“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

– Morpheus, in The Matrix

Conspiracy theories have long existed and until recently were considered as relatively inconsequential theories held locally or privately by disparate groups or individuals. However, in recent decades, advancements in telecommunication technologies, particularly the advent of the internet and social media– rabbit holes and echo chambers– “have enabled faster communication about and dissemination of conspiratorial narratives” (Mahl et al., 2023: 1782). Consequently, these narratives have become autopoietic, widespread and entangled in identity politics. 

But what are conspiracy theories?
Conspiracy theories are not conspiracies, neither are they mere suspicions of conspiracy. Cartels, Big tobacco, Watergate, the Volkswagen emissions scandal, MK-Ultra program, and Post Office Horizon cover-up– these conspiracies actually happened. They are well documented and publicly known. Conspiracy theories, however, are obstinately believed yet riddled with fallacies. They are poorly informed, often unfalsifiable, and founded upon cherry-picked evidence, pseudoscience or patent lies. 

A common metanarrative pushed by conspiracy theorists suggests that a secretive and nefarious, exclusive group of powerful conspirators are largely responsible for the course of human history, the plight, oppression and control of the masses. Further, this ‘cabal’ is not simply conspiring to cause us future harm but “are already committing horrific deeds to innocents and subvert the true order of things” (Dyrendal and Jolley, 2020: 2). According to Prooijen and Douglas (2018), these theories tend to be four-dimensional in character. They are:

1. consequential – they “impact on important life dimensions such as health, interpersonal relationships, and safety”; 
   
   
2. universal – they reflect and bloat a natural human “tendency to be suspicious of the possibility that others are forming conspiracies against one and one’s group”;
   
   
3. emotional – they are grounded in “emotional and intuitive” rather than “controlled, analytic” mental processes, and are highly correlated with anxiety; and
   
   
4. social – they “reflect the basic structure of intergroup conflict” and “flourish among members of groups who are involved in mutual conflict.”
   

So, what relevance do conspiracy theories have to education?
Often conspiracy theories are openly racist or have prejudicial undertones (Hayward and Gronland, 2021: 7), singling out particular socioethnic groups as the source of some other group’s plight or of all society’s ills (Dyrendal and Jolley, 2020: 3). Further, given their identity-protective function, conspiracy theories can increase political polarization and provide fertile, albeit sophistic, ground for culture warring, which can have real-world impacts. Indeed, “[t]he last few years have seen an increased mobilisation of conspiracy believers from the online world to the real world, ranging from relatively law-abiding anti-lockdown protests through to the violent storming of the Capitol” (Hayward and Gronland, 2021: 3).

In educational settings, students who cite conspiracy theories often do so in jest or to “disrupt class, express outsider status, and seek attention” (Dyrendal and Jolley, 2020: 4). Fortunately, however, students rarely appear to show little more than a passing interest. Nonetheless, “conspiracy thinking starts to develop around the age of 14 and may even peak in late adolescents” (Hayward and Gronland, 2021: 4). So, given their potentially serious consequences and in light of official guidance regarding SMSC development and the protection of ‘fundamental British Values’, teachers in the UK have a statutory responsibility to appropriately negate conspiratorial narratives. Hence, to demonstrate the above and help teachers to identify conspiratorial themes in schools, a variety of trending conspiracy theories are summarized below.

Eurabian Great Replacement Theory
Renaud Camus’ (2011) islamophobic ‘Great Replacement’ theory– a theory which has been widely debunked, albeit adopted by white European far-right nationalists– claims that Western elites are furtively and systematically attempting to replace white European populations with Muslim or African immigrants (Hayward and Gronland, 2021). ‘Eurabian’ iterations of this theory posit that Europe is being discreetly arabized. This idea is strongly associated with other xenophobic and anti-semitic ideas such as ‘race suicide’ (Bracke and Aguilar, 2023), ‘genocide by substitution’ or ‘white erasure’ (Feola, 2020) which invariably claim that white, Anglo-Saxon societies are ethnically and culturally degrading due to lower birth rates, interracial mixing and immigration. 

Climate Change Denial 
In 2020, a YouGov survey reported that 9% of Brits, 27% of US Americans, and 22% of all participants globally, believed that global heating is either a hoax or a purposeful, sinister plot by global elites and scientists to establish a ‘New World Order’ (Biddlestone et al, 2022). Others claim it is “a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese” (Prooijen and Douglas, 2018: 897). Evidently, climate change denial functionally discredits the scientific consensus on the issue and undermines green and sustainability agendas. 

The DEW Wildfire Conspiracy
Apparently ‘directed energy weapons’ (DEWs), or space-based military-grade lasers such as Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defence system, are being used by conspirators– possibly the State of Israel, the Rothschild family, global technocratic elites, or western environmentalists– seeking to start wildfires for the purposes of land and population management and/or to push climate change action up the political agenda (West, 2021). 

Flat Earth Theories
Similarly, according to ‘flat-earthers’, the Earth is flat rather than spherical and “[i]mages taken of the earth from space as well as other evidence of the Earth being round are part of an elaborate hoax orchestrated by the world’s governments and scientists” (Hanley et al, 2023) to suppress politically or religiously significant information and maintain control. 

QAnon
Originating on the online forum 4chan, this far-right movement centers around the posts of ‘Q’, a purportedly anonymous high-level US government insider. Building upon the online ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory, which claimed that Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign coordinator, John Podesta, were running a child trafficking syndicate out of a pizzeria in Washington DC, ‘Q’ alluded to having further intel on a secret cabal of satanic, pedophilic child trafficking elites and communists (Garry et al, 2021). QAnon followers believe that US President Donald Trump is secretly working to dismantle this ‘deep state’ network. Conversely, there is a general consensus among outsiders that QAnon was a major cause of the 2021 Capital insurrection (Gatehouse, 2024).

Medical Genocide Theories
Some African Americans believe that contraceptives are an instrument for ‘Black genocide’ (VanProoijen and Douglas, 2018). Relatedly, in South Africa, some believe that “HIV was deliberately created by humans in the laboratory, and that the pharmaceutical industry promotes the ‘HIV hypothesis’ to sell expensive yet harmful antiretroviral drugs.” Believers of this particular theory also commonly believe that contraceptives, especially condoms, cause AIDS. 

Anti-Vax
In a similar vein, ‘anti-vaxers’ claim that vaccinations have a variety of intentionally nefarious effects, such as causing autism in children. According to this theory, pharmaceutical companies knowingly profit from the increased demand for pharmaceuticals. Anti-vax theories have famously been propagated by a variety of high-profile figures, recently including the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr (Gatehouse, 2025) and Piers Corbyn, the brother of former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Holocaust Denial
Holocaust denialists reject or downplay all physical and testimonial evidence for the Holocaust, claiming that politically or financially motivated Zionists fabricated or exaggerated history, or deny that Hitler spearheaded a genocide against the Jews. According to the latter view, only a few thousand Jews died in Nazi concentration camps from disease (Lipstadt, 2012). Deniers often claim that Nazi gas chambers are an elaborate Zionist propaganda exercise and such ideas have been promoted by prominent politicians and writers, such as Jean Marie Le Pen in France and David Irving in England. 

How can teachers mitigate the spread of conspiratorial narratives in schools?
As Hayward and Gronland (2021: 7) state, “[r]epeating disinformation is spreading disinformation.” So, students who disruptively make conspiratorial claims should, as a rule of thumb, be dealt with discreetly and delicately. Equally, teachers should avoid abruptly closing down conspiracy talk since this could negatively affect the student-teacher rapport, negate attempts to create safe and inclusive learning environments or, worse, be interpreted as proof of the conspiracy whereby the student misidentifies the teacher as co-conspirator. Hayward and Gronland (2021: 8) recommend that teachers take an approach aimed at mitigating disruption whilst maintaining lesson flow and minimizing the risk of ostracising the student: “acknowledge it, park it, and move on.”

When it comes to formally addressing conspiratorial narratives via, for example, Personal Development sessions, a variety of methodologies are advised:

• Encourage and model critical thinking and scepticism as well as the use of reliable fact checkers;
  
  
• Cultivate critical media literacy, so that students critically consider the affiliations, interests and aims of media outlets, platforms and profiles;
  
  
• ‘inoculate’ (Dyrendal and Jolley, 2020) students against conspiratorial thinking through the systematic process of (i) warning them about the sociopolitical functions of conspiracy narratives and their espousers’ aims, (ii) reality checking the histories, science and themes of these narratives against the academic consensus, and (iii) summarising the theories for students to personally critique; and
  
  
• Increase fallacy awareness by, for example, didactically informing students on fallacies commonly used online by low-grade media outlets and extremists. A list of common fallacies has been provided below, to aid teachers with this.
  
  

Fallacy Name	Fallacy Description
Straw Man	Misrepresenting or oversimplifying an argument to make it easier to attack
Ad Hominem	Attacking the person marking the argument rather than the argument itself
Bandwagoning	Claiming something is true or valid because many people believe it
Blowfishing	Exaggerating something to make it appear more significant than it really is
Dead Cat	Introducing an irrelevant or outrageous topic or story to divert attention from another issue
False Dichotomy	Presenting two options as the only possibilities when others exist
Circular Reasoning	Supporting a conclusion with an argument which presupposes the conclusion
False Cause	Mistaking a correlation for a cause
False Equivalence	Equating two things as equal when they are not really comparable
Appeal to Illegitimate Authority	Appealing to the opinion of someone who is not an expert in the field
Slippery Slope	Suggesting, without evidence, that an action will invariably lead to an undesirable effect
Appeal to Nature	Claiming that something is good because it is natural or bad because it is unnatural
Argument from Ignorance	Asserting that a claim is true because it has not been proven false, or vice versa
Cherry Picking	Selecting only evidence that supports your argument while ignoring other evidence
Tu Quoque	Ignoring a criticism by accusing the opponent of hypocrisy
Shifting Goalposts	Altering the context or criteria for proof after the original standards have been met

Closing reflections
Media analysis has long been a useful means for young people to explore, relatively safely, socio-political and philosophical themes. For example, Key Stage 5 students of Philosophy are almost universally encouraged to watch The Matrix since it toys with a variety of curriculum-related concepts, such as Cartesian Scepticism, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Nozick’s Experience Machine, and Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms. Similarly, as a sociological case study, The Truman Show highlights the struggle for personal autonomy in a socially constructed world of artificial and extrinsic values and narratives. Both of these films are a pedagogically valuable means by which to, among other things, foster philosophical and critical thinking through encouraging students to interrogate the nature of reality, truth, and authority.

Arguably, however, critical thinking has become a pharmakon– both the cause of and cure for the contemporary conspiratorial disease. That is, in this emerging era of conspiracy, there is a real risk that critical thinking might struggle to properly mature before tipping into reductive conspiratorial thinking, and this is something all teachers ought to seriously consider in the context of their own practices and curricula. For instance, The Matrix explores the unreality of reality, and the notion that what is truly real can be accessed only by those courageous enough to venture through the universal veil of deceit. Furthermore, whilst the outer life of Truman Burbank is wholly constructed, students often abide in questioning the extent to which their inner world is constructed by others; the limits of their freewill; and the utility and limitations of paternalism. Both films demand audiences to look closer and deeper at reality, to think critically. Though, it is imperative that young people are guided in their readings of these films and are safeguarded against crossing the line between healthy critical scepticism and universal doubt or paranoia. For, students who live in universal doubt are conspiracy theorists in waiting.

Indeed, the narrative arc of The Matrix rests upon the protagonist, Neo, bravely taking ‘the red pill’ to catalyse his awakening from a computer-generated unreality into a truer albeit dystopian world, wherein he eventually leads a counterconspiracy against the machine overlords. Sadly, online conspiracy radicalists have hijacked this metaphor to present impressionable and young internet users with a (false) choice: either you can take the blue pill and remain ignorant puppets, subservient to the all-powerful deep state cabal, or you can take the red pill, wake up, speak up and rise up. Our pedagogic responsibility as teachers is to ensure that our students realise that there are other options.

References

Biddlestone M, Azevedo F, van der Linden S (2022). Climate of conspiracy: A meta-analysis of the consequences of belief in conspiracy theories about climate change, Current Opinion in Psychology, 46, 101390, ISSN: 2352-250X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101390.

Bracke S, Aguilar L (2023). ‘From “Race Suicide” to the “Great Replacement”’ in The Politics of Replacement, Routledge, ISBN: 9781003305927, URL: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003305927-1/politics-replacement-sarah-bracke-luis-manuel-hern%C3%A1ndez-aguilar?context=ubx

Connor Ibbetson (2020). Where do people believe in conspiracy theories?, You Gov, URL: https://yougov.co.uk/international/articles/33746-global-where-believe-conspiracy-theories-true 

Feola, M. (2021). “You Will Not Replace Us”: The Melancholic Nationalism of Whiteness. Political Theory, 49(4), 528-553. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720972745

Garry A, Walther S, Mohamed R, Mohammed A (2021). QAnon Conspiracy Theory: Examining its Evolution and Mechanism of Radicalization, Journal for Deradicalization, Spring, 26, ISSN: 2363-9849

Gatehouse G (2024). ‘The Coming Storm’, BBC Radio 4, URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001324r/episodes/downloads 

Hans W. A. Hanley, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric (2023). A Golden Age: Conspiracy Theories’ Relationship with Misinformation Outlets, News Media, and the Wider Internet, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol 7, CSC W2, 252, 1 – 33, https://doi.org/10.1145/3610043

Hayward J and Gronland G (2021). Conspiracy Theories in the Classroom: Guidance for Teachers, Institute of Education, UCL

Lipstadt D (2012). Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Penguin, ISBN: 9780452272743

Mahl D, Schafer M and Zeng J (2023). Conspiracy theories in online environments: An interdisciplinary literature review and agenda for future research, New Media & Society, vol. 25 (7), 1781-1801

West M (2021). Environmental Conspiracies: Why do conspiracy theorists believe natural events are intentionally manipulated?, Skeptic, Vol.26, Issue 4.