It’s never been easier to be a conspiracy theorist

The timing was eerie.

On November 21, 1963, Richard Hofstadter delivered the annual Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University. Hofstadter was a professor of American history at Columbia University who liked to use social psychology to explain political history, the better to defend liberalism from extremism on both sides. His new lecture was titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” 

“I call it the paranoid style,” he began, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Then, barely 24 hours later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. This single, shattering event, and subsequent efforts to explain it, popularized a term for something that is clearly the subject of Hofstadter’s talk though it never actually figures in the text: “conspiracy theory.”

Hofstadter’s lecture was later revised into what remains an essential essay, even after decades of scholarship on conspiracy theories, because it lays out, with both rigor and concision, a historical continuity of conspiracist politics. “The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent,” he writes, tracing the phenomenon back to the early years of the republic. Though each upsurge in conspiracy theories feels alarmingly novel—new narratives disseminated through new technologies on a new scale—they all conform to a similar pattern. As Hofstadter demonstrated, the names may change, but the fundamental template remains the same.

His psychological reading of politics has been controversial, but it is psychology, rather than economics or other external circumstances, that best explains the flourishing of conspiracy theories. Subsequent research has indeed shown that we are prone to perceive intentionality and patterns where none exist—and that this helps us feel like a person of consequence. To identify and expose a secret plot is to feel heroic and gain the illusion of control over the bewildering mess of life. 

Like many pioneering theories exposed to the cold light of hindsight, Hofstadter’s has flaws and blind spots. His key oversight was to downplay  the paranoid style’s role in mainstream politics up to that point and underrate its potential to spread in the future.

In 1963, conspiracy theories were still a fringe phenomenon, not because they were inherently unusual but because they had limited reach and were stigmatized by people in power. Now that neither factor holds true, it is obvious how infectious they are. Hofstadter could not, of course, have imagined the information technologies that have become stitched into our lives, nor the fractured media ecosystem of the 21st century, both of which have allowed conspiracist thinking to reach more and more people—to morph, and to bloom like mold. And he could not have predicted that a serial conspiracy theorist would be elected president, twice, and that he would staff his second administration with fellow proponents of the paranoid style. 

But Hofstadter’s concept of the paranoid style remains useful—and ever relevant—because it also describes a way of reading the world. As he put it, “The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here or there in history, but they regard a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.”

Needless to say, this mystically unified version of history is not just untrue but impossible. It doesn’t make sense on any level. So why has it proved so alluring for so long—and why does it seem to be getting more popular every day?

What is a conspiracy theory, anyway? 

The first person to define the “conspiracy theory” as a widespread phenomenon was the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, in his 1948 lecture “Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition.” He was not referring to a theory about an individual conspiracy. He was interested in “the conspiracy theory of society”: a particular way of interpreting the course of events. 

He later defined it as “the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.”

Take an unforeseen catastrophe that inspires fear, anger, and pain—a financial crash, a devastating fire, a terrorist attack, a war. The conventional historian will try to unpick a tangle of different factors, of which malice is only one, and one that may be less significant than dumb luck.

The conspiracist, however, will perceive only sinister calculation behind these terrible events—a fiendishly intricate plot conceived and executed to perfection. Intent is everything. Popper’s observation chimes with Hofstadter’s: “The paranoid’s interpretation of history is … distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will.”

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2013

According to Michael Barkun in the 2003 book A Culture of Conspiracy, the conspiracist interpretation of events rests on three assumptions: Everything is connected, everything is premeditated, and nothing is as it seems. Following that third law means that widely accepted and documented history is, by definition, suspect and alternative explanations, however outré, are more likely to be true. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the purpose of conspiracy theories in 20th-century dictatorships “was always to reveal official history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influences in which the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the outward façade erected explicitly to fool the people.” (Those dictators, of course, were conspirators themselves, projecting their own love of secret plots onto others.)

It is increasingly clear that “conspiracy theory” is a misnomer and what we are really dealing with is conspiracy belief.

Finally, the “superconspiracy theory” is that impossible fantasy in which history itself is a conspiracy, orchestrated by unseen forces of almost supernatural power and malevolence. The most extreme variants of QAnon posit such a universal conspiracy. It seeks to encompass and explain nothing less than the entire world.

These are very different genres of storytelling. If the first resembles a detective story, then the other two are more akin to fables. Yet one can morph into the other. Take the theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination. The first wave of amateur investigators created event conspiracy theories—relatively self-contained plots with credible assassins such as Cubans or the Mafia. 

But over time, event conspiracy theories have come to seem parochial. By the time of Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, once-popular plots had been eclipsed by elaborate fictions of gigantic long-running conspiracies in which the murder of the president was just one component. One of Stone’s primary sources was the journalist Jim Marrs, who went on to write books about the Freemasons and UFOs. 

Why limit yourself to a laboriously researched hypothesis about a single event when one giant, dramatic plot can explain them all? 

The theory of everything 

In every systemic or superconspiracy theory, the world is corrupt and unjust and getting worse. An elite cabal of improbably powerful individuals, motivated by pure malignancy, is responsible for most of humanity’s misfortunes. Only through the revelation of hidden knowledge and the cracking of codes by a righteous minority can the malefactors be unmasked and defeated. The morality is as simplistic as the narrative is complex: It is a battle between good and evil.

Notice anything? This is not the language of democratic politics but that of myth and of religion. In fact, it is the fundamental message of the Book of Revelation. Conspiracist thinking can be seen as an offshoot, often but not always secularized, of apocalyptic Christianity, with its alluring web of prophecies, signs, and secrets and its promise of violent resolution. After studying several millenarian sects for his 1957 book The Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn itemized some common traits, among them “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human experience.”

Popper similarly considered the conspiracy theory of society “a typical result of the secularization of religious superstition,” adding: “The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups … whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from.” 

QAnon’s mutation from a conspiracy theory on an internet message board into a movement with the characteristics of a cult makes explicit the kinship between conspiracy theories and apocalyptic religion.

This way of thinking facilitates the creation of dehumanized scapegoats—one of the oldest and most consistent features of a conspiracy theory. During the Middle Ages and beyond, political and religious leaders routinely flung the name “Antichrist” at their opponents. During the Crusades, Christians falsely accused Europe’s Jewish communities of collaborating with Islam or poisoning wells and put them to the sword. Witch-hunters implicated tens of thousands of innocent women in a supposed satanic conspiracy that was said to explain everything from illness to crop failure. “Conspiracy theories are, in the end, not so much an explanation of events as they are an effort to assign blame,” writes Anna Merlan in the 2019 book Republic of Lies.

METROPOLITAN PUBLISHERS, 2019

But the systemic conspiracy theory as we know it—that is, the ostensibly secular variety—was established three centuries later, with remarkable speed. Some horrified opponents of the French Revolution could not accept that such an upheaval could be simply a popular revolt and needed to attribute it to sinister, unseen forces. They settled on the Illuminati, a Bavarian secret society of Enlightenment intellectuals influenced in part by the rituals and hierarchy of Freemasonry. 

The group was founded by a young law professor named Adam Weishaupt, who used the alias Brother Spartacus. In reality, the Illuminati were few in number, fractious, powerless, and, by the time of the revolution in 1789, defunct. But in the imaginations of two influential writers who published “exposés” of the Illuminati in 1797—Scotland’s John Robison and France’s Augustin Barruel—they were everywhere. Each man erected a wobbling tower of wild supposition and feverish nonsense on a platform of plausible claims and verifiable facts. Robison alleged that the revolution was merely part of “one great and wicked project” whose ultimate aim was to “abolish all religion, overturn every government, and make the world a general plunder and a wreck.”  

The Illuminati’s bogeyman status faded during the 19th century, but the core narrative persisted and proceeded to underpin the notorious hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903. The document’s anonymous author reinvented antisemitism by grafting it onto the story of the one big plot and positing Jews as the secret rulers of the world. In this account, the Elders orchestrate every war, recession, and so on in order to destabilize the world to the point where they can impose tyranny. 

You might ask why, if they have such world-bending power already, they would require a dictatorship. You might also wonder how one group could be responsible for both communism and monopoly capitalism, anarchism and democracy, the theory of evolution, and much more besides. But the vast, self-contradicting incoherence of the plot is what made it impossible to disprove. Nothing was ruled out, so every development could potentially be taken as evidence of the Elders at work.

In 1921, the Protocols were exposed as what the London Times called a “clumsy forgery,” plagiarized from two obscure 19th-century novels, yet they remained the key text of European antisemitism—essentially “true” despite being demonstrably false. “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of the Protocols,” said Joseph Goebbels, who would become Hitler’s minister of propaganda. In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that efforts to debunk the Protocols were actually “evidence in favor of their authenticity.” He alleged that Jews, if not stopped, would “one day devour the other nations and become lords of the earth.” Popper and Hofstadter both used the Holocaust as an example of what happens when a conspiracy theorist gains power and makes the paranoid style a governing principle.

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | PUBLIC DOMAIN

The prominent role of Jewish Bolsheviks like Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev in the Russian Revolution of 1917 enabled a merger of antisemitism and anticommunism that survived the fascist era. Cold War red-baiters such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society assigned to communists uncanny degrees of malice and ubiquity, far beyond the real threat of Soviet espionage. In fact, they presented this view as the only logical one. McCarthy claimed that a string of national security setbacks could be explained only if George C. Marshall, the secretary of defense and former secretary of state, was literally a Soviet agent. “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” he asked in 1951. “This must be the product of a great conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

This continuity between antisemitism, anticommunism, and 18th-century paranoia about secret societies isn’t hard to see. General Francisco Franco, Spain’s right-wing dictator, claimed to be fighting a “Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik” conspiracy. The Nazis persecuted Freemasons alongside Jews and communists. Nesta Webster, the British fascist sympathizer who laundered the Protocols through the British press, revived interest in Robison and Barruel’s books about the Illuminati, which the pro-Nazi Baptist preacher Gerald Winrod then promoted in the US. Even Winston Churchill was briefly persuaded by Webster’s work, citing it in his claims of a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization … from the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to the days of Karl Marx.”

To follow the chain further, Webster and Winrod’s stew of anticommunism, antisemitism, and anti-Illuminati conspiracy theories influenced the John Birch Society, whose publications would light a fire decades later under the Infowars founder Alex Jones, perhaps the most consequential conspiracy theorist of the early 21st century. 

The villains behind the one big plot might be the Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, the communists, or the New World Order, but they are always essentially the same people, aspiring to officially dominate a world that they already secretly control. The names can be swapped around without much difficulty. While Winrod maintained that “the real conspirators behind the Illuminati were Jews,” the anticommunist William Guy Carr conversely argued that antisemitic paranoia “plays right into the hands of the Illuminati.” These days, it might be the World Economic Forum or George Soros; liberal internationalists with aspirations to change the world are easily cast as the new Illuminati, working toward establishing one world government.

Finding connection

The main reason that conspiracy theorists have lost interest in the relatively hard work of micro-conspiracies in favor of grander schemes is that it has become much easier to draw lines between objectively unrelated people and events. Information technology is, after all, also misinformation technology. That’s nothing new. 

The witch craze could not have traveled as far or lasted as long without the printing press. Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches), a 1486 screed by the German witch-hunter Heinrich Kramer, became the best-selling witch-hunter’s handbook, going through 28 editions by 1600. Similarly, it was the books and pamphlets “exposing” the Illuminati that allowed those ideas to spread everywhere following the French Revolution. And in the early 20th century, the introduction of the radio facilitated fascist propaganda. During the 1930s, the Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest and radio host Charles Coughlin broadcast his antisemitic conspiracy theories to tens of millions of Americans on dozens of stations. 

The internet has, of course, vastly accelerated and magnified the spread of conspiracy theories. It is hard to recall now, but in the early days it was sweetly assumed that the internet would improve the world by democratizing access to information. While this initial idealism survives in doughty enclaves such as Wikipedia, most of us vastly underestimated the human appetite for false information that confirms the consumer’s biases.

Politicians, too, were slow to recognize the corrosive power of free-flowing conspiracy theories. For a long time, the more fantastical assertions of McCarthy and the Birchers were kept at arm’s length from the political mainstream, but that distance began to diminish rapidly during the 1990s, as right-wing activists built a cottage industry of outrageous claims about Bill and Hillary Clinton to advance the idea that they were not just corrupt or dishonest but actively evil and even satanic. This became an article of faith in the information ecosystem of internet message boards and talk radio, which expanded over time to include Fox News, blogs, and social media. So when Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016, a significant portion of the American public saw a monster at the heart of an organized crime ring whose activities included human trafficking and murder.

Nobody could make the same mistake about misinformation today. One could hardly design a more fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories than social media. The algorithms of YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and X, which operate on the principle that rage is engaging, have turned into radicalization machines. When these platforms took off during the second half of the 2010s, they offered a seamless system in which people were able to come across exciting new information, share it, connect it to other strands of misinformation, and weave them into self-contained, self-affirming communities, all without leaving the house.

It’s not hard to see how the problem will continue to grow as AI burrows ever deeper into our everyday lives. Elon Musk has tinkered with the AI chatbot Grok to produce information that conforms to his personal beliefs rather than to actual facts. This outcome does not even have to be intentional. Chatbots have been shown to validate and intensify some users’ beliefs, even if they’re rooted in paranoia or hubris. If you believe that you’re the hero in an epic battle between good and evil, then your chatbot is inclined to agree with you.

It’s all this digital noise that has brought about the virtual collapse of the event conspiracy theory. The industry produced by the JFK assassination may have been pseudo-scholarship, but at least researchers went through the motions of scrutinizing documents, gathering evidence, and putting forward a somewhat consistent hypothesis. However misguided the conclusions, that kind of conspiracy theory required hard work and commitment. 

CARL MYDANS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/SHUTTERSTOCK

Today’s online conspiracy theorists, by contrast, are shamelessly sloppy. Events such as the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in October 2022, or the murders of Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in June 2025, or even more recently the killing of Charlie Kirk, have inspired theories overnight, which then evaporate just as quickly. The point of such theories, if they even merit that label, is not to seek the truth but to defame political opponents and turn victims into villains.

Before he even ran for office, Trump was notorious for promoting false stories about Barack Obama’s birthplace or vaccine safety. Heir to Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and the John Birch Society, he is the lurid incarnation of the paranoid style. He routinely damns his opponents as “evil” or “very bad people” and speaks of America’s future in apocalyptic terms. It is no surprise, then, that every member of the administration must subscribe to Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, or that celebrity conspiracy theorists are now in charge of national intelligence, public health, and the FBI. Former Democrats who hold such roles, like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have entered Trump’s orbit through the gateway of conspiracy theories. They illustrate how this mindset can create counterintuitive alliances that collapse conventional political distinctions and scramble traditional notions of right and left. 

The antidemocratic implications of what’s happening today are obvious. “Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish,” Hofstadter wrote. “Nothing but complete victory will do.” 

Meeting the moment

It’s easy to feel helpless in the face of this epistemic chaos. Because one other foundational feature of religious prophecy is that it can be disproved without being discredited: Perhaps the world does not come to an end on the predicted day, but that great day will still come. The prophet is never wrong—he is just not proven right yet. 

The same flexibility is enjoyed by systemic conspiracy theories. The plotters never actually succeed, nor are they ever decisively exposed, yet the theory remains intact. Recently, claims that covid-19 was either exaggerated or wholly fabricated in order to crush civil liberties did not wither away once lockdown restrictions were lifted. Surely the so-called “plandemic” was a complete disaster? No matter. This type of conspiracy theory does not have to make sense.

Scholars who have attempted to methodically repudiate conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks or the JFK assassination have found that even once all the supporting pillars have been knocked away, the edifice still stands. It is increasingly clear that “conspiracy theory” is a misnomer and what we are really dealing with is conspiracy belief—as Hofstadter suggested, a worldview buttressed with numerous cognitive biases and impregnable to refutation. As Goebbels implied, the “factual truth” pales in comparison to the “inner truth,” which is whatever somebody believes it be.

But at the very least, what we can do is identify the entirely different realities constructed by believers and recognize and internalize their common roots, tropes, and motives. 

Those different realities, after all, have proved remarkably consistent in shape if not in their details. What we saw then, we see now. The Illuminati were Enlightenment idealists whose liberal agenda to “dispel the clouds of superstition and of prejudice,” in Weishaupt’s words, was demonized as wicked and destructive. If they could be shown to have fomented the French Revolution, then the whole revolution was a sham. Similarly, today’s radical right recasts every plank of progressive politics as an anti-American conspiracy. The far-right Great Replacement Theory, for instance, posits that immigration policy is a calculated effort by elites to supplant the native population with outsiders. This all flows directly from what thinkers such as Hofstadter, Popper, and Arendt diagnosed more than 60 years ago. 

What is dangerously novel, at least in democracies, is conspiracy theories’ ubiquity, reach, and power to affect the lives of ordinary citizens. So understanding the paranoid style better equips us to counteract it in our daily existence. At minimum, this knowledge empowers us to spot the flaws and biases in our own thinking and stop ourselves from tumbling down dangerous rabbit holes. 

VINTAGE BOOKS, 1967

On November 18, 1961, President Kennedy—almost exactly two years before Hofstadter’s lecture and his own assassination—offered his own definition of the paranoid style in a speech to the Democratic Party of California. “There have always been those on the fringes of our society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan, or a convenient scapegoat,” he said. “At times these fanatics have achieved a temporary success among those who lack the will or the wisdom to face unpleasant facts or unsolved problems. But in time the basic good sense and stability of the great American consensus has always prevailed.” 

We can only hope that the consensus begins to see the rolling chaos and naked aggression of Trump’s two administrations as weighty evidence against the conspiracy theory of society. The notion that any group could successfully direct the larger mess of this moment in the world, let alone the course of history for decades, undetected, is palpably absurd. The important thing is not that the details of this or that conspiracy theory are wrong; it is that the entire premise behind this worldview is false. 

Not everything is connected, not everything is premeditated, and many things are in fact just as they seem. 

Dorian Lynskey is the author of several books, including The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 and Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World. He cohosts the podcast Origin Story and co-writes the Origin Story books with Ian Dunt. 

Can “The Simpsons” really predict the future?

According to internet listicles, the animated sitcom The Simpsons has predicted the future anywhere from 17 to 55 times. 

“As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump,” the newly sworn-in President Lisa Simpson declared way back in 2000, 17 years before the real estate mogul was inaugurated as the 45th leader of the United States. Earlier, in 1993, an episode of the show featured the “Osaka flu,” which some felt was eerily prescient of the coronavirus pandemic. And—somehow!—Simpsons writers just knew that the US Olympic curling team would beat Sweden eight whole years before they did it.

THE SIMPSONS & © 20TH TELEVISION

The 16th-century seer Nostradamus made 942 predictions. To date, there have been some 800 episodes of The Simpsons. How does it feel to be a showrunner turned soothsayer? What’s it like when the world combs your jokes for prophecies and thinks you knew about 9/11 four years before it happened? 

Al Jean has worked on The Simpsons on and off since 1989; he is the cartoon’s longest-serving showrunner. Here, he reflects on the conspiracy theories that have sprung from these apparent prophecies. 

When did you first start hearing rumblings about The Simpsons having predicted the future?

It definitely got huge when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 after we “predicted” it in an episode from 2000. The original pitch for the line was Johnny Depp and that was in for a while, but it was decided that it wasn’t as funny as Trump. 

What people don’t remember is that in the year 2000, it wasn’t such a crazy name to pick, because Trump was talking about running as a Reform Party candidate. So, like a lot of our “predictions,” it’s an educated guess. I won’t comment on whether it’s a good thing that it happened, but I will say that it’s not the most illogical person you could have picked for that joke. And we did say that following him was Lisa, and now that he’s been elected again, we could still have Lisa next time—that’s my hope! 

How did it make you feel that people thought you were a prophet? 

Again, apart from the election’s impact on the free world, I would say that we were amused that we had said something that came true. Then we made a short video called “Trumptastic Voyage” in 2015 that predicted he would run in 2016, 2020, 2024, and 2028, so we’re three-quarters of the way through that arduous prediction.

But I like people thinking that I know something about the future. It’s a good reputation to have. You only need half a dozen things that were either on target or even uncanny to be considered an oracle. Or maybe we’re from the future—I’ll let you decide! 

Why do you think people are so drawn to the idea that The Simpsons is prophetic? 

Maybe it slightly satisfies a yearning people have for meaning, certainly when life is now so random.

Would you say that most of your predictions have logical explanations? 

It’s cherry-picking—there are 35 years of material. How many of the things that we said came true versus how many of the many things we said did not come true? 

In 2014, we predicted Germany would win the World Cup in Brazil. It’s because we wanted a joke where the Brazilians were sad and they were singing a sad version of the “Olé, olé” song. So we had to think about who would be likely to win if Brazil lost, and Germany was the number two, so they did win, but it wasn’t the craziest prediction. In the same episode, we predicted that FIFA would be corrupt, which is a very easy prediction! So a lot of them fall under that category. 

In one scene I wrote, Marge holds a book called Curious George and the Ebola Virus—people go, “Oh my God! He predicted that!” Well, Ebola existed when I wrote the joke. I’d seen a movie about it called Outbreak. It’s like predicting the Black Death. 

But have any of your so-called “predictions” made even you pause? 

There are a couple of really bizarre coincidences. There was a brochure in a New York episode [which aired in 1997] that said “New York, $9” next to a picture of the trade towers looking like an 11. That was nuts. It still sends chills down me. The writer of that episode, Ian Maxtone-Graham, was nonplussed. He really couldn’t believe it. 

THE SIMPSONS & © 20TH TELEVISION

It’s not like we would’ve made that knowing what was going to come, which we didn’t. And people have advanced conspiracy theories that we’re all Ivy League writers who knew … it’s preposterous stuff that people say. There’s also a thing people do that we don’t really love, which is they fake predictions. So after something happens, they’ll concoct a Simpsons frame, and it’s not something that ever aired. [Editor’s note: People faked Simpsons screenshots seeming to predict the 2024 Baltimore bridge collapse and the 2019 Notre-Dame fire. Images from the real “Osaka flu” episode were also edited to include the word “coronavirus.”] 

How does that make you feel? Is it frustrating?

It shows you how you can really convince people of something that’s not the case. Our small denial doesn’t get as much attention. 

As far as internet conspiracies go, where would you rate the idea that The Simpsons can predict the future? 

I hope it’s harmless. I think it’s really lodged in the internet very well. I don’t think it’s disappearing anytime soon. I’m sure for the rest of my life I’ll be hearing about what a group of psychics and seers I was part of. If we really could predict that well, we’d all be retired from betting on football. Although, advice to readers: Don’t bet on football. 

THE SIMPSONS & © 20TH TELEVISION

Still, it is a tiny part of a trend that is alarming, which is people being unable to distinguish fact from fiction. And I have that trouble too. You read something, and your natural inclination has always been, “Well, I read it—it’s true.” And you have to really be skeptical about that. 

Can I ask you to predict a solution to all of this?

I think my only solution is: Look at your phone less and read more books.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Amelia Tait is a London-based freelance features journalist who writes about culture, trends, and unusual phenomena. 

Why do so many people think the Fruit of the Loom logo had a cornucopia?

There is a shirt currently listed on eBay for $2,128.79. It was not designed by Versace or Dior, nor spun from the world’s finest silk. In fact, a tag proudly declares, “100% cotton made in Myanmar”—but it’s a second tag, just below that one, that makes this blue button-down so expensive. 

Many of us have been wearing the casualwear company’s T-shirts and underpants for decades, and yet the question of whether there is a woven brown horn of plenty on the logo is surprisingly contentious. According to a 2022 poll by the research company YouGov, 55% of Americans believe the logo does include a cornucopia, 25% are unsure, and only 21% are confident that it doesn’t, even though this last group is correct. According to a 2023 post from the company, the Fruit of the Loom logo does not include—and, according to Snopes, has never included—a horn of plenty. (MIT Technology Review could not reach Fruit of the Loom for comment.)

Maybe you’ve come across this fact before, via an internet meme that made you gasp, shrug, or scratch your head. There’s a specific name for what’s happening here: Those who believe the logo used to include the cornucopia are experiencing the “Mandela effect,” or collective false memory, so called because a number of people misremember that Nelson Mandela died in prison. I helped popularize the phenomenon in a viral 2016 New Statesman article about a movie that doesn’t actually exist, and in the time since it’s become something of a household term; TV shows from Saturday Night Live to Black Mirror to The X-Files have explored the Mandela effect.

But whether you remember the brown horn, incorrectly recall Darth Vader saying, “Luke, I am your father,” or believe that a popular children’s book was spelled The Berenstein Bears, you’ve probably moved on with your life. Google searches for “Mandela effect” have plummeted from 2016 highs, and Hermann has had zero bids on the shirt she posted last year—even though, at least to her eyes, it features a cornucopia on the tag. “No one’s really offered anything, and no one’s said anything about it,” she says, “which to me is kind of crazy.” 

And yet while many find it easy to let their unconfirmable beliefs go, others have spent the better part of a decade seeking answers—and vindication. There are commonly more than 170,000 weekly visitors to a Mandela effect subreddit that sees over 1,000 comments on average every day. While a fair share of these commenters are skeptics, plenty more are dedicated believers who are not satisfied with the prevailing explanation that human memory is fallible and instead invest their time into bringing the truth—whatever exactly it may be—to light. 

“I’ve been a bit ostracized from my family ever since I started pushing this thing nine years ago,” says a 51-year-old Massachusetts-based Fruit of the Loom truther who asked to go by the name AJ Booras. “I’m not inclined to simply let this phenomenon fall by the proverbial wayside, even if I’m the last one standing.” 

Some online believe in a fairly straightforward conspiracy: They want Fruit of the Loom to confess that it’s “gaslighting” customers and used to have a cornucopia on its tags. Others speculate that the answer lies in quantum physics: If—as the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said—there’s “better than 50-50 odds” that we’re living in a simulation, then might there be some sort of glitch, lag, or failed software update that means some people see and remember the world differently from others?

“The scientific community isn’t really looking that hard at it—and if they are, they’re always framing it as a memory thing,” says AJ. “It’s a hard barrier to make any headway on.” This is why, AJ says, he’s become “addicted” to researching the phenomenon: “It’s a personal quest for vindication.” 

Will anyone ever believe these believers? There are two options for those who think the Fruit of the Loom logo once had a cornucopia: accept that your memory is wrong, or think that the world is. What makes some people happy with the simple explanation and others determined to seek the more complicated one? 

“The bridge between perception and memory” 

There’s nothing quite as disconcerting as when memory and reality conflict. After all, what is reality—or at least your reality—if not your memory? This is why it can be so satisfying to find concrete evidence that you are irrefutably correct: Here’s an old photo that proves Dad did come on the ’09 trip to Florida and your sister is foolish and wrong. 

In the Mandela effect community, evidence implying that the world used to be different is called “residue.” There is an abundant amount of residue suggesting that the Fruit of the Loom logo once had a cornucopia. 

In the 2006 animated film The Ant Bully, a pair of parodical “Fruit of the Loin” underwear is drawn with a cornucopia on the tag. A similar gag in a 2012 episode of South Park sees a fake clothing brand named “Cornucopia.” In 1973, when the jazz flutist Frank Wess released an album called Flute of the Loom, the cover showed fruit pouring out a cornucopia-shaped flute. When allegedly tracked down by Redditors, the illustrator reportedly said the clothing logo had inspired the design: “Why the hell else would I have used a cornucopia?” 

On top of that, numerous newspaper and magazine articles written from the 1970s to the early 2000s reference the horn of plenty, as does a short play first performed in 1968 and a novel, The Brothers K, published in 1992. New residue is still being discovered: In April 2025, a TikToker shared an old ’90s trivia game in which clues about brands are listed on cards. The card for Fruit of the Loom includes the words “underwear,” “apples and grapes,” and “cornucopia.” 

How can all these people—animators, illustrators, journalists, and writers—have made the same mistake? When I reached out to the author of The Brothers K, David James Duncan, he was adamant that there was no mistake: “My inspiration was the Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts I owned at the time,” he said via email. “I changed nothing in describing the boxers, and yes, they did have a Fruit of the Loom cornucopia on the label in the back of the shorts.” 

Conversely, when I spoke with Billy Cox, a journalist who referenced the cornucopia in a 1994 article in Florida Today, he was less confident. “I have no idea what fueled my initial assumption about the cornucopia. Zero. Zilch-o. Nada,” said Cox, also via email. But he’s prepared to admit that he may have been careless in his reporting: “Even if the internet had been available back then, I doubt I would’ve double-checked the logo’s history.”

It’s an interesting thought: Most of the articles referencing the cornucopia are from a period—the ’70s through the ’90s—when journalists wouldn’t have been able to quickly google the logo. But why would they all misremember it the exact same way? 

Wilma Bainbridge is an associate psychology professor at the University of Chicago who researches what she calls “the bridge between perception and memory”; she got her PhD in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT in 2016. 

Bainbridge herself first came across the Mandela effect on social media—she was “wowed” when confronted with the true spelling of the Berenstain Bears in the famous American children’s books. In 2022, she published a scientific study on visual Mandela effects and ultimately found that there is consistency in what people misremember. “People’s memories are surprisingly predictable,” she says. 

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The husband-and-wife team of Stanley and Janice Berenstain wrote and illustrated the popular children’s books. More than 300 titles bear the family name.

In one experiment in the study, she found that people who aren’t very familiar with an image can share the same false memories as those who claim to be highly familiar. For example, some Mandela effect experiencers believe that the Monopoly man wore a monocle. In Bainbridge’s study, even people who didn’t know the character well sometimes drew the monocle when they were shown the Monopoly man and were later asked to draw him; this means the mistake was based on recall, not recognition, and could suggest that there’s something intrinsic to certain images that encourages memory errors. 

Scientists have long demonstrated that human memory is inherently fallible. In 1996, psychologists asked people whether they had watched news footage of the 1992 Bijlmer plane crash in Amsterdam, and more than 60% of the participants said yes—even though no recording of the crash exists. Other studies have shown that our memories can be corrupted by our peers and that false memories can be contagious. Arguably, the internet has caused memory contagion when it comes to the Mandela effect: Comparatively very few people googled “Fruit of the Loom cornucopia” between 2004 and 2017, with searches growing more common after a Redditor pointed out what was believed to be the first piece of “residue” in 2016 and (and again spiking dramatically when a TikTok video on the phenomenon was posted in 2023; it’s since earned over 5 million views). 

“Some people make things go viral because they want to believe it,” says Don, a 61-year-old American who has been moderating the Mandela effect subreddit since 2017. (He asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy.) “People want to be part of the experience.”

Still, Bainbridge’s study didn’t land on one definitive reason for the Mandela effect. “I was surprised to find there was no singular explanation,” she says. 

Using a method of monitoring cursor movement that’s analogous to eye-tracking technology, the academic tested whether people made memory errors because they didn’t pay attention to an image or looked at only certain parts of it. She found this wasn’t the case. 

Could it be, then, that people simply fill in the blanks of their memory with archetypes—we remember the Monopoly man with a monocle because we associate the eyepiece with rich old men? 

Bainbridge has found that this explanation—known as the “schema theory”—cannot fully explain the Mandela effect either. In one of her experiments, participants were asked to select the correct Fruit of the Loom logo from three images: one without a cornucopia, one with a cornucopia, and one with a plate. Even though we see fruit on plates far more often than we see it inside cornucopias, more participants selected the horn of plenty than the crockery. 

Bainbridge is drawn to the idea that some images simply cause more false memories than others. “We think the underlying cause will not likely be a single feature—e.g., attractiveness, color—but how these features work together in relation to things already stored in our memory,” she says. “But this work is still in its early stages, so we don’t know exactly what that combination is like.” 

Believers like AJ just aren’t convinced.

“In simulation, anything can happen”

“A lot of people remember looking at this unfamiliar object on their underwear tag,” says AJ, “and asking a parent, ‘Is that a loom?’ and the parents saying, ‘No! That’s what we call a cornucopia.’” 

When he was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, AJ wore Fruit of the Loom underwear and regularly folded laundry with his mother. “You stack up enough underwear, and you’re seeing that logo over and over and over again,” he says.

As a newly fledged adult around the late ’90s, AJ had to go to the store and buy his own underwear for the first time. “I noticed,” he says, “that the logo had changed, and it was just a pile of fruit.” 

Unperturbed, AJ assumed the company had just rebranded—he didn’t worry about it too much until almost two decades later, when he came across the Mandela effect online and realized the consensus was that there had never been a cornucopia. “We call it the wave of 2016 in the Mandela effect community—it was this huge rush of many, many effects that were being noticed,” he says. 

The first time he heard about the Mandela effect, AJ says, he “actually swooned” because of an “overwhelming existential dread that something was dreadfully wrong with reality itself.” 

Today, AJ believes in numerous instances of the Mandela effect, all of which have been shown to be incorrect but nonetheless have robust believer communities online: that the pizza roll brand used to be called Tostino’s, not Totino’s; that the location of Australia has moved on the world map; that the show Sex and the City was Sex in the City; Froot Loops cereal was formerly Fruit Loops; human organs have shifted positions; the sun changed color from yellow to white …

For him, each is just one part of a larger problem he can’t explain about the universe. At first, AJ says, he sought answers by researching memory science and psychology, but he was left unsatisfied. So instead, he looked to quantum mechanics and metaphysics, specifically ontology—the study of reality. 

In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom—famous for his theories on the threat of AI “superintelligence”—posited that humanity may be living inside a simulation. Almost two decades later, the astronomer David Kipping performed some calculations and put the odds at 50-50. “In simulation, anything can happen,” AJ says. “You could have different servers—one server hasn’t been updated, some people are seeing one version, some people are seeing the other.” It is also possible, AJ argues, that we exist in a multiverse—an idea first floated by the physicist Hugh Everett III in the 1950s. If people are somehow traveling between these parallel universes, then they may have memories from different worlds. Both of these theories are recurrent in the Mandela effect community online.  

And yet AJ doesn’t find these explanations entirely fulfilling: “If we jumped universes, why would there be residue?” Instead, he’s been diving into a combination of the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s concept of the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP)—which suggests, controversially, that the act of observation creates reality—and the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner’s “friend” experiment, which theorized that two observers can experience two different realities. AJ believes that physicists’ own work may be affecting the universe: “It’s almost like you’re changing the parameters of reality itself by digging deeper.” 

There is still so much that the experts themselves can’t explain about quantum physics, so it’s no wonder that laypeople get confused. The internet offers myriad rabbit holes to go down, some of them legitimate and some of them less so. Things are complicated further when YouTubers and internet commenters who aren’t well versed in the science take specific, highly complex theories and experiments and try to apply them to other phenomena, even if there is no concrete evidence they’re related. So I set about emailing physicists, simply to see whether they believe it might be remotely possible that quantum physics could, in fact, explain the Mandela effect.

Numerous academics replied telling me they had nothing to say on the topic; Bostrom’s office said he was unavailable. I asked the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli—who has been labelled one of the world’s 50 top thinkers—whether he has any thoughts about Mandela effect believers’ quantum-physics-related theories. “Yes, definitely,” he replied. “They are all total bullshit! There are few things about which I am totally convinced. This is one.” 

I contacted the University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch—often called the “father of quantum computing”—and listed the theories believers think may explain the Mandela effect, including parallel universes, simulations, the holographic principle, PAP, and Wigner’s friend idea. “Considered as explanations of the Mandela effect, none of those follow from quantum theory, and none of them constitute a rational speculation beyond it,” he said. Johns Hopkins University professor and physicist Sean M. Carroll concurs: “I cannot imagine how any of those phenomena could be in any way related to the Mandela effect.” 

Melvin Vopson, an associate professor of physics at the University of Portsmouth who has conducted research on the simulation theory, admits he has experienced the Mandela effect himself but doesn’t attribute the phenomenon to glitches in the simulation: That’d be a “cheap explanation,” he says.

Nevertheless, scientists waving away these explanations could have a detrimental effect: In the absence of expert engagement, there are plenty of people online who can bolster believers’ views. AJ is not surprised by these responses: “I just don’t think that physicists have given it a real hard look,” he says, “because they’re already certain that it’s explainable otherwise.” 

Bainbridge, for her part, thinks her study at least disproves the theory that we’ve been jumping between different universes. When she took those study participants who weren’t familiar with certain logos and mascots and showed them the correct version for the first time, she tested their memory by asking them to redraw the image only moments later, and still some drew the Mandela effect version. 

“It’s unlikely we jumped dimensions during that short time span,” she says, “so it seems like the Mandela effect is something more about the shortcuts our memories take, rather than something about parallel worlds.” She hopes her future work will help further elucidate these “shortcuts,” and she is even planning to see whether she can create her own Mandela effects. 

Leaving it all behind

One of the most well-documented memory phenomena is the “misinformation effect.” Since the 1970s, scientists have demonstrated that exposing people to misinformation after an event can alter their memories. If people are asked leading questions—say, “Did you see the broken headlight?” rather than “Did you see a broken headlight?” after witnessing a crash—they are more likely to report seeing something they didn’t. But on the flip side, warning witnesses about the threat of misinformation before they recount an event can increase the accuracy of their memory. 

In short, the way information is presented to us is crucial. This is why it was pretty poor form for YouGov to poll Americans about the Fruit of the Loom logo with a question that was easily open to misinterpretation: “Does the logo for the clothing company Fruit of the Loom have a cornucopia of fruit in it, or not?” It is unclear here which part is in question—the cornucopia or the fruit. But it was also poor form that I didn’t mention this until now—nor did I mention that Neil deGrasse Tyson later changed his mind about simulation theory and is now “convinced” that we do not live in a simulation. 

It was also probably pretty misleading of me to start this article with a link-free reference to Brooke Hermann’s eBay-listed shirt, which she believes features a cornucopia but to my eyes clearly features brown leaves. From the ’60s to the early ’00s, the Fruit of the Loom logo did include brown leaves behind the fruit; they were recolored green in 2003. When I started writing this article, I was certain that my Fruit of the Loom childhood PE kit had a cornucopia on the tag. I’m now convinced that 10-year-old me simply wasn’t looking that closely and thus I’ve misremembered the leaves as a horn. After all, even when I look at the current logo on shirts listed on the Fruit of the Loom website, my eyes still seem to want to make this mistake: From far away, I interpret the crowded cluster as a cornucopia.

The current Fruit of the Loom logo (left) and the version submitted in their 1973 trademark design application. Neither contain a cornucopia.

It’s as easy as that to convince me my memory was wrong—whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’ll let you decide. I’m clearly at one end of some sort of spectrum here. Other Mandela effect experiencers may believe something stranger is going on but are still prepared to happily get on with their lives. Larry Jung is a thirtysomething musician who was living in New Jersey when he spent hours hunting for Fruit of the Loom residue; in 2019, he even purchased a copy of a 1969 book for around $20 so he could see the cornucopia reference within it. “I did obsess about it for a while in the beginning,” says Jung, who remembers the cornucopia because he mistook it for a croissant as a child. “But then—I don’t know, I just came to this acceptance phase. I just didn’t want it to affect my life in a big way. I didn’t want to bring it up in every discussion.” 

Or, as another erstwhile Mandela effect researcher puts it: “If I just so happened to be living in a computer simulation, and that was my entire reality, what can I do about that?”

Don, the Mandela effect subreddit moderator, has seen waves of people move on while he has stayed active in the community for the better part of a decade (I first spoke to him for my New Statesman article in 2016). “I’ve recruited a lot of moderators, and they come and go pretty quick,” he says. 

Don says he experiences “more than average but less than all” examples of the Mandela effect (he too remembers the cornucopia on his childhood underpants). “They find solutions that they find acceptable,” he says of some people who leave the sub. For others, the cognitive dissonance becomes “too much,” he adds. “It interferes with their ability to function.” Don theorizes that the people who stay are people who experienced the Mandela effect organically, “in the wild,” he says, “before it was a well-known phenomenon”—arguably the antithesis of people jumping on an internet bandwagon.

“I compare it to someone who saw Bigfoot. If you were in the woods and Bigfoot walks into your campground and he scares you and your kids, eight feet tall, smells terrible—you’re not going to forget it.” 

AJ concurs that “anchor memories” like these are key. And yet Jung has a croissant-based anchor memory, and I myself have similar anecdotes about false memories I’ve found easy to let go. Psychologically, why does the Mandela effect affect people in such vastly different ways? Why do some people hold onto their memories while others don’t? 

“We know that most people’s intuitions about memory are wrong; they think of it as an accurate recording device when in fact memory is a reconstructive apparatus that is presenting us with recollections based on very fragmented snippets,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol who writes computer simulations of memory to better understand how the mind works. “So most people will have an exaggerated sense of the accuracy of their own memories and will refuse to accept that they could be completely false.”

In recent years, Lewandowsky has studied misinformation and has coauthored The Conspiracy Theory Handbook, and he says that while some people move on from their conspiracy theories, others turn them into their identity. “They will enter a state,” he says, “in which they are extremely difficult to extract from their rabbit hole.” People who become highly committed to conspiracies “tend to be disgruntled and feel left behind by society and are extremely distrustful,” Lewandowsky adds. “Those people also tend to be high in narcissism and often exhibit paranoid thoughts.” 

Shauna Bowes is an assistant psychology professor at the University of Alabama who researches conspiratorial ideation, misinformation, and intellectual humility. Her work has found that people with this last quality—the tendency to acknowledge the limits of your own views—are less likely to believe misinformation. 

“Belief perseverance is when you double down on your beliefs, even if evidence contradicts them,” Bowes says. “There are many reasons why some are willing to change their minds while others do not. Personality traits, childhood experiences, social networks, cognitive styles, and more determine these processes. What we do know is that people who tend to be more cognitively flexible, humble, and generally open-minded also tend to change their minds more in response to evidence.” 

And yet when it comes to the Mandela effect, the question of “evidence” is a complicated one—after all, there’s plenty of cornucopia residue. Part of the trouble with understanding people’s responses to the Mandela effect is that the phenomenon can’t neatly be categorized as misinformation or conspiracy theory. 

Lewandowsky believes the Mandela effect is primarily a social phenomenon. “My take on it is that if many people believe that an event has happened, that becomes a social norm that other people can support by sharing that belief. Social norms are very powerful,” he says, adding that the internet “provides a great amplification machine.”

Creating reality

AJ tells me that even though skeptics have called him “so many derogatory names over the last nine years,” he remains passionate about spreading word of the Mandela effect. He wants to “push a dialogue” so that believers don’t feel afraid to speak out. Mostly, AJ wants scientists to look at the qualitative side of things: the hundreds of autobiographical accounts by people with very specific memories of things that are now officially said not to have happened the way they recall. He wishes scientists would speak to experiencers directly, the same way the once-skeptical astronomer Josef Allen Hynek spoke to UFO eyewitnesses in the mid-20th century. 

“Once upon a time, the UFO phenomenon was considered to be fringe. And now we have multiple world governments that have acknowledged that there is stuff flying around that we don’t know what it is,” AJ says. Overall, “the goal is to get the scientific establishment to at least consider the other side.” 

Of course, AJ is not alone, even if Mandela effect believers do exist on a spectrum. The community holds space for people having fun with the phenomenon, for those committed to just a single example of the effect, for others who dive in on a short-term basis before moving on—and for those who have run the International Mandela Effect Conference in locations across the US since 2019. 

And there’s Don, who is still moderating the subreddit after all these years and has seen believers of every stripe. “The thing that keeps me going is I want to make sure that it’s still here,” he says. “There’s a lot of history here, and I want to keep it around for that reason.” 

Personally, he believes there may be different explanations for different examples of the Mandela effect. It could be as simple as people confusing Fruit of the Loom with a knockoff brand, he says, or as complicated as Fruit of the Loom lying about the cornucopia as free advertising (though he also notes that no one has ever actually discovered an old Fruit of the Loom label with a cornucopia on it). 

Don also wonders whether some people might be guinea pigs caught up in longitudinal studies in which psychologists play with subjects’ memories. He’s considered, too, that nefarious tech bros could be digitally manipulating and deleting data on the internet as a form of social engineering, a possibility he compares to the Cambridge Analytica affair. “It’s something that’s possible. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening,” he says. “But this is the kind of thing that could be being done.” (To be clear: Don shared no evidence that this is being done.) 

Perhaps Don’s most interesting belief is that the Mandela effect is not a phenomenon but an “event”—one that may now in fact be over. In his opinion, there have been no significant or “persuasive” examples discovered since 2019 (when Redditors found that the character Baloo in Disney’s 1967 The Jungle Book never wore a coconut bra). Don believes the community peaked between 2015 and 2018, when people were making new discoveries regularly. “There was a period of time where it was an actual event, like this was an ongoing event,” he says. He compares the whole thing to medieval manias in which people danced themselves to death: “I think the fervor with which the Mandela effect spread will likely be compared to dancing plagues by future generations.”

Toward the end of my second of three calls with AJ, he asked me if I’d also experienced the Mandela effect. I explained that historically I experienced it with Fruit of the Loom, but I’m prepared to believe it was just a false memory. “Yeah, that’s fair,” he said. But I started to wonder if it is. When I wrote about the Mandela effect in 2016, I wanted to write an exciting story with twists and turns, which arguably played up the mystery. Am I responsible for making some people question reality? What are the consequences of writing another article, the one you’re currently reading? How much am I creating reality by observing it?

To be “fair” to AJ, should I tell you that one of memory science’s most famous studies has recently come under fire, and some academics now believe that people aren’t as susceptible to false memories as we once thought? 

Or to be “fair” to you, the reader, should I stress that despite my own desire to believe in the mysteries of the universe, I’ve come away thinking that the biggest mystery of all is the human mind? 

Amelia Tait is a London-based freelance features journalist who writes about culture, trends, and unusual phenomena.