Threatened by tariffs, the world is taking notice of the nonsense spitting out of Donald Trump’s mouth, and things are getting deadly serious with mass immigration rants
Conspiracy theories are as old as the hills that sit on our flat Earth. As Ella Fitzgerald famously sang: “They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly. They told Marconi wireless was a phoney, it’s the same old cry.”
You’d have thought, though, that as human knowledge expanded, the conspiracies would recede. But in my lifetime, whole industries have grown up from talking utter garbage about the likes of a faked Moon landing, 9/11, Princess Diana’s death, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, the Roswell incident and, lately, Covid.
From Bill Gates implanting microchips into people’s brains to it being a Big Pharma hoax, many millions, egged on by anti-vaxxer influencers, bought into it. And it mostly gave us a laugh, especially when celebrities like Madonna spoke, from one of her many mansions, about vaccines being concealed to help the rich get richer.
But you’d have to have been snatched from Earth by a cosmic deity and taken to heaven in The Rapture that Evangelicals predicted would take place last Wednesday (what, it didn’t happen?) to not see it’s getting serious. There was a time when Donald Trump’s conspiracy outbursts, such as the 2020 election being stolen, were not taken seriously outside America. But now that he’s threatening to scalp countries with tariffs (so much so that Britain tragically whored out the Royal Family in a failed bid to curry favour), the world is taking note of what passes in what’s left of his brain.
This week’s speech to the UN, or rather a fantasy flight to a MAGA alternative universe, was a litany of conspiracy theories. About climate-change science being the biggest scam in history, migration turning most European countries into hellholes, London’s Muslim mayor poised to introduce Sharia law, even the evil UN hacking his teleprompter.
This came the day after he terrified pregnant women by spouting the theories of his totally unqualified medical adviser, RFK Jnr (who no doubt gave Trump the line about injecting bleach to beat Covid) that paracetamol is definitely causing autism in unborn babies. Laughable, of course. But not in a world where populism is on the rise and Trump’s acolytes are on the brink of power.
Take Nigel Farage, who not only refused to condemn Trump’s autism conspiracy theory, but threw in another one for good measure. Was the President’s claim about immigrants eating cats and dogs true, he was asked on radio. His answer? He wasn’t sure, but he was sure that Eastern Europeans are eating swans from English rivers. Which they aren’t.
In Russia, conspiracy theories are the oxygen on which Putin’s repression thrives. Any claims about his regime deliberately bombing Ukrainian hospitals, cyber-hacking foreign systems, murdering his opponents or rigging elections are met with the counter-claim that it is western imperialist propaganda. And his people mostly swallow it.
Conspiracies are the global currency of populists who exploit these fact-free fantasies to create anger and division among the disillusioned.
When Trump and Farage talk about mass immigration destroying Europe, they are citing the Great Replacement theory, which states that white, indigenous populations are deliberately being wiped out by alien cultures. Which was the same conspiracy theory Adolf Hitler used to justify murdering six million Jews. Do you see where they can end? Not funny are they.
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