Introduction

Conspiracies are very real, of course. The fact that powerful people make secret plans at the expense of the general public should come as no surprise to anyone. Nixon conspired to cover up Watergate. The CIA staged “false flag” operations in 1953 to bring down the Iranian government. Powerful men in the Reagan administration conspired to illegally trade arms with Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras. Enron conspired to shut down power stations to raise the price of electricity. Executives from Archer Daniels Midland conspired to fix the price of animal feed.1 People within the second Bush administration conspired to present sketchy evidence as conclusive proof of WMDs to justify the invasion of Iraq. Politicians tacitly (and sometimes overtly) conspire with wealthy individuals and corporations, helping pass favorable legislation in exchange for campaign contributions, or sometimes just bribes.2 The prison industry conspires to get those politicians to incarcerate more people simply to maximize their profits.3

Nobody sensible is denying that conspiracies happen. These are well documented and undisputed facts. Conspiracies very clearly have happened and will continue to happen. Nobody is asking you to trust that the people in power always have your best interests at heart, because they clearly do not. Nobody is asking you to blindly trust the government, or big pharma, or any large entity with a gross amount of power, wealth, and influence. A key aspect of a well-functioning democracy is that the government should be subject to scrutiny.

Conspiracies are real, but with every one of these very real conspiracies and plausible potential conspiracy there’s a slew of false conspiracy theories. These theories are efforts to explain some event or situation by invoking a conspiracy. They are theories that are either very likely false because they lack the significant evidence needed to improve over the conventional explanation, or are simply demonstrably false.

There are conspiracy theories like the idea that the World Trade Center towers were destroyed with pre-planted explosives, or that the Moon landings in the 1960s were faked, or that planes are spraying toxic chemicals to deliberately modify the climate. There’s less extreme, but still false conspiracy theories, like the pharmaceutical industry covering up how well homeopathy works (it doesn’t), or the car industry covering up motors that can run on water (they can’t). At the far end of the conspiracy spectrum there’s the claim that the Earth is flat (it’s not) and the government is somehow covering this up (how would that even work?). There’s old conspiracy theories, like the idea that Jewish bankers rule the world, and new conspiracy theories, like the idea that the government stages shootings of children in schools to promote gun control.

The premise of this book is very simple. These false conspiracy theories are a problem. They hurt individuals by affecting their life choices, in terms of money, health, and social interactions. They hurt society by distracting from the very real problems of corruption and decreasing citizens’ genuine participation in democracy. False conspiracy theories are real problems and we can and should do something about them. This book discusses the nature of the problem, why people get sucked in, how they get out, and what pragmatic things can be done to help individuals escape the conspiracy theory rabbit hole.

The key themes of this book are:

• Understanding the conspiracy theory rabbit hole

• Realizing that conspiracy theorists are just normal people

• Developing a clear understanding of what they are thinking and why

• Fostering trust and mutual respect

• Finding areas of agreement and recognizing their genuine concerns

• Identifying mistakes in their beliefs, or areas where they lack information

• Exposing them to new information to help them gain a more fact-based perspective

• Doing it all with honesty and openness

• Giving it time

In this book I will draw on three sources of information. Firstly and primarily, I will draw upon my personal experience. I run the website Metabunk, which is a site for discussing, investigating, and debunking a wide variety of false conspiracy theories and unusual beliefs. With my previous “Chemtrail”-focused site, Contrail Science, and other sites, I’ve been debunking as a hobby for over fifteen years. During that time, I’ve met hundreds of people on both sides of the fence, heard their stories, and seen them change over the years. Many of them I’ve helped, usually indirectly, like Willie with the Chemtrail barrels, but sometimes directly. I’ll include the stories of more of those people in later chapters.

Secondly, I will draw upon the writings of other skeptical-minded people doing the same thing. In fields ranging from global warming conspiracy theories to 9/11 conspiracies, there are others who do similar things to myself, people who have researched both why people believe conspiracy theories and how they can be helped out. Many individuals have shared their experiences and thoughts about which debunking and communication strategies work, and which do not.

Thirdly, I will draw upon the academic literature in the field of conspiracy theories. Since the 1950s with the conspiracy theories of the radical right, through the 1960s with the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, and especially after 9/11 in 2001, there has been a steady growth in interest in why people fall for unfounded beliefs and what strategies are scientifically effective in bringing them back to a more realistic view of the world.

The fundamental technique outlined here is maintaining effective communication and presenting your friend, the conspiracy theorist, with information that they are lacking, and doing it all in a manner that will encourage them to look at what you are presenting without rejecting you as an idiot or a government shill. Given time, this additional information will help them gain enough genuine perspective to begin to question what they thought they knew and to start their journey out of the rabbit hole.

What Is the “Rabbit Hole”?

The normal definition of the metaphorical rabbit hole is something like:

In the modern conspiracy culture this rabbit hole is an obsession with a bizarre world of books, websites, and YouTube videos that claim to reveal hidden truths about the world. It’s a detour from regular life, one that is certainly time-consuming, and definitely one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.

The phrase comes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice enters the bizarre Wonderland by following a white rabbit down a hole.

In recent times a more specific usage has arisen, derived from the 1999 film The Matrix, where at a crucial point Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) a choice. He can either take the blue pill and return to a normal life, or take the red pill and “see how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Neo, of course, “takes the red pill,” and the “rabbit hole” leads him to discover the true nature of the world. He “wakes up” from his programmed illusion of comfortable, bland monotony into a brutal yet genuine struggle for existence, a messianic battle against evil, manipulating overlords.

This terminology has been directly adopted by various conspiracy communities. The rabbit hole is seen as a good place to be, a place where the true nature of the world is revealed. Their red pill moment might be the first YouTube video they watched, a conversation with a friend, or a book. They wake up, take the red pill, and proceed deliberately down the rabbit hole into what they see as an incredible wonderland of truth.

I also want people to wake up to the true nature of the world. But the conspiracy theory rabbit hole is not the way to do it. It’s full of seductive nonsensical theories, a bizarre wonderland of time-wasting and harmful falsehoods that are taking people further away from the real world, not closer. It’s not a blue pill or a red pill; it’s a poison pill.

This book is about helping people out of that rabbit hole of false conspiracy theories. More specifically it’s about helping your friend.

Your Friend

This book is written mostly assuming that you, the reader, are trying to better understand or help someone who is down the rabbit hole. Perhaps it’s a relative, maybe your spouse, a child, a parent, a sibling. Perhaps it’s a friend, a close friend or casual acquaintance, someone you sit next to at work, or even just someone you know online. With this in mind I’m going to refer throughout the book to this person—the target of your concerns and your attention—as “your friend.”

Of course, they might not currently be your friend. Especially in family situations, a strong belief in something that another person finds preposterous can lead to frustration, anger, and possibly even to deep-seated animosity or disgust. Your friend might find it ridiculous that you think people landed on the Moon. He might consider you borderline insane for entertaining the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He might grow angry when you refuse to watch all four hours of September 11: The New Pearl Harbor. He might turn his back on you when you refuse to be concerned about the white lines crisscrossing the skies.

But if you wanted a book for dealing with an enemy, a list of tricks you can use to annihilate someone in a debate, something that will make them look like an idiot, then I suggest you look elsewhere. I want to help people, not mock or belittle them. If you think you can only help someone by beating them in every argument and making them look stupid, then I respectfully disagree. Showing your friend their faults is only a small part of helping them out of the rabbit hole, and if you apply such a blunt tool to someone you consider your enemy, then you will probably achieve the opposite of your goal, only hammering them deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole as they harden their heart against you and their mind against your facts.

So even if they are actually acting in some sense as your enemy, I will still refer to them as “your friend.” Try to think of them as such, a good person who means well, someone who is simply mistaken about certain things and rather set in their ways. As we will shortly see, the first stage of helping someone out of the rabbit hole is to understand them, and then to gain their trust. You cannot do that by waging a war of words against them.

There is a significant danger that I will reiterate throughout the book. The danger is that advice like “treat them like a friend” and “gain their trust” might be viewed as advice from a manual on brainwashing. Conspiracists are obviously suspicious of people like me who spend time investigating and refuting their theories. I get accused of being a paid government agent, someone trained in “disinformation,” someone skilled in implanting false ideas in people’s heads. They may look at this book, and my body of work on Metabunk, and decide I’m lying, trying to gaslight individuals away from the truth.

The best defense is to be as open and honest as possible. Yes, I think treating someone like a friend makes it easier to convince them of their errors. But the only reason they are acting like an enemy towards me is because they are mistaken in their beliefs. If I’m engaging with someone it is because I think they are a good person who is just stuck down a rabbit hole. If they think I’m the enemy, and they act as my enemy, then it’s only because they are in fact a friend who has lost their way.

Finally, “your friend” might in fact be you. Perhaps you are reading this book because you recognize you are a little lost down a rabbit hole and you want a little help out, or at least a look outside. Perhaps you don’t think you are down the rabbit hole, or you think that your beliefs illustrate you are wide awake to the truth. Perhaps you are reading this because you think I’m a government shill, and you want to get the lowdown on this new government shill handbook so you can help your friends avoid being tricked. Or maybe someone asked you to read this book as a favor, and you begrudgingly agreed, because they are your friend.

If you are actually a conspiracy theorist, then you can think of “your friend” in one of two ways. Firstly, you should be your own friend. You might start out reading this book to try to figure out my mind games, but I hope you end up with some better perspective on both where I am coming from, and on your own view of how the world works. Maybe you’ll find you’ve got something wrong somewhere. Maybe you will at least find this perspective helps you better communicate your own ideas. Maybe this book will confirm what you already knew. Whatever the outcome, I hope you find it useful.

The second way a conspiracy theorist might find this book useful comes about because conspiracy theories exist on a spectrum. If you are a conspiracy theorist (and we all are to some degree), you consider yourself a reasonable person, and you believe only in conspiracy theories that you think are well founded, backed up by evidence and common sense. While you might disagree with my attempt to debunk your theories at wherever level you are at on the conspiracy theory spectrum, you might find common ground in trying to help those who are further along. I’ve had several 9/11 Truthers thank me for helping debunk Chemtrails, and I’ve had Chemtrail believers thank me for explaining to their friend why the Earth is not flat. Read this book to figure out how to help your friend who’s down a deeper, darker rabbit hole. If it seems reasonable then maybe at some point you can see if anything in here applies to your personal beliefs.

Or, if you like, go ahead read this as a brainwashing manual for government shills. Try to figure out my tricks. I’m not trying to brainwash you, but if it will get you to read the book then go ahead and assume it for a while, but I invite you to check back again later.

What’s the Harm?

“Why bother?” is a question I am asked a lot. Why should we care about people who believe in conspiracies, and why should we try to help them? This question speaks directly to the reasons why I wrote this book. I want to help people out of the conspiracy theory rabbit hole because false conspiracy theories cause harm. They do so in several ways.

Perhaps most significantly, there is harm at a direct individual level, the level of your friend. If they believe that the efficacies of natural remedies (homeopathy) are being covered up by large pharmaceutical companies then they might be tempted to avoid conventional treatments, and instead opt for herbal remedies that are not proven to work. In some cases this can lead to death.6 If they think planes are spraying poison in the sky then they might waste their money on Chemtrail detox pills.7

There is also harm for the individual in their relationships, romantic or otherwise. A common result of belief in false conspiracy theories is marginalization and social isolation.8 The rabbit hole becomes an obsession, and if one partner does not share that same obsession then significant relationship problems can develop, including divorce.9 These problems extend to family and friends, and even into the workplace.10

Beyond the harm that a belief in false conspiracy theories brings to the individual and those around them, it can also lead to harm to others. Scientists researching the climate have been harassed and threatened by people who believe that they are covering up a conspiracy, even to the extent of receiving death threats.11 Politicians have been heckled by 9/11 “inside-job” conspiracy theorists.12 The parents of murdered children have been stalked by people who think they are part of a hoax.13 One man fired a gun in a pizza parlor where he thought children were being held captive as part of a pedophilia ring involving the Clintons.14

Even more significantly, conspiracy theories can lead to major acts of terrorism, both domestic and foreign. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, was a conspiracy theorist who thought a cabal of international Jewish bankers was taking over America.15 Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon Bomber, was part of a wave of radicalization of young Muslims, driven in large part by conspiracy theories spread via online videos.16

The practical harm is very real, very tangible. But there are less tangible aspects of the harm conspiracy theories leave in their wake. Truth matters in a society. The more that public discourse is based on falsehoods, the harder it is to make constructive progress. Science is harmed when there are millions of people who think that scientists are corrupt corporate shills. The democratic process is harmed when people vote based on their belief in conspiracy theories. The nation suffers when policies are enacted based partly on false claims. The international standing of our country is harmed when conspiracy theories are increasingly accepted by the general population.

So I bother, I debunk, to stave off and spare others from this harm. I encourage other people to do so, to help their own friends and, while it is perhaps just a drop in the ocean, to make the world a better place.

Can People Change?

Is it even possible? When I tell people that I debunk false conspiracy theories their reaction is sometimes, “But they never change their minds.” Indeed, conspiracy theorists do often seem remarkably entrenched in their beliefs, able to withstand countless hours of reasonable rebuttals without giving an inch.

This is even an assessment conspiracists make about themselves. I joined a Facebook group called “9/11 Truth Movement” and announced I was looking for “Former 9/11 Truthers.” I got a few responses from actual former Truthers, but I also got a lot of replies like this one:

First they say I’d never find any. Then they say if I did, all that means is someone was lying. Then they say that you’d have to be really stupid to stop being a Truther in the first place and since stupid people don’t become Truthers that would be impossible. This attitude was surprisingly common among the group. For a true believer, no true believer would ever change their beliefs; it was literally impossible. If you pointed out people who had changed their minds and spoken publicly about it, they denounce them as shills or “gatekeepers,” or say they never really believed in the first place.

But people can change, and I have found them (or they’ve found me). Over the course of several years, I’ve interacted with, spoken with, and met in person many current believers and many former believers. Some whom I helped get out of the rabbit hole. Conspiracy theorists may not think that change for themselves is ever possible, but it is, even for those who are the most convinced. The best way of illustrating that someone deep down the rabbit hole can get out is to consider stories of those who have done just that, people who were nearly as deep down the rabbit hole as one could go, and yet they got out. I opened the book with Willie’s story as an immediate demonstration that change is possible. We shall meet other escapees in later chapters.

Why “Debunk”?

The word “debunk” is used throughout this book to denote the process of helping people understand why their conspiracy theories are not backed by good evidence. But the word “debunk” is sometimes interpreted to mean that the debunker has pre-judged the issue and is only interested in convincing others by whatever means necessary. So why use a term that might be perceived negatively?

I have discussed this with professional skeptic James Randi and veteran paranormal investigator Joe Nickell. Randi told me he thinks the term “debunker” carries too much of an assumption that the argument was presumed to be false, and as such he prefers to describe himself as a scientific investigator. Similarly, Nickell made the very compelling argument that what he does with each new case is not to set out to prove that it’s not ghosts, but instead to investigate the circumstances, to see what actually happened, and then to explain it.

But I use the term “debunk” for two reasons. Firstly, I see debunking as a two-stage process of both investigating and then explaining. Debunking is defined as “exposing the falseness” of an idea or belief.17 To expose a falseness you first have to find it, and then explain why it is false. When faced with a claim like “no plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11,” you first look at the proposed evidence behind the claim, and investigate for factual accuracy. If you find inaccuracies then you can explain these to people.

Secondly, most people, including conspiracy theorists, have no problem with the use of the term in the past tense, such as “Claim X has been debunked.” This is widely understood to mean that the claim has been investigated and conclusively shown to be incorrect.

But the focus of this book is not on investigating, it is on explaining. The majority of the conspiracy theory claims you will come across are not new claims that need investigating. They are old claims that have been investigated, and only persist in the minds of people like your friend because they are unaware of the most reasonable explanation or because they lack information that allows them to fully understand that explanation. Bringing those explanations and that missing information to your friend is what I mean by debunking.