What item does not belong on this list? What were the folks at Public Policy Polling thinking when they included it?
*Global warming is a hoax.
*Osama bin Laden is still alive.
*A UFO crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947 and the US government covered it up.
*A secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order.
*Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
*There is a link between childhood vaccines and autism.
*The moon landing was faked.
*Barack Obama is the anti-Christ.
*Bush intentionally misled about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
*The CIA was instrumental in creating the crack cocaine epidemic in America’s inner cities in the 1980’s.
*The government adds fluoride to our water supply for sinister reasons (not just dental health)
*Shape-shifting “lizard people†control our societies by gaining political power.
*A larger conspiracy was at work in the JFK assassination.
*Bigfoot exists.
*The government or the media adds mind-controlling technology to TV broadcast signals.
*Exhaust seen in the sky behind airplanes is actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons.
I’ve left out some borderline items from the survey, including “The medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry ‘invent’ new diseases to make money.” (At one level, that’s obviously true about pharmaceutical companies; the question is whether the new diagnostic entities correspond to genuine deficits.) And of course the “lizard people” question depends on what phylum you think Dick Cheney belongs to. But the outlier in the above sample lies so far out that I’m frankly puzzled. Not every statement about organized wrongdoing is a “conspiracy theory” in the pejorative sense of that term.