My take on conspiracy theories inspired of the video below.

Calling It Paranoia Is a Power Move

The easiest way to win an argument is not to refute it, but to disqualify the person making it. That is what happens when conspiracy theorists are casually dismissed as “paranoid.” The word does more than describe a mindset — it shuts down listening altogether. Once a speaker is labelled irrational, nothing they say needs to be addressed. The debate is over before it begins.

This is not a neutral psychological assessment. It is a power move.

Public discourse likes to pretend that conspiracy theories emerge from individual madness, but this explanation collapses the moment we look at who is allowed to define reality in the first place. Paranoia suggests a private distortion of perception. What conspiracy thinking actually reflects, far more often, is a social experience: repeated disbelief, exclusion, and powerlessness.

Consider how the powerful speak about the powerless. The homeless are described as addicts who cannot be trusted with money. The poor are said to be lazy, genetically inferior, or morally defective. These claims circulate freely, despite weak evidence, and are rarely branded as conspiratorial. Instead, they pass as common sense. They justify why inequality exists — and why nothing needs to change.

Now reverse the gaze.

When people at the bottom speak about those at the top, their explanations are immediately pathologised. Elites are described as predatory, secretive, inhuman, obsessed with bloodlines or ritual. These narratives are quickly labelled delusional. But structurally, they function in the same way as elite prejudices: they reduce complex social realities to moralised explanations of power.

The crucial difference is not rationality. It is authority.

The rich and powerful do not merely hold beliefs; they possess institutions. Police, courts, regulatory bodies, and mainstream media overwhelmingly operate in their favour, because their voices are treated as more credible, more valuable, more rational. A wealthy man who calls the police on a homeless person is likely to be believed. A homeless person who calls the police on a wealthy man is likely to be ignored — or suspected.

This imbalance extends across race, gender, and class. In courtrooms and professional settings, credibility is not distributed equally. A white psychologist will almost always be treated as more trustworthy than a Black woman, regardless of the latter’s lived experience. This is not accidental. It reflects a hierarchy of whose knowledge counts.

This is where figures like Candace Owens expose a deeper contradiction. She occupies an ambiguous position within social hierarchies—benefiting from proximity to power while reproducing the prejudices of those at the top. Rather than challenging dominant narratives, she often reinforces them, endorsing conspiratorial views of poverty that frame the poor as dirty, lazy, uneducated, addicted, or even genetically deficient. At the same time, she promotes unfounded conspiracy claims about political leaders themselves, including false assertions about the personal identity of figures connected to Emmanuel Macron.

The contradiction is striking: while she condemns imagined conspiracies among the powerless, she both absorbs the ideological conspiracies of the powerful and generates conspiratorial narratives of her own. In doing so, she mistakes structural prejudice for rational analysis. Critics often misdiagnose the problem by treating her discourse as paranoia; the issue is more precise than that—it is prejudice. Crucially, prejudice operates through the same mechanisms across social classes, but when it originates from or aligns with those in power, it is far more likely to be legitimised, excused, or ignored.

What we call conspiracy theories are not, in most cases, symptoms of insanity. They are symptoms of exclusion. They arise where promises of protection, equal rights, and impartial justice repeatedly fail. They are born when people learn — through experience, not imagination — that official narratives do not work for them.

This does not make conspiracy theories true. But it does make them intelligible.

To dismiss them as paranoia is to ignore the conditions that produce them. Worse, it is to reinforce the very structures of disbelief that drive people toward these narratives in the first place. Calling someone paranoid may feel like intellectual superiority. In reality, it is often just another way of refusing to confront how power actually operates.