Flood the Zone: How Tech Billionaires and Online Extremists Made Conspiracies Go Mainstream

From the Big Lie to vaccine denial, conspiracy theories are heavily monetized online and codified by the Trump administration. So how do we solve this reality crisis?

On the National Mall, as a severe storm bore down on Trump’s July Fourth celebration of America’s 250th birthday, Secret Service agents ordered the crowd to evacuate. Several hundred people refused. Some argued with the agents. A cluster of people ran back toward the stage. An officer repeated the order through a bullhorn; the crowd booed. Many started chanting, “U.S.A., U.S.A.”

One man offered his explanation to a New York Times reporter on the scene: the storm warning was the work of “liberals in the weather service.” He thought the whole thing was “baloney.”

The storm was real. All you had to do was look up at the sky.

But this is where we are — a political movement so thoroughly marinated in institutional distrust that, faced with an evacuation order from the Secret Service because a violent thunderstorm is approaching, a meaningful number of people’s first instinct is to assume a conspiracy. Not to look at what was in front of their own eyes. Not to trust the agents whose job is to keep them alive. To assume that the deep state has infiltrated the National Weather Service and manufactured a storm warning to ruin Dear Leader’s rally.

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The foundational conspiracy theory of the Trump era is simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: the 2020 election was stolen.

It wasn’t. Trump lost. His campaign lost 61 of 62 post-election court cases. Not one of those judges — not even a single Trump-nominated jurist — found that fraud changed the outcome. He incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 to stop the certification of an election he lost. It failed. He lost that, too.

And yet: it is now an article of faith in the Republican Party. Nominees to his cabinet and the federal bench decline to state the court-documented, bipartisan-certified, objectively verifiable fact that Biden won. The lie is the price of entry.

That’s how conspiracy theories function inside authoritarian movements — not as questions awaiting investigation, but as loyalty tests to be passed. You demonstrate your allegiance by abandoning your grip on reality.

This is where we are. And it’s getting worse.

Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program on Jan. 7, 2025 — the same week Mark Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, added a Trump ally to Meta’s board, and promoted a Republican operative to run global policy. He had dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago weeks before. The company avoided $13.7 billion in federal income taxes in 2025.

Elon Musk ended X’s ban on COVID-19 misinformation after taking over the platform, reinstated Trump’s account, and watched his net worth increase by more than $100 billion within the first months of joining the second Trump administration. He’s now the world’s first trillionaire.

Larry Ellison’s Oracle walked away with a controlling stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations and an anchor position in a $500 billion AI buildout announced at the White House — after Ellison quietly donated $45 million to Trump-aligned causes.

This is not a coincidence. Misinformation is profitable. It outrages, it divides, and it keeps eyeballs on screens and ad dollars flowing. And it has turned out to be extraordinarily useful for ingratiating billionaires with an authoritarian administration that controls their regulatory environment. The lies pay twice: once in engagement revenue, once in government contracts and tax breaks. The people spreading the most misinformation are also the people getting the richest.

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The COVID pandemic turbocharged all of it. And we’ve never been the same.

Before 2020, the anti-vaccine movement was already metastasizing — fueled by discredited studies and celebrity amplification from Jenny McCarthy and others. We endured years of profitable pseudoscience from figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who made serious money from scientifically baseless lawsuits, and assorted quacks and influencers who marketed “natural” health products to anxious parents.

When COVID descended and masks were shown to meaningfully reduce transmission of airborne respiratory illness, millions of people were already primed to distrust the institutions saying so. The masks were uncomfortable. They required a minor sacrifice for a collective benefit. And a critical mass of people decided they would rather believe a conspiracy theory than wear one. Thousands died who didn’t need to. That was just a warmup act for the ubiquitous anti-vaccine conspiracies that followed, resulting in another wave of preventable mass death.

RFK Jr. is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, where he gets to be a superspreader of medical misinformation from the most powerful perch in the country.

In June 2025, he fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — the independent panel of medical experts that reviews vaccine data and guides public health recommendations for hundreds of millions of Americans. In August, he fired CDC director Susan Monarez after just 29 days on the job — because she refused to pre-approve all forthcoming vaccine decisions and fire career scientists without cause.

Internal HHS emails showed Kennedy pressuring CDC officials to align their messaging with his conclusions, rather than the science. The man who built a following on quackery is now dismantling the infrastructure that catches real public health threats before they become mass casualty events.

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Meanwhile, Utah and Florida have banned fluoride from municipal water supplies. When Juneau, Alaska stopped fluoridating its water in 2007, cavity-related dental procedures among children and adolescents increased by nearly 50 percent. The American Dental Association warns that nationwide removal would cost billions and devastate oral health, especially for children.

Unpasteurized milk — which the CDC has linked to 75 outbreaks, 675 illnesses, and 98 hospitalizations in just five years, and which has since been found to carry bird flu — has been rebranded as a wellness choice by tradwife influencers and natural health entrepreneurs. It’s 2026 and we’re relitigating whether pasteurization was a mistake.

The conspiracy theory is not fringe. The conspiracy theory is now the governing philosophy for MAGA.

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I want to be honest about something, though. This is not exclusively a problem of the right. With as much time as we spend online, it would be naive to think that conspiracy theories couldn’t ooze out of right-wing bubbles and infect the entire information ecosystem.

The antisemitism churning on social media doesn’t only come in extremist forms, like Hitler memes and gas chamber “jokes” pushed by influential right-wing accounts. Plenty of progressive spaces dabble in the genre. That includes casual invocations of the Rothschilds, among the leading antisemitic tropes on Instagram and TikTok in a 2024-25 cross-platform study by CyberWell, caricatures of Jewish bankers, the framing that the United States is a puppet of Israel and that the Iran war is really Netanyahu’s doing.

Far-left antisemitic incidents surged 324.8 percent globally in 2024, driven primarily by what researchers described as radicalized social movements and disinformation campaigns conducted under the guise of anti-Israel activism.

When the Iran war began, the “puppet master” tropes resurfaced immediately — claims that Israel secretly controls U.S. military policy, amplified across social media and by Iranian state propaganda. (Some online commentators are increasingly going mask off and just blaming “the Jews” writ large these days). That conveniently lets Donald Trump off the hook for starting a dumb war that’s killed thousands. And none of this is new; it’s recycled antisemitic conspiracies that have been around for millennia. It gives a tidy, unified explanation for everything that’s wrong, and it directs the blame at a minority group. The fact that it comes dressed in anti-imperialist language does not change what it is.

Iran isn’t the only foreign government engaging in information warfare. Russia’s social media influence operation ensnaring the American right is well-documented, as is its meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But many other countries like China have their own sophisticated social media operations targeting Americans, often those on the left.

The United States formally designated China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims as genocide in 2021, based on documented mass detention, forced sterilization, and birth rates that fell more than 60 percent in Uyghur regions between 2015 and 2018 while the national rate dropped just 9.7 percent. There are reams of evidence: survivor testimony, satellite imagery, leaked government documents, systematic destruction of language and culture.

And yet, a not-insignificant cohort has concluded this is Western propaganda — an alarming trend documented across Western Marxist and anti-imperialist circles. Some of that conclusion was delivered courtesy of TikTok’s algorithm: a 2024 Rutgers University study found that searches for “Xinjiang” on TikTok returned anti-China content just 2.3 percent of the time, compared to 21.7 percent on YouTube and 17.3 percent on Instagram. And internal ByteDance records confirmed the company used monitoring tools to suppress content about Uyghurs.

The same people horrified by human rights abuses in Gaza are dismissing a documented genocide of Muslim people — because the perpetrator is an adversary of the U.S. rather than an ally of it. That is not solidarity. That is propaganda absorption.

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This is the authoritarian playbook, and it works across the political spectrum: flood the zone with enough competing narratives that people give up trying to evaluate them and simply choose the one that confirms what they already feel.

Once enough people stop trusting shared sources of evidence — courts, scientists, journalists, election officials — they turn to the strongman to tell them what’s true instead. That’s the point. That’s always been the point.

While you’re busy fighting about whether fluoride is a mind-control operation or whether a Jewish cabal controls American foreign policy, here’s what is actually happening: Jared Kushner’s investment firm received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — overriding the Saudi advisory board’s own objections about his inexperience — while Kushner simultaneously serves as Trump’s envoy negotiating Middle East peace. His firm’s $6.16 billion under management comes 99 percent from foreign governments.

The Trumps have enriched themselves through cryptocurrency while setting crypto policy. Tucker Carlson, the product of a frozen fish stick fortune, has never been richer than he is right now, spreading division and antisemitism from his podcast.

The people manufacturing the conspiracies are the ones actually getting paid.

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It’s the least powerful people who are paying the biggest price as we all drown in this sea of disinformation.

More than 120 anti-transgender laws have been enacted since 2025 began, built on the explicit premise that the most vulnerable minority in the country is somehow destroying civilization. That is a conspiracy theory dressed as legislation — and it has cost trans people their health care, their safety, and, in some cases, their lives.

The voter fraud myth that Trump could not prove in 61 court cases has been used to justify making it harder to vote in state after state, with African-Americans being disproportionately impacted. The conspiracies don’t stay online. They become law.

A free society cannot hold if enough people lose the ability — or the willingness — to evaluate evidence. That’s not a philosophical abstraction. It’s a practical description of what is currently happening to us. When citizens cannot agree on what is real, they become susceptible to whoever promises simple answers and a satisfying villain. When they cannot tell truth from fabrication, the truth stops mattering. When the truth stops mattering, accountability becomes impossible. And when accountability becomes impossible, the people in power can do whatever they want.

That is not an accident. It’s a business model and a governing strategy, and it is working.

We need to fight it — not by picking our own set of convenient facts, but by refusing to let go of the inconvenient ones.

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