How conspiracy theories went mainstream

Actor David Duchovny now takes a wry view on The X-Files, the 1990s show that gave him his fame. Largely because it also gave credence to conspiracy theories, what with its tagline, ‘the truth is out there’.

Speaking to The Times last week about his role as FBI agent Fox Mulder – the credulous one – Duchovny reflects: ‘Mulder’s way of looking at the world was through conspiracy and that was the fringe at that point… It doesn’t seem to be so fringe any more.’

Duchovny is right, in a way. There was, in fact, plenty of strange thinking going on in the 1990s, the certitudes of the Cold War having melted away. Much was written about it. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (2004) by Francis Wheen examined the ascendency of cults, postmodernism and New Age quackery. Hystories (1998) by Elaine Showalter looked at alien abductions, chronic-fatigue syndrome, Satanic ritual abuse and other hysterias and social contagions.

Notably, at the end of the last millennium, most conspiratorial and popular delusion was apolitical. As Duchovny observes, actual belief in weird phenomena was also marginal. For the most part, it was literally out of this world. As anyone who read the Fortean Times back then will testify, alien abductions and crop circles were the particular obsessions of the 1990s – hence the success of The X-Files and films such as Independence Day (1996), Men in Black (1997) and Body Snatchers (1993). So, too, was the continued belief among many that the Moon landings had been faked.

All that came crashing down, almost literally, on 11 September 2001. The brief holiday from stark reality that was the 1990s was now decidedly over. There was no longer room for fabulous, otherworldly reveries and drama. The strange and dramatic was suddenly right here, right now.

The focus of conspiracy theories accordingly came down to Earth. Regarding 9/11, a prominent counter-narrative swiftly emerged that the American government had orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon itself. With grim inevitability, the finger of blame also came to be pointed at the Jews as accomplices in this atrocity.

Conspiracy theories went somewhat into abeyance with the global recession of 2008. Once more, we could legitimately and reasonably blame governments and banks for terrible earthly matters. But the Great Awokening of around 2015 and the Year of Madness that was 2020 have seen weird thinking return with a vengeance. Conspiracy theories proliferate once more – think QAnon, the Great Reset, Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Anything-you-like and, of course, anti-Semitic whispers about ‘them’.

And while wild claims about vaccines and the World Economic Forum will rarely get an airing in polite society, many deranged delusions are now absolutely mainstream. As the recent imprisonment of Just Stop Oil protesters reminds us, one expression of this is a modern-day incarnation of an ancient apocalyptic superstition. Roger Hallam, the mastermind behind JSO and sister-group Extinction Rebellion, has convinced himself that literally billions of people are about to die from climate change, leaving behind only an end-times hellscape.

Another is the capture of people’s minds by the cult of wokery. This is the one that has led people to believe that skin pigmentation literally determines your way of thinking. It is the ideology that is beholden to the idea that human beings can literally change sex, that people have been born into the wrong body and that people have a mysterious ‘inner’ gendered self. This idea has spread like a mental virus, capturing the intellects of many impressionable minds. It’s a classic episode of social contagion. It is a case of modern hysteria for the historians of tomorrow to study.

No wonder so few people talk about aliens any longer. The body-snatchers are already here. Our minds are already being erased.

Wokeness has revived blasphemy laws

It has become a cliché to say that wokery is like a new religion. But the reason so many people say this is that it’s true.

Woke’s resemblance to traditional creeds – especially Roman Catholicism and Islam – are comically manifest. Witness the act of ‘taking the knee’, that display of humility and submission to a higher power. Witness, too, the Pharisee-like, ostentatious public displays of virtue. See this religion’s promise to change the material world through sorcery – not turning water into wine or through transubstantiation, but claiming to transform actual men into actual women. It gives a simple command for the masses to love thy neighbour – to ‘#BeKind’. It even has a belief in original sin – ie, ‘whiteness’. Most notoriously, there is the woke persecution of heretics and blasphemers, who are cast out and damned with cancellation.

The modern sacralisation of the Pride flag is confirmation of woke’s religious status. This is why police in east London have been so eager to pursue the person who defaced three variants of the Pride flag last week. ‘We stand with the local LGBTQ+ community and will not tolerate these disgusting, inexcusable hate crimes in Forest Gate’, said detective inspector James Rush, in response to this supposed act of evil.

Offending this flag is called a ‘hate crime’, yet in reality it is an act of blasphemy. There has been no act or threat against a person or people. There has instead been the vandalism of a symbol – a symbol that many now regard as overbearing, coercive and even anti-gay. It is an icon of a new religion to which we are all meant to show deference and servility.

A fundamentalist creed like woke cannot tolerate unbelievers.

Kamala Harris’s ancestral plot twist

‘Kamala Harris is a descendant of an Irish slave owner in Jamaica.’ So ran a headline in the Irish Times on Tuesday.

In the report, we read that the four-times-paternal-great-grandfather of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was Hamilton Brown, born in County Antrim in 1776. Brown emigrated to the British colony of Jamaica, where he became ‘an enthusiastic slave owner on the sugar plantations that were the mainstay of the island’s economy’. He opposed the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1832, yet ultimately received almost €11million in today’s money in compensation when it did happen in 1834.

What are we to conclude from this piece of genealogical detective work?

For one thing, that being mixed race is no guarantee that all of your forebears were oppressed. Harris’s ancestor was white and a slave owner, after all. According to the logic of identity politics, shouldn’t two past bad things cancel out two present good things?

But wait a minute – ‘Hamilton Brown from County Antrim’? That sounds suspiciously Ulster Protestant. Make that three bad things.

Steady on. Brown was still an Irishman who no doubt was forced to flee his beloved Emerald Isle, probably to the sound of mournful, lilting music. Make that three-all.

Or maybe, just maybe, we could learn that what one of our many ancestors did long ago has no bearing on your moral standing today.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.