The legendary attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who devoted a great deal of time to exhaustive debunking of JFK conspiracy theories, once asked an audience he was addressing how many of them distrusted the report by the Warren Commission. Many, if not all of those in attendance raised their hands. He then asked how many actually had read the report. Not a single hand went up. This, in a nutshell, is the trouble with conspiracy theorists. But the trouble with conspiracy theories — a term dating back to at least 1863, though the practice is surely much older –is a bit more complicated. Not a lot more, but a bit.

First of all let’s be clear: conspiracies do indeed exist. Sometimes. Elephants exist too. But that doesn’t mean that a person who sees one on every corner should be taken seriously. Conspiracy theorists don’t really have theories. They have beliefs. A theory is a conjecture that you subject to rigorous empirical testing, and discard if it doesn’t hold up. A belief is something you cling to like a barnacle underwater, evading objective scrutiny and evaluation.

Nobody denies that sometimes conspiracies are real. And yet many people disparage conspiracy theorists. Why? Because conspiracy theorists see conspiracies everywhere. They are incessantly “connecting dots” even if the dots are lightyears apart; they are generally individuals who literally believe there is no such thing as mere coincidence — some will explicitly say so. And the narratives they pursue remain unaltered no matter what kind of outcomes they’re confronted with.

With so many conspiracies flying around, it’s inevitable, courtesy of the broken clock principle, that once in a blue moon it will turn out that a conspiracy theory has a grain of truth to it — actually virtually all of them have at least a grain, which is what enables them to gain traction; but a few will have bigger grains than others. When that happens, conspiracy theorists will say, “See, I told you conspiracies are real!”

The vast majority of conspiracy theories, however, have been, will be, or can be, utterly discredited. And when that happens, then of course the theorists admit they were mistaken. Nah, just kidding. They say, “See, I told you it was real!” Many of them even wear the “conspiracy theorist” label as a badge of honor, claiming that when people call you that it means you’ve hit a bullseye — a variant of the old “I must be right or you wouldn’t bother saying I’m wrong” defense — and even proclaim that “today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s headlines”.

We may not always know when a conspiracy actually is real. But we generally can weed out the ones that clearly aren’t. Because there are six hurdles that such a theory must clear, six tests it must pass.

Hurdle # 1: Plausibility

A great many conspiracy theories can be scratched right at the starting gate just because of their sheer implausibility. Granted, plausibility is not really a concern for ardent conspiracists; they’re perfectly willing to believe that the Clintons have been operating a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor that has no basement. (When a prank “conspiracy theory” that the government eradicated all the birds in the country and replaced them with drone replicas to spy on citizens — and JFK was killed because he wouldn’t go along with it — became popular, it wasn’t clear if some of the “supporters” actually believed it.) After all, a conspiracy theory doesn’t need to make sense; it just needs to provide a comforting story, a reassurance that shit happens for a reason — even if that reason is nonsensical.

But as for the rest of us, how much consideration do we really need to give the belief that the earth is flat? Or that the moon landing was faked? Or that the world is being run by a race of extraterrestrial lizard people? Or that wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers? How plausible is it that the Steele Dossier was a plot to interfere in the 2016 election when it was not released until 2017? How plausible is it that Barack Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate is a forgery when there was an announcement of his birth on the proper date in a Hawaiian newspaper?

One reason I dismiss so many conspiracy theories out of hand is they assume that the conspirators are (a) extremely wily and efficient, enough to succeed in pulling off a sophisticated caper that goes undiscovered for years, yet (b) careless and inept enough to leave a conspicuous trail of bread crumbs for amateur sleuths to pursue.

Hurdle # 2: Accuracy

It should go without saying that if you’re going to connect dots, you need to begin with the right dots. It’s hard to build a solid case if your “facts” turn out to be not so factual. Anti-vaxxers, climate science deniers and other anti-science cultists are almost always individuals who have little or no knowledge of the science they’re denouncing. (Sometimes actual experts do jump on the bandwagon, but even a cursory scan of their utterances reveals that they’re not playing with a full deck.)

The election conspiracy “documentary” 2000 Mules is laughable for many reasons, not the least of which is its sheer ignorance of election procedures, the location of drop boxes, and even the very cellphone data that is the backbone of its supposed expose.

The Moon Landing conspiracy theorists cited as proof the photos of astronauts on the moon, but the absence of any cameras carried by the astronauts themselves. The latter is utterly false: take a careful look at the photos and you clearly see cameras attached to their spacesuits.

Hurdle # 3: Relevance

Even if your facts are truly facts, so what? Do they really point to anything significant? One thing 2000 Mules got right was that there was a great deal of foot traffic within 50 feet or so of ballot drop boxes. No kidding. Those boxes were generally located in high traffic areas. A lot of people walking within spitting distance doesn’t mean a lot of people voting, much less voting illegally.

One popular illustration of a conspiracy theory built around irrelevant facts is the “Clinton Body Count” story. Surely you’ve heard about it — a long roster of people who have crossed paths with one of the Clintons during their half century of high visibility, and later met with a “suspicious” death. Actually, the details on those memes are often quite inaccurate. Still, it’s true enough that a lot of people who had an acquaintance (however fleeting and tangential) with that family have met suspicious ends, particularly if you’re willing to stretch the definition of “suspicious”. But you can compile a similar list for just about anybody, particularly anyone who’s been in the public eye for many years. Which leads us to…

Hurdle # 4: Comprehensiveness

Even if your pet conspiracy strings together some bona fide facts, and even if those facts seem significant, they may not be the only facts. You may be ignoring part of the picture that totally demolishes your narrative. The JFK “magic bullet” theory, for instance, depends on an ignorance of certain facts.

Mr. Bugliosi, in commenting on Oliver Stone’s cinematic rumor orgy JFK, had this to say:

Stone came up with ten groups that had a motive and he’s got all ten groups involved in the assassination… His movie is one continuous lie… I mentioned [in his book Reclaiming History] fifty-three separate pieces of evidence pointing irresistibly to the guilt of Oswald, and Oliver Stone in his three hour and eight minute movie could not put in one of those fifty-three pieces. I guess poor Oliver just didn’t have enough time to do that.

Time wasn’t the issue, of course. Stone is a storyteller, not a historian or journalist; and he didn’t want to include any information that would run counter to the yarn he was spinning. The problem is that he is such an effective storyteller that some people mistake him for an authority. (The highly fictionalized Midnight Express tainted American perceptions of Turkey, its people, and its judicial and penal system for many years.)

The Moon People sometimes point to photographs of a flag the astronauts planted on the lunar surface, a flag that seems to be fluttering in the breeze. Aha! There is no breeze on the moon! That proves it’s all a hoax, eh? What they don’t realize is that the flag was fitted with a flexible metal rod that made it stand out as if it was blowing in the breeze — why would the astronauts want to bother displaying a flag if it’s just going to droop like any other piece of cloth?

Hurdle # 5: Favorability

Okay, let’s say you have the very rare conspiracy theory that clears all four of the previous hurdles. Now we need to ask, is the explanation you’ve come up with to connect the dots the best explanation — or hell, even a good one. Humans often fall prey to what I have dubbed the fallacy of single explanations — which is exactly what it sounds like. While many phenomena have more than one possible explanation, people often zero in on the one that best comports with their other beliefs and values, ignoring others that may be much more reasonable — or at least much less problematic. (Creationism is a textbook case.)

The quintessential example, as far as conspiracies are concerned, is the proposition that the 2020 election was “stolen”. (Or “stollen”, for those with orange skin.) The propagators of this claim cite what they call “irregularities” — which weren’t really irregularities at all, but the same kinds of events that happen in all elections — and declaim that the only possible explanation must be that Democrats cheated. They can’t explain how exactly Democrats cheated; they just know, “intuitively” that it must have happened.

Like creationism, election denial turns Ockham’s razor upside down; it doesn’t really explain anything, but simply demands further explanations. The spirit guide of conspiracy theorists is not William of Ockham, but Rube Goldberg. Just how did those boatloads of fake ballots from China make it to Arizona, anyway? Ultimately, the only plausible explanation of how Biden “cheated” was simply by getting more votes — which has now become the GOP’s official definition of Democratic fraud.

Hurdle # 6: The Conspirators

Finally we have what is perhaps the steepest hurdle of all. The fatal flaw to many a conspiracy theory is ironically the one thing that it takes for a conspiracy to succeed: people. But humans are only human. And their involvement in a plot makes it more likely that the plot will be discovered, and thus fail. To return once more to Vincent Bugliosi:

I’ll stipulate that three people can keep a secret, but only if two are dead. Now here, it’s close to 44 years later [in 2007], and not one word, not one syllable has leaked out that any of these groups [CIA, FBI, KGB, ASPCA, etc., etc.] were involved in the assassination.

He was exaggerating to suggest that only one person can keep a secret, but it wasn’t a huge exaggeration. Every personality you add to the loop increases the chances — possibly geometrically if not exponentially — that the game will be betrayed, either deliberately or inadvertently. And as Mr. Bugliosi indicates, that probability only increases with time; the guilty parties may all die out, but they still leave evidence, which in some cases is more subject to being discovered when they’re no longer around to keep a lid on it.

If you can think of a real conspiracy, whether successful or not, you’re probably thinking about a scheme involving only a handful of people. There are, for example, the Gunpowder Plot (which did not succeed) and the assassination of Lincoln (which did, with about half as many participants). But even though the latter mission was accomplished, it was found out shortly thereafter.

In contrast, the conspiracy theories you most often hear about involve hundreds, thousands, even millions of participants. And, very often, government agencies. Parenthetically, it’s semantically debatable whether a covert operation by a single government body should be classified as a conspiracy, as opposed to — well, a covert government operation. A joint venture by two or more government agencies has a stronger case to earn the conspiracy label. And a collaboration between federal agencies, state agencies, private groups and/ or individuals certainly merits the distinction.

The most glaringly ludicrous example of an outsized conspiracy theory is surely the belief that the Holocaust didn’t really occur. To pull off such a conspiracy you’d need the cooperation, over a period of many decades, of millions and millions of people, several different nations, and many diverse demographics, some of whom are very much at odds with each other — it would include not only millions of Jews (many millions of whom were cooperative enough to disappear from the earth forever in a short time frame) but the Nazis themselves. Not to mention you’d need to manufacture an overwhelming volume of highly convincing fake evidence, such as film clips (long before deepfake technology) and mass graves. The odds against being able to carry out such a deception are so high that mathematicians don’t even have enough numbers to measure them.

Of course this all assumes that secrecy is vital to the endeavor, which is usually presumed to be the case. But it’s certainly possible to have a conspiracy that hides in plain sight — in which case it wouldn’t matter how many people are in on it. This could occur if the conspirators are confident they will face no consequences for their actions.

This, in fact, is exactly what has been going on the U.S. for the past several decades. There has been an open conspiracy, involving millions of people (though a considerably smaller number are actually pulling the strings) to turn the country into a full-fledged authoritarian theocracy. It’s been remarkably successful. And the participants generally have not been the least bit covert about their plans and intentions; on the contrary, they’ve blared their ambitions quite noisily, in the hopes of recruiting more support for the cause. They can afford to be quite out in the open, because with very few exceptions, they can act with total impunity.

The big irony is that this very real, very big and very successful conspiracy doesn’t get nearly as much limelight as the many spurious, secretive and often bonkers conspiracy theories you hear about. But that really isn’t so surprising. The people who promote the latter are, more often the not, the supporters of the former.

Hmmm… would it make one a conspiracy theorist to suggest that this deflection away from a real conspiracy that poses a dire threat to a bunch of silly fake conspiracies is the result of a calculated strategy?