Conspiracy Theories Poison Social Movements. Political Education is the Cure.

As we see conspiracy theories seeping into radical movements for change, they reveal that we have been unable to build consensus on how systems of power work and what to do about them.

"Be forewarned that this has left me very disillusioned and I felt the same way as I felt when deconstructing Christianity,” said one TikTok creator, talking into her phone camera. She was one of dozens, if not hundreds, of young people whose videos went viral after reading one particularly striking bit of agitprop: Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America.” The letter, recently republished in The Guardian until deleted it, outlines a relatively straight-forward critique of American foreign policy, laced with extreme social conservatism and vast conspiracism.

For the mostly Gen-Z readers, the letter was new, but it has been added to university syllabi and passed around the blogosphere for decades. The disillusionment these first-time readers were experiencing was presumably the reality that Bin Laden did not orchestrate 9/11 simply because he “hates our freedom,” but that Western powers have engaged in real crimes, with the U.S. as a primary culprit. But for anyone who knows their way around American history, Bin Laden’s critique is thin and obvious, and the diagnosis strays into familiar tropes.

“These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people,” wrote Bin Laden, who blamed Jews for just about every violation. “You are the nation that permits usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions … the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants...”

The piece does what populist, conspiracy tracts have always done: it takes real instances of oppression and places them into an easily digestible, and false, narrative so that those making sense of the horrors can point fingers. While not a particularly novel take, Bin Laden’s references to Palestine made it relevant, and if you have never encountered a deconstruction of America’s foreign policy, it may shock you.

But the idea that the letter offers a biting critique misunderstands the purpose of dissent: opposition to the current state of the world is not synonymous with fighting for a liberatory future. And the inability to parse out this reality has revealed instability across a radical left that often clamors after any ally in the struggle against systemic injustice. Without safeguards and clarity of the mission, nearly any voice against the status quo, including those who want to replace it with something even more deadly or whose analysis relies on conspiracy theories, can be mistaken for a friend.

Revolts from below

History is a staccato of uprisings and revolts, nearly instinctual rejections of various systems of peonage and slavery. The question about uprisings is not if they will happen, but what form they will take. The conditions that bring about struggle, such as the exploitations that inspired peasant uprisings across feudal Europe or the explosive growth of the labor movement around the turn of the 20th century, are always legitimate, but not every expression of resistance is valid. The same labor movement that fought for the weekend also stood against non-white immigration and, at times, went on strike to “protect” white workers from integration. Experiencing a crisis does not immediately grant someone with special insight into the causes of their conditions, and there is a long history of communities turning their anger on marginalized people rather than the powerful.

This is endemic to fascism’s rise. In countries where economic deprivation and crisis were explosive, many turned towards revolutionary impulses that promised to address society’s failures while also validating the worst impulses established by colonialism and white supremacy.

As French-Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell chronicled, fascist movements actually emerged out of a dissenting socialist trend: they wanted to destroy the system so badly that they cared little for the mechanism or outcome of that destruction. These “national syndicalists” replaced class as the historical change agent with “nation,” thus redirecting the dramatic anger the masses held towards their stagnating societies away from a class struggle and onto a racialized, authoritarian nightmare. They certainly wanted revolution, just not the type the left typically desires.

Undirected populism tends to reproduce our society’s bigotries and biases. For the West, antisemitism was a primary folk narrative to explain dislocation and alienation: it was the Jews that were responsible for widening inequality and political disenfranchisement. This belief has deep roots in Christian empire. And when modernity emerged and people were looking to explain new systems of abstraction, many turned to older antisemitic theories and simply secularized them. As European colonialism spread across the globe, it also exported many of its ideas, which explains why antisemitic conspiracy theories are found far from antisemitism’s Christian origins.

During populist uprisings, it's common for antisemitism to replace grounded political analysis. These ideas are often not the result of intentional misdirection by antisemites, but present because antisemitism remains a part of the Western populist imagination. Marxist scholar Moishe Postone called this “structural antisemitism” because of the complicated way that capitalism works often confuses the public as to where the center of power lies, and what kind of figures should be seen as uniquely pernicious. The same principle works for most forms of scapegoating, such as when economic conflict is channeled into anti-immigrant xenophobia.

This type of conspiracy theory and scapegoating is endemic to the political right, which needs to channel working-class anger away. Since the right are not interested in challenging the wealthy or petitioning the powerful, they redirect disaffection onto spectral forces as a form of diffusion.

This dynamic can also exist on the left when political acumen is not valued and rebellion of any type is understood as a net positive. The left has changed dramatically over the past 30 years, moving into more spontaneous formations like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and mass antifascist actions. This has created a vacuum where movements need support, training and political development. Communities now organize more horizontally, and there is no turning back the clock on this development, at least in the near term. But as these movements lack any clear plan to achieve liberation, activists can also misread the issue, relying on conspiracism instead of analysis and finding friends where none exist.

War Conspiracies

This confusion has shown up in countless movements, including some fringe cases in the historic, and incredible, movement to liberate Palestine. "There have not been beheadings or babies and rapings. Israel murdered its own people on October 7," said one person in her Nov. 27 testimony before the Oakland City Council, arguing against including a denunciation of Hamas' Oct. 7 attack in the proposed ceasefire resolution. The speaker was referring to the idea — taken up with different levels of conspiracism attached to it — that many, if not most, of the deaths during the Oct. 7 violence came from an over-zealous Israeli Defense Force attack that actually killed scores of Israelis and then, presumably, covered it up while blaming Hamas for it.

"It's quite clear that on October 7th...a good number of the Israelis that were killed were not killed by Hamas, they were killed by the IDF,” says University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, who himself is best known for his book The Israel Lobby that claims pro-Israel organizations (primarily Jewish ones) have essentially captured U.S. foreign policy. Mearsheimer has never been without his useful critiques, but like many people in this discourse his tendency for hyperbole, extrapolation, and generalization have not dissuaded conspiracy theories and flattened descriptions from replacing grounded political analysis.

Ostensibly socialist news outlets like Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone focused heavily on trying to undermine the claims of Hamas atrocities, assigning Jewish casualties to Israel Defense Forces. It is clear that some casualties, including in a tank attack and possibly from helicopter fire near the rave, on October 7th could have were likely killed in reckless IDF behavior (when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail), but there seems to be little evidence that this is a sizable portion of those killed. But the suggestion from much of this discourse is that the killing of Israelis was either mostly from the IDF or that Hamas killings were largely manufactured, thus displacing any concern that may emerge about what was done. Despite being one of the most well documented attacks in recent history, many seem to think that acknowledging Hamas violence will undermine their justifiable charges of genocide against Israel. Even more wild conspiracy theories have circulated, such as a popular TikTok video claiming the Hamas attack was created by the media and was seen by over 300,000 accounts before being plucked from the platform. Once conspiracy theories enter the fray they often cross-populate with seemingly unrelated topics, as well. This has led to allegations of connections between Israel’s bombing campaign and the war in Ukraine, both possibly the machinations of a new world order.

Given the IDF’s history of duplicity and denial of war crimes, there are reasons why distrust should be endemic. And as Israel enacts one of the most brutal, one-sided assaults in the country’s history, the biggest displacement since the nakba, there are reasons that people are motivated to reframe the narrative away from the Western media’s complicity in Israel’s killings. It can feel as though you are screaming into the void to see the horrors Palestinians are facing and then have it spun back to you by news outlets as a justifiable war of self-defense by Israel, so any way to puncture that narrative can feel enticing. But Israel has also chosen to conduct their indiscriminate violence in plain sight, no conspiracy theory is required. If we are unable to see where the conflict comes from, to understand the historical, economic and political forces involved, conspiracism becomes an easy way to explain something that demands an intense amount of context. The conspiracy theories and misinformation have been as extreme in the other direction as well, with extensive false claims circulating about Hamas, such as the untrue allegation that they had “beheaded babies,” that a baby was “cooked in an oven,” or that Gazan suffering and casualties have been exaggerated, as well as an emerging far-right conspiracy theory in Israel that it was the pro-democracy protesters who staged the attack as a false flag. It is exactly those types of claims that create even more distrust amongst those witnessing the violence, more unable to find clear reporting to believe and facts to depend on. All of this has become even more severe as AI generated images and “deep fakes” give us a window into what the future of online conspiracy holds for us. This extensive misinformation has been used to mask, or even justify, Israel’s emerging genocide in Gaza, something that is clearly verifiable and whose reality does not require extrapolation beyond the evidence.

When we include unprovable claims or assume extraordinary covert means beyond those verifiable in normal statecraft, we undermine our own analysis and allow for latent falsehoods and bigotries to replace grounded outrage. They can also frame any resistance to imperialism, even by far-right political and racist theocratic political movements, as allies simply by virtue of their attack on the imperial antagonist.

This requires the left to build a vision and set of principles, an insight about the kind of world we want to build once we usher away the institutions that are propping up the currently unacceptable society. Rather than simply picking the least objectionable side in a conflict between despotic powers or empowering anyone who can strike a blow to the halls of power is not enough.

Establishing this consistency requires the left to return to political arguments, reading groups, liberation schools, teach-ins and other ways we share political theory. This  is what will move the justifiable instinct that something is wrong to an accurate diagnosis that begs workable action. Without a clear picture of how our world has failed us, any demagogue can capture the energy of the disaffected by offering a solution just as extreme as the problem. Our mission is not just to destroy the old world. It’s to build a new and more just one in its place

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