memes

And theories have rules. Most modern "conspiracy theories" are more conspiracy hypotheses, or conspiracy conjectures, or conspiracy wouldn't it be fucked up ifs. They have the accusatory paranoia that gets people emotional instead of reasonable. They resemble contrarian explanations that make people feel clever, and special, and maybe safe from a complex and dangerous world. But there's never really an argument because these people have no idea how an argument works.

It's tribalism. It's reality as a team sport.

So "Bush did 9/11!," but if you ask "In what sense?" you get seven conflicting answers. The people with totally incompatible versions of the claim will not be seen disagreeing with each other. They will all simply disagree with you. Even though the guy saying 'Osama hired holographic crisis actors' has no underlying claims in common with the guy saying 'Dubya personally fired those missiles.' What's important is that they're all on the same side, insisting something happened, and the details thoroughly do not matter. A person in the ingroup does not even have to agree with themselves from sentence to sentence.

It works the same way as religious dogma, and for the same reasons. Tribalism is humanity's default. This is why even blatant gags like flat earth can accidentally form a clique of completely serious... loons. "Someone's keeping [blank] secret!" becomes a target for fictional worldbuilding. Obvious exasperated replies like why?! and how?! are not treated as counterarguments. They are indications of where to backfill plausible-sounding bullshit, to support this baseless nonsense. It's never an argument with these people. If you prove their reasons wrong, they will pick new reasons. It's all in service to the conclusion, because otherwise, they'd have to admit they'd been fooled, and find new friends.