Within hours of the disgraced US financier Jeffrey Epstein being found dead in his cell in August, Donald Trump was retweeting a conspiracy theory about his death. Epstein hanged himself but the original tweet by the right-wing comedian Terrence K Williams implied that the Clintons had somehow been involved in his demise. Unsurprisingly, neither Williams nor Trump produced any actual evidence in support of this suggestion.
A conspiracy theory isn’t a theory like any other. The official account of the 11 September 2001 attacks is a theory about a conspiracy – an al-Qaeda conspiracy – but not a conspiracy theory. What are called “conspiracy theories” subvert received opinion and are based on the idea that things aren’t as they seem. The official account of 9/11 and the theory that the attacks were planned by the Bush administration are both theories about conspiracies but only the latter is a conspiracy theory.
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