Confessions of a Conspiracy Theorist

I guess I’m a conspiracy theorist now. This comes as a shock, not least to me, because rejecting conspiracism was among my first worthwhile political instincts, and because I’ve spent much of my career batting away kooky claims about malign forces working secretly to direct the course of history for their own benefit. But in an effort to take down Tucker Carlson, the New York Times has now so widened the definition of a conspiracy theorist as to catch me in its dragnet.

I hail from Iran, where state TV might casually suggest, for example, that Pepsi is actually a Zionist acronym (“pay each penny, save Israel”), or that the Jews created lovable Jerry from Tom and Jerry to rehabilitate the reputation of mice, given their own rat-like disposition. Growing up there honed my loathing for the conspiratorial cast of mind. I proudly remember the contempt with which I dismissed the LaRouchies I came across in Seattle as a University of Washington undergrad.

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