In a world awash with misinformation, conspiracy theories are often treated as harmless digital flatulence — absurd, viral, a bit unpleasant, sometimes amusing, but ultimately inconsequential. But from the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion to QAnon and the Great Replacement theory, conspiracies have always been the Miracle-Gro of authoritarian politics: germinating paranoia, cultivating fear, and nourishing the toxic knotweeds of repression.

There’s nothing new or marginal about them. Nazi ideology was born of the conspiracist claim that Jews had betrayed Germany from within—propaganda rooted in centuries of European antisemitic folklore, dressed up as common sense. Stalinism relied on old resentments, imaginary plots, and phantom saboteurs to justify purges and gulags. Conspiracies rarely spring from imagination alone; they grow in soil already rich with normalized prejudice. That’s why they feel so plausible to their believers—they don’t invent hatred, they fertilize and weaponize existing bigotry.

The post-9/11 “War on Terror” gave conspiracy thinking a fresh veneer of respectability. Suddenly, it was reasonable to suspect and vilify entire populations. Islamophobia became geopolitical strategy. Governments embraced this authoritarian cocktail of fear, suspicion, and bigotry, while despots worldwide eagerly borrowed Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” rhetoric—tweaked for local consumption as required — to reframe ethnic cleansing, mass imprisonment, and military crackdowns as acts of heroic self-defense. Label dissenters as terrorists, and the paperwork gets a lot easier.

Few worked this angle harder than Vladimir Putin. An ex-KGB man fluent in the politics of paranoia, Putin has spent a quarter-century manufacturing legitimacy through conspiracy. The 1999 Moscow apartment bombings—widely believed to have been a false-flag operation by the FSB—provided the pretext for war in Chechnya and launched his image as a no-nonsense national saviour, rebranding his savagery as cool heroism in the face of terror. In Syria, he, Assad, and Iran’s regime perfected the art of carpet-bombing civilians while branding the victims jihadists; as with GW Bush, critics were ‘either with Putin and co or with the terrorists’. Chemical attacks were dismissed as Western hoaxes, a Kremlin line cheerfully parroted by the far right, far left, and a few useful idiots in between. More damningly, the same conspiracist worldview—authoritarians defending “civilization” by bombing hospitals—was echoed by parts of the Western political establishment. Netanyahu praised Putin’s Syria intervention and copy-pasted the strategy and narrative to Gaza. Obama floated partnering with Russia in 2016. Blair was still calling for cooperation with Putin against “Islamist extremism” in 2018. In this fertile ground, conspiracism didn’t just get cover—it got applause.

Trump, of course, has been one of its main beneficiaries. He rose to power—and is largely governing — on the back of far-right conspiracies, from QAnon to outlandish claims about Anthony Fauci to policy positions seemingly lifted from Alexander Dugin, Putin’s conspiracist-in-chief. Trump hasn’t yet used the phrase ‘Great Replacement,’ but he’s fluent in the dialect: white South African farmers facing “genocide” (they aren’t) are offered sympathy and refuge, while actual refugees face mass deportation. His health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a deluxe-model anti-vax conspiracist. These aren’t party outliers. They are the party and goverment programme.

The white supremacists’ current favourite, ‘Great Replacement theory’ itself is a typically senseless layer-cake of bigotries, according to which Jews are importing Muslims and non-white peoples to “replace” white populations—combining three ancient hatreds in one viral narrative. That’s the genius of conspiracism: it doesn’t need logic, just enemies. And now it’s shaping governments, globally.

Conspiracies offer intoxicants: secret “knowledge,” moral clarity, tribal belonging, and scapegoats. They bypass reason and plug directly into primal fear. In quieter times, cranks muttering about 5G and vaccines could be safely ignored. But once conspiracism goes mainstream, it becomes a vector for authoritarianism. Accept that hidden forces control everything, and suddenly institutions, evidence, even your own judgment seem suspect. If everything is a lie, nothing can be trusted—not the press, the courts, science, or elections. And in that void, strongmen flourish.

But if conspiracists believe nothing can be trusted, that’s not a reason to agree with them. The antidote isn’t naïve optimism or fatalism. It’s rejecting their poison, however it’s packaged, and remembering that freedom, human rights, and truth still matter—and two plus two still equals four.

There’s nothing romantic or fanciful about standing up for universal freedoms or defending and expressing solidarity with the scapegoats you’re told to fear. It’s not airy-fairy idealism. It’s survival.

By Ruth Riegler

Image: Getty Images, via Scientific American