It is now perfectly reasonable, for instance, to believe that a novel virus that killed more than 20 million people worldwide and upended for years the daily life of billions was engineered by scientists and then released by accident, with a global cover-up improvised in the months that followed. To me, it is probably fair to call this a campaign of information suppression, but it does not appear to have been especially effective, since as early as May 2020, at roughly the peak of that censorship, nearly half of Americans believed the Covid virus had come out of a lab. But over time, the lab-leak theory of pandemic origins has grown even closer to consensus, and not just in America; the German spy agency, for instance, now believes that the virus probably came out of a lab — a view broadly in line with the views of American intelligence.
Other conspiracy theories hang so much in plain sight, they look like wallpaper. The biggest story of the new presidential term, for instance, has been that the world’s richest man, anointed rather than elected to government, has spent the administration’s first two months trying to resize and reprogram the functioning of the entire federal bureaucracy — relying on a team of shadowy operatives devoted enough to secrecy and anonymity that those identifying them have been accused by Musk of criminal harassment.
This web of conspiracy reality is not brand-new. There was, in fact, Russian interference in the 2016 election, if probably not the coordinated kind that obsessed resistance liberals through Trump’s first term (in which Blackwater’s Erik Prince appeared to be conducting a shadow American foreign policy). The Panama Papers revealed a large network of corruption, influence and tax avoidance by the world’s richest and most powerful people; in the 1MDB scandal, billions of dollars had allegedly been stolen from the Malaysian government and funneled into Hollywood (among other places).
In 2016 it was at least a small scandal that Trump didn’t put his financial holdings in a blind trust before assuming the presidency; by 2022, it was barely a news story when the Saudi crown prince’s investment fund gave $2 billion to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law; and by 2024, it was so taken for granted that the family was hoping to profit while governing that no one really blinked when the president released a meme coin on the eve of his inauguration. In 2020 and 2021 the Department of Defense conducted a social media disinformation campaign to dampen the uptake of Chinese Covid vaccines in the Philippines and several Muslim-majority countries in Central Asia, and over the past five years, we’ve been treated to several serious news cycles about U.F.O.s and what the government has learned about them.
And then there is Jeffrey Epstein, the obvious lodestar of this everybody-knows age of conspiracy and corruption, whose connections to many of the world’s most powerful people are not whispered rumors but stunningly well-known facts. This is part of what made social media enthusiasm about the Epstein files during the presidential campaign so strange. We already had the flight logs and the address book, the video with Trump and the photo of Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell. (We even had the story of Steve Bannon conducting a long on-camera interview with Epstein, as a way of testing whether an appearance on “60 Minutes” would be a good idea.)
