How to Fend Off Your Conspiracy Obsessed Relatives During the Holiday Season

By Matthew Cantor, Guardian UK

24 December 19

When Uncle Ted has a few drinks and starts screaming that the world is flat, have a few tactics ready to counter his bizarre rants

t’s the holidays: time for eggnog, ironic Christmas sweaters, and interactions with relatives you’d avoid like the plague if you didn’t share DNA.

Perhaps in past years, you’ve argued politics over the dinner table. But thanks to our internet echo chambers, things may now get even weirder. You could find yourself not just arguing over Donald Trump’s impeachment, but also over whether the president and Robert Mueller were secretly teaming up to expose Tom Hanks as a cannibal; or whether the Federal Reserve exists because JP Morgan sank the Titanic; or whether Meghan Markle is a robot.

So what do you do if, after a few drinks, Uncle Ted starts screaming that the world is flat? We offer a few handy strategies:

• Fire back with an even weirder theory of your own. When Ted claims that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead and the person posing as the beloved supreme court justice is actually a body double, nod vigorously. Then, slowly pulling a tinfoil hat from your pocket, reveal that it all goes further: the body double is actually Tupac, who embraced the moniker Notorious RBG as a peace offering to his former rival. None of this came as a surprise to you, of course, because everyone involved was a known lizard person, which, if you think about it, explains how aliens from Roswell killed JFK and faked the moon landing. Keep pushing until your uncle excuses himself in a moment of deep self-reflection.


• Tell him what he’s saying must be true, because you heard it first from Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state is the Rome of conspiracy theories: all roads lead to her.Convince your relative Clinton believes his bonkers claim, and he’ll begin to question everything he knows.


• Begin dispensing cryptic messages yourself. Set up an online account under a pseudonym, and begin issuing a slow drip of accurate messages to distract the conspiracy-minded from their favorite nonsense. Post weekly on an obscure subreddit, telling seemingly innocuous personal stories with the third letter of each word in bold. Taken together, these letters spell out the text of articles from Snopes.com. (Anything so secretive must be accurate.) Then tip off your relative to the new mysterious account you’ve been following.


• Looking around furtively, inform him the conspiracy theory is exactly what the government wants him to believe. In fact, you too had believed it for ages, until QAnon himself DMed you with the shocking truth: the deep state has been feeding us falsehoods about Democratic servers in Ukraine and hurricanes hitting Alabama in order to distract from their real dastardly deeds. Fortunately, if he wants the actual story, there is a cabal of truth-tellers who publish facts online. They’ll even write down the facts, roll them up and leave them in his driveway every morning, for a small fee.


• If all else fails, descend, very gradually, under the table. Each time your uncle drives home a new, indisputable fact proving that Paul McCartney’s been dead since Sgt Pepper, slump a bit further down in your chair. If you do it slowly enough, he’ll be too wrapped up in feeding you the red pill to notice that you’re shrinking. Once your head is fully under the table, make a break for the kitchen and never return.

Of course, there’s a small chance none of this will work, and you’ll need to resort to better-researched tactics.

Experts say the best approach is a gentle one, and you probably won’t change anyone’s mind in one night. Listen to your relative rather than relegating her to pariah status, and ideally come equipped with accurate information rather than just telling her she’s wrong, the cognitive scientist Nadia Brashier tells PBS. Mick West, author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect, writes that the goal is to present the conspiracist “with information that they are lacking, and doing it all in a manner that will encourage them to look at what you are presenting without rejecting you as an idiot or a government shill”.

In other words, when you’re explaining to your aunt that Australia does, in fact, exist, be ready with accurate information about kangaroos – and accept that she might not be convinced before dessert.