[Editor’s Note: This is an op-ed. The views are the author's own, and not necessarily those of DoubleBlind.]

When the Jeffrey Epstein case crashed our consciousness, he provoked a mind-manifesting experience. “Conspiracy theories” had seemingly become conspiracy realities. Believing in conspiracies, like elite sex-trafficking rings, used to mean you were paranoid or "crazy," but now, enough of these absurd “conspiracy theories” have turned out to be true that the label doesn't land the same way. That confusion is exactly where propaganda lives. 

Propaganda and conspiracy theories pair like fun house mirrors and carnivals, and you have to be blind not to see the illusions. And that pairing is more than just a metaphor.

In a 2025 study in the journal Social Epistemology, researcher M. Giulia Napolitano, an assistant professor in the School of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, argues that what makes a conspiracy claim function as propaganda has less to do with whether it’s true than with the attitude it spreads. Some conspiracy beliefs, she writes, become “self-insulated,” meaning that they’re held so firmly that even contradicting evidence gets absorbed as further proof of a cover-up, gradually sealing believers off from anyone who disagrees. Injecting such narratives into political discourse, she argues, can be an “insidious and effective strategy for advancing political agendas and closing off rational debate.”

But the term didn't always carry this divisive charge. Author Charles Bristed is credited for coining the term  “conspiracy theory” in 1863, although many people attribute the term’s ascent into the zeitgeist to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In the wake of his death, the CIA labeled skepticism of the official narrative a “conspiracy theory,” an early case of the phrase being used to discredit a belief instead of describing one. Whether the term was more popular before or after JFK’s death, we can’t be sure. 

From there it hardened into an insult. Merriam-Webster defines a conspiracy theory as “an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) goes further, tying the term to “marginalized, unorthodox, or paranoid narratives.” In other words, to be called a conspiracy theorist was to be dismissed. 

Then, the definition flipped. The European Parliament, citing the OED, adds that  conspiracy theories  “can be used as a tool for spreading disinformation and propaganda with destabilising effects.” The same label that was once used by the powerful to wave away the fringe is now described as something the powerful themselves deploy. 

So why does any of this matter? Because the phrase is now doing two opposite jobs at once. "Conspiracy theory" can mean a paranoid fantasy with nothing behind it or an uncomfortable truth that the powerful prefer you not examine. The term itself no longer tells you which. That ambiguity is what makes it so easy to weaponize it in either direction: Institutions can use it to bury legitimate questions, and bad actors can use it to dress up nonsense as suppressed truth. The word won't do the sorting for you anymore. That, in the end, is what Napolitano argues — what matters is what the claim is doing and who it serves. 

In the 1980s, the US government secretly sold weapons to Iran — then under an arms embargo — and funneled the proceeds to fund rebels in Nicaragua, circumventing an explicit congressional ban. The Iran-Contra affair was a Watergate-level conspiracy (not a theory) that produced indictments, convictions, and televised hearings. Years later, journalist Gary Webb reported that the CIA had worked with Contra-linked traffickers who helped flood American cities with cocaine during the crack era. Webb was ravaged by the mainstream press and driven out of the profession, even as the CIA’s own inspector general later conceded  the core of what he reported. Whatever one makes of how far the connection went, it’s indisputable that the state was operating off the books, in a space where accountability had been deliberately switched off. 

This type of arrangement is known as “parapolitics.” The term comes from Peter Dale Scott to describe “a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.” 

In his book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Scott expanded the definition of parapolitics to include the idea of what he called “deep politics,” which he says are, “all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.” Tellingly, Scott rejected the “conspiracy theory” label for his own work, reaching for new vocabulary because the old word came pre-loaded with much dismissal. 

Many of us know exactly what that’s like. Talk about something that’s popularly known as a “conspiracy theory” and it earns a reflexive eye roll from whomever you’re in conversation with. But describe the same pattern as parapolitics, however, and people listen. It can be frustrating because, realistically, there are often nuggets of truth within conspiracy theories. So, categorically dismissing all conspiracy theories throws away the documented along with the deranged. But the documentation doesn’t get any less true just because someone refuses to look at it. The clearest example of this is MK Ultra.

MK Ultra, the CIA’s decades-long, secret program in search of mind control, spanned hundreds of institutions (universities, prisons, mental institutions) and tortured countless victims. MK Ultra shows us that some conspiracy theories are valid, and the MK Ultra subproject Operation Midnight Climax provides damning evidence. For the uninitiated, Midnight Climax was the side project within the MK Ultra operation where the CIA paid sex workers to lure men to safe houses in San Francisco and New York, secretly dosed them with LSD, and watch the results through one-way mirrors (all in the name of “research”).

MK Ultra also provoked paranoid delusions in victims. Depraved scientists like “poisoner in chief” Sidney Gottlieb and Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West sent people over the edge. They dosed unwitting subjects without consent, and many of those people spiraled into lasting paranoia and psychosis, according to The National Security Archive. But one man, Jose Delgado, looms largest in this history. 

Delgado spent over 20 years teaching neurophysiology at Yale. Moreover, Delgado moonlighted as a pivotal figure in MK Ultra’s search for the holy grail of mind control. Before Elon Musk and Neuralink, Delgado was mind control’s forefather. An interview in Cabinet Magazine describes Delgado as seeing himself, “on the verge of a new era where humans will undergo ‘psycho-civilization’ by linking their brains directly to machines.”

Delgado and his colleague, Dr. Vernon H. Mark, an American neurosurgeon, believed, “all anti-social behavior is caused by brain damage.” Worse yet, Dr. Mark recommended, “the mass scanning of the American population in order to detect such damage in time and ‘correct’ it.”

Then came the moment that made Delgado infamous. In the summer of 1963, he stopped a charging bull in its tracks with a brain implant. This demonstration embodied the era’s mind control ambitions, the same ones that had been animating MK Ultra over the previous decade, and the implant technology would soon give rise to the lore of the “tin foil hat.”

The tragic story of Leonard Kille is MK Ultra’s nucleus. Leonard Kille, who was a gifted engineer, held several US patents as a co-inventor and worked on parts for the Polaroid camera. According to Boston Institute of Nonprofit Journalism, Kille “consented” to a brain operation, “under the influence of the ‘stimoceiver,’ a remote-controlled brain stimulation device invented by the eccentric Dr. Jose Delgado.” 

Beginning in 1966, Dr. Mark and Dr. Frank Ervin, a psychiatrist, put Kille through months of pretreatment testing and eventually drilled a hole in his skull. They plunged a blunt-tipped needle deep into his brain and implanted electrodes that seared his amygdalae. These electrodes sent high frequency microwave currents into his limbic loci, a brain structure located within the limbic system, ultimately destroying his brain tissue. The experimental psychosurgery deranged Kille and sent him into a downward spiral. 

“Serious social problems emerge at once,” according to a case chronology, called the “Kille Case Chronology,” compiled by S.L. Chorover for an MIT course. “He is patently deranged. His deterioration accelerates in weeks and months after release."

In 1967, after wandering a supermarket parking lot late at night, police apprehended Kille and he was forcibly hospitalized. He was diagnosed a “paranoid schizophrenic,” according to the MIT chronology, largely because of the “incredible and fantastic story” he told, in precise technical detail, about being a research subject at Boston Massachusetts General Hospital. They didn’t believe that doctors implanted electrodes in his brain and, finally, "used radio frequency currents to destroy portions of his limbic system.” 

Years later, a psychiatrist named Peter Breggin investigated Kille's case after reading the book Violence and the Brain by Dr. Mark and Dr. Ervin, and what he uncovered was grim. In 1971, Kille was transferred to a Boston VA hospital, where the staff remained uninformed about what had been done to him. An attendant discovered Kille holding a metal wastebasket over his head to “stop the microwaves.” A sympathetic doctor ordered him “a large sheet of aluminum foil so he may fashion a protective helmet for himself.” Kille claimed the tin foil hat blocked the signals sent to his brain and wore the hat often. Uninformed that Kille had been fitted with electrodes, the VA doctors diagnosed him as a delusional paranoiac.

The bizarre lore of the "tin foil hat" traces further back to a 1926 science fiction story published in the Yale Review and Cornhill Magazine. “The Tissue-Culture King” by Julian Huxley, includes characters who use "caps of metal foil" to block telepathic mind control. Julian was the brother of psychedelic thinker and philosopher Aldous Huxley. Julian was the president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962 and the first director of UNESCO. The Huxley family, largely celebrated as a family of intellectuals, displayed an unusual affinity for transhumanism and psychedelics.

But the legacy of the tin foil hat persists, and is often assigned to people deemed as paranoid cranks. Kille’s hat wasn’t a delusion, though. He really had been wired and remotely controlled. That’s the nucleus of truth at the center of all of this. Once you know the government has, in fact, run secret programs to monitor and manipulate people, where do you draw the line between healthy suspicion and paranoia? 

What is a psyop exactly? It’s shorthand for “psychological operation” and is defined as the planned effort to “convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals," according to the Federation of American Scientists. And it can be seen everywhere these days. 

The phrase, “nothing is real, everything is a psyop,” is popular — even overused — on the internet. But if propaganda is to conspiracy theories, as fun house mirrors are to carnivals, then social media is P.T. Barnum, the co-founder of Barnum & Bailey Circus, who helped build an empire dazzling people with illusion. The spectacle of social media has grown so large that exploring psyop-based conspiracy theories on social media has even garnered academic study.

Most people attribute the saying “nothing is real, everything is a psyop" to  British journalist Peter Pomerantsev's 2014 book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. But the book title is a riff on an older maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” traditionally attributed to the medieval Persian leader Hassan-i Sabbah (c. 1050-1124) and later popularized by critically acclaimed Beat writer, William S. Burroughs. While this sentiment may reflect many people’s current, cynical view of the zeitgeist and our post-truth society, it isn’t anything new. 

Distrusting the government is an American tradition and public trust in government has nosedived for decades. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act may have an invisible hand in the public distrust. In 2013, an amendment was passed to the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act that effectively lifted a decades-old ban on the government distributing its own propaganda to domestic audiences. Critics say the changes brought on by the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act opened the door to influence campaigns aimed at Americans, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. But on October 8, 2025, Rep. Thomas Massie introduced HR 5704, a bill to protect Americans from federally funded propaganda, ultimately repealing the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, and restoring the ban. So are we lunging for tin foil hats for good reason? 

If not, we’re at least having a curiosity breakthrough. Google Trends shows rising interest in searches for “conspiracy,” “psyop,” and “Epstein” through 2026. Doubting the official narrative isn’t a crime, but sometimes creating that narrative is. 

Still, the battle for your mind rages on, even if you don’t have electrodes implanted in your brain. We see this with the “illusion of truth” effect, which was perfected by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He is often credited with saying, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,” indicating people’s tendency to believe information is true following repeated exposure, regardless of its validity. Decades later, Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet defector who had worked for a KGB front agency, described what he called “ideological subversion” in the US in a now-viral 1984 interview. 

“What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that, despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country. It's a great brainwashing process…” 

Though the clip has circulated endlessly online, and often stripped of its context, Bezmenov’s description of this process is chilling. 

The unsettling part is how ordinary this has become. While the CIA didn’t invent propaganda, it did professionalize it by bringing behavioral scientists into the work of “influence.” This tactic scales down, too. During this past presidential election both political parties hired “influencers” to court voters’ support — a strategy analysts credited with helping engage young, difficult-to-reach demographics. 

In 2018, the Alabama attorney general investigated "Project Birmingham," a social media misinformation campaign during the December 11, 2017 US Senate race in Alabama between Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore. While the evidence proving the operation changed the outcome of the election is still murky, the campaign relied on misleading Facebook pages and posts that sought to siphon support away from Moore. Jones benefitted from a $750,000 campaign donation from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman paid out to American Engagement Technologies (AET). In turn, AET subcontracted a company called New Knowledge to spearhead the misinformation campaign. By his own account, New Knowledge’s co-founder Jonathon Morgan, “led teams for DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] using AI to measure extremism online” and advised the US State Department. Later in 2019, New Knowledge raised $3 million “to expand its technology aimed at stopping fake news and protecting clients from disinformation campaigns,” according to the American-Statesman.

A large part of why propaganda operations work is because they exploit the cognitive biases we navigate, like conservatism bias, our tendency to "revise our beliefs insufficiently when presented with new evidence." 

Where is the emergency off-ramp to truth? 

Believing the Earth is flat, ancient aliens built the pyramids, or 5G spread Covid might be sheer lunacy, and these ideas serve a definite purpose. Woo woo conspiracy theories excel at providing cover for actual crimes. The post-truth society we inhabit fires psychic flak at our minds, and people grasp at wisps of candle smoke like prayers for answers to the chaos. 

Yet, some conspiracy theories have become parapolitical realities. In the book Conspiracy Theory in America, Florida State University political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith argues that the very term “conspiracy theory” entered American political speech as a CIA propaganda tool, which was deployed to discredit those who doubted the Warren Commission’s account of the Kennedy assassination. He points out the irony of the nation’s founding fathers openly assuming that powerful people scheme and abuse their positions — the Declaration of Independence is essentially a list of such accusations against the king. That built-in suspicion of elite misconduct, deHaven-Smith argues, has since been flipped into its opposite where doubting the official story gets you dismissed as delusional. 

The deepest descents into MK Ultra’s heart of darkness often lead to sinister stories about child sex trafficking, elite pedophilia, and ritual abuse. For decades, raising any of it marked you as unhinged. Then, Epstein’s network came apart in open court, and a lot of it turned out to be true. 

“Well, guys, we're going to have to get some new conspiracy theories cuz all the old ones turned out to be true,” Senator John Kennedy said during a podcast interview. “I mean, conspiracy theories are up like 37 to 0.”

We’re living in the era of the Great Revealing, and consciousness is giving us a hard look in the mirror, but this time it’s not in the funhouse. 

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