In the aftermath, Donald Trump was impeached by House of Representatives, but acquitted by the Senate. The social media companies were not so lenient. The 45th President of the United States was de-platformed by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

The chaotic end of Trump’s presidency provided a pretext, though, for a much wider purge of anything deemed to fall under the category of conspiracy theory or misinformation. This week the Republican congresswoman, Majorie Taylor Greene, had her Twitter account permanently suspended; and Joe Rogan who has had content removed by YouTube.  

The attack on conspiracy theory — and the power of the elites to define it as such — is a dangerous one. And not just because of the threat it poses to free speech and the growing influence of big tech that it points out. It’s also because conspiracy theories are an understandable — and sometimes useful — response to a confusing world. To repress this very human instinct risks doing more harm than good.

That’s not to say that this mode of thought is never pathological. But if the conspiracy theorist is obsessive or hateful, the problem is the obsession and the hate — vices which can apply to any belief system.

The trouble is, many conspiracies and cover-ups do exist. And they’d never be uncovered if no one theorised about them. 

So as well as de-pathologising conspiracy theories as a concept, we need to understand conspiracy theorists as a group of people. Most of them are quite ordinary. And, according to recent UK-based research from Ipsos, there are a lot of them. Asked about three conspiracy theories randomly assigned from a list of 11, half the people surveyed considered at least one theory to be “plausible”, with 20% endorsing two or three. 

Therefore, if you want to drive conspiratorial thinking out of society, you’re up against millions of your fellow citizens— not just a few fanatics. Of course, one could argue that’s all the more cause for a crackdown. How can we tolerate a situation in which whole swathes of the population believe in crazy stuff? Except that most of them don’t believe it. Not really. 

For a start, there’s a huge variation in the extent to which different conspiracy theories are accepted. The theory considered the most plausible — with 40% of those asked agreeing — was that “Princess Diana’s death in a car crash was not accidental”. In contrast, the notion that “the COVID-19 vaccine is a cover for implanting traceable microchips” got the thumbs up from just 4% of respondents and the allegation that “5G mobile phone towers are responsible for the spread of COVID-19” a mere 2%.

What do people mean when they say that they find a conspiracy theory plausible, though? What do the Diana conspiracy theorists truly believe? That she was literally assassinated? In some cases, yes. But for most of the 40% it’s probably something much less extreme — like blaming the media for hounding the princess at every turn. 

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The researchers found “a high overlap” between those who consider a conspiracy theory plausible and those who consider it “not strictly accurate but a reasonable challenge to the official explanation”, which is telling. It’s not so much that they believe the conspiracy, but that they’re using it to express their doubts about the institutions that tell us what we ought to believe.

Ipsos asked about trust in various kinds of institutional authority. While more than 40% of respondents considered media and political institutions to be “untrustworthy”, the corresponding figures for scientific and public health organisations were much lower — just 3% and 6%. It’s clearly no coincidence that the Covid conspiracy theories had the least public support.  

The lesson here is that those in authority would do better to make themselves more worthy of trust than to wage epistemic war on the public. For most people who indulge in them, conspiracy theories are not about dogmatism, but uncertainty.

As human beings, doubt comes naturally to us. Rational analysis may persuade us to think a certain way about a situation, but inevitably we’ll have irrational thoughts about it too — including secret fears and sneaking suspicions. And why not? Until a situation becomes clear it pays to have multiple, perhaps contradictory, ideas about it. Even if our gut reactions prove unfounded, we’re bound to have them anyway. This isn’t to say that we should allow the emotional, instinctual side of our nature to dominate, but to repress it completely would be just as unhealthy. 

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I’d argue that the equivalent applies at a collective level. Though a society doesn’t have a mind like a person does, it does have what Emile Durkheim called a “collective consciousness” composed of a shared set of understandings. Not everyone thinks the same thoughts about everything, of course — a non-totalitarian society makes room for multiple interpretations of reality. Nevertheless, through mechanisms such as democratic elections or the price setting function of the market place, decisions can be collectively arrived at. 

Conspiracies theories are part of this bubbling mix of interpretations. At the social level, they’re equivalent to the stray thoughts, nagging doubts, daydreams and nightmares that individuals experience. As such, they need to be talked about, not repressed — taken seriously, if not always literally.

They might, after all, turn out to be true. Consider the origin of the Covid pandemic. The idea that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory was once repudiated as delusional, not to say xenophobic. Fortunately, there were some investigators willing to question the established view. Though not yet proven, the lab leak hypothesis is now taken seriously. At the very least, it has focused much-needed attention on the perils posed by high-risk research.

Just because conspiracy theories aren’t true, that doesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose. There’s no conspiracy theory — no matter how obscure — that doesn’t speak to some unmet need to make sense of the world. 

A deliberately silly example is the bizarre claim that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike. What possible psychological need might that satisfy? Well, how about the desire to comprehend the astonishing pace of cultural change over the course of the Sixties? Like the Beatles themselves, the world looked completely different at end of the decade from how it did at the beginning. I don’t think that McCartney’s supposed death and substitution provides any sort of useful explanation, but it does reduce a question of unfathomable complexity to a human scale. 

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The same psychological forces are at work in Covid conspiracy theories. Take the notion that vaccinations are being used to inject us with tracking technology. On one level it’s obvious nonsense, but on another it’s symbolic of the vastly expanded capacity of the state to monitor and control our movements. Even if we believe that these measures were justified, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also be horrified by what’s been done to us. A necessary evil is still an evil. 

Our collective sense of horror needs an outlet. Conventional politics has done a poor job of providing one — as has the mainstream media. So, instead, the trauma bubbles to the surface in the form of conspiracy theories. Which is why I worry about the actions of the social media companies. Who are they to edit the collective consciousness?

They may imagine that they’re shutting down opportunities for charlatans and demagogues. But what I fear they’re really doing is closing off a safety valve.

In a clip that’s been viewed more that 10 million times, O’Brien interviews Ross, whose Advance New Zealand Party failed to secure enough votes to win a single parliamentary seat in the recent general election — although “interview” isn’t quite the right word for what happens. Maybe what I mean is “humiliate”.

She starts by calling him a “loser”. He smiles gamely. Then O’Brien asks if he has any regrets; he rattles off a boilerplate answer praising the people he worked with, and she bowls straight back in. “Do you want to have another crack at answering that?” she says, “Because I just asked you if you have any regrets. You’ve just been part of a political movement which has been peddling misinformation during the election campaign. Do you have any regrets?”

Advance New Zealand are often referred to as an alt-right party, which doesn’t quite convey its full bizarreness as a political entity. For the 2020 election, Advance formed an alliance with the Public Party, which is a kind of grab-bag of the conspiracist and crankish. Imagine someone scraping all the maddest bits from the carcass of Facebook — a reclaimed slurry of 5G alarmism, anti-vax propaganda and scaremongering about electromagnets — and turning it into a manifesto. That, very roughly, is the Public Party.

One of the group’s candidates was a self-proclaimed psychic who withdrew from the race 24 hours after announcing her candidacy, presumably due to unforeseen circumstances. And that’s the most benign end of the lunacy that Ross bound himself to by allying the two parties, since the Public Party is also an avid promoter of covid conspiracies, something Advance New Zealand were happy to go along with. During the campaign, the New Zealand Advertising Standards authority upheld a complaint against Advance for spreading misinformation about coronavirus; Facebook shut down the party’s page for the same reason.

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That’s why O’Brien went in hard on Ross with her questioning. When he tries to defend himself, she slaps him down, saying: “You know exactly what you were doing; you were whipping up fear and hysteria among vulnerable communities.” When he ventures something dubious-sounding about death rates, she talks clean over him: “No, no, no, I do not want to hear any of that rubbish.” At the end, after he’s manifestly failed to salvage any dignity from the encounter, she terminates the interview with a tart, “You’re dreaming, mate.”

New Zealand apparently already has a word for this: Ross had been Tova’d. But for most of the rest of the world this was new, delightful, glorious. Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept called it “an absolute masterclass”. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen said it was “the way it should be done”. Such fun! Well here I am, the killjoy who says you don’t need a third Negroni and that the hot bartender encouraging you to order it probably doesn’t really fancy you anyway.

It is fun — but so what? O’Brien says herself that Ross’s career is over, and it’s highly unlikely that most of the people fawning over her interview style had ever heard of her victim before this moment. He was a nonentity when he walked onto her set: now he’s just a nonentity that everyone has heard of. Which I guess makes him… an entity, of sorts?

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And if the interview didn’t, after all, take down a worthy foe, what did it achieve? O’Brien slammed Ross for misleading “vulnerable communities”, but it’s highly unlikely that anyone who believed his nonsense was going to be dissuaded from it by watching this encounter. Yes, there’s a simple principle of right and wrong, truth and falsehood here — but simplicity is exactly the problem with the way a lot of issues are handled by the media.

Carve any subject down to its barest conflicts, and you won’t help people find enlightenment and resolution. Instead, you’ll make them feel attacked, embattled, inflexible. In a recent piece Amanda Ripley warned of the dangers of journalism that goes in pursuit of simplicity; and which has, unfortunately, the effect of making everyone more committed to the certainties they’ve already chosen. Instead, she says, they should look for complexity, arguing that “Complexity counters this craving, restoring the cracks and inconsistencies that had been air-brushed out of the picture. It’s less comforting, yes. But it’s also more interesting — and true.”

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Perhaps it doesn’t matter very much in the case of Ross. Advance got less than 1% of the vote, so you can hardly think of him as the representative of New Zealand’s Covid-denying left-behinds. More worrying is the idea that O’Brien is some kind of role model for journalists — “the way it should be done”. What she offers is the stupefaction of a cheap pleasure, which is fine once in a while, but nothing you can live on. Turn this approach on an actually popular populist, rather than a sadsack failure content to soak up the last moments of his dead career, and you’d quickly have a polarised nightmare.

Rather than attack people as liars or presume their bad faith, Ripley suggests journalists should look for ways to open conversations: instead of telling people what they think, ask them about why they believe the things they do. Often, the things that people seem to be at odds over are just proxies for underlying issues; and sometimes, those underlying issues are more tractable than you ever expected.

It’s even possible that the questioner could be the one to change their mind about something. A world where you might be the dumbass after all isn’t very reassuring, but it’s a lot more plausible than one where you’re only ever right.

The guessing game began. Their clothes didn’t scream Socialist Worker Party. So what were they protesting? Who were these children, and what did they need saving from? The Bedroom Tax? Black Lives Not Mattering? Turkey Twizzlers?

As we crowded into Trafalgar Square the answer became obvious: satanic paedophile cults.

There, a crowd of true believers were gathering for the grand jamboree of dissent that was the Unite For Freedom Rally. I had accidentally stumbled into the conspiracy theory motherlode. There were many more QAnon posters — the particular creed that these two were devoted to. But there were also posters that advertised Bill Gates’s largely unrelated attempts to depopulate the West. Then the vaguely related but far more established anti-vaxxers. Then the ultra-modern 5G types. A man in a cut-out face visor held a garish folk art poster with more orthodox anti-Semitic Rothschild tropes, even as more milquetoast libertarians used their posters to assert only that “masks are muzzles” and “new normal = new fascism”. Finally, there was a single placard, perhaps designed to unite these disparate sub-tribes under a single belief system. It said only: “SCAM”.

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The Unite For Freedom Rally had been advertised online as aiming for ‘an end to Government lies and the restoration of all freedoms’, but its remit went far wider than that, because its organiser was Kate Shemirani.

In recent weeks, Shemirani has emerged as the leader of Britain’s anti-Covid conspiracists. The quickest way into her belief system is to note that she refused chemotherapy for breast cancer on the advice of a husband who thought 9/11 was an inside job, then embarked on: “a fat-free, salt-free, sugar-free vegan regime including high doses of vitamins as well as 13 juices a day, five coffee enemas and mistletoe injected into her stomach”. Anti-vax is her strong suit, but you name it and Shemirani will believe it.

So why was she teaming up with Dolores Cahill? Cahill is a doctor and a professor from University College Dublin. She’s a world expert in biomarker discovery and diagnostics; you can’t say that about people who squirt mistletoe into their tummies.

Cahill was one of the early speakers. She believes we’ve over-egged the lethality of coronavirus (perfectly reasonable), and also that vaccines carry safety risks (debatable, but she has the scientific chops to make a case). Just upstream of her, the day’s first speaker quoted nothing more noxious than Karol Sikora and Carl Heneghan, putting a mainstream case that anyone locked down with Toby Young would know only too well.

Yet just 20 minutes later David Icke was onstage, joining all imaginable dots as he hammered his emetic catchphrase: “People of England get off your knees, the lion sleeps no more.”

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Many conspiracy theories are already negations of other conspiracy theories. Is it a necessary or merely a sufficient condition to believe that Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the Western world, in order to believe that a New Jersey pizza parlour is a global hub for the dial-out molestation of children?

If Dolores Cahill believes that vaccines containing aluminium risk long-term toxicity if injected intra-muscularly, how does this square with Shemirani’s view: that they are full of microchips bearing ‘Darpa thought-monitoring agents’? Curiously, no one seemed interested in debating anyone else’s view. The crowd cheered everything.

‘Sharing a platform’ is a peculiar modern fallacy — a kind of lo-res conspiracy theory in itself about how ‘wings’ in politics work. But there’s also something quite strange about the bland pax that prevails here. In the world of deep belief, it seems all are welcome, more belief is always better, and nothing is ever contradictory so long as it pushes against power. It’s like one of those pan-faith conferences beloved of CofE bishops and Prince Charles. I do Buddha. You do Allah. They do Yoga. But — hey man — we all worship the same spiritual dimension.

Are conspiracy theories on the Left or on the Right of politics? Only their targets give it away. Inside the horseshoe, a hatred of the shadowy ‘Elites’ invokes both a libertarian desire to live freely and a leftist desire to topple power hierarchies. The sleight of hand that resolves the paradox is that no one is ever required to define what comes after the Elites are toppled.

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One reason for the present boom times for the likes of Shemirani is an age-old one: in times of trial we turn to faith. Another is more specific: the spectrum between conspiracy and truth is as blurred as it’s ever been.

The present moment seems designed to test the premise that Michel Foucault and R.D. Laing tried to write into our culture: that madness itself is a social construct, and a rational response to an insane society. Glaring contradictions in plain view are a force multiplier to the paranoid. In normal times, those contradictions are hidden by the sheer imposing gloss of an advanced society.

Yet anyone who has participated in the past few weeks of British life will be able to stick at least one finger in the gap between appearance and reality. Is it terribly surprising that some will also give it a wiggle?

Every day we are being asked to participate in what amounts to hygiene theatre. Never mind the rule of six, witness the contradiction between wearing masks in the queue for your coffee, and not when sat down right next to the queue. Witness the perspex shield between you and the barista. Then watch agog as the same server calmly places a receipt into your hand. It only takes a few seconds of googling to learn that a covid particle is 0.125 microns across, while a high-end N95 mask protects only against particles 3 microns or bigger. The size difference between a football and a goal.

Those who study conspiracy theories point out that they are seldom based on nothing. Normally, a kernel of jarring truth is exagerrated, kneaded, worked on. In the world of QAnon, that process of growing the dough even has a name: ‘baking’.

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It’s not much of a conspiracy to say that day-to-day, we are often asked to practise folk epidemiology to avoid frightening the horses. My mask doesn’t so much protect you as it protects some semi-imagined other who would be too scared to go onto a packed tube carriage without an implement that only months ago the WHO said didn’t work.

So where exactly is line between frightened horses and the ‘scared sheeple’ prominent on so many Unite For Freedom posters? The paranoid already see life as one big psyops game. In the Covid age, government sees it as one big Nudge Unit. Is that much of a difference?

Some of the sheer arbitrariness involved in Covid rules is unavoidable. Other bits are merely the voice of a government that has learned to speak in an infantilising tone. But both implicitly force the mainstream to cede ground to the nutters, to reveal that they may have some small, limited point. Around that tiny reef of truth, the barnacles of Q and Anti-Vax and Gates and 5G are attaching themselves.

After the Iraq War, the fallout from Alastair Campbell’s 45 minute dossier disintegrated our belief in what ‘they’ were telling us as foreign policy. Covid is rapidly turning into a home front version. The bourgeois conspiracy Iraq unleashed: “It’s all about oil”, is not too far from the Covid libertarian one: “It’s all about control.” Both feed more feral versions: “It’s all about Israel,” and “It’s all about mind control.”

This week, the Australian state of Victoria witnessed yet another extraordinary act of police overreach: footage of cops stomping on a mentally ill man’s head, after running him down in their car, for what seems to be little more than the crime of breaking curfew.

Rather than shrink in shame, the state’s premier, Dan Andrews, used his news conference to justify their actions with a shrug. “Much of this, sorry, all of it can be avoided,” he told the press, “if people don’t protest.” What paranoia is unjustified in the face of Andrews’ statement? What part of V For Vendetta is still science fiction? Who’s the real nutter here?

Between Il Duce Dan in the real world, and the vile fantasies of QAnon online: that’s the narrow ledge of sanity on which we must all perch.

We’ve never met, but we do have a connection. We’ve both lived in the same house on Heathbank Road in Stockport. The Sweets moved out in 1983; you moved in about three years later when you started working at BBC Manchester. Coincidence? Well, yes. Even David Icke would have trouble drawing a sinister line between those two dots. But it’s a coincidence that means whenever I clock you on the telly, I think of my mum and dad.

I thought of them this week, when I saw you on ITV, sharing the contents of your inquiring mind. I found myself remembering a taxi ride I took with my mum in September 2017. We were going to visit my dad after his cancer operation, and the driver wanted to tell us why he’d voted for Brexit. The EU, he said, was a secret plot to re-establish Nazi rule across the continent, and it had to be stopped. As you might appreciate, this wasn’t what either me or my mum wanted to hear at this moment. After we came back from the hospital I rang the cab firm to ask them never to send that driver to us again — rather, I suppose, as hundreds of people rang your employer this week to complain about you.

Let’s remind ourselves of what happened, shall we? On the Easter Monday edition of This Morning, your reporter Alice Beer was debunking one of the more exotic problems of the current crisis — the spate of attacks on 5G phone masts, carried out, it would seem, by people who believe them to be exacerbating or even facilitating the spread of Covid-19. You agreed emphatically with Alice, so I think we can assert that you don’t really believe that a virus can be transferred from bats to humans via radio waves. But the caveat you issued did leave some room for doubt. “What I don’t accept,” you said, doing that stern look I think you may have copied from Huw Edwards, “is mainstream media immediately slapping that down as not true when they don’t know it’s not true … it’s very easy to say it is not true because it suits the state narrative.”

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I detect several problems here. The first is the idea that there is any measurable distance between you and the mainstream media. Eamonn, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are the mainstream media. You are to television what the individually-wrapped Weetabix is to a hotel breakfast bar — always present, whether requested or not, and rarely the subject of a strong opinion.

The second problem resides in that little cluster of negatives with which you adumbrate your position on the limits of knowledge. There are, I suppose, an infinite number of things that we don’t know are not true. We don’t know, for instance, that you are not a homunculus operated by a highly-trained owl, though we would be suspicious of anybody who suggested this was a question that merited investigation. It’s harder, however, to push a proposition about corona and the phone signal into this category — or, indeed, any proposition about the health dangers of 5G — because, unlike the possibility that you are a bird-driven human simulacrum, science has already chewed this over very thoroughly, and found no evidence that any such dangers exist.

So I wonder why you said this? Perhaps you read a May 2019 piece in the Daily Mail, quoting the research of the Californian academic who described 5G as a “massive public health experiment”. (But, not, I’d guess, the subsequent article in Scientific American that concluded that his work “pivots on fringe views and fatally flawed conjecture, attempting to circumvent scientific consensus with scaremongering.”) Maybe you’ve been monitoring the Twitter feed of Piers Corbyn, the meteorologist brother of the former Labour leader, through which he shares his view that Bill Gates and George Soros have faked the corona pandemic as part of their bid to surveil the world’s population with 5G and cull it with vaccines.

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Or maybe you’ve been streaming the 5G-themed fireside chats hosted by the American writer Naomi Wolf, in which she declares that “there’s almost no objective reporting in mainstream media about the real dangers of 5G,” and warns that “your DNA changes to a precancerous condition when you’re around these cell towers”. Her own reporting in this field includes publishing a link to an approving account of a man named Mark Steele, who is convinced that Gateshead council is poisoning its electorate with 5G transmitters hidden inside the streetlamps. (No such transmitters exist.) Dr Wolf also believes that 5G may be responsible for the headaches and tinnitus suffered by her neighbours in New York. “Everybody who lives in my apartment [block],” she says, “is very much more uncomfortable.” I suppose that’s one explanation.

Conspiracist thinking thrives in anxious times. Corona has made it bloom like mould on toast. The Times caught two British academics from Russell Group universities sharing speculations that the virus is a biological weapon. A journalist for Metro announced that he’d submitted an FOI request to St Thomas’s NHS Trust, suspicious that Boris Johnson had somehow faked his stay in the intensive care unit. (“The PR timing,” tweeted Marcus J Ball, “is just too perfect.”) London Live, the cable television station associated with George Osborne’s London Evening Standard, made the bizarre editorial decision to air an 105-minute interview with David Icke, in which the former Coventry City goalkeeper was permitted to serve a Covid-scented platter of half-digested matter from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I’ll throw you a bone, here, Eamonn. Intelligent people are not free from these predilections. The Nobel prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis doubts the link between HIV and Aids and strongly suspects that he was once abducted by extraterrestrial racoons. So your willingness to leave a space for conspiracy theories on This Morning does not necessarily mean that you are an idiot. And such an instinct may not always be misguided. Conspiracist thinking can sometimes be virtuous. Ask Bob Woodward, who investigated Watergate, or Chris Mullin, who led the campaign to prove the innocence of the Birmingham Six.

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Those who engage in it, however, need to protect themselves against its corrupting effects. The philosopher Quassim Cassam is, I think, our wisest writer on this matter. I’d heartily recommend his work to you. He points out that conspiracy theories can reduce our confidence in knowledge that there is no good reason to doubt. That Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, for instance, is a bare historical fact. But if you swim in the discourse that claims otherwise, you may find yourself describing the history of the Apollo missions as, let’s say, a “state narrative”.

Likewise, there is no reasonable evidence that the 5G phone signal carries a health risk. But there is a discourse that asserts the opposite — based on unsound extrapolations from weak studies, which have been amplified into certitudes by unreliable commentators. Now, like the Moon landings, George Soros, Zionism, Pizzagate and Atlantis, 5G has entered the repertoire of things that conspiracy theorists like to talk about — and will go on talking about until, I suspect, the arrival of 6G.

On Tuesday, as ITV totted up the complaints, you issued a statement suggesting that your remarks had been misunderstood. You reiterated your rejection of any link between Covid-19 and 5G, but then, astonishingly, repeated your original error. “Many people,” you said, “are rightly concerned and are looking for answers.” Well, there are people think that the Rothschilds were responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, and we would know what to think of a broadcaster who thought such a view worth airing.

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Cassam’s book, Vices of the Mind (2019), notes that psychologists have tended to see conspiracist thinking as a problem of mindset. He prefers to regard it as an epistemic vice. A form of intellectual masturbation. And perhaps, if we think of it in this way, it might help to reduce its dangerous allure. So those inclined to regard you as the Noam Chomsky of ITV Daytime, critiquing the MSM between the Danone adverts, might be better simply to think of you as a man who gave into a weakness and discharged something unwelcome in front of his work colleagues.

Nobody would judge you for doing this at home and in private. Visit all the websites you please. Feel free to watch terms such as #soros and #EU and #fourthreich tumble from the hashtag tombola of Piers Corbyn’s twitter feed. And if you want to chat with other people online who are into this kind of stuff, then fine, it’s a free country. But for shame, Eamonn, for shame, not on the This Morning sofa. Not with your wife sitting next to you, and my mum and dad watching at home.

All the best, Matthew