Where Did The Phrase “Conspiracy Theorist” Originate?

The term “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” were created by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1967 to discredit those who doubted the government’s official reports of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. This conspiracy theory claims that the CIA invented the term to disqualify those who questioned the official version of the assassination and doubted that his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was responsible.

A conspiracy theory is defined as a theory that rejects the standard explanation for an event and instead credits a covert group or organization with carrying out a secret plot. In a world of less literacy, partisan political press, and word-of-mouth communication, conspiracy theories have had a bad reputation since their first popularization by philosopher Sir Karl Popper in the 1950s. Politicians use the term to mock and dismiss allegations against them, while philosophers and political scientists warn that it could be used as a rhetorical weapon.

The term “conspiracy theory” emerged much more recently, only a few decades ago, and has proliferated in newspapers since the 1870s onward, particularly after the assassination of President Garfield in July 1881. Since the Warren Commission concluded that a lone gunman assassinated President John F. Kennedy, people who doubt that finding have been widely skeptical.

Conspiration theories often incorporate elements from pseudoscience, such as employing scientific terms or referring to data, research, sources, and other sources. American society needs to do more to address the far-fetched ideas that fuel events like the Capital Insurrection.