2025’s Conspiracies and Theories

I’ve ne'er liked the full term “ confederacy theory.” In pop usage, it assumes the thing signified must be false, whereas people do conspire, and it is reasonable to devise theories about their schemes. But I can’t think of a better term to describe the bizarre hypotheses that emanate from almost every news event of national or international significance.

My fervent hope is that historians a century from now will view 2025 as the year when America’s mania for conspiracy theories reached its height. It isn’t crazy to think that the podcaster Candace Owens, whose recent hits include the suggestion that the Mossad killed Charlie Kirk, has taken her act as far as it can go. On the other hand, things can always get worse, as I was reminded last week by a line in Chris Whipple’s profile of Susie Wiles in Vanity Fair. The White House chief of staff stated, on the record, that Vice President JD Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”

The belief that dark forces lie behind unwelcome circumstances, and concomitantly that nobody sees these forces but oneself and perhaps a few others, is as old as politics. In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, Saul, the first king of Israel, convinces himself that his son Jonathan is plotting a coup with David. Saul ignores all contrary evidence and bends the rest to fit his theory; his delusion propels him to order the murder of an entire village of priests and their families. It is among the saddest passages in the Bible.

American political history has produced far fewer actual conspirators than theories about who they might be: Freemasons, Catholics, Jews. Communists could join that list, provided an acknowledgment that some of them really did conspire to overthrow the U.S. Government, their activities encouraged and funded by the Soviet Union.

Today’s conspiracy-seeking mindset was born on Sept. 11, 2001. The “9/11 truther” believes the terrorist attacks of that day were either perpetrated or allowed to happen by the U.S. Government. Some of the zanier, more niche conspiracy theories skew rightward; 9/11 trutherism skews leftward, its original purpose having been to accuse the George W. Bush administration of perpetrating the attacks to justify war. In December 2003, Howard Dean, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, told an interviewer that “the most interesting theory that I’ve heard so far, which is nothing more than a theory,” was that President Bush “was warned ahead of time by the Saudis.”

The myth has grown that Mr. Dean lost the 2004 primary because of a scream he let out a few weeks later. In fact, he belted the scream during a campaign event after a loss to John Kerry in Iowa, and he lost the Iowa caucuses (such is my surmise) because voters heard about his 9/11 theory and concluded he was a kook.

I doubt his kookery would have cost Mr. Dean in 2025. Conspiracy theories proliferate like weeds in an untended garden, their spread aided by the failure and corruption of formerly trusted institutions, and by the ease with which anybody with a username can circulate them. I’m convinced that many people embrace conspiracy theories as a form of entertainment. QAnon, which posits a secret scheme, coordinated from inside the Trump White House, to expose a “deep state”-run child sex-trafficking ring, is Dungeons & Dragons for the 21st century.

Do purveyors of the claim that Damar Hamlin died from a Covid vaccine—his expiration now covered up by a body double playing safety for the Buffalo Bills—believe what they say? Maybe not entirely, but the thought offers a thrill. An acquaintance of mine holds the firm conviction that at least three former first ladies of the United States were men. Often have I recalled the scene in John Buchan’s spy thriller “The 39 Steps” when the protagonist, Richard Hannay, tells his true but unlikely story to an innkeeper. To Hannay’s surprise, the man believes him. “I believe everything out of the common,” says the innkeeper. “The only thing to distrust is the normal.”

If the weirder theories bubble up from the right, the more plausible-sounding and thus consequential ones prevail on the left. That Israel is perpetrating a “genocide” in Gaza is a preposterous lie, easily disprovable to anyone not determined to believe it, but a shocking number of academics, intellectuals, Hollywood actors and Democratic politicians accept the claim without qualm. Belief in a right-wing conspiracy to suppress the black and Latino vote is gospel to many liberals—not least Barack Obama—though the evidence leads overwhelmingly in the other direction. I am not the first to note that the Russia “collusion” investigation, which throttled the first Trump administration and dominated headlines for more than two years, was based, literally, on a conspiracy theory.

The trouble with most theories about conspiratorial schemes—the weird ones of 4chan and the specious ones of the faculty lounges—is that they arise from motivated reasoning. Their purveyors are interested in some other point and therefore have no interest in reason. Mr. Trump’s enemies wanted to get him, and Russia was the nearest thing to hand. That Charlie Kirk was murdered was only an excuse for the aforementioned Ms. Owens to indict the Jews.

Such disingenuousness makes argument impossible, but theorists of the non-Jew-hating sort might ponder two points in 2026. For the bigger, darker conspiracies to work, their participants require a) limitless competence to carry them out, and b) the ability to keep a secret. When, in a long history of folly and shame, has mankind ever exhibited these qualities?

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