Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

I'm reading Barkun's book, "A Culture of Conspiracy," and in it he makes an interesting claim. In short, he argued that because part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they offer the believer an insight into "special knowledge" the pop-culture exposure of conspiracy theories (CTs hereafter) caused, among the believers, a disgruntling effect. As more and more people looked at these two artifacts of pop-culture and became exposed to the ideas the average conspiracist had to rethink their positions. I'm not entirely sold on this idea but it does need some exploring. First off one appeal of CTs is definitely the exposure to secret knowledge. This is argued in two different papers: "I Know Things They Don't Know" (Lantian et. al, "Social Psychology" 2017) and "Too Special to Be Duped" (Imhoff and Lamberty, European Journal of Social Psychology 2017) which made this point pretty explicit. This, to be clear, is not