FROM CONSPIRACY THEORY TO CONSPIRACY PRACTICE

 

Like sports teams and pop stars, some media words and phrases have their season. There are frivolous conceits that burst like soap bubbles after a few news cycles: Nothingburger, takeaway, hot mess, all of these rather culinary epithets were around for a little while. News types started saying ‘circle back’ a lot when that troll of a White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, replied to every question using it. I was a little irritated recently when I noted that on Fox political news shoes with a panel, everyone referred to, well, the act of referring to, by saying “To so-and-so’s point”. Then I came across the same construction in George Eliot’s Felix Holt: Radical and allowed that if it is good enough for Eliot – a great stylist – then it is good enough for me. The most miserable of the contemporary examples of low rhetoric is to end a sentence with “moving forward”. At this point, like Bertie Wooster, one simply shakes one’s head and passes on.

One phrase that is now a veteran of the scene is ‘conspiracy theory’.

‘Conspire’ has, as so many English words do, a Latin root incorporating spirare, meaning to breathe, and the prefix con, meaning ‘together’. Breathing together, then, like the musicians in a quartet of wind instruments, or perhaps people who all voice the same opinion. But by the time it reaches 14^th-century Old French, conspirer means to aspire or plan maliciously, to agree together to commit a criminal or reprehensible act. On its etymological journey, then, a conspiracy has gone from breathing in unison, like a mild-mannered yoga class, to something a good deal more sinister. If a dozen people get together to plan an animal sanctuary for stray dogs, we do not say they are conspiring. But if they gather to plan a terrorist attack, we are more inclined to say that they are doing that. That (some) conspiracy theories describe things that don’t exist is, in my opinion, a conspiracy theory.

Now, of course, what were dismissed – and threatened and censored – as conspiracy theories concerning COVID are turning out to be reasonably accurate. Hunter Biden’s laptop does exist after all. There is a ruling elite. We know, because they keep telling us. They’re not making any secret. If the Left say something is a conspiracy theory, it generally means both that it exists and that they are afraid of it, or rather afraid of its being discussed.

And the phrase was also ‘weaponised’ – another word enjoying its day in the sun. Conspiracy theorists so labelled were not subject to ridicule or funny looks at the office. Some of them can get you jail time.