Conspiracy Theorist

Most people don't even think to ask The Question.

"Everywhere I go there's someone in a trenchcoat staring at me,
And when I'm not at home I'm sure someone's rummaging through my trash.
Whatever could they want from me? Is it just a part of a giant government conspiracy?
I gotta go see my doctor about this itchy pentagram-shaped rash..."

— Barenaked Ladies, "Get in Line"

Describe Conspiracy Theorist here? Shyeah right. That's just what they want you to do. Haven't you sheeple ever heard of MKUltra? Your vibrational frequencies are too high! They thrive off of fear! Your Zero-point is a great distance from fear! Alright, I'll tell you what. I'll give you the Official Line about truth-seekers; what they want you to think. And you can just think about that. And then, if you're ready to take the Red Pill, then maybe you can go do some digging of your own. Maybe, just maybe, you'll learn the real truth. Better luck next time, Low-Vibrational Reptilians!

A Conspiracy Theorist attributes the ultimate cause of an event or chain of events (usually political, social or historical events), or the concealment of such causes from public knowledge, to a secret and often deceptive plot by a group of powerful or influential people or organizations. Many conspiracy theories state that major events in history have been dominated by conspirators who manipulate political happenings from behind the scenes. The Conspiracy is generally evil beyond evil. And yet despite how evil they are, they never betray each other, so the conspiracy stays together for thousands of years. How they accomplish this is unexplained. It is something beyond the wisdom of our puny minds.

Conspiracy theorists in the media may be Mad Scientists associated with Right Wing Militia Fanatics or Dirty Communists, and always seem to come off as somewhat mentally unhinged (though you and I know better, right?). This seems to be the case even when one of them catches the trail of a genuine Ancient Conspiracy or Government Conspiracy. Of course, said conspiracies have a tendency to try to silence the "kook" once they learn he's on to them, despite the fact that no one would actually believe he's telling the truth. This tends to backfire in one of two ways:

1. If the attempt fails, it gives the theorist the Heroic Resolve he needs to unravel the conspiracy.
2. If it succeeds, whoever investigates the murder is bound to stumble upon the conspiracy, particularly if higher-ups try to hush it up.

There is a medical condition frequently attributed to conspiracy theorists: apophenia, "the tendency to see connections where none exist" (thank you, Question). But that's only what The Man and his crony doctors will have you believe. And as Agent Mulder would say: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean They're not out to get you.

Okay. That's the official line. The rest is up to you. I've left a few clues below to follow up if you want to find the real story. Be careful. The reptilians are watching you.

To those who still just don't believe me, then wake up, smell the muffins, and get off that bandwagon! And don't you dare say those things to me!

Every conspiracy theorist worth his salt has a pegboard filled with weird photos and connecting strings and a Tinfoil Hat ready... but if you ever get the urge to buy a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, for God's sake, resist!

noreallife

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Examples are just misconceptions created by the government. I have proof!

Anime & Manga

• In Full Metal Panic!, Mithril has programs that troll online forums and denounce anyone who makes connections about events Mithril was involved in as a conspiracy theorist so that nobody pays any attention to the (sometimes accurate) conclusions that the posters are coming to.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Char's mentor and Ramba Ral's father Jimba is shown as one. When sheltering Char and his family, Jimba constantly rants about how the Zabi family are responsible for killing Char's father Zeon Deikun and are planning to take over Side 3 to form their evil empire. Interestingly, Jimba himself was proven to be correct in many of his rants as Degwin Zabi did actually poison Zeon while his daughter Kycilia killed Sasro Zabi with a bomb and then framed the Ral family for the assassination.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Campus Apocalypse has Kensuke trade in his military fanboying for this.
• Teen Genius Susumu in Wandaba Style adamantly believes that the 1969 moon landing was fake, and is thus trying to get a rocket there himself (using environmentally safe methods). In the second half of the series, his mother is introduced as a Designated Villain, simply because she wants him to admit that he is wrong (it's her methods in doing so that put her into villain territory).
• GTO: The Early Years: In Chapter 192, Yasuo somehow gets it into his head that Alien Abduction is the reason Saejima, Tsukai, and Katsuyuki haven't been coming to school the last few days. Even after seeing Atsushi get whacked in the head by a stick during a drive-by, he asks if it was aliens.
• Satou's old school friend in Welcome to the NHK: "It's a conspiracy" is practically her catchphrase. Satou himself is one of these, thanks to her influence. The title is a reference to his main conspiracy theory, that the Japanese TV channel NHK is a conspiracy to create Hikikomori.

Comic Books

• Azula takes this role in Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Search. Weird use of the trope too. Azula believes everything is in some way, shape or form, a ploy by her mother to kill her before Azula can get to her first. Azula uses this belief as a means of latching onto some semblance of sanity and to keep her focused, as readers who watched the series before knows that Azula's been long broke-brained.
• Berrybrook Middle School: Jensen's defining character trait in "Awkward", as he just cannot help but rattle on and on about the dreaded sunspots that threaten to destroy the Earth. In "Brave", this aspect is toned down...on the subject of sunspots. He now fears a potential Zombie Apocalypse.
• The Big Book of Conspiracies is a graphic novel detailing (along with some actual plots and cover-ups) many popular conspiracy theories. Its narrator/host is a mysterious character implied to be a rogue MIB who claims he, at the very least, finds each conspiracy theory he presents plausible... though he also suspects that at least some of them (along with accounts generally accepted as true) might be deliberate misinformation. A ghostly Charles Fort who narrates another book in the series, The Big Book of the Unexplained, is implied to suspect he might be deliberately trying to mislead people for one reason or another, making this a possible subversion.
• Perry Noia from The Crossovers, who is convinced that aliens are launching a secret takeover of Earth. His neighbors' ten-year-old son Cliff is a UFO abductee and alien collaborator whom Perry is trying to reveal as a traitor.
• In G.I. Joe (IDW), Mainframe came to be regarded as a conspiracy theorist after he stumbled onto the Cobra conspiracy. He went AWOL from the Joes and started living like a stereotypical conspiracy theorist as he attempted to prove he was right.
• The Ghost, an Iron Man villain, is a massive conspiracy theorist.
• Inversion: In "Everything You Know About The Powerpuff Girls Is Wrong" (issue #40, DC run), the students of Pokey Oaks are giving their own ideas on how the girls were created, paralleling the origins of Spiderman, Superman and the Fantastic Four in their tales. The girls finally step up to tell how they were really created, only to find it was Ms. Keane's creativity assignment for the class—which the girls receive a failing grade.
• Cecil Holmes from PS238. Of course, in obsessing over the belief that his elementary school is a front for an alien invasion, he's completely missed out on its nature as a superhero training program. Turns out he can sense if someone else has superpowers. So his entire life he's felt that other people are different, and since so many of those people are secretive he believed aliens.
• Robin (1993): At his third high school, Tim befriends a fellow student named Bernard who has a number of interesting theories. His most amusing one is that "Batman owns a bunch of secret orphanages all over the world — where he gets his Robins from", since he earnestly tells it to Tim, who was Robin.
• Arnie Burnsteel from Scare Tactics (DC Comics) is the chief of paranoia; a living, breathing encyclopedia of arcane trivia, conspiracy theories and questionable proven facts
• Superman: The short story "The Deniers!" features a blue-collar worker named Phil who believes that Superman isn't real and is just a hoax made up by the government to keep people in line. Part of his evidence is that he's lived in Metropolis his whole life and has never seen Superman or the so-called monsters and supervillains he faces. A montage shows Superman and his enemies always appearing out of Phil's line of sight. When one of his friends points out the abundance of news footage and photos of Superman in action, Phil claims it's all doctored.
• Tim Drake: Robin: Bernard spends their date in issue 1 telling Tim about his theory that Batman is a Demigod-Demogorgon hybrid.
• Rorschach from Watchmen. He started as an Expy of The Question, who in the DC Animated Universe is a saner Expy of Rorschach.
• X-Wing Rogue Squadron: The Ante-Endor Assocation on Mrlsst are an Imperialist group of these. In the two months following the Battle of Endor, they begin claiming this never took place and is just Rebel propaganda. They insist the Empire is still at full strength, Palpatine's alive, no Jedi exist and in fact the Rebels had destroyed Alderaan while trying to make a superweapon like the Death Star.

Comic Strips

• Huey Freeman from The Boondocks takes this to ridiculous extremes. Originally he simply believed that there was a conspiracy among whites against African-Americans (accusing even the most unlikely people of being "in" on it, such as Henry Kissinger and others who won Nobel Peace Prizes) but eventually took this a little too far, spouting crazy theories accusing the government of covering up the dangers of the bird flu pandemic (which is Hilarious in Hindsight, as there was never a single case of someone dying from that outside of China). Eventually he made an enemy's list where he included Santa Claus (resulting in him getting a threatening letter from the big man himself) and Lucy from Peanuts (claiming he never liked her because of "the whole football thing").
• One gag in The Far Side had a lone man standing on a street-corner preaching about the existence of vampires, with a mirror being carried by in the background revealing that all those passing by his soapbox cast no reflection.
• Al, the bartender in Liberty Meadows, believes in numerous conspiracies, most notably that Shakespeare was actually written by Bacon.

Fan Works

• The Seraphim, the main villain of Angel of the Bat is this to a ridiculous extreme. Amongst his theories is that he is a "descendant of Enoch" (who, if the Bible is taken literally, is ancestor to everyone) and that he is descended from an English occultist whom the Catholic Church imprisoned when he foretold events such as the destruction of Gotham.
• In Blood and Spirit, Fi is highly suspicious of all members of the Sheikah tribe, specifically their leader Sheik. She warns Link not to trust any of them, thinking that they too have gone rogue like Veress and her followers. However, Link is quick to shoot that possibility down.
• In the Buffyverse fic Bring Me to Life, Kennedy goes off on a massive rant against Buffy after finding out about Angel's Dark and Troubled Past, which Buffy had withheld from the others, going so far as to accuse her of deliberately sending Annabelle and Chloe to their deaths and being in league with the First; naturally, Buffy blows her stack and punches Kennedy in the face before outright telling Kennedy that she's young, stupid, and not to make assumptions on what she thinks she knows.
• The Supernatural fan fic Coast To Coast With Castiel has Castiel having a debate with a Conspiracy Theorist radio host who lives in a basement.
• Dekugate revolves around a group of these believing that the marriage of All Might and Inko Midoriya and the birth of Izuku has some ulterior motives from the HSPC and their eventual escalation to try to kill Izuku.
• The Discworld of A.A. Pessimal introduces the Ankh-Morpork Unidentified Flying Saucer Reasearch Association, who are Ground Zero for every conspiracy theory doing the rounds. In The Price of Flight, they firmly believe the main base of the Air Watch (which necessarily has tight security) is Area Fifty-Seven, where Vetinari sanctions not only advanced research into flight, but also contacts representatives of advanced civilizations from elsewhere. Of course, this is all Hushed Up.
• The Elements of Friendship: At one point during Book I, a pony named Tinfoil Hat takes over Octavia and Vinyl's rebel radio broadcast, and tells everyone that Celestia and Nightmare Moon are actually the same pony, Twilight is her chief enforcer, and the quest to learn how to use the Elements of Harmony is actually a complicated plot to Take Over the World. And then Octavia and Vinyl kick him out of their safehouse.
  • He reappears in Book II. During the height of Discord's rampage across Equestria, he hacks into a radio broadcast to tell everyone listening that Discord is actually Celestia's ex-boyfriend, and Selena is her child by Discord's bat-pony half-brother. He then goes on a rant about how he's not going to let all the facts that contradict him stop him from spreading the "truth". And then Vinyl shows up and knocks him out again.
• In Equestria: A History Revealed, the narrator, and by extension, one of her sources, Crazy Larry definitely qualify. The narrator goes to the extent of stating she is the only "true" historian in all of Equestria, and all the rest have been paid off by Celestia to support her lies.
• For the Glory of Irk:
  • Dib is still this, like in canon. For example, at one point he mentions not trusting pigeons, while at another he explains he taught himself to resist telepathy because he thought his third grade teacher was a government agent spying on him.
  • Another example is an Irken named Zeke, who self-publishes magazine articles about various shady activities carried out by the Empire. He turns out to be right about them.
• In A Gun to Love's Head, Misa becomes one after the end of the Kira case and L publicly declared that Higuchi was Kira all along, with the Second Kira, whose identity is "classified," privately executed. Misa becomes a pro-Kira writer that writes books on the fact that that theory does not make sense.
• Zoe is characterized as one in Hero Chat, having theories that range from Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing on the actual moon to claiming that Jagged Stone is a hologram being controlled by Fangs the crocodile.
  • When Marinette asked her to become Talon, Zoe thinks she's being inducted into their vampire coven (stemming from the Cute Little Fangs that Team Miraculous possesses).
  • After Rose tells the other heroes that she's the granddaughter of a Necromancer supervillain and had inherited his powers, Zoe is mentioned to have torn down her conspiracy board because she pegged Rose as a Dryad or Fae.
• Light's Song: Jacob Hopkins, as in canon. After he attacks Hunter at a supermarket, believing that he's a demon, an employee mentions that he's banned from the store for attacking said employee with a baguette, believing that he's a cyborg drone for the Martians due to his cochlear implant.
• Alya goes through a brief but intense period of this in Missing (Miraculous Ladybug) while attempting to reconcile Lila's claims of being best friends with Ladybug with Ladybug's staunch insistence that she only knows her as an occasional akuma victim. She offers up various theories, each twisting logic more severely than the last to try and make things fit together in a way that doesn't require her to accept the idea that maybe — just maybe! — Lila was lying. Because if she admits that much, it also means admitting she might have made a serious mistake in accepting Lila at her word rather than fact-checking... and she's not mentally prepared to face what that might mean.
• Shoto Todoroki from My Hero Academia tends to get played up as one in fanon for laughs due to him asking Izuku "Deku" Midoriya at one point if he's the secret love child of All Might.
  • In Custody Battle, Shouto Todoroki is one that believes that All-Might and Hisashi/All-For-One are secretly dating, much to the disgust of both. In the epilogue, the entire Todoroki family gets in on the act and are convinced that Yuuto, Hisashi's younger brother, is actually their missing brother Touya Todoroki.
  • In Forgiveness is the Attribute of the Strong, a My Hero Academia fanfiction, Shouto Todoroki is notorious for coming up with conspiracy theories that have a grain of truth but are never completely right.
  • Mischief (MHA): Shoto is a great example of it, aside from the usual "secret love child" gag, he likes to make extensive research about aliens and supernatural subjects, which often comes in handy given the amount of trouble the kids often find themselves at.
  • In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Todoroki's canon assumption that Deku is All Might's secret lovechild is painted even more as him developing a random conspiracy theory, with him revealing it to Momo when she arrives to his house while he is suspended for being utterly unapologetic for nearly getting Deku killed in the USJ attack and Momo thinking there is something wrong with him for thinking that, as well as him spreading it through the UA students when he returns to the campus being treated as a literal adding insult to injury to Deku.
• Zack from Total Drama Legacy. He'll tell you anything you need to know about aliens, cryptids, or how they faked the moon landing.
• In Twillight Sparkle's awesome adventure, ADMIRAL Awesome would rather believe that the President of Amarican is controlled by evil Martian deep-sea fishes than that he would, of his own free will, refuse to give him any money or medals.
• Two Letters: Jalil became convinced that Ladybug was secretly working with Hawkmoth, and railed against her online under the handle of LadybugSkeptic9000. Due to this, Marinette isn't particularly concerned about his mysterious disappearance.
  • She also takes advantage of his addiction to conspiracies when she and Luka want to get into his father's office, by telling Veronique that she's heard rumors that Jalil was spreading slander about the new Ladybug, and she's worried that he might have left those materials in Mr. Kubdel's office. Given that the new Ladybug has marshalled a Cult of Personality around herself, such rumors could ruin the Louvre's reputation.
• What Goes Around Comes Around (Miraculous Ladybug): Truth & Journalism reveals that there are groups have cropped up who insist that "Hawk Moth did nothing wrong", and that the magical terrorist and his allies were trying to create a utopic new world (which has some measure of truth to it, though Gabriel's concept of ideal is entirely self-centered and a far cry from the paradise they believe in). Among these fervent believers is Jalil, Alix's older brother, severely straining his relationships with the rest of his family as his father fears that he'll destroy their reputations.
• The cut original draft of Zootopia featured a paranoid badger named Honey who was known to believe that all sheep were part of a grand "Cud-spiracy" against all other mammals. As you can expect, numerous Zootopia fanfics have taken the character and run with her.
  • Guardian Blue has a (moderately) more grounded take on Honey, where she's untrusting of sheep, but the Cud-spiracy is shown to have some degree of truth to it, and later on, she's shown to work with sheep, first reluctantly with Sharla, then it's revealed that she was working with Sharla's brother Gareth, who was acting as Honey and her cohorts' inside mammal.
  • The Bin and the Badge on the other hand deconstructs this, with Honey being shown to be seriously disturbed and even highly bigoted against sheep as a result of her paranoia, and the story centres around her undergoing treatment to address this.

Films — Live-Action

• In 13 Sins, Vogler has been tracking the history of the Game for years, and believes that it is an entertainment for the super-rich, and has been running since Ancient Greece. The ending indicates he may be right.
• In Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, Cooper, the Nerd's friend and producer, believe in (among other things) the Eee Tee dumping grounds, the Roswell UFO incident, Area 51, Santa Claus, the Flat Earth theory, and "Death Mwauthzyx": an ancient monster who created God and the Devil, rests in Mount Fuji, and can end reality simply by turning a radar dish on its head 180 degrees, and the only thing that would survive the apocalypse would be one bologna sandwich that would be of immeasurable mass due to there being nothing to compare it against. Turns out, he's not far off the mark with some of his theories.
• In the '90s Disney Channel remake of the '60s comedy The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, the main character's best friend was a stereotypical college-age radical who, in a parody of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, believed that President William McKinley was actually killed by his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt.
• Terrance, Aaron, and Mark in The Conspiracy; the in-universe documentary on Terrance is most prominently centered around his 9/11 theories.
• Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) from the movie Conspiracy Theory. By the end it hints that he was right about all his theories as the president almost gets caught in an earthquake just like he predicted.
• Vasily in The Death of Stalin. He has a strange belief in 'Zionists' and 'New York queers' who are somehow in league with the Central Committee to open his dead father's head and fill it with American lies. Vasily is a strange, unstable person.
• Gabriel from Drive, He Said eventually becomes one.
  Gabriel: Do you know what we're doing while they're parading? We're being sterilized by the death ray. Our brains are literally being electrified into neon gas by this piece of history.… They faked the whole goddamn moon shot in Phoenix! Do you hear that, paper people of America?
• General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove. He believed that the fluoridation of drinking water in the 50s was a Communist plot to poison America. Believe it or not, this was an actual conspiracy theory at the time. Reading between the lines, though, indicates that he came to this conclusion due to a sudden attack of impotence. So yes, the trope namer doomed the world because he couldn't comprehend that he was getting old and could no longer become erect at will. The fluoride conspiracy is STILL floating around, but is now usually attributed to the US government attempting to subdue the populace.
• In the film Eight Legged Freaks one of the Characters is a Conspiracy Theorist with his own radio station, which he uses to rant about aliens and the government. He notably continues to believe the giant spiders besieging the town are aliens through the whole film and he refuses to get a rectal probe.
  Chris: (completely fed up with Harlan's insistence that the spiders are aliens) Okay, they are spiders from Mars! Satisfied?!?
  Harlan: (very nervous) Not really...
• Extraterrestrial (2014): Travis, a Shell-Shocked Veteran friend of April's dad, who has a pot farm in the area and lives as far off the grid as he can. He is a cynical, distrustful person who relates to the young people how the government had long ago made a treaty with aliens allowing the abductions of many people so they could experiment on them. All of this turns out to be true, although Kyle dismisses it at the time.
• Godzilla:
  • Joseph Brody. After his wife Sandra was among the deaths at the Janjira nuclear power plant when it was abruptly destroyed, he is convinced that whatever caused the disaster was a bit less "natural" than an earthquake. He spends the next 15 years trying to puzzle out the truth behind the tragedy and becomes estranged from his son in the process, so he's unsurprisingly miffed to find out that a group called MONARCH is, indeed, covering up what actually happened.
  • The opening credits montage also has a glimpse of text concerning some guy who thinks the cover-up of Godzilla's existence in The '50s was the work of the Illuminati:
    The illuminati has been using PRODUCTION DESIGNER OWEN PATERSON to build facilities to hide their study of the creature and it's origins. All clues are suppressed.
  • Burnie Hayes from Godzilla vs. Kong is one. Notably, with the exception of believing that Apex is doing something crazy (they're using the last remaining Ghidorah head to create Mechagodzilla, provoking Godzilla to attack them in the process), he's still portrayed as being utterly crazy for believing in things like lizard people and the government controlling people via fluoride in tap water.
• In Pixels, Ludlow Lamanoff is played for laughs as the worst version of those. His saner theory is that CIA is spying on us by cable TV. His less sane theory is that "JFK shot first".
• Bobby Lee Swagger from Shooter. He has the 9/11 Commission report on his nightstand, and generally distrusts The Government (and for a reason). Nick Memphis also sees signs of conspiracy around the attempted presidential assassination where the president wasn't the real target, anyway, and gets tortured and almost "shoots himself" with the help of some Secret Agents.
• Darren "Mother" Roskow (Dan Aykroyd) from the movie Sneakers.
  Mother: Did you know the Deputy Director of Planning was down in Managua, Nicaragua the day before the earthquake?
  Crease: Now what are you saying, the C.I.A. caused the Managua earthquake?!
  Mother: Well, I can't prove it, but...
  
  Crease: Now what are you saying — The NSA killed Kennedy?
  Mother: No. They shot him, but they didn't kill him — he's still alive!
• Charlie's dad in So I Married an Axe Murderer is convinced that the world is run by a secret group known as "The Pentaverate:" the Queen, the Rothschilds, the Vatican, the Gettys, and Colonel Sanders "before he went tits-up."
• The aptly named "Conspiracy Brother" from Undercover Brother thinks everything is out to get black people, and freaks out at even the most innocent-sounding of gestures. In a setting where there actually is a white conspiracy led by The Man to keep the black man down, he still manages to come across as a paranoid lunatic. It takes real conspiracy theory skills to turn "Good morning!" into a two-minute paranoid manifesto.
  Conspiracy Brother: Let me tell you something about the word "good," brotha. Good is an ancient Anglo-Saxon word, go-od, meanin' the absence of color. I.E. it's all good, which it is, OR Good Will Huntin', meanin, "I'm Huntin' Niggas!" So when you say good morning, what you're telling me is "I'm gonna kill yo black ass, first thing in the mornin'!"
  • And yet even he won't insist that O.J. is innocent.

Jokes

• A man dies and goes to heaven. He was a raging conspiracy theorist in life, but otherwise a very nice stand-up guy. He arrives at the pearly gates and meets with St. Peter, who seeing his record, tells him that he gets one wish before being let into heaven. He tells St. Peter that all he really wants to know is the truth behind who killed John F. Kennedy. St. Peter nods and tells him, "Yes sir, that was Lee Harvey Oswald, and he acted alone." The man stares for a moment, then mutters to himself, "Wow, this conspiracy really does go all the way to the top."

Literature

• Area 7 opens with an article from "The Conspiracy Theorist Monthly" (circulation: 157 copies) connecting a senator's death by hunting accident with the deaths of his wife and daughter by gas explosion. There's actually a bigger conspiracy going on than the writer knows...
• Area 51: We meet a number of these, "UFO watchers" who camp outside Area 51. They turn out to be right that the government is involved with/covering up UFOs. In later novels, it's mentioned that most Americans don't believe aliens are real, that it's all been fabricated by the government (along with thinking the Moon landing didn't happen). No doubt the first lot being correct fueled later ones.
• The whole point of The Big Book of Jewish Conspiraces, a satirical work by Joshua Neuman and David Deutsch. Everything from the American Revolution and Christianity to the reemergence of anti-semitism is described as due to Jewish conspiracies. The introduction describes the decision to commission the work to discredit said theories. For instance, the Chinese Revolution is an attempt to get payment for a meal provided to the Chinese Emperor. Eventually the meal is paid for by a high-ranking communist who used to work for the Jewish couple. They had nicknamed him "Katzen" or "kitten" because of his name Mao.
• James and Harrison of The Chronicles of Steve Stollberg. When the government says that Mickey Mouse was killed in a drive-by-shooting, James suspects that Mickey actually faked his death, and Harrison suspects that he was actually cryogenically frozen rather than cremated.
• In David Wingrove's Chung Kuo, Kim is a genius who in his teens uncovers the files showing the truth about world history, which has been falsified by the T'ang Lords.
• In the Ciaphas Cain novel The Traitor's Hand, there were apparently a number of people who believed that the Governor of Adumbria's death from apparently natural causes without designating an heir a year before Chaos forces invaded was actually a very clever assassination. These people took the fact there was absolutely no evidence to back this theory up, even after twenty years of looking, to be proof of exactly how cleverly done the plot was.
• The Devil's Dictionary: Bierce satirizes some views of these with the entry on "Freemasons":
  An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucius, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids — always by a Freemason.
• Llurdis of The Dinosaur Lords is always sniffing for an intrigue and instantly jumps in with her convoluted theory when a dead body is found (it involves attempting to murder the father to make him marry the daughter off to the killer). It doesn't help that Palace of the Fireflies is a Decadent Court.
• Several examples in Discworld, almost always involving the phrase "the government hushed it up":
  • Hogfather: The opening passage about differing theories about how science works eventually turns to the idea that the Advanced Ancient Humans knew it all, but governments hush it up, then digresses further in a footnote about how hushing things up seems to be the only thing governments do reasonably successfully.
  • In The Truth, William loses his patience with one, and says he heard that huge meteors crash into the city every day, but the Patrician hushes it up (and, since William Will Not Tell a Lie, he presumably has heard someone say that). The guy accepts it without question.
  • Thud! has a mention of people who have strange theories about hidden messages in Methodica Rascal's painting of Koom Valley, as described in the book The Koom Valley Codex. Nobby says Dave of Dave's Pin and Stamp Exchange says the government hushed it up, to which Sergeant Colon points out that Dave always says the government is trying to hush things up, and no-one ever hushes him up.
• The Doctor Who Expanded Universe contains a novel called Who Killed Kennedy which works as a Perspective Flip on the 1970s U.N.I.T stories by presenting it from the perspective of a journalist who becomes convinced that U.N.I.T and the Doctor are part of some malevolent organization, determines to uncover the truth, and ends up ruining his reputation and becoming considered one of these. It's partly Deconstructed; the general gist of what he believes is true, but he's got things completely wrong with regards to who are the good guys and who has malevolent intentions. He also learns that alien invasions are covered up mainly because no one would believe the truth.
• In Good Omens, some of the stuff Adam absorbs from the New Age magazines Anathema lent him falls into this category. He's momentarily stymied in his explanation of all this to his friends when they ask him why the government wants to hush up the existence of aliens; the magazine had just taken it as an article of faith that that's what governments do.
• One or two theorists are seen in Hell in The Great Divorce, where they insist that the afterlife they're in is false and that any attempt to invite them to Heaven is a deceptive trick.
• Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter novels as well as her father, Xenophilius Lovegood.
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: Helen's mother Roxanne believes that the National Questing Bureau doesn't actually exist and that a Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy called the Black Knights are ruling the world from the shadows, the exact reasons for why things happening changing on a weekly basis.
• In several of Tom Holt novels, recurring character (or possibly multiple characters with the same name) Danny Bennett is convinced that the Milk Marketing Board is somehow connected to the assassination of JFK.
• In The Host (2008), by Stephenie Meyer, conspiracy theorists were more likely to survive the Alien Invasion than the average person. This is because the aliens are Puppeteer Parasites and most people did not notice the difference, except the "crazies".
• Various characters in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, though due to the nature of the book, they're maybe the sanest people around.
• Crazy Emmett in the Kate Shugak novel Hunter's Moon. A former history teacher who believed the United Nations was plotting to install a one world government, he dropped off the grid to live deep in the Alaskan bush.
• In Johnny and the Bomb, Kirsty has become one, refusing to believe that the rain of fish was related to the gas leak under the pet shop, or that the crop circles were made by Bigmac even though he says they were. Johnny, who is cursed with seeing what's really there, thinks everything's complicated enough without people like Kirsty making it worse.
• After watching too much I, Claudius, Ephraim Kishon became very suspicious of his wife. Well, in one of his satirical short stories. It tends to overlap.
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress included a conspiracy theorist as an aversion, as he disdains the conjecture that passes for 'theory'. Professor de la Paz pursued the study of historical conspiracies and developed a body of principles to describe how they work, how they fail to work, how they wind up being revealed. As a founding member of a revolutionary conspiracy, his theories are quite valuable for functioning in the scientific/academic meaning of the word. This also helps him develop his theory; since the most successful conspiracies are never revealed, the only way to be sure he's observing one is to take part in it.
• In the Night Huntress books, Timothy, Cat's next neighbor in the first book, is convinced the government covers up evidence of the supernatural (he's right). He later goes to work for "one of those magazines that give Cat's boss headaches".
• In The Pale King, There's an old lady later revealed to be Toni Ware's grandmother who believes Jack Benny is attempting to achieve global thought control via radio waves. She covers her house with electrified hubcaps, which jams her neighbors' signals. She ends up getting cited for diverting her household's amperage, so she salvages a generator that runs on kerosene.
• Planet Earth Is Blue: Before Bridget and Nova were taken away with CPS, they lived with their mama, who believed that the moon landings had been faked and would watch TV static for secret government messages.
• The Power: Many of these attempt to explain what happened when the Power emerges, among them UrbanDox, an online blogger. He blames this all on a secret cabal within the government planning to kill off most men, roping in the Zionists too.
• The poem "Conspiracy" from Raving Lunacy by Blaine Munday is a parody of inane conspiracy theories, the narrator berating how he believes people want him to die and to eat his eyes.
  • "Non-Falling Towel" features this together with Insane Troll Logic as the poem's narrator thinks a towel he saw was made by aliens from another dimension.
• Several flavors of this trope (alien abductee, Satanic cult victim, militia gun nut) appear in the Repairman Jack novel Conspiracies, which is actually set at a Conspiracy Theorist convention. Turns out the only genuine conspiracy there is an Eldritch Abomination plot targeting Jack himself.
• Jonathan Shriek in Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword is perceived as one by the world at large because he insists that midgets who live underground secretly control the people in his home town with fungus spores. Of course everyone knows that there are midgets who live underground and really like mushrooms, but don't think that they're any more than that. They are wrong.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Played for Laughs with Ned Land: as a professional fisher, he doesn’t believe in sea monsters (giant narwhales or octopi), but he believes that his captors could be cannibals, that the language spoken in the Nautilus is a conspiracy to let him die of hunger (see Conlang) and in Artificial Human:
  "Haven't seen or heard a thing!" the Canadian replied. "I haven't even spotted the crew of this boat. By any chance, could they be electric too?"
  "Electric?"
  "Oh ye gods, I'm half tempted to believe it!"

Live-Action TV

• Accused (2023): Joanna is one with a large number of followers who claims children murdered in a mass shooting never existed, with the entire thing faked to seize people's guns. She also thinks that this is a global conspiracy, and that the people she thinks are involved sexually abuse their children too.
• Angel. A god-like being who calls herself Jasmine has used her power to take over Los Angeles. Winifred Burkle, the only member of Team Angel to escape her influence, takes refuge in a conspiracy bookstore and asks the owner if he hasn't noticed anything strange about the way everyone is acting. The owner says that the CIA are still listening to the implants in his head, but it doesn't bother him any more as he's broadcasting Jasmine's love back to them via the mind control satellites. Jasmine later turns up at the bookstore, and grants the conspiracy theorist's greatest wish by telling him Who Shot JFK? — turns out it was Oswald.
• Babylon 5:
  • Michael Garibaldi in is a paranoiac conspiracy theorist of the future (as the show is set in the 24th century), not helping the fact that he was made more paranoid than normal by the telepath villain Bester. Although he's not totally unjustified, as Earth's government does have conspiracies going on, not to mention Psi Corps and the Shadows. After Bester goes to work on him, his paranoia about possible conspiracies starts getting out of hand, but he sadly fails to spot that he's currently part of one.
  • In "Spider in the Web", Captain Sheridan mentions "collecting" conspiracy theories as a hobby in one episode, naming a rumoured secret government agency as possibly being behind B5's recent troubles - "Bureau 13". However, this ended up being rendered Early-Installment Weirdness: after the episode was finished, somebody on the production crew discovered there was an unrelated tabletop RPG by that name, so the organization and Sheridan's interest in conspiracy theories were both abandoned out of an abundance of caution.
  • Crusade: "Visitors from Down the Street" has the crew visiting a pre-First Contact industrial-age planet where two aliens that resemble Mulder and Scully a lot enter the ship explaining that their government hides the existence of humans to the population, but no record of contacting such government exists, to what the aliens in an innocent way think that the human government "hides the truth" to them too. It turns out the planet's government did discover the existence of humanity due to radio and television signals and created the conspiracy that they were manipulated by humans secretly to avoid uprisings and coups (very common in their homeworld to that point) as the general population can't fight the "alien" masters and can't get angry with the puppet government. Captain Gideon, irritated at being used by an authoritarian government, dumps a load of probes onto the planet surface with messages explaining the situation to the populace, which (so we're led to assume) ends the practice.
• A Black Lady Sketch Show: Dr. Hadassah, by nature of being a female Hotep, espouses some tenuous beliefs about the world with an Afrocentric slant.
  Hadassah: "The Earth Is Flat and Other Reasons You Shouldn't Vote."
  Gabrielle Union: But people should vote.
  Hadassah: Why? Cast a ballot? Think about it: "Ballot" is just two letters away from "bullet." They want us to kill our community.
• Hodgins on Bones. He takes it pretty hard when he misses the ancient conspiracy that has a member living in his house. He also takes it as an insult when he is informed that the government has deemed him 'harmless'. Interestingly Hodgins' own family is wealthy and influential enough to feature in the conspiracies he believes in. If anyone would know...
  "You call it "conspiracy". I call it "the family business"."
  • There is one conspiracy theory he won't touch, and only one: he is quite adamantly NOT a '9/11 Truther'. Everything else is fair game.
• Cheers: Cliff starts becoming one over the course of the show, espousing theories like the Beatles somehow being involving in the JFK assassination, or how earthquakes in LA are actually the government drilling down to the center of the Earth to install a computer that will control the planet's rotation, or one of his neighbours secretly being Hitler.
• Over the past 10 years or so, medical shows like Chicago Med have episodes where the doctor characters encounter people who believe in vaccination conspiracy theories by "The Government" or "Big Pharma".
• Cold Case:
  • An elderly man who was interviewed in "World's End" was convinced that the FBI somehow facilitated an invasion of Martians in 1938, and that it was covered-up as a hoax using the Orson Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds.
  • One of the suspects in "One Small Step" believes that the moon landings were faked. The murder that the protagonists are investigating occurred on the day of the first moon landing, and the events of that day may have fueled the suspect's later delusion.
• In the Community episode "Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design", Jeff is ostensibly taking a class that studies various Conspiracy Theories. The truth of the matter is quite another beast.
• The whole point of Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura.
• The hostage-taker from the Criminal Minds episode "Derailed" is one of the "government is watching me" variety.
• The CSI episode "Leapin' Lizards" involved a group of conspiracy theorists who believed that Earth's governments were controlled by a group of shape-shifting reptilian aliens. Which was based on a real case.
• Fredwynn from Dispatches From Elsewhere is convinced that the Alternate Reality Game he's stumbled into is a government-run social experiment, and he's not above trying to break the game's apparent "rules" in order to gain more information.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Rose": Clive Finch is a downplayed example as, despite sounding like an utter nutcase to anybody who doesn't know Doctor Who, he's mostly correct: he thinks the pictures of the Doctor from various time periods are all the same man (they were), that the Doctor's an alien (he is), and that the Doctor is immortal (not 100% true, but 900 years is a hell of a long lifespan). The only thing he didn't guess was the time-travel angle.
    • It's also implied in the episode (and confirmed in the novelisation) that Clive has evidence of the majority of the Doctors, and not just the Ninth, but believes it to be a case of the title "the Doctor" is passed from generation to generation and not the same person with different faces.
  • "Love & Monsters": LINDA, the Doctor fanclub the episode focuses on, has aspects of this when they try to deduce exactly who the Doctor is and what his deal is.
  • "The God Complex": Howie believes wholeheartedly in conspiracies, and thinks the alien Hell Hotel is actually a secret bunker in Norway for world leaders to survive the destruction of the Earth, prompting Rory to sarcastically compliment him on having come up with a theory "more insane than what's actually happening." This belief in conspiracies is what led him to be abducted as food for the faith-targeting Emotion Eater.
  • "Deep Breath": A man named Alfie is a Victorian Era version of this. He thinks the Tyrannosaurus rex accidentally brought to London by the Doctor is a "special effect" created by the government, and his wife's reaction suggests he's been thinking like this for a long time. Then he gets murdered and his eyes stolen by the Faceless Man.
  • "Arachnids in the UK": Hakim Khan, companion Yaz's father. This is to the point that when his wife and daughter realize he actually was on to something with the garbage he'd been collecting, Yaz is annoyed, and Najia complains that she'll have to hear about him being right.
    • Becomes a Brick Joke in "Spyfall", as he notes he was accurate about a conspiracy involving all of the world's computers and smart devices.
  • "Fugitive of the Judoon": "All Ears" Allan (the nickname is self-granted) believes that Lee Clayton is not who he says he is and has compiled a dossier full of information while attempting to persuade Lee's wife Ruth, with whom he's in love, to leave him. While Allan turns out to be onto something about Lee, his crush on Ruth blinds him to similar holes in her backstory.
• In Elementary, one of Sherlock Holmes' hobbies is to troll conspiracy theory websites and submit absurd theories that he makes up on the spot just to see what everyone else on the sites will believe. He claims that the (depressingly, real) conspiracy theory that the CIA invented crack cocaine is one of his. Ironically, in the same episode (Season 1's "The Red Team"), he discovers a real conspiracy, but despite initial appearances, it's not the work of a murderously paranoid and secretive government agency; the initial death that starts them on the case was an argument that got out of hand, and the deaths of Red Team members have all been orchestrated by a single killer. Is it technically a conspiracy if there's only one person in on it?
  Sherlock: I adore [conspiracy theorists], as one does a barmy uncle, or a cat that can't stop walking into walls.
• FBI: Most Wanted: In "Hairtrigger", Doug Timmons believes that the US government allows school shootings to happen to raise a younger generation who are terrified and easily controlled.
• In First Wave, "Crazy Eddie" is a well-known crackpot conspiracy theorist, who publishes an online journal called Paranoids Times. During his first meeting with Cade, he insists that Lincoln was killed with a sword (which he has) and that the CIA has developed a compound that is capable of quickly dissolving a dead body. By the end of the episode, he finally accepts the truth — aliens are real, they're here, and they're preparing for an invasion. Of course, the show's premise is straight out of a conspiracy nut's repertoire: hostile Aliens Among Us, predicted by secret quatrains of Nostradamus. This conspiracy theory happens to be true in-universe, but, of course, most disbelieve Eddie anyway.
• Good Omens:
  • Though it's not really lingered on, Anathema appears to be one. Not only is she sure that GMOs and nuclear plants are evil, but she's subscribed to a magazine that advocates for many different theories (ranging from aliens really visiting us or Atlantis being real to Tibetans spying on people from tunnels). Adam reads all of her issues and turns into a believer too (with all their claims becoming real as a result of his powers).
  • Shadwell, in his own peculiar way, is also a conspiracy theorist, albeit one more focused on witches and other supernatural phenomena.
• Real Life examples of this trope are frequently given the opportunity to rant by certain programs on The History Channel.
• John Munch was one of these when he appeared in Homicide: Life on the Street. This was also a major aspect of his character when he moved to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, to the point where a shrink accurately concluded, "You could smell a conspiracy at a five-year-old's lemonade stand." At one point he is pretending to be a homeless man and is shouting about random conspiracies. His partner just claims this is what he always says but louder.
  • Actor Richard Belzer is actually a real conspiracy theorist, having not only written some books on the subject, but advocated these views in public appearances.
  • Steve Crosetti was also fixated on the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
  • The episode "Zebras" deals with a schizophrenic man who became a conspiracy theorist after the 9/11 attacks.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia mocks this trope in "Sweet Dee Has A Heart Attack". After working in the mail room for several days, Charlie believes he's uncovered a Corporate Conspiracy involving fake employees and a mysterious figure named Pepe Silvia, tipped off by a Man In Black-esque guy named Barney Barney. It is quickly revealed that Barney Barney actually a stress and caffeine-fueled hallucination and that the conspiracy is completely inside Charlie's head, with the implication that "Pepe Silvia" is just the illiterate Charlie's misinterpretation of the word Pennsylvania written on all of the mail that he's supposed to (and subsequently neglecting to) deliver. Charlie's paranoid antics resurface in a number of later episodes, most notably in "Charlie Catches A Leprechaun" where he is seen fully believing in the existence of leprechauns and a resultant cover-up, leading him to almost torture a dwarf in a leprechaun outfit. This one is explained by Charlie's habit of drinking green paint.
• Just Shoot Me!: Nina is revealed to believe that the moon landing was really a hoax. Maya brings in one of the astronauts involved to tell her otherwise. She's mollified by his outrage at the idea, but then it turns out he believes in even weirder theories.
• In the Law & Order episode "Absentia", a guru on trial for murder claims that the government is framing him ... and also that the government killed John Lennon (this is Very Loosely Based on a True Story).
• Leverage: "Wade Perkins" (Hardison) in "The Three Days of the Hunter Job", complete with a standard-issue Room Full of Crazy. Hilariously, Eliot and Hardison start telling Parker the stuff on there is real, just to mess with her.
• Field Commander Moss of Lexx is an over-the-top parody:
  Moss: Take the 1 from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Split it in half. Take the two halves. Now, attach them to the two zeros. What have you got? 666 Pennsylvania Avenue. Coincidence? I don't think so. There are no coincidences, my friends!
• Frank Lapidus on Lost, who believes the wreckage of flight 815 is a fake. He is of course correct.
  • There's also a hilarious conspiracy theory video in the season 4 DVD extras.
• Dudley Carew in the Midsomer Murders episode "Murder on St. Malley's Day". Amongst his theories was one that Lee Harvey Oswald was in Midsomer two weeks before Kennedy was assassinated.
• Stuart from M.I. High, who has failed that to notice that there is a secret government Elaborate Underground Base beneath his school.
• Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: In the first episode, as Cate is taking a taxi to her disappeared father's apartment in Tokyo, the driver notes how the Japanese government is massively beefing up the country's military defences in preparation for potential kaiju attacks (the series being set one year after the events of Godzilla (2014)). He thinks the kaiju attack in San Francisco was all a hoax made with CGI to profit the military–industrial complex, and tells Cate to check out his podcast where he goes into more detail. Later in the episode, we see that Cate, working as a schoolteacher, was present in San Francisco on G-Day, saw Godzilla with her own eyes, and lost many of her students in the attack.
• Murder One: In episode eleven one of the potential jurors turns out to be convinced that Cross and Avedon are part of a Masonic plot. He takes his own dismissal as further evidence for this, naturally.
• Sebastian Lund from NCIS: New Orleans. According to him, the faked moon landings are the reason why there isn't any decent footage of Bigfoot. Somehow.
• Joe Garrelli from NewsRadio is obsessed with conspiracies, particularly ones involving the government's cover-ups of knowledge about extraterrestrials.
• In New Tricks, Brian Lane turns into one of these if he comes off his anti-depressants; most notably in one episode where the team are investigating the suspicious death of a prominent 1970s trade unionist, Brian — himself a member of the Police Union during his service — becomes convinced that he was spied on then and is being observed now. He's wrong about the latter, but it turns out that the intelligence services did have a file on him back then... which concluded that he was insignificant. He's deeply offended.
• The Night Agent: Peter is hounded by one name Elliot Rome. He believes Peter was behind the Metro bombing, along with his many followers. We see him harassing Peter in a video, while his followers later do this too.
• No Tomorrow: Hank, who believes a Jade Helm conspiracy theory.
• On Orange Is the New Black, Alex thinks one of the new inmates, Lolly, was sent by drug kingpin Kubra to kill her, after Lolly starts following her around. However, it turns out Lolly is just mentally ill and thinks Alex is working for the CIA and spying on her.
• The Plot Against America: Evelyn and Bengelsdorf turn into this near the end of the show to explain what happened, causing disdain or sadness from other people.
• Second Technician Arnold Judas Rimmer has traits of this in the first two seasons of Red Dwarf, where everything odd has a chance of being explained as being aliens. This has ranged from everyone missing days of their memory and two unexplained broken legs, to a new computer, to "that time we used a whole bog roll in one day."
  • It's even Rimmer's entire plotline in the first season episode Waiting For God, as he becomes convinced a pod the ship picked up contains aliens that can replace his hologram body with a new organic one. It's a garbage pod, and everybody else agreed not to tell him.
• Rizzoli & Isles: The main suspect in "Somebody's Watching Me" is Leroy, a conspiracy theorist who believes he is being spied on by aliens.
• Royal Canadian Air Farce had a recurring conspiracy theorist character who liked to share his theories with strangers on the street. According to him, the Kennedys were assassinated by Hitler, George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are brothers, bin Laden is in Canada working at a gas station, and the Chernobyl accident happened because aliens spilled a Slurpee on the control panel.
• Sleeper Cell: Ilija hooks up with a woman like this after he's gone on the run in the wake of the first season's terrorist attack. She believes he's innocent, with both the attack and 9/11 being staged by the government. As a result, she willingly shelters him so Ilija can flee the US.
• Martin Lloyd in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Point of No Return".
  • His case was a rather amusing Deconstruction, as it turns out that all his beliefs were not only correct, but he knew the truth because he himself was an alien from another world who was suffering from a drug-induced amnesia perpetrated by his fellow aliens.
• Star Trek: Voyager had an episode ("The Voyager Conspiracy") where Seven of Nine goes temporarily crazy from information overload and links most of the major events of the series up to that point into a massive Federation conspiracy to capture her, a Borg Drone... this is easily dismissed until you realize that, even though her conclusion about it being all about her was flawed and delusional, several of her premises were, in fact, quite grounded and made for some tantalizingly uncomfortable questions that were completely swept under the rug by the show... One can't help but wonder if there really WAS a conspiracy going on there...
  • Voyager was a long running highly episodic series with numerous writers of various qualities. As such, it included many plot holes, logical inconsistencies and cases of characters getting the Idiot Ball. This makes it a fertile ground for any theory that could go back re-explain past problems.
• Supernatural:
  • Ron Reznick in "Nightshifter", who is convinced that the shapeshifter attacks he's been doing independent research on are caused by "mandroids". His research is sound, he just came to the wrong conclusion.
  • In "Slash Fiction" paranoid whackjob Frank Devereaux doesn't put much stock in magic, but he's sure that "The government's been cloning people for years."
  • In the "Clap Your Hands If You Believe..." episode, Dean and Sam come across several cases in a town where there have been kidnappings, light shows in the sky, and Crop Circles. They run into a group claiming it was aliens. Subverted when it is revealed at least one of the group is a Fairy, who is using the "alien" cover to make sure the Fair Folks kidnappings, light shows, and other effects are not taken seriously.
• Steven Hyde from That '70s Show. For example, he claims that Steven Spielberg directed a fake moon landing for the government - which "is how he got the job for Jaws." Most prominently, however, is his frequent mentioning of the car that runs on water, man.
  Hyde: I'm not a conspiracy nut, okay? My history, shop and gym teachers secretly started that rumor to discredit me.
• Wilson Wilson in Utopia. Through various means, he's erased himself from all government databases and has built a fallout shelter under his house but is still shocked when he accidentally becomes involved in a real Government Conspiracy. Subverted when he performs a Face–Heel Turn and actually joins the conspirators.
• The West Wing: Sam Seaborn has recurring run-ins with a conspiracy theorist of the "there really were aliens at Roswell and the government is covering it up" variety. He got it from his father.
• Mozzie, Neal's criminal contact, on White Collar, is incredibly paranoid and suspicious of the government, which leads to him acting out various Hollywood spy story cliches like meeting on park benches, playing loud music or running water during conversations, using code names, and so on. His antics are treated as ridiculous, but in the show's world, he may have a point.
  • Ironically it's discovered that one of his old fake identities had become a patsy for criminals, so Mozzie accidentally created a conspiracy himself. Mozzie's response?
    Burke: You're a living conspiracy theory.
    Mozzie: See? They do exist.
• The X-Files:
  • Fox Mulder is a heroic conspiracy theorist who is unusual both in almost always being right in his postulations about secret doings and in (usually) being a rational, shrewdly observant investigator who labors to find solid evidence to support his ideas rather than just relying on Wild Mass Guessing. Of course, as the evidence tends to disappear, everyone not "in the know" still thinks he's nuts.
  • The Lone Gunmen are Agent Mulder's geeky friends and conspiracy theorists themselves. In their first episode, one of them tells Mulder that they like to hang out with him because his theories are way crazier than theirs. Like Mulder, it's not really a conspiracy theory if the conspiracy is true.^note Their origin episode took place in Baltimore with Richard Belzer as a weary police officer (heavily implied to be Munch) interrogating them, meaning the Gunmen may have been the inspiration behind Munch's love of conspiracy theories (which Belzer shares, even writing some books on them).
  • The trio of conspiracy theorists Langly, Bayers and Frohike got their own spin-off series, The Lone Gunmen. Ironically, the fact that it was canceled has led to conspiracy theories about why it was canceled. Perhaps it was the March 2001 pilot being about an attempt by a shadowy government conspiracy to crash jet liners into the World Trade Center, which of course has only inspired further theories about how they "anticipated" it somehow.

Music

• "Get In Line" by the Barenaked Ladies provides the page quote. The song was written specifically for the official King of the Hill soundtrack and is meant to serve as sort of an Image Song for Dale Gribble (see entry under Western Animation).
• "Everything You Know Is Wrong" by Chumbawamba is a parody of this trope.
• The song "Stuart" by The Dead Milkmen is either about a conspiracy theorist or a drunkard (or, more likely, both) who has 'interesting' ideas about the relationship between soil erosion and The Homosexual Agenda.
• Diamond Rio's "It's All in Your Head" is about a snake-handling preacher who seems to be one ("We never walked on the moon, Elvis ain't dead / You ain't goin' crazy, it's all in your head").
• "Touch-Tone Telephone" by Lemon Demon is about a fanatical conspiracy theorist frantically trying to get in contact with a radio show host, who he believes is the only other one who understands what he's talking about, so he can explain his theories on air.
• Nautilus Pompilius: In the song "My Brother Cain", Cain wants to save Russia from Freemasons.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic parodies the character type in the second verse of his song "Foil", playing off of the Tinfoil Hat.
• Nick Lutsko's music frequently star a fictionalized version of himself who frequently makes outlandish declarations, such as celebrities staying hot by drinking baby blood, Joe Biden being a criminal obsessed with stealing people's meat, and Donald Trump hiding something under his ass.

Podcasts

• In Alice Isn't Dead, the Character Narrator learns that her missing wife Alice was actively investigating The Conspiracy before her disappearance, gathering information on three mysterious parties: The Cumberland Project, Vector H, and Bay & Creek Shipping. The discovery of her scattered notes prompts the Narrator to involve herself more directly, going so far as to get hired as a long haul trucker by Bay & Creek Shipping, one of the parties concerned, though its clear her interest in the conspiracy itself is generally secondary to its usefulness in locating her missing wife. However, agents of the Conspiracy, including a cannibalistic Humanoid Abomination, don't much care for her meddling...
• Comedy Bang! Bang! has a parody of Jesse Ventura played by James Adomian who's a crazy conspiracy theorist.
• Jessica from Fat, French and Fabulous has multiple theories about the disappearance of Maura Murray, including that she eloped with Bigfoot. "Wake up Sheeple! They've got three children!"
• Parodied in episode six of Mystery Show, when someone tells Starlee that she's just over-thinking things and she takes it as a Suspiciously Specific Denial.
• It Could Happen Here: The show mentions Alex Jones and goes into his conspiracist rants at length, explaining that people like him (especially since he has a massive following) are dangerous rather than just harmless cranks, since he's pushed for violence against people (liberals or the LGBT), he claims are really vicious criminals. Rhetoric like this, Evans believes, could push extremists to act on his words.
• Less is Morgue: Riley is such an extreme conspiracy theorist that their beliefs sometimes border on dangerous, including attempting to tear the face off of one of their Uber drivers because they believed they were a secret hidden reptilian.
• Interestingly inverted in Welcome to Night Vale: In the episode "The Sandstorm", Night Vale resident Steve Carlsburg sends an email to the radio station, claiming that he thinks the sandstorm was engineered by the government. Cecil, the radio broadcaster, scoffs at him...because "of COURSE it was created by the government, the City Council announced that this morning!"
• A Running Gag of Well There's Your Problem is the hosts blaming the industrial accident of the week on a conspiracy and/or a cryptid, especially Mothman. They have also claimed that their podcast is a CIA front, as is every other podcast in existence.

Pro Wrestling

• Paul London and Brian Kendrick are believers in the "Babylonian Gods were really reptilian space aliens who still control humanity" theory, among others. One segment had them watching a television show where Nigel McGuinness turned into one such lizard man after they openly speculated on it.
• Whenever post-Heel–Face Turn Michael Cole suspects that a heel is up to no good, John "Bradshaw" Layfield (who supports most heels) scolds him and calls him this. But when he rants about Jerry Lawler supporting the Occupy Raw Movement, Cole is quick to fire the insult back at him.
• Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian were correct in their suspicion that there was a conspiracy in Ring of Honor against The Knigts Of The Rising Dawn. What they failed to realize was that their fellow Knight, Chris Sabin, was the one conspiring with Alex Shelley to advance the Motor City Machine Guns at their expense. Furthermore, The Knights Of The Rising Dawn were themselves born out of a conspiracy against ROH to ensure talent was rewarded ahead of company loyalty and ensure the defeat of reDRagon.
• After Chris Jericho lost the WCW Cruiserweight Championship to Dean Malenko, Jericho branded himself a "conspiracy victim" in his bid to get the decision overturned (due to Malenko using an Impersonation Gambit to get the match with Jericho) and would spend several weeks accusing the WCW locker room, the company's upper management, and eventually the entire United States government of conspiring to rob him of the Cruiserweight Championship.

Roleplay

• Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
  • Mr. Morrison, the Philosophy teacher at Rogers High, believes that the strange events at the school (such as destruction of property and the appearance of apparitions on the camera feed) are a result of government interference. He's not too far off the mark, but his overt eagerness gets him branded as a kook by the students he tries to talk to about it.
  • Crispin Hayward writes a best-selling YA novel about an urban legend that was, in turn, inspired by a government conspiracy that he wholeheartedly believes in. He makes mention of a 'sizable' internet community that agrees with him, and also brings up other conspiracies that he's convinced have been covered up. This leads the cast to not take him seriously.
  • Josephine is a conspiracy theorist that's portrayed sympathetically, as her paranoid delusions that the government is out to get her, and that she can't trust anyone, are due to a childhood of vicious bullying, during which she was betrayed by someone who she thought was a close friend.
• Mr. Liatsis, a teacher from the V4 pregame of Survival of the Fittest, is commented on as being a notorious conspiracy theorist. Some students have their moments as well.

Tabletop Games

• Blackbirds RPG: The influence of the Allmother - which can be spread with something as innocuous as unwittingly glimpsing one of her servants - causes the afflicted to become increasingly paranoid, convinced that society has been infiltrated by inhuman monsters masquerading as ordinary people. Due to the Allmother's general MO these conspiracy theories are often somewhat accurate, but their paranoia is so obvious that almost no one would believe them anyway.
• Dark•Matter (1999) is filled with conspiracy theories and just downright strange stories and information.
• The Deadlands supplement The Black Circle: Unholy Alliance had a Conspiracy Theorist archetype suitable for use as a player character. From an In-Universe perspective, those who work for the newspaper called the Epitaph, and a lot of people who read it, are seen as this. The reality, of course, is that these people are actually telling the truth (though they still don't know everything), and there really are monsters and magic all over the place now, and there really is a governmental cover-up to try and suppress this truth. To be fair, there's a good reason to cover it up: spreading fear of monsters makes more monsters appear.
• The Inquisitors archetype from Demon: The Descent are a bunch of conspiracy theorists. The problem, given how the God Machine works with its Infrastructures and Occult Matrices, and how they actually worked with such systems before the fall, this may be less conspiracy theory and more Properly Paranoid.
• In the collectible card game Illuminati, one of the groups you can control is the Conspiracy Theorists. They have zero Power (nobody believes them), but they let you hold an extra Plot card... because while they're completely wrong, they do have useful ideas. Another group, Paranoids, gives you protection against everything except Natural Disasters, because their worries are correct...
• Mage: The Awakening does not respect them. There is an Ancient Conspiracy, yes...who do everything in their power to promote conspiracy theorists (especially the Panopticon) since they (a) enforce a cultural meme that La Résistance is pointless when the Seers of the Throne have bitterly learned that it isn't (see: The Pentacle, but especially the Free Council) and (b) tend to think of the good guys as The Illuminati, since if the Pentacle wins, they're going to...change things (for the better, mostly, but most conspiracy theorists are of a reactionary bent). There are fairly positive portrayals of some theorists, but unlike most examples they actually bother to fight back against the evils they see by making the world a better place (indeed, one of the characters for the Silver Ladder is one who, upon being offered to join the conspiracy that promotes cooperation and personal freedom, couldn't wait to sign up).
• The "Flake" archetype in Monster of the Week is this — and depending on the group, they may be hunting monsters alongside people like the "Initiate" (who really does belong to a secret ancient sect), the "Monstrous" (an actual monster notionally on the side of good) or the "Professional" (who's explicitly working for some "Agency" or other that may or may not be government-related), who can also be player characters.
• In the Old World of Darkness Clanbook: Gangrel, there's a Gangrel vampire who's a conspiracy theorist. And indeed, they were common (and often right) in all the OWOD games, especially Mage: The Ascension.
• In Delta Green, you are a part of the Conspiracy. Your job is keeping the Cthulhu Mythos in check as much as possible and keeping the population from knowing about it while working at some other US Government agency. The Conspiracy Theorist is an insanely common thorn in your side; typical MO is to feed them something stupid besides the truth to keep them busy.

Video Games

• One of the Wrath punishments in Afterlife (1996), appropriately named "Illuminatiland," is specifically designed to slowly, methodically, turn every SOUL living in it into one of these. It starts out like a pretty heavenly place until the demons seed the thought that something isn't right, then begin Gaslighting the soul in question with manufactured conspiracies right out the corner of the eyes and co-opting anyone the soul confesses to until the damned have lost their minds five times over.
• There are mentions in some routes of AI: The Somnium Files of a massive conspiracy known as Naixatloz, dead-set on sending a satellite into space with the mission of spreading the Wadjet System, the basis for the game's artificial intelligence, throughout the universe. Iris believes that she has uncovered this truth and become a target of them in doing so. If Date commands Aiba to follow Iris's instructions within her Somnium, it's shown that he has become swallowed up in her delusion as well, and he spends the rest of that route tying everything to Naix, much to Aiba's frustration.
• Steven Heck of Alpha Protocol is a (supposed) CIA Agent/Psychopath who has knowledge of damn near every government conspiracy out there. He's actually right most of the time despite his insanity.
• Bugsnax has Snorpy Fizzlebean. He's incredibly paranoid about the "Grumpinati", blocks out both his and Chandlo's names during his interview (by saying "REDACTED"), puts tracking devices on people by hugging them, has a String Theory board in his house, and accuses his older sibling Floofty of "working for the man".
• Citizens of Earth has the Conspiracy Guy as one of the first characters you recruit. He starts up the plot by informing you that there's something strange about the Moonbucks' Special Blend, which appears to brainwash people. In combat, he can perform an Enemy Scan, talk enemies to death (literally), reveal government secrets to confuse enemies, or perform elemental attacks with a cattle prod, Truth Serum, and a spotlight.
• Since The Conduit is a Conspiracy Kitchen Sink, it's only fitting it has its own Conspiracy Theorist, talk radio host Gordon Wells.
• In The Darkside Detective, Dooley has tendencies in this direction, and runs his own conspiracy blog. Being The Ditz, his conspiracy theories are things like "the moon is fake" (not the moon landings, mind you — the moon itself), "Columbus faked the America landings" (he says there's no evidence America actually exists, and his hometown is actually in a secret location in the Alps), "the government is pumping dihydrogen monoxide into our homes", and "the government is a mass hallucination caused by chemicals put in the water by the government".
• Conspiracy theorists appear in Destroy All Humans!. In the first, they are referred to as "town crazies," and suburban ones are a bit more geared towards conspiracies than others (who are sometimes just plain nuts), even catching onto the plot of the Villain Protagonist. In the second, "The Freak," a California hippy, occasionally has these moments.
• Pretty much every character in Deus Ex, but when one considers that the conspiracies usually prove true only minutes after being first mentioned, and that just one conspiracy is nowhere near enough for this game, it's to be expected.
  • And as an added Genius Bonus for people who follow conspiracy theories, pretty much all the ones in the game are based on real-life conspiracy theories.
  • At one point, you can try explain the conspiracy you're working against to a minor character, who'll react with amusement and think you're a complete nutter.
  • The Prequel, Human Revolution, has Lazarus, a paranoid radio host convinced that FEMA are the foot-soldiers of a fear-mongering One World Order conspiracy group bent on using the augmentation debate to fulfill their nefarious schemes. Anyone who has played the original Deus Ex will be impressed with how much he got right.
• Discworld Noir: Malaclypse, a servitor of Errata, Goddess of Confusion and Misunderstanding. This is a Shout-Out to out world Malaclypse the Younger (a penname for Gregory Hill), the supposed creator of Principia Discordia, which details the worship of Eris, the Goddess of Chaos. A reasonable chunk of his gibberish is actually true, and covers a lot of Discworld (and Discordian) mythology/history.
• Dragon Age II:
  • Cassandra (the Chantry Seeker interrogating Varric) is initially one due to her desperately seeking someone to blame for the Civil War. At first, she's convinced that Hawke and their companions planned the entire thing from the moment they set foot in Kirkwall. Deconstructed when we learn that there isn't a true Big Bad, and like in Real Life, most of the events are simply caused by a combination of coincidence and Grey-and-Gray Morality. Unlike most conspiracy theorists, Cassandra is reasonable and objective enough to accept evidence that contradicts her original view.
  • If Hawke aligns himself/herself with the Templars in the endgame Meredith also becomes this. A combination of her red lyrium sword's corrupting influence and her own Control Freak nature lead Meredith to believe that Hawke is the Big Bad behind Kirkwall's troubles (which naturally makes her The Hero, as it should be).
• Helsdim Rolfsen from Dragon Age: Inquisition DLC "Jaws of Hakkon" is an Avvar weirdo who writes long, convoluted missives concerning sinister plots by anyone from the Tevinters to the aliens from unknown parts of the universe. With proper prerequisites, you can recruit him into the Inquisition, where he will work tirelessly to uncover conspiracies (mostly imaginary, but some quite real) under Leliana's supervision.
• A side quest in Dying Light has the player working for a conspiracy theorist, hunting meteorite fragments that he believes are associated with the cause of the epidemic. In the end, it's revealed that he believed the meteor to have been sent to the Earth by a reptilian race called the Gadoids, and that his theory about the origin of the Harran virus is basically just a tinfoil hat conspiracy.
• Teddy in Dyscourse believes that the plane crash which stranded the main characters on a Deserted Island was the government's way of getting them all in one place so that they can test them for some unspecified reason and that a rainstorm which happens if you help him build an SOS out of driftwood is the result of a government weather machine, among other equally-wacko things.
• A side quest in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion concerns a wood elf named Glarthir in Skingrad who is convinced that three of his fellow townspeople are spying on him, and must be part of some nefarious conspiracy against him. He asks you to follow each of them for a full day and report back any suspicious behaviour. None of them are spying on him at all, nor do they do anything else suspicious. However, if you tell him this, rather than putting his mind at ease, he decides that there's no way they're all innocent, so for you to say that they are can only mean you're in on the conspiracy, and he attacks you. If you investigate his house, there's lots of notes that indicate that he's been spying on them and the PC for a while. Also, from the second he first sees you in Skingrad, he follows you everywhere so there's no escaping his quest unless you run everywhere you go. He even follows you into the Mage's guild and your house, if you've bought the one in Skingrad.
• No-Bark is Novac's town crazy in Fallout: New Vegas. He believes a rash of feral ghoul attacks coming from an abandoned rocket factory are the work of "Ghosts! Commie ghosts that don't know they're dead!" Their objective: fly to the moon, paint it pink and stick Lenin's face on it. Although, similar to some other of his crazy stories, he's partially right: the sentient ghouls inside the factory really want to fix the rockets and fly away to a place they call "The Far Beyond".
  • Ulysses can also be seen as one, developing an obsession with symbols and patterns and hidden meanings, and kicking off much of the plot simply because he can't accept that the destruction of his home in The Divide was an unfortunate accident and nothing more.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • The Truth from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, though revealed to be much more insightful than he appears.
  • Parodied in the expansion packs for Grand Theft Auto IV, which include a radio show called Conspire hosted by "John Smith", a parody of Alex Jones and similar right-wing/libertarian conspiracy theorists. "John" entertains, and often voices, every single crazy conspiracy theory and bit of paranoia and racism his listeners phone in with.
  • Likewise in Grand Theft Auto V, there's Nervous Ron's show on Blaine County Talk Radio, which is less Alex Jones and more The X-Files with a bit of The Matrix. His main topics included the Annunaki (lizard people), The Illuminati, and how banks make cyberspace clones of you that you have to level up. Ironically, his reflexive skepticism of the "official story" makes him an easy dupe for a slick energy-industry shill who comes on his show to claim that Global Warming is a hoax. Meanwhile, Ron's other friend Chef buys into Ron's "lizard people" theories, Lester believes in the Illuminati, and Trevor Philips believes in both.
• Guild Wars 2: A minor NPC in Lion's Arch, "Wild-Eye Miller", offers several conspiracy theories as part of the area's ambient dialogue. One of them (Evon Gnashblade's "twin brother") was written as a Developer's Saving Throw after a glitch put Evon in two different outfits and two different areas at the same time. The others are straight-up conspiracy theories, from every single playable race being dragon minions to how Mai Trin escaped justice after Scarlet Briar's attack on the city.
• Zeke is one of these in inFAMOUS. This clearly seen in his pad with Big Oil posters and often connecting something with a government conspiracy.
• The Captain of the Gourd from Kingdom of Loathing seems to think that tin cans, spiders, and/or goblins are conspiring against him and his precious gourd, and offers a side quest where he gives you a XP-granting item in exchange for can lids, spider webs, or Knob goblin fire crackers (depending on your main stat). According to the Captain's jar of psychoses zone, the Gourd whispers nonsensical conspiracy theories to him.
• Not for Broadcast: Alan James starts out as a crackpot who seems convinced the Advance party is going to do all sorts of horrible things now that they're in power, based largely on Insane Troll Logic. Not only is he proven right, but he ends up becoming the head of the main resistance movement against Advance, Disrupt.
• A minor example occurs in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, if you play the male character. The trainer you meet at the Ferris Wheel during winter months (named Beauty December) tells you that "They" are out to get her because she has some secret that they want kept secret. She does battle you and ride the Ferris Wheel with you, but then warns you to stay away, saying "They" might get you too. (Of course, this could well be a subversion; there's no way of knowing whether she's paranoid or this is the truth.)
• Boyd in Psychonauts invented the Milkman Conspiracy. And you get to dive into his mind...
• Bosco from the Telltale Sam & Max: Freelance Police games. Oddly enough, he's usually right!
• Dave Screed of The Secret World, edits a magazine for like-minded theorists and is currently hiding in a noisy laundromat for fear of being spied on by the Illuminati; among other things, he believes that they replaced his girlfriend with an android. It's later revealed that he's actually serving as an Unwitting Pawn of the very people he's trying to expose: the Illuminati periodically feed conspiracy theorists like Screed with erroneous information to keep them producing nonsense conspiracy theories, and then leak the truth by the same method, ensuring that it remains lost amidst the flood of bullshit. Also, despite his paranoia, Screed is completely oblivious to the fact that the player character is actually an agent of one of the secret societies he fears.
• Otis Monday of Stubbs the Zombie, who mistakenly identifies a zombie invasion as a combined communist/Illuminati/New World Order/Nazi strike on his homeland.
• Gomez, one of Deb of Night's regulars in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, comes up with increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories throughout the game... then in the final chapter, he suddenly starts citing the cosmology of the Old World of Darkness to the letter. The problem is: if that last "theory" actually precisely describes the very setting of the game, then what about the others?
• XCOM: Chimera Squad: Floyd Tesseract is a radio host who constantly rants about conspiracies and advises his listeners to question all authority figures, including himself. Of course, he does genuinely live in a world where aliens controlled the population for decades using propaganda and psychic powers—and he was one of them. Beneath all the yelling and self-contradictory theories, he just wants to atone for helping to enslave entire species.
• The Prepper in ZombiU has a lot to say about the government's role in keeping the public ignorant about John Dee's prophecy and the zombie outbreak it foretold. He also claims that the Queen is a Reptilian, though he may have been joking about that one.

Visual Novels

• Katawa Shoujo has Kenji Setou, the main character's Bromantic Foil, who believes that Yamaku Academy is a forward staging base for a vast feminist conspiracy plotting to take over the world. The game being a romantic Visual Novel, this is (mostly, thus far) Played for Laughs in the extreme.
• Steins;Gate has the main hero, Rintaro Okabe, who believes that there is a mysterious "Organization" that rules over humanity from the shadows, and that he is one of the few fighting against it. Naturally, over the course of the story he happens to stumble upon an actual global conspiracy (by SERN, the research firm that built the LHC, of all people) to use Time Travel to enslave the rest of the human race.

Web Animation

• Etra chan saw it!: Hiiragi thinks his sister's crime for stealing Tsutsuji's money is a government conspiracy to make her break up with him, Tsutsuji dismisses his pathetic claim as an alien language.
• Hello Kitty and Friends Supercute Adventures: Kuromi would love to prove the existence of ghosts, UFOs, and other assorted oddities, though she insists on "healthy skepticism".

Webcomics

• Blood is Mine: Grizwald is a seemingly crazy conspiracy nut who wears a Tinfoil Hat and lives in an empty arcade building, except he is completely right on every single occasion (yes, even about tinfoil hats protecting from psychic attacks). He has an incredible wealth of knowledge and he often provides important information to the protagonist and her team.
• C-Section Comics comic "Sorting Hat": The Sorting Hat reads various conspiracy theories from the brain of the child being tested (jet fuel can melt steel beams, vaccine toxins, and something about Bill Gates), to McGonagall's horror. He is eventually sorted into House Trutherdor.
• In El Goonish Shive, a swarm of conspiracy theorists came to Moperville after a supernatural being spontaneously appeared on a news broadcast. Unusually, the conspiracy theorists are portrayed as crazy even though there really is a conspiracy.
• Jessica of Freakwatch grew up with an uncle who was a huge fan of horror and mystery, and taught her to solve puzzles and cyphers of all sorts. The end result, of course, is she tends to read into things more than most people, though given the peculiar circumstances of her uncle's death, perhaps her paranoia is warranted.
• Homestuck: Roxy is considered one by her friends (mostly Jane) in-universe. Given that her theories include "Betty Crocker is an alien sea witch overlord", they're probably justified for having that opinion. Actually, she's got more or less the full story and is probably the only protaganist to get close to the full story behind BC. And it turns out that this is because she lives hundreds of years in Jane's future, where the world was already conquered and ravaged by BC.
• Leaving the Cradle: Dan is this towards the government. His reasoning for taking the unconscious alien away from the crash site is that the military shot down the shuttle on the government's orders, they're going to take the creature to a secret laboratory to vivisect it, and they're going to search the area for witnesses and evidence. Although he's partially correct about the military being involved and completely right about them looking for witnesses, it's clear that his distrust of them is pretty extreme to say the least.
• In The Order of the Stick Miko made huge leaps in logic and crafted a huge conspiracy pinning the blame for a horrible situation that she created on Roy and company. It's ultimately the main reason she couldn't earn redemption — she just couldn't accept that anything was her fault.
• In Rogue Diamond Twilight fits this trope to a T, to the point where her entire ROOM is covered in Tinfoil !
• In Rooster Teeth Comics Gus is portrayed as one of these. Occasionally, he's proved right, such as his theory about the cantaloupe industry trying to discredit the watermelon industry. Ironically, he actually does believe the moon landings happened. The Vikings just beat America to it.
• Malcolm of Sam & Fuzzy does this both in story and in the Fourth-Wall Mail Slot.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
  • How to be a Conspiracy Theorist. The sample reasoning mostly consists of really bad puns substituting for connections between things.
  • In "Human 3," aliens capture a sample human and, because of what he says because he's a Conspiracy Theorist, decide that humans aren't a threat and don't need to be annihiliated after all.
• Sleepless Domain: Rue Bahia is an active magical girl who highly distrusts the government, and refuses to register with the Board of Magical Girls in order to stay "off the grid." She's critical of the government's attitude towards magical girls in general; she criticizes the benefits that the government offers to entice girls to register, and she denounces the Celebrity Superhero aspect of magical girl culture as propaganda to downplay the life-threatening work they do. She even goes as far as claiming that the government knows what (if anything) exists on the other side of the Great Barrier, but is covering it up to put off dealing with whatever the answer is.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: The Denmark segment of the prologue has one pointing out the fact that nothing is known of the Patient Zero group, and uses this as a basis for suspecting an Apocalyptic Gag Order about the Rash disease's seriousness. She turns out to be right in the following segment, that has an official newcast admit what she suspected two days earlier.
• Tales from the Pit briefly features a Magic: The Gathering player who believes the New Phyrexia expansion is a hoax.
• Unsounded: There's a wild-haired fellow in Mulimar who has drawn up his ideas on a wall that he stands before while proclaiming the Aldish eat their "lesser breeds" for immortality, and that they're pushing south because they're running out and need more victims. Even with the dislike of the Aldish everyone dismisses him as crazy.

Web Original

• Above Top Secret is the Wretched Hive of conspiracy message boards. ATS has actually played a role in some notable conspiracy theories. Someone who called himself John Titor, posted on the site in 2000, claimed to have traveled back in time from 2036. His predictions of the USA falling to civil war and breaking into 5 subnations was memetic for a while, but disproven by 2004. Some of the first "no planes" 9/11 theories appeared on this site. Many ATS users suspected that the "no planes" theory was itself a conspiracy to make truthers proposing more rational theories look crazy by association.
• Aegeroth: A Checkered History: It is hinted at that the guardsman Davi might be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, judging from the scolding he says he received from the chief of police.
• Binder of Shame: Collateral Darren insists, among other things, that employers only insist on being sent resumes as part of a conspiracy to make more money for paper manufacturers, because at the interview you have to write down all the same information on a job application.
• Mercilessly mocked in the CollegeHumor video Deceptive Deceptions. Truly something to behold: among the things "uncovered" as part of a massive conspiracy embracing all of humanity in this "truthumentary", they include the shooting of Tupac Shakur, Dan Aykroyd's role in Caddyshack II and Nothing but Trouble, Paul McCartney's replacement by a doppelgänger, Helter Skelter possessing Charles Manson with the spirit of the Anti-Christ, Adolf Hitler actually being "a cyberganic demon" created by Nazi scientists, NASA faking the space landings, the John F. Kennedy assassination, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dick Cheney, Nabisco, AOL, CITGO, Atkins, Adidas, the New York Knicks, Hooters, and Google. And the identity of the secret cabal that is more powerful than the American government, the Freemasons, and The Illuminati? The College Humor staff.
• Illuminati and Ancient Astronauts are common themes in Doctor Steel's songs and web videos, though perhaps just for flavor. (Or are they...?)
• An orphaned webseries called The eX-Files from South Africa (a parody of The X-Files and, to a degree, Californication) milks this archetype for all that its worth. The Agent Mulder Expy (creatively called Hound Moulder) is in conspiracy theorist rehab at 'The Umberco Centre for Secular Theodicy' with a whole bunch of other conspiracy theorists, each with their own crazy theory. During sessions with a psychiatrist Moulder shares several of his conspiracy theories involving extra-terrestrials, Elvis Presley and a particularly nutty one involving Ralph and Joseph Fiennes.
• Kentucky Fried Politics:
  • A man aptly nicknamed "Conspiracy Joe" is frequently depicted as a guest on a political radio talk show, citing long lists of ridiculous conspiracy theories regarding just about any subject. For example, after Pol Pot dies, Joe claims that he and Colonel Sanders were actually the same person in some bizarre False Flag Operation, and after the assassination of President Lee Iacocca, he lists dozens of suspects, each more nonsensical than the last.
  • Later entries feature chat conversations taken from a conspiracy website discussing everything from government conspiracies to subliminal communist messages in The SpongeBob Zone (this timeline's version of SpongeBob SquarePants).
• Miniminuteman regularly debunks conspiracy theories regarding historical artifacts, and on one occasion created an entire video dedicated to refuting one particular conspiracy theorist who thinks geographic features—natural mountains—are melted buildings and proof that ancient Egyptians colonized North America.
• MonteFjanton: "Mystikhörnan" follows middle-aged conspiracy theorist Morgan Månstråle and his friend Kenneth Hyvel (and Leffe, Morgan's landlord, who isn't quite as convinced) as they try to prove all sorts of conspiracies, focusing especially on the reptilians. It is never quite clear if the series does take place in a Conspiracy Kitchen Sink or if it's all in the main characters' heads and by the finale of season 2, all the plot holes that arose from contradicting theories manifest into a physical plot hole that the protagonists get sucked into, taking them out of the Show Within a Show.
• Downplayed and lampshaded by The Nostalgia Critic when he believes the Spider-Man movie cut out a World Trade Center scene as to not offend anyone after 9/11.
• YouTube personality The Real Weekly News made a video called "HuluTube: Phasing You Out of YouTube." In this video, he states that the (at the time) recently added "Shows" tab on YouTube's front page was a grand conspiracy by companies like Burger King and Disney (seriously, those were his two big examples) to get all the normal content creators off of YouTube. Mentions of tin foil hats were pretty common from critics of the video.
• Chris, the deuteragonist of Shea Scientific Films, is a downplayed one, having an apparent suspicion of the government in general, a belief in more plausible things like secret aerospace projects, but an unwillingness to accept more outlandish claims without good evidence.
• Talib Al-Jarrah, a peacekeeper in Six Chances is this. He believes bubble blowers are weapons of mass destruction, styrofoam is used for mind control, and that there is an Organization out there that is controlling everything and that is out to get him because he knows that.
• SCP-1862 is an adherent to the "fluoridated water is poison" theory, which is ironic considering his body's organs are now made entirely out of various fluorine compounds.
  • Parawatch is an in-universe online forum dedicated to conspiracies and the paranormal. While the setting is legitimately overflowing with the abnormal and powerful top-secret agencies trying to hide the anomalous from the public, users of said site tend to be completely out of the loop and have totally off-base theories. The Foundation monitors it just in case some legitimate sensitive material slips through, but for the most part it chooses to leave Parawatch alone; wild conspiracy theories like theirs serve as an effective disinformation campaign.
• Seinfeld - "The Twin Towers": Arthur, one of Kramer's kooks, believes that 9/11 was an inside job. Kramer says later that he last saw Arthur get tossed into a van by some Men In Black.
• Slimecicle Cinematic Universe: In "We Spent 100 Days in a Hardcore Minecraft Apocalypse", Ronald Boo (played by Ranboo) seems to believe that the zombie apocalypse is staged and that all the zombies are (highly trained) paid actors.
• In WarpZone Project, where the Masquerade can be summed up as Comic Books Are Real meets Weirdness Censor, Edouard knows that something is going on. However, when he actually runs into well-known super-villains, he tends to assume that they are government agents dressed up as fictional characters to throw people off guard instead of considering the possibility that they could be real life comic book characters, even when they use their powers right in front of him. He gets even more confused when he starts developping super strength, the person sent to mentor him gets killed by the villains on which he was spying and he realizes one of his good friends has repeatedly used the weirdness censor on him before this within the same day.
• According to a tweet from the titular Muse from the Twitter blog Worst Muse, everything is either a conspiracy or a Contrived Coincidence. No middle grounds.
  "Commit to a motif: everything is conspiracy, or everything is coincidence."

Western Animation

• Big City Greens has Andromeda, Tilly’s friend. She believes in all sorts of supernatural elements, such as aliens and lizard people. She even thinks that Officer Keys is an alien in disguise.
• Huey Freeman from The Boondocks believes that that there's a Government Conspiracy against black people from, you guessed it, the white man. (Like the comic strip examples above, he takes it very much to extremes.)
• Alex from Close Enough.
  Alex: (dressed only in his underwear surrounded by conspiracy theory boards) Quiet! I'm this close to connecting Garfield... to Jesus.
  Emily: [picking up a jug of yellow liquid] Are you drinking moonshine?
  Alex: That's disgusting! That's my urine.
• Numbuh One from Codename: Kids Next Door. Considering the world he lives in, he more often than not is Properly Paranoid. One episode had him theorizing that Numbuh 5's older sister Cree's bras were, in reality, adult combat armor. Cree and Abigail both mocked him for the remainder of the episode until he left her home. And then it turned out they really were combat armor...
• Family Guy: In one episode, Adam West spends $150,000 of taxpayer money to discover why his plants absorb the water he pours them.
• Ferret from Ferret And Parrot, who gets all of his information from old tabloids that are used to line the floor of his cage.
• Freezbone from Freefonix. Everything is either a conspiracy, or aliens.
• Futurama:
  • Parodied when the cast travel back in time to 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, inspiring an actual conspiracy. The Area 51 base brings President Harry Truman and a conspiracy nut no-one will believe. Inexplicably, the photographs the nut takes of actual evidence (such as Truman himself being on the base, the Planet Express spaceship right above him) turn out looking like real-life "evidence" of UFO lights and the Loch Ness Monster, respectively.
  • "Decision 3012" spends the entire episode satirizing the Obama "birthers", as a presidential nominee faces accusations about not being a "true" citizen because of a missing "Earth certificate".
• Matt Bluestone from Gargoyles, thanks to his obsession with the Illuminati (which actually does exist in the show's universe).
• Dipper Pines from Gravity Falls is this mixed with properly paranoid due to the town he is residing in. It's implied, however, that arriving in Gravity Falls, was not the start of his interest in conspiracy theories, merely the beginning of his ever being right about them.
• The Question from Justice League Unlimited. "There was a magic bullet! It was forged by Illuminati mystics to prevent us from learning the truth!" However he is also played oddly positively for a conspiracy theorist, as while his tendency to connect everything to a single overarching conspiracy (supposedly dating back at least to Ancient Egypt, and secretly controlling the world ever since) is shown to be insane, it also allows him to see the connections to the real conspiracies. He's even called the League's "Data Guy" and is a case of someone being a Properly Paranoid Cloudcuckoolander, to the point that Batman of all people admits he's "wound a little tight." The rest of the JL can only give Batman dropped jaws. Also, the tips at the end of shoelaces are called aglets. Their true purpose is SINISTER. And Batman has said in the show that The Question is a better detective than him. Batman only considers rational possibilities when he investigates things. In his intro in the animation, The Question's room aboard Watchtower is shown, with a posterboard showing an elaborate conspiracy that the Girl Scouts are behind Crop Circles, that the government is using boy bands to control the public, and that they are part of a single grand conspiracy with the aglets and the magic bullet. He's convinced that this all ties together somehow, but admits to not having figured out how.
  Green Arrow: This whole trip might just prove the kid shouldn't eat nachos before bed.
  Question: Peanut butter sandwiches.
  Supergirl: How did y- What, do you go through my trash?
  Question: Please... I go through everyone's trash.
• Kamp Koral: One of the original characters, Harvey. He's quick to attribute aliens as the cause of anything slightly odd, partly due to his heavy interest in comics and science fiction. "Gimme a News Break" mainly focuses on him and Perch reporting news, while Harvey thinks everything is due to Martians. In "Wise Kraken", when everyone is supposed to go on stage to do stand-up comedy and tell jokes, Harvey rambles about aliens and has to be pulled off multiple times.
• Kim Possible:
  • Ron Stoppable is like this at times. Many of his beliefs (such as the bad guys stealing Christmas and corn dogs) are proven incorrect. However, he has been right on a few occasions, such as claiming that the lake at Camp Wannaweep is dangerous or that Lord Monty Fiske (later known as Monkey Fist) is, as he put it, "bad road". In the episode where Shego is temporarily turned good, he shows a bizarre mix of skepticism and credulity:
    Kim: (elbowing Ron) Ron, that's Shego!
    Ron: Nah, it's not Shego, it's Miss Go — see, it says so on the board.
    Kim: Putting something on the board doesn't make it true!
    Ron: Oh, sure, y'know, when I said that in 20th Century History, I got sent to the office!
    Kim: The moon landing wasn't faked in the Arizona desert, Ron!
  • In one episode, it turns out that all the stories about Area 51 are true, leaked by the government so that people will think they're just wild conspiracy theories.
• Dale Gribble on King of the Hill. A believer in every conspiracy theory known, yet unable to discover that his wife had been cheating on him. And when he finally realizes that the only time she could've gotten pregnant was during the time John Redcorn was visiting while he was away, he comes to the logical conclusion. His son was conceived when aliens artificially inseminated his wife! He comes to that same conclusion in a later episode when a family moves into the neighborhood, and they have a daughter who resembles Joseph and was born at about the same time as him.
  • He apparently became a Conspiracy Theorist after something in the report on JFK's assassination didn't add up for him. Then he rereads it and discovers he got that particular detail wrong. With the correct detail in place, the whole thing "makes complete and perfect sense", leading him to abandon this status... for the episode.
• Tigress is shown to be this in an episode of Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, "Ladies of the Shade". Monkey comments on this.
  Tigress: I don't trust them.
  Monkey: You don't trust anyone! Not even the mailman, and he's been coming here for thirty years.
  Tigress: Planning something for thirty years!
• Reigh in Lost in Oz, who even had a big board of evidence to track the magic shortage.
• Molly of Denali; In "Mystery in the Night Sky," Montey Cribbits, the "Alien Detective," claims to have seen aliens, believes that aliens built the Taj Mahal, and charges fans to join his club for $19.95.
• In My Adventures with Superman, Superman's Best Friend Jimmy Olsen believes that aliens, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster are real, and has a Youtube channel talking about these theories. As he lives in The DCU, he experiences a lot of The Cuckoolander Was Right. He's not just guessing either; he figured out Clark wasn't human from day one after seeing him accidentally break a door handle in half, but kept quiet out of respect for his privacy.
• My Goldfish is Evil: Scoop believes in many bizarre stories, which makes him the only adult Beanie can always count on to help him thwart Admiral Bubbles (even if he also doesn't believe the goldfish is behind any of the show's weird happenings).
• The Owl House has a minor character named Tiny Nose, who was in jail for this in the first episode. The show also later introduces a far more serious example in Jacob Hopkins, a minor human villain who caught a glimpse of Eda in her owl beast form and became obsessed with demons and witches. His actual knowledge of the subject is a blend of some facts he managed to figure out on his own, combined with an enormous amount of nonsense he got from Mewtube. The dangerous part is that he is so deep into his own wild theories that he refuses to listen to anything else, and nearly disects an entirely benevolent, sapient and capable-of-speech demon under the assumption that it's malevolent.
• Fred on A Pup Named Scooby-Doo is often babbling about Red Herring (his nemesis), aliens, Mole Men and other monsters. It doesn't help that his uncle runs a tabloid paper that churns out this stuff.
• Sid, a crazy guy living in Roswell in Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends, but he's really Obfuscating Stupidity. He's a former Alliance operative and an alien invader.
• Bart Simpson becomes one of these (and converts most of the other kids in Springfield) in The Simpsons episode "Grandpa vs. Sexual Inadequacy". And again, due to the effects of a Ritalin Expy, in "Brother's Little Helper". This time, he's right.
• Dooper from Slacker Cats. He has a different theory each episode.
• Sticks the Badger from Sonic Boom is smart, but also very paranoid and loopy, and not too fond of the government. Living by herself has given her some extremely backwards ideas on how the world works. Chief among them being that everything is a massive conspiracy, and the government is out to get her. Citing just one example is this quote from the episode, "The Curse of the Cross-eyed Moose":
  Sticks: Crossin' paths with a cross-eyed moose brings a curse on the moose-crosser and the non-moose-crossed friends. DON'T YOU PEOPLE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT SCIENCE?!
• Steven Universe has Ronaldo Fryman, Peedee's older brother. He has a blog detailing the oddities around town and thinks the government is ruled by snake people. After the events of "Keep Beach City Weird", Ronaldo changes his theory to a surprisingly accurate one about "polymorphic sentient rocks" and "the Diamond Authority" which he claims wants to hollow out the Earth. Many fans have noticed he seems to be The Cassandra and have made theories based on things he has said.
• In Star Trek: Lower Decks, Ensign Mariner runs into Lt. Levy while trying to run away from other crewmembers trying to earn a favor for her towards the captain. It's revealed that he believes the Battle of Wolf 359 was an inside job^note To be fair, the Borg did assimilate Captain Picard..., that Changelings aren't real and the Dominion War never happened. This is later Deconstructed in the season 4 episode "Caves" where he annoys Boimler with tales about the Vendorians and, when his paranoia leads to him destroying a vehicle that could get them out of there, Boimler finally blows up at him. And while he was right about the Vendorians, his paranoia has made him something of an outcast.
• Members of "Humans Against The Extraterrestials" (from the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon) believed that the aliens which had recently invaded Earth had left behind agents to infiltrate the planet, and were willing to blow up Manhattan in order to exterminate them.
• Harry Bolye's neighbor on Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, Ralph Kane, thinks the Commies are on the move in our country. He has a grass roots squadron of neighborhood citizens at the ready to ward off the Red foe...wherever they are.

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Remember, tin-foil hats preventing mind control is merely a lie cooked up by Reynolds Corporation in order to sell more tin-foil and fund the New World Order. But you didn't hear it from me.

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