On September 11, 2001, as part of a planned terrorist attack, commercial planes were hijacked and flown into each of the two towers at the World Trade Center in New York. A third plane was flown into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed after the passengers fought back. This, of course, was a huge world-affecting event. It is predictable that after such events, conspiracy theorists will come out of the woodwork and begin their anomaly hunting, breathing in the chaos that inevitably follows such events and spinning their sinister tales, largely out of their warped imagination. It is also not surprising that the theories that result, just like any pseudoscience, never truly die. They may fade to the fringe, but will not go away completely, waiting for a new generation to bamboozle. In the age of social media, everything also has a second and third life as a You Tube or Tik Tok video.

But still I found it interesting, after not hearing 911 conspiracy theories for years, to get an e-mail out of the blue promoting the same-old 911 conspiracy that the WTC towers fell due to planned demolition, not the impact of the commercial jets. The e-mail pointed to this recent video, by dedicated conspiracy theorist Jonathan Cole. The video has absolutely nothing new to say, but just recycles the same debunked line of argument.

The main idea is that experts and engineers cannot fully explain the sequence of events that led to the collapse of the towers and also explain exactly how the towers fell as they did. To do this Cole uses the standard conspiracy theory playbook – look for anomalies and then insert your preferred conspiracy theory into the apparent gap in knowledge that you open up. The unstated major premise of this argument is that experts should be able to explain, to an arbitrary level of detail, exactly how a complex, unique, and one-off event unfolded – and they should be able to do this from whatever evidence happens to be available.

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By now most people have heard that on Saturday there was a failed assassination attempt on candidate Trump at a rally. While it has only been a few days, preliminary investigation has found that 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, using a AR style rifle purchased legally by his father, acted alone in attempting to kill the former president. Again preliminarily, Crooks fits the typical profile of someone who would do this (young white male, loner, fond of guns) although his ideology is not clear at this time, and may be complicated. He is a registered Republican but has donated to liberal groups.

This is a huge event, which may alter the course of the campaign (although I am not convinced, given how galvanized public opinion is at this point). It was also an extremely close call, and we can’t help considering how world history can turn over a fraction of an inch. It’s unsettling. How people react in the moment says a lot about their psychology and the broader culture. Unsurprisingly, many people immediately reached for a conspiracy theory to help make sense of these events. Even among people I know personally, who are generally savvy and not conspiracy theorists, the possibility was immediately raised.

The conspiracy theories come into basic flavors – on the left the possibility was raised that this was a false flag operation in order to help Trump’s campaign. On the right, there were accusations that Biden was somehow responsible for the shooting, or even directly ordered it. Some comments are just political opportunism and spin, but the reaction goes way beyond that to blatant conspiracy theories, which exploded on the internet within minutes of the event.

It is a great example of motivated reasoning and the pitfalls of conspiracy thinking, so at least can serve as a teachable moment. First, at least anecdotally it is pretty blatant that these casual conspiracy theories align with the politics of the one proposing the conspiracy. In this sense, they essentially amount to wishful thinking. With blood still on his face, Trump was immediately seizing the event for its obvious political opportunity. The wishful thinking comes in when one imagines that it can all be taken away, and even reversed, if it is discovered that Trump staged the whole thing. On the other side, a desire for the event to have maximal impact, even be a death blow to Biden, leads to thinking that the assassination attempt can be tied to him. In either case, people then search for reasons to support their emotionally generated conspiracy theory.

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Most major cities in the US experienced a major fire sometime between 1860 and 1920. Actually these fires, called conflagrations, have been occurring since colonial times and into the middle of the 20th century, but saw a peak in the late 19th and early 20th century. Many cities experienced multiple conflagrations, and in the 19th century was responsible for more loss of property than any other phenomenon.

Why this is true is an interesting historical story. But in the world of social media, especially platforms like TikTok, history may seem irrelevant. I have been reviewing videos on TikTok and it’s been quite the journey. I find it interesting that each social media platform has its own subculture within the broader social media culture, which itself is a subculture of the broader culture. In any case, what I have found is that TikTok is a cesspool of confident ignorance. Obviously there is lots of kinds of content there, and some of it good, but there is also a high proportion of people just making stuff up and presenting it to the world as if it were some great realization or bit of wisdom.

I have been thinking quite a bit about what this phenomenon actually is. I think a large part of it may be generational as well as just part of the changing times brought to us by social media. My overall impression is that TikTok videos are primarily about performance. Everything in infotainment. I often find it difficult to determine if someone believes what they are saying or not, and am often left with the impression that even they don’t know. More precisely, they don’t care – whether or not something is true is irrelevant in the world of TikTok. Engagement matters. Performance matters. All ideas are equally valid.

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Ah, the categorization question again. This is an endless, but much needed, endeavor within human intellectual activity. We have the need to categorize things, if for no other reason than we need to communicate with each other about them. Often skeptics, like myself, talk about conspiracy theories or grand conspiracies. We also often define exactly what we mean by such terms, although not always exhaustively or definitively. It is too cumbersome to do so every single time we refer to such conspiracy theories. To some extent there is a cumulative aspect to discussions about such topics, either here or, for example, on my podcast. To some extent I expect regular readers or listeners to remember what has come before.

For blog posts I also tend to rely on links to previous articles for background, and I have little patience for those who cannot bother to click these links to answer their questions or before making accusations about not having properly defined a term, for example. I don’t expect people to have memorized my entire catalogue, but click the links that are obviously there to provide further background and explanation. Along those lines, I suspect I will be linking to this very article in all my future articles about conspiracy theories.

What is a grand conspiracy theory? First a bit more background, about categorization itself. There are two concepts I find most useful when thinking about categories – operational definition and defining characteristics. An operational definition is one that essentially is a list of inclusion and exclusion criteria, a formula, that if you follow, will determine if something fits within the category or not. It’s not a vague description or general concept – it is a specific list of criteria that can be followed “operationally”. This comes up a lot in medicine when defining a disease. For example, the operational definition of “essential hypertension” is persistent (three readings or more) systolic blood pressure over 130 or diastolic blood pressure over 80.

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It was recently revealed that the House subcommittee probing the origins of COVID-19 accidentally released a “trove” of documents related to their investigations. The documents include e-mails and internal communications among the scientists and experts who put together the first analysis of the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, published in Nature in March 2020. The documents reveal that there was a lot more discussion and credence given to the lab origin theory of SARS-CoV-2 in February 2020 than was reflected in the final published paper, which some see as evidence of a deliberate coverup. Further, because the documents are now publicly available, an army of online sleuths can pour over every word to find more evidence of something sinister.

Having looked through the reports myself, I don’t see anything unusual at all. Here is a typical exchange:

“I believe RaTG13 is from Yuanan, which is about as far away from Wuhan as you can be and still be in China,” Andersen wrote, referring to a virus that produced Covid-like symptoms in miners in 2013, a strain that was later stored and researched at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “What are the chances of finding a viruses that are 96% identical given that distance? Seems strange given how many SARS-like viruses we have in bats.”

Rambaut responded on Slack suggesting they back off such interrogation. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need irrefutable evidence. My position is that the natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

These are scientists discussing through various possibilities. Remember, this was February 2020 – we knew virtually nothing about the virus, the origin of COVID, the source of the virus (we are still not sure about the animal vector), or what was happening at the Wuhan lab. We have the genetic sequence of the virus, that was it. You’ll note they are still talking about bats, a theory that was later refuted.

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RFK Jr., who is now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is anti-vaccine. He will vehemently deny this, but I don’t buy it for a second. He is simply playing the, “I’m not anti-vaccine, I am pro-safe vaccine” gambit, which is disingenuous and always has been. We have been covering this topic for years, and David Gorski did a recent excellent review of this at SBM. You can’t claim not to be anti-vaccine, and then defend a long list of anti-vaccine tropes.

RFK has apparently been avoiding his views on vaccines on the campaign trail, but it always seems to come up. On the Joe Rogan podcast RFK found what he must have thought was a friendly environment, and felt free to repeat is claim that vaccine cause autism. This is a topic I have been covering for two decades – vaccines do not cause autism. But let’s do a quick review of this harmful claim.

This first appeared in the 1990, when the anti-vaccine movement hit upon the increase in autism diagnoses as a new tactic. They start with the assumption that all bad things that happen to children are caused by vaccines, so obviously they must also be causing the rise in autism. When Andrew Wakefield came out with his fraudulent and now retracted study claiming an association between the MMR vaccine and autism, he became an instant celebrity of the anti-vaccine movement. Trouble is – the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. Wakefield, it turns out, had a patent on an alternative vaccine and was trying to torpedo the competition. But the anti-vaccine movement does not let science, evidence, or basic logic get in their way. So they simply moved over to a vaccine ingredient, thimerosal, which is a mercury-based preservative.

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I know this wasn’t the purpose of sending up a €4.3bn satellite into geostationary orbit, but tweaking flat earthers is a fun side effect. European countries have collaborated on this project, having weather satellites in orbit since 1977. The latest iteration is Meteostat-12, which was launched in December and is now in orbit 36,000 km above the equator. This means it will have a constant view of Europe, where it takes high resolution pictures every 10 minutes. The goal is to provide a constant stream of weather information surrounding Europe. Two more satellites are planned, which will keep Europe in weather data through the 2040s.

If you believe the data coming back from Meteostat-12 it absolutely proves that the Earth is a globe. It also breaks a lot of the false claims of flat earthers. For example, because of the distance of the satellite it can take a picture of the entire Earth at once, without having to stitch multiple images together. In these pictures you can also clearly see the curvature of the Earth. The satellite is stationary so you don’t see the Earth rotating, but you do see day and night cycles, and you see weather patterns moving across the Earth. You are also seeing one hemisphere of the Earth. As evidence goes, this one is a complete slam-dunk.

But of course that initial caveat is the key – flat earthers will simply deny this evidence is real. But even there they should be squirming just a bit (if they weren’t already completely deluded). Flat earth conspiracy theories generally revolve around NASA, who, in their fevered imaginations, is an all-powerful organization that has been perpetrating the round earth hoax for, well, I guess longer than NASA has even been known to exist. However, the Meteostat-12 has exactly nothing to do with NASA. This is entirely a European project. This problem is easily “solved”, however – apparently NASA has control over the European Space Agency and all European governments as well.

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Some ideas never seem to die. There is something compelling about the narrative, perhaps because it fills some explanatory need. One of those narratives is that “they” have “the cure” to cancer but are keeping it hidden from the public in order to protect the profits that result from cancer treatment. I recently received the following e-mail (partly redacted):

“I read many articles by physicians like yourself that claim secrets cannot be kept about cancer cures.  I beg to differ.

Pharmaceutical firms require their associates to sign confidentiality agreements as a condition of employment.  If they breach it, it’s safe to assume that they risk grave consequences for doing so.

These companies could care less about sick people.  They only care about the health of their bottom line.  They make far more profit on lifetime treatments rather than one-shot cures.  After the patent expiration on a cure, the steady stream of revenue comes to a halt.

A cure eliminates the need for any new drug development unless the side effects are unpalatable.  I was even told as much by a retired employee of a pharmaceutical company.  She saw the private memos from their lobbyists.

In any case, the confidentiality contracts are why secrets are kept in the pharmaceutical industry.  It’s also why cancer cures can be kept hidden as it would be treated as a trade secret.  No one wants to be brought up on a felony charge of industrial espionage.  Nor do they wish to be sued for it by their former employer.

Ask yourself the following question: would you risk your family’s future under those circumstances?  No way!  If you signed one of those legal instruments, you would never divulge such information if you came across it.”

The notion that a pharmaceutical company could hide a cancer cure is, in my opinion, and from the perspective of an academic physician who has participated in clinical research for pharmaceutical companies, hopelessly naive. The belief comes partly from looking into a complex system from the outside, without any real idea how it actually works.  First let’s talk about the science and then we’ll turn to the logistics of the conspiracy itself.

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Grand conspiracy theories are a curious thing. What would lead someone to readily believe that the world is secretly run by evil supervillains? Belief in conspiracies correlates with feelings of helplessness, which suggests that some people would rather believe that an evil villain is secretly in control than the more prosaic reality that no one is in control and we live in a complex and chaotic universe.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a natural experiment to see how conspiracy belief reacted and spread. A recent study examines this phenomenon by tracking tweets and other social media posts relating to COVID conspiracy theories. Their primary method was to identify specific content type within the tweets and correlate that with how quickly and how far those tweets were shared across the network.

The researchers identified nine features of COVID-related conspiracy tweets: malicious purposes, secretive action, statement of belief, attempt at authentication (such as linking to a source), directive (asking the reader to take action), rhetorical question, who are the conspirators, methods of secrecy, and conditions under which the conspiracy theory is proposed (I got COVID from that 5G tower near my home). They also propose a breakdown of different types of conspiracies: conspiracy sub-narrative, issue specific, villain-based, and mega-conspiracy.

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Research into conspiracy beliefs reveals that there are basically two kinds of people who believe in conspiracies. One type is the dedicated conspiracy theorist. For them, the conspiracy is what they are interested in. They never met a conspiracy theory they didn’t like, and they believe pretty much all of them. It’s part of their cognitive makeup. Others, however, are opportunistic conspiracy theorists – they believe one or two conspiracies that align with their ideology or tribe. Rosie O-Donnell is a 9/11 truther probably because it aligns with her politics. (As and aside, I can’t help thinking of her “fire melt steel” quote every time I see someone burn their steel on Forged in Fire.)

We are now facing a new conspiracy that largely follows the opportunistic paradigm, the notion that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump due to massive coordinated voter fraud. Persistently, surveys show that about 70% of Republicans feel that Biden was not legitimately elected. This is still a minority of Americans, about 30% total, but it represents a substantial political movement. The reasons for the popularity of this conspiracy theory are complex and debated, including a general rise in conspiracy claims surrounding elections (on both sides), the closeness of the election, the fact of the “red mirage” that was later wiped away, and of course the fact that Trump himself has been vehemently promoting the “big lie”.

I would note, however, that belief in conspiracies itself is not increasing over time. A recent study shows that conspiracy belief is essentially flat over long periods of time. The stolen election is a blip, an anomaly caused by the factors I listed above. I also note that while doubt in election results has been increasing over the last two decades, the 2020 stolen election belief is of an entirely different order of magnitude. This is not just some whining on the fringe – this is now a core political movement.

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