Conspiracism is often seen as a sign of stupidity, gullibility, mental illness or personality dysfunction. But what if it is none of these things? Religious belief is not just tolerated but often respected and it is the general outlook for a large majority of the global population. How can we be so dismissive of people who think we didn’t land on the moon or that Frank Sinatra killed John F Kennedy while we are outnumbered by people who regularly have private conversations with an invisible man? Like religious believers, conspiracy theorists can escape their belief systems, can wake from their fevered dreams. So Charlie talked to some of them.

Brent Lee is that rarest of birds, an ex-conspiracist who is happy to use his real name. That’s because, after spending 15 years of his life deeply influenced by the tidal flux of global conspiracy theories, Brent now publicly campaigns against their power and seduction. He has a podcast at https://anchor.fm/somedarecallitconspiracy full of advice and resources about how to leave behind conspiracy-type thinking and to armour yourself with better information. His approach is one of message me, any time. Let’s talk. You really can’t say fairer or more open than that.  

Lee makes an important distinction. I wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, I was a conspiracist. A conspiracy theorist tends to believe in a small handful of conspiracy theories but a conspiracist believes that the world itself is a product of a grand over-arching conspiracy. There’s a difference.

Giving the lie to the idea that conspiracists are stupid, Lee is notably clever (and funny). None of those qualities prevented him from spending a decade and a half believing in the Illuminati and a global conspiracy to bring about a New World Order (common tropes of American conspiracism). I suppose it began around the millennium and was then accelerated by the 9/11 attacks in the US. I would download videos that were very persuasive about those attacks. They presented the information in a way you had never seen or heard before. That had a considerable impact. By 2005 I was on internet forums promoting the theories of David Icke (a British conspiracist, an ex sports broadcaster who claims amongst other things that he is the 2nd coming of Christ and that world governments are actually controlled by Lizard-people). It seems crazy now, but before you get to the mad stuff, there’s lots of material about deceitful government and social control that is much more credible

Lee’s journey progressed. Because conspiracism is like the mythical shark, it can’t stay still, it dies without forward momentum.

The 7 July 2005 Islamicist attacks on metro trains and a bus in London (popularly known as 7/7) which killed 52 people and injured 700 were an important moment in Lee’s thinking. 7/7 was my personal 9/11. It was so extreme, so devastating that I could not explain it to myself other than with conspiracy thinking. It was a false flag attack (where a government or organisation actually organises an attack against itself in order to promote a security crackdown). I couldn’t believe in what Americans call crisis actors (where the death tolls of mass shootings or terroristic attacks are false and victims are played by actors). I knew the deaths were real. I began to think that globalism’s violence had a ritualistic element, that the increasing victims of public violence were sacrifices to Satan.  

Then came social media which threw petrol on the fire of conspiracism, it was an almost perfect delivery system for such thought. I became increasingly active. I grew a public. By the time Obama was President, I was full-fledged. He was part of the Illuminati as much as George Bush. Left or right made no difference. At this point, Lee laughs loud and long. I was actually very unaware of the real politics of the time. What left wing or right wing actually meant. He says with rueful comedy. I could listen attentively to proper crazy people. It was a particular mindset. You could accept 70% or 80% of what they were saying and leave the nutty stuff aside.

It was really the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks that began to change my thinking. I had huge fights with friends who immediately decided they were hoaxes. The weird thing about those attacks is that they simply didn’t feel like hoaxes. They felt like what they were. There was an in your face quality that mitigated against finding an ulterior motive. There was nothing hidden about those motives.

I can’t really put my finger on how and why I came out of it. I definitely think conspiracists aren’t stupid, the way most people think. You need to know who you are dealing with. I think we’re reasonably intelligent. And we definitely care. I got into this in 2003, when Tony Blair and the dodgy dossier (incorrect and exaggerated intelligence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction) led us into war in Iraq by the side of the US. That was a time of deceit and great manipulation. And then I added bad information.

In recent years I’ve been trying to delve into why I thought all that. During Covid, quite a percentage of the population became conspiracist and I kept wondering, why don’t I believe this stuff now? People think of conspiracism as a fragile construct, like a house of cards. But its fragility is more like that of a jenga tower. You can remove block upon block but the thing can still stand. I logged off Facebook and just looked at the world. I think I realised for the first time that our votes count. The political upheavals of Donald Trump and Brexit were the opposite of a New World Order. They were chaos, dysfunction. They couldn’t be part of a One World Government. They were too crap.

Unlike the upfront Brent Lee, Billy is not Billy’s name. I’m not sure I’ve ever had to disguise someone’s identity as I’ve had to with Billy. Our Billy has an incredibly important and respectable job (best to think of it as a mix of brains-surgeon, airline-pilot and prime-minister). Miraculously, he agreed to speak to me and he gave me one of the most contentious interviews I’ve ever had (and I once interviewed and IRA murderer who I fucking HATED).

Billy is less of an ex-conspiracist than Lee because he still believes in some conspiracy theories, of his own devising. Intensely snobbish, remarkably brilliant, Billy pays no heed to the dunder-headed fantasies you find on the internet. He constructs his own, artisanal, fait à la maison, like mamma used to do. He knows we landed on the moon, that Oswald killed Kennedy (though he didn’t always). But Billy firmly believes that Emmanuel Macron has made some kind of deal with Vladimir Putin for an exit from the war in Ukraine. A son avis, that’s why French support for Ukraine is so very peculiar.  

I toyed with the nonsense stuff for a time. I was unconvinced that we knew all we could know about 9/11. I believed George Bush was capable of any stupidity or atrocity. If you were conservative and you despised Bush, you were particularly vulnerable to conspiracies about him. The left could just lament or mock his stupidity, we had to explain it.

I asked him if his spectacular (and extremely expensive) education had had any effect on his willingness to believe in conspiracy thinking. "Well, you might read better books and know more fonctionnaires but it doesn’t inoculate you or anything. I was completely taken in for a year or so by the bullshit documentaries made by teenage stoners after 9/11, Loose Change in particular. I hated myself for it but was intrigued when I reminded myself how incredibly enjoyable it had been. That shook me. I hadn’t noticed it before. How much actual fun it could be to believe nonsense."

"But the worst of it was when I dallied a little with disinformation about mass shootings in America. But the foundation of that was oddly logical. I simply couldn’t believe there would be one of these insane atrocities every three or four days. And SO many school shootings. My brain recoiled at it so I looked for some explanation of it. Only because I was forgetting how monumentally stupid and cruel people are."

Billy sounded like a grumpy mix of Voltaire and Bertrand Russell. We bickered for an hour or more. He shared his view of the EU which he viewed as an out in the open conspiracy that was so boring it prevented proper investigation - thus one of the most successful and sustainable conspiracies in history. Yet he infinitely preferred it to Brexit which he referred to as a paroxysm of moronic self-harm. And proof that British conservatives were too incompetent to conspire about anything.

At the end of our scratchy hour, I asked Billy why he had agreed to talk to me. He gave me one of the greatest replies I’ve ever heard, and one of the most revealing. If there is a character or emotional key to what brings people to conspiracy, it might lie somewhere here, in its cussedness, its inconvenient wilfulness. For, in answer to why he agreed to speak to me, Billy said this, "Well, I don’t like you very much. I find you flip and annoying. So I thought it might be interesting."

I loved this, of course. But I can’t help thinking that it explains really quite a lot.

Robert McLiam Wilson (Charlie Hebdo)