We all know the conspiratorial mindset. It sees patterns where there aren’t any, it treats links, however innocuous, between any individuals or organisations as sinister cabals. Any media outlet that takes money from a source you dislike is assumed to to be bought and paid for. Everyone who pushes your theories is a brave truth teller, everyone who casts doubt is a stooge or a spook. You understand the dark forces undermining democracy, the West, and Our Way of Life, but “they” don’t want you to expose them. 

People set out, often with noble intentions, to fight back against the chaos of propaganda, error, deceit, credulity and fake news now rampant online and in our media. They see the swivel-eyed ravings of David Icke or the explosive rants of Alex Jones; the spread of bizarre speculations about satanic child abuse, 9/11 Trutherism or QAnon; and conclude, naturally, that someone needs to counter the flood of fraudulence. 

But in the highly charged world of political partisanship and the “culture war”, the accusation of misinformation is itself a common form of misinformation. Fake news is a real phenomenon, but it’s also a favoured phrase for highly dishonest politicians of the Right, most famously Donald Trump. 

There’s always been a whacky fringe, but the supercharging of conspiratorial thinking is the product of the politicisation of news, a sort of permanent wartime footing has overtaken many media organisations, and cynically manipulating information is now the primary mode of political persuasion. 

Rather than setting out to carefully distinguish the elements of truth, falsehood and exaggeration in a particular narrative, most have opted for the far more combative (and, to grant the commercial imperatives involved — entertaining) concept of “debunking”. Like the conspiracy theorists they rail against, the mythbusters are desperate to “expose” and discredit their opponents, and often fantasise about investigations, fines and imprisonment as penalties for speaking untruth. 

Such was the case in the latest missive from the BBC’s answer to Taylor Lorenz, Marianna Spring. Her programme, “Marianna in Conspiracyland”, focuses on the growth of what she calls the “conspiracy movement” in the town of Totnes, a countercultural market town beloved of hippies, and the popularisation of the conspiracy newspaper “The Light” in the community. It’s a fascinating story, and could have made a compelling and powerful BBC documentary. 

Unfortunately, Marianna did not so much gild the lily, as commission a golden facsimile of the lily. The documentary begins with local elected officials denouncing the conspiracy movement in Totnes, reading “The Light” aloud sarcastically, and telling their side of the story. Marianna herself makes no pretence at neutrality, starting out by describing how “something has gone awry” in Totnes, and a “faultline has emerged between a minority who have been drawn in by disinformation laced with hate and those who are fighting against it”, and “the threat it could pose to society in the UK and beyond” and speaks of conspiracy as “infecting” communities. 

Are the anti-disinformation reporters starting to embrace exactly the sort of conspiratorial narratives they claim to oppose? 

When she does get around to the conspiracy theorists themselves, the interviews are clipped like a political attack ad. Sinister music is played under their words. In one interview, with artist Jason Liosato, the audio continually drops so Marrinna can contradict or give a negative spin to Jason’s words, or make observations like “the mood in the gallery shifts, Jason is visibly agitated by my question, fiddling with coins in his pocket”, before going to describe how “the extremity and violence of his answer shocks me” and how “as he speaks Jason makes a stabbing motion with his hands”. Jason may be as mad as a bag of frogs (and certainly give her plenty of material to work with), but the audience might have been left to reach its own conclusions. Louis Theroux this is not. 

Regular mention is made of how the pandemic tipped Totnes’ hippies into a conspiracy frenzy, with former Totnes Mayor Ben Piper describing confrontations and threatening behaviour from residents, many of whom he’d known for years. Marianna notes that he’d become a target due to “his role enforcing coronavirus restrictions”, but this thread is left almost entirely unpulled throughout the documentary. Conspiracy theorists are presented, no doubt rightly, as dissembling opportunists, but Marianna seems to never pause to ask whether the general suspension of civil liberties is the sort of thing that might drive anger and extremism, or whether libertarian-minded hippies were ever going to take kindly to their mayor telling them whether they can leave their homes or go down to the pub. 

Despite being a BBC reporter Marianna makes no attempt at balance, and is explicit about what she’s setting out to do, tweeting, “I expose radicalisation of UK conspiracy movement, investigating a conspiracy theory paper & exposing connections and harm”. This language of “exposure” is also in the BBC description: “She exposes how radical they have become and how action is spilling offline.”

At one point she describes how conspiracy “hides in the most unsuspecting corners of communities” and “there is no prototype for a conspiracy theorist, they can be a doctor, a teacher, an artist”. This is the language, quite straightforwardly, of conspiracy theorists themselves. As philosopher Daniel Williams has pointed out fears of disinformation and enemy propaganda are a recurrent theme in modern politics, but there is little evidence that it as powerful and widespread as it is generally portrayed. Marianna’s own language of disease is borrowed from the work of those like Cambridge social psychologist Sander van der Linden, who has resurrected long-discredited ideas of misinformation as a “contagion” in his book Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity. In fact, suggests Williams, most people are extremely resistant to manipulation and outside influence, and the factors driving conspiracy theories reflect preexisting beliefs, and a loss of faith in institutions and authorities. 

The “viral” framework appeals to reports like Marriana because it represents a much more compelling and self-flattering story than one of general distrust of the mainstream media that employs her. When journalists like her take up the fight against the “disease” of disinformation, they often cease to think of themselves in the mundane terms of a reporter, and start thinking of their role as that of “truthteller”, fighting against shadowy cliques of propagandists. 

Marianna herself continually draws connections between the hodge-podge of conspiracy theories in Totnes and the UK, many of them focused around lockdown, vaccines and the pandemic, with Q-Anon in America and the German coup attempt. But as Fred Skulthorp has pointed out, this claim is as much of an improbable reach as the kinds of connections  conspiracy theorists themselves make. Nor is it clear she always gets her facts right — with at least one person mentioned on the programme, former UKIP candidate and YouTuber Carl Benjamin, seeming to contradict a number of her assertions about him. Yet fresh-faced crusader for truth Marianna hasn’t deigned to respond, or cough up her receipts. 

When it comes to journalism like Marianna’s, we’re forced to ask ourselves — are the anti-disinformation reporters starting to embrace exactly the sort of conspiratorial narratives they claim to oppose? 

A favourite focus for the debunkers’ ire are the 2020 US elections, and the events of January 6th, in which eccentric Trump supporters, many of them conspiracy theorists, protested at the capital alleging the election had been rigged. Ineffectual policing saw protestors swarm throughout the Capitol building, before eventually being herded out. One (unarmed) protester was shot trying to climb in a window. The event was universally and hysterically condemned, and was treated like a coup attempt. 

Four years ago, of course, it was the Left who was screaming about a “stolen” and “hacked” election. Whether or not you think Russiagate was a conspiracy theory, it was certainly a theory about a conspiracy – one that appears not to have taken place. All the same logic at work in QAnon was present then – it wasn’t enough for Trump to be a cynical, callous and crude populist with little respect for convention or ethics, he also had to be engaged in some kind of grand conspiracy against the American people. It’s not that people feared it to be true – they wanted and perhaps needed it to be the case. 

Rather than focusing on the misdeeds and half-truths of the powerful, they direct their fire against the myths and fables of the powerless

Whether conspiracy theories abound, conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories also swarm and flock. Take the idea of the “new world order”. As a conspiracy theory the terms refers to the idea of a secret worldwide government or cabal directing human affairs, whether it be the Masons, the Jews, the Illuminati or simply shadowy elites. Proponents will greet every UN initiative, every international conference, every inter-faith initiative, climate agreement or trade deal as an example of this emerging “New World Order”. Any organisation with pretensions to internationalism is assumed to be complicit, and believers are expert at filleting out any official, author or speaker foolish enough to use the phrase or something like it.

But, of course, one reason they find fuel for their theory is that it has been used entirely descriptively and non-conspiratorially by many to describe emerging forms of global governance, law and economics. Woodrow Wilson and Churchill used the term, and it was the latter who Bush senior cited in his speech to Congress entitled “Towards a New World Order”:

Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the genuine prospect of new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a ‘world order’ in which ‘the principles of justice and fair play … protect the weak against the strong …’

Much of the criticism of this idea, which would go on to form the basis of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, was indeed hyperbolic and conspiratorial. But there were actual conspiracies conducted in the name of this idea (the illegal assassination, abduction and torture of terrorist suspects, the lies in the build up to the Iraq war). When confronted with secretive, unaccountable, and undemocratic processes, conspiracy theories take root and flourish. The sometimes excessive focus and importance given to such fantastical ideas, often by some of the most senior journalists at the most influential outlets, has been an error, and often a very damaging one. 

Rather than focusing on the misdeeds and half-truths of the powerful, they direct their fire against the myths and fables of the powerless. Little surprise, that for all the accolades journalists have piled up for crushing obviously untrue theories underfoot, conspiracy theories are more widespread and popular than ever, and institutions, including the media, are less trusted every year. 

But worse than simply wasting their time, much of the reporting around conspiracy theories itself lapses into the conspiratorial, and in some instances involves exactly the sort of unaccountable manipulation of information that helps breed conspiracy theories in the first place. Put the term “New World Order” into the title of a YouTube video, and the website will helpfully add “context” linking to a Wikipedia page on the “New World Order conspiracy theory”. The page itself, if anyone bothers to read it, does in fact report the non-conspiratorial origins of the term. But the effect for any viewer is to label the video as conspiratorial, and for those given to believing in conspiracies, it provides ample fuel to the fires of suspicion. 

This sort of platform-provided “context”, which became especially popular on social media during the pandemic, is a direct response to the lobbying of the debunkers, who wanted their particular fact-checking cottage industry to be built into social media platforms to fight “disinformation”. In a perverse bit of circular logic, the solution to the problem of conspiracy theorists complaining a cabal is manipulating them is for…a cabal to manipulate information to stop conspiracy theories. 

Leaving aside snide “context”, the debunkers also share a love of pointing the finger. Rather than accusing those unfortunate enough to drop the phrase “New World Order” into their writing or words of being part of it, they instead accuse them of believing in its existence. Just as conspiracy theorists trade on the vagueness and fluidity of the term to suggest the existence of a global cabal, so too do opportunistic fact-checkers love to paint those who use terms linked to conspiracy theories as fully signed-up cranks. 

The same hermeneutics of suspicion and moral contagion that inform the wackiest tin-foil hat wearer are at work in many of those employed by organisations like the Southern Poverty Law Centre, the Anti-Defamation League and numerous fact-checking outlets and liberal media organisations. Use of terms like the New World Order, “cultural Marxism” or “globalism” are all taken to be dog-whistles indicating anti-semitism, white supremacy, support for Russia, or radical libertarianism. Likewise any scepticism towards mainstream reporting is treated as grounds for assuming “denialism” whether towards issues like climate change, evolution, gender ideology or vaccines. 

The shadow of suspicion seems to fall only upon the Right however – George Monbiot wrote “Manifesto for a New World Order” without apparent controversy from the luvvies – I guess it’s not a conspiracy theory if you’re in favour of the New World Order. Cultural Marxism is regularly cast as a rightwing anti-semitic conspiracy theory, despite emerging as a term on the dissident intellectual Left in the 1990s amongst thinkers who believed that Marx’s materialistic analysis had been subverted by the post-modern academy. 

Just as is the case with the curtain-twitchers, UFO abductees and moon-landing sceptics, context and intent are irrelevant to the debunkers where there’s a damaging connection to be made. The specifics of conspiracy theories are nonsense, but they flourish because the generalities — that we’re governed by unaccountable elites, whose interests are served by global rules and organisations — seem unassailably true.