The Conspiracy Theorist Playbook

How to Pretend You’ve Done the Work When You Absolutely Haven’t

Conspiracy theorists (CTers) like to think they’re rebels. Brave outsider-heroes and truth-seekers. That’s the story they tell themselves as they march in lockstep, like lemmings, away from the truth, parroting the same stale talking points over and over again; lines that fall apart under even moderate scrutiny.

This page is a growing collection of CTer talking points: the kinds of logical and factual errors that CTers repeat endlessly to pretend they’re knowledgeable and wise. Not every CTer uses all of them, but they all rely on some of them. These aren’t just bad arguments—they’re tells. They give away the game. And the more you see them, the clearer it becomes: conspiracy theorizing isn’t about evidence, logic, or critical thinking. It’s about evasion. About pretending to be brave and smarter than everyone else while hiding from reality.

Unlike scientists, historians, investigative journalists, academics, and other professionals—who see value in changing their minds when the facts change—CTers imagine their stubborn refusal to consider anything outside their community is a virtue. CTers have no mechanisms for exposing their own errors and revising their understanding of the world. No peer-reviewed journals or institutional safeguards. No institutions at all. This enables them to posture with lines like “I do my own research” and “I think for myself” without doing anything but repeating stale talking points. And this is why there are no greatly admired CTers to be found in history.

There are good and bad political figures, religious figures, scientists, and others. But there’s no one people point to and say, “That guy was a great conspiracy theorist. We are fortunate that he did such good work.” Because the nature of CTer thinking does not facilitate good work.

The following list will help you recognize the fundamentally flawed nature of CTer thinking and give you a great deal of thoughtful ammunition to use against it.

If you’ve got more points you think should be added, drop us an email or post a comment below.

“We’re not conspiracy theorists—we’re Truthers.”

CTers rebrand constantly, like a failed pop group that keeps changing its name. “Truther,” “Conspiracy Realist,” “Independent Researcher”—all variations on the same desperate attempt to sound credible without doing credible work. But no matter how many times you change your label, the smell of pseudoresearch lingers. If the methodology and conclusions are garbage, the name doesn’t matter.

“The CIA invented the term ‘conspiracy theory’ to silence us.”

Wrong. The term predates the CIA by decades. The 1967 CIA dispatch that CTers obsess over didn’t invent the label; it responded to a flood of JFK conspiracy nonsense already in circulation and was an attempt to counter misinformation with facts. But CTers love this fantasy because it makes them feel important. They imagine shadowy agencies working overtime to suppress them—as if they are such a threat that “The Government” had to launch a global PR campaign just to make sure nobody listens to them. The irony is that this talking point is just another phony conspiracy theory.

Do a quick Google search for “CIA Dispatch 1035-960” or “CIA Document 1035-960” and you’ll find more websites, memes, and social media posts than you’d ever care to read, all repeating the same basic lie. What you won’t find is any acknowledgment that CIA dispatches don’t have numbers, and that “1035-960” has nothing to do with the CIA. That number was stamped onto a copy of the dispatch when it was released under the Freedom of Information Act in September 1976—nearly a decade after the dispatch was created.

Why have no CTers noticed that this is a FOIA number? Why do they constantly repeat it as if it’s an internal CIA reference? Because they don’t research anything. They don’t thoughtfully consider anything. They don’t look for the context around anything. They skim the surface of history, looking for things they can exploit, without any real understanding of what they’re looking at.

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

And sometimes there’s just a smoke machine. CTers love this line because it lets them pretend suspicion is evidence. But suspicion isn’t proof, and unexplained does not equal unexplainable. Lots of things can look odd from a distance, or when you don’t understand what you’re looking at. That’s why CTers keep their distance and don’t bother with the details.

“History is written by the victors.”

No. History is written by writers. It’s corrected and revised by real researchers, and endlessly rewritten and reexamined. And it’s distorted by CTers who treat everything they don’t like as a cover story, based solely on their feelings. If the phrase “history is written by the victors” were true in the way CTers mean it, we wouldn’t know about slavery, Watergate, or the many missteps that led the U.S. into the Vietnam War. Victors may get the first draft, but they don’t control the whole library.

“Real conspiracies prove conspiracy theories are legit.”

Watergate happened. So did Iran-Contra. But these examples don’t support the CTer worldview—they destroy it. Why? Because real conspiracies are discovered through evidence, exposed by insiders, and documented by historians. They’re not immortal rumors passed around on message boards with no evidence ever coming forward.

Watergate, in which fewer than two dozen people were involved, fell apart almost immediately. It left a paper trail, audio tapes, and confessions that can be reviewed and cited. The JFK “deep state” theories have memes and Oliver Stone’s hallucinations. That’s not a difference of opinion. It’s a material difference in method. One is journalism, history, and reality. The other is fan fiction.

“You just believe what the mainstream media tells you.”

This one’s projection at its finest. CTers only believe what their preferred sources tell them—and those sources are usually YouTube rants, Twitter threads, or self-published books no reputable outlet will touch. People who read broadly across outlets and ideologies don’t simply believe what they’re told. They’re the shepherds, trying to guide the willfully blind away from danger.

“Everyone’s just in it for power, money, and sex.”

CTers reduce every human action to greed, fear, or manipulation—except their own, of course. Everyone else is compromised. Bought. Intimidated. But they’re the lone exception: incorruptible, insightful, immune. This isn’t critical thinking—it’s narcissism disguised as analysis.

People are complicated. They act for all sorts of reasons—personal, ethical, ideological. CTers can’t handle that complexity, so they flatten every motivation until it fits their paranoid script. It’s not investigation. It’s projection and cynicism. Plenty of people do valiant things, from jumping on a grenade to losing their livelihood to expose wrongdoing. You never know who those people will be—or what might trigger the best in them to come forward.

“If an expert disagrees with the official story, they must be right!”

Nope. A Ph.D. isn’t a permission slip to ignore evidence. CTers love their handful of rogue voices who tell them what they want to hear—but they ignore the 99.9% of serious experts who don’t. That’s not skepticism. That’s cherry-picking with a forklift.

“The official story changed, so it must be a lie.”

Science changes. Journalism corrects. History updates. That’s what real disciplines do. CTers take correction as proof of deception—which tells you how alien the concept of intellectual honesty is to them. If they ran the world, no one would ever admit a mistake; they’d just double down on lies forever.

“The Government is all-powerful and can cover up anything.”

“The Government” is not a single entity with one goal or unified objectives. It’s multiple, competing departments, branches, and layers—many of them staffed and run by people who disagree with each other. This is why governments can’t balance a budget, deliver the mail on time, or keep a secret about a sex scandal.

The idea that thousands of people across multiple administrations and generations could coordinate a perfect decades-long cover-up with no evidence ever coming forward is fantasy. Real conspiracies leak. Real conspirators get caught. That’s why you know about Watergate, COINTELPRO, and MK-Ultra—but nothing about a phantom plan to fake the moon landing.

“That expert disagrees, so everything they say is fake.”

CTers treat dissent as divine when it supports them and satanic when it doesn’t. If one government scientist gets it wrong, the whole field is corrupt. But if one disbarred doctor says vaccines contain mind-control nanobots, he’s a brave truth-teller. This isn’t skepticism. It’s wishful thinking, willful ignorance, and no understanding of how credibility is earned.

“You weren’t there, so you don’t know what happened.”

Were you there? No? Then why does this talking point only apply in one direction?

This argument isn’t just weak—it’s dishonest. It implies that eyewitness accounts are the only valid form of evidence, which would wipe out all science, history, journalism, and law. Ironically, most CT theories are built on reinterpreting events they also weren’t present for—and they’re happy to trust secondhand sources when those sources say what they want to hear.

“They’ve never explained why…”

Most of the time, this is false. “They” have explained. You just didn’t read it.

I’ve been asked the same questions over and over again about President Kennedy’s assassination—questions answered in the Warren Report. But even when I answer them, CTers just move on to the next already-answered question.

When someone claims “no one’s explained X,” they’re usually ignoring a pile of documentation. Sometimes because they don’t know it exists. Sometimes because they can’t handle what it says. And when there really is no explanation, that still doesn’t make their wild stories magically true—but they’re quick to imagine otherwise.

“So you trust the government?”

Trust? No. But I also don’t believe every plane crash is an inside job. CTers operate on a binary: total faith or total fraud. That’s not how healthy skepticism works. Trust should be proportional to evidence and accountability. If your worldview can’t tolerate the idea that some institutions are flawed but functional, it’s not critical thinking—it’s cynicism in a tinfoil hat.

To make matters worse, CTers do believe the government, when it suits them. Most CTers are not Holocaust deniers. But where do they get their knowledge of the Holocaust? From government agents who liberated the camps. From Allied Supreme Commander General Eisenhower, who ordered documentation and filmed the evidence to prevent future denial.

Even most of the “evidence” CTers point to comes from government reports, like fragments of interviews or declassified documents that seem to support their claims. So, yes—they trust the government when it tells them what they want to hear.

“It’s just a theory.”

No, it’s just a slogan. “Just asking questions” doesn’t mean what CTers think it means. Asking loaded questions with assumed conclusions isn’t inquiry. It’s insinuation. It’s the rhetorical version of a smear campaign—one that lets you dodge responsibility for the answers.

“What about [completely unrelated event]?”

Ah, the classic deflection. Can’t defend your claim? Bring up something else. It’s the CTer’s favorite move: hopscotching from JFK to 9/11 to COVID to Epstein until the whole argument is buried under a pile of loose threads. If you press them, they’ll just shrug and say, “It’s all connected.” What they really mean is: “I can’t prove any of it, so I’ll overwhelm you instead.” Piles of nonsense are still nonsense.

One Last Thing—for Now

These talking points aren’t random. They’re patterns—defensive reflexes dressed up as wisdom. They show up again and again because conspiracy thinking isn’t a form of investigation. It’s a way of avoiding the hard work of real research and real doubt.

So if you hear someone use these lines, call them out. Better yet, ask them to stop performing and start proving. And if you’ve noticed a new variation—a fresh spin on an old dodge—send it in. Leave a comment or use the contact form. Help expose the playbook.

Let’s keep the spotlight where it belongs: on the people who want to hide behind it.