Conspiracy Theories: A Guide to the World's Most Intriguing Mysteries

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Ultimately it’s not about the key players, it’s about our history and the history of conspiracy, as an act. It’s a story of a modern day conspiracy and the players happen to be Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and Peter Thiel. But it’s more than that. It’s about our world and our current landscape, political and social. And speaking of agency: Thiel and Denton are clearly, in the words of Eric Weinstein, "high-agency people." They have a vision and execute on it. That trait is in limited supply, and tends to be selected-against in high-status education and the early stages of high-status jobs. In a sense, Denton was a class traitor, by using his Nietzschean will-to-power to build an institution that mostly swatted other unique people aside. Enter GamerGate and the culture wars and then the 2016 election, and the judgment against Gawker became fraught with implications that went well beyond the politics of outing and whether or not it's okay to publish someone's sex video without their consent. What I wanted to do with this book is to lay out that this is almost like a playbook that gets run and that one step to defeating it is being aware that it’s used like this. When the next one comes along – because there will be a next one – maybe we’ll be able to get out ahead of it a little bit faster.”

It could be the naming of characters after Bond villains – the mysterious unelected Conservative fixer about whom she has collected so many spectacularly libellous-sounding stories that he cannot be named is dubbed “Dr No”. Or even the way Dorries, a woman far sharper than critics suggest, casts herself for narrative purposes as a political ingenue, roaming Westminster asking impossibly wide-eyed questions as she tries to establish who killed Boris Johnson’s career. Eventually, our amateur sleuth discovers it’s … Rebekah Vardy’s account! Just kidding: apparently it’s a sinister cabal called “the movement” comprising Cummings, Michael Gove, spin doctor turned BBC executive Robbie Gibb and various lesser-known apparatchiks who have “set out to control the destiny of the Conservative party” for 25 years. And that’s where the story falls apart. He says: “Almost any conspiracy theory starts with a legitimate question that I would agree: yeah, let’s look into that, let’s see what we can find. It’s the refusal to accept evidence when the evidence doesn’t pan out in the way that you want it to that leads to problems because then what you have to do is construct an increasingly elaborate conspiratorial framework to explain why you’re not finding the evidence you were hoping for. That’s where you get completely lost in the weeds.” Vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson takes the presidential oath of office in Dallas, Texas, two hours after Kennedy was shot. Photograph: Reuters Terry Bollea, meanwhile, comes off as very sympathetic and vulnerable in this tale. Sure, he was rich and famous. But he was also busted up after years of pro wrestling. His marriage went to hell, his wife ran off with a younger man and took most of his assets, his son was in prison, and when he went to his best friend's house for comfort and support, his best friend's wife essentially seduced him, and unknown to Bollea, the two of them were taping every encounter.

Conclusion

This argument is counterintuitive, but not obviously wrong. And it's a good heuristic that when an argument is easy to dismiss but turns out to be hard to argue with, you should default to strongly believing it. If nothing else, when you find out you're wrong you do so in a way that leaves you better-informed than the conformists. A highly readable overview of conspiracy theories: how we create them, why we fall for them, how to spot them, why the internet has empowered them hideously.

The prominence of Mexico and Cuba in the Kennedy books means that those countries are likely to be among the most frequently searched words in the latest archive release. And those of us who find The Tears of Autumn the most plausible explanation of the assassination will look with particular interest at any CIA documentation dealing with Diem’s death. Most contributions to the JFK book depository have fingered at least some of the figures in the Garrison-Prouty conspiracy theory. The most recurrent prime suspect has been Cuba, which had been infuriated by the Bay of Pigs operation – Kennedy’s failed attempt to depose the Castro dictatorship through a CIA-run invasion by Cuban exiles. The communist island also features in Oswald’s still-mysterious trip, weeks before the Kennedy shooting, to Mexico City, where he apparently hoped to secure a visa to defect to Cuba.The chapter that dealt heavily with COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories was both frustrating and satisfying for me. Frustrating because of my own experience working in an ICU during the first year and a half of the pandemic, satisfying because it validated what I experienced first-hand; frustrating, because this type of conspiracy theory is so cyclical and recognizably present whenever major infectious diseases appear; satisfying for the exact same reason.