1.1 Frames and Scenarios

Such conceptual wholes are called frames in cognitive linguistics, a generic label for “the knowledge network[s] linking the multiple domains associated with a given linguistic form” (Taylor Reference Taylor1995: 87; see also Fillmore Reference Fillmore1985; Lakoff Reference 65Lakoff1987, Reference Lakoff and Ortony1993; Entman Reference 60Entman1993; Brugman & Burgers Reference Brugman and Burgers2018). This cognitive sense of framing differs from its colloquial and polemically charged sense of framing someone (up) as falsely implicating an innocent person in a criminal activity (SOED Reference Trumble and Stevenson2002, 1: 1026). Every successful act of sense-making “conceptual integration” (Fauconnier & Turner Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002: 126) involves framing. It is of special importance in areas of public discourse that aim at achieving persuasion, for example as a technique of convincing others of the “pressing relevance of certain political facts … by using frames in which those facts actually make sense” (Lakoff & Wehling Reference Lakoff and Wehling2016: 75). Frame analysis also underlies “Conceptual Metaphor Theory,” which views metaphors as the linking of two (or more) different domains through “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980: 5). An explicit CT utterance (such as “The present crisis or catastrophe X is the outcome of a conspiracy Y”) is not a metaphor but it, too, links several conceptual domains, namely those of crisis/catastrophe and conspiracy, through a supposed causal link. Insofar as the conspiracy aspect is expressed or suggested figuratively – for instance, as a war of an evil cabal to achieve world domination (which we will encounter in several CTs discussed later) – it does of course contain metaphors. Marcel Danesi (Reference Danesi2023) rightly speaks of CTs as “false narratives based on underlying metaphorical constructs” and of “layers of metaphors that are mapped onto conspiracy theories” (Danesi Reference Danesi2023: 9, 50).

Frame analysis is thus well suited as an overarching framework for analyzing all instances of conceptual “mapping” (Lakoff Reference Lakoff and Ortony1993) or “blending” (Fauconnier & Turner Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002). To study CTs, however, it seems useful to distinguish them as a specific subtype of frames, specifically as emotionally loaded and pragmatically forceful or emphatic scenarios. Scenarios are a complex and dynamic type of frame that includes more than a basic event schema (source–path–goal), its participants, and their ontological relations (Lakoff Reference 65Lakoff1987: 284–287; Taylor Reference Taylor1995: 87–90; Musolff Reference 68Musolff2016: 25–38). In addition to these basic semantic components, scenarios have narrative and argumentative structure; they contain mini-stories with a default outcome as a preferred “solution” and suggest strongly evaluative and emotion/action-guiding inferences. They are never neutral but lend themselves to polemical exploitation.

The motivation to speak of conspiracy theories specifically as scenarios is twofold. In the first place, the term scenario is meant to remind us of the story lines, scripts, and plots of theater and film dramas; that is, of explicit plans for how the story/narrative unfolds, who plays which roles, and how their actions contribute to the outcome/ending. Crucially, as social constructs that are specific to particular cultures, scenarios have a default narrative structure, which includes stereotypical characters (heroes, villains, victims …) as participants as well as stereotypical action and event sequences and a standard outcome (e.g. a “happy ending” in fairy tales) against which a nonstandard outcome stands out as an exception. As stories, they are changeable and adaptable to expectations of the respective audiences. Secondly, there is the concept of best- and worst-case scenarios, which are often presented as alternative options for decision-making processes. Thus, a highly risky enterprise is often discussed by planners in terms of a choice between different scenarios in order to aid the decision-finding process with a view to achieving an optimal outcome for the task to be completed (Yoe Reference Yoe2019). The CT turns this decision-finding process on its head by interpreting a perceived crisis or catastrophe as being a point at which the worst-case outcome has almost been reached and can only be avoided or prevented at the last minute by exposing the conspiracy behind it (Fichtelberg Reference Fichtelberg2006; Zwierlein & de Graaf Reference Zwierlein and de Graaf2013; van Prooijen & Douglas Reference van Proijen and Douglas2017). The interpretation of a crisis as the intended outcome of a conspiracy thus provides a worst-case scenario, which is no longer merely optional. The CT scenario excludes all other, less dramatic options and demands an urgent “solution.”

Such a scenario analysis focuses on CTs’ cognitive function of emphatic framing, including the “maximum impact” case of empowering believers to engage in activism including violence against others and even self-sacrifice. The overall conceptual structure of CT scenarios includes three core components that form a narrative with (pseudo-)argumentative import, plus a further, politically most dangerous, practical application component:

1. (1) the (pseudo-)premise: an assertion of a presently occurring or looming crisis or catastrophe (e.g. a pandemic, a lost war, or a spectacular crime such as a terrorist attack or an assassination) or a scandalizing suspicion of its invention as a “hoax” (which the CT negates);

2. (2) the backstory: a narrative, explanatory account of a supposed causation of the crisis by a conspiracy with hitherto hidden motives and plans;

3. (3) the (pseudo-)conclusion: the circular (i.e. logically fallacious) inference that the crisis or catastrophe self-evidently “proves” the backstory and that any critic of this proof is acting irrationally and is most probably part of the conspiracy; and

4. (4) the resistance fight scenario: a perspective of “resolving” the crisis or catastrophe by collectively “fighting back” against those supposedly responsible for it.

In terms of its rhetorical presentation, a CT may be monological but it is always at least implicitly addressed at an audience that it is meant to persuade. It is not only persuasive in the general sense of being designed to attract as many believers as possible, but also in the emphatic sense of convincing them that they are sharing privileged, secret knowledge. This “special knowledge” aspect makes CTs seem not only useful but also enjoyable as an advantage over others. In popular culture and in literature, this aesthetic and emotional advantage can generate emotions such as feelings of superiority and Schadenfreude, but also compassion, through dramatic irony, which enables the spectator or reader to know the background plot better than the characters (Korthals Altes Reference Korthals Altes, Herman, Jahn and Ryan2008: 262). Films and online games (Aupers Reference Aupers, Butter and Knight2020: 475) employ CTs to generate the equivalent of such dramatic irony – their “suspense” factor lies in the gradual exposure of the villain’s dastardly plans, which the hero(ine) understands in full only just at the ending but which are discernible to the spectator/game player earlier on. This dramatic irony adds to the emotional appeal and enjoyment of narratives and provides a powerful cognitive asset to CTs.

Another user-friendly aspect of CTs is the wide range of epistemic commitments that they allow – that is, the degree of belief invested in them, which ranges from near-indifferent to fanatical. CTs can thus be epistemically almost noncommittal whilst still ludically appealing. They often also take the form of pseudo-naive queries and “just asking questions” (Byford Reference Byford2011: 90–92), of challenges to alleged taboo topics (“asking the questions you are not allowed to ask”), or of “playing the devil’s advocate” (see Section 2.3). Typical formulations in these suggested CTs are brimful with caveats and hedges (“perhaps,” “possible,” “why not?,” “isn’t it possible that …?”) which make them almost impossible to refute. They enable the speaker (and the hearer/reader) to withdraw, if challenged, from the epistemic commitment to any specific detail and present it merely as a tentative or hypothetical speculation that may need further investigation. On the other hand, some CT propagators and believers stake their own lives or livelihoods – and risk those of others – on the absolute “truth” of their narratives, sometimes with suicidal or murderous consequences, as in the case of people believing that the whole COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax. I will first focus on this pandemic-as-hoax CT in Section 2.1 and use examples of pandemic-related CTs later on, as they are still “in living memory,” but in addition other contemporary and historical CTs will be discussed to support and illustrate the analyses. This Element does not, however, try to give a comprehensive overview of CTs (for global COVID-19 CTs see Butter & Knight Reference Butter and Knight2023) but will concentrate on a set of recurring examples to elucidate the three main research questions:

• How do CTs work?

• What makes them successful?

• What are the promising counterstrategies to combat their detrimental sociopolitical consequences?

Accordingly, we will proceed in the following steps: Section 2 provides an overview of CTs (as narrative–argumentative scenarios) and their framing functions, Section 3 applies theories of conceptual evolution and metarepresentation to them, and Section 4 discusses the chances and limits of debunking CTs in view of the results of their cognitive analysis.

2.1 Hoax CTs, or “the Pandemic Crisis Has Been Invented”

When in January, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a global alert about a new virus disease that was spreading from China (WHO 2020a, 2020b), the announcement was almost immediately denounced in a number of CTs as a “hoax,” invented to scare the US public into compliant behavior and to effect an economic slowdown that would damage the reelection chances of the incumbent President Donald J. Trump (Imhoff & Lamberty Reference 63Imhoff and Lamberty2020; Cook & Choi Reference Cook and Choi2020). The term “hoax” (perhaps derived from hocus, as in “hocus-pocus”) indicates an act of willful deception (SOED Reference Trumble and Stevenson2002, 1: 1250). It has been used to dismiss numerous scientific insights and achievements, such as the analysis of climate change (supposedly invented to ruin the global Western economy), the 1969 moon landing (alleged to have been staged in a film studio to secure funding for NASA), and vaccination legislation and campaigns (denounced as fake therapies invented by doctors and “Big Pharma” to make profits) (Kitta Reference Kitta2012; Lewandowsky, Oberauer & Gignac Reference Lewandowsky, Oberauer and Gignac2013; Jolley, Mari & Douglas Reference Jolley, Mari, Douglas, Butter and Knight2020: 235–237). CTs which claim that something is a hoax (i.e. does not exist in reality) have a conceptual structure of two cognitive tiers: (1) a claim that the public has received misleading information and (2) the suspicion that a malicious conspiracy is behind it. It is, so to speak, a minimal or abridged conspiracy theory, because it lacks the third tier (a circular “conclusion”).

Hoax CTs are, however, not restricted to science-based claims but include historical denialism, as in Holocaust denial by Nazi apologists (Guttenplan Reference Guttenplan2001; King Reference King2017; Lipstadt Reference Lipstadt2017); Trump’s denial of his own defeat in the 2020 presidential election (Baker & Glasser Reference Baker and Glasser2022: 549–582), which inspired the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; or the claim that the 2012 massacre of twenty-six children and adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, USA, never took place, which led some of its believers to abuse and attack the murdered children’s parents and helpers (Nelson Reference Nelson2013). Despite their minimalist conceptual structure, hoax CTs demonstrate in a nutshell a feature that is characteristic of all CTs. They reject the “official” information as disseminated by mass media, government agencies, and academic/scientific institutions, which is accepted by most people as a matter of course. Statements and directives of scientifically qualified medical authorities concerning illnesses, for instance, are normally accepted bona fide both on a personal and a collective basis by large majorities of people. When doctors tell you that your health and life are threatened by an illness and that a certain range of therapies are available to cure or mitigate it, normally competent adult patients will follow their advice. In the case of COVID-19, the huge number of fatalities (7.1 million over four years, see WHO 2024) and the widely known suffering of many more people would seem to make the claim that the pandemic is/was a hoax preposterous. How and why should anybody want to “invent” a pandemic? People doubting its reality and severity at the start of the pandemic may have had the excuse of lacking experience, but the first global wave in spring 2020 (which already caused hundreds of thousands of fatalities) should have sufficed to end the notion that it was a hoax. Instead, this conceit still persists in the public realm today, with fanatical believers denying its deadly effect even on their deathbed (Kale Reference Kale2021; Saner Reference Saner2021; Brumfiel Reference Brumfiel2022). Why is it, then, that people believe in a hoax CT to the point of self-destruction? The CT pretends to be based on evidence that contradicts the official, scientifically legitimated information, which is denounced as propaganda that serves ulterior motives. To develop and believe such a construct, one must have a suspicion to start with – for example, a conviction bordering on paranoia (Hofstadter Reference Hofstadter1964) and maintaining that there are conspirators who have invented a chimerical pseudo-disease to serve their own interests.

In cognitive terms, this suspicion provided the frame in which pieces of public information and personal experiences of the pandemic could be integrated. As a result, a coherent narrative was built up that lacked, however, any prima facie evidence to support it. This evidence was, however, seemingly supplied by CT propagators’ suggestions in the media that the official news about the pandemic (e.g. testing results, fatality statistics) was exaggerated, while “alternative” news about easily accessible and successful cures was suppressed, and that further supporting evidence was being or would shortly be uncovered that proved complicity between scientists, businesses, and foreign powers (e.g. China) that amounted to a conspiracy. The fact that none of this supportive “evidence” has ever been substantiated has done little to stop the CT from being spread. In fact, even critical media and other public voices inadvertently reiterated it by spending a huge amount of work into its fact-checking and fake-news-debunking – that is, treating the CT suggestions as if they were serious factual statements. In so doing, they managed to explain to the public some of the complexities of the new virus, but what they were not able to prevent was the spread of the suspicion narrative, which remained unfalsifiable. For while it was difficult for the hoax-CT propagators to prove the nonexistence of a set of supposed hoax facts, a counterproof of the falsity of the primary hoax claim, when integrated into a CT, was also impossible. After all, the core content of a CT includes two items – crisis and conspiracy – the latter of which is based on speculative suspicion. CT holders could easily cancel some of their evidential claims concerning the crisis in question while still asserting and even widening their conspiracy claims, for example by involving alternative culprits in diverse combinations (e.g. in COVID-19 hoax CTs: US Democrats, global liberal elites, communist China, the “Big Pharma” industry complex, or rogue scientists; see Birchall & Knight Reference Birchall and Knight2023: 66–91). Thus, the suspicion of a conspiracy could be maintained thanks to its endless adaptability even if detailed factual claims had to be ditched. This principal non-falsifiability characterizes all CTs. Even if CT propagators are exposed as liars or frauds and publicly proven wrong, they can hardly ever be brought to acknowledge the absurdity of their claims. At most, disgraced CT propagators such as the historian David Irving (publicly exposed and convicted for Holocaust denial) or the internet influencer Alex Jones (ordered by a US court to pay compensation for the Sandy Hook massacre denial) have “excused” themselves by claiming to have been misunderstood (see Section 2.3) and by blaming critics as being members of the respective conspiracy.

Hoax CTs express a disdain for the “social construction of reality” (Berger & Luckmann Reference Berger and Luckmann1991) by assuming that the background assumptions that are taken for granted in understanding our world are a fraudulently and malevolently invented fiction. If we cannot rely on science to identify a pandemic, on mainstream news to report a Moon landing or on election results, or on historical research to record a genocide or the attempt to storm a parliament, the boundaries between reality and imagination become blurred and ultimately irrelevant. Such a condition is a fascinating topic for philosophy or for the theory of poetry and narratology (Baudrillard Reference Baudrillard1991; Norris Reference Norris1992; Rajewsky Reference Rajewsky, Fludernik and Ryan2020), but for public communication it poses a fundamental problem. Public discourse relies on the distinction between fact and fiction in order to function. Of course, it also includes diverse, even opposing opinions and ideologies, but they all concern the same social reality and assume that there is in principle a reliable interpretation of that reality that can be shared by all. Public discourse becomes meaningless if its participants concede that the opposite of what they consider real may also be the case.

The principal challenge of hoax CTs to this commonsense view of reality lies in their tacit or explicit assumption that all or most of the normally accepted knowledge in a particular domain is fake, not just individual pieces of information. Thus, the CT of the COVID-19 pandemic as a hoax implies the assumption that all the mainstream media (as well as all governmental and medical institutions) are lying about the pandemic, its fatalities, and its biological causes, and that all people who believe their information (i.e. the vast majority of the population in any one country or even across the whole world) are dupes of a gigantic conspiracy. For such a vast suspicion to be plausible, one also has to assume enormous secret powers on the part of the conspirators to control and deceive societies. The CT believers’ supposedly new, alternative insight thus consists in considerably more than learning a few new facts or questioning some old ones; rather it is akin to the religious revelation of converts or an awakening that matches “taking the red pill” in the 1999 film The Matrix, which allows its takers to leave the simulated world that they had regarded as normal and to “go down the rabbit hole,” exploring the reality outside the “Matrix” (Wagner & Flannery-Dailey Reference Wagner, Flannery-Dailey and Grau2005).

The belief in a hoax CT fundamentally affects its holder’s intellectual commitment and emotional attachment to their living world. It disarms the “linguistic division of labor” which the philosopher Hilary Putnam postulated in his essay “The Meaning of Meaning.” With regard to the commonsense acceptance of differences in expertise about the meanings of everyday terms such as gold, Putnam observed that “everyone to whom gold is important for any reason has to acquire the word ‘gold’; but he does not have to acquire the method of recognizing if something is or is not gold. He can rely on a special subclass of speakers … who know how to tell if some metal is really gold or not” (Putnam Reference Putnam and Gunderson1975: 145). If lay users with a nonscientific understanding of gold find themselves in a situation where their knowledge of its true meaning is challenged, they defer to an expert, that is, a chemist or metallurgist, to check whether an object in the real world is truly a referent of that term (Putnam Reference Putnam and Gunderson1975: 143–145). Despite the fact that scientific and other experts’ unquestioned authority has suffered a relative decline in public reputation over the past decades (Nichols Reference Nichols2017), most adult people are aware of the fact that they have to rely on experts who know the theories and procedures of how to determine correct from incorrect statements about most topics. One would assume that such practical epistemic deference would apply in the COVID-19 medical emergency, if only because the topical terms such as pandemic, infection, immunity, virus, and so on clearly have specialized scientific meanings. Indeed, the vast majority of laypeople did leave it to scientists and public health authorities to explain what was happening during the pandemic and what measures were needed to defend against it. The fast-rising numbers of people falling ill and dying underlined the urgency and necessity of medical experts dealing with the emergency. But to those who regarded it as a hoax, their “authority”-based information was nothing but an elaborate system of make believe. As a consequence, they did not feel obliged to follow the officially recommended protective measures such as social distancing, wearing face masks, or lockdowns.

Psychological research has confirmed that the belief in COVID-19-as-a-hoax CTs was linked to diminished risk-perception and increased noncompliant behavior (Imhoff & Lamberty Reference 63Imhoff and Lamberty2020; Marinthe et al. Reference Marinthe, Brown, Delouvée and Jolley2020). Despite being minimal CTs in the sense of including only the conspiracy suspicion and a (negated) crisis account, hoax CTs have devastating consequences in that they entice people to mistrust in principle any “mainstream” information on both public health and socioeconomic/political developments and to abdicate realistic risk-assessment in their personal lives. Instead, hoax CT believers become dependent on “trending” alternative news in the media, especially in social media, which leaves them at the mercy of internet “echo chambers” and “influencers” (Evanega et al. Reference Evanega, Lynas, Adams and Smolenjak2020; Keith Reference Keith2022; Bondi & Sanna Reference Bondi, Sanna, Demata, Zorzi and Zottola2022).

2.2 Asserting CTs, or “the Crisis Is Real and Caused by a Conspiracy”

If hoax CTs are based on the supposed “revelation” that a crisis or catastrophe did not take place because it was or could have been invented (by a conspiracy), asserting CTs insist on the catastrophe “with a vengeance,” namely by insisting that it must be the result of a malevolent conspiracy. The most prominent asserting CT associated with COVID-19 was the narrative that the pandemic was indeed a real medical emergency but caused in a completely different way from the one told in scientific and other official statements. Instead of assuming that the outbreak was caused by an accidental animal–human crossover, it claimed that a manmade virus from the virology laboratory in Wuhan was released and then infected humans (see e.g. Kennedy Reference Kennedy2023; Paul Reference Paul2023; Smith, B. Reference 72Smith2023; for the conspiracist internet video series “Plandemic,” see Ohlheiser Reference Ohlheiser2020; Lee et al. Reference Lee, Bao, Wang and Lim2023). This so-called “lab-leak” account is often treated in the media as being a CT in its own right (e.g. Buranyi Reference Buranyi2021; Stack Reference Stack2023; Smith, D. Reference Smith2023).

Strictly speaking, however, a statement that the virus came from a laboratory is just one of several possible factual hypotheses about the pandemic’s origin. Whether it is correct or not is a matter for empirical investigation, which so far has been inconclusive, not least due to severe access limitations for international researchers imposed by Chinese authorities in Wuhan (Maxmen & Mallapaty Reference Maxmen and Mallapaty2021). At the start of the pandemic, when relatively little was known about its principal agent (the “SARS-CoV-2” virus), various hypotheses about its possible origin were in competition (Baier & Re Reference Baier and Re2020; Rincon Reference Rincon2020; Koley & Dhole Reference Koley and Dhole2021: 35). There was, for instance, an alternative Wuhan-linked CT with a similar ideological orientation of blaming China, which had considerable success in the first pandemic phase (i.e. that 5G broadband technology, first trialed near Wuhan and then built up across other regions in China and later globally, was causing COVID-19 [Bruns, Harrington & Hurcombe Reference Bruns, Harrington and Hurcombe2020]). Scientific research into the genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 has failed to produce evidence for the “lab-leak” origin and has instead produced data that make a species crossover at a Wuhan animal market seem the most probable origin (Mallapaty Reference Mallapaty2023; Gallagher Reference Gallagher2024).

As research on SARS-CoV-2 is ongoing and the “lab-leak” hypothesis has not been fully falsified so far, its status as false/“fake” (or, on the contrary, as truthful) information is as yet undecided. But, as argued in the introduction, the factual evidence for or against it does not determine its status as a CT. Only a narrative alleging that the production was intentional and that the leak of the virus was covered up makes the hypothesis part of a CT. This “lab-leak”-based CT includes as frame participants more than just a few “rogue scientists,” but also the communist Chinese government, the WHO leadership (for refusing to condemn or sanction China), and scientists, politicians, and public health administrators in the West who allegedly helped to cover up the whole operation. For US Republicans, the “usual suspects” were: the Democratic Party and other political adversaries of President Trump, and all Trump-critical media. An unexpected, almost paradoxical, suspect was Dr Anthony Fauci, the Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief presidential advisor on COVID-19. His recommendations guided much of the national and international response to the pandemic. According to CT propagators, Fauci had cooperated with the Wuhan laboratory in producing the SARS-CoV-2 virus and tried to cover up this collaboration and the lab-leak event itself (for a detailed analysis of the CT-campaign against Fauci, see Section 2.3).

Further support for the China–WHO–Fauci conspiracy was said to come from big industrial and financial institutions, headed by super-rich figures such as the Microsoft founder Bill Gates and financier George Soros, who were accused of plotting to erect a dictatorship founded on population control (Birchall & Knight Reference Birchall and Knight2023: 10, 59, 96, 109–110). Being based in the USA, figures like Fauci were seen as traitors “on the inside.” Globally extended versions of the CT have also linked the lab leak narrative to larger and longstanding myths, such as anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim CTs, and to superconspiracy theories (i.e. combinations of event and systemic CTs [Barkun Reference Barkun2013: 6]), some of which predate the pandemic, like the so-called “QAnon”-denunciations of a “Deep State” left-wing pedophile network in the USA (the network was “revealed” over several years by a supposed military operative under the pseudonym “Q” on internet platforms; Forberg Reference Forberg2021; Rothschild Reference Rothschild2021; Holoyda Reference Holoyda2022). Another superconspiracy is the suspected plan for a Great Reset of world economies to monopolize power in the hands of a global elite, or the Great Replacement of “white” populations by people from the Global South in Europe and the USA (Slobodian Reference Slobodian2020; Önnerfors Reference Önnerfors and Önnerfors2021; Holoyda Reference Holoyda2022; Birchall & Knight Reference Birchall and Knight2023: 61, 86–89, 99–100). These already-globalized CTs were all “updated” with the “Plandemic”/”lab-leak”-based CT about COVID-19, which thus became a confirmation of sorts for the QAnon, Great Reset, and Great Replacement (super-)CTs. Outside the USA (e.g. in Russia and China), ideologically “reversed” CT versions alleged lab leaks from secret US-linked laboratories in Ukraine, which were then cited to justify Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine (Ling Reference Ling2022; Loh Reference Loh2022).

This technique of integrating a specific CT within a wider “super-CT” frame will be discussed in detail in Section 3 as a main factor in making CTs successful. In terms of its cognitive function, it extends the CT’s narrative, leading towards the pseudo-conclusion that an initial suspicion about unclear facts is connected with a suspected specific conspiracy (e.g. China has engineered and released the virus), which is then linked to an even wider, even global superconspiracy. These nested suspicions provide the “smoke” that indicates for CT believers the existence of the conspiracy “fire” that must surely be its origin. But neither factual details such as the “lab-leak” nor the suspicion frame have been proven: Both are only potentially true. The conclusion is therefore circular and fallacious; the facts that are supposed to prove the conspiracy suspicions are only seen as evidence because of the suspicions – without them they do not prove anything. If they remain unsubstantiated (as is so far the case for the “lab-leak” hypothesis), the conspiracy suspicion is wholly speculative. Even if the factual hypothesis were discovered to be true, the conspiracy itself would have to be substantiated independently to make any sense. Super-CTs only inflate the basic CT-fallacy by promising “further” evidence to be uncovered at some future point in time.

2.3 Empowering CTs, or “Our Resistance Proves the Existence of the Conspiracy”

The breakthrough of developing and launching vaccination programs against COVID-19 in late 2020 (Krammer Reference Krammer2020; Li et al. Reference Li, Chi, Su, Ferrall, Hung and Wu2020) stopped the uncontrolled spread of the pandemic but it did not stop the creation of new conspiracy theories and their public dissemination. On the contrary, the introduction and rollout of the vaccines soon triggered further CTs and led to a rise in noncompliant behavior, specifically via rejecting vaccination (Hotez Reference Hotez2021a). The motivations were diverse, building on already extant CTs (e.g. that the vaccination was completely superfluous because the pandemic itself was a mere hoax, or that the vaccine was designed to make people even more ill). But they went far beyond such vague general concerns, alleging specific conspiratorial designs such as the vaccination being a cover for the implementation of microchips to track and/or mind-control individuals and groups or stigmatize them with the apocalyptic “mark of the beast” (Inwood & Zappavigna Reference Inwood, Zappavigna, Demata, Zorzi and Zottola2022). These anti-vaccination CTs must not be confused with scientific or clinical concerns about side-effects and failures of vaccines for particular groups of patients (Ledford Reference Ledford2021a, Reference Ledford2021b). News about vaccinations that did not work and led to dangerous, in some cases deadly, side-effects was, however, exploited and exaggerated by CT propagators to foster vaccination-skepticism and resistance, which they complemented by narratives about corrupt scientists acting for “Big Pharma,” as well as powerful individuals such as Bill Gates or George Soros, foreign powers, and/or global elites (Langer Reference Langer, Önnerfors and Krouwel2021; Pertwee, Simas & Larson Reference Pertwee, Simas and Larson2022; Birchall & Knight Reference Birchall and Knight2023).

CT propagators also recycled longstanding CTs and religious beliefs about all vaccinations functioning as attacks on the health and sanctity of the human body (Bok, Martin & Lee Reference Bok, Martin and Lee2002) and linked them to traditions of skepticism towards public welfare and healthcare systems in general, especially among so-called “prepper” groups that took pride in their supposed “self-reliance.” They had indulged in noncompliant behavior already in the early phase of the pandemic (e.g. by refusing to obey social distancing rules and wearing face-masks), but the principal rejection of vaccination was of a different quality. It signaled a determination to not accept the healthcare provision supplied by national and international health authorities and to actively resist its implementation. As a result, verbal and violent physical attacks on health officials increased (Hotez Reference Hotez2021b, Reference Hotez2023; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2023). The resulting additional pressure of undecided patients impacted hospitals, care homes, and health systems, to the point of health workers having to deal with patients dying from COVID-19 while rejecting available treatment (Modern Healthcare 2021). Scientists, already vilified as traitors, were now denounced as murderers, which justified in the eyes of some CT-believers violent attacks on them and even killing them (Nogrady Reference Nogrady2021, Reference Nogrady2024). How could CTs motivate this extreme degree of destructive activism?

The same question has been asked about infamous historical CTs that were linked to catastrophic world-historical crises such as wars and genocides. The Holocaust or “Shoah” – the murder of six million Jewish people in Europe at the hands of the Nazis – has been explicitly connected, for example, with the conspiracy outlined in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Some historians have claimed that the Protocols text was a “warrant,” “blueprint,” or “license” for the Jewish genocide (Cohn Reference Cohn1967; Wippermann Reference Wippermann2007: 67–77; Wistrich Reference Wistrich2010: 158). The case for this judgement may seem open and shut, given that leading Nazis such as Hitler, Goebbels, and Rosenberg endorsed the Protocols (Rosenberg Reference Rosenberg1923; Hitler Reference Hitler, Hartmann, Vordermayer, Plöckinger and Töppel2016: 799; Goebbels Reference Goebbels and Fröhlich1993, II, vol. 8: 287). However, as Evans (Reference Evans2020: 28–29) has pointed out, referencing these endorsements begs the question of whether the Protocols really informed or motivated Nazi policy.

Only one far-right terrorist group in the Weimar Republic seems to have been directly motivated by the Protocols: the assassins of the terrorist “Organisation Consul” who murdered the Jewish German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau as an alleged member of the “Elders of Zion” in 1922 (Evans Reference Evans2020: 27). The “identification” of Rathenau as one those “Elders” was, like the whole supposed conspiracy, completely fictitious. The Nazis retrospectively expressed their sympathy for the assassins but that does not prove a contemporary parallel belief in the Protocols in 1922. Nor did the Protocols text contain any of the main Nazi allegations of an innate tendency of a Jewish “racial parasite” to destroy the German nation or the Aryan race (Bein Reference Bein1965; Musolff Reference Musolff2010: 24–42). Hitler, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders were well aware of the fact that the authenticity of the Protocols was in doubt early on (Bytwerk Reference Bytwerk2015: 212–215), so it is not plausible that it was the basis for their plans for genocide ideology. Rather, the Protocols’ “revelations” about Jewish plans for a world dictatorship were “taken by the Nazis to confirm what they already knew” (Evans Reference Evans2020: 45) – that is, as a corroboration from an outside source “to legitimate anti-Jewish legislation and persecution” (Girard Reference Girard, Butter and Knight2020: 571) – and it served them as a point of reference in their propaganda. A blueprint for the Holocaust they were not.

The “blueprint” metaphor for the Protocols is more plausible in the sense of providing a textual summary or frame for the whole range of suspicions against Jews that had grown up in the second part of the nineteenth century, the popularity of which the Nazis relied on. The frame was easily adaptable to any new crisis or emergency that could somehow be linked to suspected Jewish culprits. It had existed in many countries since before the publication of the Protocols and it lived on despite its exposure as a forgery. In post-1918 Germany, nationalists blamed their country’s defeat in WWI on a whole sequence of alleged Jewish-led conspiracies, all of which fitted the Protocols frame: (1) an alleged “encirclement” of Germany by the Entente-powers France, Britain, and Russia, organized by Jewish financiers (Krumeich Reference Krumeich1989), (2) the sabotage and cowardice of Jews during the war allegedly proven by the aforementioned 1916 “Jewish census” of the German army, and (3) the specific “stab-in-the-back” narrative of a Jewish-led cabal who thwarted Germany’s near-certain victory and engineered the “shameful” armistice of 1918 and the Peace Treaty of 1919 (Krumeich Reference Krumeich2019; Evans Reference Evans2020: 70–83).

Each of these treason narratives can be analyzed as a CT “in its own right” but together they form a series of ever more radical and general applications of the super-CT frame of the “perennial” (Hagemeister Reference Hagemeister2022) suspicion against Jews, which was adapted to successive experiences of crises and catastrophes in the master-narrative of eternal Jewish guilt. This series culminated in Hitler’s 1939 “prophecy” of the “extermination of the Jewish Race” as a revenge for “plunging the nations once more into a World War” (Hitler Reference 62Hitler and Domarus1965: 1058). Hitler’s “prophecy” that the Jews deserved extermination as punishment for their alleged conspiracy against the whole world – and especially against the German people – was supposed to be fulfilled by the Holocaust (Evans Reference Evans2005: 604–605; Herf Reference Herf2006: 52–53). As post-WWII history has shown, however, the anti-Semitic super-CT of a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination has retained the power to generate new narratives about conspiracies that need to be resisted far beyond Europe. New CT propagators, such as the terrorist organization Hamas in Gaza, harken back to the Protocols as supposedly reliable evidence for a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Palestinian people by erecting the state of Israel (Simonsen Reference Simonsen, Butter and Knight2020: 364–367). Again, it would be wrong to assume that the Protocols originally “inspired” this new twenty-first-century anti-Semitism; rather, the reference to them is recycled to bolster new CTs, like the idea that Israel’s existence is a product of preplanned Western Jewish colonialist/imperialist conspiracies that must be resisted (Webman Reference Webman and Webman2011; Hoffman Reference Hoffman2023). As the murderous attack of Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023 showed, the CT is virulent enough to embolden its holders to engage in murderous – and to some extent suicidal – violence (Sachs Reference Sachs2023). In such an extreme case, the identity of being a resistance fighter, and the readiness to risk one’s own existence for that identity, is seen and experienced as the ultimate “proof” of the CT.

In addition to the question of how CTs are able to motivate their believers to (self-)destructive activism, we must also ask how this motivation, as a cognitive-emotive effect, can apparently “survive” over longer periods of time and spread across different cultural contexts, despite sustained campaigns of debunking them and despite repeated historical experiences of the CTs’ catastrophic consequences. This rather depressing “success” of CTs to turn into super-narratives that survive their own falsification is the focus of the following section.

3.1 CTs as “Selfish” Memes: The Evolution of Conspiracist Scenarios

One of the most longstanding historical CTs was the belief in “witches” who allegedly conspired with the Devil and among themselves to harm individuals, whole communities, and their worldly and spiritual authorities in Europe and America, spanning a period from the late fourteenth to the late eighteenth century (Cohn Reference Cohn1975, Levack Reference Levack2006, Reference Levack2013a; beyond the European-American sphere, there is of course a global anthropological and theological dimension to the belief in demons and witches). The European CT complex based on belief in witches certainly deserved Barkun’s (Reference Barkun2013) label of a super-CT but did not form a static, homogeneous system. Originating from medieval theories about the pervasive presence of demonic powers in the world, the witch CT complex acquired distinctive conceptual innovations over the course of the Renaissance and early modern times, including beliefs that witches could influence the weather, climate, and nature; that they could shapeshift into other bodies; that they congregated as groups (“witches’ sabbaths”) and could magically fly. Also part of this complex was the identification of their “familiars” and, fatefully, their prosecutors’ acceptance of – and indeed preference for – physical torture to obtain confessions at all cost. The introduction of torture in interrogating “witches” at first necessitated explicit ideological justifications, but once introduced, it quasi-automatically multiplied the number of suspects and confirmed the belief in witches through apparently conclusive confessions and testimonies (de Blécourt Reference de Blécourt and Levack2013; Hofhuis Reference Hofhuis2022: 161–172). Following dramatic episodic and local upsurges in “witch hunts” in the late seventeenth century, which threatened the cohesion and existence of the respective communities, the enormity of the persecutions led finally to growing official and popular resistance (Hofhuis Reference Hofhuis2022: 173–178).

This new sociocultural environment in turn provided a context in which the judicial, scientific, and religious counterarguments that had been leveled against witch-hunts since their beginnings gained credence (Levack Reference Levack2013b; Hofhuis Reference Hofhuis2022: 310–316), leading to the further problematization of beliefs in witches. In the eighteenth century, a core concept of witch CTs (i.e. their key function of “fighting the Devil,” which had dominated religious discourses) became more and more irrelevant in the increasingly secularized and science-dominated cultural environments in Europe and North America (Elmer Reference Elmer and Levack2013a, Reference Elmer and Levack2013b). As a consequence – albeit gradually and with significant regional differences – “witch-persecutions went extinct” (Hofhuis & Boudry Reference Hofhuis and Boudry2019: 24). Since then, over the course of the last two centuries, the religious legitimation of witch CTs has effectively ceased and witchcraft beliefs have been recategorized as irrational “superstitions” that supposedly exist only among marginal groups in Western societies and/or in non-Western cultures (Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1950; Douglas Reference Douglas1970; Rabo Reference Rabo, Butter and Knight2020). Nevertheless, motifs of witchcraft CT beliefs keep resurfacing to this day in suspicions of Satanism and ritual child abuse that feed into present-day CTs (whilst the term witch hunt itself has been reinterpreted as a metaphor for the persecution of innocent victims; see Ayto Reference Ayto2010: 386). One example of recycled secularized witch CTs is the so-called “Pizzagate” CT that started circulating on the internet in 2016, according to which a criminal ring of US “liberals” had children abducted and held in underground prisons. These children, the CT alleged, could be ordered by the conspirators under the cover of pizza deliveries and subjected to sexual abuse or the “harvesting” their blood and their (supposedly mind-enhancing and/or life-extending) adrenaline derivative adrenochrome (Bloom & Moskalenko Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021; Holoyda Reference Holoyda2022). The Pizzagate CT led to violent threats against the alleged conspirators and a gunman’s attack on a pizza restaurant in Washington (Thalmann Reference Thalmann2019; Miller Reference Miller2021). It is thus debatable whether we should view witch CTs as a past historical phenomenon that “our” modern society has overcome or recognize in the Pizzagate story a new version of the old witch CT mind-virus.

The variation in witchcraft CTs across historical periods, regions, and national cultures is reflected also in the diversity of historical explanations of their supposed “real” motivations (e.g. discrimination against minority groups, suppression of women, resistance to state and church elites, and attempts to resolve inner-community tensions; Levack Reference Levack2006: 175–202; Hofhuis Reference Hofhuis2022: 184–204). The “cultural Darwinian” perspective, in contrast to approaches that arbitrarily prioritize one explanation over others, accommodates such variation by following a “selfish culture hypothesis” (Hofhuis Reference Hofhuis2022: 210). This hypothesis assumes that those “cultural variants that accidentally enhanced the reproduction of the witch-hunts were selected and accumulated” in their respective regional and period contexts (Hofhuis & Boudry Reference Hofhuis and Boudry2019). It focuses on the details of changes in the popularity and virulence of witch CTs and relates them to a “thick” description of the communities in which they temporarily flourished (Hofhuis Reference Hofhuis2022: 358). In terms of the neo-Darwinian approach, witch CTs can be seen as narrative meme-complexes that were successful when and where they could serve as cognitive scenarios to explain and overcome natural, economic, and social crises and catastrophes such as (civil) wars, epidemics, or starvation caused by bad harvests. In competition with other available crisis narratives, the witch CTs must have been more attractive to believe in, offering as they did a seemingly plausible “solution” to the local crisis through the persecution and punishment of the individuals and groups stigmatized as witches. The witch CT complex thus became a self-perpetuating, changing narrative meme that gained the quality of a self-fulfilling promise: If the crisis experiences persisted, more witches had to be found and persecuted until the crisis came to a socially satisfactory conclusion in the eyes of believers. The well publicized falsifications of witch allegations by CT critics were insufficient in stopping the witch hunts as long as they fulfilled that function in the respective communities, especially where church and state authorities still backed them tacitly (Levack Reference Levack2013b). Until then, they still engendered conceptually innovative witch CT variants that responded to the perceived needs of local communities.

By comparison with the super-CT of witch beliefs, which stretches over more than three centuries, COVID-19-related CTs can only be accorded a “micro-evolution” since their inception in 2020. Still, their conceptual variation and their transcultural spread also invite a cognitive-evolutionist approach along the lines sketched above for witch CTs. The devastating impacts of the COVID-19 CTs on specific communities can be viewed in analogy to the “upsurges” of witch hunts. Pandemic-related CTs that interpreted COVID-19 as a hoax, as a hostile national attack, or as an attempt for global population control (see Section 1) provided “backup” arguments for the deaths of patients who refused COVID-19-specific treatments (Modern Healthcare 2021; Keith Reference Keith2022) and for patients’ self-damaging use of “alternative” cures recommended by influencers and politicians (Birchall & Knight Reference Birchall and Knight2023: 94–96). CT-based resistance against the social containment measures and vaccination campaigns to halt the pandemic also led to violent – in some cases, fatal – attacks on medical staff, social workers, and members of the public (Hall Jamieson Reference Hall Jamieson2021; Pentucci Reference Pentucci2022; US Attorney’s Office 2022; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2023) and to attacks on Chinese and Asian-looking people due to “China virus” CTs (Wang & Catalano Reference Wang, Catalano, Musolff, Breeze, Kondo and Vilar-Lluch2022). These CTs led to enduring public confusion over scientific statistics concerning fatality figures, infections, vaccinations, and patients suffering from “long COVID” (Lewínski & Abreu Reference Lewínski, Abreu, Oswald, Lewiński, Greco and Villata2022; Hotez Reference Hotez2023; Marshal Reference Marshal2023). The CTs were “backed up” by the argument that the rise in infection cases was the result of increased testing rather than reflecting the spread of the pandemic. Despite the refutation of this simplistic conclusion by experts in mathematical statistics, speculations about an artificially fabricated inflation of data about the pandemic persisted for years (Begley Reference 55Begley2020; Jarvis Reference Jarvis, Musolff, Breeze, Kondo and Vilar-Lluch2022).

These detrimental effects of COVID-19-related CTs spread globally as fast as the pandemic itself, despite the efforts of many governments, media, and supranational organizations such as the WHO to shield the public from them (Wodak Reference 76Wodak2021; Holland & Jarvis Reference Holland and Jarvis2024). From an evolutionist perspective, we can regard the various pandemic CTs and their sub-versions as memetic CT narratives within a “globalized” super-CT complex, undergoing continuous replication/reinterpretation and competing for maximum dissemination. We can then ask how these global pandemic CTs became culturally localized into scenarios that motivated their believers to take violent action and risk harm to themselves and others within their sociocultural context. (This concept of localization is drawn from theories of translation and intercultural communication, where it captures the adaptation of texts and products to a local sociocultural context, as a counterpart to the corresponding notion of globalization; see e.g. Coupland Reference 58Coupland2010). In the remainder of this section we look at the spread of such an “innovative” COVID-19-related CT variant in Germany.

On August 29, 2020, the German capital Berlin witnessed a large protest rally against the government’s COVID-19 restrictions, which by that time had already included social distancing, mask mandates, and lockdowns (one in spring 2020, and another one expected for the following autumn and winter). The demonstrators (who numbered around 40,000 according to police estimates) comprised a multitude of protesters from across the whole political spectrum, ranging from loosely organized groups of “independent” or “lateral thinkers” (Querdenker) to advocates of “alternative” lifestyles (including “New Age” science skeptics) and far-right groups (Pantenburg, Reichardt & Sepp Reference Pantenburg, Reichardt and Sepp2021; Reichardt Reference Reichardt2021). This wide variety of groups from all political/ideological corners should not be interpreted as evidence for a truly spontaneous, grassroots character of the rally. On the contrary: Sociological research has shown that “the protest organizers follow[ed] a strategic logic” (Plümper, Neumayer & Pfaff Reference Plümper, Neumayer and Pfaff2021: 2247). During the afternoon of August 29, one of the right-wing protest groups, about 400 strong, broke through the barriers around the Parliament building, the Reichstag, and ran up its stairs with the ostensive intention to get inside, spurred on by rumors that the police would stand aside and the bizarre notion that US President Trump had come to Berlin to help them personally (Der Tagesspiegel 2020; Die Welt 2020a, 2020b; Die Zeit 2020; T-Online 2020a, 2020b). They were, however, stopped by a small police force guarding the Reichstag, who hindered them from advancing into the building, kicking some of them down the steps to the main entrance.

This attempted “storming” of the Parliament was photographed and filmed and became a news item across the world (The Guardian 2020; The New York Times 2020). It soon became clear that the group that had attempted the “Reichstag storming” consisted mainly of so-called “Reich citizens” (German: Reichsbürger), that is, extreme right-wing opponents of the present-day German state, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). These Reich citizens usually refuse to pay taxes or other official fees (Pentucci Reference Pentucci2022: 20). Some Reich citizen groups have taken on fantasy patriotic names such as “United Patriots” (Vereinte Patrioten), “United German Peoples and Tribes” (Geeinte Deutsche Völker und Stämme), or “Free State Prussia” (Freistaat Preußen), but they are closely interconnected (Schönberger & Schönberger Reference Schönberger and Schönberger2023). They have existed in Germany since the 1980s, but have grown in size, especially after the 1990 unification in conjunction with other right-wing groups, including the far-right party “Alternative for Germany” (Alternative für Deutschland; AfD), which, on the basis of a strong anti-immigration stance linked to a German-specific version of the Great Replacement CT (Correctiv 2024), has gained considerably in popularity over the last two decades, rising from below 5 percent share of the vote in the first national election it contested in 2013, to 20.8 percent in the 2025 national elections.

The 2020 “storming” of the Parliament, though in practical terms a failure, had a high symbolic value as a first-ever attack on the center of post-WWII German democracy in its historic building. Global media showed the demonstrators carrying flags and banners bearing the colors of the 1871–1918 “German Empire” (black, white, and red) and the symbol of its “imperial” eagle (T-Online 2020a, 2020b; Thorwart Reference Thorwart2020). As the following years showed, the August 2020 action was no one-off event – it was part of a far larger political strategy. During 2021 and 2022, groups of Reich citizens were arrested and put on trial for making concrete preparations to abduct the federal health minister, Karl Lauterbach, kill the Saxon minister president Michael Kretschmer, and even lead an armed putsch against the national government (Deutsche Welle 2022; Der Spiegel 2022, 2023a, 2023b; Die Welt 2022, 2023; Thorwart Reference Thorwart2022; Kupper & Dittrich Reference Kupper and Dittrich2023). By 2021, police forces in Germany already estimated their strength as at least 2,000 violent activists, including some officers from the armed forces, and 21,000 sympathizers (Pawelz Reference Pawelz2022). For these groups, the pandemic crisis, with its potential for social and political unrest, appeared to be a fitting context in which they could launch their plans for overthrowing the hated federal state and re-found a Reich that could negotiate such a peace treaty as the German nation was supposedly denied after WWII (in order to keep it “enslaved” by the Western victorious powers) (Rathje Reference 71Rathje2017, Reference Rathje2021; Schönberger & Schönberger Reference Schönberger and Schönberger2023).

But what have a far-right nationalist CT about Germany’s enslavement and nostalgia for the pre-WWI empire to do with anti-COVID protests? Prima facie, a link of authoritarian ideology and healthcare protests in Germany is counterintuitive, for the 1871–1918 German empire was known for its strict policies against infectious diseases (Hess Reference Hess2000; Thießen Reference Thießen2013). It is by no means self-evident that present-day German right-wing extremists should try to form the avant-garde of an anti-authoritarian protest rally against pandemic policies. Neither is it self-evident that the protest movement should allow itself to become fellow travelers of far-right extremists keen to engage in scuffles with riot police and to plan an overthrow of the state. However, when studying the conspiracist narratives of both sides in detail, some convergent argumentative trends emerge. On the presupposition that the government’s anti-COVID-19 containment measures such as social distancing, lockdowns, mask mandates, and, ultimately, vaccination were superfluous, the authorities trying to impose them became the target of suspicion (i.e. for having hidden ulterior motives for imposing the containment measures). Noncompliance with the restrictions was likened to an act of “resistance” on a par with anti-fascist resistance during the Third Reich. Some protesters even posed as equivalents of Jewish Holocaust victims by wearing mock Star of David symbols stigmatizing themselves as untested or unvaccinated. Similarly, they denounced the COVID-19 laws as a repeat of the 1933 “Enabling Act” (Ermächtigungsgesetz) that had legalized the Nazi dictatorship (Der Spiegel 2020; Deutsche Welle 2020). The Reichsbürger CT of the German federal government acting on foreign orders to keep the nation enslaved matched their suspicions of the state authorities’ hidden agenda sufficiently to join arms and legitimize using violence against it.

More details about the Reich citizens’ motivation to join and spearhead the 2020 rally became known three years later when the weekly Die Zeit published a dossier reporting the results of a series of interviews with twenty-nine of the Reichsbürger demonstrators identified as participants in the attempted “storming of the Reichstag” (Die Zeit 2023). Their statements provide some, albeit self-reported, insights into the conspiracy beliefs that motivated these protesters to engage in their violent actions. The informants articulated two main lines of argument and shared one common emotional experience. The two arguments for excusing their actions consisted in (1) minimizing their personal actions or involvement in the violence (especially in view of the then-ongoing judicial investigation and prosecution) and (2) insisting on the legitimacy of resisting the national COVID-19 restrictions on the grounds that they were violations of their human rights and in any case the result of a colonial regime, in contrast to the last “proper” German state (i.e. the old empire founded by Bismarck, where everything was “in order”) (Die Zeit 2023). Their shared emotional experience of the “storming” event was described as “huge joy” (riesig gefreut), solidarity of “us against the rest of the world” (Wir gegen den Rest der Welt) and being together with “so many wonderful” people (so viele tolle Menschen kennengelernt) (Die Zeit 2023). Some verbal aggression also came through in the interviews, in the form of insults against the journalists (e.g. as “prostitutes” of the ruling “system”) combined with threats to prosecute or even use violence against them or against members of parliament (Die Zeit 2023). All in all, the 2020 rally was assessed retrospectively as an epiphany-like experience in which their long-held suspicions were revealed as true by the manifest repression of an authoritarian state. Blending their own CT narrative of an alleged national enslavement with the conspiracist criticism of COVID-19 restrictions seems to have presented the Reich citizens with a unique chance to view themselves as part of a popular uprising in self-defense, which they tried to “enact” through storming the parliament and preparing for a coup d’état.

Criticism of COVID-19 restrictions after the first lockdown by the wider civil protest movement and parts of the broader public thus presented the Reich citizen groups with a unique chance to interpret and promote their own CT scenario (national oppression) as part of a general popular uprising, which they tried to “enact” through storming the parliament and preparing a putsch. In a wider global perspective, the QAnon-inspired suspicions of a worldwide conspiracy of evil elites were concretized into the specific situation of a “battle” against the national government and its executive forces (who were thus legitimate targets for acts of resistance and counterattacks). In Barkun’s (Reference Barkun2013) terminology, such a combination of a local-nationalist CT and global COVID-19-related CTs can again be classified as a super-CT in the sense of a “supercharged,” enhanced CT that urges people into violent action, in which they could validate their feelings of frustration and hostility towards the state and could enact fantasies of a people’s rebellion. Remarkably, this radicalization dynamic of the CT-based “resistance fight” scenario was activated in the pandemic situation within months of the outbreak, in stark contrast to the CTs of long duration (such as witch beliefs or anti-Semitic CTs, which developed over centuries). In a comparative perspective, the microevolution of the August 2020 fight scenario at the Reichstag reveals itself as the result of a super-fast fusion or blending of CTs which, though conceptually unrelated and diverse, suddenly “made sense” together as revealing a hidden pattern behind the believers’ crisis experiences and providing an opportunity for their resolution.

This “resistance fight” scenario as a fulfilment of the Reich citizens’ “fight for liberation” can serve as a test case for comparative analyses of the “success” of diverse CTs in radicalizing believers, such as the 2021 storming of the Capitol in Washington, DC (combining, as it did, local – i.e. US-national – CTs implied in the “Stop the Steal” campaign with global COVID-19-related CTs [NPR/IPSOS 2020; Allain et al. Reference Allain, Bhattarai, McNeally and Medina2023; Hall Jamieson, Levendusky & Pasek Reference Hall Jamieson, Levendusky, Pasek, Hall Jamieson, Levendusky, Pasek, Holbert, Renninger, Ophir, Walter, Hardy, Kenski, Winneg and Romer2023]), and also historical CT “upsurges” such as the Dreyfus trials, specific witch hunts, anti-foreigner riots, or racist pogroms based on CTs. A central connecting characteristic of such events seems to be the believers’ experience of their violent actions as epiphany-like revelations. This liberating “resistance fight” scenario fulfils both cognitively and emotively reassuring functions: It provides seemingly incontrovertible manifest “proof” that the conspiracy in question exists – namely, in the form of a concretely identifiable enemy – and it conveys an experience of solidarity among the self-appointed resisters (viz. the QAnon slogan “Where we go one we all go” see Wendling Reference Wendling2021).

In the evolutionist perspective, the integration of COVID-19-related CTs in the Reich citizens’ national resentment CT can be analyzed as a memetic adaptation to a specific sociocultural environment. Conceptually, it involved the “innovative” reinterpretation of already existing COVID-19 CTs as confirmed by the Reich citizen experience of being oppressed by illegitimate, foreign-controlled rulers. In the competition with other CTs it was sufficiently “successful” to have a public breakthrough in the far-right groups’ actions. Due to a number of adverse factors, not least the police action at the Reichstag in August 2020, the uncovering of their terroristic plans, and the subsequent judicial prosecutions, the propagandistic activity by Reich citizen as meme carriers has recently diminished. On the other hand, this super-CT is also almost certain to “survive” in the form of new conceptual adaptations (e.g. in the rhetorically toned-down but narratively congruent versions propagated by right-wing extremists to undermine the legitimacy of the federal government in Germany) (AfD 2020, 2022).

3.2 CTs as Scenarios with a Dissemination Dynamic of Their Own

Following the evolutionist perspective with its distinction between meme-innovation, on the one hand, and meme-dissemination, on the other hand, this section focuses on the latter aspect. It asks: How can CTs, once they have been created and put in the public sphere, “survive” in competition with each other and with mainstream, authoritative explanations of crises? As has already been argued, it is hardly their flimsy information content that makes belief in CTs attractive. Their conceptual ingredients are exchangeable, variable, and even “cancellable,” depending on the propagandistic and ideological contexts in which they are propagated. Thus, for audiences of COVID-19 CTs who believed already that “white” Western culture was the victim of a “Great Replacement,” the pandemic “made sense” as a means to reduce or exterminate it (Birchall & Knight Reference Birchall and Knight2023: 141); hence, the narrative of COVID-19 as being spread on purpose and being followed by a deadly vaccination campaign seemed for them plausible. If, on the other hand, audiences were mainly worried about “not being told the truth” by governments and scientists, the hoax version sufficed. Both CT versions could even be combined despite their mutual logical incompatibility (Bruns, Harrington & Hurcombe Reference Bruns, Harrington and Hurcombe2020; Imhoff & Lamberty Reference 63Imhoff and Lamberty2020). However, beyond their integration into and with other CTs, what is it that makes certain CTs particularly attractive and thus “successful” in competition with other CTs and commonsense crisis explanations?

Whilst CTs with the same target topic may sometimes contradict each other in their details, they have one essential aspect in common: They presuppose the existence of a hidden, “true” reality behind the make-believe, misleading mainstream information – that is, its control by a conspiracy. CT believers assume they have a privileged access to this hidden reality, which entitles them (at least in their own view) to use uncooperative and fallacious forms of “strategic maneuvering” against criticism, especially concerning the “burden of proof” (van Eemeren & Houtlosser Reference van Eemeren, Houtlosser and van Eemeren2002). They present their own claims and conclusions as being self-evident (i.e. not needing any further proof); they also appeal to sources that are “only seemingly authoritative” (van Eemeren & Houtlosser Reference van Eemeren, Houtlosser and van Eemeren2002: 24), and act as if the standpoint of their critics “had been refuted” when they had not (van Eemeren & Houtlosser Reference van Eemeren, Houtlosser and van Eemeren2002: 25). A case in point is the routine refusal of COVID-19-CT believers to accept any substantial burden of proof. Neither the hoax-CT believers nor the vaccination skeptics engage with the overwhelming evidence of publicly available statistics of pandemic fatalities and recovery (Hotez Reference Hotez2023); instead, they appeal without any backup to nonscientific “authorities” such as politicians and (social) media pundits (Jennings et al. Reference Jennings, Stoker, Bunting, Valgarðsson, Gaskell, Devine, McKay and Mills2021; Andone & Lomelí Hernández Reference Andone, Lomelí Hernández and Oswald2022) and often simply deny counterevidence (Maxmen & Mallapaty Reference Maxmen and Mallapaty2021; Mallapaty Reference Mallapaty2023). Similarly, adherents of 9/11 CTs have failed to engage with the detailed proofs from the analysis of the ruins and from physical experiments showing that the affected buildings did collapse and burn down due to the impact of the airplanes flown into them (Dunbar & Reagan Reference Dunbar and Reagan2011; Bergmann Reference Bergmann2025: 66–68). Likewise, the believers in the 1933 Reichstag fire or the Kennedy assassination CTs, who insisted that one person could not have perpetrated those crimes, have denied over decades the existence of all reliable evidence that pointed towards the solitary culprits (Evans Reference Evans2020: 107–119; Gagné Reference Gagné2022: 72–103).

When attempting to compensate for their disengagement from material evidence for their core claims about a conspiracy, CT propagandists and believers often focus on “proving” its existence by way of circumstantial evidence, shifting the burden of proof to a seemingly more accessible terrain. QAnon believers, for instance, have had as their “database” only the cryptic messages sent by a poster under the pseudonym “Q,” which they have to decipher (i.e. speculate about) for themselves in their “echo chamber.” They therefore concentrate on arguing about the finer points of “Q”-exegesis, rather than finding the source or assessing the plausibility of “Q-drop” messages (Forberg Reference Forberg2021; Holoyda Reference Holoyda2022; Bondi & Sanna Reference Bondi, Sanna, Demata, Zorzi and Zottola2022). This invitation-to-speculate is similar to that of computer games that entice their players to search endlessly for clues (Thorwart Reference Thorwart2020). This gaming quality imparts a ludic attractiveness to CTs but it leaves believers unsatisfied for most of the time spent on their “quest.” Hence, it is only in moments of a sudden epiphanic revelation, such as the attempted 2020 “storming of the Reichstag” in Berlin or the storming of the US Capitol in Washington in 2021, that the CT temporarily seems to be confirmed – specifically, through violent action. However, unless these experiences can be repeated and intensified, the quest for confirmation of the CT suspicion continues, which likens it to an addiction that never comes to a rest.

The reception history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion provides a classic example of the CT believers’ century-spanning quest for confirmation. The Protocols’ dubious character as a text (i.e. in its being the product of forgery and of repeated plagiarism of anti-Semitic writings dating back to the eighteenth century) was publicly exposed as early as 1921 and was further exposed in two high-profile trials in Switzerland, which confirmed its fictitious character (Hagemeister Reference Hagemeister2022: 21–38). In Nazi Germany, where the Protocols were emphatically endorsed by the Nazi leadership as supposedly proving their suspicions against “World Jewry’s” conspiracy, these publicized doubts about the published Russian texts’ authenticity were well known, even to Hitler and Goebbels (see Section 2.3). After WWII, the Protocols were further discredited and a stream of critical research has since identified every single source of the historical plagiarisms in the text (Cohn Reference Cohn1967: 60–107; Hagemeister Reference Hagemeister2022: 1–20). Nevertheless, they continue to be recycled and applied (e.g. in contexts of anti-Israeli propaganda [Webman Reference Webman and Webman2011; Hoffman Reference Hoffman2023]) and in conspiracist “explanations” of COVID-19 as the product of a global elite plot (Zipperstein Reference Zipperstein2020). This continuing readaptation of Protocols-based CTs shows that they mainly serve the believers’ search for new opportunities to see them “come true” again and again, like the prophecies of Nostradamus. Neo-Nazis and present-day terrorists denying Israel’s right to exist (Landes & Katz Reference Landes and Katz2011; Girard Reference Girard, Butter and Knight2020) still feel entitled to attack the state of Israel, Jewish institutions, and individuals with reference to the Protocols, not because of but regardless of the details of the original text. In this sense, the Protocols are a prototypical CT “mind-virus” (Dawkins Reference Dawkins and Menon2004) that generates, through continuing variation and adaptation, its own momentum for continued dissemination. It provides time and again a “virtual” subtext for anti-Jewish interpretations of all real-world crises that can be invoked, often indirectly or metonymically (e.g. as the dog-whistling clue to “International Finance,” which is beyond critical discussion or reflection) (Subotic Reference Subotic2022).

Occasionally, however, CT propagandists and believers find themselves confronting critics and nonbelievers who won’t take the unproven assumption of a conspiracy (or its enactment in a violent fight scenario) as sufficient proof of its truth. The following section deals with the tactics with which CT propagators and believers shield themselves – and immunize their CTs – against radical conceptual/ideological critique and competition.

3.3 Self-Justification of CT Scenarios: Immunization against Criticism

Declaring factual details of CTs irrelevant is, as we have seen, a routine defensive move of their propagators and may convince followers who are already certain that a conspiracist account of their crisis experience is right. It is, however, a weak form of “strategic maneuvering” in terms of argumentative plausibility. Of course, CT propagators can meta-communicatively deny that they have abdicated the commitment to discharging the burden of proof but in any, even minimally, open argumentation, such a move appears as an obvious fallacy that may make their stance an object of derision. To avoid such a loss of credibility, the semblance of commitment to searching for evidence must be kept up. So, how do CTs “survive” open falsification?

One set of seemingly more sophisticated tactics is to declare one’s CT to be a mere hypothesis or to be meant figuratively (i.e. not as a proposition that entails strong epistemic commitments) so that those who believe its literal version appear to have misunderstood it. The concomitant loss of face is compensated by immunity from judicial prosecution. The professional CT propagator, talk show host, and internet influencer Alex Jones, for instance, employed it to defend his hoax-CT slur against the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which twenty-six people were murdered by a gunman. In his radio talks and on his internet platform InfoWars, Jones had alleged that the victims, their families, and helpers who had come to the rescue were all actors in a drill exercise who “staged” the shooting to support reforms to the liberal US gun laws (Olmsted Reference Olmsted2023). In 2022, he was sentenced to pay $1.5 billion in compensation to the victims of his defamation, some of whom had been subsequently harassed and attacked by CT believers (Nelson Reference Nelson2013; Otten Reference Otten2022). Apparently aiming to restore Jones’s reputation and to justify his readmission on the social media platform “X,” the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, invited him to take back his hoax CT. On Musk’s prompt, Jones was quick to assert that “of course” he had not wanted to imply such a denial but that he had only covered what others had said and thus could not be held responsible for the actions of his CT followers: “I just … play devil’s advocate … And if that hurt people’s feelings, I apologize. But I did not send people to your houses. I did not pee on graves” (Olmsted Reference Olmsted2023).

Jones’s answer includes several “minimization strategies” that turn it into a near-perfect “non-apology” (Benoit Reference Benoit1997; Kampf Reference Kampf2009): He attempts to shift responsibility by blaming others (e.g. talk show listeners), as well as by apologizing for potentially (“if”) having hurt “feelings” and by claiming to have only “played the devil’s advocate” (i.e. to have taken up an stance opposing the main proposition, simply in order to be evenhanded and to consider all possibilities) (Ayto Reference Ayto2010: 92; Pascovich Reference Pascovich2018). This excuse presumes the existence of uncertain (i.e. still debatable) aspects of the topic. If that were the case, playing the devil’s advocate would be an intellectually respectable exercise for interpreting an issue that is still unknown to some extent (van Eemeren, Houtlosser & Snoueck Henkemans Reference van Eemeren, Houtlosser and Snoeck Henkemans2007: 19). As some factual details of a crisis or catastrophe may remain unclear for some time, a conspiracy scenario may indeed be a potential explanation, however improbable it may be from a common-sense viewpoint. In Jones’s case, however, the notion that the amply documented mass murder had not taken place was no “remote possibility” that could be considered by the devil’s advocate. The denial only made sense as a pretense to justify the invention of a conspiracy for the supposed hoax; here, that the anti-gun lobby “staged” the school massacre to legitimize their calls for tighter gun laws. Argumentatively, it amounts to the circular (i.e. fallacious) conditional statement: “If the shooting had been invented, it would be proof of a conspiracy, therefore, let’s assume that the shooting was invented.”

This fudging of the boundary between documented, proven, and potential invented “facts,” or, in the words of Donald Trump’s PR counselor K. Conway, the presentation of “alternative facts” (Blake Reference Blake2017) appears to be part of a wider “post-truth” trend (d’Ancona Reference d’Ancona2017), which aims at confusing critics by pretending to make an explanatory argument about “facts” when in reality it is the suggestion of a wildly speculative suspicion. Within a CT such as Jones’s “Sandy Hook hoax,” or the COVID-19-as-hoax theory, there is no fact-based “premise” that could be used to build an explanatory conclusion: Their cognitive import amounts only to a speculative conditional. The presumed conspiracy is never substantiated but used to construe new opportunities for keeping the debate open. Jones’s “devil’s advocate” defense amounted to no more than a hypocritical self-excuse from the real-world consequences of his own CT.

Variants of this strategy can be found in many CT propagators’ self-justifications when they have been publicly exposed as relying on invented assumptions. Like the devil’s advocate defense, they involve the notion of not having spoken “in earnest.” Thus, when confronted with legal prosecution for their self-publicized attempt to “storm” the Reichstag in 2020 and their plans for a putsch, one of the Reich citizen defendants declared the accusation to be an “old wives’ tale” (Ammenmärchen) (Die Zeit 2023; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2024a, 2024b). US President Trump’s incitement of his followers to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” on January 6, 2021, to rectify the “steal” of his supposed election victory was defended by his attorney as a way of “speaking metaphorically” (The Hill 2021). The leader of the Dutch far-right party Forum for Democracy, Thierry Baudet, disclaimed his own denunciation of political adversaries as “reptiles” (which echoed D. Icke’s notion of reptilian bloodlines controlling the world [Icke Reference Icke1999)] as being “of course a metaphor” (Emmery Reference Emmery2022). This list could be extended further but the argumentation tactic is the same: It comes down to a partial retraction of the CT by reinterpreting it as a hypothetical “debating point.” This tactic still weakens the CT’s credibility but keeps it in play as an “open question” and thus maintains the “quest” character of the CT belief.

A second, more aggressive and more powerful tactic of CT propagators is the counteraccusation against CT critics or opponents that they are part of the conspiracy. Instead of abdicating or reducing the burden of proof for the CT, this one “raises the stakes,” so to speak, by adding further sub-CTs to an already existing main CT. An example of such a CT-defense tactic was the vilification of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In several COVID-19-related CTs Fauci was cast as a traitor scientist who was allegedly responsible for the pandemic by collaborating with the Chinese bioweapons laboratory in Wuhan. The Fauci-centered CTs acquired a momentum of their own, outlasting his retirement at the end of 2022, and triggered investigations and accusations in the US Senate and House of Representatives as well as in Republican-leaning media. His case can serve as an exemplary illustration of the self-perpetuating force of CTs.

4.1 A Red Herring: Fact-Checking for CT Falsification

The insight that CTs cannot be effectively countered by simply supplying “facts and figures” has by now become almost a commonplace in the research literature on the evidence that many falsified CTs have persisted over longer periods of time; examples in recent decades have included the enduring CTs about the Kennedy murder, the 9/11 terrorist attack, or the COVID-19 pandemic (Barkun Reference Barkun2013: 158–169; d’Ancona Reference d’Ancona2017; Gagné Reference Gagné2022: 100–103; Birchall & Knight Reference Birchall and Knight2023; Bergmann Reference Bergmann2025). Butter & Knight (Reference Butter, Knight, Butter and Knight2020a: 2) rightly insist that “conspiracy theories are not identical with fake news.” As argued in Section 1 of this Element, fact-checking and “fake news”-exposing on its own is not a viable strategy against CTs because most of them are non-falsifiable, and the few historical CTs that appear to have been confirmed or disconfirmed by research or judicially based consensus were resolved only after many years (or even decades), so that for much of their existence in the public sphere they remained undecided. Even after a generally accepted debunking, they are usually not fully abandoned by their propagators or followers. Instead, as the preceding section showed, they are “argued away” through excuses such as that of the CT being only a hypothetical argument from a “devil’s advocate” point of view or a metaphorical way of speaking. Moreover, as the evolutionist approach to CTs has demonstrated (see Sections 2.1 and 2.2), many present-day superconspiracies such as QAnon and the Great Replacement include sub-CTs adapted from centuries-old beliefs, such as Satanism, witch CTs, and anti-Jewish or anti-Islamic prejudice complexes. Some of these sub-CTs never seem to die out completely, like the blood libel dating back to the twelfth century which has reappeared in the Pizzagate and QAnon CTs. The feasibility of conclusively falsifying them appears to be illusory, as they have already “survived” repeated debunking attempts and fulfill apparently popular tastes, like those for occultist fiction, horror, and science fiction stories.

It must be stressed, however, that such an acknowledgement of CTs’ enduring popularity does not at all invalidate their fact-checking, fact-correction, or “debunking” and factual falsification as heuristic moves in combatting CTs. Indeed, these and argumentative countermoves – such as highlighting their implausibility, as well as ironical subversion and “cognitive infiltration” (by turning CTs’ tacitly presumed skepticism against them) (see Sunstein & Vermeule Reference Sunstein and Vermeule2009; d’Ancona Reference d’Ancona2017: 129–149; Krekó Reference Krekó, Butter and Knight2020) – are essential tools to fight against CT “weaponization” (Bergmann Reference Bergmann2025). On the other hand, a preoccupation with fact-checking every sub-CT and circumstantial “evidence” claim may play into the hands of CT propagators, as it only reacts to and follows new quests for “supporting evidence” (see Section 3.3) and thus extends its public dissemination.

When we recall that CTs’ central cognitive function lies in the reassurance of audiences whose confidence in having a sufficient overview of their living-world reality has been undermined by experiences of crisis or catastrophe, even such argumentative countering is unlikely to remove the fundamental conditions for the emergence and successful adaptive evolution of CTs. As far as regards the creation and emergence of CTs (“memetic innovation”), it may even be argued that it is both impossible and unnecessary to prevent. As long as humans feel helpless and disoriented by crises, their cognitive creativity will produce conspiracy scenarios that seem to make sense of an uncertain “reality” and that motivate them to engage in (political) actions to solve the crises. A few of these scenarios may even prove to be correct (i.e. conspiracies that are revealed to have taken place) and their exposure may lead to a cathartic, liberating effect. “False” CTs, on the other hand, manage to linger on and revive again and again due to their reassurance function until the latter has lost its attraction, which may take a very long time.

What then can a cognitive-evolutionist analysis contribute to developing strategies to “neutralize” CTs that go beyond factual “debunking”? On the basis of the preceding discussion, two strategies seem worth considering, namely those of (1) preventing CTs from being developed into resistance fight scenarios that promise believers a victorious outcome, and (2) obstructing the dissemination of CTs through deconstructing the never-ending quests for and presentations of supposedly new “circumstantial evidence” that extend CTs’ conceptual “careers.”

4.2 Combatting Scenario Formation

As argued before, CTs are “theories” in the colloquial sense of the term; that is, they are invented conceptual constructs that link a given crisis/catastrophe experience with a presumed conspiracy, for which there is no immediately obvious evidence. At this stage, a CT is not much more than a privately entertained suspicion. This privately held “mental representation” of a causal link, “Conspiracy X → Crisis Y,” may spread (through verbal and multimedia communication) and become a “public representation” (Sperber Reference Sperber and Aunger2000a), with the particular slant of contradicting an already established official narrative of the crisis. The latter is of course also an explanatory account but is deemed unsatisfactory by CT believers because it allegedly underestimates or hides the true extent of the conspiracy, for example by identifying only a single perpetrator (as in the assassination of J.F. Kennedy) or a relatively small group of perpetrators (such as al-Qaeda for the 9/11 attack); by explaining the crisis as the result of an accidental mishap (e.g. the theory of the COVID-19 origin as a chance animal-human crossover event); or by even admitting that it is not yet resolved (as in the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370; see de Changy Reference de Changy2021). Against the supposedly misleading and mendacious official account, CT propagators assume a defensive position of proposing an alternative account to reveal the “real” conspiracy. This “counter-CT” may be at first a more or less plausible speculation among others, which is entertained or believed to a greater or lesser degree by its recipients, depending on their disposition for a “conspiracist mentality” (Lantian, Wood & Gjoneska Reference Lantian, Wood, Gjoneska, Butter and Knight2020; van Prooijen, Klein & Milošević Đorđević Reference van Prooijen, Klein, Milošević Đorđević, Butter and Knight2020). Even if they are shared in an internet chat-group or in a private meeting in the real world, such nascent CTs are hardly likely to have an immediate attitude-changing and action-inspiring impact. However, their continued repetition as “privileged” knowledge within a group that views itself as being stigmatized by the official knowledge holders may well create the basis of a feeling of solidarity and cohesion among the “chosen few” who consider themselves to be “in the know” (Douglas et al. Reference Douglas, Uscinski, Sutton, Chichocka, Nefes, Ang and Deravi2019: 8–10). They accord themselves the status of alternative “experts” who, instead of relying on the “division of linguistic labor” (Putnam Reference Putnam and Gunderson1975), view themselves as the only true knowledge holders – that is, the ones who should be deferred to by others. Even then, however, an isolated CT existing in a niche of the offline or online world will still not be memetically successful as long as its potential adaptive potential is not realized due to a lack of wider uptake.

The essential condition for such an uptake is the integration of a CT with other CTs and worldviews by the CT propagators into a narrative complex that appears to provide a fully coherent explanation for a set of crisis/catastrophe experiences of their audience and to outline an action scenario for them that has a positive “solution” outcome. Once construed, such a scenario can be turned into a quasi-concrete experience that seems to confirm the CT-holders’ beliefs in the possibility of a final “victory.” Thus, the Reich citizens managed to integrate their CT beliefs about COVID-19 (both as a hoax or fabrication) with nationalist resentments about the alleged foreign occupation of Germany sufficiently to enact the 2020 Reichstag battle (Section 2.2). A similar dynamic emerged from Trump’s “Stop the Steal” CT alleging that a “Deep State” conspiracy had cheated him out of a victory in the 2020 US presidential election, which in combination with QAnon-beliefs, led to the “storming” of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. It is at this “scenario”-stage that a CT is turned into an apparently self-fulfilling prophecy that has the force to trigger an epiphany-like revelation for its holders.

It stands to reason that at moments of such seeming fulfilment of CT beliefs the commonsense “epistemic vigilance” (Sperber et al. Reference Sperber, Clément, Heintz, Mascaro, Mercier, Origgi and Wilson2010) techniques or consensus-oriented, “pragma-dialectical” argumentation strategies (van Eemeren & Grootendorst Reference van Eemeren and Grootendorst1992) are set aside for the experience of a shared understanding of an “inner truth” about what goes on behind mainstream politics and for the emphatic optimistic feeling of overcoming it, together with one’s “comrades in arms.” The supply of “more facts and figures,” instructions about logical thinking, or advice to believe in what official “experts” or “authorities” say are insufficient to counter this emphatic experience. The only form of cognitively effective countermeasures seems to be the deconstruction of the conspiracy scenario, for example through persistent questioning of its apparent coherence. It is not sufficient to rely on the one-off effect of the “better argument.” Rather, a sustained exposing of a CTs’ non sequiturs, false backup arguments, and overgeneralizations – together with the reassertion of consensus information – can challenge CT-holder’ beliefs without damaging their socio-communicative “face” and still “update” (i.e. correct) their understanding of a crisis experience in favor of a less conspiracist explanation and even worldview (Cook, Lewandowsky & Ecker Reference Cook, Lewandowsky and Ecker2017; Costello, Pennycook & Rand Reference Costello, Pennycook and Rand2024).

Deconstructing CT narratives is perhaps easier against asserted CTs than for hoax CTs, as the latter are often disguised, when challenged, as being “devil’s advocate” arguments or as “merely questioning” the discrepancies in the mainstream consensus, to avoid incurring argumentative commitments. However, insofar as they assume the existence of a specific conspiracy scenario, this can be also questioned, for example by rejecting the burden of proof evasion by the CT’s proponents.

After all, the principally skeptical attitude that CT believers apply to “mainstream” explanations can also be turned against their own CTs in order to break up their apparent super-coherence. Such a “subversive” approach in countering CTs is, however, only possible in contexts of roughly equal discussion rights, that is, when counterarguments are allowed to penetrate details of CTs’ assertions and challenge their backup evidence. These conditions may be difficult to achieve in polarized or highly adversarial contexts, such as when scientists are publicly interrogated by CT-sympathizing politicians but not allowed to “talk back,” as was the case in the media treatment of “Climategate” in the UK or in US Senate hearings on the COVID-19 pandemic management, where the burden of proof commitment was one-sidedly loaded against the scientists who were treated as a priori conspiracy suspects. On the other hand, well-conducted judicial procedures providing affordances for an evenhanded allocation of burden of proof seem to offer good chances for exposing and deconstructing the absurdity of CTs, as in the humiliation of CT propagator David Irving in his libel case against critics who had exposed him as a Holocaust denier (which was later reiterated by a conviction for that crime in an Austrian court; see Shermer & Grobman Reference Shermer and Grobman2000 and Lipstadt Reference Lipstadt2017). The implementation of such deconstruction strategies in appropriate institutional contexts designed to expose the CT propagators’ own pretended expert authority and the CTs’ internal pseudo-argumentative coherence seems more promising as a means to counter CTs than a sole reliance on fact-checking and debunking. The following, final section looks at ways of obstructing CTs’ uncritical dissemination.

4.3 Obstructing CT-Dissemination through Cognitive Deconstruction

The spread, or dissemination, of CTs has been researched extensively, especially with regard to the impact that internet communication and the rise of “social media” on mobile phones have had over the three past decades (Stano Reference Stano, Butter and Knight2020; Mahl, Schäfer & Zeng Reference 67Mahl, Schäfer and Zeng2022). Much of this research remains stuck, however, within the paradigm of viewing CTs as forms of disinformation or “lying.” It rightly notes that CTs, like fake news and false rumors, are at first reiterated mainly inside the discourse niches, “bubbles,” or “echo chambers” of the world wide web until their endorsements and reiterations in the form of “likes,” “retweets,” and “trending” threads reach a critical mass and then suddenly and quickly multiply, reaching and misinforming many millions. But that is where the similarities end. CTs are, as we have seen, conceptually and rhetorically more complex than representations of individual pieces of incorrect factual information because they connect their account of a crisis or catastrophe experiences with a conspiracy “backstory” into narrative wholes. Their purpose is not merely to spread false information but to motivate their recipients to believe in, and potentially enact, scenarios of confrontation that are supposed to resolve their cognitive-emotional “dissonance.”

Whilst there seems to be little chance to prevent the emergence or invention of CTs, obstructing their spread as “mind-viruses” may be more feasible. One aspect of this strategy are legislative and administrative interventions to regulate social media providers. This aspect is beyond the remit of this analysis and requires media-sociological, educational, and technological treatment, as well as an in-depth discussion of legal and ethical implications. In the following section I will sketch perspectives for cognitively deconstructing CT narratives in as far as their dissemination turns them into virulent CT scenarios (i.e. platforms for activism). For this, I build on the four core components identified earlier.