conspiracy theorists

The Talent of Delusion

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I’ve been thinking about Conspiracy theories a lot. I mean as my regular readers I know I do that anyway, but as 2025 is the age Conspiracy Theories and reality collide at lightspeed, I’m thinking more. Mostly I’m asking how did we get here – not in the exact causal sense, but how the Conspiracy Theorist mind works.

Lately among my readings, viewings, and podcast-listening I realized that Conspiracy Theory Believing requires skill.

If you’ve ever listened to someone go on about Conspiracy Theories, you realize they are retaining a complex alternate world inside their head. They have a skill to retaining and organizing that information about things that are, let us be honest, not true, sometimes bonkers, and often very bigoted under the skin. Yet these folks can recall it.

More than that, they are constantly resolving conflicts in their theories. Conspiracy Theorists are having the world collide with their beliefs all the time. New facts come in, the apocalypse doesn’t come, the hated (often female and/or PoC) politician resigns, the space lasers don’t fire. Conspiracy Theorists have to re-spin their tales all the time or else they have to question them, and if they questioned them they wouldn’t be Conspiracy Theorists. They’re maintenance experts on believing an illusion.

But Conspiracy Theorists also collide, believers who believe vaguely different things come together – and they display a talent for taking new input and combining them. This is the infamous “yes, and” discussions you can see among True Believers, where a person states one belief, and a slightly different believer agrees, then adds onto it. If you’ve witnessed a Conspiracy Theorist get on a good rant going at an event or in a conversation, you can see this happen at amazing speed as people ask questions.

(The Knowledge Fight podcast focuses on Alex Jones, but has covered other subjects, and in almost all cases you can see their subjects build mythology in real time.)

Conspiracy Theory is a skill, skill is similar to if not exactly the same as the worldbuilding done by writers, gamers, game designers, and artists. They have an ability to create on the fly, to recall vast information, and to adsorb and polish information. The jaw-dropping connections of a Tonspiracy Theorist are all too close to the clever ideas of a good writer to act like they’re not two branches of the same tree.

Conspiracy Theorists are easier to understand if you realize they had a skill at such creations (that they misused) or that they have developed it. It also means the evil grifters are even worse because they have some skill here and use it to screw up the world.

This gives me pause to other ways we might use such an insight to help those lost in these conspiracy worlds to get out.

  • We can recognize this “talent at fabulation” by asking “does this person sound like they’re worldbuilding?” It’s a key to detection. Also if the theorist in question is some evil grifter, we can help people avoid them.
  • If we’re trying to help the Conspiracy Theorist, realizing a skill is being deployed will allow us to help them find their way back with the various oft-discussed techniques.
  • This skill they developed might be channeled elsewhere. As facetious as it sounds, I wonder how many people who have developed this creative skill might find outlets elsewhere. I’m not saying they should write fiction, but who knows?

It’s strange as I think over this insight. I realize some people I’ve seen, some I despise, really do have a skill. It’s just been used or developed in ways making the world worse.

-Xenofact

Tyrants for Freedom

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I often talk about conspiracy theories and the like when I write about spiritual issues since conspiracy theories and spirituality tend to intersect – what is often called Conspirituality. Also there’s plenty of spiritually grifty conspiracy peddlers and those people and what they sell fascinate me. They infuriate me too, but in a kind of fascinating way.

One thing that fascinates me is how Conspiracy Theorists seem to want to build the very world they claim they warn against.

I’ll watch Conspiracy Theorists predict violent uprisings and secret attacks. The solution is usually “more guns and also maybe shoot non-white people” which quickly sounds like they are the very thing they hate. Usually this goes unnoticed as we’re used to it or focus on other weird stuff they say.

I’ve also watched how Conspiracy Theorists quickly become bang alongside police states. Oh they may not feel threatened as it’s their police (or milita, or army) but it’s absolutely the same thing they fear others are doing to them. Funny how the jackboot ends up on the other foot.

But this is all the standard violent crap humanity has plagued itself with for years. The revolution’s evolution ends in devolution and destruction too often.

However one thing that really stood out to me the last few years is watching Conspiracy Theorists who were afraid of secret billionaires and tyrants . . . go and seek out tyrants. I’m sure you can guess who they usually chose to worship, but it’s weird when you look at the breadth of history, especially in the 20th century and onward.

It’s unsettling to see people who scream about freedom lick the boots of some hack businessman or creepy politician or weird media figure. People acting so worshipful towards a transparent grifter that you suddenly really understand things like Jonestown. There are people bang alongside freedom so much they want to follow a dictator to get their freedom.

Read that again. They want to follow a dictator to get their freedom and they don’t immediately die of embarrassment.

Lately, I’ve come to realize the difference between a Conspiracy Theorists and a person who believes in conspiracy is in part “do they want a dictator?”

Conspiracy Theorists, addicted to conspiracy theories, besotted by clear personal issues, often a bit gifty at heart, seem to easily fall into wanting a dictator. The Conspiracy Theorists have issues of power and control that the Theory helps address. If power and control are your issues and integrity of belief aren’t as important, a dictator is an easy solution.

But people who just believe there are conspiracies? Accurate or not they’ll seek solutions and try to build them. They might not be the best solutions or rational one, but as the solution matters there’s hope. They see a threat and want to correct it, so there’s some potential dialogue and growth It may not always end well, but there’s an attempt to fix things.

Of course I can see these two being interchangeable. I have dark suspicions some famous Conspiracy Theory figures started off with concerns that at least involved practical solutions, but then went more and more off the edge. Or they found they could make money in the Conspiracy Theory space.

So beware people espousing conspiracies, yes. But check for a desire for tyranny and you may save yourself a lot of time, words, sanity, and maybe just safety. Those who easily want tyrants aren’t trying to solve anything for anyone else.

-Xenofact

Are They Even Trying Anymore?

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After the Key Bridge Disaster and the April 8th 2024 eclipse, I listened to several podcasts on conspiracy theories. A strange consistency emerged that I had also witnessed – it seemed people weren’t really trying to craft conspiracy theories.

Oh there was the usual stuff. The rapture and chemtrails, cyberattacks and secret plots. But it was all things we’d heard before. Some of it, especially the eclipse conspiracy theories seemed laughable like some extremely predictable astronomical event was a magical/occult/divine arrangement that was important for some reason. It was lukewarm and recycled.

There was bigotry and biases, of course, especially in the Key Bridge Disaster. Plenty of racist crap was spewed online about various people and the city of Baltimore. It was no different than any of the racism and bigotry the day before, just shifted around a bit. It was racists being racists because of racism.

Finally, there was a lack of coherence to the conspiracy theories. There wasn’t any grand overarching plan or narrative – even “God” apparently didn’t have one. There was no chart with red string, no colorful complex graphic explaining it all circulating online. It was so low effort.

A lot of what I saw, and what the podcasts I followed saw, seemed to be people essentially tossing out old ideas and biases and calling it a day – or mentioning disconnected points and saying, essentially, “suspicious?” Maybe both if you got some really ambitious person with an online handle like “EagleFlightPatriotAlpha1776” and AN AI avatar with ten-pack abs and thirteen total fingers.

But man, the usual suspects and newcomers to stringing together bullshit weren’t trying. Maybe they were tired, maybe it was just the confluence of events and non-events, but I mean I had expectations. However I wonder.

Is conspiracy theory culture tapped out in America? I mean we’ve done it all, from space super-soldiers fighting reptoids (which are just anti-semetic tropes) to gigantic financial and political conspiracies (which are just anti-semetic tropes). Maybe people are out of ideas, maybe we’ve hit a kind of saturation.

Perhaps people are ALL trying to do the old trick of spewing random things and seeing what audiences want. Maybe everyone wants to get hits by low effort, give in to audience capture, and do whatever. Maybe we’re hitting even more widespread, but lazy grift.

Could it be that current news (Trump, Israel, and Ukraine as of this writing) has sucked all the oxygen out of the room? Has reality occupied too much time of people’s minds?

Were these events just too reality-based to get a good theory going?

Or maybe we’re all just worn out from continuous crap and it’s even hit people who are Too Online.

I mean I’d be glad if Conspiracy Culture is somehow worn out, winding down, and maybe falling apart. Maybe we can get some reality in there But I suppose I have to know what’s going on, just in case.

Which I guess makes me a bit like a Conspiracy Theorist.

– Xenofact