Everything is a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.
Yesterday the Trump administration barred top US infectious disease researchers from speaking to the World Health Organization. They can listen in on meetings. They cannot speak.
This week the case count crossed a thousand. Two hundred and thirty-four dead.
The word arrives in the body before the news does, fever first, then the bleeding from the eyes and the gums, then the organs softening into something the person is still alive to feel.
The virus has taken hold in Mongbwalu, a gold mining town in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where men with pickaxes cut into the forest for the ore that ends up in your phone. Bats hang in that forest, carrying the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which has no vaccine.
In late April, a nurse came to work with a fever, and she vomited, and she bled, and she died before anyone could say what killed her, and the clinic kept moving. The virus moved unseen for weeks before the first sample reached the laboratory in Kinshasa.
By Sunday it had crossed two borders, into Uganda and into Milan, where doctors quarantined two travelers from Uganda. An American physician named Peter Stafford, who treats Ebola patients at a hospital in Bunia, tested positive last week; his wife works the same wards and was also exposed.
Elon Musk’s DOGE dismantled the agency that ran disease surveillance here in early 2025, selling the closure to the public as waste, foreign aid bloat, “America First.” On social media, the same man told two hundred and fifteen million followers a different story: USAID, in his telling, was a criminal organization that funded the bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people.
The infectious disease physician Celine Gounder said her team's monitoring surfaced six hundred and forty Ebola videos and more than sixty-eight million views across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube in the forty-eight hours after the first confirmed cases. A narrower search for the words ebola conspiracy, ebola bioweapon, ebola cure, and ebola cover-up returned fifty more videos and two and a half million views. Every new outbreak, she said, triggers the same disinformation playbook.
There is a joke that goes like this. Two conspiracy theorists end up at the gates of heaven before God. God says to them, you may ask any question of me. The first man asks, was the Maui fire started by a space laser to clear out residents so the rich could buy up all the land? God says, no, my child. It was a combination of poor agriculture and climate change. The first man turns to his friend and says, this goes up higher than we thought.
In the Cascades, a Sasquatch hunter is bent in the wet leaves with a tray of plaster, pouring a cast of what he believes is a footprint. Two men named Patterson and Gimlin spent October of 1967 in Bluff Creek shooting eleven hundred frames of a tall figure walking through the woods, and for half a century the figure has been a man in a costume to everyone who has looked at the footage closely. Your coworker insists the Anunnaki built the pyramids, because no human could have stacked the stones. On a flat earther’s phone, his own cousin pulled up a horizon photo — and got told the photo was faked. Friday nights, the X-Files. I want to believe.
The cost was the joke at Thanksgiving, not the kid in the ICU. Then Donald Trump spent five years insisting Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, and a presidency ran on the lie. Then a man with a rifle walked into a Washington pizza parlor looking for a basement that did not exist, and Sandy Hook became a hoax to the people who would not stop calling Lenny Pozner about his dead son. Then the kid in the ICU stopped getting the measles vaccine because someone on YouTube said the measles vaccine causes autism, and the measles came back.
The conspiracy theorist will tell you he is a skeptic. He is doing his own research, a phrase that used to mean reading sources and now means watching a man on YouTube. His skepticism toward the doctor and the agency and the textbook and the peer-reviewed study is total, and his trust in the man on YouTube is also total, and the man on YouTube is the only one of them with no credentials at all.
For six years Peter Buxtun wrote memos his bosses ignored. When a Public Health Service investigator got hold of documents showing that for forty years the U.S. government had been withholding penicillin from 399 Black men with syphilis in Macon County, Alabama, he believed something was wrong. So Buxtun took the documents to an AP reporter named Edith Lederer, who passed them to her colleague Jean Heller, and on July 25, 1972, the story ran.
For more than two years Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald sat in a cramped office in downtown Miami working a paper trail of flight logs, sealed plea deals, prosecutorial memos, and the names of victims who had been waiting since 2008 to be heard. Her three-part series ran in November 2018. Eight months later federal prosecutors arrested Jeffrey Epstein, although the survivors have still not gotten justice and the client list remains mostly sealed. But the work was tedious. Reading memos and flight logs is the unglamorous work of gathering irrefutable evidence.
In 1945, watching Europe in ruins from his exile in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper finished The Open Society and Its Enemies and traced the sermon back further than most people would expect. The Greeks at Troy did not lose battles because of supply lines or weather or the resilience of their enemy or any of the things mortal soldiers actually lose battles to. They lost battles because Hera was scheming on Olympus and Athena was angry about a beauty contest. After people stopped believing the gods were doing it, they still needed someone to be doing it, and into the empty seats went the Elders of Zion, then the Bilderbergers, then the Reptilians, then the Deep State. Popper called it a secularized superstition.
On May 8, 2026, the Department of War released the first batch of one hundred sixty-two declassified files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena under a program called PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. A second tranche followed on May 22, sixty-four more files and fifty-one videos, including grainy infrared footage of a football-shaped body near Japan, three lights above the lunar terrain in an Apollo 17 photograph, spherical objects going in and out of the water near a submarine, and lights observed over the Persian Gulf, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates by U.S. troops between 2018 and 2023. The Pentagon used the same release mechanism the Department of Justice had used for the Epstein files in December.
The Epstein client list is still sealed.
Last year, the Secretary of Health and Human Services said the Environmental Protection Agency would finally expose the diabolical mass poisoning of our people, our communities, our waterways and farms. Contrails are water vapor condensing in cold humid air at thirty thousand feet. The public was told to look up at the sky while the agency that handles environmental health stopped doing its work.
Elon Musk’s DOGE shut down the office that ran disease surveillance in Ituri. The phone in Atlanta cannot ring the phone in Geneva. The case count in Mongbwalu crossed a thousand this week.
Tobacco lied about being safe for pregnant women. Purdue lied about OxyContin being non-addictive, which is the lie that built the opioid epidemic. The Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we invaded a country that did not have them. The 2008 banks lied about the subprime mortgages they had bundled into securities and sold to pension funds. The people who lost their houses were not the people who went to prison. Jeffrey Epstein lied about being alone in his crimes. Powerful men whose names are sealed in federal court records remain protected from what they did to children.
And yet, two things can be true.
Instead of demanding to understand how things actually work, we settled for a simpler story. Understanding how things actually work takes years. The gold in your phone came from a hand-dug pit in Mongbwalu, moved through Goma to Dubai and ended at a refinery in Switzerland, and learning the route takes longer than watching a video. Sit down for an afternoon with an atmospheric chemist and you will learn that contrails are water vapor condensing at thirty thousand feet. Almost nobody sits down for the afternoon. The conspiracy fits on a screen.
You are sitting at home with the television on, the screen flickering blue across the wall. The anchor is moving fast, Ebola and then bioweapon and then cover-up and then a clip from the press secretary and then back to the Ebola map. You do not know who to believe when every source has a stake: your cousin on Facebook, the journalists, Elon Musk and his two hundred and fifteen million followers, a cabinet secretary calling a chemical that does not exist a diabolical mass poisoning of our people. The ground gives under you, shifting.
At the General Referral Hospital in Mongbwalu, a woman sits beside the body of a relative who has died of Ebola. The supplies arriving in Bunia this week were brought by the World Health Organization and the Congolese Health Ministry, seven tons of protective equipment and tents and bedding flown in on a UN plane out of Nairobi. The United States, which used to coordinate this work through USAID, has been described in The Guardian as “notably absent.”
