Going down the rabbit hole

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

Imagine a conspiracy theorist. What kind of person do you think about? I’m guessing maybe some kind of loser, an angry young man in a low-status job, perhaps with a low level of education and a grudge against the world. Probably someone on the political right?

This maybe isn’t a bad guess. Certainly lots of people Just Asking Questions about “Experimental Gene Therapy” or chemtrails would fit into this category, and it’s right to worry about them. But I think it would be a mistake to suppose that all conspiracy theorists are like this. There’s another type, much less likely to be the focus of an investigation by Marianna Spring or Louis Theroux, and you may even know some of them yourself.

This was really brought home to me this week. After the Hatzola ambulances were set on fire in London on Monday, there was a fair amount of nudging and winking on social media. And some undoubtedly came from the first category low-status conspiracy theorists (as well as paid slop merchants from around the world), but not all of it.

The Mayor of Bath (the next city over, and a place I’ve visited a lot) took to social media to share posts suggesting that the arson attack was “was insurance fraud and an "Israeli false flag operation".” This isn’t some low-status uneducated right wing loser. He’s a Liberal Democrat for goodness sake! As well as being the Mayor of one of the most beautiful cities in the country, he’s a qualified doctor and Senior Clinical Lecturer at University of Exeter Medical School.

Worse, as I realised, because we share an interest in infectious diseases (his professionally, mine purely of the armchair epidemiology variety) we had a large number of Twitter acquaintances in common:

Perhaps as a reader of Dave Rich’s Substack, I shouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of casual dinner party antisemitism being quite so ubiquitous. But it’s still a shock to realise that you are two hops on the network away from someone who is (even in the best case) blindly oblivious to these kinds of tropes. And it’s disturbing that an educated man like Dr Pankhania can end up in a place where he feels comfortable trotting out stuff that would get rapidly you barred from polite society if you said it about other groups.

Still, he has apologised now, and I have no reason to believe that it isn’t a sincere apology. But it still might be reasonable to ask how someone ends up in a mindset of retweeting this kind of stuff.

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My explanation for how respectable and well-educated people might end up down a conspiracy rabbit hole is very simple: Brexit and COVID broke many peoples’ brains.

In the first few months of the pandemic alone, we had high-status people sincerely believing that the DHSC were running a network of fake tweeting nurses, that Boris’s hospitalization for COVID was a scam, and that he had pretended to have a baby. These posts played into an instinctive idea that the Tories were untrustworthy liars, and bounced around the #FBPE echo chamber without being questioned. People were locked down and bored, they didn’t have their normal social circles to error-check, there was a mass suspension of critical facilities. Even if these theories weren’t true, in some peoples’ minds the fact that they could have been true was telling enough.

And this conspiracist mindset went further than that. Respectable newspapers like the Observer were prepared to indulge the idea that UK borders weren’t closed against the delta variant so as to not jeopardise Boris’s Indian trade deal, and to allege that Public Health England were suppressing the data concerning the variant.

And somewhere close to these kinds of theories, you could usually find an FBPE hashtag in a bio, and a supporter of Independent SAGE nudging and winking. I genuinely don’t think it’s a coincidence that Dr Pankhania follows nearly all the members of that group on Twitter:

Once you get into a mindset of assuming by default that the authorities are lying, if you don’t stop to wonder how plausible it is that they could get the entire scientific community to keep silent, it’s a short step to believing that Mossad are torching ambulances in London.

And there’s no better exemplar of descent into this kind of rabbit hole than Carole Cadwalladr, founder of Independent SAGE itself, and the author of at least one of those Observer pieces. It’s a pretty radical ten-year journey to speedrun from deciding that Russia was behind Brexit and Trump, to approvingly quoting Tucker Carlson (not exactly an anti Russia voice):

It’s a remarkable demonstration of the conspiratorial mindset, like Withnail and I spiralling through stronger and stronger drinks to recover the original buzz. As a rule of thumb, if you are far enough gone that you have reached the “Tucker Carlson’s got a point actually” stage, it’s probably long past time for people around you to intervene.

But it might be worth all of us thinking about the steps that lead there, to recognise them in ourselves, to think a little bit about when a reasonable distrust of Government spin starts to turn into something darker, and to not let this kind of conspiratorial thinking go by from your friends without saying something. That way maybe we really can leave the crazy stuff to the groypers.