Last week, from his new home in Florida, the born-again Trump supporter Russell Brand expressed his excitement at the release by his new hero of 80,000 pages from the official files on the assassination of John F Kennedy. In a post on X he wrote “JFK Files: ‘We are sure, without uncertainty, that the assassination of President Kennedy WAS NOT carried out by Mr Lee Harvey Oswald or any member of any organised crime syndicate.’”
Had Brand read on for just four sentences he would have discovered that this document also asserted that “The lone shooter in Dallas Texas on 22 November 1963 was Miss Penelope Keith, star of the BBC television program The Good Life.” When this was pointed out to him even Brand was embarrassed and deleted his post.
The incident brought together in a farcical way two elements: a social media world of conspiracy obsessed “influencers” and an administration now full of those influenced by them. It’s a combination which might easily – and probably will – cause tragedy. And it’s never existed before in the history of democracy.
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN - JULY 18: Comedian and actor Russell Brand attends the fourth day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 18, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Delegates, politicians, and the Republican faithful are in Milwaukee for the annual convention, concluding with former President Donald Trump accepting his party's presidential nomination. The RNC takes place from July 15-18. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Russell Brand at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Photo: Leon Neal/Getty)
In 2008 Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. Almost immediately, elements in the “new” online media began to suggest that he had not been born in the US, but in Kenya or Indonesia, and was therefore not eligible to remain in office. The clear implication was that Obama was an Arab, or a Muslim or an anti-American African but certainly not a patriot.
These same primitive influencers had cut their teeth on circulating conspiracy theories during the Clinton years and had now found new inspiration in trying to undermine another Democratic president.
By 2009 there was a slew of lawsuits, including one from a serving soldier arguing that he was obliged to refuse orders from this bogus commander-in-chief.
They were all dismissed by the courts, yet in mid-2009, 44 per cent of Republicans when polled said they thought Obama had been born outside the US (for the record, he was born in Hawaii).
Senior Republican politicians, however, were not prepared to indulge this craziness. As the Republican candidate John McCain told a woman who had called Obama an “Arab” at one of his rallies: “Senator Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States”.
Enter (on a golden escalator) reality TV show host and property magnate Donald Trump. In early 2011 Trump told the world that he was paying for private investigators to uncover the suppressed truth about Obama’s birth, strongly implying that he believed the conspiracy theories.
At the time it seemed laughable, and indeed later that year, at the White House correspondent’s dinner, Obama famously mocked him for it. But it looks as though Trump had realised something that others had overlooked – that 44 per cent figure.
Those were people highly likely to be voting in any Republican primaries for a presidential candidate. If Trump stood, they would have a champion for their conspiracist view of the world and that could help him win the nomination. By 2017 the US had its first conspiracy theorist president.
WATERBURY, CONNECTICUT - SEPTEMBER 21: InfoWars founder Alex Jones speaks to the media outside Waterbury Superior Court during his trial on September 21, 2022 in Waterbury, Connecticut. Jones is being sued by several victims' families for causing emotional and psychological harm after they lost their children in the Sandy Hook massacre. A Texas jury last month ordered Jones to pay $49.3 million to the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, one of 26 students and teachers killed in the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. (Photo by Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images)
InfoWars founder Alex Jones outside court in Connecticut during his trial in 2022, when he was sued by families of victims for spreading conspiracies about the Sandy Hook massacre (Photo: Joe Buglewicz/Getty)
At the same time social media exploded. Suddenly there was money to be made from YouTube channels and podcasts, there were algorithms on social media platforms that drove attention towards sensationalist sites. And all this in the context of the resentment that partly originated in the aftermath of the crash of 2008.
This was the world of Alex Jones and Infowars, of sites selling stories of globalist conspiracies alongside health supplements. It was the world of the QAnon mega-conspiracy theory encompassing the “deep state”, the “world state”, mass child sexual abuse and Trump as saviour – a theory espoused by (among others) Trump’s former security adviser, Michael Flynn.
None of this was funny: armed men turned up outside pizza restaurants looking for child dungeons. Mass shooters believing in the Great Replacement Theory – now being espoused by hosts on Fox News – shot up synagogues and shopping centres frequented by Black people or Central Americans.
During the pandemic, conspiracy theories about how Big Pharma had exaggerated or created the disease, became widespread on social media. A new nexus of conspiracism incorporating “wellness” New Agers, isolationists, extreme libertarians and – inevitably – antisemites, had come into being.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 11: A person wears a protective face mask next to a graffiti that reads, "COVID is a hoax" in TriBeCa as the city continues Phase 4 of re-opening following restrictions imposed to slow the spread of coronavirus on September 11, 2020 in New York City. The fourth phase allows outdoor arts and entertainment, sporting events without fans and media production. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)
Graffiti in TriBeCa, New York, during the Covid pandemic (Photo: Noam Galai/Getty)
The apparent culmination of such thinking came on 6 January 2021 when Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election being “stolen” led to the attack on the Capitol to try to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Despite initial revulsion at the riot, the Biden era saw the full blossoming of the conspiracist mindset. Media figures like Tucker Carlson, whose show had been the top-rated cable TV show in the US, went on a journey from mainstream Republicanism to full-on conspiracism.
Just the other day, Carlson, who had addressed Trump’s election eve rally, even repeated a theory by another Trumpian “influencer”, Candace Owens, that Brigitte Macron, wife of the French President, is secretly a man.
In the past few weeks, what mainstream Republicans used to call right-wing nutjobs have now been rechristened “conservative influencers”, and have been invited to the White House to take delivery of the Jeffrey Epstein files (they were disappointed that there was nothing new in them). It was confirmation that they are an important part of the Trumpite coalition.
Indeed, Trump even appointed an administration liaison officer with the conspiracist right, in the shape of Florida Congresswoman Anna Maria Luna. Luna, who believes that “the federal government has been hiding information from Americans for decades” has her own task force, looking into re-examining such conspiracist favourites as the 9/11 attacks, the origins of Covid, UFOs and the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna at a press conference in Washington DC about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – also known as UFOs. Listening is party colleague Matt Gaetz (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP)
But far more significant than this mixture of obsessives and grifters currently adjacent to the Republican Party are the conspiracists now part of the Trump administration, either formally or – as in the case of Elon Musk – informally.
Day in, day out on the platform he owns, Musk boosts posts alleging conspiracies. To take a local example, last August he shared a faked-up Daily Telegraph front page reporting the British Government opening a detention camp on the Falklands to hold conservative dissidents.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is a serial conspiracist, arguing that Covid was deliberately produced in a lab and bio-engineered not to affect Jews. And whereas it may make little difference to the world if junior believes that Sirhan Sirhan – who shot his father Bobby Kennedy in a crowded room full of people – wasn’t the lone killer, the same is not true of his health theories.
Eradicating measles, for example, requires a 94 per cent vaccination take-up to ensure herd immunity. You only need 10 per cent of parents believing Kennedy’s vaccine scepticism and you’ll have measles outbreaks (and deaths) on your hands. In fact, they’ve already started. If there were another pandemic requiring the development of a vaccine, and let’s say this one affected younger people as the Spanish flu did, then God Help America.
FILE PHOTO: Tesla CEO Elon Musk wears a 'Trump Was Right About Everything!' hat while attending a cabinet meeting at the White House, in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 24, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends a cabinet meeting at the White House (Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
But also God Help the World, because the US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard – one of those who was part of the top secret conversation on Signal, inadvertently shared with a journalist for The Atlantic – has for years encouraged conspiracy theories and conspiracists, usually with the effect of trying to exculpate dictators such as Assad in Syria and Putin in Russia.
In March 2022, Gabbard amplified an online theory, also promoted by Tucker Carlson on Fox News – that Ukraine was developing secret weapons in US funded biolabs. The theory was then widely circulated by Russian media as a justification for the previous month’s invasion of Ukraine.
One media organisation refuting this claim was the United States Agency for Global Media, which operated Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. When the Trump administration ordered that that agency be shut down, Gabbard reposted an X post by a Dubai-based Malaysian conspiracist saluting the closure and claiming that “these organisations produced and disseminated far-left propaganda, in central European countries… and perpetuate a pro-war narrative against Russia”.
These are a few examples among hundreds. At “conservative” rallies and conferences in the US and elsewhere, promoters of theories like these are cheered to the rafters and lionised by politicians who 30 years ago wouldn’t have given these people house-room, and some of whom know that this thinking may one day destroy them too. That is, if Penelope Keith doesn’t get them first.