They call them "conspiracy theories." The phrase itself is a linguistic cattle prod, designed to herd the sceptical back into the pen of approved opinion. Yet the last five years have delivered one of the most spectacular vindications of so-called conspiracism in modern history. What was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy is now simply Tuesday's headline.
Start with the granddaddy: the origin of COVID-19.
2020: Question the wet-market story and you were a racist, a Trumper, a science-denier. Facebook slapped warning labels on your posts. Twitter suspended virologists who dared mention "lab leak." The Lancet published a letter, organised by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, declaring the idea a "conspiracy theory" that "created fear, rumours, and prejudice." Twenty-seven scientists signed it. Most had undisclosed conflicts: they had funded, collaborated with, or worked at the very lab in Wuhan under suspicion.
2025: The U.S. Department of Energy (moderate confidence), the FBI (moderate confidence), and now a bipartisan Senate report (2024) all conclude the pandemic most likely began with a laboratory incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, funded in part by NIH grants routed through Daszak's EcoHealth, created viruses frighteningly close to SARS-CoV-2. Emails obtained via FOIA show Fauci and Collins privately admitting the virus looked engineered within days of the sequence being posted, even as they publicly orchestrated the "natural origin" narrative.
The lab-leak hypothesis went from banned speech to consensus in under five years. That is not the track record of a "conspiracy theory." That is the track record of an actual conspiracy, one involving grant money, reputation laundering, and the suppression of legitimate scientific debate.
But COVID is only the loudest example. The last half-decade is littered with "theories" that aged like fine wine:
mRNA vaccines would stop transmission → turned out they don't (Pfizer exec admitted it in European Parliament, 2022).
Ivermectin is "horse dewormer" with no human evidence → turned out the ACTIV-6 and TOGETHER trials were deliberately under-dosed and late-treated to generate null results (FLCCC meta-analyses now include dozens of positive RCTs).
Lockdowns would save millions of lives → turned out Sweden (no lockdowns) had lower excess mortality than most strict nations, and the UK's own Sage minutes show ministers knew by April 2020 the policy was more theatrical than epidemiological.
Vaccine-induced myocarditis is "extremely rare and mild" → turned out the rate in young males is closer to 1 in 270–1 in 600 (Thai, Israeli, and Nordic registry data), and the new Hulscher paper (2025) shows subclinical heart damage in 1–3 % per dose.
Every one of these was branded "misinformation" and aggressively censored. Every one is now either admitted or overwhelmingly supported by the data.
This is the central point the smug dismissers keep missing: Conspiracy theories are not true because they are conspiratorial. They are conspiratorial because powerful people really do meet in private, lie in public, and coordinate to protect their interests.
History is a graveyard of "debunked" theories that later became textbooks:
The CIA really did dose unsuspecting Americans with LSD (MKUltra).
The FBI really did try to blackmail Martin Luther King into suicide (COINTELPRO).
The Gulf of Tonkin incident really was staged to escalate Vietnam.
Big Tobacco really did know cigarettes caused cancer decades before they admitted it.
The NSA really was bulk-collecting everyone's phone records (Snowden).
These were not the fever dreams of basement dwellers. They were the documented actions of bureaucracies, corporations, and governments acting in secret because sunlight would have destroyed them.
The sociological reality is simple and grim: Wherever there is concentrated power and low accountability, people will conspire. It is not a glitch of human nature; it is a feature. The only variable is whether the conspiracy succeeds long enough to rewrite the first draft of history.
Today the tools of secrecy and narrative control are more sophisticated than ever: pre-bunking, "trusted flaggers," outsourced censorship to NGOs, behavioural-psychology units inside government (the UK's "Nudge Unit," Canada's "Public Safety" horizon-scanning teams). When an entire class of people, academics, journalists, tech platform staff, share the same moral worldview, the same funding streams, and the same fear of being called "Right-wing," you don't need a smoky room. You just need a Slack channel.
So the next time someone sneers "conspiracy theory," try this reply:
"Which part is impossible? That powerful people lie? That they coordinate? That they punish dissent to protect the lie? We just watched all three happen in real time, on a global scale, with the biggest story of our lives."
The lab-leak saga is now the ultimate litmus test. Anyone who still says "conspiracy theory" about that one is either intellectually dishonest or chronologically challenged.
The rest of us have learned a simpler rule: When the establishment needs a new taboo, starts a censorship campaign, and deploys armies of "fact-checkers" who are funded by the same people being questioned… start taking notes. Because history has a habit of turning today's heresy into tomorrow's obvious truth.
And the only real conspiracy is pretending otherwise.