The Conspiracy Paradox

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

 

The basic, most sensible argument against believing conspiracy theories is that pulling off a given conspiracy would be too large, too far-reaching, and too complicated an effort to remain a secret. You can’t rely on individual competence when things get that big. Something or someone would leak.

 

The best argument in favor of conspiracy theorizing is that we’ve recently lived through a few documented conspiracies. Isn’t it time we started to wise up?

 

Here’s the thing about those actual conspiracies: They turn out to bolster the first point, as well. They involved too many people in too many institutions and required too much clean-up to remain undiscovered. The conspirators were only so competent. That’s why we know about them.

 

Take Russiagate. Whether or not it started out as a semi-earnest effort to uncover a suspected crime, it bloomed into a conspiracy. People working for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign dug up a bogus story about Donald Trump colluding with the Kremlin to throw the election. They roped in intelligence and law-enforcement officials who abused their authority, ran with bad information, ignored countervailing evidence, and surveilled several individuals who had done nothing wrong. This involved the coordination of various institutions, high-level figures, and people on multiple continents. While the collusion narrative endured for too long, the whole thing was eventually revealed as what Trump rightly calls it, a hoax.

 

Then there’s Hunter Biden’s laptop. In October 2020, it was staffers on Joe Biden’s campaign who got the ball rolling when a potentially incriminating laptop belonging to Hunter was brought to light. They got “51 former intelligence officials” to say that the laptop had “all the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation—even as Biden and the FBI already knew that it was real. Social media platforms banned posts referring to the New York Post’s accurate reporting on it, and, once Biden got into office, his administration worked with social media to crack down on all sorts of inconvenient opinions—as exposed in the “Twitter Files.” Once again, there was no way this multifaceted conspiracy was going to stay in the dark.

 

All of this brings us around to yesterday’s federal grand jury indictment of Anthony Fauci’s longtime closest aide at NIH, David M. Morens.

 

The indictment accuses Morens of conspiring with others to hide potential evidence that the Covid-19 virus was created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had been receiving U.S. funding through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. Morens is also accused of destroying federal documents and accepting bribes from EcoHealth. After one of Morens’s co-conspirators at EcoHealth had just received a big grant installment, Morens emailed him, “Ahem…. do I get a kickback???? Too much fooking money! DO you deserve it all? Let’s discuss.”

 

We’re now reading Morens’s emails because you can’t engage in an alleged conspiracy involving a massive U.S. government agency, its most celebrated official, millions of taxpayer dollars, nonprofits, foreign state-run laboratories, and millions of deaths worldwide, and make it disappear.

 

Yes, we should learn from these cases. The lesson isn’t that all conspiracy theories are true. It’s that grand conspiracies are too grand to get away with. 

 

There’s another paradoxical aspect to note about these actual conspiracies, and it’s also educational. Their aim tends to be the spreading of false conspiracy theories. Russiagate had half the country believing that Vladimir Putin got Trump into the White House. The laptop conspirators also pushed a tale about a Russian plot. And Fauci’s NIH dismissed the lab-leak theory as a right-wing conspiracy.

 

So if you believe in a particular conspiracy, you’re probably being duped by a different one altogether.