For this year’s symposium of the Veerstichting, I spoke with the British philosopher Quassim Cassam, professor at University of Warwick, about conspiracy thinking. Apt, as this year’s theme is ‘blind trust’. I asked him what is new about conspiracy theories today – after all, they go back as far as the Red Scare about Communists and the assassination of JFK. “The theories about JFK were not all completely crazy”, he says. “Now, however, it is now no longer necessary to put forward even a superficial degree of plausibility. It is an interesting question why this has changed in say, the last decade.”