Inside the Mind of Conspiracy Theorists

The term “conspiracy theorist” functions today as a defamatory label that prevents any critical discussion. I propose to explore how this word, born in a specific context, has become a tool of intellectual censorship that threatens the very exercise of critical thinking.

Genealogy of an insult, from the Warren Report to contemporary uses

The term “conspiracy theorist” (historically “conspirationist”) entered public debate after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, but its systematic use dates from a CIA memorandum of April 1, 1967. This document, known as “Memo 1035-960,” gave explicit instructions to discredit those who questioned the Warren Report (the official investigation into the assassination): qualify critics as “conspirationists,” present them as motivated by ideology or financial interests, and insist on the integrity of the official investigation. This deliberate disqualification strategy established a precedent that persists.

The use of the word became commonplace and entered everyday sphere during the Covid crisis from 2020 to 2022, and anyone can use it daily, in debates and disagreements of all kinds. But what exactly is a conspiracy theorist? The imprecision of the term reveals its primary function: not to describe a reality, but to discredit the person it designates. Calling someone a conspiracy theorist amounts to reducing them to their supposed stupidity, their simplism, their obscurantism, and their assumed marginality. It’s an insult that functions as a verdict without appeal.

Between those who think the Earth is flat and those who questioned health policy during the Covid Crisis, many of whose arguments proved well-founded later, the gap is immense. Yet all were placed in the same defamatory category. This deliberate confusion reveals that the term serves less to describe a reality than to police the limits of acceptable debate.

The amateur investigator facing real conspiracies, a porous boundary

The “conspiracy theorist,” in its original meaning, is above all someone who seeks to detect the truth behind appearances they judge to be false. It’s an investigator who doubts, who seeks evidence, both lawyer and judge, but as an amateur. Yet this approach is not illegitimate in itself. The police officers who investigated the malfeasance of Servier laboratory around Mediator were considered by the entire laboratory hierarchy as lunatics, “conspiracy theorists” in the pay of hostile forces. Yet they were right: the laboratory was indeed manipulating data to sell a dangerous drug knowingly.

The secret agreements between the three major French telecom operators to falsify competition constitute another good example. The lawyers who sought evidence were labeled as paranoid and possibly in the pay of another operator. Once evidence was gathered, it was proven that Orange, SFR and Bouygues were indeed organizing secret meetings, and they each had to pay a record fine of 700 million euros in 2005. These examples show that decisions made in the shadows by people with convergent interests, what we might call “conspiracies,” constitute a fairly common reality.

Lobbies, paid by industries to serve their financial interests, represent a legal and visible form of coordination of private interests to influence public decisions—it’s institutionalized “conspiracy.” Or in another field, terrible, cases of family incest, we observe “conspiracies” of family members to protect family balance at the expense of abused children’s suffering, whose suffering is minimized. When these children speak out, they are often discredited as dangers to the community, even though everyone knows the truth. These children are indeed dangerous to the sick and symptomatic system, but rightly so. The “conspiracy theorist” thus finds themselves stigmatized, discredited, excluded, while they most often seek an essential truth for themselves and for the community, behind organized lies.

The child, the whistleblower and the researcher, figures of legitimate questioning

The child embodies the conspiracy theorist par excellence: despite injunctions to obedience, they always ask too many questions, embarrassing questions we’d rather not answer. A child who questions too much in class, raising points the teacher may not know how to answer, will quickly be asked to be quiet because they threaten the class balance. But maybe they’re right to threaten this balance? Maybe if, thanks to them, this balance could change, it would be beneficial for all students?

Whistleblowers like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden have also been labeled as dangerous conspiracy theorists. Attempts were made to discredit them even though the majority of journalists today profitably use the documents they brought to light. Assange risks life imprisonment if extradited to the United States, not for lying, but for revealing disturbing truths. Those whose interests are not served by the disclosure of these documents claim that these acts threaten state security.

After Kennedy’s assassination, numerous speculations emerged about the real responsibilities behind this murder. Many doubted that an isolated shooter could have succeeded alone in this act, also considering all the interests this assassination served. It was in this context that the CIA produced its strategy to disqualify those who expressed doubts. I’m not seeking here to discuss the veracity of theories about CIA involvement in Kennedy’s assassination. But even today, asking questions about this subject earns you the conspiracy theorist label. Isn’t it the very nature of democracy to welcome debates and doubts? Isn’t it also the condition of any scientific approach to be permanently open to questioning, sometimes even to reversal? Thus, when Galileo had maintained that the Earth was round and that it revolved around the Sun, initially he was supported by the Church of Rome, because this went in the direction of an evolution of dogma. And it was in a second moment, when religious dogma went backward for political reasons, that his hypothesis was condemned! The choice was indeed political and in no way scientific or even religious. And at the time, saying the earth was round was being a “conspiracy theorist,” that is, asking forbidden questions that excluded you from respectable people. Today, the situation is reversed: the institution affirms that the Earth is round and orbits around the Sun, which is presented as definitive truth. Discourse is a construction, whether it’s real or not is a scientific subject, in short science always mixes with politics in the way we explain the world, it’s never alone.

Philosophy of media analysis

Rather than trying to distinguish true from false according to pre-established criteria, I instead invite examining the conditions of discourse production. This approach is inspired by Michel Foucault who reminds us that “discourse is not simply what translates struggles or systems of domination, but that for which, that by which one struggles.”

The questions are: Who speaks? Where does this person derive their legitimacy? What interests might they serve? How is information constructed? This method applies to all discourses, whether they come from dominant or alternative media. It joins Jacques Ellul’s warning against “integration propaganda”, this subtle form that, in democracies, aims to “give citizens the feeling of having wanted the government’s acts.”

Laurent Mucchielli’s analysis reveals how “most journalists were not capable of distancing themselves from politico-industrial propaganda”. This failure underscores the urgency of training citizens capable of exercising their judgment independently of imposed interpretive frameworks. We must face the fact, following Mucchielli again, that “digital giants and social networks have set a terrible example by massively practicing censorship of non-conforming remarks”, which has created informational bubbles that reinforce prejudices rather than question them.

Covid-19, a full-scale laboratory of disqualification

During the Covid-19 crisis, the majority of those called “conspiracy theorists” shared analyses that proved true afterward. Their discourse was simply not what was expected by social space at the time. They came to threaten the coherence of the argument that political power deemed necessary to implement measures presented as good for public health. People who said from 2020 that the State would take advantage of the situation to implement a population control system were immediately discredited by Emmanuel Macron and Olivier Véran as spreading “shameful conspiracy theories.” A year later, the same people defended the health pass as a necessity, which was precisely what the “conspiracy theorists” feared from the beginning.

The fact that anti-Covid vaccines were still in experimental phase until 2023 was systematically denied and presented as a “conspiracy theorist” lie, when it was a factual truth. Those who dared say that vaccines didn’t protect against transmission were reduced to their supposed imbecility, while Pfizer laboratory itself later acknowledged that this vaccine had never been tested or designed to prevent transmission. As Laurent Mucchielli documented in his sociological work, “the systematic devaluation of scientific and/or medical voices criticizing the government’s politico-health policy” mobilized “TV talk show doctors” to designate critics as “conspiracy theorists.”

The Lancet study on hydroxychloroquine, published May 22, 2020 and withdrawn June 4 following for manifest fraud, perfectly illustrates this dynamic. This study, based on data fabricated by Surgisphere company, had served to suspend clinical trials and ban the use of this molecule. Those who questioned the validity of this study were immediately labeled “pro-Raoult conspiracy theorists.” The article’s withdrawal validated their doubts, but without ever publicly rendering them justice, and especially without lifting the usage ban on this effective and safe molecule, because to be able to sell a drug still in experimental phase, the law stipulates that no other treatment must exist.

Mechanisms of disqualification, from simplism to demonization

There was no organized conspiracy during Covid, but industrialists who managed to profit from the situation to sell billions of dollars worth of products in experimental phase, in an opportunism that shows their effectiveness as merchants. To be able to exercise their trade, it was necessary to discredit all other treatments and present these vaccines as the only way. They succeeded by using precisely the principle of “conspiracy theories” to discredit all those who said otherwise. This trick, which divided families by sowing fear, produced unprecedented financial gains: the fortunes of the greatest billionaires and shareholders were multiplied by two in two years, a unique fact in the history of capitalism.

Today, in the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of the assassinated president and now Health Secretary, exposes exactly these mechanisms of dishonesty in choices made during Covid. A recognized ecologist before joining the Trump administration, he receives enormous animosity from those whose interests are not served by his discourse. On other aspects, the Trump administration indeed manufactures false truths, notably on gender issues or global warming. This complexity shows that we must not be simplistic: it’s not because a government is globally criticizable that everything it produces is automatically so.

Intellectual simplism would consist of eclipsing all critical spirit in favor of principled disqualifications. No, looking at situations in their own nuances. As 35 researchers and doctors emphasized in their Tribune du Parisien in September 2020, including Jean-François Toussaint and Laurent Mucchielli: “We must not confuse enlightened responsibility with moralizing guilt, nor citizen education with infantilization.” Their call to no longer be “governed by fear” was immediately disqualified as “reassuring,” a neologism created for the occasion, and never published by national press organs.

For authentic dialogue beyond labels

I believe we absolutely must not be afraid of those called “conspiracy theorists,” because we have our own critical spirit. Being afraid of them or considering them dangerous is precisely granting them great power of truth they would carry and which could destabilize society. In open discussion with someone who has alternative theories, we will often find that their arguments sometimes lack solid evidence, or that they give them an identity in a parallel system that explains their marginality. They need this to make sense of the world. This openness doesn’t mean accepting everything without discernment, but refusing a priori disqualification.

But this is not the case for everyone. Others may help us discover information, authors, relevant scientific research. Notorious example, history shows that a large number of wars began with official lies: the Iraq war in 2003 over imaginary weapons of mass destruction, the escalation in Vietnam from false Vietnamese attacks, the invasion of Poland in 1939 by fake Polish soldiers who were actually disguised Germans. And last example in another field, witchcraft accusations for centuries, completely invented, served mainly to settle neighborhood problems through institutionalized murder.

Entering into dialogue can only enrich us, either by understanding the cognitive biases that lead to false assertions, or by opening our minds. As Hannah Arendt emphasized, “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is neither the convinced Nazi nor the convinced Communist, but the man for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” This distinction cannot be learned through submission to verification authorities, but through the patient and rigorous exercise of critical judgment.

The media and information education I defend aims to train minds capable of navigating informational complexity with discernment and autonomy. It requires accepting the discomfort of methodical doubt, the complexity of situations where truth is not univocal, and the responsibility of forming one’s own judgment. It is at this price that we can hope to train truly enlightened citizens, capable of participating in democratic debate without being locked into categories that prevent any authentic dialogue, nor allowing themselves to be manipulated by the various forms of propaganda, including those of the dominant and major media, that traverse our era.