THOUSANDS gathered in Trafalgar Square in August to listen to conspiracy guru David Icke and fellow Covid-19 denier Piers Corbyn rail against the “plandemic.” 

They returned en masse last month, as did the far-right groups who are infiltrating these events.

Such large gatherings amid a global pandemic can no longer be dismissed as the rantings of just a few cranks.

This incipient revolt against the Covid-19 restrictions is the culmination of a growing trend to see events through the prism of conspiracy thinking, fed on growing alienation with mainstream news and Establishment framing of our current ills.

Of course, people are not just being paranoid about the powers granted to the government during the pandemic. 

Liberty and others have warned that the Coronavirus Act and the special powers it gives police and authorities are a massive attack on our rights and freedoms.

But the movement that has emerged in recent months was years in the making. Ever since the September 11 2001 attacks and the “war on terror,” an increasing number of people have looked to the internet to find new sources of information that are not tainted with “mainstream media” propaganda. 

As internet companies have become part of the infrastructure of surveillance and censorship, those who don’t subscribe to mainstream narratives increasingly turn to alternative sources and search engines like DuckDuckGo, where Google’s restrictions on “extremist” content don’t apply, and individuals can make up their own minds about what they can watch and read.

With Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and now Covid-19, there is a growing group of alienated ordinary people who want to find explanations for the trends of chaos, deep-state activities and political corruption — and the alleged culprits are being identified by popular conspiracy sites.

The villain-in-chief in 2020 is Microsoft monopolist turned vaccinator-in-chief Bill Gates.

Traditionally, socialists and liberals are deeply suspicious of the idea that a small group of shadowy figures can manipulate events and use crisis situations to institute new kinds of control over society. 

This is the basic tenet of the new mass conspiracy movement: that all “Black Swan” type events — from September 11 to Covid-19, cataclysms that seem to come out of nowhere to destroy the social order — are anything but. 

They are, the theory goes, part of a long-term plan to institute what is described as a “global tyranny” or, as David Icke called it in his speech at Trafalgar Square last month, while urging the crowd to throw off their masks — “fascism.”

Icke, long condemned as a lizard-seeing anti-semite, goes to great lengths to say that he wishes to see a new dawn of human freedom embracing the whole planet, regardless of race, creed, sexuality or religion. 

Despite his protestations, what Icke and his movement share with Trump supporters and the far right is a belief that all events have a common cause — a secret group of globalist billionaires and Satanist “psychopaths’ who are bringing us to a state of complete tyranny. 

This includes the biggest threat of all, climate change, which Icke et al believe is also a hoax, rather than a massively verified threat caused by endless economic growth and ecological destruction.

In the absence of a historical view of capitalism, of how it produces ever-greater concentrations of wealth and, in turn, captures political power, it is easier to identify a handful of individuals, mostly very rich, as the puppet-masters of the new world order. 

And though the conspiracists and the far right lash out at bankers and the Federal Reserve, their critique tends to boil down to a “Jewish conspiracy” and the actions of individual tycoons, such as John D Rockefeller.

Without an understanding that structural forms of economic and political domination emerge from the workings of the economic and social system itself, it is easier to believe in a conscious plot of a secret power cabal. 

Rather than see opportunistic reactions to crises — disaster capitalism, as Naomi Klein coined it — everything is seen as planned by the shadow elite.

This conspiracy view does not see structural racism, imperialism or exploitation, it only sees power-hungry psychopaths who are itching to crush the thwarted freedom of the mostly white, lower-middle-class masses.

The movement has little time for strategies of collective resistance and even less for class struggle, since it sees politics through the classic prism of populism — the undifferentiated “people” verses the “globalist elite.” 

Despite its aversion to “the system” it wholeheartedly embraces a kind of new-age spiritualism, and sees salvation through a global awakening (not so far from the evangelists’ end-of-times “rapture”).

For the left, this is a difficult conundrum to deal with. It’s easy to dismiss everyone who is attracted to this movement as an anti-social nut-job. 

But since the pandemic, and in the absence of social movements to mobilise against our rapacious capitalist elite, this movement has attracted millions to its superficially convincing narrative, even when the conspiracists add two and two to get nine.

For example, there is no doubt that our health system has become a conveyor belt for pharmaceutical drugs that tend to treat symptoms, with variable effects, rather than offer preventive, holistic approaches to health that tackle the root causes of illness, such as poverty, bad diet, lack of exercise and stress. 

Further, institutions like the NHS and World Health Organisation are undoubtedly compromised by the private corporate interests that now provide services in the name of public health. 

We cannot simply accept the health proscriptions of unqualified billionaire Bill Gates, for example, without questioning whether he is building a massive business empire by infiltrating global health organisations and acquiring highly lucrative health data. 

Gates has said that seven billion vaccinations are needed to distribute globally for the virus. 

For conspiracists his real goal is to microchip all of us and, somehow, radically reduce the world population. 

Perhaps he just wants to become even more rich and powerful than he already is.

As Devi Sridhar, chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University, wrote in the British Medical Journal blog: “The Gates Foundation has expanded its ownership of the measurement of global health problems into the heart of the foremost global health institution [the WHO] and ensured that only these data will be accepted globally.” 

Gates has monopolised global health data through his “philanthropic” health foundation — effectively controlling the most valuable data on the planet, potentially worth trillions of dollars.

The widely watched conspiracy film Plandemic goes further and claims that Gates has acquired a Covid-19 virus patent, which was unleashed in 2019 after a spookily prescient pandemic simulation exercise in September, funded by — you guessed it — Bill Gates. These claims have been widely debunked.

The new movement’s locus of suspicion is the “big pharma-finance-media-science-tech-industrial complex” which some believe has created or exaggerated the virus to bring about a world police state. 

The gallery of villains includes Gates, WHO director Tedros Adhanom and America’s health chief, Dr Anthony Fauci. 

The US Centres for Disease Control is the bete noir not only of Trump, because it challenges his misleading claims about the pandemic, but of Covid-19 denialists in general.

For disbelievers, a million dead is just a made-up statistic based on fake tests, which countless health officials and governments are somehow all a part of (a conspiracy of everyone except those who have seen the Truth is never a step too far for these enlightened folk).

The answer to all this isn’t ever-increasing censorship. Covid denialists are refusing to follow public-health guidance — but that guidance has been confused and the government has not acted in good faith, lining the pockets of its corporate backers with Covid-related contracts, so this is hardly surprising. 

Twenty-first-century “surveillance capitalism”, with its ability to drive conspiracy thinking through profit-driven algorithms, combined with sinister online political campaigns, have fed this maelstrom. 

When lies and misinformation are the common currency of right-wing regimes from Washington to Budapest, it’s very hard to expect people to be able to know what on Earth is actually going on.

Grassroots movements to give working people a sense of collective power and control in their lives will be the only effective answer to this growing but dead-end populist movement.