I Was a Teenage Conspiracy Theorist
Illustrations by Chrissie Abbott
My induction into conspiracy thinking came in the fall of my first year of high school, when my seventh-period journalism teacher devoted a lecture to the Illuminati. A nefarious group of global elites controlled our politics and our economy, he told us. They met in secret and communicated via symbols. Their members included U.S. presidents, CEOs, celebrities. They were everywhere.
He explained all this soberly, in the same way other teachers of mine had explained the International Monetary Fund, or certain laws of mathematics: as unshakable pieces of the universe’s infrastructure that any thinking person had to learn about eventually. I do not recall him using the term theory or otherwise indicating that this was a contested idea, though perhaps I should have been tipped off when he presented as evidence a clip from a then-recent film called The Matrix. At any rate, I was utterly captivated.
This was Berkeley, California, in the anxious time between September 11 and the start of the Iraq War. The world was full of unseen enemies and ulterior motives. Sidewalk graffiti implored anyone who looked at it to DEMAND THE TRUTH ABOUT 9/11 and STOP CHEMTRAILS. The local city council passed a resolution declaring the air overhead a “space-based weapons-free zone.” (This did not affect Pentagon planning, as far as we could tell). Radio DJs and my friends’ parents would talk vaguely but knowingly about Dick Cheney’s financial interests or the real reasons we were going to war. Long before filter bubbles had a name and a pathology, I lived in one: The government was lying, the elites were consolidating power, the game was rigged, the paranoia was warranted. I knew things were bad, and I knew they were bad in a way that was murky and still emerging. The idea that everything confusing or unfair or suspicious could be the result of an actual conspiracy, and not anything more abstract or complicated, felt appealing to me, and roughly as plausible as any number of extraordinary things I knew to be true. I walked home from school, ate a bowl of Goldfish crackers while watching Oprah, and casually informed my family about the New World Order over dinner.
When I called my parents recently to ask them about my awakening as”
