Well... bad people do conspire (i.e. cooperate)... just as much as good people do. It's not outlandish to worry that say the church is conspiring (e.g. Catholic

Well... bad people do conspire (i.e. cooperate)... just as much as good people do. It's not outlandish to worry that say the church is conspiring (e.g. Catholic abuse scandal). Of course solid evidence is always nice, but as with so many things it takes decades of mounting anecdotes and evidence to accumulate formal proof. Perhaps conspiracy theory is just the first stage of hypothesis refinement, and that's where they mostly die. There are many times it's actually a healthy and correct choice to mistrust motives of an institution (e.g. No thanks, I don't need that oxycodone), even if the mainstream consensus is a few years out. The challenge is, as it always was, to figure out which claims of bad-people-conspiring are true and which ones aren't. And when those bad-people-conspiring can taint/hide the information sources themselves (e.g. Nixon trying to withhold Watergate recordings by claiming "National Security", or astroturfing, or settle out of court, or using authority figures, or buying research) it becomes exponentially more complicated and the net gets cast much wider. This piece is a very detailed historical read, but I'm not sure it has any bearing.