THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

 'Jet fuel can't melt steel beams'. Nowadays, 9/11 conspiracy theories are such a fringe preoccupation that it's easy to forget how widespread they were in the early 2000s.

The hugely popular homemade documentary Loose Change, released in 2005, pushed the idea that the mainstream theory of why the twin towers fell - al-Qaeda flew planes into them - just couldn't explain all the facts, and it was far more likely that the US government had deliberately blown up the buildings in a 'controlled demolition'.

One reason people believed these ideas was that the 9/11 attacks were very confusing: there was a huge morass of information from the day of the attack, and at first blush it didn't all seem to line up. Seemingly anomalous facts - like the temperature at which steel beams melt, which is way above the temperature of burning jet fuel - were genuinely difficult to square with the official story. That led to people latching on to the alternative theories - however bizarre.

Which brings us to another major focus of conspiracy theories: the pandemic. Now that most of us have moved on with our lives, it's easy to forget the context of the time, the exact statements politicians, scientists, and doctors made, and the precise timeline of scientific progress with vaccines and other treatments.

Enter the Covid conspiracy theorists.

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