Periodically, one of these tropes would be taken off the shelf and turned into a book, film or documentary: paranoia as entertainment, exemplified by the X-Files’ long run on TV in the 1990s. As for real connoisseurs, there was always David Icke: I could never look at the Queen in quite the same way after he revealed that she was actually a shape-shifting alien lizard whose favorite tipple was human blood.

Today’s conspiracy theories, however, are much less entertaining. Things started to change with the notion that 9/11 was an inside job. This idea attracted some high-profile popularisers who believed that Bush was a moron but nevertheless able to pull off a “false flag” operation of diabolical complexity; it is still popular with many tinfoil hat wearers to this day.

Then, around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, the “New World Order” surged in popularity as people such as Alex Jones railed against the plot to create a totalitarian, One World government. Jones, meanwhile, rose from the status of Austin-area eccentric who I used to watch on public access TV, to a globally infamous figure pumping out misinformation at an incredible rate via his Infowars site and social channels.

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Eventually, Jones’s mouth got him into serious trouble, so we don’t hear from him as much these days. But conspiracy theories continue to proliferate. A few weeks back, I learned that something was afoot with the US postal service that could jeopardise the election. That was after I discovered that the national coin shortage was a ploy to eliminate cash so that I could more easily be tracked by the government and/or big business. Nothing is accidental or a result of incompetence in the world of conspiracy theorists: always there is a hidden hand moving the pieces on the board.

But these are small conspiracies compared to “QAnon”, which posits that Donald Trump is civilisation’s only defence against a cabal of paedos, Satanists and baby-eating Democrats. The theory has spread rapidly. Supporters were first spotted at a Trump rally in 2018 while the movement received a (vague) shout out from Trump himself at a recent White House briefing. Spittle-flecked and barking mad it may be, but let us not forget that large parts of the UK press, an MP and the police were taken in by a fantastical paedophile conspiracy theory not so long ago. Meanwhile this straight-to-video, porno-horror, Right-wing blend of nonsense comes hot on the heels of the collapse of the much more socially acceptable “Russiagate”, the liberal-Left fantasy that Trump was some kind of double agent, taking orders from his master in the Kremlin.

Paranoiacs we shall always have among us, but in healthier epochs they are relegated to the margins. Sometimes, however, a Joseph McCarthy can destroy careers, while a Stalin or Mao can destroy lives with paranoid imaginings. Our 21st century conspiracy theories have not reached that level, but the proliferation of poisonous fantasies is surely a sign, if more signs were needed, that something has gone badly awry in our hyper-partisan, hyper-online society.

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Richard Evans, a respected historian of the Third Reich, is supremely contemptuous of conspiracy theories, and in his new book, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, he takes aim at five associated with the Führer: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the claim that the German army was betrayed in World War I by its own people; the belief that the Nazis started the Reichstag fire deliberately; the speculations surrounding Rudolph Hess’ flight to Scotland; and the unkillable notion that Hitler and Eva Braun escaped to Argentina to live out a cozy old age among the alpacas.

But if the title is suggestive of History Channel schlock, then the truth of the book is quite the opposite: Evans ruthlessly annihilates each conspiracy he tackles. Indeed, towards the end he demolishes the History Channel’s fatuous “Hunting Hitler” with all the vigor of an irate 1950s schoolmaster caning a blancmange into oblivion.

Yet Evans’ book does much more than make fans of dogshit cable channels disappointed. Referencing Richard Hofstader’s seminal essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, he frames his case studies in the broader historical context of conspiracy theories going back to writings about Freemasons and the Illuminati in the eighteenth century, while seeking to draw out common traits, from the core belief that only an elite few can detect the sinister forces lying behind events to the tendency towards accumulating piles of “alternative facts” which are martialed against “official histories” which (of course) only exist to serve the interests of the powers that be.

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Not that facts are actually all that important. For instance, in his analysis of The Protocols, Evans not only traces the history of this notorious forgery but highlights the fact that many people knew and accepted that it was a forgery quite early on in its existence. Hitler referenced it only glancingly in Mein Kampf to address the question of its fakeness, while Goebbels admitted to his diary “I believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery.” Henry Ford — a great populariser of the Protocols via his book The International Jew — also admitted as much. Yet this awareness did not stop them from finding the Protocols useful, or advancing the Piers Morgan-type argument that literal truth didn’t matter if they expressed a deeper greater truth.

For Evans, however, defence of the truth is non-negotiable: he rejects “naïve scepticism that casts doubt not only on the truth of the conclusions reached by painstaking and objective historical research, but on the very idea of truth itself”. Without this, he adds, “the possibility of organising society on rational lines and on the basis of reasoned and informed decisions is thrown into question”.

For me, the most illuminating section of Evans’ book is the second chapter, which is dedicated to the “stab in the back” theory. Typically, we imagine conspiracy theories to be the preserve of weirdoes and extremists, but this was a fantasy geared towards the psychological needs of the establishment: members of Germany’s officer class, nationalists and conservative clergymen could not accept that they had lost the war through their own failures. Instead, they blamed a collapse of morale and willpower on the home front for the army’s defeat; this eventually mutated into a belief that there was an active conspiracy undermining the war effort, involving socialists, communists and pacificists.

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This flight by members of Germany’s wartime establishment into self-exculpatory fantasy, I think, helps us to understand the phenomenon of Russiagate — which similarly enabled large swathes of America’s political and media elites, traumatised by the defeat of their candidate at the hands of a ridiculous showbiz caricature, to retreat into a conspiratorial delusion that liberated them from the need to honestly assess their own failings. Initially, editors of major news organisations dispatched explorers to the heartlands to find out why the people had failed them so, while Clinton undertook a grand defeat tour of the country to blame others.

But this was not enough, and so it was that a bunch of unverified assertions in some oppo research developed into a conviction that Trump and his minions were consciously colluding with the diabolical Putin. This in turn developed into a multi-million dollar, three-year investigation and all-you-can-eat buffet of paranoia served up day and night by the media, and then amplified via social media…. only to turn out to have been a nothingburger of epic proportions. Conspiracy theories are not only for basement dwellers and loons: nice, respectable people who recycle and read The New York Times can get into them too.

Which brings me to my next point. Evans notes that the question “cui bono?” is “almost always” a feature of conspiracy theories: find out who benefits, and you know who is to blame. Now the metastasising of paranoid imaginings may very well represent a society losing its shit on a grand scale, but asking cui bono of the theories themselves reminds us that they are often packaged and sold to us as commercial products.

The fake moon landing myth inspired the film Capricorn One; The X-Files came with endless merchandising tie-ins and a movie; Alex Jones promotes conspiracy-as-lifestyle through his site, selling everything from survival foods to emergency radios to “ProstaGuard” prostate health pills “…because there’s a war on for your mind.” Meanwhile, non-stop Russiagate on MSNBC, CNN and in pages of The New York Times worked wonders for ratings, clicks and advertising revenue.

Thirty years ago, it took months or years and a large investment of money to make a documentary or book. Today these obstacles have disappeared: anyone anywhere can write, publish and distribute conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the paranoid imagination — apocalyptic, extreme, divisive, pornographic, Manichaean — provides almost perfect fodder for today’s click-fuelled news business model. But what the heck: it’s all fun, games and record profits right up until society collapses and we’re all fighting giant rats for scraps of food in the smoking rubble of our ruined societies, isn’t it?

But what it lacks in those departments, it makes up for in an explosive gearing for what marketing types would call ‘influencer endorsement’. Unlike the others, YouTube is deeply parasocial (a term I’m about to explain), and its success is giving rise to what I shall call the parasocial politician: a new kind of actor, a bedroom press baron, beholden not to party or editor, but only to their own often vast audience.

The term ‘parasocial’ was a term coined in 1956, by the sociologists Horton and Wohl. Their paper, “Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observation on intimacy at a distance”, described the way in which we relate to those who come to us through a one-way lens.

These relationships develop across most media. When JR was shot, a nation mourned parasocially. But Web 2.0 affords a deeper grain of intimacy. Taylor Swift’s Instagram feed, with its faux-candidness, its artfully dishevelled air, the sense of a little secret between you and her, is a better example of how a parasocial relationship develops.

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In that sense, YouTube is perfect for making new one-way friends. “Hey what’s happening guys?” is its unofficial catchphrase, the opening gambit of a million vloggers who often offer us little more than the chance to relate to them, as they plod about the humdrum of their lives, offering makeup tips, playing video games.

YouTubers whisper to you in the earphones of your mobile device. They’re far-off pals, who loom out of a laptop, often in the most intimate of moments: tidying a bedroom on Monday evening, home from a party on a Saturday night, interstitial points when we gladly take off our critical faculties, and seek simply to hear a voice that is not the one in our head. YouTube, with its wan parasocial glow, fills those pockets in the lives of a generation that has forsaken TV.

These are the facts. And as the percentage of the population who get their news media exclusively online increases (now at 84% among the 18-25 bracket), the old red versus blue party politics will have to bend not to Fleet Street or broadcast, but to a new, online commentariat that isn’t responsible to editors, only to the audience they have cultivated. No Murdoch can fire them, their power is a direct mandate from their subscribers, and in turn those subscribers often pay their wages through direct fan-funded donations.

The parasocial politician is part commentator, part political actor, but crucially, is independent of the structures that once bound the press to their quarry.

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Into that void have come men like Sargon of Akkad – a Swindon-dwelling, 38-year old father of two called Carl Benjamin, who broadcasts from his converted garage. A total outsider with no previous interest in politics, who began his career because he “couldn’t stay silent any longer”, Benjamin also runs a separate YouTube channel exclusively devoted to people watching him playing video games. He has built a cult fanbase of 850,000 subscribers by railing against the ills of ‘Social Justice Warrior’ culture, defending what he describes as ‘Classical Liberalism’ (a label claimed by a wide range of viewpoints these days).

Men such as Paul Joseph Watson are here, too: friend of InfoWars kingpin Alex Jones. Another self-proclaimed ‘Classical Liberal’, he makes pithy five-minute packages railing against whatever political correctness has most recently gone mad, whether calling feminists “swamp donkeys“, or arguing for the proposition that certain African countries are, as the POTUS put it, “shitholes“.

Both are increasingly influential. Benjamin receives an average of 250,000 views per video, while an episode of Newsnight averages 344,000. On YouTube, Paul Joseph Watson has 1.4 million subscribers, compared with Owen Jones’s 113,000.

With their revenues – Benjamin alone earns somewhere near £20,000 a month – they could afford to upscale their productions. Yet neither exactly flays himself in the editing department. Benjamin’s set dressing is an old black velour curtain that looks like it was plucked from a closing down sale at a strip club. Paul Joseph Watson’s SFX run as far as speeding up his voice into a high-pitched squeal.

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They’d be ill-advised to professionalise. It’s precisely their amateurism that makes them parasocial, affording them a shonky, homemade DIY charm that disarms, that allows these very ordinary demagogues each to penetrate the places that a journalist or a politician can’t, to become yer mate rather than an authority figure.

I’ve just finished making a documentary, for BBC Radio 4 about the rise of the YouTube Right, and one thing that struck me was that Benjamin didn’t seek to define himself as a journalist. I don’t think it would have occurred to him to join those formal structures, even if it were as easy as signing up. He had no idea who Fraser Nelson was; he didn’t even know who Richard Littlejohn was. He might have been on the pro-Trump, pro-Brexit Right, but his agenda was not synched with theirs.

Talking to Benjamin, it’s obvious that the gatekeepers of the old world have been bypassed. There’s now a direct audience-to-ideologue connection. Jordan Peterson often points to this direct connection as one of the key binding agents in the Intellectual Dark Web – that people like him, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, have built their own vast audiences from nothing but charisma and ideas worth hearing, on the new technologies of YouTube and podcast.

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Though they pre-date his fame, Benjamin and Watson have drawn both intellectual nourishment and fans from the project of Jordan Peterson and his associated Intellectual Dark Web.  Peterson also situates himself as a “classic British liberal” and an “individualist”. But the IDW styles itself as grown up – a heterodox place for the long-form and the nuanced – while there’s often more of an air of Nineties pro-wrestling to the polemics of the YouTube crowd. At the same time, the polarising nature of the culture wars, and especially the free-speech agenda, increasingly sees them lining up next to Tommy Robinson, even though they often consider themselves to be ‘of the Left’. ’The Left left me’ is a cliche of their genre.

A few weeks ago, US think tank Data & Society acknowledged the importance of this model when they published The Alternative Influencer Network, a rather shrill taxonomy of the various strata on the YouTube right that are gradually becoming their own ecosystem.

As their power grows, the strange multiple-narrative universe we’ve entered in the past few years will only grow more confusing as the same events are forced through competing filter bubbles. One of the obsessions of this world is how they stand in opposition not only to certain politics, but to a consensus on what reality is: the dreaded “mainstream narrative”. In the same sense that a Trump or a Brexit was a ‘glitch in that matrix’, they see themselves as being forced into intellectual exile and smeared by an elite that won’t accept them. It’s both a neat rhetorical flourish, and a revolution in the offing.

Carl Miller has written a book that touches on the idea: The Death Of The Gods: The New Global Power Grab. He told me that he sees the conventional parties’ monopoly on messaging breaking down. Increasingly, you have individual actors able to mobilise around a particular issue. Black Lives Matter vs Blue Lives Matter. Feminists vs Anti-Feminists. The MAGA hats vs Antifa. As these thought-leading upstarts gain more traction, the future, he suggests, will involve more rapidly-shifting coalitions between small groups of political actors, often organised around these kinds of fanbases.

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That kind of new power broker also fits neatly into the theories of tech philosopher Jordan Greenhall: a networked world that no longer fits with the top-down traditional ‘Blue Church’ mode of distributing power we’ve been used to. The News At Ten World, in which events are plugged into a matrix of gatekeepers that gives reliably high quality, if reductive, answers. Instead, these are Greenhall’s ‘Red Religion’: the coming thing, non-hierarchical actors, plugged into the instant feedback and deep audience connection of social media, not gate-kept, and so prone to going wildly off-the-reservation, but also prone to far more nuance and originality in their ideas.

We tend to imagine that the social media revolution has long since matured, but the rise of the parasocial politicians is still relatively recent: they’ve been going for at most four years. They are in their infancy, and the scene that surrounds them is as crude as it is influential. There is a long way left to run in this story. Its initial actors may fall by the wayside like many of the tech giants of the 90s eventually did. But Miller suggests that we’re primed for “a Farage who knows how to work these new technologies”.

It’s worth noting that Tommy Robinson only roared back into the public eye when he became a correspondent for hard-Right Canadian YouTube TV news company The Rebel. He is probably too tarnished a figure to ever find the mainstream, but he can garner bigger crowds than any politician bar Corbyn. Is it a matter of time before someone else, in their bedroom, finds they possess a talent for raw rhetoric as great as Paul Joseph Watson, but with the message polish of a Trudeau?

Perhaps the next truly powerful British politician won’t be in parliament at all – they’ll be parasocial.