The Conspiracy Label as a Tool of Propaganda, Part IV: Closing My Case on the “Conspiracy Theorist” Slur
(Originally published at propagandinfocus.com)
In my closing installment for this series, I’d like to start with a joke I recently came across. Jokes and humor help speak truths and gain attention, some would say, but ask yourself, what’s funny about this joke?
It’s worth noting two of the top comments for the post above. Johnny BCCB said, “This is perfect. I think the same analogy applies to flat earthers, chemtrails and a number of other conspiracies. I’ve often wondered — if God himself told these people they were wrong, would they even believe it?” And James Smith asserted this: “Very good. You cannot reason with a conspiracy theorist.”
If you can’t access the rest of the 𝕏 post above, the gag is that God agrees with headlines like those in the March 20, 2025, Washington Examiner, “Sorry conspiracy theorists, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,” and the so-called “JFK conspiracy theorist” responds by expanding his sphere of suspected co-conspirators to include God Himself. Maybe it’s funny because it’s true, but who can say for sure? Or, perhaps philosopher Brian Keeley is right, maybe “God [is] the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory.” “But seriously, folks,” as the saying goes, there’s much to unpack here.
In Jokes and Their Targets, sociologist Christie Davies points out that there are many interchangeable jokes in which you could replace, say, lawyers with tax auditors or one national or ethnic group with another, and the joke would turn out the same so long as the audience understands the key characteristic of the target group that serves the punchline. Other jokes, like the one above, are less interchangeable because they depend on the audience’s understanding of a unique characteristic of a particular group that is the butt of the joke. My question is, from where, whom, or how did a collective understanding of JFK conspiracy theorists create a situation in which the joke above is comprehensible at all?
This is the same line of questioning that runs through this series of essays on the conspiracy label as a tool of propaganda. In Part I, I used James Rankin’s PhD dissertation to identify Karl Popper, Richard Hofstadter, and CIA memo 1035-960 as primary sources of the stigmatizing and pejorative conspiracy label. “Karl Popper, a historian of science, ... described in the late 1940s what he called the conspiracy theory of society as an utterly simplistic and, more importantly, unscientific way of understanding social relations” (Butter & Knight, 2019, p. 34). However, it has been argued that Popper should be let off the hook because he was not attacking conspiracy theories in particular but all unfalsifiable speculations about human intention. To that, I say, release all information requested by “conspiracy theorists,” and let the chips fall where they may.
Richard Hofstadter, on the other hand, most assuredly intended to pathologize conspiracy beliefs. Famously referring to them as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter’s thesis inspired hundreds of academics, journalists, and other public intellectuals to follow suit, errantly making reductive fallacies by psychologizing skepticism of official accounts of historically significant events. As can be seen in the passage below in Figure 1, Hofstadter kicked off a “line of thinking [that] has carried over into modern frameworks of conspiratorial ideation, as some scholars contend paranoia is part-and-parcel of the conspiracist worldview” (Bowes, Costello & Tasimi 2023, p. 264). Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I wonder why some sources say Hofstadter “worked with the CIA-funded American Committee for Cultural Freedom” and that “a CIA front group, the Fund for the Republic, even paid for the distribution to opinion makers of 25,000 copies of one of Hofstadter’s anti-populist essays.“ Here, I’m simply raising the question, which anti-conspiracists crudely refer to as “JAQing off: the sneaky way to spread conspiracies.”
In his doctoral work, James “Ed” Rankin convincingly lays out evidence of the type of multi-institutional politics that push to pathologize conspiracy beliefs, which I addressed at length in Part II of this series. Regarding this relationship, Rankin concluded that “primarily Richard Hofstadter (1958,1963, 1964, 1966) and an agency of the government, the CIA (1967a, 1967b), played a significant role in creating and adopting the [hegemonic conspiracy theory] meme in popular culture” (Rankin, 2017: p. 82). Among his final remarks, Rankin laid out questions for future research:
Was the CIA in fact responsible, directly or indirectly, for the widespread adoption of these discursive strategies? Is the adoption the result of a coincidence, a systemic operating dynamic, a deliberate propaganda strategy orchestrated by others, or simply a result of less intentional hegemony? These questions may be more clearly answered as advances in technology make interpreting interrelationships of influential organizations and people more feasible through analyzing large data sets. [sic] (P. 85)
Technology did advance, and so I utilized ChatGPT in Part III of this series to demonstrate that CIA dispatch 1035-960 very likely influenced the eventual rise in usage of the pathologized conspiracy label in popular and academic press. Here’s how I summarized it in Part Three of my parallel series for Propaganda in Focus, called “Taking Tucker Carlson Seriously:”
I’ve been sensitive to the discursive function of the conspiracy label since 2008, and I started studying its origins and functions in earnest around 2010. Perhaps due to Professor [Lance] deHaven-Smith’s personal insights that he shared with me starting in July 2013, I believe it’s important to understand that the CIA helped popularize the conspiracy label. As I show in Part III of my conspiracy label series, CIA Dispatch 1035-960 is the seed from which a Mirkwood forest of anti-conspiracy discourse has sprouted. Among the many pitfalls and predators in that dark thicket are rhetorical packages people use to dismiss or diminish “conspiracy theorists” or rebuff “conspiracy theories” once identified. For example, one might be accused of “just asking questions” as a matter of a discursive rebuttal. As if asking questions is somehow off-limits or imprudent when it comes to matters as serious as State Crimes Against Democracy.
That’s right; you can be labeled a conspiracy theorist just for asking questions about official, authorized accounts of historically significant events. Does this apply to rhetorical questions posed by pseudo-skeptics or only to troubling questions about officialdom? As I concluded in a 2013 paper on a similar subject, “We might never know” (p. 9).
What we do know, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, is that “a lot of people lie and get away with it.” One problem with this fact is that proving a lie involves proving intent to deceive — for one, people can fully believe they are not lying because they genuinely believe what they are saying is accurate, and for another, they can lie about their beliefs or intentions if accused of lying. Another problem is a type of postmodern relativism in which capital-T objective Truth is denied altogether, a subset of this being one or more rhetorical fallacies that propose authoritative truth comes only from authoritative sources. The irony is tied to circular reasoning: Authoritative sources define what are considered “conspiracy theories,” designate people who espouse them as “conspiracy theorists,” and thus create a self-sealing and self-serving logic that the narratives they uphold and defend are legitimate and those who pose disturbing questions about their officialdom are incredible, untrustworthy, and likely suffer from one or more psychological disorders.
Michael Parenti provided a solution when he said, “We know truth exists because we know Liars exist; we may not always know when our leaders are lying to us, but after a while, we catch on.” Eventually, the truth will out, as they say, but the problem, as indicated in the recent debacle over the Jeffrey Epstein case, is that authority can —and sometimes does —trump the truth. Parenti’s test would compare our best evidence against the propaganda used to prop up any given official account of a historically significant event. Evidence like that is treated as one of those anomalous “kernels of truth” that are said to be at the heart of any good conspiracy theory and ignored or explained away with appeals to the very authority “conspiracy theorists” call into question. I’ll give a not-so-clear-cut example.
In their 2008 article, “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” ask yourself, are Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule lying or speaking such an obvious truth that they need give no direct evidence that what they say here is true?
To think, for example, that U.S. government officials destroyed the World Trade Center and then covered their tracks requires an ever-widening conspiracy theory, in which the 9/11 Commission, congressional leaders, the FBI, and the media were either participants in or, at best, dupes of the conspiracy. But anyone who believed that would undercut the grounds for many of their other beliefs, which are warranted only by trust in the knowledge-producing institutions created by government and society. (p. 209)
I’ll spare you my analysis and direct you to David Ray Griffin’s book-length critique in which he surmises that the authors make so many glaringly obvious and such sophomoric errors in logic, reasoning, rhetoric, and scholarship that they must not have made a mistake; no, according to Griffin’s esoteric interpretation, they were been being ironic in the full sense of the term. Based on Sunstein’s tricky title and admissions in his 2016 book, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas, I’d say sophistry is his strategy. Anti-conspiracists like him and those discussed below routinely rely on rhetorical tricks as their discursive tactics to malign the collective character of “conspiracy theorists.” Double standards, appeals to authority, circular reasoning, red herrings, and strawman arguments are rhetorical hallmarks of the anti-conspiracist sophists who continuously work, often together, to deny the existence of conspiracy. The ad hominem conspiracy label is their most prized discursive weapon, but it has a built-in contradiction. It’s a glass canon, the fatal flaw in their as-yet Pyrrhic victories since 1967 in the culture wars.
This article is written with a particular audience in mind. I hope you have or will read the previous three installments; if not, I provide enough context to help you navigate this piece. In what follows, I lead you through the absurd rabbit hole psychologists have dug in their pursuit of the wellspring of their own academic success and what they believe to be the Greater Good for society writ large. There are teams of researchers who have made their careers out of defining and studying the nature of beliefs in conspiracy theories and the individuals who hold and disseminate them. These psychologists believe that conspiracy beliefs are not just a problem for conspiracy believers themselves, but for society as a whole. They seek to cure current conspiracy believers and inoculate future populations against converting into conspiracy theorists. They seek to bring back to their reality those (of us) who have dived into what they believe is the true rabbit hole, a conspiratorial worldview. What started as a trickle in 1967 has now become a tidal wave of not just academic research, but also networks of organizations and institutions openly working in concert to put out fires popping up in societies around the world. Like water, fire can be a deadly force or a helpful tool. The problem, as I see it, is that psychologists have been tasked with gaslighting the world into believing it’s best to live in darkness.
Whom the Gods Would Destroy
Circling back to where I started in this last installment of this series of essays, a commonality between conspiracy theories and jokes, beyond the fact that some treat them both as trivialities while others are prone to take offense by them, is that they both are said to have a kernel of truth. Take the short video below, for instance, “Life’s most important questions.” A man dies and goes to the afterlife. Essentially, doing a debriefing of his life with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, as it were, the man is allowed to ask any questions he wants for one minute, which just so happens to be the longest allowed duration of videos in that format. Along with many personal and mundane questions, he excitedly asks, “Who killed JFK?” The bureaucrat-looking yet ethereal intake angel matter-of-factly asserts with an air of ambiguity, “It was the Secret Service agent in the car in front of JFK” who accidentally shot the president while attempting to fire back in the direction from which he heard Oswald firing his rifle. Many people actually believe it was the Secret Service driver of the president’s limo who fired the fatal shot, but they think it was neither an accident nor a laughing matter. Their kernel of truth is that the driver turns around and appears to have pointed to something that looks like a gun in the direction of the president at the moment JFK’s head was violently tossed back and to the left, as famously dramatized by Oliver Stone in his film JFK.
Here’s another tragic bit of comedy, as told by Michael Parenti in his book Dirty Truths and in a lecture titled “The JFK Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State.” See if you get the punchline:
“Like the Warren Commission, the press assumed a priori that Oswald was the killer. The only question it asked was: Did Oswald act alone? The answer was a loudly orchestrated YES. Meanwhile, almost every in-depth investigator had a different conclusion: Oswald did not act at all. He was not one of the people who shot Kennedy, although he was involved in another way, as a fall guy, in his own words ‘just a patsy.’
The media have been tireless in their efforts to suppress the truth about the gangster state. In 1978, when a House Select Committee concluded that there was more than one assassin involved in the Kennedy shooting, the Washington Post (1/6/79) editorialized:
Could it have been some other malcontent who Mr. Oswald met casually? Could not as much as three or four societal outcasts with no ties to any one organization have developed in some spontaneous way a common determination to express their alienation in the killing of President Kennedy? It is possible that two persons acting independently attempted to shoot the President at the very same time.
It is ‘possible,’ but also most unlikely and barely imaginable. Instead of a conspiracy theory the Post creates a one-in-a-billion ‘coincidence theory’ that is the most fanciful of all explanations.”
Conspiracy or coincidence? Take your pick. Not to mix scholarship with pop culture, but let’s look at this from a different angle.
“Sir, that could also be a coincidence,” Officer Blake says. “You're a detective now, son,” replies Commissioner Gordon, “You're not allowed to believe in coincidence anymore.” Imagine if real detectives’, investigators’, and intelligence analysts’ first assumptions were like Officer Blake’s fictional character in The Dark Knight Rises. Would, or more importantly, could we solve or prevent crimes, establish cause and effect, or identify prime movers or significant contributing factors to any situation or event? As a scientist, I must acknowledge that there are numerous spurious correlations, i.e., coincidences do occur. This is why we randomize subjects into experimental and control groups, and for similar reasons, we pose the null hypothesis (H₀) as our starting point, i.e., that without evidence to the contrary, we must assume there is no relationship, no difference, or nothing special about any phenomenon under scrutiny. Of course, scientists want to provide evidence against H₀ and in support of the alternative hypothesis (Ha). Why is it, though, that so much of the prevailing literature on conspiracy theories, let alone news media stories about historically significant events, seems to take Officer Blake’s naive position and then set standards so high that we can never legitimately reject H₀, the official, authorized accounts of historically significant events? When it comes to hypotheses that a large-scale conspiracy has occurred, why is Ha considered a conspiracy theory by those who have not provided adequate or justifiable evidence for retaining H₀?
I’m not “just asking questions” here. This double standard is essential to interrogate. Take some examples: In The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski (1997) laid out a strategy to retain U.S. geopolitical hegemony, lamenting that as a multicultural society, public consensus on supporting U.S. foreign policy would be difficult “except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat” (p. 211). Luke Rudkowski and another member of We Are Change confronted Brzezinski on two occasions with troubling questions about his surreptitious plans for expanding the U.S. spheres of influence around the world, both of whom received boos, hisses, and the conspiracy label from Brzezinski’s audiences. In an article titled “’How do the American People Know?’,” excerpted in Figure 2 below, geographer Laura Jones raises the critical point that while Brzezinski is allowed to suggest the use of false flag incidents to instigate war, Rudkowski is treated as a conspiracy theorist for questioning Brzezinski for making such statements. It’s a double standard, and if you look for it, you’ll find that it routinely appears in anti-conspiracy discourse.
In Part 3 of my series “Taking Tucker Carlson Seriously,” I gave a more recent example of this double standard. Establishment news outlets used the conspiracy label when Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones predicted that there would be an assassination attempt during President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, but they did not apply the label to news agency that speculated on the same hypothetical situation—and, as far as I know, no retractions have been made. Circling back to the H₀ assumption that coincidences are the norm, here’s another: As I stated recently in a post on 𝕏, in September of 2000, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), composed of many individuals who a year later would become members of the Bush administration and find themselves responding to 9/11, argued that absent “a new Pearl Harbor,” transforming U.S. society toward ideological militarism necessary to support U.S. foreign policy would be a frustratingly long process. The 9/11 Truth movement (see Jones’s definition above) has made much ado about PNAC’s plans, but take note of what journalist Matt Taibbi said in his book, The Great Derangement (see Figure 3).
Matt Taibbi is no stranger to controversy and corruption, yet when it comes to 9/11, he defaults to H₀. The Brzezinski and PNAC quotes in Figure 3 above are hardly news to those who know about such matters. So consider this article, “Whom the Gods Would Destroy: An Information Warfare Alternative for Deterrence and Compellence,” authored by Major Robert D. Critchlow, U.S. Air Force, and published in Summer 2000 by Naval War College Review. Major Critchlow proposed that information warfare, “specifically the use of computer network attacks and electronic warfare techniques against the military systems and, especially, the national information infrastructure of an antagonist” (p. 22), “provides an alternative that the public is likely to be more willing to accept than a nuclear response to WMD use by a small power.” He goes on to cite in endnote 11, “Central Intelligence Agency, Unclassified Report to Congress” (p. 36), as his basis for the statement that “The CIA considers it likely that Iraq resumed its WMD programs after the air and cruise-missile strikes of Operation DESERT FOX in December 1998” (p. 24).
I don’t recall WMD ever having been found in Iraq during the Bush- and Obama-era U.S. occupation, but the point here is that publicly available information indicates a) collective desire among those working inside and alongside U.S. policymaking organizations, the federal government, and the U.S. military to expand U.S. hegemony around the world and b) their understanding that they must acquire public support to achieve their goals. Then 9/11 happened. Well, 9/11 didn’t just happen. The events of September 11, 2001, have been scrutinized by skeptics of the 9/11 Commission Report to no end, just as the Warren Commission Report has been turned through page-by-page with no lack of questions arising from “JFK conspiracy theorists.” Furthermore, Major Critchlow, like Brzezinski, would not and has not been labeled with the common parlance of the pathologized conspiracy theorist label, despite both literally theorizing about how to manipulate the public to achieve political and military power across the planet.
Like so-called “Kennedy assassination buffs,” 9/11 Truthers are endlessly rebuffed for calling out people who propose, (allegedly) carry out, and cover up conspiracies. For their troubles, these “citizen sleuths,” as one anti-conspiracist calls them, are stigmatized, ridiculed, and silenced, much like other marginalized groups who challenge the status quo. U.S. history is rife with ordinary people challenging the status quo, from the revolutionary founders to the abolitionists, the suffragists to the 60s social movements, and on up through the anti-globalization protests of the 90s and the 9/11 Truth movement still active today. So, why is it that so much time, money, and energy go into maligning the collective character of so-called “conspiracy theorists,” a category that encapsulates all ages, races, ethnicities, religions, social classes, genders, and political ideologies, and how can such a category exist at all? I thought good, sane people generally have contempt for collectivist prejudices and bigotries!
Conspiracy Theorists are the *******, *******, *****, and ******* of the World
Unlike other slurs and epithets, you don’t have to substitute asterisks for any letter in “conspiracy theorist.” I’ll leave it to your imagination what those other words are, but none are pretty, I assure you. “Sticks and stones may break my bones,” the saying goes, but a label can delegitimize and stigmatize me. Name-calling is said to be the lowest form of argument, and next in line is the ad hominem rhetorical fallacy. We sociologists would pool these together under what we broadly refer to as labeling theory. The argument behind labeling theory is that social definitions arise in specific historical and cultural contexts, either emerging from daily discourse or generated by experts and professionals for institutional purposes, and that they are often used to identify and castigate troublemakers, delinquents, deviants, and other presumed social reprobates. If the label sticks, individuals adjust their behaviors in accordance with or in opposition to the label (it depends on the individual and situation). That’s the argument, anyway. That said, neither name-calling nor ad hominem is the lowest form of argument, mainly because they are not arguments, but the point remains.
As an example, here’s the dumbest definition of “conspiracy theorist” I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a lot):
“Conspiracy theorist” is being simply defined as a person who believes a conspiracy theory. This is a perfectly reasonable definition that fits what 9/11 Truthers believe, or what JFK conspiracists believe, and what Chemtrailers, Moon landing hoaxers, Sand Hook False Flaggers, and alien base cover-uppers all believe. They think that there was a secret plot behind something, and/or that there’s been a secret cover-up of something…I will continue to use the term “conspiracy theorist” (or shorter “conspiracist”) because the dictionary definition and common usage of it very accurately describe many of the people that I have encountered online, that I have interviewed, and that I have met in person. They are in fact people who tend to believe in conspiracy theories as explanations for all major events in the world…
I could write an entire article dismantling that passage alone and a book interrogating the chapter excerpts in Figure 4 below, but here I’ll keep it brief. This is an instance of the trust me, I-know-it-when-I see it approach to conspiracy theory theorizing. Philosopher Matthew R.X. Dentith, whom I trust more than anybody on this subject, identifies this approach as the intuitive but largely unexamined assumption that certain theories are obviously false or possibly socially harmful simply because they're labeled "conspiracy theories.” Beyond that, there’s a lot going on in the passage above (as well as in the rest of the chapter, as represented in Figure 4).
First of all, notice that I’m not calling the author dumb. I’m not just being polite; he is definitely not dumb. I’m saying he’s proffered a dumb argument, and I cited my source as to why I think this. I’m not mentioning this person’s name because they have harassed me in the past. I believe they had a notification set for my Facebook posts and then began replying to nearly everything I said within minutes of me posting in the leading 9/11 Truth Movement Facebook group. It was exhausting. Some people, apparently, have all the time in the world to respond to particular individuals on social media, run websites, write books and articles, and do whatever else they do with their days (if much else). I used to dedicate a lot of time to that kind of thing, and I’d prove it by linking to specific posts I made in the 9/11 Truth Movement group, but Facebook locked my Richard G. Ellefritz account, and there’s no apparent way for me to unlock it (yes, that’s a cry for help). This is important to mention because I constructed and used that account for 10 years as part of my online ethnography with the 9/11 Truth movement, and during that time, I encountered the above author/debunker on numerous occasions. One is worth noting here, but you’ll just have to trust me that this is an accurate retelling (I, hypocrite?).
“On September 6, 2017, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Schaibel Auditorium, Dr. Leroy Hulsey presented the findings and conclusions detailed in his team’s September 2017 progress report.” That’s the description on YouTube for a video titled, “WTC 7 Did Not Collapse from Fire’ - Dr. Leroy Hulsey, UAF, Sept. 6, 2017,” which aired live that day. I know this because I watched it live along with many others in the 9/11 Truth Movement Facebook group who were also engaged in discussions about the presentation. The author of the passage above invited himself to the discussion, and this is when I realized that the double standard is a key discursive tactic of 9/11 Deniers and anti-conspiracists generally. For posterity, I copied that thread into a Word document, including screenshots, thank God. Since the study and lecture were, in part, sponsored by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, the author of the passage above said at the beginning of the presentation that the results were biased. He said this before the study's results were presented; a clear double standard if there ever was one. Of course, when I called him out on this, he denied it was a double standard, just as he denied that he was financially motivated to write his book, and that is another tactic: Deny, Deny, Deny.
This is why, in my doctoral dissertation, I used the label 9/11 Deniers, which the author above rejected as inaccurate and further refused to accept on the grounds that it associated people like him (a self-proclaimed “debunkers”) with Holocaust and climate change deniers. Oh, the hypocrisy! Re-read his passage above, and ask yourself why “9/11 Denier” is not a suitable label according to his own logic. Pose critical questions about or assertions that contradict the 9/11 Commission Report to these anti-conspiracists, and they will deny the facts and evidence, claim that you’ve misinterpreted the facts and evidence, and/or deny your legitimacy in terms of speaking on such matters (if you do have relevant credentials and professional expertise, see the first two clauses). So, it’s an apt description, but evidently they don’t appreciate the connotation.
In line with that, consider this example, which I noted in my dissertation on pages 196-198: Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas published a 2013 paper titled “’What about Building 7?’ A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories,” and in it, they say the following: “The data also indicate that conspiracists were largely unwilling to apply the ‘conspiracy theory’ label to their own beliefs and objected when others did so, lending support to the long-held suggestion that conspiracy belief carries a social stigma.” If I were a member of their ethical review committee, I would have asked them to use a different label, considering that their research subjects express disapproval of its stigmatizing function. However, this is not a widely shared perspective, given the widespread and continuing use of the conspiracy label in peer-reviewed literature up to this date.
It is worth noting at length a passage in which these psychologists present their definitions. First, note that they opt for “conspiracist” rather than “conspiracy theorist.” If I had to, I would reluctantly choose the latter rather than being referred to as a conspiRACIST, but the choice is apparently not mine. Secondly, note the line of psychology research they reference, which ties into Part III of my series of articles on the propaganda function of the conspiracy label:
Although the psychological literature on conspiracy belief has a relatively short history, with most of the relevant research having been conducted only within the past twenty years, it has revealed a great deal regarding individual differences between those who generally believe conspiracy theories (whom we call “conspiracists”) and those who prefer conventional explanations (whom we call “conventionalists”). Conspiracy beliefs have been shown to be positively correlated with mistrust of other people (Goertzel, 1994) and authorities (Swami et al., 2010); feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999); superstition, beliefs in the paranormal, and schizotypy (Darwin et al., 2011); a perceived lack of control (Hamsher et al., 1968; Whitson and Galinsky, 2008); a Machiavellian approach to social interaction (Douglas and Sutton, 2011); and openness to experience (Swami et al., 2010; but see Swami et al., 2011).
No wonder “conspiracists” believe being labeled as such is stigmatizing!
If you have the drive or time, read through the following review articles on the psychology of conspiracy, and you’ll likely notice that they predominantly pathologize beliefs in conspiracy:
Biddlestone, M., Green, R., Douglas, K. M., Azevedo, F., Sutton, R. M., & Cichocka, A. (2025). “Reasons to believe: A systematic review and meta-analytic synthesis of the motives associated with conspiracy beliefs.” Psychological Bulletin, 151(1), 48.
Douglas, Karen M., Joseph E. Uscinski, Robbie M. Sutton, Aleksandra Cichocka, Turkay Nefes, Chee Siang Ang, and Farzin Deravi. "Understanding conspiracy theories." Political psychology 40 (2019): 3-35.
Douglas, Karen M., and Robbie M. Sutton. "What are conspiracy theories? A definitional approach to their correlates, consequences, and communication." Annual review of psychology 74.1 (2023): 271-298.
Douglas, Karen M., and Robbie M. Sutton. "Why conspiracy theories matter: A social psychological analysis." European Review of Social Psychology 29.1 (2018): 256-298.
Van Prooijen, Jan‐Willem, and Karen M. Douglas. "Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domain." European journal of social psychology 48.7 (2018): 897-908.
You might also notice the recurring names of Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton. There are dozens of other articles, books, podcasts, and other sources in which these two psychologists work with scores of individuals, all in an apparent effort to raise awareness about a growing threat to society.
If you don’t have the will or a way to read them, I’ll provide you with a few quotes from the most recent review article, breaking down a complex statement for ease of understanding, including links to the original citations in the article. The first quote is from the very first sentence, and the last quote is from the very last sentence:
“Belief in conspiracy theories has been linked to harmful consequences for individuals and societies” (Biddlestone et al. 2025, p. 48).
“Research suggests that belief in conspiracy theories is a threat to democratic processes and social cohesion” (ibid., p. 49).
“Conspiracy theories have been linked to
extremist ideology (Enders & Uscinski, 2021; Imhoff, Zimmer, et al., 2022),
political violence (Rottweiler & Gill, 2022),
prejudice (Jolley et al., 2020),
and problematic civic disengagement, including
unwillingness to reduce one’s carbon footprint (Biddlestone, Azevedo, & van der Linden, 2022; Jolley & Douglas, 2014a),
to follow COVID-19 pandemic guidelines (e.g., Biddlestone et al., 2020),
or to accept COVID-19 vaccines (e.g., Bertin et al., 2020)” (ibid., p. 49).
“A nuanced understanding of these motives is important in guiding efforts to protect individuals and society from the adverse effects of conspiracy beliefs” (ibid., p. 49).
“We hope this work can serve as a basis on which scholars can develop tools to better protect us against complex societal challenges” (ibid., p. 81).
Apparently, “conspiracists” are not only not a part of society, they/we are a threat to it, so say the psychologists!
Circling Back: The Anti-Conspiracy Conspiracy
There’s a great scene in a great movie I’d like to reference before I circle back. 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, and Madeleine Stowe, explores the concepts of free will versus determinism, paradoxical time loops, and, most importantly, anti-psychiatry. The particular scene I have in mind involves the heroine, a psychiatrist, Dr. Kathryn Railly, who has recently discovered irrefutable proof that the protagonist is, in fact, a time traveler and, therefore, his claims of an impending and catastrophic plague are true. Reporting her observations to her superior, Dr. Owen Fletcher, portrayed as an older man smoking a cigarette while sitting at his office desk, Dr. Railly is met with rational skepticism. Here’s the dialogue:
DR. FLETCHER He kidnapped you, Kathryn. You saw him murder someone. You knew there was a real possibility he would kill you, too. You were under tremendous emotional stress.
DR. RAILLY Oh, for God's sake, Owen, listen to me — he knew about the boy in Fresno, and he says three billion people are going to die!
DR. FLETCHER Kathryn, you know he can't possibly know that. You're a rational person. You're a trained psychiatrist. You know the difference between what's real and what's not.
DR. RAILLY And what we believe is what's accepted as "truth" now, isn't it, Owen? Psychiatry — it's the latest religion. And we're the priests — we decide what's right and what's wrong — we decide who's crazy and who isn't. ... I'm in trouble, Owen. I'm losing my faith.
In no way do I mean to diminish the severity of mental illnesses in general, nor do I mean to disparage all psychologists and psychiatrists. I’m sure there are some people labeled as conspiracy theorists who do suffer from some form of mental illness (or, is it the other way around?), just as I’m sure there are some good psychologists and psychiatrists. Keep in mind, the history of psychiatry is fraught with human rights abuses in totalitarian and democratic societies alike, financial and scientific corruption, class action lawsuits (with more cases to be made), many other scandals and controversies related to corruption, and the ever-evolving set of definitions and diagnoses in their bible, the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual (now the DSM V), in tandem with how those diagnoses are formulated, should raise at least one brow. Much more could be said about the corruption of the psychiatric industry and the relationship between psychology and state propaganda.
To be clear, psychiatry and psychology are related yet distinct professions and academic disciplines. My point is that people in the business of diagnosing and prognosticating mental illness and psychological pathologies are not omniscient saints, though some of them certainly act the part. Thank God, after all, that we have psychologists like Karen Douglas and co. to keep society safe from the dredges who dare question the sanctity of officialdom! Why, without these guardians of the Greater Good, some people might not “accept COVID-19 vaccines (e.g., Bertin et al., 2020)” (Biddelstone et al., p. 49)! Never mind the concerted and ongoing media blitz and global networks of policymakers who ensured the willing public that the redefined COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective.” Fortunately, we have evidence, in their own words, that they were lying, or at the very least, not telling the truth about the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which might raise questions about the CDC’s agenda for inoculating the public.
Speaking of inoculations, and circling back to jokes, I’ve got a new one for you: Have you ever heard about inoculation theory? No? Well, that’s probably because you’re a conspiracy theorist! Get it?
In 2025, a chapter was published in The Handbook of Social and Political Conflict titled, “Inoculation Theory and Conspiracy, Radicalization, and Violent Extremism.” Worryingly, it reviews a growing body of scientific literature on how to prevent people from believing conspiracies exist, not to mention the authors’ association of belief in conspiracies with violent extremism. My trepidation concerns Free Will versus the will of networks of individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions that seek to determine the cultural content of what “society” is allowed to think and discuss, as outlined in Part II.
My growing concern is that fewer and fewer people will ask critically pertinent questions, like “Is It Pathological to Believe in Conspiracy Theories?” Moreover, my concern here is that few people who care enough to read such articles would notice the glaring lack of any reference to Mathew R.X. Dentith, who had published an article seven years prior that might have changed the author’s approach and conclusions. Instead, who do we find in the references? You might have guessed, it’s Karen Douglas and co.
Let’s circle back to the lengthy passage above that I cited from Michael Wood and Karen Douglas from their 2013 article, “What about Building 7?” Do you think they actually care about the answer to that question, other than it being a signifier of some social psychological malady? A quick way to answer this is with reference to their bibliography. Here are four sequential references I find utterly fascinating:
Griffin, D. R. (2004). The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press.
Hamsher, J. H., Geller, J. D., and Rotter, J. B. (1968). Interpersonal trust, internal-external control, and the Warren Commission report. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 9, 210–215. doi: 10.1037/h0025900
Hofstadter, R. (1964, November). The paranoid style in American politics. Harper's Mag. 77–86.
Icke, D. (2012). David Icke–A Programmed Reality–Wake Up … Wake Up … Wake Up! Retrieved from http://www.davidicke.com/headlines/69538-david-icke-a-programmed-reality-wake-up–wake-up–wake-up/
Assuming at this point you, dear reader, are familiar with the content of my series of essays, take a guess as to which two references are used as authoritative sources and which two are treated as examples of pathological conspiracy theories, though, for Douglas, I doubt there’s any other kind.
To be fair, Wood and Douglas do not necessarily outright malign David Ray Griffin or David Icke, though I question why they would classify them in the same category (even though I know the simple answer is that they’re both “conspiracy theorists”). And, moreover, while they do cite the very old 1968 article as an authoritative source on a passing reference (more on that article below), they use Hofstadter only to highlight “the hostility of intellectual orthodoxy toward conspiracist explanations for events and the labelling of conspiracists as paranoid or otherwise mentally ill” (Wood and Douglas 2013, n.p.). As an example of the hostility of intellectual orthodoxy, passive-aggressive as it might be, see the highlighted portion of Figure 5. Notice how Wood and Douglas lump together 9/11, the 7/7 bombings, the JFK assassination, the moon landing, aliens, Bigfoot, Elvis, “and David Icke’s reptilian shapeshifters?” If you follow Dentith’s argument on generalism versus particularism, like I do, you’ll see the problem. Or, maybe you don’t need a philosopher to tell you that some of these things are not like the others.
Beyond that, let’s circle back once again to the passage of theirs I reproduced above. To set the stage, I’ll quote myself from Part III: “Scholars often do their due diligence in searching for existing literature that serves as the basis for their hypothesis, reinforces or extends their analysis and/or conclusions, and/or serves as a source to cite in an attempt to communicate that there is an existing authoritative source that backs up an assertion or declaration.” I.e., scholars and researchers will often, though not always, cite their opposition, but they are likely to do so selectively and much more likely to cite more and in a much more friendly manner those who are in their same academic and political camp. Now, here’s a real head-scratcher for you: If Michael Wood and Karen Douglas were actually interested in the question, “What about Building 7?,” or if they were doing their due diligence as ethical academics and rigorous researchers, why did they choose to cite David Ray Griffin’s 2004 book, The New Pearl Harbor, and not his 2009 book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7? The question answers itself.
Take notice, also, that at the end of that passage above, Wood and Douglas (2013) cite themselves, Douglas and Sutton (2011), which is a reference to their 2008 article, “The Hidden Impact of Conspiracy Theories: Perceived and Actual Influence of Theories Surrounding the Death of Princess Diana,” that I discussed in Part III. Why does this matter? In Part III, I showed that CIA memo 1035-960, “released to certain station chiefs in 1967,” aligns with or has parallels to Tom Bethell’s 1975 editorial in the regional news periodical The Washington Monthly. Four years later, Bethell’s article, “The Quote Circuit,” which proposed his pet theories about why people questioned and criticized the Warren Commission’s findings in the JFK assassination, served as the hypothesis used in the first peer-reviewed article on the psychology of conspiracy theories. Douglas and Sutton’s 2008 paper stems from that original 1979 paper on the psychology of conspiracy theories.
Remember those four citations I listed just above, the ones from Wood and Douglas’s 2013 article? Well, a year after the CIA released 1035-960 to their station chiefs, Hamsher, Geller, and Rotter published their article, “Interpersonal Trust, Internal-external Control, and the Warren Commission Report,” but it does not employ or make use of the conspiracy label. It’s simply cited as part of the literature on conspiracy theories because it fits the frame. Following Bethell’s armchair psychology in his editorial in a regional monthly news magazine, McCauley and Jacques’s 1979 article, “The Popularity of Conspiracy Theories of Presidential Assassination: A Bayesian Analysis,” was the first peer-reviewed paper in psychology to use the conspiracy label, and it has been foundational to the whole line of literature on the psychology of conspiracy theories ever since.
Bear in mind, the vast majority of psychologists, not to mention other academics, not only believe that conspiracy theories are inherently psychologically pathological on the individual level, but they believe conspiracy theories are so disruptive and threatening to the social order that they need to need to prevent people from believing in conspiracies in order to protect society at large from what they consider to be a dangerous way of thinking about and understanding the social world. As I showed in Part III, Karen Douglas and colleagues have a direct connection back through this line of literature, all the way back to 1967. Now, let’s circle back once more. Remember the author whose name I shall not mention? His book is called Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect (now in its second edition). In 2022, Robbie Sutton and Karen Douglas published an article titled “Rabbit Hole Syndrome: Inadvertent, Accelerating, and Entrenched Commitment to Conspiracy Beliefs,” as part of a special issue in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology. Spoiler Alert: The current opinion in psychology about conspiracy theories is exactly what you’d think at this point.
Closing the Loop
Now, let me quickly circle back one last time. In Part I, “Origins and Organizations Behind the Conspiracy Label,” I set out to do what I’m doing right now, providing a road map for understanding how and why the conspiracy label came to be a useful tool of propaganda. At the end of that first piece, written so many years ago now, there’s a heading that reads, “How to recognize and debunk conspiracy theories.” In that section, I alerted readers to the existence of COMPACT, the Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories, which is a consortium of 150 scholars from 35 countries who, by and large, share the consensus opinion among psychologists on the nature of conspiracy theories. The members of COMPACT are names you’ll see throughout the special issue on conspiracy theories in Current Opinion in Psychology, as well as in many of the citations in passages and quotes presented above. Save, possibly, for Matthew R.X. Dentith (and maybe a few select others), their research, in one way or another, stems back to 1967 when the CIA dispatched memo 1035-960 to their station chiefs.
In Part II, “The Multi-Institutional Politics of the Santa Claus Conspiracy and 9/11 Truth,” I elaborated on how COMPACT is part of a global network of individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions that operate as a truth regime of gatekeepers and propagandists. I discussed how corporate news outlets, universities, and specific journalists and academics construct and maintain large-scale myths in defense of the official, authorized narrative of the events of September 11, 2001. “Myth lies at the basis of human society,” started William H. McNeill in his 1982 article, “The Care and Repair of Public Myth,” published in the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs. Sixteen years later, around the time Brzezinski and PNAC separately pined for “a new Pearl Harbor,” soon-to-be author of the 9/11 Commission Report, Philip Zelikow picked up “William McNeill’s notion of ‘public myth’ but without the negative implications sometimes invoked by the word ‘myth’” (p. 5). He called this the “public presumptions” about contemporary political history, and he pontificated about how “particularly ‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events take on a ‘transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene” (p. 6). Similar concepts are the noble lie and the big lie.
It is not unusual to construct and partake in intergenerational public mythmaking practices. Consider mundane and ritualistic traditions, such as Christmas and Santa Claus. Children eventually see through the lies of the mythmaking processes adults engage in, and many of those children go on to reproduce the process with their own children. From their writings, CIA officers, academics, journalists, pundits, politicians, military officials, and others with vested interests in pushing the public into accepting a version of reality in which war and its vast industrial complex are necessary and desirable, they’re the adults and the public are like naive children who should believe what they’re told. Step out of line and you’ll be labeled a bad little boy or girl, i.e., a “conspiracist.”
Metaphorically, and to borrow Cass Sunstein’s concept, we “children” sometimes need to be nudged in the right direction, like using behavioral and social sciences to shape public behaviors in accordance with COVID-19 pandemic policies and bribing people to accept the vaccines. To compel compliance and dispel disobedience, psychologists have prognosticated cognitive inoculation against rumors, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. For the psychologists scrutinized above, society needs to be saved from outcasts they label “conspiracists,” and, like Dr. Fletcher said of psychiatrists, they “know the difference between what’s real and what’s not,” despite having little to no training in fields other than the study of human behavior. But that will always be the problem for propagandists and mythmakers; ultimately, reality will always wins out, just as Light defeats Darkness. And now, more than ever, flame bearers have lit the candles of multitudes who have seen the light at the end of the tunnel and are working their ways out of the psychologists’ rabbit hole.
(Featured Image: "Corona conspiracy" by 7C0 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)