”. To describe the years since 2008 as an age of abundance seems absurd, but we may well soon be nostalgic for the stagnation of the 2010s.

It is as if we have entered a dark tunnel, and the political forms waiting at the end of it are too distant and obscure to make out. But there is no reason to believe things will get any better, and much reason to believe that there is much further for us to descend. We don’t know how the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine will end; there is the prospect of a grave escalation. We don’t know the consequences of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, now more likely than ever. But surely, given the West’s total dependence on China’s industrial base, it will dwarf the consequences of the Ukraine war. 

The term “crisis” implies an end state, like a fever breaking: but this is the new baseline normality. Next year will be worse than this year; the year after will be worse again. Previous attempts to stave off disaster, the mass demonstrations of the early 2010s and the populist wave that followed, were often inchoate attempts to correct our course: both failed. The ideological output of the 2010s, like fully automated luxury communism, posited a post-scarcity world of happy, abundant consumption derived through mining asteroids and other unlikely tech fixes. A decade later, we’re having to settle for energy rationing and trying to restore the very most basic competences of governance.

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As the Marxist thinker Wolfgang Streeck warns: “We are facing a long period of systemic disintegration, in which social structures become unstable and unreliable, and therefore uninstructive for those living in them…” It is a time, perhaps lasting centuries, when “deep changes will occur, rapidly and continuously, but they will be unpredictable and in any case ungovernable”. Life in such a society “offers rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”.

How are we to manage life in this hard new world, for ourselves and our children? The survival of the British state, our ark in the coming storm, is paramount. Yet whether the British state will even exist at the end of the decade is still a matter of helpless conjecture. We must demand a wartime level of mobilisation focused on state resilience: we are now far beyond nudges and quick fixes. This is a campaign for the basic functions of the state: streets that are safe to walk, homes to live in, healthcare for those in need, universal access to food, warmth and shelter. 

As Milton Friedman put it: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” That time has now come. Of necessity, in a world without a convincing successor ideology, this new model of politics must be pragmatic and non-ideological. Centred on restoring the basic functions of statehood, it must unite Labour voters as well as Tories, socialists and conservatives. It is a call, I propose, for Anglofuturism.

“Anglo”, because Britain should survive as an entity focused on the health and prosperity of the people, and not merely as a theme park for international capital. Through shifting domestic industry abroad and encouraging mass immigration of low-wage labour at home, policymakers were able to create the illusion of prosperity, conjuring the outward form of a middle-class existence even as it demolished its foundations. But this world has now gone forever, leaving us poorer and less resilient. 

The “futurism” is for the understanding that unlike our current political class, this approach looks beyond the electoral cycle. It is the idea that the state, and the nation, have interests to be safeguarded over the course of generations, and that infrastructure should be built now to secure the lives and prosperity of our descendents. “Futurism” also because it harnesses the optimism and high modernism of the post-war era, a vanished world of frenetic housebuilding and technological innovation where British scientific research could lead the world, and produce higher living standards through its fusion with well-paid, high-skilled labour. 

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The Anglofuturist vision of Britain is one where every county town has its own Small Modular Reactor providing clean, abundant nuclear energy. It is a country where cheap and reliable high-speed rail darts across the country, through the new towns where everyone who wants can have their own warm and spacious home, past the small family farms which provide the country’s food security. In the clean skies, electric airships move freight across the country; in our seas, teeming with fish, vast arrays of domestically-manufactured wind and wave power stations, the product of a revived industrial strategy, unite British ingenuity and manufacturing capacity in clean power generation that is the envy of the world. 

This is not a reactionary vision, for there is no going back: the Britain of the Fifties is gone forever, as is the Britain of the Nineties and the 2010s. Yet everything to come has been shaped by what has been before. Rooting our vision of the future in the best of our past, and Britain’s unique natural and cultural gifts, perhaps we can emerge from this crisis richer, happier and healthier than we have ever been. This requires a total, war-level shifting of the Westminster worldview, brought about by public pressure: after all, the political incentives currently in place are what brought us here. Like the austerity of the 2010s, which midwifed the weakened state of the 2020s, Truss’s desperate, cargo-cult Thatcherism promises only deeper, faster, harder collapse: it is the proposed cure that already ails us. We must look towards a pragmatic, emergency programme of rebuilding state capacity as a matter of national survival. Even as we enter a decades-long period of near-collapse, it is time to reject decline and embrace a better future: it’s time for Anglofuturism.

Then, as if acting as warm-up man for the coming entreaclement of Luton Airport’s runway, the UK’s former energy and climate change minister, Sir John Hayes, went on Radio 4 to argue that all this fuss over a heatwave showed that “we’ve lost our sense of what’s normal”. (“I can remember the summer of 1975,” he declared, puzzling anyone who could remember the summer of 1976.) Three days later, his home county sent a four-wheeled gritter named Spreaddie Mercury to discharge itself over Lincolnshire roads liquefying at a record-breaking 56.3°C.

Then, just as I was about to finish this piece, Esquire magazine revealed that Chris Evans — the Knives Out one not the TFI Friday one — had been detected trying to “normalise” something. When you hear about things being normalised, it’s usually in reference to lying or racism or toxic masculinity, but thankfully Evans had just decided to go to the premiere of The Gray Man wearing a white vest under his suit jacket. “The normalisation of sexy, sexy menswear,” the mag confirmed, “has been coming for some time.”

At our moment in history, is the word “normal” exhausted beyond use? Is it time to retire it? We expect it to do so much. The normality of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, for example, resides in its characters’ struggles with mental illness; the novel argues for the ordinariness and ubiquity of experiences that fiction might once have treated as exceptional. It’s not the same normal as Planet Normal, the Daily Telegraph podcast that offers views on Covid policy that are not broadly shared by either the public or the scientific community. So what, if anything, does it now mean?

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Could you spot a conspiracy theorist?

By Matthew Sweet

These are questions for Sarah Chaney, research fellow at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, which in recent years has produced exciting work on British weeping, shame in early modern Spain, and Busman’s stomach (a psychosomatic disorder that troubled double-decker drivers around the time of the 1937 Coronation). Chaney’s new book, Am I Normal? takes a single term and, like a long, chatty entry from Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords (1976), traces its sources and explores the different uses to which it has been put.

Her first lesson about “normal” as we understand it today is that its history is short. In essence, her book is an account of an escape. In 1800, “normal” was a mathematical term designating a straight line perpendicular to the tangent. But in 1840, along came Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and statistician who loosed the term into the space of a new discipline he called “social physics”. (Auguste Comte had thought of it first, but coined another word — “sociology” — to ensure nobody confused their work.) Taking data on the chest measurements of 5,738 Scottish soldiers from a two-decades-old copy of the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Quetelet plotted these numbers on a graph to produce an average chest size, rather as astronomers used multiple readings to establish the length of a planetary orbit. As revolution brought chaos and disruption to Belgium, Quetelet found that on paper, all measurable human qualities — from height and weight to propensity for suicide — fell into the quiet and simple order of the bell curve. We still call this “normal distribution”.

Quetelet knew that his calculations were not offering a simple description of reality. The average soldier who emerged from his numbers did not exist. Not all who followed in his footsteps were so clear-sighted. As Todd Rose relates in The End of Average, the spectral figure of the average man led US Air Force designers to produce a generation of jet planes with cockpits that fitted nobody. (It’s also why nuclear families are easier to find in adverts than censuses.)

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There’s another story here that’s just as big. Chaney spells out the problem with the data itself: it shows an enormous bias towards white middle-class individuals, who comprise less than 12% of the world’s population, but make up 80% of subjects in medical studies and 96% of subjects in psychological ones. The normal isn’t just a phantom; it’s one raised from the experience of a minority. Yet it is used to create standards for a world in which everyone must live.

Quetelet’s work generated a universe of good and ghastly work based on averages — the Body Mass Index, typologies of criminals, Florence Nightingale’s hospital reforms, John Snow’s discovery of the waterborne nature of cholera, the IQ test, the Kinsey Report into the sex habits of Americans, eugenic projects from Francis Galton to the Nazis.

Amazingly, Am I Normal? suggests that the data didn’t even have to be real in order to have an impact. For instance, statistics about the poor physical state of British recruits to the Anglo-Boer War are often credited for starting the process that gave us the 1904 Committee on Physical Deterioration, free school milk and — eventually — the National Health Service. The numbers are scary. 8,000 of the 11,000 men who volunteered in Manchester, it was said, were unfit to serve. Chaney uses a 2008 paper by the medical historian Vanessa Heggie to show that this figure has no source but the rambling polemics of Arnold White, a failed Liberal parliamentary candidate with a thing for antisemitic conspiracy theories. (“When we survey other nations,” he wrote in Efficiency and Empire (1901), we “perceive how weakness, self-indulgence, want of foresight, self-respect, culture and industry are enabling astute, industrious, or unscrupulous Jews to destroy the power of whole classes.”) A culture convinced of its own declining state did not ask for White’s receipts. It had a picture of itself that matched its prejudices.

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But Chaney’s work also yields a warning about making the same kind of mistake about the past. In one of her chapters, she uses the brutal practice of the clitoridectomy to illustrate how 19th-century medicine attempted to regulate female sexuality. The operation, she argues, was “a cure for sexual desire” that “acquired a dubious reputation after the discrediting of its main advocate, gynaecologist Isaac Baker Brown, in 1867”. She is not the first to use Brown to tell a story about normality imposed by a surgical blade — but I’m not sure whether the facts really serve her thesis.

Scandal erupted around Brown when it was revealed that he had been operating on patients without consent. The subsequent inquiry also allowed his peers to pass judgement on the procedure itself. They used words such as “barbarous”, “quackery” and “terrorism”. I can find only one example of an English doctor other than Baker who ever carried out it out. It was the opposite of normal. It was shockingly extreme.

Moreover, the case that brought Brown down was not the one that we might naturally imagine – a Victorian wife punished for her desires. The central figure in the affair, Mary Hancock, suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. She saved pus from her blisters in a gallipot, believed that she was turning into a crystal, imagined that she was Princess Charlotte of Wales, who had died in childbirth in 1817. Her doctors were concerned about what they perceived as a manic sexual energy, but marriage, not mutilation, seems to have been their preferred cure.

All this became a matter for the courts only when her husband, Robert Peaty, fought, unsuccessfully, to save her from the machinations of her family, who wanted to annul the marriage for financial gain. As the astonished press coverage indicates, there was nothing normal about any of this (except, perhaps, the punishment meted out to the doctor who cut Mary Hancock with steel scissors of his own design). A misplaced scholarly tradition of seeing the clitoridectomy as an exemplar of Victorian cruelty may be the only reason that Chaney implies otherwise.

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Ironically, Am I Normal? is just the sort of book that might save a researcher from error. Its pages are full of implied warnings against the unquestioning use of data, particularly when it fits preconceived ideas too neatly. But as Raymond Williams reminds us, this is hazardous work. Many of the entries in Keywords begin by saying that the term under discussion is “one of the most difficult words in the language”. “Normal” is not on his list. But, as Chaney demonstrates, it merits the same careful handling. It’s a word that imposes a false picture of the world and may sometimes cause us much pain. But it’s one for which we’re grateful when we’re trying to work out how many Paracetamol to take, or how to read a red hot weather forecast.

A few weeks ago, a clip of the scruffy CBBC personality Hacker T. Dog went viral. It was a short moment from a 2016 TV show in which he made a strange emphatic statement to his co-presenter, Lauren Layfield. “We’re normal men!” he declared. “We’re just innocent men.” Layfield, her face close to his snout, dissolved into incapable laughter.

Hacker is a little glove puppet with button eyes, but this was probably a more intelligent and sensible deployment of the word “normal” than the examples at the beginning of this piece. It demonstrated its meaninglessness and its power. It showed how a young and promiscuous concept has exerted such a powerful influence on our lives — despite being fragile to the point of absurdity.

At one stage he even says: “When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting.” But he continues to do it, and frequently segues into lengthy digressions about how stupid and harmful the idiots’ beliefs are. Presumably you would not feel that the author had really taken his own advice on board

This is very much how I feel about How to Talk to A Science Denier, by the Harvard philosopher Lee McIntyre.

McIntyre wants to help us change people’s minds. Specifically, to help us change the minds of these strange, incomprehensible people called “science deniers”. He addresses five main groups of “deniers”: flat earthers; climate deniers; anti-vaxxers; GMO sceptics; and Covid deniers.

This is, on the face of it, an important project. It’s a truism that the world is polarised, and our sense of shared reality is under attack. If there is some way of learning how to talk across difference, and to persuade without attacking, that might go a long way to bridging our various divides, not just the five he discusses.

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The framing is that McIntyre goes and meets representatives of these groups and tries to persuade them out of their wrong beliefs. He goes armed with social-psychology research about how best to persuade people. His big trick (which I think is a good, if limited, one) is asking: what evidence would it take to make you change your mind?

But the whole book is premised on one idea: McIntyre is right, and the people he is “talking to” are wrong. 

And it’s true that all five groups are wrong, or at least their central claims are. The earth is in fact an oblate spheroid; the climate is warming, due to human influence, and will likely have severe negative impacts; vaccines work; GMOs are safe; and Covid is real.

The trouble is that by using these groups, McIntyre is playing on easy mode. When your example of a “science denier” is a literal flat-earther, it’s easy to say “look over there at the crazy deniers”.

Even with climate change scepticism, sure, there are people who literally don’t believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet. But those people are relatively rare. People who believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet, but that the emissions are going to be hard to stop because of economic growth in the developing world and it would make more sense to concentrate on adaptation rather than mitigation, are much more common. Are they “deniers”? Certainly they’re often called deniers. But McIntyre himself acknowledges that China is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and that the IPCC says the sweeping global changes required to cut emissions sufficiently to avoid a 1.5°C warming are unprecedented.

McIntyre constantly wants to make a clean distinction between “science deniers” and non-deniers. So, for instance, he says that there are five “common reasoning errors made by all science deniers” [my emphasis]. They are: cherrypicking, a belief in conspiracy theories, a reliance on fake experts, illogical reasoning and an insistence that science must be perfect. If you don’t make all five of those errors, you’re not an official McIntyre-accredited science denier.

Hang on, though. A “belief in conspiracy theories”? McIntyre spends a lot of time talking about the tobacco firms who manufactured doubt in the smoking/lung cancer link, and the oil firms who did the same with the fossil fuel/climate change link. He says that the spread of Covid denialism through the US government was driven by Republican desire to keep the economy open and win the election. Aren’t these conspiracy theories?

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Ah, but for McIntyre these aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracies. The distinction is “between actual conspiracies (for which there should be some evidence) and conspiracy theories (which customarily have no credible evidence).”

So, since some anti-vaxx conspiracy theories like the polio vaccine giving children polio, or the CIA using fake vaccination stations to take people’s DNA, are true, does that mean anti-vaxxers don’t believe in “conspiracy theories” but “conspiracies”?

Obviously not. But the point is that there’s not some clear line between “real conspiracies” and “conspiracy theories”. When Alex Jones says that chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay, he’s referring to real claims that endocrine disruptors are affecting sexual development in lots of animals. It’s not easy to draw a line between real and fake, evidence-based and not evidence-based.

I think the basic problem is that McIntyre is a Popperian. That is, in hugely oversimplified terms, he believes that no amount of evidence can confirm a theory: but evidence can falsify it. “If we find only evidence that fits our theory, then it might be true,” he writes. “But if we find any evidence that disconfirms our theory, it must be ruled out.” 

I, on the other hand, am a Bayesian. I have some prior belief and I assign some level of probability to it: “climate change is real and dangerous”: 90%; “the world is flat”, 0.1%. And then each new piece of evidence shifts my belief a little: if next year NASA say “we got new photos in, looks like Earth is sitting on the back of a turtle”, then I’ll upgrade my belief in a flat earth to, I dunno, 1.5% (but also upgrade my belief in there being mad people at NASA to 95%).

So I don’t need to draw a bright line between “denial” and “reality”. I can say: “I think it’s likely that tobacco firms conspired over lung cancer, but I think it’s pretty unlikely that NASA faked the moon landings.” And I can update my beliefs as new evidence comes in. I don’t have to “rule anything out”, I can simply downgrade how likely it is.

McIntyre, though, is stuck with two categories: things that might be true; and things which have been “disconfirmed”. If you believe things that have been disconfirmed, then you must be a “denier”. And so he needs to find ways of explaining why these “deniers” are so different from the rest of us. 

He has various ideas about “inflated self-confidence, narcissism, or low self-esteem”. But if you reject the idea that there are two groups of people, “deniers” and “non-deniers”, then you can avoid the need to explain it at all, beyond saying “some people are better than others at working out what’s true”. 

But we’re not just here for his epistemology: we’re here for a masterclass in how to persuade people out of false beliefs. Over the course of the book he meets various people — the flat earthers; two coal miners; a couple of hippyish friends of his — and tries to talk to them about their beliefs, using the methods he has learnt. His solution is to listen, to be respectful, to meet people face to face, and to do so over several meetings. Does his approach work?

In short: no. Hilariously, both of the coal miners he meets cheerfully accept the reality of climate change, but say that the economic value is worth the potential damage to the climate. His first hippyish friend is entirely pro-vax and only slightly GMO-sceptical; the other one is anti-GMO but on anti-corporate grounds rather than safety ones. 

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So he falls at the first hurdle: he not only doesn’t convince anyone, he doesn’t meet anyone who unambiguously disagrees with him, except the flat earthers. (He also struggles to be respectful, at least in the book itself. There’s an astonishing line on p77 in which he says “When speaking to them, we should remember that it is an insult to use the word ‘anti-vaxxer.’” There are 109 uses of the term “anti-vaxx” in the book. Occasionally he remembers and says how important it is that we listen and pay attention, then he immediately reverts to calling, say, Covid scepticism “ridiculous conspiracy theories and partisan nonsense”.)

But there’s a bigger problem. McIntyre’s big question, as mentioned, is asking: What evidence would it take to change your mind? But at no point does McIntyre ever ask himself what it would take to change his mind. 

For instance: when he was talking to the Pennsylvania coal miners, he accepted that they were just trying to feed their families. I assume he’d also acknowledge that Chinese coal mining is allowing that country to get richer and improve its citizens’ way of life. But I don’t think I’m misrepresenting him when I say that he thinks coal mining is a disaster.

When he talks to a friend of his about GMOs, though, that friend says that even though GMOs can save lives now (in the form of golden rice), they’ll cause disaster in the future. McIntyre says, OK, so the kids who can’t get the golden rice now, they’re just going to die? And his friend says yes. McIntyre says that’s easy for him to say, “because he had money and wouldn’t be one of the ones who suffered”.

The exact same question, though, can be asked about coal mining. Sure, McIntyre can say stop using coal, and it’ll help prevent future disasters. But it will also presumably mean some number of tens or hundreds of millions of Chinese people losing electric lights and functioning hospitals, and a smaller number of Pennsylvanians losing their jobs. McIntyre himself would be fine, except for somewhat higher electricity bills. 

Is the tradeoff worth it? McIntyre clearly thinks so (and I think I do too): but what would change his mind? I can tell you: I would update my beliefs significantly if you showed me a utilitarian calculation showing that more people would be harmed by ending coal mining than by continuing it. But McIntyre never asks himself the question. He is stuck on transmit, never on receive.

What’s sad is that he sometimes comes close. He recognises that beliefs are part of people’s identity, and that that makes it hard to change them – but again, applies the lesson only to the weird, wrong, other people, not to himself and people like him. The near-total lack of introspection renders the whole grand project largely meaningless. I am right, you are wrong, the only thing we need to discuss is how to make you realise how wrong you are. The idea of working together to establish a shared reality is hamstrung by his certainty that the reality that needs to be shared is his one.

It’s mainly a book designed to tell readers that people they already think are dumb are, in fact, dumb. It is, really, How to Talk to A Contemptible Idiot Who Is Kind of Evil.

This piece was originally published in August. 

Only 40% of the South African population has been jabbed against Covid — a slow take-up which is euphemistically described as “vaccine hesitancy”. It is anything but: it is enraged rejection.

There are a number of reasons why it is so hard to get South Africans to take the umjovu, the injection: appalling technical management of the outbreak, a prevailing scepticism towards science, wariness about the Government and a wide-spread apprehension by the poor and marginalised that this is at best another form of repression and at worst witchcraft. It is a dangerous brew in a country already in a state of great political, social and economic instability.

In common with the rest of the world, South African epidemiological estimates of fatalities at the outset of the coronavirus outbreak verged on the fantastical. Initial predictions were for between 87,000 and 350,000 fatalities in the first phase. There were 103. Two years later, with the virus in retreat, fatalities attributed to Covid (but by no means vouchsafed) are only now beginning to touch the lowest initial estimates.

Yet the South African Government imposed one of the longest and most severe lockdowns, supported by a baying national and social media. The decision has proved inappropriate in nature, premature in timing and catastrophic in impact. In a country where many depend on ad hoc daily or weekly subsistence wages, the sudden cessation of economic activity wreaked havoc amongst the poor and self-employed. A failing state was unable to deliver on its promise of subsidies, responsible policing or effective containment.

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It took more than a year for the first subsidies to individuals or small businesses to start coming through. And even then they were erratic, corruption-prone, inadequate, and according to many attested reports, distributed on a racially biased basis. Nearly a quarter of small businesses have gone to the wall and unemployment has rocketed.

An entire section of the population was effectively criminalised: in the first four months of the outbreak, 230,000 citizens, 0.4% of the population, were charged with infringement of the Disaster Regulations for breaking the restrictions, 311 of them policemen. All the charges were later dropped: the criminal justice system simply could not cope.

For every reported infection to the end June last year, seven citizens were arrested for breach of regulations; for every 100 infections, one police officer was arrested; and for every 1,200 infections there was a High Court urgent application. Seven people had been killed in heavy-handed enforcement.

When two doctors working in a Government hospital were forcibly interned in one of the state’s make-shift rural isolation camps, the High Court ordered they be allowed to self-isolate at home: it accepted the doctors’ deposition that they stood more chance of dying from the conditions of incarceration than from the virus.

Small surprise, then, that the general population, particularly the poor, headed for the hills. Take-up of the crucial HIV-Aids retroviral dropped from 95% to 30%; malaria medication showed the same path. Attendances for tuberculosis screenings dropped by two-thirds, while consultations with GPs were down 60% and tens of thousands of urgent surgery procedures were postponed for the coronavirus patients who never arrived.

Emergency procurement of personal equipment, meanwhile, opened the door to the corruption lurking in every interstice of the State. The  heir-presumptive to President Ramaphosa has resigned: a state investigatory agency accuses him of directing a R350 million (£16.6 million) Personal Protection Equipment account to friends. The Gauteng Health Department, industrial heartland of the nation, is embroiled in a R560 million (£26.5 million) fraud inquiry. The female whistle-blower was assassinated within days of the inquiry’s launch.

The begging question, whether President Ramaphosa, a decent man, is presiding over a ruling party in the throes of a Robert Kennedy versus The Mob has at least been definitively answered.

At the same time, a public service already perilously compromised by patronage, corruption, incompetence, and the dismissal of key white personnel for affirmative action reasons, went into a long recess. Two years later it has still not properly returned.

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Enforcement of traffic licencing rules have also been in abeyance for 18 months as 500,000 drivers’ licences await clearance. Estates cannot be closed, forensic inquiries completed, crimes prosecuted (including culprits in the so-called State Capture project of former President Jacob Zuma) and property transferred. More than half a million school children have quite simply not returned to school.

As for the burden of this failure of service delivery, it has been carried disproportionately by the poor, mainly black but increasingly also by white citizens, judged by the street corner beggars. There is little doubt that the effect of the containment strategies advocated by South Africa’s warrior scientists facilitated the July Troubles this year, which claimed 357 lives in a scourge of looting, arson and violence and has directly accounted for the drastic decline in ruling party support in last month’s municipal elections.

South Africans have endured, if never condoned, the absurdities and atrocities of this misjudged, exploited and needless panic to date. The ebb and flow of the global debate about the course of the pandemic has been intensely watched here by the literate and online portion of the community.

They have followed, like many others in the world, the way the arrogant scientific certainties that locked up the world are dissolving in the face of measured science and empirical fact. They understand one cannot follow a “science” when the scientists are hopelessly at odds. They are aware of the abuse of both language and statistics, particularly the new phenomena of snatch-stats whereby mortality from other causes is snatched for Covid-19, or the natural path of an expiring virus is used to justify the efficacy of an antidote or Excess Deaths are annexed to justify a lost cause.

They note the irony whereby their government, correctly, tells the world not to be alarmed by the Omicron variant, while it simultaneously contemplates a grievous assault against the rights of its citizens to contain it, egged on by the usual howling suspects who demanded total lockdowns. Citizens have minutely followed recent reports of how Pfizer arm-twisted their desperate government into signing legal indemnities for its product: who ever heard of citizens being forced to be vaccinated when the supplier is absolved of any responsibility for the consequences?

Most South Africans are not conspiracy theorists but their history teaches them one certain thing: uncontained power always gets one screwed. And many feel screwed now by a confluence of forces (not a conspiracy) that — from Big Pharma, to Big Tech to authoritarian governments — seeks rent from this incomparable tragedy.

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But another, far more important constituency of hesitaters and rejectionists exists. Those who take the time to talk to the black poor and marginalised are astonished by the extent to which, scarred by their lockdown experiences, they regard the current scare as yet another means to oppress them. Curfews, liquor and tobacco bans and the outlawing of political meetings under the guise of fighting Covid-19 support their case. And, for many, the umjovo is nothing less than ubuthakathi or witchcraft.

President Ramaphosa enters dangerous territory here. Take-up of vaccines is higher among the minorities for a variety of reasons and it is a section of the white minority who are the most vociferous supporters of vaccinate-at-all-costs. Banning access to public spaces will instantly translate, as it always does, into a political and racial rumpus. Pieces of paper that permit or restrict certain people’s movements have a terrible record in this country’s history: a bitter resonance for every black person.

Proven and restless forces in South Africa are today looking for chances to reignite the insurrection of July. These are people who do not protest by way of orderly marches, posters and pram-pushing. They seek only opportunity; the consequences brought by the human attempts to contain the pandemic is a revolution.

But revolutions always eventually consume their children. Time will certainly consume the reputations of the architects of this epochal tragedy: the scientists, pharmaceutical companies, politicians and media. And if Ramaphosa isn’t careful, it could also consume the fragile nation of South Africa.

Costner was exaggerating but not by much. Around that time, 77% of Americans told pollsters that they believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was not solely responsible for the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Phrases from the case had long ago entered the national vocabulary: magic bullet, lone gunman, Zapruder film, grassy knoll, patsy.

Stone’s movie did not actually do much to shift the numbers. What it did do, in generating $205m, eight Oscar nominations and an almighty debate, was introduce a mainstream audience to the mindset of conspiracy theories: the obsessive accumulation of data, wild deductive leaps and spinning of yarns.

I know because I was one of them. JFK was my gateway drug into the thrillingly murky world of post-war dirty tricks and black ops, where I was often unable to distinguish between actual conspiracies such as Watergate and MK-ULTRA and fanciful speculation. As a reformed conspiracy theorist, I’m familiar with the seductive power of that adventure into an underworld where there are no coincidences, only connections. “My eyes have opened,” says Costner’s Garrison, “and once they’re open, believe me, what used to look normal seems insane.” And vice versa, of course.

JFK coloured a decade which, though remembered as relatively stable, was riddled with paranoia, from The X-Files to the fantastical Right-wing conspiracy theories swirling around the Clintons. Yet today, as Stone releases a 30^th anniversary documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, JFK’s legacy is even more complicated.

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Christopher Hitchens wrote that “modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission”. In fact, the first counter-narrative was published within a month of the assassination. An article in the National Guardian by Mark Lane, a young lawyer hired by Oswald’s mother, caused a sensation in the UK as well as the US. Worthies including Labour MP Michael Foot, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper promptly formed the Who Killed Kennedy Committee.

The Warren Commission, under pressure to reach a unanimous conclusion before the 1964 election, left many inconsistencies unaddressed and alternative perpetrators unexplored; ironically, its critics largely relied on the commission’s own published evidence, which ran to 27 volumes and 10.4 million words. Two years later, when Lane’s massive bestseller Rush to Judgment led a pack of anti-Warren books including Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash and Richard H Popkin’s The Second Oswald, half of Americans said that they disbelieved the commission’s lone-gunman theory.

Lane’s theories later inspired the 1973 movie Executive Action, a weirdly boring dramatisation of a hypothetical plot to kill Kennedy. By then, an an assassination completist would have amassed around 2,000 volumes of speculation about the accuracy of Carcano model 91 rifles, doppelganger Oswalds, Cuban exiles, mobsters and spooks. It was already, as Stone says in JFK Revisited, “the most thoroughly documented crime in American history”. By 1979, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy and (based on later discredited acoustical evidence) probably a fourth shot from the grassy knoll, Kennedy conspiracy theories were thoroughly mainstream. “Next thing you know they’ll be blaming World War II on Hitler,” joked talk-show host Johnny Carson.

The 25^th anniversary of the assassination, 1988, was a busy year. Don DeLillo, American literature’s great scholar of conspiracy and paranoia, fictionalised the story of Oswald and “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” in his bestselling novel Libra. In the UK, ITV broadcast The Men Who Killed Kennedy, a two-part documentary so tenuous that director Nigel Turner was censured by regulators.

This was also the year that Stone met a publisher and former Garrison staffer named Ellen Ray, who gave him a copy of Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins. Until then, Stone told Esquire, “I thought that people like Mark Lane were crazy. I thought Lee Oswald had shot the president.” No longer. After giving Garrison a three-hour grilling, he optioned the book and plunged down the rabbit hole.

Garrison, as fans of the film will know, is still the only person to bring a criminal prosecution in relation to Kennedy’s murder, identifying a CIA-connected New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw as a key conspirator. He failed. Newsweek called the 1969 trial “a merry kind of parody of conspiracy theories, a can-you-top-this of arbitrarily conjoined improbabilities”. Yet this patriotic military veteran who came to believe that his country had been betrayed at the highest level was to Stone the ideal protagonist for an “outlaw history or counter-myth” about the crime that marked the end of America’s innocence.

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That’s why Stone cast the Republican Costner as an all-American truth-seeker in the mould of James Stewart or Gary Cooper and commissioned a John Williams score that sounded like a Fourth of July parade passing through a horror movie. A Vietnam veteran, Stone believed that Kennedy would have averted the conflict, broken up the CIA and ended the Cold War, thus making the assassination nothing less than a coup d’etat. As Costner says in the movie: “The ghost of John F Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder at the heart of the American dream.”

Stone wanted to tell the story not just of Garrison’s investigation but of Oswald, Dealey Plaza and military escalation in Vietnam, to which end his research team consulted around 200 books of assassination lore. He pitched JFK to Warner Brothers’s Terry Semel (who had produced All the President’s Men and The Parallax View) as a Rashomon-style tapestry of conflicting perspectives rather than a coherent thesis. But that’s not the film he made.

In purely cinematic terms, JFK is a masterpiece of casting, editing, cinematography and storytelling. For a film which runs to 188 minutes (206 in the director’s cut currently available on Amazon Prime) and consists mostly of not just dialogue but lectures, it is both comprehensible and exhilaratingly watchable: part pseudo-documentary, part star-studded paranoid thriller. The ultimate effect is overwhelming, phantasmagorical, a bad dream.

Roger Ebert, a Warren sceptic and bullish supporter of the movie, argued that this eerie mood made JFK’s myriad historical inaccuracies and fabrications beside the point. “I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares,” he wrote in a retrospective piece. “As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact.”

But did Stone agree? There are gestures towards ambiguity in JFK — Costner’s Garrison often signposts a theory with “Let’s suppose”, “My guess is” or “What if” — but we are obviously meant to believe that he is on the right track. “My own conclusions go harder and further than the film,” Stone admitted to Ebert.

Elsewhere, the director insisted: “We clearly differentiate between fact and theory in the film. Any person familiar with film techniques knows that when we cut to something like [Jack] Ruby picking up the bullet in the hospital in black and white, it’s a hypothetical image.” But this is disingenuous. Even if you assume that the average cinema-goer is au fait with the semiotics of film stock, JFK is too sense-alteringly fast and dense for cool-headed scrutiny. And some realistic-looking scenes, such as the manic hotel-room confession of Joe Pesci’s David Ferrie, are completely imagined. Compare it to David Fincher’s Zodiac, which evokes obsession and paranoia without cooking the historical books or pretending that its hero is not somewhat of a crank.

Still, it is hard not to feel sorry for Stone over the backlash against JFK, which began with Lardner’s article two months before the movie had finished shooting and rolled on throughout 1991. He was attacked in almost every major newspaper and magazine, and mocked on Saturday Night Live. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association, went so far as to compare him to Leni Riefenstahl. “Saddam Hussein did not receive half the vituperation the op-ed crowd has aimed at JFK,” Ebert protested.

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Stone went on the counterattack, firing off a fusillade of angry letters to publications to defend his movie’s veracity, all of which were reprinted in JFK: The Book of the Film, a heavily annotated screenplay followed by 400 pages of press clippings. One recipient, the New York Times veteran Tom Wicker, had a pithy response: “The director of JFK is not, as he claims, an artist. He is a polemicist.”

I’d suggest he is (or was) both. Let’s suppose, in Garrisonian style, that just as conspiracy theorists claim there were two Lee Harvey Oswalds, there were two Oliver Stones: the artist who made the movie and the polemicist who defended it. My guess is that what seemed like a concerted effort to pre-emptively discredit JFK led him to identify too strongly with Garrison, a man of “lone-wolf integrity” who was “accused, pandered, ridiculed and humiliated”. So he doubled down on the movie’s claims and rejected the licence of fiction. He has been stuck in that defensive posture ever since. “There’s nothing in the movie that I would go back on,” he said in 2013.

With the release of JFK Revisited, the polemicist has decisively defeated the artist. More like the book of the film than the film itself, this investigative essay is earnestly insistent on backing up JFK’s claims with evidence declassified since 1991. “Conspiracy theory,” Stone declares, “has become conspiracy fact”. He promises to “piece together what really happened that day”.

Those are bold statements. In a way, JFK succeeded too well. As Stone had hoped, it led the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, which has since released almost every piece of evidence gathered by the Warren Commission and the HSC; the process is due to conclude by December 2022. Yet to this day the only smoking gun is Oswald’s Mannlicher. There have been no decisive revelations, no incriminating leaks, no deathbed confessions to wrap things up. On the contrary, books such as Gerald Posner’s Case Closed and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History have methodically debunked many of the claims in JFK.

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And so JFK Revisited feels like an old rock band on tour, mixing classic hits with underwhelming new material. Minus the artistry and stardust of the first movie, it resembles a high-end version of one of those YouTube documentaries which promises to tell you the truth about 9/11 or Covid-19. The assassination buffs interviewed by Stone are still effectively in the same position they occupied in 1966: capable of casting enormous doubt on the Warren Commission’s flawed account but unable to replace it with a convincing narrative of their own. They remind me of the researcher in Libra: “He knows he can’t get out. This case will haunt him to the end.” No wonder that the percentage of Americans who believe in a conspiracy has slipped from a high of 81% in 2001 to 61% now, or that the last major film about the assassination, Jackie, concentrated on grief rather than guilt. A theory cannot thrive on scraps forever.

But there is a darker context. Rewatching JFK made me nostalgic for a time when conspiracy theories seemed titillating, exotic and largely well-intentioned. These days, Stone’s once-reasonable request that viewers do their own research is the mantra of every crank. The anti-imperialist Left and authoritarian Right come together to smear the White Helmets and deny President Assad’s use of chemical weapons (Stone himself has praised Putin as a “stabilising force” in Syria). Donald Trump convinces tens of millions of his followers that the last election was stolen. A pandemic breeds theories about a “plandemic”. Alex Jones is sued for claiming that the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax and the grieving families and survivors merely “crisis actors”. On and on. This mindset has poisoned the world.

The Kennedys are infected, too. Last month, QAnon believers gathered in Dallas to await the return of John F Kennedy Jr to become Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate. (Generally believed to have died in 1999, he did not show up.) Robert F Kennedy Jr, who appears in JFK Revisited, is America’s most influential anti-vaxxer.

“Conspiracy theory thus becomes an ailment of democracy,” Christopher Hitchens wrote sympathetically in 1991. “It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version.” But we can see now that conspiracy theories spring up even when the official version is much more solid than the Warren report. Which authority is to blame for the obscene fantasies of Alex Jones? What space are QAnon or Pizzagate moving into except a zone of epistemological chaos — the ruins of our shared reality?

Thirty years on, it is clear that JFK is not remotely a good movie about the assassination but it is a peerless dramatisation of how it feels to be a conspiracy theorist. Perhaps that makes it more valuable than ever.

Psalmanazar’s Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704) reported the details to eager readers. Island laws, he explained, were a mixture of imperial edicts imposed by the Japanese Emperor and rules established by the local clergy and monarchy. Slap a priest and you were buried alive. Cheek your husband and he could behead you and keep your carcass for the larder. Other rules kept natural disasters in check: the high priest oversaw an 18,000-boy-a-year anti-earthquake human sacrifice programme. (Girls could be used to meet the quota if they underwent a ritual in which they were passed twelve times through the four elements.) The name of the supervising priest was Gnotoy Bonzo.

Psalmanazar, of course, was a liar. Ian Keable, author of The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth Century England, thinks he may have been one of the greatest who ever lived. Some of Psalmanazar’s dupes had status: the Bishop of London was so impressed by the man (and his fervent anti-Catholicism) that he funded a student place for him at Oxford. But not everyone swallowed. The astronomer Edmond Halley quizzed Psalmanazar about the qualities of the Formosan twilight. (Psalmanazar said the concept was unknown to him.) Those who wondered why he was blond and blue-eyed were told that privileged Formosans stayed pale by living in “apartments under ground”. These assertions were hard to contest. During his time in England, Psalmanazar — or whoever he really was — never met another person who had been to Formosa.

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There is a canon of classic hoaxes, which have been filling anthologies and saving journalists on slow news days for generations. The best are immortal. The saga of the Tichborne Claimant, the mountainous butcher from Wagga Wagga who presented himself as the vanished heir to a Victorian baronetcy and was discredited in a court case that involved much discussion of his penis size. The affair of Piltdown Man, a confection of bones sourced from an Orangutan and an anonymous medieval human, widely accepted as evidence of an ape caught in the act of evolving into person. The tale of the Cottingley Fairies, the little paper figures pinned to the ground in a back garden near Bradford, that fooled the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

These hoaxes probably wouldn’t work today. Their effectiveness depended on various forms of absence — a missing aristocrat, a gap in the fossil record, the paucity of evidence for a supernatural phenomenon, English ignorance about Formosa. Such voids can no longer be filled so easily. Identity is far less falsifiable than it was in the 19th century. (Some complain that the state knows us too well.) An old bone can be carbon-dated. Photographic trickery is easy to detect. Britain is home to thousands of people who have been to Taiwan, and accurate accounts of it are more accessible than at any other point in human history. But the discourse of the hoax has not faded. Instead, it has become more widespread, corrosive and destructive.

Hoaxes, says Keable, “tend to be short-lived, overturned by an inevitable revelation, newly acquired information or a forced confession”. An eighteenth-century hoax, that is. The examples he gives are lies confected to mislead, often by those who craved attention. But in the information age, the hoax is, characteristically, an imagined act: a fantasy projected into a space where there is no true void of knowledge, just an event to which the fantasist objects. And these unreal hoaxes are far more tenacious than the relatively modest cons Keable describes.

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The Moon landings are the founding modern example. In 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the lunar surface. But a vast literature has worked hard to cast doubt upon this event, and that doubt now exists as a measurable phenomenon in the world. One in six Britons suspects that the Moon landings were faked. We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle (1976), a self-published pamphlet that focused on apparent anomalies in Nasa photographs, found a receptive readership in a generation that believed, correctly, that the state had lied to them about Watergate and the war in Vietnam.

In the contemporary world, Syria is the ground for similar work, carried out by a small but influential group of British bloggers and academics whose views receive little serious attention at home but plenty of amplification in Damascus and on Russia’s RT news channel. Their principal contention is that evidence of war crimes by the Assad regime has been faked by foreign intelligence agencies. A strong focus of their literature is the claim that the White Helmets, a volunteer organisation that organises search and rescue work in opposition-controlled areas of the country, are not a real organisation, but a CIA or MI6-backed espionage unit that uses actors and dead bodies to create hoaxes calculated to bring the Assad regime into disrepute. (The chemical attack on Douma in April 2018 is, they claim, the group’s most audacious deception.)

Like Moon hoax culture, this world has its own set of stars. Vanessa Beeley, a 57- year-old former waste management consultant who believes that the Charlie Hebdo attacks were faked and that “Zionists rule France”, is among the most prominent. Her dubious work on the White Helmets, boosted by RT and the official Twitter feed of the Russian Foreign Ministry, has led her to assert that the NGO should be considered a “legit target” for Assad’s bombing campaign.

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While Beeley toils in the field — with the co-operation of the Syrian government — a group of British academics and former academics follow the same track from their desks. In May 2019, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and the Media published a document that claimed the Douma chemical attack was a staged event, for which at least 35 civilians were killed to provide human props. “It follows from this,” they argued, “that people dressed as White Helmets and endorsed by the leadership of that organization had a key role in this murder.” There is no evidence for this.

The authors of the report are Piers Robinson (who left Sheffield University after promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories), David Miller (currently under investigation by Bristol University for his remarks about its Jewish students’ society) and Paul McKeigue (an epidemiologist who teaches at Edinburgh University.) None of these people is really a hoaxer. They don’t mean to be liars. Like Beeley, they believe that they are exposing the deceptions of others. But their work does not expand knowledge: it corrodes it. Their pronouncements, published on their blogs, relayed by Russian and Syrian state media, and echoed and re-echoed on conspiracy websites that fail to meet the most basic journalistic standards, and create territories of doubt in which authoritarians can rest easy. New Formosas, founded on a gas-choked ruin in Douma.

But there is, in all this moral awfulness, a little whisper of 18th-century wit. Conspiracy theorists with exotic ideas about the White Helmets are also sceptical about the activities of other bodies investigating war crimes in Syria, including the San Francisco-based Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA). Paul McKeigue is one of those sceptics. Last year he received an email from a man who proposed to help him dig for dirt on its employees. His contact claimed to be a Russian secret agent called Ivan. They corresponded for three months, during which time McKeigue sent Ivan hundreds of pages of speculation about spies in the British media, revealed the identity of a confidential source, and suggested that members of his own Working Group were exchanging encrypted messages with a Russian diplomat in Geneva.

In the context of Russian espionage, Ivan might seem as preposterous a name as Gnotoy Bonzo. But McKeigue went on pressing send until his correspondent revealed his true nature — a fictional persona created by Nerma Jelacic, a former Observer journalist, and her colleagues at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, who were investigating the workings of pro-Assad disinformation campaigns in the west.

Eighteenth-century commentators, notes Keable, believed themselves to be living through an age of unique gullibility. In this, at least, they were mistaken.

At one stage he even says: “When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting.” But he continues to do it, and frequently segues into lengthy digressions about how stupid and harmful the idiots’ beliefs are. Presumably you would not feel that the author had really taken his own advice on board

This is very much how I feel about How to Talk to A Science Denier, by the Harvard philosopher Lee McIntyre.

McIntyre wants to help us change people’s minds. Specifically, to help us change the minds of these strange, incomprehensible people called “science deniers”. He addresses five main groups of “deniers”: flat earthers; climate deniers; anti-vaxxers; GMO sceptics; and Covid deniers.

This is, on the face of it, an important project. It’s a truism that the world is polarised, and our sense of shared reality is under attack. If there is some way of learning how to talk across difference, and to persuade without attacking, that might go a long way to bridging our various divides, not just the five he discusses.

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The framing is that McIntyre goes and meets representatives of these groups and tries to persuade them out of their wrong beliefs. He goes armed with social-psychology research about how best to persuade people. His big trick (which I think is a good, if limited, one) is asking: what evidence would it take to make you change your mind?

But the whole book is premised on one idea: McIntyre is right, and the people he is “talking to” are wrong. 

And it’s true that all five groups are wrong, or at least their central claims are. The earth is in fact an oblate spheroid; the climate is warming, due to human influence, and will likely have severe negative impacts; vaccines work; GMOs are safe; and Covid is real.

The trouble is that by using these groups, McIntyre is playing on easy mode. When your example of a “science denier” is a literal flat-earther, it’s easy to say “look over there at the crazy deniers”.

Even with climate change scepticism, sure, there are people who literally don’t believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet. But those people are relatively rare. People who believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet, but that the emissions are going to be hard to stop because of economic growth in the developing world and it would make more sense to concentrate on adaptation rather than mitigation, are much more common. Are they “deniers”? Certainly they’re often called deniers. But McIntyre himself acknowledges that China is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and that the IPCC says the sweeping global changes required to cut emissions sufficiently to avoid a 1.5°C warming are unprecedented.

McIntyre constantly wants to make a clean distinction between “science deniers” and non-deniers. So, for instance, he says that there are five “common reasoning errors made by all science deniers” [my emphasis]. They are: cherrypicking, a belief in conspiracy theories, a reliance on fake experts, illogical reasoning and an insistence that science must be perfect. If you don’t make all five of those errors, you’re not an official McIntyre-accredited science denier.

Hang on, though. A “belief in conspiracy theories”? McIntyre spends a lot of time talking about the tobacco firms who manufactured doubt in the smoking/lung cancer link, and the oil firms who did the same with the fossil fuel/climate change link. He says that the spread of Covid denialism through the US government was driven by Republican desire to keep the economy open and win the election. Aren’t these conspiracy theories?

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Ah, but for McIntyre these aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracies. The distinction is “between actual conspiracies (for which there should be some evidence) and conspiracy theories (which customarily have no credible evidence).”

So, since some anti-vaxx conspiracy theories like the polio vaccine giving children polio, or the CIA using fake vaccination stations to take people’s DNA, are true, does that mean anti-vaxxers don’t believe in “conspiracy theories” but “conspiracies”?

Obviously not. But the point is that there’s not some clear line between “real conspiracies” and “conspiracy theories”. When Alex Jones says that chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay, he’s referring to real claims that endocrine disruptors are affecting sexual development in lots of animals. It’s not easy to draw a line between real and fake, evidence-based and not evidence-based.

I think the basic problem is that McIntyre is a Popperian. That is, in hugely oversimplified terms, he believes that no amount of evidence can confirm a theory: but evidence can falsify it. “If we find only evidence that fits our theory, then it might be true,” he writes. “But if we find any evidence that disconfirms our theory, it must be ruled out.” 

I, on the other hand, am a Bayesian. I have some prior belief and I assign some level of probability to it: “climate change is real and dangerous”: 90%; “the world is flat”, 0.1%. And then each new piece of evidence shifts my belief a little: if next year NASA say “we got new photos in, looks like Earth is sitting on the back of a turtle”, then I’ll upgrade my belief in a flat earth to, I dunno, 1.5% (but also upgrade my belief in there being mad people at NASA to 95%).

So I don’t need to draw a bright line between “denial” and “reality”. I can say: “I think it’s likely that tobacco firms conspired over lung cancer, but I think it’s pretty unlikely that NASA faked the moon landings.” And I can update my beliefs as new evidence comes in. I don’t have to “rule anything out”, I can simply downgrade how likely it is.

McIntyre, though, is stuck with two categories: things that might be true; and things which have been “disconfirmed”. If you believe things that have been disconfirmed, then you must be a “denier”. And so he needs to find ways of explaining why these “deniers” are so different from the rest of us. 

He has various ideas about “inflated self-confidence, narcissism, or low self-esteem”. But if you reject the idea that there are two groups of people, “deniers” and “non-deniers”, then you can avoid the need to explain it at all, beyond saying “some people are better than others at working out what’s true”. 

But we’re not just here for his epistemology: we’re here for a masterclass in how to persuade people out of false beliefs. Over the course of the book he meets various people — the flat earthers; two coal miners; a couple of hippyish friends of his — and tries to talk to them about their beliefs, using the methods he has learnt. His solution is to listen, to be respectful, to meet people face to face, and to do so over several meetings. Does his approach work?

In short: no. Hilariously, both of the coal miners he meets cheerfully accept the reality of climate change, but say that the economic value is worth the potential damage to the climate. His first hippyish friend is entirely pro-vax and only slightly GMO-sceptical; the other one is anti-GMO but on anti-corporate grounds rather than safety ones. 

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So he falls at the first hurdle: he not only doesn’t convince anyone, he doesn’t meet anyone who unambiguously disagrees with him, except the flat earthers. (He also struggles to be respectful, at least in the book itself. There’s an astonishing line on p77 in which he says “When speaking to them, we should remember that it is an insult to use the word ‘anti-vaxxer.’” There are 109 uses of the term “anti-vaxx” in the book. Occasionally he remembers and says how important it is that we listen and pay attention, then he immediately reverts to calling, say, Covid scepticism “ridiculous conspiracy theories and partisan nonsense”.)

But there’s a bigger problem. McIntyre’s big question, as mentioned, is asking: What evidence would it take to change your mind? But at no point does McIntyre ever ask himself what it would take to change his mind. 

For instance: when he was talking to the Pennsylvania coal miners, he accepted that they were just trying to feed their families. I assume he’d also acknowledge that Chinese coal mining is allowing that country to get richer and improve its citizens’ way of life. But I don’t think I’m misrepresenting him when I say that he thinks coal mining is a disaster.

When he talks to a friend of his about GMOs, though, that friend says that even though GMOs can save lives now (in the form of golden rice), they’ll cause disaster in the future. McIntyre says, OK, so the kids who can’t get the golden rice now, they’re just going to die? And his friend says yes. McIntyre says that’s easy for him to say, “because he had money and wouldn’t be one of the ones who suffered”.

The exact same question, though, can be asked about coal mining. Sure, McIntyre can say stop using coal, and it’ll help prevent future disasters. But it will also presumably mean some number of tens or hundreds of millions of Chinese people losing electric lights and functioning hospitals, and a smaller number of Pennsylvanians losing their jobs. McIntyre himself would be fine, except for somewhat higher electricity bills. 

Is the tradeoff worth it? McIntyre clearly thinks so (and I think I do too): but what would change his mind? I can tell you: I would update my beliefs significantly if you showed me a utilitarian calculation showing that more people would be harmed by ending coal mining than by continuing it. But McIntyre never asks himself the question. He is stuck on transmit, never on receive.

What’s sad is that he sometimes comes close. He recognises that beliefs are part of people’s identity, and that that makes it hard to change them – but again, applies the lesson only to the weird, wrong, other people, not to himself and people like him. The near-total lack of introspection renders the whole grand project largely meaningless. I am right, you are wrong, the only thing we need to discuss is how to make you realise how wrong you are. The idea of working together to establish a shared reality is hamstrung by his certainty that the reality that needs to be shared is his one.

It’s mainly a book designed to tell readers that people they already think are dumb are, in fact, dumb. It is, really, How to Talk to A Contemptible Idiot Who Is Kind of Evil.

I think aliens might just be visiting earth — and I reckon there is an intriguing psychological link with Covid-19.

Before you click off this website, and permanently erase it from your memory, let me explain with some context, and some history.

First, the aliens. Next month, the Pentagon will deliver an eagerly awaited report, detailing all its observations of UFOs over decades. Excitement has been building for a while, but in recent days it has become feverish. Serious people are taking this seriously.

Could they really be right? I think: yes, it is just possible — and this is where you need the history.

In January 2020 I was writing a book in Bangkok, Thailand. The sun was hot, the beers were cold; life was pretty good. Then the first rumours began to swirl: of a fatal respiratory virus, running out of control in China. As I was spending much of my Bangkok time in air-conditioned bars, alongside happy Chinese tourists, I paid some attention.

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I paid even more attention when I flew back to London, at the end of January, and developed an odd, persistent “flu”. It was nasty, yet it fluctuated. I then gave it to my wife, who coughed so badly on the Tube she nearly fainted (sorry, London). At this point I genuinely started to wonder, and so I called Public Health England to recount my symptoms, just in case.

To my surprise they went bananas. They ordered me to a hospital for isolation, and said I maybe had coronavirus or “Avian Flu”. I googled Avian Flu and found that it has a mortality rate of 50%. After drinking an entire bottle of wine in 15 minutes I rushed to the hospital, where there was much confusion: this was very early in the pandemic. The promised testing didn’t happen, and in time the “flu” abated.

My illness remains a mystery, but it did have one definite consequence: I immediately became obsessed with the new pestilence. Over the following week I read every scholarly article I could find; I watched the videos of Chinese people being welded into apartments. By mid-February my mental job was done. I knew we were headed for a global plague, because the exponential logic of pandemics is relentless. So I bought my first masks, and stocked up on tuna — and then I tried to warn my friends.

This, it turned out, was a hopeless task. No matter how many graphs, extrapolations, and gory Tweets I showed them, nothing worked. They laughed, they scoffed, they made bets against my maths. Some were kind of resentful.

It was an unexpected response, so I did more research. Pretty swiftly I discovered that I was butting up against a known mental block. It is called Normalcy Bias, and it describes the common human disposition to reject appalling information, and to presume that extraordinarily bizarre or terrible things never happen.

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Normalcy Bias explains, it is thought, why the people of Pompeii simply stared at the eruption of Vesuvius, for hours, instead of fleeing. Normalcy Bias could also explain the workers who sat in the Twin Towers and carried on typing, even as the second plane crumpled into the glass.

And this is where the aliens come in. As happened with coronavirus, I have become modestly obsessed by the new alien story. I have watched all the videos: of the black blob hovering near to the USS Omaha, of the “Tic Tac” UFO disobeying the laws of physics. I’ve read the eye-witness reports from pilots, I’ve listened to baffled Pentagon experts. Most of all I’ve gazed on, boggle eyed, as much of the US journalistic and political Establishment, from Fox News to the New York Times, from Senator Mario Rubio to Former President Barack Obama, have all lined up behind the hypothesis that Yes, there might be aliens.

To give you a flavour of these mind-bending analyses, here’s one, from the foreign policy expert Tom Rogan on the conservative Washington Examiner.

First he examines the “less dramatic” explanations for the UAPs (ie: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, a new initialism invented to take away the “stigma” of “seeing UFOs”). He wonders if the UFOs are secret, advanced American tech, and the US is spooking itself or others. Or perhaps this is Chinese technology, and Beijing has developed aircraft that can fly at 15,000mph, without anyone really noticing.

Then Rogan addresses the other hypothesis — which he believes should be put to Congress. “The most compelling UFOs, those UFOs which lack conventional alternative explanation after exhaustive investigation, give credible indication of being highly advanced, intelligently controlled vehicles… beyond the understood technical capacity of any Earth nation.”

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He goes on: “This sounds extraordinary, and it is. But even if not offered formally in writing, it is also the truth recognised by those who have worked intimately on this issue. After all, these most compelling UFOs evince means of non-jet propulsion-based hypersonic travel in the air and in space, and of 100 knots-plus speeds underwater. Some UFOs also show apparent anti-gravity capabilities, reflected by their instantaneous acceleration and deceleration…”

If you’re like me, you’ll have read these sentences, written by a mainstream US journalist, with mounting incredulity. Is he really saying alien craft are cruising our skies? Surely not. There are so many unanswered questions. How did the aliens get here? What’s their fascination with nukes? Why are all the photos and videos so grainy? If they can fly faster than light, why can’t they hide properly? I scoff at these ideas, I laugh at them and I kind of resent the stupidity.

And that’s the point, I am actively averse to this news story, in the same peculiar way my friends reacted to my prophesies of plague back in early 2020. To me this UFO flap feels like a religious spasm, a fearsome portent in the sky: not unknown during plagues. But is it? How do I know I am not exhibiting Normalcy Bias? How can I be sure I am not standing in the piazza in Pompeii, munching a panino, even as the volcano blows?

I don’t have an answer, but I remember Early Covid, and how I overcame Normalcy Bias back then. A pivotal moment came as I watched the mighty quarantine efforts in China, sealing off 60m people. It dawned on me that the Chinese authorities would only take these horrific steps, so damaging to their own economy, if they saw something deeply troubling. I began to sense the danger. I went to buy my tuna.

And now I am watching, once again: as half of the American elite, which is closer to this UAP narrative than everyone else, reacts with quite surreal alarm. What are they seeing that I can’t? What explains this crazy over-reaction? And so I go back to the UFO videos, and those gyrating blobs of grainy light, calmly looking back at us across the swaying Pacific waves.

Instead, the man gazing out is Brian Rose.

Rose, 49, would certainly make an unusual boss at City Hall. He is, after all, a former Wall Street stockbroker who has spent the past year hosting Covid-19 conspiracy grifters on his YouTube channel and website. He is also Britain’s first post-truth political candidate.

In Rose’s self-created fantasy world, his campaign is proving a roaring success: he is running in second place to be Mayor, he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history” and his raft of glossy films calling out Mayor Khan have racked up millions of views.

Yet in the consensus-based reality occupied by the rest of us, this version of Brian Rose doesn’t really exist. Why? Because all his metrics of success have been systematically distorted — and in the one that really matters, the polling for London mayor, he doesn’t even register, not even breaking 1%.

So how has Rose managed to craft such a fabricated narrative of success? The answer, I suspect, can be traced back to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when San Diego-born Rose first made a name for himself after hosting the conspiracy theorist David Icke — most famous for claiming that world is controlled by a secret lizard Illuminati — on his show “London Real”.

In the frantic early days of the pandemic, the interview hit a nerve and went viral. Unchallenged by Rose, Icke spun a grand narrative, that the “Covid pandemic” was fake, was really caused by 5G and  was a cover for a murderous global cult who were determined to create a fascist state. He said that 5G was designed to cause a mass cull, and that if humanity didn’t “get off its knees” then “human life as we know it is over”.

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In an environment where 5G masts were already being destroyed, and engineers threatened, YouTube took the video down. All of which allowed Rose, never one to miss an opportunity, to turn himself into a free speech martyr; a victim of Big Tech censorship. Whether or not he knew it at the time, his Mayoral campaign had just begun.

In the following days, Rose went into overdrive, claiming that he had been censored by Big Tech and that he was determined to fight back. He launched a crowdfunder for what he called a “Digital Freedom Platform” to host another interview with Icke. It would, he said, be “of the people, by the people and for the people”. More importantly, it would be fully independent of London Real.

What he didn’t say, however, was that it would also be fully owned by Longstem Ltd, the company that owns London Real and has one shareholder: a Mr Brian Rose.

Still, in the early days of the pandemic the crowdfunder hit a nerve among those frustrated with Big Tech’s heavy-handed attempts at censorship. Rose hit the initial $100,000 target in less than a day — so, over the course of a few days, he added new features to the crowdfunding campaign to justify increasing the target, including unspecified “blockchain technology” for $200,000, and a promise to take YouTube and other tech companies to court for another $200,000. In the end, the crowdfunder maxed out at over a million dollars.

But it was unclear from the start what the point of the platform was, or even whether it was necessary. Several tech commentators have noted that he could have used any number of free video services, such as Bitchute, to host the videos, if YouTube took them down. Needless to say there have been no court cases brought against the big tech platforms — though Mr Rose’s spokesman assures us that they “plan to proceed” — or any introduction of “blockchain technology”. Instead, he seems to have dedicated all his energies to his Digital Freedom Platform, and hosted a slew of interviews with other controversial conspiracy figures, from Infowars‘s Alex Jones to anti-vaccine activists Judy Mikovits and Robert Kennedy Jr.

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In fact, at the time, the only tangible development was the sacking of nearly all of London Real’s video production staff, and the hiring of political advisors for his mayoral bid. Today, the homepage for the “Digital Freedom Platform” takes you through to a campaign site of “Brian For Mayor”. When I pointed this out to Rose’s campaign, his spokesman said that the Digital Freedom Platform “is in the process of being set up as an entirely separate commercial entity”. He also emphasised that none of the money raised through the “Digital Freedom Platform” fundraiser has been used to fund this mayoral bid.

After raising $1m, Rose was flying high, but then he managed to push his luck just a little too far. Shortly after the crowdfunder was completed, he announced that he needed to raise running costs for the platform to $250,000 per month. Within hours, the penny dropped for his supporters; the comment threads under his video turned into a bear-pit. Overnight, he became an online pariah, and finally got the media attention he craved — but not the headline he wanted: “The YouTuber Accused of Using Coronavirus to Scam His Followers”.

And yet in many ways, Rose’s fall from grace was a long time coming. Before he set up his Digital Freedom Platform, the main source of income for London Real was their expensive online courses. Indeed, at one point these courses were the business’s main source of income; eight-week courses titled “Business Accelerator” or “Podcast Yourself” were, for example, on offer for $3,000, while those who wanted to join his exclusive “Inner Circle” – for personal mentoring – could do so by coughing up $15,000.

Predictably, many of Rose’s “customers” felt they had been scammed: the website Scamguard has 28 scathing reviews of the courses, and a Google search for reviews shows up multiple unhappy customers. A Facebook group set up to advise unhappy customers on how to get their money back has nearly 300 members. In fact, many of those who signed up for London Real’s courses managed to get their money back from credit card companies, after they were able to prove that the courses were such poor quality that they were covered under the credit card company’s guarantee against mis-selling.

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The $15,000 “Inner Circle” fared even worse. A few months ago, a letter signed by nearly every single person from the “Inner Circle” was sent to Rose, asking for their money back and complaining about the lack of value from the course. One of the signatories told me: “We had no mentorship whatsoever, it was a joke, we would have three minutes with him every 15 days and he would just talk about himself. The whole course rebelled against him.” When they eventually complained, the member said, Rose lectured them about how lucky they were to speak to him, as “people queue just to shake my hand”.

“Like many businesses, we receive occasional complaints,” Rose’s spokesman admitted. But, he said, “the reality is that this is from a handful of people amongst the thousands of satisfied graduates of our academy”.

It’s a bold claim in the face of such criticism, yet such self-confidence informs much of Rose’s myth-making today. From the start of Rose’s mayoral bid, he has claimed to be the “second ranked candidate” in the mayoral race, because he was second favourite at the bookmakers. At one point, before any polling data was collected to burst Rose’s bubble, he was rated at only 3-1 to beat Sadiq Khan.

How did he achieve this? Well, a number of political pundits have questioned whether Rose may have bet heavily on himself to distort the odds. In a flattering interview with the Times last month, he confirmed that he has bet on himself. His spokesman told me: “Mr Rose has staked a small amount on himself in the mayoral race, which wouldn’t be enough to influence even a single bookmaker’s odd”. As it stands, he is still around 20-1 at many bookmakers, ahead of the Conservative Candidate Shaun Bailey.

One suspects, however, that those odds remain extremely generous. On the face of it, if you visit the London Real YouTube page, it looks like Rose’s recent films, including one criticising Sadiq Khan, are receiving hundreds of thousands of views. Yet many of these videos show the tell tale signs of being paid posts, and the vast majority of his films released in the last few weeks are getting around two or three thousand views, a massive drop off from the heights of his conspiracy content during the pandemic.

As for his claim that he has the “largest outdoor campaign in British political history”, this also doesn’t appear to tally with reality. The non-profit group “Reform Political Advertising” identified this as one of multiple “false statements of fact, or blatant misrepresentations” in his advertising, in a letter they sent to his campaign.

Typically undeterred, Rose has since tried to repeat the trick of the Digital Freedom Platform, and generate controversy by claiming to be victimised by powerful forces. For months, he has been one of the only candidates to be campaigning heavily in person under lockdown, releasing stylised videos of him without a mask and shaking hands and mingling with assorted Londoners.

When the inevitable happened and he was stopped and fined by police while campaigning in February, he attempted once again to turn himself into a martyr, releasing a video claiming that he was being targeted for political reasons. He was given an on-the-spot fine, and tried hard to spin up some notoriety firstly claiming falsely to have been arrested, and then also falsely that he now had a criminal record as a result of the fine.

When I asked Rose’s campaign about this, his spokesman said: “Mr Rose was referring to the fact that he would ultimately be arrested if he refused to comply with the terms of the FPN he received. As he has chosen not to comply with these terms, he anticipates that the next phase of the legal process will commence in due course.”

That, of course, remains to be seen. And in the meantime, faced with the increased scrutiny that comes with any political campaign, his fantasy world could soon be about to come crumbling down. Only a couple of days ago, for example. Dorian Yates, a regular London Real guest, pulled out of an interview and released a statement claiming that Rose had refused to allow him to question on-air what had happened to the money donated to the Digital Freedom Platform.

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Rose is yet to respond to Yates’s claim, instead preferring to release films of him shadow-boxing the camera. But in truth, it is hard to see where he goes from here. The pivot from his glossy interviews via his Digital Freedom Platform to his mayoral bid has alienated his online fanbase, while more and more of his course “customers” are starting to speak out. He now has Facebook groups and Reddit threads dedicated to calling him out and picking apart his claims.

Indeed, once London’s voters deliver their verdict, it is hard to see where Brian goes next. After all, the actual votes counted come May 6th are a somewhat purer metric of popularity. And so far London seems immune to Brian’s reality distortion field.

He wasn’t alone. The Archdeacon of Croydon, the Ven Rosemary Mallett, then issued a similar statement: “I also hear that there are a number of people from black and minority ethnic communities who are finding themselves really worried about the vaccine… Please, please, get yourselves vaccinated.” The Diocese of Southwark went one step further, bringing in an urban epidemiologist, Professor Tolullah Oni, to lead an online forum to try and disabuse churchgoers of their fears.

As a priest with a black majority church in the same diocese, I am also making every effort to reassure people that the vaccine is safe.

It seems, however, that the same cannot be said of the very people whose jobs it is to promote the “public understanding of science”. Take Professor Alice Roberts, the Professor of the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, who is also the President of Humanists UK. At the same time as Bishop Karowei and others were pleading with their communities not to see science as a threat, she was doing her level best to ridicule people of faith.

Without any consideration for whether now is an appropriate time to go on the offensive, Professor Roberts, displaying that jocular, superior tone so beloved by professional religion haters, took to social media to sneer about the resurrection, the virgin birth and so on. It “all seems a bit … makey-uppy,” she proclaimed.

Here, of course, Roberts is following in a tradition well-established by another former Professor of the Public Understand of Science, Richard Dawkins. He famously denounced God as “a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, genocidal, phillicidal, pestilential, meglomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. This too from the person paid to promote the public understanding of science: “Science is interesting and if you don’t agree you can fuck off.”

Such a callous attitude is symptomatic of the growing “facts don’t care about your feelings” school of thought. But those tasked with the public understanding of science surely need to do a lot better than “fuck off” if they are to win over the sorts of communities who see in science some sort of threat.

That was, after all, one of the chief concerns of the “public understanding of science” movement that took form following the Bodmer Report, commissioned by the Royal Society and published in 1985. On its opening page, it explained that “many personal decisions, for example about diet, vaccination, personal hygiene or safety at work or at home, would be helped by some understanding of the underlying science”. Concerns about vaccination scepticism were there on the very first page. That’s partly why it recommended that “scientists must learn to communicate with the public, be willing to do so, and indeed consider it their duty to do so”.

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This is undoubtedly a noble aim. But in recent years, what began as considerate public engagement has become tainted by a new group of public intellectuals who, comfortable in their own echo chambers, understand their role as preaching to the choir.

Roberts and Dawkins are not the only ones who have taken it upon themselves alienate religious believers. Brian Cox, Professor for Public Engagement in Science at the University of Manchester, argued on the Joe Rogan podcast only last week that physics “ruled out” the existence of the soul. Likewise Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey and former President of the British Humanist Association, has said that “someone of a religious faith will just stick their fingers in the ears and say: ‘I’m not listening, there’s nothing you can say that will make me change my mind.’” So too Professor Richard Fortey, Collier Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the University of Bristol, has suggested that proponents of Intelligent Design should be known as “IDiots”.

On and on it goes. Indeed, it was in this spirit that, back in 2019, the National Secular Society successfully lobbied Public Health England to remove a suggestion from their literature that some people, worried about vaccinations, might like to seek advice from “faith leaders”. Following his victory, Stephen Evans, the NSS’ Chief Executive, crowed: “Advising people to approach religious leaders on healthcare decisions is incompatible with the best interests of individual patients and the wider public.”

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Certainly it is true that not all faith leaders are taking the sort of lead exemplified by the Bishop of Woolwich. But the scornful rhetoric used by the NSS is equally unhelpful. “Some of these fanatics are obstinate, some are deluded or exploitative,” was how one author on the their website described religious attitudes towards Covid-19.

It doesn’t matter how many mosques and cathedrals open themselves up as vaccination centres; there will always be those who want to turn the complex relationship between religion and vaccination into some sort of culture war — using the present situation to leverage more condemnation of religious belief. And that is profoundly unhelpful, not least because it ultimately undermines the efforts of religious bodies to explain to their communities that science is their friend.

Some people just can’t move on from those tired, old, 19th-century debates surrounding science and religion. In fact, we’ve almost come to expect it from anti-religious campaigning organisations like the NSS. But what we should not expect, let alone accept, is the fact that so many of those now tasked with increasing the public understanding of science regard it as part of their brief to attack religion — it can seriously undermine the communication of all the good that science can do to people who may not share the same world view.

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The current pestilence has powerfully reminded us that we are all in this together, and that, unless vaccination is going to be imposed by law, people have to be persuaded about its importance. This is, after all, precisely what the entire public understanding of science movement was intended to achieve, as opposed to being used as a Trojan horse for the advancement of attacks upon religion.

Perhaps it’s high time we had someone in one of these roles who believes in God. This is not an argument about religious privilege — nor one about greater inclusivity. It is simply an argument about public health.

According to one estimate, more than 65% of Nobel Prize-winning physicists in the 20th century were Christians or had a Christian background – a figure which rises to more than 72% for chemists. Yes, a Christian background isn’t necessarily a sign of faith. After all, Professor Roberts went to a church school herself — and sends her children to one. But surely it is not beyond the wit of the scientific community to find someone who can communicate with religious people without resorting to condescension. And if it is, perhaps they should call upon Bishop Karawei.

Put simply, the bugman is slang for a default, normie consumer, who imbibes uncritically the great narratives of today’s power structures: the kind of person who mistakes the basic bitch hedonism that Western society offers in abundance for a source of deep meaning.

Accordingly, the bugman enjoys Netflix and Deliveroo; Marvel franchises and Blue Apron. The bugman probably thought The Last Jedi was pretty cool for its feminist messages. It is an article of faith for him that Beyoncé is a queen who slays. In fact, the bugman’s opinions are so tediously orthodox they can be widely shared on social media without any fear of payback.

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The bugman’s original etymology (and entomology) refers to how he lives in a kind of honeycomb of similarly indistinct humans — a block of flats, say, probably in a major metropolis. But in recent years, the bugman has taken on another origin story. It can now mean ‘he who would gladly eat the bugs’. A global citizen, primed for the coming age of deep ecology proposed by XR and Greta, in which cows are banned, and protein is dispensed from reconstituted insect matter with far lower carbon footprints.

It’s the future in which we no longer own cars but merely rent space in self-driving taxis; the one in which we have to apply for our annual flight credits from the National Carbon Register. In its most extreme version, it’s the world of pod people — where the joyous citizen takes on the awesome planet-saving responsibility of limiting his housing to the necessary few square metres of dormitory space. After all, the bugman is instinctively a globalist, deeply trustful of international institutions, and their high-level plans for his future.

Which brings us neatly to an international institution, and its high-level plan for our future. It takes us into the heart of a conspiracy that isn’t, but a tendency that most certainly is. It is in the spaces between this non-existent conspiracy and the thriving tendency that a new war to control meaning is now raging.

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In June of this year, the World Economic Forum hosted a video seminar called The Great Reset, to promote a book, also called The Great Reset. It was a crushingly tedious time for all concerned. Bookended with the mitherings of Prince Charles, the event mainly involved a panel of worthies — who all had that NGO tan that comes from endlessly staring at discussion documents about third world poverty from a luxurious Alpine apartment — sharing their thoughts on ‘sustainability’, ‘green jobs’ and ‘the global south’.

Their Great Reset, as unveiled in their seminar, proposes a generational shifting of the track-lines of our economic development. It calls for de-carbonising, with the help of massive government stimulus; it wants an internationalist approach that clamps down on tax-dodging companies, paid for by new taxes on the wealthy. Lame, perhaps. But on the face of it, hardly sinister.

The stronger thesis of The Great Reset was best stated by the former Vatican ambassador to the US, Archbishop Carlo Vagano, who in November of this year wrote an open letter to President Trump:

Mr. President, I imagine that you are already aware that in some countries the Great Reset will be activated between the end of this year and the first trimester of 2021. For this purpose, further lockdowns are planned, which will be officially justified by a supposed second and third wave of the pandemic. You are well aware of the means that have been deployed to sow panic and legitimize draconian limitations on individual liberties, artfully provoking a world-wide economic crisis. In the intentions of its architects, this crisis will serve to make the recourse of nations to the Great Reset irreversible, thereby giving the final blow to a world whose existence and very memory they want to completely cancel. 

This is the Great Reset as it now exists within the conspiracy world: the premise that life as we knew it is being flattened so as to be re-forged into the bugman’s paradise — with special emphasis on Covid-19 being essentially fake, or at least wildly overstated.

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Clearly, these two Great Resets — the lame version and the conspiracy version — are very different propositions. Yet there is also a sense in which they talk to each other, feed off each other. Above all, each provides an excellent strawman for the opposing team to attack.

Take the case of Justin Trudeau, who became a viral sensation in Great Reset (lame version) circles in September, when he used his speech to the UN General Assembly to talk about using Covid to pursue more of the politics he already enjoys:

“Building back better means getting support to the most vulnerable while maintaining our momentum on reaching the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development”

Agenda 2030, often spoken of in the same breath as the Great Reset, is the UN’s “sustainable development goals”, a long list of platitudes about the environment and inequality of such aching tedium that it makes The Great Reset (lame version) look like The 120 Days Of Sodom.

In the moment, Trudeau was saying no more than what the Trudeaus of this world tend to say. But then, the beauty of the Great Reset is that it has become a framework for connecting the dots between all the world’s Trudeaus and their mandarin class. These are all the people Steve Bannon used to call The Party Of Davos. And in the battle to define what comes after the Jahr Null of Covid, so far, it’s this Davos crowd and these ideas that are winning every skirmish.

For the very online Right, it hasn’t escaped notice that, whether it’s voiced by Biden, Trudeau or Johnson, ‘building back better’ always seems to mean pinning the individual under the state, in service of an open-ended, easily-redefined ‘common good’. Boris Johnson’s great green reset is one of the more curious cases in point: a moment where a leader went over the heads of his working class, northern balance of power, to play to a gallery of internationalists. The Prime Minister has bet our future on untested heat pump technology and expensive electric cars.

Of course, Klaus Schwab’s annual talking shop is hardly the only organisation vying to turn the crisis towards their agenda. The problem, it seems, was that they were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off; the title was just too good, too on-the-nose, to be ignored. The Great Reset was accidental over-sell, but only in the way that lighting striking the highest conductive point is ‘accidental’. By November, when the phrase really took off, societal disquiet was already rumbling, looking for an obvious point-of-contact with reality. Suddenly, a vague unease had a name.

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But at the same time, both sides also refuse to concede that the term has multiple meanings. For the WEF and its allies, any opposition to their policies must therefore come from wackos. This kind of queasy duality is a standard part of the modern playbook. By 2017, the term ‘alt-Right’ had come to mean both ‘card-carrying Neo-Nazi’ and ‘young people slightly to the right of Douglas Carswell who own a modem’. In debate, the distinction was deliberately elided to de-platform and defame. Ever more, the term ‘climate denier’ performs a similar function.

On the other side of the fence, those who deal in the fantasies can deploy their own motte and bailey. They point to the WEF’s actual plan as a safe harbour in reality — a stout Christmas tree of genuine fact, on which they can then hang their madder baubles. As one YouTube commenter beneath the WEF video had it: “When we warned of a reset, we’re [sic] were called conspiracists. Now what idiots?”

Between them lies the real argument, unloved and untackled. The crisis has already put down several waymarkers towards a world few of us signed up for: from the steamrollering of mom-’n’-pops in favour of Amazon, to the truly cashless society, to credit scores based on your Google history to the oft-floated ‘vaccine passport’. The bugman is always figurative: a kind of platonic ideal pointing towards the dangers of a technocratic 2020s. To take it literally is always to miss the point.

The WEF case rests precisely on explaining why we won’t end up in that future. But tackling the unease fuelling The Great Reset’s wide spectrum of critics would also mean addressing the sentiment underlying both strands of opposition: that however buttery the buzzwords, human beings are rightly suspicious of those who make abstruse high-level plans for their ‘welfare’. Especially if they’re designed by pointy-heads from Davos with no skin in the game — whether they come bearing a thought, a plan, a scheme, or an outright conspiracy.

But of course, the media, the tech companies and the rest of the political elite which Obama describes as “we” are not trusted in the first place. And looking at their recent record — Russiagate, the Cambridge Analytica non-story, the suppression of inconvenient reports about the Biden campaign — you can see why. So perhaps it’s better to start with the other question: how can the mainstream media regain the public’s trust?

The simple answer to that is that it needs more people like John Hersey, and more institutions like the New Yorker of 1946.

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Hersey, a journalist and novelist who died in 1993, is the hero of Lesley Blume’s absorbing new book Fallout. As Blume shows, the US government did a remarkably efficient job of covering up the effects of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reporters were first banned, then allowed in on condition that they toed the line. At one point, the Pentagon invited reporters from outlets including the Associated Press, United Press, the New York Times, NBC, CBS and ABC to join a supervised trip to the two cities. The results were exemplified by a piece in the New York Times assuring readers that, “horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the Japanese are exaggerating its effects … in an effort to win sympathy for themselves in an attempt to make the American people forget the long record of cold-blooded Japanese bestiality.”

There were a couple of more truthful journalists; one found that his report was lost in the post, while the other had his camera stolen and was kicked out of the country. Both spoke contemptuously of the “housetrained reporters” who were, in effect, relaying government propaganda. It’s the kind of thing which encourages conspiracy theories: a major atrocity, a huge historical event, concealed from the public — and not despite the media but with its help.

What eventually rescued the credibility of the press was Hersey’s New Yorker report from Hiroshima, which described, in 30,000 vivid and precise words, what had happened on the day the bomb fell. The horrifying facts Hersey had uncovered, and the novelistic skill with which he presented them, caused a sensation. The article reached hundreds of thousands of readers — among them Albert Einstein, who ordered a thousand copies for him to distribute to leading scientists, and President Truman, who publicly pretended he “never read” the New Yorker while launching a damage-limitation PR campaign.

Hersey himself was named as one of Celebrity Bulletin’s top 10 celebrities of 1946 alongside Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. After his article, celebrations of scientific progress, or of World War II as a great moral crusade, would never ring quite as true again. And it’s partly thanks to Hersey that the atom bomb has not been used since.

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What was Hersey’s, and the New Yorker’s, secret? Partly it was luck: he arrived several months after the first wave of journalists, by which point the authorities had relaxed their grip. But partly it was Hersey’s — and his editors’ — very particular virtues. At the time, anti-Japanese feeling was running high in the US: polls found that almost one in four Americans wished there could have been “many more” atom bombs dropped. Hersey remembered an atmosphere of “rage and hysteria”, and having read about Japanese wartime atrocities, he had at first shared those emotions. But over the course of the war, his own attitude changed. If “civilization was to mean anything,” Hersey decided, “we had to acknowledge the humanity of even our misled and murderous enemies.”

The deputy editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, was an ideal colleague in this respect. As the writer Lillian Ross recalled, Shawn believed “every human being [was] as valuable as every other human being … every life was sacred.” Ross once pushed Shawn on this: “Even Hitler?” “Even Hitler,” Shawn replied.

The New Yorker sent Hersey to Japan not to judge, but to listen. First he found a Hiroshima priest who could introduce him to locals and act as a translator. Then he simply sat down with the survivors and humbly, attentively, heard them out. One Japanese interviewee said it was like talking to an old friend.

That respect for survivors’ stories made Hersey’s report extraordinarily vivid. Instead of writing in a tone of outrage or forced empathy, he focused on the human side — the banal, even comic, details of the day the bomb fell. A doctor, rushing to help survivors, discovers that his own glasses have been lost in the explosion, and snatches a pair off the face of a wounded nurse. (He ends up wearing them for a month.) Two survivors find a dead carp in a pond and discuss whether it is safe to eat. (Probably not, they conclude.) A priest, falling asleep in a temporary camp, is sadistically woken by his housekeeper who feels like a chat. It was against this backdrop that Hersey set his tale of death, destruction and disease — and those who read it understood: These people are like me.

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All of which suggests a moral. If the mainstream media is distrusted, it’s partly because it seems to ignore or look down on large parts of society. Journalists like Jon Ronson, who sympathetically interviews social outcasts, or Chris Arnade, who listens to the stories of poor Americans, have to put up with a lot of mockery and criticism. But they are doing what Hersey did: going to the people on the margins, and hearing what they have to say.

The other thing about Hersey was his love of truth. He had left a previous job at Time because the editors were taking the controversial bits out of his articles. (Echoes of Suzanne Moore and The Guardian.) The New Yorker was a better fit: the editor Harold Ross, and Shawn, his deputy, had what Blume’s book calls “a near mania for accuracy” — not just about facts but about linguistic precision. In an early draft, Hersey described a bicycle as being left “lopsided” by the blast. Ross was kept awake at night worrying about this single adjective. Could a bicycle, in a sense a two-dimensional object, be lopsided? So he put Hersey and Shawn to work, and they settled on the right word: crumpled. That kind of care over language is closely related to truthfulness: it’s no accident that where you find lazy, jargon-filled, clichéd prose, you will also find distortions of reality.

If the mainstream media ever regains the public’s trust, it will be because of journalists like Hersey who genuinely seek the truth wherever it is to be found, and institutions run by editors who, like Harold Ross, aim to “present the truth and the whole truth without fear.” Everyone, of course, claims to be doing that. But as the poet George Crabbe put it 200 years ago:

Truth! for whose beauty all their love profess;
And yet how many think it ugliness!

On December 17, Martin apparently had a phone call from one ‘Captain Video’, from outer space, telling her that a saucer was to land in her backyard to pick her up, at four that afternoon, just before the end of the world. When the ship didn’t come, Martin and her rapidly-assembled coterie fell into despair. But then they discussed the matter further, and realised that the true meaning of the message had been that salvation would come later that day.

So it went on. On December 21, while yet again waiting for the spaceship that would save them when the earth was destroyed at precisely 12pm, it was suggested that perhaps the lounge clock they were timing the planet’s destruction by was wrong. Thus, the room of true believers waited for a second, slower clock to chime midnight, fingers presumably in ears. When, still, nothing happened, it was agreed amongst them that God in his infinite mercy had decided to save everyone. This time.

In terms of their own timeline QAnon is now perhaps at its first midnight clock. That makes this week both a fecund and an unnerving time for believers. Unnerving, because there is as yet no word from the high priest. “Q”, the anonymous figure who speaks the revelations that hold QAnon together — supposedly someone inside the Trump White House with high, ‘Q-level’ security clearance — has remained silent since polling day. His movement is a lifeboat drifting.

The last post in Q’s preferred receptacle — a messageboard on extreme speech site 8kun — was on November 3. It was a photo of a swimming pool-sized US flag on a hill, entitled “largest_flying_flag_in_america.jpg”; a quote from the Gettysburg Address: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom  and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”; and the words: “Together we win”.

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But the prophecy failed. Winning was not what happened. Ostensibly, Trump has now lost. So, what hope is there for those who believe he is the last line of defence against a Deep State paedophile conspiracy? Will he still be held up as the Lion of Judah when he’s reduced to hosting chat and light entertainment on Trump TV in 2021?

For now at least, like Trump himself, most believers remain in the denial phase. It’s easily done, at a time when the line between QAnon and not, between Republican and kook, is more blurred than it has ever been. The President continues to regularly erupt on Twitter over illegal voting. His son Eric posts discredited images of someone ‘burning 80 Trump ballots’. Even Republican moderates are perturbed by the vertical Philadelphia vote spike and the Sharpies in Arizona. Trumpist clickbait blog The Gateway Pundit has been making hay while the conspiracies shine with stories like “System ‘Glitch’ Also Uncovered In Wisconsin: Reversal Of Swapped Votes Removes Lead From Joe Biden”, making reference to an original ‘glitch’ in Michigan’s Antrim County that mistakenly awarded 6000 votes for Trump to Biden.

If Trump has his way, somewhere within that cacophony of allegation, the courts will now magnify a few grains of truth.

This would be easier to disentangle if there weren’t also a vague sense that the media are playing their own kind of fast and loose to hasten Trump’s departure. “It is totally impossible!” said Trump’s attorney Rudi Giuliani, discussing the six contested states that all seem to have edged for Biden in his video stream, Rudi Giuliani’s Common Sense. “Illogical. Irrational. That the same thing would happen in all five or six places where there were close votes.” USA Today reported that Giuliani was “ranting” in “a bizarre internet video” with “ink-stained hands”, but a quick inspection will show a fairly solemn version of the ex-mayor, with fairly clean hands, poring over tables of Arizona voters rolls.

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And so, the mainstream media muddies the water, creating a perfect cover for QAnon theories to mingle unmolested. On InfoWars, Steve Pieczenik, a former state department assistant secretary, and Tom Clancy co-writer turned QAnon truther, explained how the ‘voter fraud’ had been permitted by an all-seeing Trump because it was in fact an elaborate sting operation against his enemies: “We watermarked every ballot paper with blockchain technology…. We know very well where every one went. All of this was expected.” Or, to quote Q’s unofficial slogan: Trust The Plan.

But the open-ended nature of Q allows for many different plans. In Philadelphia, two men were arrested on gun law violations after turning up at a polling station apparently hoping to ‘straighten things out’. The back window of their Hummer was plastered with QAnon decals.

Trump seems comfortable playing all angles. Before the election, at the town hall interview that replaced the second debate, he was asked about QAnon, and openly winked at them: “I don’t know anything about QAnon… I know they’re very concerned with paedophilla”. A vote’s a vote, after all. Indeed, there was some heated talk before polling day of a ‘Quacus’: with an estimated 5% of Republican candidates in some way connected to QAnon, would the movement now have to be treated as simply another voting bloc — slapping on some pork barrel come budget-time for the anti-Satanism lobby?

In fact, most of those connections were tangential, and the vast majority of Q-endorsing candidates were no-hopers, who lost on election day. A few did slip through the net: Marjorie Taylor Greene won her Georgia Congressional race by default after her opponent withdrew, and Lauren Boebert is now a Congresswoman-elect in Colorado’s third district. Both have rowed back somewhat: while Greene once said she considered QAnon “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out”,  ever since her campaign took off, she has been careful to avoid the subject.

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National-level politics tends to homogenise. The liveliest supporters are usually found lower down the ballot paper. In the unlikely neighbourhood of Brooklyn, Mark Szuszkiewicz stands on the brink of election to the State Assembly. In one Instagram post, replete with #QAnon and #Q hashtags, Szuszkiewicz suggested that Tom Hanks became a Greek citizen after Greece declared paedophilia a disability. Hanks denies the allegation.

As with any falsifiable event in the life of a cult, from Heaven’s Gate down, there’s great danger for those who find they can’t deal with the cold slap of reality brought by new evidence. On the QAnonCasualties forum, the news this week was often grim: “I hoped I’d never have to write this… My aunt who was ultra QAnon shot herself earlier today, she left a note saying she was terrified the cabal was coming for her and her kids because of Trump’s loss.”

Yet for most, as sub-plots like the watermarked ballots show, this is a moment for reinvention, not dissolution. In October 2017, the prophecy went out that Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month and shipped to Guantanamo Bay. When that failed to happen, some suggested that Clinton had been arrested, but was wearing an ankle bracelet, others that the Hillary Clinton appearing at book signings and TV interviews was simply a clone. So QAnon’s disappointments are full of rich creative potential. Perhaps we are about to see a new dawn, not a sunset.

One of Festinger’s key criteria in his study was that, if the believer’s views are to adapt, they “must have social support”. The individual on their own, Festinger theorised, would be too weak to push back against irrefutable evidence. But if multiple people could talk their way round to a new consensual reality, reinforce it to each other, then all would be good again.

In that sense, at least, Q is like blockchain. Where blockchain is a distributed ledger of banking, with each transaction housed on a multiplicity of individual computers which all check each other’s homework  — Q is the distributed ledger of conspiracy. With tens of thousands of eyes group-sourcing the meaning of any given clue — and a natural internal market signal-boosting the most optimal — the Q hive mind may prove just as indestructible.

Periodically, one of these tropes would be taken off the shelf and turned into a book, film or documentary: paranoia as entertainment, exemplified by the X-Files’ long run on TV in the 1990s. As for real connoisseurs, there was always David Icke: I could never look at the Queen in quite the same way after he revealed that she was actually a shape-shifting alien lizard whose favorite tipple was human blood.

Today’s conspiracy theories, however, are much less entertaining. Things started to change with the notion that 9/11 was an inside job. This idea attracted some high-profile popularisers who believed that Bush was a moron but nevertheless able to pull off a “false flag” operation of diabolical complexity; it is still popular with many tinfoil hat wearers to this day.

Then, around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, the “New World Order” surged in popularity as people such as Alex Jones railed against the plot to create a totalitarian, One World government. Jones, meanwhile, rose from the status of Austin-area eccentric who I used to watch on public access TV, to a globally infamous figure pumping out misinformation at an incredible rate via his Infowars site and social channels.

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By Gavin Haynes

Eventually, Jones’s mouth got him into serious trouble, so we don’t hear from him as much these days. But conspiracy theories continue to proliferate. A few weeks back, I learned that something was afoot with the US postal service that could jeopardise the election. That was after I discovered that the national coin shortage was a ploy to eliminate cash so that I could more easily be tracked by the government and/or big business. Nothing is accidental or a result of incompetence in the world of conspiracy theorists: always there is a hidden hand moving the pieces on the board.

But these are small conspiracies compared to “QAnon”, which posits that Donald Trump is civilisation’s only defence against a cabal of paedos, Satanists and baby-eating Democrats. The theory has spread rapidly. Supporters were first spotted at a Trump rally in 2018 while the movement received a (vague) shout out from Trump himself at a recent White House briefing. Spittle-flecked and barking mad it may be, but let us not forget that large parts of the UK press, an MP and the police were taken in by a fantastical paedophile conspiracy theory not so long ago. Meanwhile this straight-to-video, porno-horror, Right-wing blend of nonsense comes hot on the heels of the collapse of the much more socially acceptable “Russiagate”, the liberal-Left fantasy that Trump was some kind of double agent, taking orders from his master in the Kremlin.

Paranoiacs we shall always have among us, but in healthier epochs they are relegated to the margins. Sometimes, however, a Joseph McCarthy can destroy careers, while a Stalin or Mao can destroy lives with paranoid imaginings. Our 21st century conspiracy theories have not reached that level, but the proliferation of poisonous fantasies is surely a sign, if more signs were needed, that something has gone badly awry in our hyper-partisan, hyper-online society.

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Richard Evans, a respected historian of the Third Reich, is supremely contemptuous of conspiracy theories, and in his new book, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, he takes aim at five associated with the Führer: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the claim that the German army was betrayed in World War I by its own people; the belief that the Nazis started the Reichstag fire deliberately; the speculations surrounding Rudolph Hess’ flight to Scotland; and the unkillable notion that Hitler and Eva Braun escaped to Argentina to live out a cozy old age among the alpacas.

But if the title is suggestive of History Channel schlock, then the truth of the book is quite the opposite: Evans ruthlessly annihilates each conspiracy he tackles. Indeed, towards the end he demolishes the History Channel’s fatuous “Hunting Hitler” with all the vigor of an irate 1950s schoolmaster caning a blancmange into oblivion.

Yet Evans’ book does much more than make fans of dogshit cable channels disappointed. Referencing Richard Hofstader’s seminal essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, he frames his case studies in the broader historical context of conspiracy theories going back to writings about Freemasons and the Illuminati in the eighteenth century, while seeking to draw out common traits, from the core belief that only an elite few can detect the sinister forces lying behind events to the tendency towards accumulating piles of “alternative facts” which are martialed against “official histories” which (of course) only exist to serve the interests of the powers that be.

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Not that facts are actually all that important. For instance, in his analysis of The Protocols, Evans not only traces the history of this notorious forgery but highlights the fact that many people knew and accepted that it was a forgery quite early on in its existence. Hitler referenced it only glancingly in Mein Kampf to address the question of its fakeness, while Goebbels admitted to his diary “I believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery.” Henry Ford — a great populariser of the Protocols via his book The International Jew — also admitted as much. Yet this awareness did not stop them from finding the Protocols useful, or advancing the Piers Morgan-type argument that literal truth didn’t matter if they expressed a deeper greater truth.

For Evans, however, defence of the truth is non-negotiable: he rejects “naïve scepticism that casts doubt not only on the truth of the conclusions reached by painstaking and objective historical research, but on the very idea of truth itself”. Without this, he adds, “the possibility of organising society on rational lines and on the basis of reasoned and informed decisions is thrown into question”.

For me, the most illuminating section of Evans’ book is the second chapter, which is dedicated to the “stab in the back” theory. Typically, we imagine conspiracy theories to be the preserve of weirdoes and extremists, but this was a fantasy geared towards the psychological needs of the establishment: members of Germany’s officer class, nationalists and conservative clergymen could not accept that they had lost the war through their own failures. Instead, they blamed a collapse of morale and willpower on the home front for the army’s defeat; this eventually mutated into a belief that there was an active conspiracy undermining the war effort, involving socialists, communists and pacificists.

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This flight by members of Germany’s wartime establishment into self-exculpatory fantasy, I think, helps us to understand the phenomenon of Russiagate — which similarly enabled large swathes of America’s political and media elites, traumatised by the defeat of their candidate at the hands of a ridiculous showbiz caricature, to retreat into a conspiratorial delusion that liberated them from the need to honestly assess their own failings. Initially, editors of major news organisations dispatched explorers to the heartlands to find out why the people had failed them so, while Clinton undertook a grand defeat tour of the country to blame others.

But this was not enough, and so it was that a bunch of unverified assertions in some oppo research developed into a conviction that Trump and his minions were consciously colluding with the diabolical Putin. This in turn developed into a multi-million dollar, three-year investigation and all-you-can-eat buffet of paranoia served up day and night by the media, and then amplified via social media…. only to turn out to have been a nothingburger of epic proportions. Conspiracy theories are not only for basement dwellers and loons: nice, respectable people who recycle and read The New York Times can get into them too.

Which brings me to my next point. Evans notes that the question “cui bono?” is “almost always” a feature of conspiracy theories: find out who benefits, and you know who is to blame. Now the metastasising of paranoid imaginings may very well represent a society losing its shit on a grand scale, but asking cui bono of the theories themselves reminds us that they are often packaged and sold to us as commercial products.

The fake moon landing myth inspired the film Capricorn One; The X-Files came with endless merchandising tie-ins and a movie; Alex Jones promotes conspiracy-as-lifestyle through his site, selling everything from survival foods to emergency radios to “ProstaGuard” prostate health pills “…because there’s a war on for your mind.” Meanwhile, non-stop Russiagate on MSNBC, CNN and in pages of The New York Times worked wonders for ratings, clicks and advertising revenue.

Thirty years ago, it took months or years and a large investment of money to make a documentary or book. Today these obstacles have disappeared: anyone anywhere can write, publish and distribute conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the paranoid imagination — apocalyptic, extreme, divisive, pornographic, Manichaean — provides almost perfect fodder for today’s click-fuelled news business model. But what the heck: it’s all fun, games and record profits right up until society collapses and we’re all fighting giant rats for scraps of food in the smoking rubble of our ruined societies, isn’t it?

It soon transpired that Professor Segal was a retired 76-year-old biophysicist, living in the Soviet-controlled puppet state of East Germany. But by then it was too late. Critical faculties, as we know, can go out the window during pandemics — whisper ‘scientific evidence’, and frightened people will believe what you say.

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The Soviets knew this. As the AIDS epidemic worsened, the lie that the virus was created in a Pentagon laboratory proliferated in the Soviet press, which widely cited the Segal report. The Soviet news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti, which together had over 100 bureaus worldwide, amplified the story; it began to go viral, appearing in dozens of sympathetic or unsuspecting newspapers around the globe. By the end of the decade, it had appeared in major outlets in more than 80 countries. This disinformation campaign, codenamed ‘Operation Infektion,’ was the most successful of the Cold War.

Its legacy is felt to this day. The genocidal conspiracy theory is disproportionately believed in black American communities — to the extent that it hinders HIV prevention. One survey of black Americans found that 48% believed that AIDS was an artificially made virus, and 27% believed it was made in a government laboratory.

And although the Cold War is over, the old Soviet strategy of race-baiting as a form of information warfare against America lives on. Indeed, the techniques have only become more potent, as our modern information architecture — the Internet, smartphones and social media — makes it infinitely easier for bad actors to disseminate disinformation quickly and widely.

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As the battle for America’s soul threatens to rip the country apart ahead of November’s election, race has become one of the key partisan battlegrounds. This is being exploited with devastating precision by the Russians — who’ve been refining their methods for years. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller found in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election, the Kremlin started laying the groundwork in 2013 — well before Donald Trump had even announced his candidacy. That year, it set up the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — a unique mash-up between a digital marketing and intelligence agency, whose task was to experiment with social media to fuel polarisation in American society. Race was one of the most fertile battlegrounds.

In mid-2014, IRA agents travelled to the United States in an “intelligence gathering mission” in order “to obtain information and photographs for use in their social media posts”. Then, from their base in St Petersburg, they built fake pages, communities and personas that looked authentically American. These included ostensibly Left-wing groups like ‘Black Matters’, which targeted black Americans by appearing close to ‘Black Lives Matter’. This disinformation project was known as ‘Operation Lakhta’.

A paid ad sponsoring the IRA’s ‘Black Matters’ page on Facebook

Paid ads publicising the group went straight for the jugular: this one features photos of three young black Americans — Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray — who were killed either in police shootings or custody. Rice was only 12. He had allegedly been shot on sight for playing with a toy gun.

Once they had ensnared followers, and as the election grew closer, groups like ‘Black Matters’ became a vehicle for the IRA’s attempts to suppress the black Democrat Vote. Agents posted emotive narratives of political alienation, suggesting that Hillary Clinton did ‘not care for Blacks’, or that a race between Trump and Clinton was ‘one that Black people should sit out’.

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But the IRA wasn’t just baiting black voters on the Left; it was also targeting white voters on the Right. Again, race was the trump card. Agents set up pro-police social media groups that promoted the so-called ‘Blues Lives Matter’ movement. In a sponsored ad for one of these pages called ‘Being Patriotic’, the IRA urged white conservative Facebook users to ‘like’ its page by pushing anti-BLM content. These ads were just as emotive as the ones aimed at black voters. The one pictured below, in the full text, attacks Hillary Clinton — warning that she is the ‘main hardliner against cops,’ and that Donald Trump is the ‘one and only who can defend the police from terrorists’.

‘Being Patriotic’ Promoted Page on Facebook

As the IRA’s operation grew, it found it could socially-engineer the real-life actions of American citizens — manipulating many, for instance, into attending political rallies organised and promoted from St Petersburg. Donald Trump’s campaign unwittingly boosted one such event on its Facebook page, but the IRA also ran anti-Trump rallies after he won the election. One, organised on the ‘Black Matters’ page, managed to convene up to 10,000 protestors in Manhattan’s Union Square, who then marched on Trump Tower, four days after the Republican victory. ‘Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda!’ said the Facebook event page for the rally. ‘Divided is the reason we just fell. We must unite despite our differences to stop HATE from ruling the land.’ The tragic irony, of course, being that division was exactly what the Russians were exploiting.

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The Democratic House Intelligence Committee has publicly released a cache of IRA social media advertisements from between 2015 and 2017, demonstrating how prolific they were. On Facebook alone, the IRA purchased 3,393 ads, which 11.4 million Americans were exposed to. They built 470 Facebook pages, and created 80,000 pieces of organic content, which reached over 126 million Americans.

It is difficult to quantify the extent of the IRA’s influence; it’s worth bearing in mind that the election that was decided by just 70,000 votes. It would be naïve to attribute Trump’s victory wholly to Russian interference, but it is nevertheless clear that the poison the IRA injected into US public discourse has played some part in making it increasingly febrile.

And now the 2020 election looms. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and global BLM protests, race has re-emerged as the critical dividing line. And Russia is better placed than ever to exploit it, with methods that grow more sophisticated with every passing month. Though the situation is developing as you read this, there are already some clues as to how their tactics are evolving.

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On 12 March 2020, CNN, Twitter, Facebook and the network analytics firm Graphika exposed another disinformation operation. While Project Lakhta was run by IRA agents in St Petersburg, by 2020 the work had been outsourced to Ghana, where the IRA was operating behind the front of a fake NGO called Eliminating Barriers to the Liberation of Africa. EBLA had office buildings, employees and a website, which at first glance looked legitimate — it referred to an array of ‘projects’ and had a big ‘donate’ button. On closer inspection, the façade crumbled. The donate button did not work, the site was populated with Latin-stock text, and one of its projects claimed to have raised $231.53 billion — over three times Ghana’s annual GDP​.

The IRA had employed Ghanaian operatives to entice black Americans to join online communities, then post positive messages that would encourage them to have pride in their racial identity. Agents would then start to feed these manufactured communities negative messages, making followers feel angry and isolated. The aim was to alienate black voters from the rest of society. The Ghanaian operatives were encouraged to play with content to see what would resonate and what would go viral, just as the IRA agents have done since 2013. EBLA employees had access to a library of memes and images — many simply recycled from the IRA’s stock, built up at the time of the last election.

It was not hard for these operatives to guess that they were targeting American audiences — particularly because they were told to post content on social media during the late afternoon and night in local Ghanaian time, to correspond with US daytime. Still, it would have been quite a leap for them to figure out that they were being unwittingly used as agents of a Russian disinformation campaign. This split-level subterfuge — practised on both Americans civilians and Ghanaian operatives — led the operation to be dubbed ‘Double Deceit.’ That it had been outsourced to African soil made it even harder to trace, and fight, the true perpetrators of this assault on America.

It’s reassuring to think that Operation Double Deceit was exposed, but it would be surprising if Russia doesn’t have other irons in the fire ahead of this year’s election. Perhaps more worrying, though, is that Russian disinformation against the United States has become a hyper-partisan political issue. With one side paranoid about Russia — seeing it everywhere — and the other denying that Russia is a threat at all, the Kremlin’s strategy is working beautifully.

While armed vigilantes and pro-and anti-BLM protestors were filling the streets of America earlier this year, these divisions were being weaponised by foreign actors; Americans, meanwhile, were too busy downplaying or magnifying the Russian threat for their own ends to organise any coherent response. Obviously, this does nothing to help race relations. In fact, extreme partisanship undermines the security of the entire nation, by blinding Americans to the real threats.

When the dust settles in the wake of the 2020 race, the US is likely find that, yet again, it was too slow to understand and react to foreign psychological operations.

We’ve never met, but we do have a connection. We’ve both lived in the same house on Heathbank Road in Stockport. The Sweets moved out in 1983; you moved in about three years later when you started working at BBC Manchester. Coincidence? Well, yes. Even David Icke would have trouble drawing a sinister line between those two dots. But it’s a coincidence that means whenever I clock you on the telly, I think of my mum and dad.

I thought of them this week, when I saw you on ITV, sharing the contents of your inquiring mind. I found myself remembering a taxi ride I took with my mum in September 2017. We were going to visit my dad after his cancer operation, and the driver wanted to tell us why he’d voted for Brexit. The EU, he said, was a secret plot to re-establish Nazi rule across the continent, and it had to be stopped. As you might appreciate, this wasn’t what either me or my mum wanted to hear at this moment. After we came back from the hospital I rang the cab firm to ask them never to send that driver to us again — rather, I suppose, as hundreds of people rang your employer this week to complain about you.

Let’s remind ourselves of what happened, shall we? On the Easter Monday edition of This Morning, your reporter Alice Beer was debunking one of the more exotic problems of the current crisis — the spate of attacks on 5G phone masts, carried out, it would seem, by people who believe them to be exacerbating or even facilitating the spread of Covid-19. You agreed emphatically with Alice, so I think we can assert that you don’t really believe that a virus can be transferred from bats to humans via radio waves. But the caveat you issued did leave some room for doubt. “What I don’t accept,” you said, doing that stern look I think you may have copied from Huw Edwards, “is mainstream media immediately slapping that down as not true when they don’t know it’s not true … it’s very easy to say it is not true because it suits the state narrative.”

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I detect several problems here. The first is the idea that there is any measurable distance between you and the mainstream media. Eamonn, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are the mainstream media. You are to television what the individually-wrapped Weetabix is to a hotel breakfast bar — always present, whether requested or not, and rarely the subject of a strong opinion.

The second problem resides in that little cluster of negatives with which you adumbrate your position on the limits of knowledge. There are, I suppose, an infinite number of things that we don’t know are not true. We don’t know, for instance, that you are not a homunculus operated by a highly-trained owl, though we would be suspicious of anybody who suggested this was a question that merited investigation. It’s harder, however, to push a proposition about corona and the phone signal into this category — or, indeed, any proposition about the health dangers of 5G — because, unlike the possibility that you are a bird-driven human simulacrum, science has already chewed this over very thoroughly, and found no evidence that any such dangers exist.

So I wonder why you said this? Perhaps you read a May 2019 piece in the Daily Mail, quoting the research of the Californian academic who described 5G as a “massive public health experiment”. (But, not, I’d guess, the subsequent article in Scientific American that concluded that his work “pivots on fringe views and fatally flawed conjecture, attempting to circumvent scientific consensus with scaremongering.”) Maybe you’ve been monitoring the Twitter feed of Piers Corbyn, the meteorologist brother of the former Labour leader, through which he shares his view that Bill Gates and George Soros have faked the corona pandemic as part of their bid to surveil the world’s population with 5G and cull it with vaccines.

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Or maybe you’ve been streaming the 5G-themed fireside chats hosted by the American writer Naomi Wolf, in which she declares that “there’s almost no objective reporting in mainstream media about the real dangers of 5G,” and warns that “your DNA changes to a precancerous condition when you’re around these cell towers”. Her own reporting in this field includes publishing a link to an approving account of a man named Mark Steele, who is convinced that Gateshead council is poisoning its electorate with 5G transmitters hidden inside the streetlamps. (No such transmitters exist.) Dr Wolf also believes that 5G may be responsible for the headaches and tinnitus suffered by her neighbours in New York. “Everybody who lives in my apartment [block],” she says, “is very much more uncomfortable.” I suppose that’s one explanation.

Conspiracist thinking thrives in anxious times. Corona has made it bloom like mould on toast. The Times caught two British academics from Russell Group universities sharing speculations that the virus is a biological weapon. A journalist for Metro announced that he’d submitted an FOI request to St Thomas’s NHS Trust, suspicious that Boris Johnson had somehow faked his stay in the intensive care unit. (“The PR timing,” tweeted Marcus J Ball, “is just too perfect.”) London Live, the cable television station associated with George Osborne’s London Evening Standard, made the bizarre editorial decision to air an 105-minute interview with David Icke, in which the former Coventry City goalkeeper was permitted to serve a Covid-scented platter of half-digested matter from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I’ll throw you a bone, here, Eamonn. Intelligent people are not free from these predilections. The Nobel prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis doubts the link between HIV and Aids and strongly suspects that he was once abducted by extraterrestrial racoons. So your willingness to leave a space for conspiracy theories on This Morning does not necessarily mean that you are an idiot. And such an instinct may not always be misguided. Conspiracist thinking can sometimes be virtuous. Ask Bob Woodward, who investigated Watergate, or Chris Mullin, who led the campaign to prove the innocence of the Birmingham Six.

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Those who engage in it, however, need to protect themselves against its corrupting effects. The philosopher Quassim Cassam is, I think, our wisest writer on this matter. I’d heartily recommend his work to you. He points out that conspiracy theories can reduce our confidence in knowledge that there is no good reason to doubt. That Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, for instance, is a bare historical fact. But if you swim in the discourse that claims otherwise, you may find yourself describing the history of the Apollo missions as, let’s say, a “state narrative”.

Likewise, there is no reasonable evidence that the 5G phone signal carries a health risk. But there is a discourse that asserts the opposite — based on unsound extrapolations from weak studies, which have been amplified into certitudes by unreliable commentators. Now, like the Moon landings, George Soros, Zionism, Pizzagate and Atlantis, 5G has entered the repertoire of things that conspiracy theorists like to talk about — and will go on talking about until, I suspect, the arrival of 6G.

On Tuesday, as ITV totted up the complaints, you issued a statement suggesting that your remarks had been misunderstood. You reiterated your rejection of any link between Covid-19 and 5G, but then, astonishingly, repeated your original error. “Many people,” you said, “are rightly concerned and are looking for answers.” Well, there are people think that the Rothschilds were responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, and we would know what to think of a broadcaster who thought such a view worth airing.

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Cassam’s book, Vices of the Mind (2019), notes that psychologists have tended to see conspiracist thinking as a problem of mindset. He prefers to regard it as an epistemic vice. A form of intellectual masturbation. And perhaps, if we think of it in this way, it might help to reduce its dangerous allure. So those inclined to regard you as the Noam Chomsky of ITV Daytime, critiquing the MSM between the Danone adverts, might be better simply to think of you as a man who gave into a weakness and discharged something unwelcome in front of his work colleagues.

Nobody would judge you for doing this at home and in private. Visit all the websites you please. Feel free to watch terms such as #soros and #EU and #fourthreich tumble from the hashtag tombola of Piers Corbyn’s twitter feed. And if you want to chat with other people online who are into this kind of stuff, then fine, it’s a free country. But for shame, Eamonn, for shame, not on the This Morning sofa. Not with your wife sitting next to you, and my mum and dad watching at home.

All the best, Matthew