No sooner had Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassin died than rumors began spreading that his death was part of a government plot. He wasn't the first to say so. White supremacists claimed black militants were responsible. Most recently, a crackpot named William F. Pepper has convinced King's entire family that the U.S. government, including President Lyndon Johnson, was responsible for his death . With their grand designs in which everything has its place, conspiracists seek to impose a reassuring order on the randomness of history.
History is a conspiracy.
Conspiracy theorists adopt the trappings of scholarship, touting irrelevant titles and credentials. They burrow into the arcana of their topics and inundate potential acolytes with a barrage of pedantic details. Rather than build a case from evidence, conspiracists deny the available evidence, maintaining that appearances deceive. Rather than admit to inconvenient facts, they dismiss them as lies, making their own theories irrefutable. Modern conspiracism is almost a thousand years old.