Anselm Guise

One of the strangest byproducts of the Covid era has been the dramatic growth in the number of people who believe in a series of seemingly interconnected conspiracy theories involving the World Economic Forum and a ‘great reset’, Bill Gates, vaccines, George Soros, oppressed farmers and the right of the Dutch people to live in a vast pool of livestock slurry, lizard people secretly running the world, ‘globalists’ (aka ‘Jews’), climate change and the moon landings are both a hoax, and so on. You don’t see it so obviously on Twitter, because they tend not to be the kind of people you choose to follow, but on Facebook or Instagram – old school friends, former colleagues, even family members. It’s almost as if the loss of religion in the West has left a kind of a void, an absence of belief and belonging that people feel compelled to fill. Cue the post-Covid conspiracy peddlers.