Evidence and Support

Ultimately the question of the legitimacy of a conspiracy theory comes down to evidence. It comes down to the question of whether or not the claim is supported by facts external to the belief of the claimant. Conspiracy theories are the products of a desire. A person wants an explanation then sets out to find anything which supports it to the exclusion of any kind of contradictory evidence. This is problematic in that the desire will have the effect of pushing what would normally be a tenuous link to being conclusive evidence.

"...all the devils are here."

Let's take my personal favorite conspiracy theory: the claim that William Shakespeare was a fraud. The evidence for this theory is presented like a checklist of things that we all kind of knew but no one pointed out to us. For instance, why do we study this guy's work in PhD programs while he, himself, had no education other than elementary school? More familiarly it's posted like this: how could the son of an illiterate glove-maker write the works that literally created the modern English language?

This is considered the most damning of the evidence. After all, I'm in a PhD program which means that I've worked infinitely harder on my education than Shakespeare did on his, so WTF?

This, isn't evidence. This is a rhetorical question that only has a single answer: "he didn't." The problem here is that the question isn't proof of anything, it's a question. It merely expresses a doubt because the official story is so incredible to the believer that there must be something else going on. What is that other thing? Even they don't know.

Debunkers of the theory often point to the element of classism that exists in the Shakespeare conspiracy. The highest concentration of anything in the Supreme Court is Shakespeare deniers, they edge out Originalists by a long shot (which is a different but far more dangerous intellectually vacuous position) and the classicism seems evident. After all, they didn't spend over a 100k on ivy league education to study the writings of someone so low class that it's hard to find the shitty apartment he used to live in.

The desire for this position to be true leads the person to find an inconsistency, any inconsistency from their perspective and use that as proof of the conspiracy. For this to be the case, it requires that everything squares with our perspective of how things ought to be. Shakespeare, from our perspective should have been educated at the best school in England at the time, a place where he is currently studied, with a wide experience of the world and noble parents indicative of the type of characters that he wrote.

Similarly we can look at the conspiracy surrounding the JFK assassination. JFK should have been killed by a person of singular character. A dedicated, well trained assassin someone that had support and knowledge of Secret Service protocol and serving a greater purpose. The official story that it was a lone individual with little training (though not that little) and no discernible motive. However the desire overrides the actual evidence here.

Generally the evidence is always going to be incompleteness. In other words they are going to claim that the official story is incomplete in some manner. However, the issue with that is you can look at any clear event and find distinct little factoids that are "incomplete" with the official story. I can walk to the library and find something wrong with that event. Perhaps there's an elderly man smoking a cigarette oddly while waiting of the bus and then link that with whether or not a book I was looking for was on the shelf (since I research conspiracy theories I could easily fall into a trap of thinking "they don't want me to read something").