We live in an age of conspiracy. For me, I was red-pilled by one of the most consequential events of my lifetime: COVID-19. From the beginning, the facts (which, if you remember correctly, were nearly impossible to find) did not align with the hysteria I was witnessing around me. Nonetheless, we were sold a narrative and told not to ask questions. Doing so, in any capacity, often resulted in some form of shaming or ostracization—and for the most unfortunate among us, loss of employment or even violence.
For many, hindsight is quite literally 2020—we were right to be skeptical, and the full truth of what happened during that time is still coming to light six years later. The handling of COVID left an indelible mark on my conscience and has made me a more critical, albeit cynical, thinker. I look at things differently now.
While I’m encouraged to see people asking more questions and pausing before taking every event or news headline at face value (with AI undoubtedly contributing to this), I fear we have found ourselves in much more dangerous waters. One can become so distrustful of the world around them or the powers that be that everything becomes a conspiracy. The only person you can trust is, well, yourself.
The problem with this is that human intuition is not infallible and conspiracy talk is particularly effective at tickling the ears of those who want to believe what suits their own passions. We let our emotions override facts, sound reasoning, and actually plausible explanations. Unlike conspirators, who, ironically, must have a strong sense of the truth in order to cover it up, conspiracy thinkers deny apparent truth for a favored theory or “psyop.”
This is what distinguishes critical thinking from conspiracy thinking: critical thinking questions claims in pursuit of truth, while conspiracy thinking questions truth in pursuit of a predetermined claim.
More recent events, such as the assassination of Charlie Kirk, have revealed this growing mind sickness. A jaded podcaster claims that she—and only she—knows the truth of what happened on September 10, 2025. A year later, and the results from her web of inconsistencies, clickbait, and slanderous claims have been a rabid army of co-conspiracy theorists and deeper pockets for herself.
And what about the Lindsay Clancy trial? TikTok and X are awash with empathetic online sleuths who think her ex-husband is the real murderer of their three children, not Lindsay. Nevermind that her husband has an airtight alibi or that neither her nor her defense ever deny that she did it—things just “aren’t adding up,” and therefore an alternate explanation that directly contradicts the provided evidence must exist.
And today, on 9/11, out of respect for the 2,977 people who lost their precious lives 25 years ago, I won’t even touch the theories that have long been pet favorites among conspiracy theorists.
To those of you who have been drawn in by this type of titillating speculation, I ask a very important question: would you believe the truth if it denied what you suspect to be true? Perhaps you’re forming opinions from sound bites or have spiraled into countless hours of investigation and Reddit commentary. That’s fine. The greater problem is when a conclusion that coincides with reality cannot be accepted. This is what you have done in that moment: you have made yourself the arbiter of truth, and your intuition the sovereign judge. The truth is only what you want it to be.
I took it upon myself to reflect on this special type of madness because I cannot help but see it as fundamentally a worldview issue. The danger of the conspiracy era is not simply that people believe false things. It is that the rules for distinguishing truth from falsehood can themselves collapse. When every fact can be dismissed as manipulation and every contradiction absorbed into the conspiracy, the search for truth becomes detached from the possibility of being wrong—and a worldview that cannot be proven wrong can no longer reliably discover what is right.
There is nothing wrong with noticing inconsistencies. There is nothing wrong with asking uncomfortable questions, challenging consensus, distrusting institutions that have forfeited trust, or entertaining explanations that others dismiss. Sometimes yesterday’s conspiracy theory contains some measure of tomorrow’s accepted truth. But none of that gives us permission to abandon the standards by which truth can actually be known. Real-life events are not Netflix docuseries meant to entertain and dissect. Speculation is not harmless. And sometimes, the truth is exactly what it appears to be.
As Contributor Robert George says below, real truth-seeking requires humility: the willingness to question ourselves, admit when we are wrong, and accept that truth does not bend to our suspicions. We must bend to it.
