The importance of rigour - Village Magazine

42 October-November 2024

The importance

of rigour

Most conspiracy theorists obsess about false

conspiracies, but ignore the real ones

By George Monbiot

POLITICS

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October-November 2024 43

am a conspiracy theorist. I believe that

groups of people conspire secretly

against our interests to line their pockets,

cover their backs or achieve political

goals. By this deﬁnition I suspect you are,

too.

We see evidence of these conspiracies every

day. We see them in the Horizon scandal, in

which the Post Office kept prosecuting

innocent operators. We see them in the

government’s use of a ‘VIP’ lane for procuring

PPE from friends and donors at extortionate

prices. We see them in the Windrush scandal,

in which people were denied their legal rights

and unlawfully deported by the UK government.

In the Cambridge Analytica scandal: a secretive

micro-targeting campaign likely to have

inﬂuenced the Brexit vote. In the Panama

Papers and the Pandora Papers, showing how

the ultra-rich hide their money from taxes and

legal scrutiny.

All these are conspiracies in the true sense:

hidden machinations that advance particular

interests while causing harm to others. A

theory is a rational explanation, subject to

disproof. If you accept these scandals are the

result of hidden machinations, which they

evidently are, you are a conspiracy theorist.

As so often with matters of public

importance, the language we use is deﬁcient

and misleading. We need better terms, that

distinguish wacky and often malign fairytales

from the very essence of democracy: the

reasoned suspicion of those who exercise

power over us. I prefer to call the fairytales

“conspiracy ﬁctions” and those who peddle

them “conspiracy fantasists”.

An extraordinary aspect of this issue is that

there’s so little overlap between conspiracy

fantasists and conspiracy theorists. Those who

believe unevidenced stories about hidden

cabals and secret machinations tend to display

no interest in well-documented stories about

hidden cabals and secret machinations.

Why might this be? Why, when there are so

many real conspiracies to worry about, do

people feel the need to invent and believe fake

ones? These questions become especially

pressing in our age of extreme political

dysfunction. This dysfunction results, I believe,

in large part from a kind of meta-deception,

called neoliberalism. The spread and

development of this ideology was quietly

funded by some of the richest people on Earth.

Their campaign of persuasion was so

successful that this ideology now dominates

political life. It has delivered the privatisation

of public services; the degradation of public

health and education; rising inequality;

rampant child poverty; oﬀshoring and the

erosion of the tax base; the 2008 ﬁnancial

crash; the rise of modern-day demagogues;

our ecological and environmental emergencies.

But every time we start to grasp what is

happening and why, somehow this

understanding is derailed. One of the causes

of the derailment is the diversion of public

concern and anger towards groundless

conspiracy fictions, distracting us and

confusing us about the reasons for our

dysfunctions. It’s intensely frustrating.

There are plenty of hypotheses about why

people believe these stories, but only one

good way of answering the question. Talking

to them.

I live in the Lentil Belt: close to Totnes in

south Devon. While all sorts make their homes

here, it has a reputation, not entirely

undeserved, for “conspirituality”: the

convergence of new age culture and conspiracy

ﬁctions. The most disturbing episode in the

BBC radio series Marianna in Conspiracyland

featured Totnes artist Jason Liosatos. He

couldn’t see what was wrong with a blatantly

antisemitic and eugenicist claim he’d made.

When I looked him up, I found an article by the

anti-racism campaign Hope Not Hate, detailing

his antisemitic smears. He had also been

banned from YouTube for his falsehoods about

the pandemic. He sounded like a monster. But

when his name came up among friends, I was

told, “The weird thing is, he’s also a really nice

bloke, always helping people and giving his

money away, a pillar of the community”. The

apparent opposite of the basement-dwelling

misanthrope I had pictured.

I was intrigued. How could someone walk

both paths? How could they be prosocial and

kind, yet spread the most antisocial and cruel

falsehoods? He seemed the obvious person to

talk to if I wanted to learn why and how these

ﬁctions spread.

When I stepped into his gallery, Liosatos

greeted me warmly (he knew who I was) and

mentioned a mutual friend. A tall, ﬁt, handsome

man of 62, with a powerful frame and thick

hair, he seemed remarkably friendly and kind.

How could this person hold such terrible views?

He agreed to talk to me and we arranged to

meet at Dartington Hall, a medieval building

not far from town.

Researching the interview, I found the

contradictions astonishing. Like Russell Brand,

he mixes toxic fables with spiritual

exhortations. “Cherish the gift of another day

alive on this planet in this vast universe”. I

found all the usual conspiracy fictions:

vaccines, nanoparticles, 9/11, “chemtrails”,

5G, net zero, the Great Reset … and some of the

worst antisemitic slurs I’ve ever seen online.

Born in Barry, Liosatos has a warm south

An extraordinary aspect of this issue

is that there’s so little overlap between

conspiracy fantasists and conspiracy

theorists

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44 October-November 2024

Wales accent. He left school early and suﬀered

drug and alcohol abuse and homelessness. His

sense of social justice led him into trouble: in

South Africa he was shot at while trying to

defend Black citizens from police beatings.

After a spiritual awakening, he got his life

together: he’s a talented and successful artist.

Many of his paintings have non-political

themes: portraits, landscapes, cows, horses,

abstracts. A few show grim scenes of star vation

and exploitation. How could I make sense of

this man?

We sat across a table long enough for

Vladimir Putin, in a grand room in the old hall.

He struck me as almost guileless, without the

barriers most people erect against the world.

His body language was open and relaxed. It

was hard not to like him.

But from the moment we began to talk, I

found myself in a place of extreme discomfort.

The ﬁrst things he told me aligned so closely

with my own worldview that it was almost as if

I were hearing my own voice coming back at

me. Weirdly, this triggered a strong sense of

guilt by association: as if, because I agree with

him in some respects, I am also responsible for

the gross antisemitism and other ﬁctions he

has spread. He spoke ﬂuently about how we

internalise the oppressive nature of a system

“based on short-term greed, fear, proﬁt, power,

debt and slavery”. People, he told me, “pretend

they’re OK. And that’s part of the problem.

There’s an amazing capacity in each person to

endure suﬀering, pain, boredom, punishment,

work that they don’t want to do”. I couldn’t have

put it better myself.

Like me, he wants to “start building small

templates” of community action. And he acts

on this impulse, with remarkable generosity

and openness. “People come in my shop”, he

told me, “sometimes to ask me for money;

sometimes people just come in and burst out

crying”. He seems to function as a kind of

unoﬃcial therapist for distressed people in the

town. He said he explains to them that what

they’re feeling is a natural response to living in

a maddening world system. I strongly agree

with that, and I would put a name to it:

capitalism, which, thanks to the penetrating oil

of neoliberalism, now ﬁnds its way into every

crack in our lives.

I soon discovered, again with some

discomfort, that there’s another thing we have

in common: neither of us are in it for the money.

When I asked him about how being banned

from YouTube had aﬀected his income, he told

me it was a big blow, as he had a lot of

followers, but added, “I never pushed it as an

income thing”. He could have made a lot of

money, he said, but he wasn’t interested. Now,

on his own channel, he sells a few nutritional

supplements (this seems to go with the

territory), but says he makes hardly anything,

a claim that, looking at his site, I can easily

believe.

This diﬀerentiates him from many other

conspiracy fantasists, some of whom make a

packet by spreading their false stories. Some,

like the army of bullshitters sponsored by the

oil companies, are paid directly. Sometimes,

the arrangements are more diﬀuse. The Tea

Par ty movement, for example, which generated

toxic culture wars, political divisions and

conspiracy fictions (such as the Obama

“birther” myth), was nurtured and promoted

by Americans for Prosperity, a campaign group

founded by the ultra-wealthy Koch brothers.

Some make astonishing fortunes by

promoting ﬁctions on Substack, Spotify and

Rumble. Certain inﬂuencers have made tens of

millions this way. Liosatos, by contrast to some

of the culture war entrepreneurs, seems to

speak from conviction. “I’ve just wanted to

really talk about a better world for humanity,

and a fairer world”, he told me.

When I asked him about the impact of the

BBC series, he told me that many people in

town, including people he loved, “suddenly

wouldn’t speak to me”. Someone drew a

swastika on the wall of his gallery. “I don’t want

to be this person who’s speaking about

controversial things, George. Let me tell you,

I’d rather not do this … But I’m doing it because

I feel an obligation to people who haven’t even

been born yet”.

This is what I kept bumping up against

throughout our conversation: the rhetoric used

by people in the green and left movements –

people like me – had been repurposed to

justify grotesque libels against Jews and other

groups. Liosatos uses the language of

liberation to rationalise falsehoods that

reinforce oppression.

“People can say what they like about me”,

Liosatos said. “But come and speak to me,

come and meet me, that’s all I ask people to do.

I’m not such a bad guy”.

I asked him about a video on his channel, in

which Liosatos interviews a fellow artist called

Harry Vox. Vox, a US citizen, describes himself,

as many conspiracy fantasists do (causing me

yet another ripple of dissonance), as an

“investigative journalist”. In reality, he simply

recites discredited claims. On Liosatos’s video,

he claimed that “all of the thinktanks that have

any signiﬁcance in Washington are ﬁnanced

with Jewish money”; that “Jews control the

media”; that for 600 years Jews have made

money “as the tollkeepers, as the fee-takers,

the rentiers”. They don’t work, “they just own

the real estate and rent it out” and so on. In

other words, he deployed that ancient transfer

of guilt, blaming all the ills of capitalism on

Jews. Throughout this disgusting diatribe,

Liosatos nodded along, sometimes

interjecting, “Well said, Harry”.

All these stories are longstanding tropes or

false generalisations used to spread and

justify antisemitism. As Hope Not Hate has

documented, Liosatos himself has a history of

such claims, for example telling people to

“read the Protocols of the Learned Elders of

Zion to know who your masters are”, and

claiming that Bill and Hillary Clinton are owned

by “Zionist Jewish Banksters”.

When I challenged him about these and

There was something tragic about the

way he had tried to navigate what he

rightly sees as a mad world, and come to

all the wrong conclusions

Liostos’s wrm expnsiveness vnished

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October-November 2024 45

“You’re going to call me a Holocaust denier

now, are you?”

“What is your view of the Holocaust?”

He started speaking very rapidly.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sure there

was a Holocaust, George. Yeah, there was a

Holocaust, wasn’t there? … I know people were

… Were they gassed, killed? You know? So

many people, Polish people as well, lots of

people, right?”

While many other people, including 1.8

million non-Jewish Poles, were killed in cold

blood by the Nazis, the number of Jews they

murdered – six million – far outstrips their

assaults on any other group. A common theme

in “soft” Holocaust denial is to fudge these

facts.

By now Liosatos’s warm expansiveness had

vanished. He was stammering and tense, arms

rigid. I felt at once furious and sad for him.

There was something tragic about the way he

had tried to navigate what he rightly sees as a

mad world, and come to all the wrong

conclusions.

I raised another interview he had conducted,

with a man called Courtenay Heading. On

Liosatos’s video, Heading claimed that viruses

don’t exist and Covid is “a fraud”, and called

doctors promoting Covid vaccines “Mengele

medics”. This is a common theme in Liosatos’s

work: for example, he has promoted the

groundless and discredited claim that the

blood clots found in corpses by embalmers are

caused by Covid vaccines.

At the time of the interview, Heading was

awaiting trial. Liosatos thanked him for

everything he’d done, described him as a hero

and compared him to Martin Luther King and

Gandhi for putting himself on the wrong side

of the law. Liosatos told me that Heading is now

in prison. When I asked him why, he said,

“Well, he was doing a lot – he was doing a lot

of things, doing a lot of marches, he was – he

was – he was really being … ”

“What was he actually in prison for?”

“I don’t even know”.

“You said that by putting himself on the

wrong side of the law he was a hero. But you

didn’t know what charge he was facing?”

“I can’t remember, it was a plethora of

things”.

There are plenty of

hypotheses about why

people believe these

stories, but only one good

way of answering the

question. Talking to them

other such falsehoods, it soon became clear

that Liosatos believed the Protocols of the

Elders of Zion was a real strategy document

written by Jews. How on earth, I wondered,

could anyone not know it was a notorious

antisemitic forgery? When I tried to persuade

him to see that he was channelling outrageous

lies, Liosatos started rambling, waving his

arms, speaking in broken sentences, suddenly

diverting into unrelated subjects.

I began to suspect that he saw himself as a

martyr, persecuted for following his beliefs. He

claimed that the Guardian was paying me to

prove that he was antisemitic. “What do you

want to do, put me in Dartmoor prison? Is that

where you think I should be?”

I wasn’t scheming to bring him down. But I

felt it was worth interviewing him, or someone

like him, because conspiracy ﬁctions, even –

perhaps especially – when promoted by people

who claim to want a better world, can have

deadly consequences. They inspire terrorism

and attacks on Jews, Muslims, immigrants,

legislatures and other targets. Anti-vaxx myths

help spread infectious disease. Some of the

most common falsehoods also target the

public sector and civic life, spreading lies

about public health, schools, traﬃc calming,

urban planning, climate policy, university

courses, taxes. They reinforce the assaults of

neoliberalism. When such falsehoods are

spread by powerful interests, you could see

them as conspiracies to spread conspiracy

ﬁctions. They bamboozle people, disempower

them and distract attention from the crimes

and strategies of states, oligarchs and

corporations. People who recite these fables

might imagine they’re sticking it to The Man. In

reality, they’re serving him.

Almost invariably, this litany of false stories

leads people towards the far right. Conspiracy

ﬁctions are the fuel of far-right politics: it

cannot operate without them.

I asked Liosatos whether he agreed that, for

hundreds of years, including during the

Holocaust, Jews have been persecuted and

murdered as a result of antisemitic slurs. The

paranoia I had begun to detect now seemed to

burst into the open.

“There was a speciﬁc charge”.

“OK, you tell me. Show me that I’m a dummy,

George. Go on, take the glory”. He seemed

both frustrated and resigned, almost as if he

knew the jig was up.

“It was persistently stalking and harassing

a woman scientist. Throughout the time she

was pregnant. For which he received eight

months’ jail”. To Heading, the scientist’s

“crime” was to set up a Covid testing centre.

“Right”.

“The judge said it was hard to conceive of a

worse case of stalking“.

“Yeah. I didn’t know that…So you’re now

next going to say – to make me out to be even

more of an idiot, obviously – that I should have

investigated that more”.

Yes, I said, he should have investigated that

more. Wasn’t he curious about why Heading

was awaiting trial?

“Well, I knew he’d been – I heard he’d been

harassing someone who was in the science

department. And he had plenty of proof that

this vaccine is hurting people”.

“And you think that justiﬁed harassing a

scientist?”

A long pause. “Well, I think it does, yeah.

Yeah, I do, yeah. And now they’ve said, ‘Oh, she

was pregnant.’ But, George, listen, I ﬁnd your

questioning amazing. I think you should have

been a lawyer or something, George”.

When I told him I was trying to understand

him, he said, “You’ve been sent here”. It

seemed he felt he, too, was the victim of a

conspiracy.

I moved on to the issue that puzzles me

most. Why are so many conspiracy fantasists

uninterested in real conspiracies?

It must take quite an eﬀort to see the false

stories but not the true ones. For example,

there’s a widespread ﬁction that “chemtrails”

– the term conspiracy fantasists give to aircraft

contrails – are a dastardly scheme to spray us

with toxic metals (barium and aluminium

compounds), to alter our minds. There is no

evidence for such claims – but toxic metals in

aircraft exhausts could indeed be altering our

minds. In the UK, the fuel used in piston prop

aircraft still contains tetraethyl lead. At

suﬃcient doses, lead reduces IQ and mental

performance, and can cause irrational

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46 October-November 2024

behaviour, delirium, nightmares and

hallucinations. A paper in Public Health

Challenges estimates that more than 370,000

households (about 900,000 people) living

close to aerodromes in the UK are “at risk of

being exposed to damaging levels of lead”.

In the EU, tetraethyl lead in aircraft fuel is

being phased out. But the UK government has

insisted, since Brexit, on creating a separate

chemicals regulation system. One result is that

there are no plans to stop the use of tetraethyl

lead here.

I strongly suspect, but can’t prove, that this

is a result of industry lobbying. Call it a

conspiracy hypothesis. I also suspect this is

the kind of outcome some big donors to the

Leave campaign were hoping for: the

deregulation of dirty and antisocial capital is a

central aim of neoliberalism and, as we’ve seen

in many cases, Brexit has delivered it. Call that

a partly upheld conspiracy hypothesis. But I’ve

yet to ﬁnd a chemtrail fantasist who shows the

slightest interest in either tetraethyl lead or the

dark money poured into Brexit. If a story is

either plausible or proved, it seems, they don’t

want to know.

So I asked Liosatos about the scandals I

mentioned at the start of this article: Post

Office, Windrush, VIP lane, Cambridge

Analytica, Panama and Pandora Papers. In

every case, he told me he didn’t know enough

about them. “It seems to me”, I told him, “that

you focus on the things that aren’t true, and not

on the things that are true”.

“Oh my God!” He laughed. “That’s

unbelievable. I’m amazed you’re saying that,

George, I really am … Why do you think I haven’t

looked into them, George?”

“I don’t know”.

“Well, what are you insinuating … ? Say it.

Get it oﬀ your chest … It’s almost like … You’re

just sort of trying to sort of pick a ﬁght! It’s

really weird, you know?”

The wind suddenly seemed to go out of him.

“I think I’ve had enough, mate, honest to

God. I really have. I’ve had a long day … I’ve

been in the hospital with my friend for the last

week and a half … And to be honest, I love you

dearly, I really do, I’m not pulling out because

I feel threatened by you … I just – I can’t do

this”.

He seemed so dismayed and outraged that

I began to wonder whether I was persecuting

him. Was I being too harsh towards this

confused and ﬂailing man? Can you be too

harsh towards someone who spreads vicious

antisemitic lies and seeks to justify stalking? I

still felt both pity and anger towards him, but

by then these sensations had been joined by

another: contamination. I felt as if I needed a

shower.

He began shifting on his seat, almost

standing up to leave. I asked if we could

discuss just one more thing. It seemed to me

that Liosatos genuinely wanted to create a

better world. How can the journey to that better

world involve spreading antisemitism and

defending stalkers?

“I’m trying my best, you know? If someone

needs help, I’ll try and help them. At the same

time, OK, maybe, like you said, I’ve made some

terrible mistakes … You can write what you

want about me, I’m not worried about it. I’m

really not. I’ve got nothing to lose”.

Could it be, I asked, that he focuses on

conspiracy ﬁctions because he can’t face the

real horrors we confront? He threw his

shoulders back, exasperated.

“Oh God, George, I’m amazed you just said

that to me. I’m shocked. I’m not saying you’re

wrong about everything. It’s complex, that’s

what I’m saying. What I do, George, is I look at

what everyone says, right?”

“But you don’t look at what everyone says,

do you?”

“Oh, OK, George. That’s it”.

“Should I stop the recording?” I asked.

“You can say that Jason said to turn it oﬀ in

the Guardian … Hey, wait for it, hang on: ‘He

became irritated, he kept putting his glasses

on. And then he came towards me.’ George, are

you going to do that?”

“No, I’m not going to do that”.

“I bloody hope not, mate”.

As we stepped into the mossy courtyard, he

seemed deﬂated. He said: “I’m not going to do

this any more. I’m getting nothing out of it. I’m

going to go back to the spiritual vision”. I said

I thought that was a good idea.

“Let’s have a hug”, he said.

In her excellent book Doppelganger, Naomi

Klein explains how today’s conspiracy ﬁctions

are a distorted response to the impunities of

power. We know we’re being lied to, we know

justice is not done, we see the beneﬁciaries

flaunting their immense wealth and

undemocratic power. Conspiracy fantasists

may get the facts wrong, “but often get the

feelings right”.

I would add a couple of thoughts. I see

conspiracy ﬁctions as a form of reassurance.

This might sound odd: they purport to reveal

“the terrifying truth”. But look at what they’re

actually saying. Climate breakdown? It’s a

hoax. Covid? All fake. Power? Just a tiny cabal

of Jews. In other words, our deepest fears are

unfounded.

These ﬁctions are highly conservative.

Several of Harry Vox’s libels would have been

familiar in England 800 years ago. Suspicion

of science and technology, to judge by the

widespread association of blacksmithing with

dark arts, goes back to the iron age. Anti-vaxx

myths in Europe are as old as vaccination.

Conspiracy fictions tell us nothing has

changed, the same bastards are in charge, this

is an evil we know. Perhaps this is why some

fantasists become so attached to their stories:

they’re a place of safety.

Conspiracy ﬁctions also tell us we don’t have

to act. If the problem is a remote and highly

unlikely Other – rather than a system in which

we’re deeply embedded, which demands a

democratic campaign of resistance and

reconstruction – you can wash your hands of it

and get on with your life. They free us from civic

responsibility. This may be why those who take

an interest in conspiracy ﬁctions are so seldom

interested in genuine conspiracies.

When I got in touch to fact-check with

Liosatos after writing a draft of this article, he

emailed back to ask for a couple of small

deletions about personal matters, which I

accepted, but otherwise seemed resigned to

it. He told me that while “this is deﬁnitely not a

retaliation for your character assassination of

me”, he wanted me to know that “when I was

with you I sensed a deep spiritual emptiness

and sadness within you, albeit well covered …

it can be quite sad for me to see and feel

people’s pain which they hide so well”. Then,

reminding me of his warmth and lack of

rancour, and the turmoil this has caused me

from the beginning, he wrote, “Thank you

again for inviting me for our meeting, and I wish

you all the very best, love, and prosperity”.

It’s hard to assess our own spiritual welfare,

but all I can say in response is that I’ve been

surprised, as I’ve grown older, by a powerful

and gathering happiness. I feel strangely

reconciled to both life and the end of life, no

longer haunted by either the demons of my

youth or by the prospect of inﬁrmity and death.

Or maybe I’m deceiving myself. Perhaps we

all succumb to ﬁctions of our choosing.

Jason Liosatos and I have the same desire for

a better world, the same anger towards those

who thwart it. What diﬀerentiates us, I think, is

rigour. I think he is insuﬃciently rigorous in

choosing what to believe. As a result of this

lack of rigour, his instinct for justice and his

potent sense of his own persecution have

taken him to a very dark place. This has led

someone trying to be good to spread great

harms. It’s a warning to us all.

The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot

and Peter Hutchison was published by Allen

Lane on 16 May.

www.monbiot.com. This article ﬁrst appeared

in the Guardian

As a result of this lack

of rigour, his instinct

for justice and his

potent sense of his own

persecution have taken

him to a very dark place

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