This was back in 2002, long before I took my own “heroic dose” to squeegee my third eye nice and clean, but even then I recognised a fellow traveller, struggling with the same American culture that seemed so alien to me growing up in suburban Virginia. This was eight years after Bill had tragically died from pancreatic cancer. It was the peak of the War on Terror, and somehow this dead prophet was perfectly describing, as well as succumbing to, the problems that were unweaving our social fabric; problems that, 20 years later, are fully out of control across the political spectrum.

However, I come here not to praise Bill Hicks, but to bury him. Bill was a brilliant and passionate psychonaut who inspired in me a lifelong desire to see through the illusions and legitimising myths that shape our world. He was also a conspiracy theorist and a proto-incel, whose misogynistic bits often felt like more than just jokes. Some have sought to canonise him for the former while downplaying the latter and, in reaction, others have sought to dismiss him as only the latter and downplay the former. The reality I experience is that Bill was just a person, filled with anger and passion that gave him insight but also blinded him to the flaws in his own worldview. He was the canary in the coal mine of 90s American culture. Most of all, Bill was a true believer.

A true believer, specifically, in High Weirdness. If you want to understand what High Weirdness looks like when it takes root in a single human being, you don’t need to read Erik Davis’s book or wade through Robert Anton Wilson’s conspiracist fiction. You just need to watch Bill Hicks perform. He described himself as “Chomsky with dick jokes” and that’s not a bad summary, but it misses what made him special. Hicks didn’t just do political comedy. He embodied every tension, every promise, and every catastrophic failure mode of the High Weirdness movement more completely than perhaps any other figure in American culture. He was its poet laureate and, like any good laureate, he captured the spirit of the thing, warts and all.

High Weirdness is fundamentally about skepticism of normie, mainstream beliefs and narratives. The psychonauts who pioneered it saw the world around them as asleep, and believed it was their obligation to wake everyone up. Bill’s entire comedic persona was built on that conviction, the firm belief that mainstream American culture was a con job, a machine for manufacturing complacent consumers too dull to notice they were being constantly fucked by the devil himself, as Bill put it with ample visual aid.

His famous routine about newly elected presidents being ushered into a smoky back room to watch secret footage of the JFK assassination from an angle nobody has ever seen before is the perfect distillation of this worldview. The punchline – where the new president is simply asked “Any questions?” – captures the High Weirdness sensibility in miniature: the real power isn’t where you think it is, and if you could see what they see, you’d understand why nothing ever changes. It’s funny, it’s paranoid, and it contains just enough truth about the relationship between wealth and political power to feel uncomfortably resonant. That’s the High Weirdness sweet spot, and nobody hit it more consistently than Bill.

When he turned this lens on televangelists, on anti-drug hysteria, on the shallow performativity of American patriotism, the results were often genuinely brilliant. This is the Bill Hicks that lives in my mind, the one my dad and I couldn’t stop listening to on that road trip. The prophet who saw through the bullshit and had the guts to say so, night after night, to audiences that sometimes literally attacked him for it.

But Bill didn’t just want to tear down mainstream narratives. Like any good psychonaut, he wanted to replace them with something better – and that something, inevitably, involved drugs. He was an enthusiastic and vocal advocate for psychedelics, particularly LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. On Relentless, he joked that he quit drugs because “once you’ve been taken aboard a UFO, it’s kind of hard to top that”, but his advocacy was always earnest and persistent, always coupled with a keen awareness of the cost in human suffering that came from the war on drugs.

This is High Weirdness at its most appealing: the sincere belief that altered states of consciousness can reveal truths inaccessible to the sober, consumerist mind in ways that allow us to reshape society for the better, even if that just means no longer imprisoning non-violent drug users. As someone who eventually took that journey myself, I understand the pull. There’s something genuinely moving about Bill’s insistence that consciousness itself is worth exploring, that a society which permits alcohol and tobacco while criminalising mushrooms has its priorities catastrophically wrong, and that it is worth experiencing universal love and the recognition that we’re all one, even if doing so will fuck up the economy, which Bill reminds us is fake anyway.

Altering one’s consciousness is also, as Davis warns, a tightrope. The line between ‘consciousness expansion has value’ and ‘I have accessed truths that normies can’t comprehend’ is perilously thin. Bill didn’t always stay on the right side of it, and anyone who walks this path has to do so with concern about going similarly astray.

That’s the thing about true believers, the same fire that illuminates can also blind.

Which brings us to the conspiracy theories. Bill wasn’t just skeptical of mainstream narratives, he was conspiratorial about them. His JFK material wasn’t just comedy, he seems to have genuinely believed the assassination was a deep-state operation, and he presented this not as speculation but as obvious fact that only the wilfully blind could deny. His material on the Waco siege came from the same place: a conviction that the government was not merely incompetent but actively malevolent, engaged in deliberate violence against its own citizens. Which is not to say that the US government is above deliberate violence against its own citizens, only that Bill represented a “yes and” response to conspiracy theories that is now mainstreaming a wide spectrum of misinformation through popular media like Joe Rogan.

This is the failure mode for skepticism that I’ve written about extensively. When you take seriously the maxim “question everything”, it becomes dangerously easy to end up in a place where you’re confident you’ve found the hidden truth that the sheeple can’t see. Bill was brilliant at identifying genuine problems with official narratives, but he lacked the epistemic guardrails to distinguish between ‘the government sometimes lies’ and ‘the government is engaged in a vast, coordinated conspiracy to suppress the truth about everything’.

The bitter irony is that there is now a persistent internet theory that Hicks faked his own death and reinvented himself as Alex Jones, creating a sort of High Weirdness ouroboros in which the comedian who mainstreamed anti-government conspiracy comedy is himself the subject of a conspiracy theory connecting him to the man who took that same paranoia and weaponised it into a far-right media empire. The through-line isn’t biographical, but it is ideological, and it runs straight through High Weirdness. Bill helped build the road that leads from healthy anti-establishment skepticism to InfoWars. He didn’t mean to, but true believers don’t get to control where their belief systems end up once other people get hold of them.

The concerns get less grey when you turn to Bill’s routines about women. Bill often did bits about his troubles with women and difficulties maintaining relationships while traveling constantly as a comedian. He also frequently did a bit about the show Cops, where the police respond to a domestic violence situation in which the woman aggressively defends her abusers. This thread of his comedy peaked with his album Relentless, which includes a song called “Chicks Dig Jerks” performed with Marblehead Johnson, a band he’d formed with friends. The song’s thesis is right there in the title: women are inexplicably attracted to abusive men and ignore nice guys like the narrator.

The opening verse runs through Hitler, Manson, and Ted Bundy as evidence that terrible men have no trouble attracting women, before pivoting to vignettes about domestic violence victims who can’t leave their abusers. The song is deeply unfunny, and always stuck out to me as the first time I can remember hearing someone seriously argue that women prefer terrible men.

Looking back now, it’s clear to me this was proto-incel material, released just a few years before the term was first coined and decades before it became a significant influence on society. The self-pitying “nice guy” who can’t understand why women don’t want him, the framing of women’s romantic choices as a pathology rather than decisions made by autonomous human beings, the resentment dressed up as bewildered comedy – all of it would be right at home on a contemporary manosphere forum. And again, this wasn’t an isolated moment. Bill’s comedy regularly featured material about women that ranged from dismissive to hostile.

This, too, is High Weirdness. Along with questioning taboos around drugs, the psychonauts questioned taboos around sexuality, which often resulted in pressuring people into sexual acts they did not want. The transgressive impulse doesn’t come with a built-in moral compass. If you’re committed to violating normie conventions, you have no reliable mechanism for distinguishing between ‘this norm serves no real purpose’ and ‘this norm exists to protect people’. Bill’s drug advocacy challenged norms that arguably deserve challenging. His gender politics mostly just reproduced the misogyny of his era and gave it a veneer of countercultural cool.

I said I came to bury Bill Hicks, not to praise him, but of course that’s not quite right either. The whole point of the Shakespeare reference is that Marc Antony says he comes to bury Caesar, then proceeds to do the opposite. I’m trying to do something harder than either praising or burying: I’m trying to hold the whole picture at once.

Bill Hicks was the perfect embodiment of High Weirdness: brilliant and dangerous, insightful and paranoid, capable of genuine moral clarity in one breath and lazy misogyny in the next. A motion in the British House of Commons placed him alongside Lenny Bruce as an “unflinching and painfully honest political philosopher”. That’s not wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete.

Understanding the full Bill means understanding how his anger could fuel both his insight and his follies. The same forces that made him a cultural prophet also made him a conspiracy theorist and a man who wrote “Chicks Dig Jerks” without any apparent irony. That duality isn’t a contradiction. It’s the whole point. It’s what happens when you walk the tightrope every night – sometimes you make it across and sometimes you fall.

The fact that we still can’t agree on which moments were which tells you everything you need to know about the enduring, infectious, maddening legacy of High Weirdness itself, and about the true believers it produces.

The post Bill Hicks embodied all the good and bad of High Weirdness appeared first on The Skeptic.

Following Oxford, she embarked upon a writing career, finding fame in 1991 with The Beauty Myth – a feminist blockbuster and international bestseller, which argued that beauty is a socially-constructed concept designed by the patriarchy to shackle women. Even then, there were warning signs that the academia flowing through her veins might have been taking a few shortcuts. The book claimed 150,000 women die every year in the US from anorexia, citing the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association. However, the organisation says she misquoted them – the 150,000 figure referred to sufferers, not fatalities. The actual number of annual deaths was closer to 100.

The error wasn’t a one-off: Wolf also claimed that 3.5 million Brits suffered with anorexia or bulimia – which in 1991 would have accounted for 6% of the UK population. When challenged, she said she’d calculated the figures herself by extrapolating data from a single clinic. Experts did not agree that this was a realistic number. In fact, of the 23 statistics cited in The Beauty Myth, 18 were incorrect – and on average, Wolf’s figures were 8 times larger than the real numbers.

Two years later, Wolf published her follow-up, Fire with Fire, espousing what she called “power feminism”. It argued that Anita Hill’s sexual harassment accusation against US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas provoked a ‘genderquake’ that turned American women into ‘the political ruling class’ – an idea other feminist writers described as “grossly exaggerated” and a “dubious oversimplification and highly debatable assertion”.

The die was cast, with her feminist academic peers now describing her as “a sloppy thinker and incompetent writer” – although such verdicts did little to diminish her growing reputation as a feminist public intellectual across the course of several more books. In 2007, she wrote her critique of fascism, The End of America, comparing post-9/11 politics in the United States to what she described as a 10-step checklist of fascism through history. A review in The Atlantic pointed out that the historical parallels she lists between historical dictators and modern American politicians were constructed by cherry picking data and misusing sources. By 2010, Wolf was giving interviews about how Barack Obama’s presidency resembled Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship.

In October 2014, Wolf took to Facebook to just ask questions about videos that showed ISIS beheading journalists from the US and UK. According to Wolf, the videos were staged by the US government – no such journalists were killed. Those grieving parents? Actors.

When criticised for expressing such opinions, Wolf doubled down:

All the people who are attacking me right now for ‘conspiracy theories’ have no idea what they are talking about … people who assume the dominant narrative MUST BE TRUE and the dominant reasons MUST BE REAL are not experienced in how that world works. I stand by what I wrote.

Shortly afterwards, she deleted the post, and retracted her statements, saying the videos were “not yet independently confirmed by two sources as authentic” and claiming that the single source for the videos was in the pocket of the US government. That also was not true – the videos had been independently verified.

The same year, she claimed that US troops dispatched to West Africa to help treat Ebola were actually ordered to import the virus back to the US for use as a bioweapon to secure a military coup on US soil. Elsewhere in 2014, she claimed that the Scottish independence referendum was rigged in order to keep Scotland under control of the Westminster.

Academic death recorded

Then came the pivotal moment in Wolf’s career. After finally completing her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2015, Wolf turned her thesis into a book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. The book, and her PhD, was a study into how homosexuality had been punished by British society – including the “execution” of “sodomites”. Oprah’s magazine listed it as one of their top books of the year. However, the very next day, all copies were recalled from US bookstores, and pulped.

The reason for this change in fortune was Wolf’s May 2019 interview with BBC radio presenter Matthew Sweet, in which Sweet highlighted that one of the central lines of evidence Wolf relies upon to prove the persecution of homosexuals was a list she’d found of several dozen executions.

“I don’t think you’re right about this”, Sweet told her – live on air – before explaining that one of the people her book claims was executed in the 1860s… had actually been released. In fact, Wolf had misunderstood the text of her main source: in each of the cases, where a victim was listed as “death recorded”, the judge had seen fit to issue a pardon, while fulfilling a legal requirement to write “death” in the records. The radio interview makes for excruciating listening.

It only gets worse: the crime in each case was listed as ‘sodomy’, but despite what Wolf had assumed, this didn’t mean homosexuality. Sodomy was a broad category at the time, covering a range of sex crimes. Wolf was, as historian Fern Riddell put it, conflating “child rapists and those taking part in acts of bestiality as being gay men in consensual relationships” – all in order to decry the persecution of homosexuality. This was the central tent pole of Wolf’s book – and of her doctoral thesis – and she hadn’t checked what the terms meant. 

To say Wolf took this huge public humiliation badly is an understatement. Two months later, in July 2019, she was spiralling into conspiratorial whirlpools, including warning against the dangerous rollout of 5G:

It was amazing to go to Belfast, which does not yet have 5G, and feel the earth, sky, air, human experience, feel the way it did in the 1970s. Calm, still peaceful, natural, restful.

The sentiment once again showed her lack of understanding of history, given that Belfast in the 1970s was rather famously not very calm, and rarely peaceful.

Wolf and Covid

That was late 2019, and already a novel virus was evolving in a wet market in Wuhan, which would capture the mind of this conspiracy-prone writer. The pandemic was a perfect storm for Wolf, with her overestimation of her own ability to figure out what’s true, her questionable research methods, and her instinct for identifying in the shadows sure-fire signs in of the looming totalitarian regime – especially so soon after the high-profile humiliation she’d suffered over her most serious academic work.

From March 2020, her Twitter, Facebook and Telegram channels became a clearing house for misinformation about the virus, the wearing of masks, the effectiveness of lockdowns, and the safety of vaccines. She told her 140,000 Twitter followers that Covid-19 restrictions were tantamount to the Jim Crow laws. She explained how terrifying it was that in these post-mask times, “children don’t have the human reflex that they when you smile at them they smile back” because she was “seeing kids with their lower faces hanging inertly, absolutely unmoving facial muscles, when they take their masks off”. She explained that, having read the Moderna website, “the mRNA is not actually a vaccine but a software platform”. She told her followers:

I actually work with developers who create software so I understand how dangerous it is to have a tech in one’s body that can receive ‘uploads’.

For Wolf, these revelations apparently finally made sense of a conversation she claims to have overheard in a restaurant in Manhattan in 2019, explaining to her Twitter followers in February 2021:

Terrifying. Also confirms/explains the conversation I overheard in a restaurant in Manhattan two years ago in which an Apple employee was boasting about attending a top-secret demo. They had a new tech to deliver vaccines with nanoparticles that let you travel back in time. Not kidding.

It’s hard to know what the conversation was that she overheard. Perhaps it was a conversation about Apple’s “Time Machine” backup feature, or perhaps relevant is the fact that the movie Avengers: Endgame came out in 2019, in which the heroes essentially inject themselves with nanoparticles in order to travel back in time.

In April 2021, she made international headlines after using her former feminist credentials to amplify myths that the vaccines were causing infertility in women – which they weren’t. Later the same month, she claimed Anthony Fauci doesn’t work for the US, because he had loyalties to Israel that interfered with service to public health. Wolf, it’s worth pointing out, is Jewish – a fact she used to deflect criticism for sharing what some people read as an obvious antisemitic trope.

The claims continued, including claiming that “unvaccinated people report feeling ill when in enclosed rooms for a length of time with vaccinated people” because “the virus could have been a Chinese bioweapon”. She even highlighted the urgency of keeping the urine and faeces of vaccinated people out of the general sewage supply while tests were done to measure its impact on non-vaccinated people through drinking water.

It is no surprise, then, that her political allegiances have shifted throughout this time – she appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show in May 2022 to warn about “military-age men pouring over the border from places like Afghanistan and Ukraine” in order to be armed on behalf of the World Health Organization. She has appeared on Fox News, and Tucker Carlson, and became a regular contributor to Steve Bannon’s War Room. She even appeared as an expert on Infowars, with Alex Jones. Then, in 2024, this former feminist trailblazer threw her weight behind two men who could hardly be considered allies of equality: Donald Trump and RFK Jr. Even that final conclusion of her political transition didn’t happen without suspicious circumstance, as she explained last October:

I endorsed Pres Donald Trump yesterday. Today all day my phone froze, the cursor on my computer started wandering around the desktop, and my wifi continually disconnected. All coincidentally.

As the New Statesman summarised: “Perhaps it’s not that Wolf is a feminist who’s degenerated into conspiracism, but instead that she’s a conspiracy theorist who happened to fall into feminism first.”

The post Who’s afraid for Naomi Wolf? The fall of a feminist icon into a conspiracist rabbithole appeared first on The Skeptic.

For many, it will come as a surprise that denial of HIV’s role in causing AIDS could persist almost 50 years since the start of the AIDS epidemic. Sadly, Duesberg’s death does not herald the end of that misguided and dangerous movement: the Duesberg Hypothesis on AIDS lives on, in the shape of the world’s most popular podcaster – and repeated AIDS denier – Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan and AIDS denial

In November 2025, Joe Rogan released episode 2,411 of his wildly successful podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. In it, he spoke to security expert and self-styled vaccine researcher Gavin de Becker, and through a meandering three-hour conversation that has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube, the pair talked about Covid vaccines, swine flu, SIDS, autism, the tetanus vaccine, the polio vaccine, the measles vaccine, and the fact that Adolf Hitler didn’t really shoot himself.

Early in the conversation, Rogan raised the issue of AIDS, and his belief that HIV is merely a “passenger virus”, too weak to cause any harm to people – so weak that even newborn babies can fight off an HIV infection without any treatment (this isn’t true – there are babies who have tested positive on birth but negative later, but these were almost certainly the result of initial false positives). Instead, according to Rogan, people with AIDS-compromised immune systems were a result of the party lifestyle of the 1980s gay clubbing scene:

“The vast majority of the people that got air-quotes AIDS all were hardcore drug users. They were these partiers in the gay community… And these guys are burning it at both ends. And when you do that, sometimes you fucking die. Sometimes your immune system gets crashed”

While it’s true that participants in the 1980s gay party scene might have often had late nights and used recreational drugs, these were not the cause of AIDS – we know that, because there was no shortage of drug use among heterosexual clubbers in the 1980s, who experienced fewer cases of AIDS. Also, use of recreational drugs hasn’t gone away… but the widespread reality of AIDS as a death sentence has. The reason is clear: there was a virus circulating among sections of the population, which was eventually curtailed with effective treatments and then brought under control via a mixture of public health messaging and preventative pharmaceuticals.

Part of the reason HIV was able to circulate among the gay male community for so long was the stigma society placed on that community – stigma that Rogan explicitly perpetuated in his conversation with de Becker. Rogan repeated the myth that AIDS patients’ respiratory symptoms were caused by the prominent use of amyl nitrate, or poppers, in the gay community – in reality, the effects of HIV in decimating the immune system left AIDS patients susceptible to extreme infections by viruses that otherwise-healthy immune systems could fight off, including respiratory viruses.

Rogan even repeated the false notion that AIDS was a disease specific to the gay community:

“Why did it never make its way to the heterosexual community? If it’s really a sexually transmitted disease that’s so unbelievably contagious… how come it never really had any meaningful transition to the heterosexual community?”

The fact is, while AIDS did disproportionately affect gay men (HIV is more likely to spread through anal sex than via vaginal or oral sex), it is absolutely untrue that there was no transition to the heterosexual community. For one, the gay and heterosexual communities are not distinct; they’re not even sexually distinct. Men who have sex with men sometimes also have sex with women. In fact, according to AIDS Map from the Terrence Higgins Trust, 62% of new HIV diagnoses in the UK in 2024 came from heterosexual sex – outstripping the infection rate in men who have sex with men, partly because the heterosexual population is larger, but also because the message around the importance of safe sex has been received so effectively in the gay community.

Why did the world’s most popular podcaster believe these extraordinary – and comprehensively outdated – things? In 2012, Joe Rogan interviewed cancer researcher and prominent AIDS denier, Prof. Peter Duesberg.

Prof. Peter Duesberg

After finishing a PhD at the University of Frankfurt, Peter Duesberg was offered a position at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, to study the role of viruses in the development of cancer. In 1971, he sequenced the genome of the Rous sarcoma virus (RSV), identifying a gene in the chicken virus that caused rapid, unchecked cell growth when inserted into the host genome. A gene called src (spoken as ‘sark’). This was the first oncogene to be discovered and was soon followed up by work from Duesberg’s colleagues, identifying an analogous src gene in human cells.

But Duesberg’s long-acknowledged contrarian streak saw him turn his back on his own discovery – a finding that had secured him international acclaim, and tenure at the age of 36 – in favour of a 1914 theory from German scientist Thodor Boveri.

Boveri had noticed that cancer cells contained an abnormal number of chromosomes, a trait called aneuploidy. This, Duesberg believed, was the true cause of cancer – rather than viruses, or genetic mutations. While it is true that most cancer cells exhibit aneuploidy, researchers have argued this comes as a consequence of cancer, rather than a cause – once a cell is affected by a virus or hit by a mutation, it can’t reproduce healthily and aneuploidy can result.

Duesberg didn’t just reject the role of viruses in causing cancer – he went further, stating that no retrovirus could cause harm to humans. According to Duesberg, retroviruses (whose genomes consist of RNA rather than the more common DNA template) have an evolutionary imperative to be harmless, “because they depend on viable cells for the replication of their RNA from viral DNA integrated into cellular DNA”. This belief would send him crashing headlong into the defining health crisis of the 1980s: the AIDS epidemic.

The AIDS epidemic

The first recorded AIDS patient in America was a teenager in St Louis in 1969, who developed Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS) – a type of cancer that usually occurred in ageing men of Mediterranean ancestry, rather than young African-American men under the age of 20. At the time, doctors were confused as to how this came about, but retrospective tissue analysis has shown their condition was a result of having contracted HIV, which had caused AIDS.

KS became a common symptom among AIDS patients, with their compromised immune system leaving them unable to fight off the herpes simplex virus that can cause KS. However, prominent cancer specialist Professor Peter Duesberg disagreed with the hypothesis that a virus can cause cancer, or that any retrovirus can harm a human being. It was impossible, therefore, for HIV to be the root cause of AIDS.

In 1987, Duesberg wrote his now-notorious article in the journal Cancer Research, Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality, where he explained that HIV is nothing but a “passenger virus” – the term explicitly used by Rogan, nearly 40 years later. According to Duesberg, HIV was present in AIDS patients only because their immune system was unable to defeat it, as the immune systems of healthy patients routinely did, and therefore the “AIDS virus could be just the most common occupational infection of those at risk for AIDS”.

The Duesberg Hypothesis

Given his unshakeable belief that HIV was a weak and inconsequential bystander in the human body, Duesberg had to find something that could account for the tens of thousands of people who were dying from AIDS. As such, the Duesberg Hypothesis was born, attributing the immune deficiencies of AIDS to the lifestyles of gay men in the 1980s – late nights, sexual promiscuity, recreational drugs, and regular use of poppers.

Obviously, the Duesberg Hypothesis couldn’t account for the large number of cases identified in Africa – which, in the 1980s, wasn’t as hospitable to the homosexual community as New York’s East Village. This wasn’t difficult for Duesberg – he explained that there is no AIDS in Africa, merely a case of the CDC and WHO “manufacturing contagious plagues out of noninfectious medical conditions”, such as malnutrition and unclean drinking water. This AIDS “myth”, he claimed, was egged on by the media in order to help secure funding for bogus AIDS initiatives, and supported by local doctors who were paid to keep up the pretence.

Rather than being dismissed, Duesberg’s ideas were taken up by other AIDS deniers of the time – including by Thabo Mbeki, who was South African president from 1999 to 2008. Mbeki appointed Duesberg as an advisor to lead their AIDS policy in 2000 and, as a result, an estimated 300,000 South Africans died.

Not that Duesberg accepted those figures. In 2009, he published an article in Medical Hypotheses, HIV-AIDS hypothesis out of touch with South African AIDS – A new perspective, denying that his advice had led to any deaths in South Africa, nor anywhere else. According to reviewers, the paper consisted of cherry-picked data alongside statements taken completely out of context.

After investigation, the journal retracted the article, but Berkeley took no further action and Duesberg remained a tenured professor – a position he held when he was interviewed by Joe Rogan for his podcast in 2012, in an episode that remains available on Spotify to this day. It would be a conversation that would set Rogan on the path to becoming an all-out AIDS-denier.

Joe Rogan and AZT

The evolution of Rogan’s AIDS denialism can best be tracked through mentions on his show of one further element of the Duesberg Hypothesis – one that Rogan clearly took to heart. At the height of the AIDS crisis, medical researchers worked hard to find a treatment that could mitigate the disease’s effects and prolong healthy lives. They soon settled on a little-known cancer treatment: zidovudine, or azidothymidine (AZT).

AZT had originally been developed in the 1960s as a treatment for cancer. The theory was that the drug would be able to insert itself into the DNA of a cancer cell and disrupt cell division as the cell tried to reproduce. Unfortunately, it proved ineffective: it simply wasn’t good at binding to cancer DNA. However, initial trials during the AIDS crisis showed that AZT was 100 times more effective at binding to an enzyme produced by HIV than it was to cancer cells’ DNA replication machinery and so the first antiretroviral medication to combat HIV was born.

However, if you were a regular listener to the Joe Rogan Experience, this is not the story you would be familiar with. During his interview with de Becker, Rogan claimed:

“AZT was a chemotherapy medication that they had to stop using because it was killing people quicker than the cancer was killing people… it had already been approved and they could just push them through quickly and they were very profitable.”

This is simply not true. There were no legions of cancer patients whose lives were cut short by AZT, because AZT never made it out of the lab and into hospitals. Where did Rogan get the notion that AZT had been deadly? It was a central pillar of the Duesberg Hypothesis. In his 1996 book “Inventing the AIDS Virus”, Duesberg described AZT as “dangerously toxic”. Duesberg’s evidence for this claim, as science writer Jonathan Jarry discovered when following up on citations, was a book from AIDS denialist Jon Lauritsen, who provided no evidence for the statement.

In their 2012 interview, Rogan and Duesberg talked extensively about the harms of AZT, though Rogan later admitted that the pushback the conversation received gave him pause for thought – reasoning that it might be unlikely that Duesberg is correct on this issue while every other professional in the field is wrong. As a result, he backed off discussions of AIDS, mentioning AZT in just four further interviews across the next seven years. It seemed like AIDS denial was an idea Rogan had flirted with, even entertained by having a prominent AIDS denier on the show. But between the backlash from his audience and the pushback from other guests, he’d reasoned his way either out of the belief, or out of expressing the belief in public – except when talking to someone who might also agree.

Then in 2021, something changed, and Joe began to raise the deadly nature of AZT with his guests more and more – on three shows in 2021, four shows in 2022, and seven shows in 2023. What sparked this renewed enthusiasm for a conspiracy theory from four decades prior?

Joe Rogan contracted Covid.

In 2021, Rogan posted a video on social media explaining that he’d tested positive for Covid, and that he was treating himself with a regime of ivermectin and supplementation. The pushback he received was global, with CNN featuring his video in their news bulletins. Rogan insists CNN applied a filter to the video in order to make him look sicker, and mocked him for taking ‘horse dewormer’. In reality, the video discolouration was far more likely a result of differences in image encoding between devices, with Apple devices rendering the HDR visuals in Rogan’s original post differently.

Regardless, the effect on Rogan was severe, hastening his radicalisation into more extreme health beliefs. In subsequent interviews, he explains that he’d managed to square the circle of his prior objection: is it possible that all of the other health professionals could be wrong about AIDS? Absolutely – after all, how many health professionals pushed the Covid vaccine, which Rogan was sure had been proven to be deadly, and how many of them mocked him for taking ivermectin?

Already firmly now radicalised along the road to health extremist, Rogan needed one final push to go all-in on AIDS denial… and in 2022 that push arrived in the form of a book: The Real Antony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr and AIDS

“The Real Anthony Fauci” is almost 480 pages long, with more than a fifth of those pages dedicated to resurrecting AIDS denialist arguments, including directly quoting the work of Peter Duesberg. Kennedy writes about the “orthodoxy that HIV alone causes AIDS”, and the “theology that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS”. He writes about how no one has isolated the HIV particle – echoing the ‘Koch’s Postulate’ argument that was also used by some to deny the reality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid.

The book accuses Dr Anthony Fauci – the public face of America’s Covid response – of having abused his power and position for 30 years, stretching back to the AIDS epidemic, when Fauci had been one of the country’s leading researchers. This was music to the ears of the world’s most popular podcaster, whose hatred of Fauci had been cemented in that backlash to Rogan’s use of ivermectin and his repeated scaremongering about the Covid vaccine. To Rogan, Fauci had masterminded the use of AZT on AIDS patients, in the full knowledge of how deadly the drug would be, in order to make money for pharmaceutical companies… pocketing a tidy profit for himself along the way.

The book had a colossal impact on Rogan – he has raised it in at least 30 different episodes, starting on Christmas Eve 2021 and spanning interviews with Bill Maher, Gavin de Becker, Aaron Rodgers, Russell Brand, Aseem Malhotra, and indeed RFK Jr himself. The book has become the new bible of AIDS denialism, penned by the man now in charge of America’s Health and Human Services.

It has also cemented Joe’s belief that, unequivocally, HIV is a weak virus that can’t harm people, but the drug companies came along and forced AZT onto people, killing them in the process, just to make money. And the doctors all agreed to cover that up in exactly the same way they all agreed to turn a blind eye to the many provable harms of the Covid vaccine; because it’s profitable for them to do so.

The resurgence of AIDS denial?

Joe Rogan is without question the most influential broadcaster in the modern alternative health ecosystem; Robert F. Kennedy Jr occupies one of the most powerful roles in the US healthcare system. Together, they hold outsized roles and influence on the health of Americans and people elsewhere, yet they are arm-in-arm bringing 1980s-era AIDS denialism back into the mainstream discourse. Worse still, these discussions happen at a time when the realities of the AIDS crisis are beyond the living memory of many in their audience.

This is a threat we should take seriously, just as we previously saw signs that the flat-Earth movement we once thought dead and buried could return with renewed vigour, and just as the antivax movement we thought had ended in the 2010s came back with a vengeance in the 2020s.

Peter Duesberg’s life saw him responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, given the respected position of influence he had achieved and the political connections it afforded him. He might be dead, but his legacy more than lives on in RFK Jr and Joe Rogan.

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The really dangerous superstition is the conviction that their vote has no impact on the political outcome. And it isn’t just a fringe idea: two-thirds of Italian citizens are certain that important decisions are taken elsewhere, behind closed doors.

The rhetoric of “powerful forces” plotting in the shadows to impose their will over democratic institutions through bribery, sabotage and opaque processes has circulated around the country since the 1980s. This climate of profound disillusionment was arguably sustained by real crises, such as the uncovering of the P2 Masonic lodge. The clandestine organisation, which implicated some of the leading figures of the era, was found guilty of a series of crimes and subversions aimed at overthrowing the nation. Some of the bloodiest events in Italian history have been traced directly back to their machinations.

The suspicion, however, endured. While the terminology of “powerful forces” was once associated with specific individuals, its boundaries have become increasingly fuzzy over the years. It now encompasses major institutions like the European Central Bank and the Church, as well as lobbies and “hidden elites” interested in sabotaging the country. Today, with no evidence of a resurgence of the ploys of the past, this lingering political mistrust delegitimises the very existence of a functioning democracy, leading down a treacherous path from pure concern towards social pseudoscience.

As Andrea Alemanno, head of public affairs and corporate reputation at Ipsos, puts it:

Conspiracy theories stem from the fact that in Italy many of the mysteries and scandals that shook the country have never been solved… The mysteries of this country fuel populism and conspiracy theories, but above all, they fuel a distancing not so much from politics as from active participation. And with growing abstentionism, not only do people not feel represented, but they also feel entitled to criticise because they didn’t vote for the current leaders. This is why no government in Italy has ever won re-election.

The deep-seated distrust that many Italians harbour towards the democratic system keeps voters away from the ballot box. A recent survey found that 50% of eligible Italian voters choose to abstain, with 10% citing the “lack of clarity and credibility of the electoral system” as the main motivation behind their decision. But this structural abstentionism guarantees election results that are not representative of the population’s will, thus reinforcing their initial belief that the system is rigged. It ensures the realisation of a self-fulfilling prophecy, ultimately leading to a lethal erosion of civic life.

Abstentionism has been relentlessly on the rise in Italy since 2006. After 2013, it has become the largest “party”, representing the most common choice among the electorate. At the 2024 European Parliament elections, the lowest voter turnout in the whole Republican history of the country was registered.

Although it would be easier to think of the non-voting segment of the country as a single, cohesive party – as it is often referred to by news outlets – this image is far from reality. Abstentionists are not a static bloc; their composition changes from one election to the next. Some have never participated since becoming eligible, while others may pick and choose which elections to vote in. The choice to not participate in the polls can also be ascribed to different reasons: some abstain to manifest their disappointment with the candidates; others to express their disdain for the political scene, viewed as plagued by corruption and scandal; and others report feeling exhausted by the continuous political turmoil and failures.

While non-voters are an ever-changing group and are not bound by a common political interest, they often belong to the same socio-economic categories. Their lack of participation, consequently, has the harmful effect of eroding the quality of democracy itself. This results in the systemic exclusion of younger people, the less educated, the economically disadvantaged, and other marginal groups from the process of democratic representation.

Moreover, Andrea Alemanno explains, it means that whoever wins will be governing with a minority mandate:

Although Giorgia Meloni is the current Prime Minister, only 30% of Italians voted for her, while 70% did not. In a system such as the Italian one, initially designed to have broad consensus, the current situation clearly highlights the challenges that the democracy is facing. The eventual winners are faced with a country that is neutral but potentially hostile to them. As soon as they make a mistake, everyone will promptly turn against them, even those who didn’t vote for anyone.

The relationship between conspiracy thinking and political paralysis is more complex than it might initially appear. At first glance it is evident that Italian citizens are engaging in a self-destructive political act. Their belief in conspiracy theories provides a convenient mental shortcut that justifies inaction; yet, this lack of participation only corroborates their suspicion that crucial decisions are taken elsewhere by vague entities working in the shadows.

“The phenomenon of abstentionism in Italy is a recent one, while conspiracy theories are nothing new,” Alemanno told me. “Twenty years ago we reached one of the highest levels of voter turnout in history with the clash between Prodi and Berlusconi: almost 80% of people voted, and the election was decided by a difference of 23,000 votes between the two coalitions. Is it because twenty years ago there were no conspiracy theories circulating? No, there were countless conspiracy theories.”

According to Alemanno, what changed between then and now is the weakening of intermediary bodies and political parties throughout the West, particularly in Italy:

There are no longer any entities that mediate, that carry out interest aggregation; or there are fewer and fewer of them, and as a result, there is no one who can guarantee voters to be on their side. When bombs exploded in the 1970s, Catholics knew who was on their side, workers knew who was on their side. It may or may not have been true, but they had a sense of belonging, they had someone they trusted who would try to understand the situation better and avoid negative consequences for them, their families, their social group, and their sphere of interest as much as possible. All of this has, as of now, disappeared.

Therefore, conspiracy theories have gained more traction than ever before, precisely because they fill a void. “They are all that remains,” argues Alemanno. “They are not countered by a more rational narrative, one focused on defending its electorate’s interests, which previously managed to absorb them. In the past, I could think that there was a ‘Great Old Man’ behind the terrorist events of the 70s and 80s, but I would vote for the Communist Party because I was a blue-collar worker, and it promised to defend me from American interference, from the CIA, and from the P2 Masonic lodge. Today, who is going to take my side against these threats?”

In 2024, the political engagement rate among Italian citizens has reached an all-time low. A recent study found that one third of the population never even broaches the subject of politics.

This decline in civic action is particularly puzzling in today’s world, where information and resources are so easily accessible. Social media platforms bear significant responsibility: even though they offer a handy source for keeping up with the political scene, they also facilitate the escalation of “filter bubbles”. This environment fosters the rapid expansion of dangerous ideas. Algorithms trap users into vicious cycles, luring them in through content that satisfies their confirmation bias and validates their convictions.

One other problem in contemporary politics and elections is the excessively confrontational manner in which they are discussed. The oversimplification and extreme polarisation of messages cause many people who do not hold extreme beliefs to feel distant from both sides, and therefore abstain, Alemanno explained. “And this mainly has to do with the fact that they do not have a mediator who interprets their point of view. If everything is polarised but I am not, how can I take a stand? I need someone to show me the way, but everything is reduced to a fight against the opposing parties”.

Against this backdrop, it’s no wonder that conspiracy theories serve as a get-out clause for citizens and politicians alike. In the midst of economic instability and political volatility, coupled with the erosion of traditional mediating bodies and increasingly extreme political messages, conspiracy narratives serve as the perfect psychological fillers.

When citizens are overwhelmed with political communications or commentary, resorting to a fatalistic outlook on the situation is the most convenient way out. Instead of expending cognitive energy in trying to understand the complexities of modern society, it’s easier to blame a single, vaguely identified evil force. Conspiracy thinking allows us to synthetise the harsh reality (where systemic institutional failure might be caused by varied issues, such as bureaucratic inefficiency or persistent regional disparity) into a more digestible narrative. Inaction thus appears as the only reasonable choice, since any effort seems futile against such powerful enemies.

Different age groups process this feeling of powerlessness in their own unique ways. Younger people exhibit increasing disinterest in politics due to their lack of familiarity with democracy (considering that civic commitment is no longer being taught in schools). Through the lens of the “powerful forces” rhetoric, they feel justified in not seeking out information on their own. Middle-aged people feel overall disappointed by the current political situation and voice their opinion through abstention. Older people, instead, use non-voting as a specific protest against their former party, which they believe has lost its ability to represent them.

Unfortunately, this only strengthens civic apathy, which is profoundly detrimental to the welfare of the nation’s political infrastructure. Democracy is fundamentally rooted in trust; if its own citizens consistently doubt and degrade the system because they perceive it as failing, then it is unlikely it will ever function properly.

This is not to suggest organisations and elites intent on imposing their will on the Italy’s institutions no longer exist, or will stop existing in the short-term. However, the nation has taken significant steps to mitigate secrecy. The formal structure of the Italian state is legally obliged to repudiate total secrecy: as of 2013, transparency is a legal requirement which mandates specific public disclosure for the prevention of corruption.

As the state moves towards increased transparency and requires honesty from the entirety of its public administration, if citizens fail to take the matter into their own hands by voting to express their will, the final results will never be representative of the entire population. This guarantees that the interests of the active minority overrule those of the abstainers. By abstaining, non-voters are creating fertile ground for what they believe to be organised groups and lobbies to impose their will more easily.

Believing in conspiracy theories means not merely recognising that bribery and corruption might still exist, but bypassing legitimate criticism to identify a single, faceless enemy without a precise goal. It is not a valid critique of the country’s political situation but, rather, promotes a harmful, self-reinforcing mechanism of social pseudoscience. It relies on terminology dating back to the 80s to evoke the cognitive comfort of having a conviction to hide behind.

Before embracing political fatalism, we must ask ourselves whether the system is truly faulty. If it is convenient to believe so because grappling with the complex realities of the everyday world has become increasingly wearisome, there’s still hope for change. After all, no situation is without remedy.

References:

• I tanti perché dell’astensionismo: dal non sentirsi rappresentati al considerarlo una protesta politica – Vita.it
• Cosa sono esattamente i “poteri forti”? | Wired Italia
• ArchivioAntimafia – P2
• Politica: il 50% degli elettori è astensionista. Dal 2015 è fuga dalle urne – La Stampa
• In Italia l’affluenza più bassa nella storia repubblicana. Calo nell’Ue
• Com’è cambiata l’affluenza alle elezioni in Italia | Pagella Politica
• La rivista il Mulino: Gli astensionisti
• L’astensionismo e il partito del non voto – Openpolis
• Astensionismo, tre italiani su dieci sono poco o per niente interessati alla politica. Bocciati parlamentari e partiti, meglio i sindaci – Il Sole 24 ORE
• Elezioni Europee 2024: i risultati elettorali e le analisi post-voto di Ipsos.
• Il grande vecchio | Podcast on Spotify
• Sempre meno italiani si interessano di politica: cosa dicono i dati ISTAT
• Complottismo: origini, manifestazioni e psicologia

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One can question the legality and legitimacy of the way Maduro was taken, as critics and his defence team describe the raid as a “military abduction” and raise concerns about sovereignty, due process, and the extraterritorial reach of US criminal law. Likewise, even the detailed indictments and public accusations leave room for debate over the extent of his personal involvement in, and command responsibility for, the alleged drug‑trafficking apparatus he is accused of leading. Yet there is no serious doubt in the international human rights record that Maduro ruled Venezuela as a dictator, presiding over systematic repression, electoral fraud, and widespread abuses – including killings, torture, arbitrary detention, and the crushing of political opposition – documented by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and other monitoring bodies.

If there is so much to criticise about Maduro’s record in power, it is pointless to revive one of the oldest and least substantiated accusations against him: that he was never a legitimate Venezuelan president, because he was allegedly not even born in Venezuela, but in Cúcuta, Colombia. According to this rumour – which circulated for years in exile and opposition circles – Maduro’s true birthplace lies across the border, and it is resurfacing now because some claim that, in the context of the legal proceedings in New York, he must formally state his place of birth and the authorities supposedly cannot be entirely sure he was born in Venezuela. Yet all of this remains at the level of rumour and political folklore, and it has not played any real role in the case against him. The New York court has focused on the concrete criminal charges and has shown no genuine concern with litigating where, exactly, Maduro first entered the world.

In a sense, this renewed focus on Maduro’s birthplace functions as a subtle form of American cultural imperialism in the Western hemisphere, because it imports into the Venezuelan context a style of delegitimising politics that Americans themselves popularised through “birtherism.” In the United States, the Obama birth conspiracy theory claimed – falsely – that Barack Obama had not been born in Hawaii, and was therefore constitutionally ineligible to be president, despite overwhelming documentary evidence and official confirmations to the contrary. The story emerged on the fringes during the 2008 campaign, and then gained national prominence as Donald Trump promoted it aggressively in the years that followed. Trump has repeatedly and inaccurately insisted that the whole thing was originally invented by Hillary Clinton, even though there is no evidence that she personally launched the conspiracy, and the most that can be said is that a few low‑level staff or supporters in her 2008 primary orbit appear to have recycled or flirted with rumours that were already circulating in the darker corners of partisan media.

Birtherism is not, in fact, an exclusively American invention; Latin America has its own long history of similar conspiratorial attempts to delegitimise political leaders by questioning their origins. In Peru, for example, opponents of Alberto Fujimori repeatedly claimed that he had actually been born in Japan rather than on Peruvian soil, and in Venezuela, long before Maduro, there were rumours that President Carlos Andrés Pérez had really been born in Colombia rather than in the Andean State of Táchira he always claimed as his birthplace. In each case, the point was not simply to dispute a biographical detail, but to suggest that the leader was constitutionally or symbolically unfit to represent the nation, because he was supposedly not truly “one of us.”

These Latin American birther conspiracy theories, much like the US version targeting Obama, can be traced back to the pernicious influence of nationalism as a political religion. If one is obsessed with the greatness and purity of one’s own nation, and with sharply distinguishing it from its neighbours, it becomes tempting to turn politics into a kind of witch hunt aimed at purging those whom one suspects of not being authentically part of the national body. In such a nationalist context, if one dislikes a political figure, the easiest and most intuitive move is to accuse them of being a foreigner – of literally not belonging – so that disagreement over policies or corruption or abuse of power is recast as an existential threat posed by an alien intruder who must be expelled.

Ironically, it was the Maduro government itself that helped cultivate precisely the kind of paranoid, exclusionary mindset that now fuels birther-style conspiracies against him, so that the doubts about his own birthplace are in some sense the chickens coming home to roost. Chavismo, the movement inspired by Hugo Chávez that combines left‑populism, militarism, and intense nationalism around the figure of the “pueblo,” has for years thrived on a mixture of aggressive national pride and baroque conspiracy theories, in which enemies of the “homeland” are forever plotting to infiltrate, corrupt, or dismember Venezuela. Ever since the separation from Gran Colombia in 1830, Venezuelan governments have played to the tune of nationalism, but from 1998 onward Hugo Chávez radically intensified its symbolism and emotional charge, saturating public life with flag-waving, ritualised singing of the national anthem, and a quasi-sacralisation of the founding fathers that left little room for critical historical reflection.

Colombia, meanwhile, has always been an uneasy neighbour, and a convenient foil for this nationalist dramaturgy. On the surface there are even light-hearted culture-war skirmishes – such as the playful but telling dispute over who can truly claim authorship of the arepa – but beneath that lie long-standing territorial disputes, cross-border militancy, and episodes of diplomatic and military tension. Against this background, a general Venezuelan suspicion or animosity toward Colombia has long existed, and Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s political mentor, elevated it into a central axis of his narrative about the Bolivarian revolution and its enemies.

Chávez repeatedly portrayed Colombia as a country ruled by oligarchies in league with North American imperialism, and he even rewrote the death of Simón Bolívar into a grand conspiracy according to which Colombian aristocrats, hand in hand with US interests, murdered the Liberator. This narrative persisted despite the firm historical consensus that Bolívar died of tuberculosis, not poisoning, and Chávez went so far as to have Bolívar’s remains exhumed in a macabre, made-for-TV gesture to “investigate” whether he had in fact been assassinated. No credible evidence has ever emerged to support those claims, but the episode shows how Chavismo normalised the idea that foreign or “foreignised” elites are secretly responsible for every national trauma – which makes it grimly fitting that some of Maduro’s own detractors now turn that same conspiratorial logic against him by casting doubt on his Venezuelan birth.

All of this should worry skeptics, because it shows how easily conspiratorial ideation and senseless nationalism cut across both the left and the right. Einstein famously described nationalism as a kind of childhood illness of humanity, and there is something to that diagnosis: once one becomes infatuated with one’s own country and its grand narratives, critical thinking atrophies and even the most absurd conspiratorial claims start to feel intuitively plausible. When political identity fuses with national identity in this way, questioning the story becomes tantamount to betrayal, and people who pride themselves on being hard-headed realists end up embracing fantasies about birth certificates, secret plots, and foreign infiltrators.

If skepticism is to mean anything in such a climate, it has to include pushing back against the emotional seductions of nationalism itself.

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Where did the files come from?

To understand the impact of the Epstein Files, it’s important to first know their genesis. The short version of a very long and sordid story is that Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier, prolific human trafficker, serial child sex offender, and well-connected fixer for the elite and the establishment. While the exact source of his vast wealth is a matter of debate, he had been a figure around and in the centre of wealth and power in America – and therefore the world – for at least a decade before his investigation and arrest in 2006. In 2008 he was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for the crime of procuring for prostitution a girl below the age of 18 – a single charge, for a single case.

Eyebrows were raised at how lightly he had been let off, not least because he spent his sentence in an unlocked cell, and after four months he was allowed to leave his prison on day release for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. This has since become known as the “sweetheart” deal, in its obvious leniency, with police accusing the state of giving him preferential treatment, and attorneys describing it as “the deal of a lifetime”.

Epstein was out on house arrest until August 2010, at which point he became a free man. And he evidently saw himself as free to return to the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed, resuming his relationships with the centres of wealth and power, and resuming his crimes against women and girls.

He was arrested again in 2019 on a series of sex trafficking charges. While in prison awaiting trial, he first tried to kill himself in July 2019, resulting in him being placed on suicide watch for a week, and then moved to a special housing unit. Two weeks later, on August 10, 2019, he was found hanging in his cell, with all the evidence indicating that he killed himself – despite what the internet and many thousands of conspiracy theorists will tell you.

Those conspiracy theorists are, in a way, key to what is happening now, because the rumours around the circumstances of his death were used as fodder for a cavalcade of ‘just asking questions’. For example, I’ve watched multiple interviews in which Joe Rogan speculates about the details of his death, anomaly hunting for any sign of something nefarious and suspicious. The phrase “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” became an internet meme. People who saw themselves as smart and clever would talk in knowing tones about gaps in footage, and reports of the bruising found on his body.

Rogan himself repeatedly brought up claims by forensic expert Dr Michael Baden, who said that Epstein’s body showed evidence of homicidal strangulation – though, it’s worth pointing out, Dr Baden never examined the crime scene nor Epstein’s body because Dr Michael Baden was the star of an HBO TV show, a man who also courted publicity by claiming that the evidence showed that both OJ Simpson and Phil Spector were innocent. Baden had also been hired by Epstein’s brother in order to prove his death was homicide, which would otherwise have been viewed as a potential cause for bias, except it agreed with things the conspiracy theorists wanted to be true, so it was fine.

One of the times Rogan raised this point about Baden was in talking to Kash Patel, the QAnon conspiracy theorist who was appointed by Donald Trump to direct the FBI. This was amid the growing calls from folk like Patel, who wanted the release of all evidence gathered by the FBI during the investigation into Epstein. For many, this call was part of their belief that Epstein’s crimes converged with the claims of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and that the files would show evidence of satanic-tinged paedophilia by senior democrat figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton. Others from a non-QAnon background joined those calls, including those who wanted light shone on the close personal friendship Epstein had with Donald Trump.

As a result of the growing calls for transparency, in November 2025 the Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed in the US, requiring the redacted release of the millions of documents, images and videos gathered during the investigation, including the many, many emails they found in Epstein’s account. Now that they were legally compelled to release those files, the US Department of Justice released… a very small batch of the files. When people pointed out that this was not complying with the law, the FBI found millions more files, which they said they would release. On January 30, an additional 3.5 million pages were released, of the total six million possible files. They were added to a searchable database on the US Department of Justice server, so the public could dig through it themselves. From here flows everything we have seen in the recent news.

Digging for dirt

Obviously, once the files were released, the first thing people did was search for whomever they expected to see in the database. As a result, a lot of people found that Donald Trump had been mentioned more than 1,400 times. This was not a surprise, because Trump’s close friendship with Epstein was already a matter of record, despite the various attempts to deny it over the years. Trump had previously given interviews calling Epstein “a terrific guy” who likes beautiful women as much as Trump does, “and many of them are on the younger side”. He famously penned a message in a book of birthday tributes to Epstein, in which he reminds Epstein that they have “certain things in common” and that “enigmas never age”, wishing that they continue to share their “wonderful secret”.

So, people obviously went to the files expecting to find evidence of allegations of sexual assault by Donald Trump. And what they found was evidence of allegations of sexual assaults committed by Donald Trump. That included one document detailing fourteen separate allegations of various sexual assaults committed by Trump against underage girls. However, the caveat there is that the allegations were detailed in 2025, from a tip line in which members of the public could contact the FBI to report crimes. Given how public the links between Trump and Epstein were by that time, it’s no surprise that there would be allegations to these tip lines, but these aren’t confirmed assaults. The document details some of the efforts the FBI made in order to verify the reports.

The fact is, given the redactions, we can’t know what the outcome of these tip offs were, or what level of credibility they had. It’s possible that the credibility was high and they were inappropriately dismissed, but it’s also possible that one of the most disliked figures in US political history was the subject of false reports to an anonymous tipline. Without more to go on, we can’t know, and I’d be wary of anyone who confesses certainty over Trump’s complicity based on the documents that are in this release (though, obviously, Trump’s culpability in other sex crimes, including the assault on E Jean Carroll, is a matter of public record). We can have our private opinions on the likelihood of Trump acting in consort with Epstein in committing crimes against women and girls, but the Epstein files are not evidence of that.

In a similar vein, there are claims that the files prove that Epstein and figures around him, including George Bush, were guilty of ritualistic and satanic murders, and even cannibalism. One viral claim viewed more than a million times included a screenshot from August 2019, detailing a victim’s account of being involved in a ritualistic sacrifice where their feet were cut with a scimitar that left no scar, while people killed babies and feasted on their entrails.

That file is indeed in the latest release… but it references an interview with an alleged witness from 2019, whose story seem highly fanciful – including that he was also sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and George Bush, while George Soros and Henry Kissinger watched. The FBI’s interviewer noted that the initial conversation and mannerisms of the witness suggested some degree of possible mental illness or emotional instability, and none of their story was backed up by any kind of evidence. The key here is that these files represent a broad range of things, from hard evidence of genuinely awful crimes to the fake tales of fantasists who were spinning yarns to the feds.

While some are looking to the false accounts of cannibalism and sacrifice that explicitly appear, others are looking to find the meanings hidden in plain sight, trained in the QAnon school of codes, symbolism, and baking breadcrumbs into narratives. You can imagine, then, what they thought when they came across an email from 2013 in which Epstein talks about making ‘jerky’, and how his friend is “working at a restaurant called Cannibal and cooks… wait for it… Beef Jerky and Steak!”.

In other emails he jokes with someone about “cream cheese”, in an email chain titled “Cream Cheese baby”, a redacted correspondent responds to an email we can’t see, with “I don’t know if cream cheese and baby are on the same level..”, to which Epstein replies “there are millions of babies, very little good vegatble cream cheese (sic)”. Is this proof, as some have speculated, that Epstein was eating the flesh of babies, and comparing it to cream cheese?

I would say obviously not, but it is proof that people who have decided on a satanic narrative to explain a very human abuser will pounce on anything to support that. It also shows that people are willing to manipulate the evidence to fit their chosen narrative or to chase online clout – including photoshopping cream cheese into an unrelated photo:

People looking for evidence to fit the narrative is the inevitable risk with a story as big, prominent and horrible as this one. On The Know Rogan Experience podcast, we sometimes get emails meant for Joe. After the release of the Epstein files, someone cc’d Joe in on an email they had sent to the billionaire Warren Buffett, which cited specific mentions of him in the Epstein files, reading:

Warren E. BuffetT,

You have been identified as an Epstein associate based on the official documents released by the Department of Justice of the United States of America.

Epstein’s friend asks Epstein to get an autograph of yours when he meets you next time. Reappearing in another document, another person calls herself Epstein’s female Warren Buffett.

Were you a position of Epstein’s too? Did you get the 30 girls? You attended dinner with him. Your wife was a secretary of Epstein. Epstein visited you during Annual Meeting of 2011.

How many times did you meet with Epstein? What did you discuss with Epstein? Did you just step down at the end of 2025 from Berkshire because you had known this coming all along? Why don’t you step up and support openly the release of all Epstein files UNREDACTED?

Did you order pizza and grape soda too? Did you eat children too?

This clearly is someone who has decided that Warren Buffett is bad, and has tried to use his mentions in the Epstein files to prove it. Even when those mentions amount to someone asking Epstein to get Buffett’s autograph if he bumps into him, and someone else describing themselves as the female Warren Buffett. This is desperate dot connecting, just to smear someone you dislike. It is not the only example. You may have seen that JK Rowling is in the Epstein files, for inviting a noted sex offender to the opening of her Harry Potter theatre show, The Cursed Child. Meanwhile, people were highlighting that soon after the files were released, the real-time traffic data for Rowling’s yacht had been scrubbed from a tracking website, with speculation that her yacht had visited Epstein island. I saw a lot of people sharing the fact that ‘noted defender of women’s rights JK Rowling must be a friend and associate of Jeffrey Epstein’.

Except, that’s almost certainly not the case. That premiere invite wasn’t a personal invitation from Rowling to Epstein – it was a promo sent to an entertainment publicist, and forwarded to Epstein. An assistant of Epstein’s asked for two seats to the premiere and celebratory dinner, without ever mentioning Epstein by name. He received tickets to the play, but not to the invite-only celebratory dinner, as his name was not on the guest list. No part of that process would have involved personal intervention from JK Rowling.

Also, there’s no evidence that Rowling’s yacht visited Epstein island… and even if it did, she didn’t buy that yacht until 2023, four years after Epstein’s death.

In my opinion, both of these examples are instances of someone trying to find evidence that the person they dislike was good friends with Epstein, in order to discredit them for the views and actions they already disagree with. And in both cases, those attempts cheapen the traumatic experiences of the victims by using them as fodder for personal dislike, however justified that dislike might be.

Speaking of people using the files to justify their dislike of public figures, there’s a viral screenshot of one of the files in which Elon Musk invited himself to a party at Epstein Island, parenthetically adding “Girls FTW!”, only for Ghislaine Maxwell to respond on Epstein’s behalf telling Elon they were actually busy and he had just missed Epstein. It went viral as proof that Elon was too cringe even for the world’s most notorious sex offender… but it isn’t a real file, it’s a fake document, it’s not in the release.

What is in the release is Epstein asking Elon when he’ll need a helicopter ride to Epstein’s island, and Elon responding to ask which day or night will have the wildest party. That is a real file. Is it evidence that Elon was engaged in child trafficking? I wouldn’t go so far – it could just be that Elon is terminally cringe in how he talks about socialising. That said, the email was in 2012, so it at least meant that Elon was comfortable asking the recently-released-from-prison child-‘prostitution’ procurer whether he could come to his wild party, and that is what we should be focusing on. When we look for evidence that Elon Musk was part of an elite paedophile ring, we overlook evidence that he was joyfully socialising with a famously convicted sex criminal.

My advice to anyone watching stories and claims circulate and go viral would be to not just believe what you’re told is in there and, before you share or repeat anything, check for yourself. It takes a moment. Don’t even trust the screenshots. It’s what I did when I saw the suspicious claim that, rather than redacting the names of victims, the FBI had taken such care to remove any incriminating references to Donald Trump that they’d even removed the word “don’t” from the middle of a sentence, because they’d done a search for “don t”. That sounded very unlikely, and so I checked… and it’s true.

Document “EFTA02440040.pdf – DataSet 11” is an email that responds to a message that contains the sentence “I was going to take polo lessons in Calgary by I <REDACTED> think my body can handle it”. But as it turns out, the email it was responding to is already in the files, named “EFTA01829530.pdf – DataSet 10“, where the sentence reads “I was going to take polo lessons in Calgary by I don’t think my body can handle it”.

So, they did remove the word don’t. And I can’t for the life of me think of a reason to do that, other than the coincidence that it is “Don T.”

Skeptics and the Epstein files

All of this is to say that I think the claims being made about the Epstein files are highly relevant to skeptics, because the conclusions we’re seeing aren’t all based on what’s in the files – not all of which are even real. But it’s also relevant for another reason, in that people who are or were involved with the skeptical and atheist movements are mentioned in those files.

In some cases, that’s peripheral and in passing – at one point, the speaker list for TAM 2014 is mentioned in passing, as Deepak Chopra discusses the nasty folks of skepticism who keep messing with his Wiki page. So, when you see Richard Saunders, Richard Wiseman, Susan Gerbic or Steve Novella in there, that’s why. It’s a drive-by, and doesn’t reflect badly on them at all.

Others are in the files for reasons more directly relevant to Epstein. I’m one of those people. I appear in the Epstein files 25 times. I’m there along with Mel Thompson, Jo Alabaster, and others. When Buzzfeed published a lengthy exposé on allegations against American physicist Lawrence Krauss, I was one of the people to go on record as a witness.

At the time, I mentioned what I had seen to the conference organiser, and to committee members of the Australian Skeptics; after Peter Aldous of Buzzfeed heard that I was a witness, I agreed to be named in the article. There were times when that felt like a hard decision, because of the weight of his celebrity and connections – and I say that as a man, who was not a victim and who has at least a modicum of profile within the same community. I can only imagine how hard it is for the victims to speak out, and I know several who wouldn’t speak out, for understandable reasons.

What we knew at the time was that Krauss was good friends with Epstein, having even defended him – Krauss told Daily Beast in 2011:

As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.

What we didn’t know until the files were released was that Krauss had talked to lawyers in an attempt to issue defamation threats to Mel Thompson, which Epstein advised him against, saying “so to be clear I will not fund… i cant [sic] participate in you damagin [sic] yourself”. Krauss also workshopped his attempts to “impugn” my testimony, and the testimony of other witnesses with a lawyer – something we know to be the case, because he forwarded multiple versions of those statements, along with tracked changes and comments, to Jeffrey Epstein for review.

I haven’t talked about this a great deal (not least because I have no well-connected billionaire friend to cover legal bills) but, on the few occasions I have, there has been pushback from a handful of men online, who refused to believe it even in the face of multiple eye-witness testimonies – including my own. Some of that pushback came from groups within (at the time) the atheist and skeptic movements of the UK, pointing to what they felt were inconsistencies between my eye-witness account and Mel’s – an attack line, we can now see, that had been originally written in consort with the world’s most famous paedophile.

Sadly, since those allegations were made public, organisations that would call themselves skeptical have continued to arrange public events with Krauss, even hosting awards evenings where he gave Richard Dawkins an award (or maybe he received an award from Richard Dawkins, or both – it’s hard to keep track), arranged by men who apparently cared more for their own chance to hobnob with someone famous than they were willing to care about the women in our movement. And that is a theme here, because Epstein got away with his crimes for so long because the men around him valued him more than the women and girls he harmed.

The actual story

Epstein was originally arrested for serious criminal acts and, while he did serve time, due to his money and his connections the charges were minimised down to a lesser-sounding offence, of which there was only a single case, the time for which he served from the comfort of his home. Upon release, he continued to enjoy the company of prominent men – some within the skeptical movement – at a point where there was no excuse for not knowing about his convictions, or for willingly associating closely with him.

Yet the people in his orbit apparently liked the lifestyle he embodied, and the brush with privilege his patronage afforded, and they didn’t ask questions because to do so might turn that tap off. At the point when they continued to associate with him, it is hard to see it as anything other than a choice they made to remain ignorant – or to pretend to be. And that choice actively makes things less safe for women in our community.

What the Epstein files cement is the fact that, yes, this was a real conspiracy – but not one that was conducted via code words about jerky, cream cheese, pizza, or hot dogs. It was grubby men, sliming their way around the international elite class, not caring that they were rubbing shoulders – and god knows what else – with a convicted and prolific sex trafficker, because they saw him as important and his victims as unimportant.

That is the story the Epstein files tell us, and it’s vital that through all of this we learn not to simply give a free pass to the perpetrators whose work we happen to admire, nor to scour and twist real tragedies as an attempt to smear and hang the people we dislike, and certainly not to treat traumatic accounts of grotesque criminality as lurid fodder for true crime intrigue. All that does is once again tell the victims of these crimes – and the similar crimes of other men, past, present, and future – that they do not matter.

The post What the ‘Epstein Files’ tell us about conspiracy theories – and about skeptics appeared first on The Skeptic.

This isn’t even an article about Taylor Swift the person or the musician. As I pointed out in my first article about her – it’s not about her so much as the attention that she brings. At the time of writing that first article, she was the most famous person in music and was conducting what would become the largest world tour in music. Famous people attract conspiracy theories simply because of their fame. As another writer for this site pointed out, as a woman she is going to be the subject of even more conspiracy theorising than her male counterparts.

October saw the release of Swift’s latest album: “The Life of a Showgirl.” It had a mixed reception. The “Swifties” loved it, her haters hated it, the overall critical consensus was that it was fine but didn’t meet the bar that she had set for herself. It was far from a cultural achievement but it was also not the civilisation destroying abomination that some celebrated the album as. Ultimately, musical taste is subjective and what one person likes is personal to them in a way that is impossible to quantify (except the band with a real-life bird as the lead singer – that’s just objectively awesome).

On top of the album there was news of a mini-documentary series about the end of “The Eras” tour on Disney+ and something about her getting engaged to her boyfriend. With her in the news again the conspiracy theories that I wrote about previously began to pop up again but then quickly died off. They didn’t gain traction because two important factors were missing: the most important being that there was no upcoming election to couple the conspiracy theory with. The initial batch of conspiracy theories only ever sort of worked because the American right wing dreaded the possibility that her endorsement of the current president’s opponent would sway a close election.

The second factor is that no one really bought those conspiracy theories to begin with. The point of the theories was to reassure conservative supporters that the most popular musician in the world didn’t openly agree with right wing politics, not because those politics are wrong, but because “they” won’t let her be real.

Secretly she has to be an American conservative. She fits a certain stereotype. Swift is blonde, blue-eyed, engaged to an all-star American football player. Of course she’s one of them – provided you ignore her public statements, song lyrics, and personal success – because she fits the mould.

In November, I found myself doomscrolling through Facebook’s AI slop wondering why we just tacitly accept that everything needs an advertisement attached to it, when I came across an actual post from a group I’m in. It was a seeming miracle that the algorithm directed me to somewhere I was actually connected to. The post was from the group page for the “Cognitive Dissonance” podcast. The post had the unfortunate effect of providing me with a shot of endorphins to reinforce the doom scrolling but that is what led to this article.

The poster, who I will not name, asked whether the group believed that Taylor Swift was “MAGA coded.” The initial post, then others like it, offered a few pieces of evidence that Taylor Swift was secretly a Trump supporter. The first was that her official store sold merchandise with “88” on it. If you are a stranger to the conspiracy sphere of skepticism you might shrug. Those of us who are cursed with unfortunate knowledge know that “88” is used by uncreative neo-Nazis as a greeting, because it references the eighth letter in the English and German alphabets, “H.” So 88 = HH, or ‘Heil Hitler.’ I’m wanting to apologise to everyone reading this, because it’s going to take a few days before you stop coincidentally noticing it.

I don’t know if the original poster saw “88”, or if they read that she was selling it… but she never was. The closest number is “89” a reference to the year Swift was born and the album “1989” – her first album solidly in the pop genre.

The second major “clue” was a necklace in her merchandise store with a lightning bolt on it. Even if you don’t see the world through a conspiratorial lens you know that a lightning bolt can be a reference to the Nazi SS… or, of course, it can just be a lightning bolt. Especially when it’s a reference to the new album’s song, “Opalite.” I feel it necessary to point out that the glam-rock band KISS has lightning bolts in the place of both “S”s and was accused of a similar reference.

Those were the strongest pieces of supporting evidence for the theory; the rest of the theory requires even more from the audience. The first being that they were primed to already believe the worst about Swift. The second was coincidentally the type of cognitive dissonance necessary to ignore the few political statements that the singer has made. It would be out of character for the singer to turn heel like this. I say that not as a fan, but as someone who understands that a legitimate criticism of the musician – and many others as well – is staying silent on large cultural and political issues. I think, as a philosophy instructor, that this is a debate we can have – do people with large platforms and followings have an obligation to speak on such matters? I can see a legitimate argument on both sides, but that topic is outside the scope of this article.

The conspiracy theory was subjected to a debunking by a research firm. An article first published in Rolling Stone attempted to make the case that this conspiracy accusation was artificial. The actual white paper leaves a bit to be desired from a research point of view. The evidence is rough, and the claim that there was overlap between the “Taylor Swift is a Nazi” and the “Amber Heard is terrible” conspiracy sites doesn’t mean that there aren’t people at the bottom of the well. It does mean that there are the same accounts doing the work, and the conclusion that it was only a small fraction of accounts which caused the larger conversation seems borne out. The issue here is that the conversation was abandoned after only a few weeks.

For skeptics though I see a larger problem.

The spy show “Burn Notice” explained that a good trap doesn’t scare people, it makes them curious. If the theory claimed that Swift was a member of Stormfront or a supporter of current right wing darling Nick Fuentes, we would dismiss it out of hand. They would be too obviously false. Instead, the theory claimed that she was secretly MAGA with subtle clues from her latest album and merchandise store. There is nothing Swift has said publicly to indicate her heel turn, but – the theory tells us – there are clues for people who know how to find them. It’s “interesting”. The clues are subtle and hidden, so you must expend energy to find them and engage in the sunken cost mentality. A trap of this nature sucks people in, because it feels wrong enough that I read the post, and so did many others.

I want to stress that I found this not on Reddit’s r/conspiracy, but on the fan page for one of the longer running skeptical podcasts – “Cognitive Dissonance” co-hosted by Cecil Cicirello of the “Know Rogan Experience” podcast. The audience of “Cognitive Dissonance” are reliable skeptics, yet there was still debate on the post. I’m not attacking fans of the show; I’m using it as an example that we are not immune to conspiracy theorising.

The attachment to conspiracy theories is not rational, it’s emotional and the reasons people are drawn to conspiracy theorising are various; but we have to be aware that we have the capacity to fall into a trap like this. Perhaps you are sick of seeing this person in the news, maybe you’re disappointed at the new album, or you think that Tay-Tay should use her platform to speak up for various causes, but she doesn’t… so maybe, you think, it’s because she supports them.

Any of those can form the emotional lever. As skeptics we’re also prone to a bit of iconoclasm, and this theory feeds right into that. Skepticism is hard because we’re often the cold water that gets thrown onto people’s theories: we didn’t panic about the drones, or the clowns, and we probably aren’t concerned about 3I Atlas either. Skepticism is more difficult when we have to police ourselves.  The hardest thing is to keep in mind that our emotional reactions are not rational. We need to especially take a step back on our own views.

The post Taylor Swift isn’t “MAGA-coded”, she is a lightning rod for conspiracist grievances appeared first on The Skeptic.

Admittedly, it was a very nerdy pub conversation, but there is a prevalent and erroneous belief that “posh” originally stood for “Port Out, Starboard Home”, referring to the most desirable, and so most expensive, cabins on ships to and from India. In fact, it came from “posh” meaning “dandy” – ie a stylish fellow – which in turn derives from a slang term for money.

Such incorrect but popularly-believed etymologies of words abound in English, from the origins of profanity to acronyms and everything in between. The weirdest false etymology in English has to be the reasonable but incorrect belief that the words “isle” and “island” are related – astonishingly, these two words have completely different origins.

No doubt this is all of interest to some English students and of course fans of Susie Dent, but what’s the relevance to skepticism? It turns out some fringe believers, conspiracy theorists and even religions are rather fond of folk etymologies…

“Ego”

A recent episode of true-crime podcast My Favorite Murder highlighted the group Love Has Won – aka The Galactic Federation of Light – which hit the headlines in 2021 due to the discovery that the group had been keeping its leader’s mummified corpse for an unspecified time after her death. The group was told that “ego” meant “Edging God Out”, although it isn’t clear whether or not the former group leader – “Mother God” Amy Carlson – was actually claiming this was the word’s origin, or its hidden meaning, or merely a rhetorical tool.

The concept is used widely and is repeated by people from Deepak Chopra to the Unity Church, and may have been popularised by motivational speaker Dr Wayne Dyer, who spoke often of this concept in talks, and may have been the source of Amy Carlson’s use of ego, as his book Inspiration came out around the same time she founded Love Has Won.

Unsurprisingly, the word actually derives from the Latin, meaning “I myself”.

“History”

You can probably guess that “history” comes from an ancient Greek or Latin source – because most of English does – in this case from the Greek “historia” via Latin and French, with the original Greek meaning “account, record, narrative”.

Many groups like to play around with the word “history”, often metaphorically, it seems to be a popularly held misconception, and at least one religious group seems to embrace it literally, with guru Sathya Sai Baba and followers saying “History means “His story” – stories of God.”

“Government”

If you’ve spent time on conspiracy forums or wider social media you’ve probably come across this one:

Government literally means mind control. Govern means to control. Ment comes from the latin word Mens, which translates into mind, specifically intention, brain, intellect, faculties, understanding. Government = mind control. We dont need no thought control. [sic throughout]

They are at least trying here, with an effort to go back to the Latin, but the correct etymology is actually from the Latin “gubernare”, which means “to direct, rule, guide, govern”.

If the conspiracy theorist etymology was correct, and any word with the “-ment” suffix referred to the mind, would nourishment be feeding the brain and not the body? Can any home improvement only take place in the imagination? Is all human achievement destined to be a mere figment? Are figments themselves just soft, sweet fruits of the mind?

“Money”

English words often have pretty peculiar origins, and the root of all evil the word “money” is via French, Latin, and the goddess Juno Moneta, whose temple was the site of the ancient Roman mint:

Initially, “moneta” referred specifically to the place where coins were minted. Over time, however, the meaning of the word broadened to include the coins themselves and eventually the concept of money as a medium of exchange.

Currency, also from Latin, is a more recent arrival in English and refers to the “that which is current as a medium of exchange”, from the Latin meaning “condition of flowing”.

English, like all languages, developed – and continues to develop – organically and through usage, as a result of generational changes, technological advancement, contact with other cultures, simplification, semantic bleaching and a host of other factors. While governing bodies can certainly attempt to control language, the success of a prescriptive approach can be most easily seen in the Académie Française’s largely ineffectual alternatives to creeping Anglicisation: from “le weekend” to “le brunch” the French people have voted with their every conversation.

That doesn’t deter some from believing otherwise, of course. Authors on truth-seeking website Stillness in the Storm (tag-line: An Agent of Conscious Evolution), see secret groups making conscious choices about which words the wider English-speaking public use:

the Dark Occultists, the Cabal, use the systems of nature as a blueprint for various control systems on Earth. This is not arbitrary or done at random. They use these words and concepts because at a very deep subconscious level we respond to them and make the associations in our minds with the true concepts which support them.

For example the word money breaks down to mon eye, mono being the latin word for one. The One Eye, which is a deeply embedded archetypal symbol for consciousness and unity thinking.”

Author Justin Deschamps then goes on to cite a seminar by PL Chang, who gets the etymology of “currency” right but then ascribes its use in English as a choice made by “them”:

The word currency originated from the Latin word currens, the present participle of currere, which means “to run.” Now, why would they based [sic] the word currency on a Latin word that does not have much to do with paper money or coin?

Chang goes on to say it is actually about energy:

To find the covert or hidden definition of currency, you need to use phonetics and separate the word currency into two words. When spoken out loud, the word currency sounds similar to “current-sea.” What does a current do in a river? It flows to the sea!

Chang goes on a long word-game tangent involving “chi”, “riverbanks” and “river”-“banks”, but for those who haven’t the inclination to read it all, the conclusion is that the use of “currency” in English is a clear indicator that the New World Order want to steal your energy using currency. Though as with all conspiracy theories, why do “they” bother to give us these clues so we can see behind the curtain? Come to think of it, is the idea of someone wealthy deriving benefit from other people’s labour unusual enough to require a grand linguistic conspiracy? Anyway, speaking of conspiracy theories…

“Conspiracy theory”

Sometimes it is more than just a word that gets a silly etymology – it’s a whole phrase.

There is a very commonly-held idea that the phrase “conspiracy theory”, with all its negative connotations, was propagated by the CIA to discredit anyone who believed in such a theory in the 1960s. Some hold that it was invented by the CIA, others accept that it was already a phrase in use, but believe that the CIA weaponised it to “counter criticism of the Warren Report”. Others manage to hold both views: that “they coined the phrase”, while also accepting that it was in fact in use since the 1800s.

The term’s existence prior to the 1960s is easy to demonstrate with the briefest Google Books search. The claim that it only acquired negative connotations more recently, which is repeated widely – even in part by those debunking the myth or conspiracy theory around its origins – seems also to be incorrect.

Mike Caulfield tracked down the earliest known use of the term in print, from The New York Times in 1863, and he notes that even then its use had a pejorative implication:

You’ll note here that conspiracy theory — almost ten years before the other examples historians often note — is used much how we would use it now. It’s a put down, an assertion that the complexity someone else sees is a result of ignorance or worse.

Language is ever changing, but more than 150 years later, human nature is still the same.

The post How word games and folk etymology feed into fringe beliefs appeared first on The Skeptic.

As Jonathan Swift once wrote,

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.”

This quote is also a fitting illustration of the problem it describes, as it is frequently misquoted and misattributed to other writers. But, arguably, a misattributed quote is of little consequence compared with misinformation that leads people to fear and reject things that are more essential to human health, like effective medical interventions. So what can we do about that?

For decades, early science communication relied on a simple strategy: present the evidence and expect people to change their minds based on numbers and graphs alone. In science communication studies, this is known as the Deficit Model, and it has been thoroughly debunked. Experience and research have, in recent years, shown that this approach rarely works. That’s because people cling to beliefs because they are entangled with identity, ideology, and community, not because they don’t understand fact-based arguments.

To persuade people effectively, scientists have to go beyond attempting to persuade people using data alone. They have to combine evidence with empathy and storytelling, to craft messages that speak to both the mind and the heart.

If it sounds challenging, it’s useful to understand why it works. The first thing to understand is that cognitive biases make false beliefs stubborn. Humans favour information that confirms what they already think – a tendency psychologists call the confirmation bias. The more emotionally charged a false claim, and the more it fits with someone’s existing belief system, the harder it is to dislodge. In this instance, attempting to correct a belief with facts alone may even backfire, potentially reinforcing them in the other person’s mind, which is known as the Backfire Effect (though the latest evidence suggests those fears may be overstated). This phenomenon helps to explain why vaccine misinformation persists despite decades of public health campaigns sharing vaccine data.

Misinformation sticks not only because of psychology but also because it travels as a story. Facts are inert, while stories are memorable and personal. Often, the outlier in a dataset tells the most compelling story; for example, a dramatic anecdote of a vaccine side effect, or a single extreme weather event carry more weight than tables of data that represent a different truth. We are a storytelling species: the human brain evolved to respond to narrative, to remember lessons and patterns embedded in social context. When scientists ignore this, evidence struggles to compete with storytellers who may not have the best intentions.

However, understanding why people believe false claims is only half the battle. Communicators also need strategies to make corrections stick, and this is where research in cognitive science and psychology offers insights.

First is the principle of identity-protective cognition: people reject information that threatens their social, political, or cultural identity. A correction framed as a direct challenge to someone’s worldview will almost certainly fail to convince them. This means that when countering a viewpoint, it’s essential to take into account and speak to the person’s belief system, meeting them where they are, rather than demanding that they step away from the groups and values that shape their sense of self.

Then there is the role of empathy, which is a surprisingly powerful – and often underused – tool. Science communicators who acknowledge concerns rather than dismiss them create space for dialogue. Studies show that people are more receptive to corrections framed around shared values than to confrontational messaging. For example, a climate skeptic may resist charts of carbon emissions, which represent abstract statistics, but is more likely to engage with a story about how extreme heatwaves are disrupting a local community. The human experience grounds the narrative into emotional storytelling, and allows a reframing of the data. Similarly, public health campaigns that frame vaccination as protecting loved ones or the broader community tap into emotional responses, reducing resistance.

Another important element is communicator trust. This refers to the confidence an audience has in the person or source delivering a message. It’s the belief that the communicator is honest, knowledgeable, and has good intentions. When people trust a communicator, they are more likely to accept, understand, and act on the information that person shares – even if it is scientifically false. Communicator trust is often built through credibility, authenticity, and consistency over time, and it is usually linked with the most effective storytellers.

It can be daunting to start from scratch with building trust in the digital world, but the good news is that some groups are already naturally more trusted than others, and they can leverage this to debunk misinformation more successfully. For example, doctors are generally highly trusted because of their expertise and perceived good intentions.

You may ask, if trust in doctors is so high, why do people reject vaccinations in the first place? And that is a very good question. Almost always in those instances, the doctor-patient trust has been eroded through a negative experience of some kind. Again, there’s positive news: studies show that even once lost, trust in doctors can be regained through transparency, empathy, and demonstrating competence. Being honest about uncertainties, listening carefully to patients, showing care for their well-being, and consistently providing reliable medical advice all help rebuild trust over time. This is an underused element of science communication that can yield significant results – studies have found that vaccine-hesitant parents often change their minds after being invited to have a one-to-one conversation with a qualified doctor, through having their fears heard and addressed respectfully.

Even in the most resistant populations, messenger choice matters. Research shows that peers, community leaders, or individuals with shared identity traits can influence beliefs far more effectively than distant experts. Similarly, relatable voices telling stories of climate impacts can persuade audiences that data alone cannot reach. It may seem counterintuitive that people are more likely to trust a single individual than broad scientific consensus, but it reflects how the human brain is wired – we respond more strongly to personal stories and relatable messengers than to abstract data, however robust it may be.

The implications of these insights are significant. To be effective, science communicators need to learn to craft messages that engage empathy through storytelling, in recognition of the fact that persuasion is as much an art as a science. Changing minds is not easy, but it is possible. Evidence shows that respectful, narrative-driven communication can reduce the influence of misinformation and encourage people to rethink deeply held beliefs. The goal is not to shame or lecture people, but to connect with them and guide them toward understanding without triggering defensive resistance. In a world saturated with misinformation, the ability to communicate science effectively is as critical as the science itself.

Ultimately, combating misinformation requires humility and persistence, but it is also necessary to build trust, strengthen understanding, and create a foundation for informed decision-making in society. If we want truth to keep pace with fake news, we need to learn to meet people where they are, communicate with empathy, and commit to the long, patient work of rebuilding confidence in reliable information. Only then can evidence claim a central position in public discourse, guiding decisions instead of being drowned out by convincing but misleading claims.

The post Why do people ignore evidence, and what actually changes minds? appeared first on The Skeptic.

As I’m sure readers of this magazine will have realised, this is the switchover date from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian, which for the British Empire involved skipping out the 11 days between 2 September and 14 September, 1752.

Supposedly, the skipping of 11 days prompted the ‘calendar riots’, where the people took to the streets and demanded the crown return their 11 days. While historians these days believe the riots to be highly mythologised, appearing to be the Georgian equivalent of an urban legend, the removal of 11 days from the calendar did not pass without comment. There was genuine concern and confusion from some people, even just around practical matters like rents and wages. I imagine those whose birthdays fell in the gap were none too pleased either. People born on 29 February don’t realise how easy they have it.

The Julian calendar was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, and took effect the following year. It replaced the older Roman calendar and divided the year into 12 months, with a total of 365 days. To keep things roughly in sync with the Earth’s orbit around the sun, the calendar also added an extra day every four years, creating the familiar leap year system.

However, the Julian system was not perfectly accurate. Over time, the calendar drifted slowly out of alignment with the solar year. This proved to be a problem, especially for the Christians who depended on the calendar to determine the date of Easter. Easter is linked to the spring equinox, so as the equinox shifted so too did the date of Easter, leading to confusion and concern. If left unchecked, this drift would eventually have led to Christians marking both the birth and death of Jesus on the same day (though not until around the year 34,000).

To solve this, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582. The new system refined the leap year rules. Instead of simply adding a day every four years, years divisible by 100 would not be leap years. That is, unless the year was divisible by 400, in which case the leap day would be kept. This subtle change brought the calendar closer to the true length of a solar year. But the reform came with a drastic step; to bring the calendar back into alignment, 10 days were skipped. So the day after Thursday 4 October, 1582 was not Friday 5 October, but Friday 15 October. The 10 intervening days simply vanished.

The adoption of the Gregorian calendar was not uniform across Europe. The British Empire did not switch until 1752, by which time the drift had grown to 11 days. So, in the UK, Wednesday 2 September, 1752 was immediately followed by Thursday 14 September, 1752. This is the calendar system we continue to use today.

But there is a problem. If you count backward from the introduction of the Gregorian reforms of 1582 to the introduction of the Julian Calendar in 45 BC, and do your sums, it turns out that we should actually have been 13 days adrift from the solar year, not 10. So what happened to the missing three days?

And from this comes the Phantom Time Hypothesis.

Initially proposed in the 1980s and 1990s by German historian Heribert Illig, the Phantom Time Hypothesis suggests that about three centuries of history – from 614 CE to 911 CE – never happened. According to Illig, these centuries were fabricated, and our calendar was simply advanced without the actual passage of time. Like a super-sized version of the 11 days in 1752.

If this were true, it would mean that much of what we consider the early Middle Ages never happened, the current year is closer to 1728 than 2025, and historical figures like Augustus Caesar lived 1,700 years ago rather than 2,000. Illig and his supporters have pointed to a lack of archaeological evidence from this period, the apparent stagnation in culture, art, and architecture, and gaps in historical records as supporting signs of this phantom time.

They argue that figures such as Charlemagne, the well-regarded European emperor who ruled from 800 to 814 AD, were fabricated to fill in this gap. The reason Charlemagne is presented as so well regarded and benevolent is because he is fictional. One might easily observe that King Arthur is held in similar regard.

It also excises from history Alfred the Great, King of Wessex from 849 to 899, along with 60 Popes and 18 Archbishops of Canterbury. Either they didn’t exist, or their reigns are misdated to cover up the change.

The theory further claims that this massive calendar alteration was orchestrated by Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, who ruled from 966 to 1002. Because his reign coincided with the turn of the millennium, the theory suggests he had a vested interest in ‘creating’ a millennium to rule over, and so declared by royal fiat that it was 297 years later, to make it appear as though the year 1000 had arrived when it had not. And his scholars followed suit.

The Phantom Time Hypothesis, like many conspiracy theories, is superficially fascinating and perhaps even compelling, but faces numerous challenges when you get into the details.

Take Otto III’s supposed motive: wanting to rule over a landmark millennium. That reasoning applies equally to anyone in power at a round-numbered date – someone had to be emperor in 1,000 AD; it just happened to be Otto.

Without evidence that Otto had any special fascination with the end of the millennium, I would argue this is a textbook Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. This informal fallacy is derived from the story of a cowboy who shoots at the side of a barn, before locating the bullet hole, drawing a bullseye around it, and claiming to be a crack shot. Otto is conveniently framed as the mastermind only because the date fits, not because there’s solid evidence.

What about the absence of art, architecture, and literature from the period? Well, it turns out we already have an established historical model to explain that. It’s called the Dark Ages. Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Europe experienced economic turmoil and cultural stagnation. This period was characterised by hardship, the breakdown of infrastructure, and general decline in artistic and architectural output. Crucially, the Dark Ages were primarily a Western European phenomenon, and elsewhere in the world time didn’t ‘stop’. There was the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Islam, which under the Phantom Time Hypothesis went from nothing to huge overnight. In China, the Tang dynasty continued to thrive. All three advanced in culture and science.

However, none of this actually addresses the missing three days in the Gregorian correction. That is the starting point from which Illig derives his entire hypothesis, and it turns out to be based on a misunderstanding of the intent of the Gregorian reform. It was never meant to reset the calendar year to its relative position from 45 BCE. It was meant to realign Easter with the date established by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. When Pope Gregory XIII introduced the new calendar, the drift since Nicaea was about 10 days, which explains why the correction involved skipping just 10 days, not 13.

Moreover, scientific dating methods contradict the idea of phantom centuries. Dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, offers a continuous record going back thousands of years. Trees add one ring per year, and the patterns of thick and thin rings vary with environmental conditions, forming a unique ‘fingerprint’ for each period. By overlapping samples from different trees, scientists have created an unbroken chronological timeline extending over 11,000 years. Roman artifacts, dated using this method, fit perfectly within the established timeline.

Radiocarbon dating of artifacts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls also confirms the accepted historical chronology, dating these objects to around 2,000 years ago. Proponents of the Phantom Time Hypothesis argue that these methods are flawed or circularly calibrated against written records they claim are fabricated. This argument is reminiscent of claims made by Young Earth Creationists and lacks convincing evidence.

Astronomical observations provide yet more support for the accepted timeline. Halley’s Comet, visible approximately every 75 years, has been recorded in various cultures for centuries. If nearly three centuries were missing from history, the timing of these sightings would not align. However, records from Europe and China match the accepted chronology. When the phantom period is removed, the visitations no longer align with the known orbital period of the comet.

The Chinese calendar, independent of the European one, also records astronomical events such as eclipses and comets. These too correspond with the accepted historical dates in Western calendars further undermining the hypothesis.

Despite the weight of evidence against it, the Phantom Time Hypothesis has its adherents. Illig himself has remained defiant in the face of criticism, perceiving skepticism of his views as a personal attack rather than scholarly debate. This pattern is common in fringe theories, where proponents dismiss contradictory evidence as conspiracy or bias.

So, while it is tempting to imagine that entire centuries of human history could be a fabrication, the evidence tells us otherwise. History remains largely intact, and the Phantom Time Hypothesis remains just that – a hypothesis, without credible foundation.

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