How do we define what is a conspiracy theory?

A conspiracy theory used to mean a convoluted and implausible explanation of events for which there were more obvious Occam’s Razor friendly answers. If the mailman didn’t deliver your mail, it was probably because he was lazy, not because he was in league with the Freemasons. 

All of that began to break down as conspiracy theories became redefined as anything that someone I disagree with believes.

The obvious example is the media’s response to the 2016 and 2020 elections. 

It was entirely rational to believe that the Russians had somehow rigged the 2016 election, in some unspecified way involving Facebook, for President Trump, but wholly irrational to believe that there was extensive voter fraud in an election with unprecedented numbers of mail-in votes.

The origins of the coronavirus fell into this same dialectic. And somehow it was more rational to believe that COVID-19 had organically and coincidentally emerged in a city with a level 4 lab under a regime that lies about everything. 

Post-Trump, the media has ‘liberalized’ enough to discuss Cuomo’s nursing home deaths and now even the idea that the virus came from a lab.

In an Orwellian system, the difference between a theory and a conspiracy theory is a matter of timing and political convenience. 

But the idea that COVID-19 was an entirely natural occurrence was always the real conspiracy theory. Not in the sense that it depended on a conspiracy, but that it violated Occam’s Razor by insisting on a less plausible and more complicated explanation that avoided the most straightforward and direct answer. If you see someone holding a rock and then the next moment it hits you in the head, it’s not a conspiracy theory to think that he threw the rock at you, rather than that you were coincidentally hit by a similar rock that fell from a building.

The simplest answer is often the most accurate because it’s the shortest way between two points.

There was always a straight line between China’s sloppy and dangerous research habits and the virus outbreak. And the real conspiracy theory was the one that the UN, China, and their Big Tech allies showed down our throats.