Conspiracy claims can float unattached to any settled belief system

Evidence

In the years before Covid, floating conspiracy claims seemed to be a kind of hobby for Wolf. She hopped from one theory to another—Ebola, Snowden, 5G, ISIS—but never stayed with any one subject for long, certainly not long enough to actually prove anything. She was just “raising flags” and “asking questions,” and then she invariably moved on. This is classic “conspiracy without the theory,” as described by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum in their 2020 book, A Lot of People Are Saying, part of the growing body of literature attempting to make sense of the surge in belief in a wide range of off-the-wall, unproven claims. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 93

Categorization

• DEFINE: Fixes the muirhead-rosenblum concept of ‘conspiracy without the theory’ — a definitional anchor for how the Mirror World differs from classic conspiracy theory.
• QUESTION: This contrast (hobbyist flag-raising vs. settled single-subject conviction) sets up the causal question of what turned Wolf into a committed node — worth tracking whether Klein explains the mechanism.
• XREF: connects to: Conspiracy theories usually aim to name an enemy, not to build a coherent story. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 64; Conspiracy theories become unfalsifiable by dismissing skeptic evidence as planted; Inclusive conspiracies become unfalsifiable since all outside sources are complicit (+5 more)