There is a phrase that, over the last decade, has done more rhetorical work than almost any other in the English language. Two words—designed to end conversations before they begin.
Conspiracy theory.
You know the cadence. A claim surfaces. It’s uncomfortable. It implicates power. And before the evidence has been weighed—before the documents have been read—the sentence arrives on cue, fully formed, from the mouth of a credentialed expert on a credentialed network: that’s just a conspiracy theory.
What if that phrase has often functioned not as a description of falsehood, but as a confession? A tell? A flag planted at the precise spot where the truth was buried.
