The Top 10 Symptoms of Conspiracy Brain
Is a media mania yanking your chain? Ten ways to tell if the answer is yes
The world has gone nuts. We’re in a perfect storm of occult lunacy, with a yin of delusional wartime government accelerating a yang of conspiratorial public outrage. It won’t be easy to get out of this.
I started covering this issue twenty years ago, with The Great Derangement. The premise was that corrupt government was inspiring rational outrage, but protest energy was being drained into “competing visions of… conspiratorial weirdness and Internet-fueled mysticism.” I spent time undercover in John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, where congregants were taught the glorious End Times would be preceded by a period when “many nations” oppose Israel in battle.
Because of this, I nearly had a heart attack a few weeks ago when Hagee said, “Prophetically, we’re right on cue.” This was after periodic flashes of recognition whenever War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke, the most recent coming after his much-denounced prayer for “overwhelming violence.” Meanwhile, the media world rising in opposition is itself increasingly dominated by familiar conspiratorial themes, with long-developing fixations of the left and right fusing in ways that not long ago would have seemed unimaginable.
Years ago, when I was researching the same topic for Hate Inc., I made a list of arguments common to moral panics. This weekend, after watching coverage of the Iran mess, I dusted off this never-published section and rewrote it for the present. It’s the sIf you find any of these elements in a news story or broadcast, be on your guard for a story that has more bull than substance:
