Trump and Farage's post-truth politics is no laughing matter

CONSPIRACY theories are as old as the hills that sit on our flat Earth.

- BRIAN READE

As Ella Fitzgerald famously sang: "They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly. They told Marconi wireless was a phoney, it's the same old cry."

You'd have thought, though, that as human knowledge expanded, the conspiracies would recede.

But in my lifetime, whole industries have grown up from talking utter garbage about the likes of a faked Moon landing, 9/11, Princess Diana's death, Barack Obama's birth certificate, the Roswell incident and, lately, Covid.

From Bill Gates implanting microchips into people's brains to it being a Big Pharma hoax, many millions, egged on by anti-vaxxer influencers, bought into it.

And it mostly gave us a laugh, especially when celebrities like Madonna spoke, from one of her many mansions, about vaccines being concealed to help the rich get richer.