
Conspiracy theories make me peevish. I believe in a complicated nuanced world and reducing all that complexity down to “the Illuminati did it”1 is lazy thinking.2 I also know that conspiracies can lead to horrors like genocide (the Holocaust, Rwanda, the Rohingya).
I’m not arguing that there are zero conspiracies. Get three people in a room and odds are fifty-fifty they’re up to something.3 Health inspectors take bribes from restaurant owners and honor roll students engage in organized cheating. For years the FBI used COINTELPRO to target dangerous leftists like Martin Luther King Jr. and the Beatles.4 The US government conspired to overthrow the governments of Iran in 1953 (successfully) and Cuba in 1961 (unsuccessfully).
So yes, conspiracies happen and governments are often up to no good. What I’m saying is that once conspiracies happen they don’t usually stay secret. We know about all these conspiracies because—unlike Hollywood—in the real world people talk, or screw up, or something.
Are there dark cabals that nobody knows about? Sure, but if I told you what they were I’d have to…take care of you. Look, I’m not saying there are never such conspiracies—I’ve got my eye on the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia5—but the facts behind them almost always leak out, especially in free-speech democracies, because humans are natural born gossips. The only guaranteed way to keep a secret is to never share it.
How can you tell if your theory isn’t a wacky conspiracy theory? For a theory to be reasonable it needs to tell a story that explains all the data we already have at least as plausibly as do our established narratives. This is something conspiracy theorists never attempt. They’ll either come up with a story full of holes that ignores many known facts or they’ll point out some specific inconsistency in the currently accepted story (“jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”) and smile knowingly.6
Finding supposed inconsistencies was the method of infamous crank Fred Leuchter, who claimed that samples scraped from bricks at Auschwitz had only low traces of cyanide residue and so the buildings could not have been used as gas chambers. Leuchter, a self-taught inventor and execution machinery “expert” (he marketed his services to prisons), made numerous technical errors that made his whole argument ridiculous. (For the full Fred Leuchter story, watch Errol Morris’s excellent documentary, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.) More importantly, however, the levels of cyanide in the bricks Leuchter scraped don’t matter because we already have millions of other pieces of evidence that prove the Holocaust was real, from German records to survivor accounts to confessions of Nazi officials. Any new theory has to explain all those other millions of facts better than our current understanding.7
Holocaust denial is insane (and yet people do it), but many less well-documented events still have far too much evidence to be undercut by some minor inconsistencies. In fact, it’d be weird if there were zero inconsistencies in our narratives. When police have multiple witnesses to a crime they become suspicious if all the stories match too perfectly. They know that memories are imperfect, stories don’t usually exactly add up, and weird things happen. That’s normal.
Which brings me to bicycles and my own weird story.
Many years ago on a pretty June day,8 I rode my bike to City Bakery (now defunct), home of my second favorite chocolate chip cookie.9 I locked my bike up to a parking sign, went in, and ordered a chocolate chip cookie with milk (yes, manly men drink milk with their cookies). I was inside for maybe 10 minutes tops. Sated, I went out to unlock my bike, but couldn’t. My bike lock was gone. Not just the padlock but the heavy chain that went with it. Even weirder for New York, the bike was still there.
In ten minutes my bike lock and chain had disappeared but nobody had taken the bike. I was left staring at my bike, keys in hand, more flummoxed than I’ve ever been before or since. Explain that one if you can!
Let me shoot down some of your answers. No, I didn’t forget to lock my bike up. First, this is New York, I never forget to lock up my bike. Second, my chain lived in only two places, ever. Either it was wrapped tightly underneath my bike seat or it was locked to something solid to keep my bike safe. I never took the chain off and just left it at home or anywhere else. And if I’d left it at home, why wasn’t it there when I returned?
It’s barely possible I forgot to lock it up, but then it would be sitting in its normal spot, wrapped under my bike seat. And no, somebody couldn’t have unwrapped it without unlocking it first.
Could the chain have been cut through in under 10 minutes? Yes. You would need special equipment because this is a New York padlock, not some wimpy “lock my bike at the corner 7-11” bicycle lock. (The photo above is my current lock and chain, similar to the one I lost.) I found this out when later a different lock got jammed and I had to call a locksmith to saw through the padlock. It took him about 90 seconds with a cool-looking portable saw.
So it could be done, but why? Why would someone saw through a padlock and then take the chain and lock but leave the bike behind?
I don’t know. Maybe the thief was an obsessive chain collector. The thing is, I don’t have to know. Weird things happen and sometimes we don’t know why they happen but that doesn’t mean that it was actually Bill Gates working with the Elders of Zion to bring the lizard-people-controlled Great Reset to (flat) planet Earth. Does your conspiracy theory better explain all the facts we already know? If all you have is some weird stuff happening we know that weird stuff is always happening. You don’t have to explain all the weird stuff as long as most of the facts match a sensible narrative.
None of my arguments will stop conspiracy mongers. There is something seductive about the idea of a super secret organization behind everything. Even my anti-conspiracy tweet attracted its own conspiracy fan.

(I believe the “WIX” stands for “vax” meaning the COVID19 vaccine. “MSM” is the mainstream media. Note the user name “NWO💉☠️” New World Order–needle–death. In other words, the New World Order is using vaccines to kill us.)
So turn away from conspiracies unless you want to end up like Jacx763.
Meaning, unless you want to know…THE TRUTH!
The “Illuminati” is a long-lasting conspiracy based on a once real organization. In the 18th century, some Bavarians founded a free-thinking organization along the lines of the Free Masons but were suppressed in the late 1780s. Conspiracy theorists claim they never disappeared and still work behind the scenes controlling the world.
I think a lot of conspiratorial thinking is fed by the fact that people would prefer believing in a simple magical explanation for reality to reading an actual book. Reading is hard.
Plotting against me, most likely.
COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was an FBI operation (1956-1971) used to illegally spy and attack people and organizations perceived to be domestic enemies. Targets included Civil Rights leaders like King, anti-war activists, and the Black Panthers.
In September 1999, bombs went off in four apartment buildings in Russia killing more than 300 civilians. Putin blamed Chechen terrorists and used the bombings as justification for his subsequent invasion of Chechnia. Putin himself (and the FSB) have long been suspects. This is not just a fringe theory, but one argued by serious journalists. Of course, we don’t know for sure!
For a full refutation of the moronic “jet fuel can’t melt steal beams” meme and other 9/11 nonsense, check out this classic Popular Mechanics article.
Knowing a lot of those facts is often key to realizing that a conspiracy theory is bunk. The less you know, the more plausible crazy theories start to sound. People who know little history are more likely to believe historical nonsense. People who understand how government actually functions don’t think there are lizard people running things. “The January 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that Americans without a college education are more likely to believe in political conspiracies.”
I don’t actually remember if it was June but I liked the sound of it.
My favorite cookie is the chocolate chip walnut at Levain Bakery.
I have a problem with being perhaps too willing to accept weird facts. I work as an insurance lawyer (usually for the carrier). My partner is constantly seeing weird facts and assuming it means that the insured is up to something. On the other hand, my first response is "there is probably a reasonable explanation for this." She'd see your missing bike lock and assume that the only explanation was that you were conspiring to have your bike stolen for the insurance money. My response would be "::shrugs:: sometimes weird things happen."
In normal life, I think my outlook (the one you are advocating for) is the better one to have. However, as an attorney, I probably should be less willing to give the other side the benefit of the doubt.