Once rock solid, the line between opinion and conspiracy now seems threadbare. The internet and social media appear to have shifted conspiracy theories from weird but seldom seen fringe groups to the mainstream.
US president Donald Trump gave the shift impetus. The combination of Trump and the pandemic was a huge injection of steroids for conspiracy theorists. This raises the question: if a conspiracy theory becomes the dominant mainstream theory, is it still a conspiracy?
Unesco defines a conspiracy theory as “the belief that events are being secretly manipulated by powerful forces with negative intent”. So, according to Unesco, conspiracy theories involve an imagined group of conspirators colluding in a secret plot.
But if a theory is dominant, does the crucial secrecy aspect fall away? And if it’s no longer secret and is being spread by powerful forces, is it just another opinion, right or wrong?
Unesco warns that conspiracy theories can be found almost everywhere, “even where you would least expect them”.
I think I know what the UN body is alluding to. Almost daily, if I’m reading good stuff or come across interesting situations, a thought or opinion will slowly form. But now, because there is so much of it around, I frequently find myself wondering if that thought/opinion is in fact the beginning of a conspiracy theory.
Apart from being EU-critical — on the grounds that it is run on a fundamentally antidemocratic basis — most of my opinions are what I’d consider mainstream. For instance, I don’t think Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum run the world; powerful, time-poor businesspeople gather at the WEF in Davos each year because it makes meeting their peers so much easier. I’m agnostic on the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy as well as Princess Diana.
Kennedy is a vaccine sceptic, so as far as the US mainstream media is concerned, essentially a conspiracy theorist who need not be taken seriously
I would prefer not to be tagged a conspiracy theorist; it sucks all the oxygen out of a debate. However, I now feel that worse than being labelled a conspiracy theorist would be the implicit dishonesty of not admitting to a growing dollop of Covid-vaccine scepticism; not quite in the antivaxxer league but … And not so sceptical that I might not push myself towards the top of the vaccine queue if another pandemic was unleashed on the world.
But right now, three Covid vaccines later and never having succumbed to the nightmare virus, I’m wondering how necessary they were. I’m told to read “the science”. I read as much as I can, and it’s distressingly inconclusive.
Even my scientific friend, who insists on references to double-blind peer-reviewed analysis before he’ll listen to anything, has doubts about the Covid vaccine. It was a scary three years and almost everyone was learning as they went along. Remarkably, with the benefit of a little hindsight, it’s still impossible to know what did and did not work. Trump’s bleach didn’t. Which is why we should be interrogating everything with an open mind.
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of getting to Robert Kennedy Jr’s decision to run for the Democratic nomination for next year’s US presidential election. Kennedy, an environmental litigator, is the son of Robert, who was assassinated in 1968, and the nephew of John, assassinated in 1963.
I came across news of his plan in early May through the website UnHerd, which carried a fascinating interview with Kennedy. It covered his views on the environment, the Russia-Ukraine war, corporate power and cultural issues. They were considered, insightful and thought-provoking.
But as far as the US mainstream media is concerned, Kennedy is deemed a threat to President Joe Biden, so all you need to know about him is his view on vaccinations. He is a vaccine sceptic, so, as the mainstream media sees it, essentially a conspiracy theorist who need not be taken seriously. Judging by the polls, it seems about 20% of Democrats are in fact taking him seriously.
Even before Covid, Kennedy was concerned about some vaccines and sought explanations for dramatic increases in childhood allergies, autism and other health issues.
As hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman said recently, science is an unending search for the truth and what was once deemed settled science is often revised. Kennedy has raised good questions that have not been adequately answered, says Ackman. “I think we would all greatly benefit by dropping the words ‘conspiracy theory’ from our lexicon and opening our minds to the possibility of improbable alternative explanations.”
Of course, the sad thing is that if Kennedy continues to poll well, he could meet the same tragic end as his father and uncle. Now that is a conspiracy theory in the making.
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