In the spring of 2020, at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, I found myself sitting opposite an NHS nurse who was calmly telling me that hospitals had become places of murder. Kate Shemirani looked me in the eye and said that people were being “taken into hospitals and murdered”, that her own profession was running “death camps” no different from those of “the Third Reich”. She compared what was happening in Britain to Auschwitz and the cattle trucks, and called it genocide. I remember the strange, almost physical pause that came over me. I was not only shocked by the words themselves, but by the certainty in her voice. She was not shouting. She was not unhinged in any obvious way. She said she was “science-led” and “law-led”. She was a nurse, someone trained to protect life, and she was describing her colleagues as killers. As a journalist, I had been taught to challenge, to question, to hold people accountable. But in that moment, I felt myself go blank. A viewer later said that I looked almost “frozen” while listening to her monologue. They were right. I was frozen. I did not know how to speak to a woman whose entire worldview rested on a set of beliefs that had no basis in evidence, yet who seemed utterly convinced that she was the one who could see the truth.
The interview stayed with me for days. I kept replaying the conversation, trying to understand how a nurse, a frontline worker who had chosen to care for the sick, could believe that hospitals were death camps. When I pushed back, she called me a “special snowflake”, a phrase that dismissed me as fragile and naive. There was an inversion of roles in that exchange. I was the one who believed in science, in institutions, in the good faith of medical professionals. She was the one who saw a hidden evil behind the masks and the ventilators. For her, I was the problem. For me, she was a puzzle. Byline TV was criticised at the time for giving her a platform. Many said we should not have broadcast her views at all. Perhaps they were right. But the experience taught me something that I could not ignore: conspiracy theories are not simply lies told by dishonest people. They are beliefs that feel true to those who hold them. They provide order and meaning in a world that often feels chaotic and frightening. And in the middle of a pandemic, when death was everywhere and information was shifting by the hour, the appeal of a simple, dramatic explanation was stronger than ever. Kate Shemirani was not the first person to see the world through such a lens, and she will not be the last. To understand our “post-truth” age, we need to understand people like her.
The pandemic was a crucible for conspiracy theories, but it was not their origin. They have been present in every major crisis of the modern era. From climate change to vaccines, from elections to economic collapse, unevidenced beliefs have flourished whenever the world has seemed unstable. The phrase “post-truth” was chosen as the word of the year in 2016, at a time when political lies and alternative facts seemed to be winning. But the deeper truth about post-truth is that it is not simply about a lack of facts. It is about the collapse of trust in the institutions that claim to produce those facts. When people no longer believe the government, the media, or science, they do not simply become empty vessels waiting to be filled with nonsense. Instead, they begin to look for other sources of meaning. Conspiracy theories offer exactly that. They turn random, terrifying events into a coherent story. They identify enemies. They promise that there is a plan behind the chaos. In a world where no one seems to be in control, the belief that somewhere, someone is in control can be deeply comforting, even if that someone is evil. This is why the pandemic became such fertile ground for theories about 5G towers, microchips in vaccines, and murderous healthcare workers. The virus itself was invisible. The grief and isolation were unbearable. Conspiracy theories gave people a way to make sense of the senseless.
For many people, these beliefs are not intellectual positions but matters of identity. To believe in a conspiracy is to join a small group of the enlightened, a brave community that can see what others cannot. This is a powerful psychological reward. It gives people a sense of agency in a world where they feel powerless. It also gives them a moral identity: they are the righteous resisters, fighting against a corrupt elite. The content of the conspiracy theory is often less important than the role it plays in the believer’s life. This is why simply presenting facts rarely works. When you challenge a conspiracy theory, you are not just challenging an idea. You are challenging the person’s sense of self, their community, their place in the world. No wonder so many debates end with insults like “special snowflake”. The attack is not against the evidence. It is against the person who represents the system. In the interview with Kate Shemirani, I was not just a journalist asking questions. I was the system. I was the one who could not see the truth. She was not trying to persuade me. She was performing an identity, and I was part of the performance. This is why conspiracy theories feel impossible to counter. They are not errors of reasoning. They are social and emotional attachments. They flourish in communities that feel ignored, humiliated, or betrayed.
Understanding this does not mean accepting the theories themselves. There is a danger in humanising dangerous beliefs, of treating them as simply another perspective. The comparison of hospitals to Auschwitz was monstrous. It trivialised the Holocaust and endangered lives during a public health emergency. But if we are serious about addressing conspiracy theories, we must understand why they attract people. The answer lies in the shifting world we inhabit. We are living through rapid technological change, growing inequality, and a climate crisis that threatens the futures of entire generations. Institutions have failed us in many ways, from contaminated food to avoidable wars to the mismanagement of a global pandemic. People are searching for meaning, community, and control. Conspiracy theories offer all three, even if the promise is false. The journalist’s instinct is to correct the record, to point out the facts, to expose the lie. But that often leaves people more entrenched. What they need, perhaps, is to feel heard. They need to be drawn back into a shared world where they do not have to be constantly on guard. This is a long and difficult process. It requires listening, not just the kind of listening that waits for its turn to speak, but the kind that tries to understand the pain underneath the words. It requires patience. It requires humility. And it requires accepting that we cannot simply shout people back to reason.
In the years since that interview, I have often thought about what I might have done differently. Perhaps I could have asked Kate Shemirani what had frightened her so deeply that she had come to believe such things. Perhaps I could have acknowledged her anger, her exhaustion, her sense of betrayal. Perhaps I could have found a way to speak to the person behind the theory, rather than simply recoiling from the words. But the truth is that there is no easy answer. The conditions that create conspiracy theories are still with us. The pandemic has eased, but its wounds remain. The climate crisis is worsening. Distrust in media and government is high. The digital algorithms that reward outrage and sensation are stronger than ever. In such a world, the desire for simple explanations will not disappear. The challenge for all of us, journalists, policymakers, friends, and families, is to meet that desire with something more powerful than dismissal. We need to offer real community, real accountability, real hope. We need to make the world legible again, not through grand narratives of hidden evil, but through shared facts and collective action. And we need to remember that the people who fall into conspiracy theories are not monsters. They are often frightened, lonely, and desperate for meaning. The nurse who called hospitals death camps believed with all her heart that she was telling the truth. I still do not know how to change that. But I know that freezing in the face of it is not enough. We must find a way to speak across the divide, not in search of victory, but in search of understanding. It may be the only way forward in a post-truth age.