Author(s): Andreas Musolff / Language(s): English
Issue: 1/2023
Conspiracy stories (also known as ‘conspiracy theories’) pretend to provide truthful and
unambiguous responses to crisis experiences and thrive in conjunction with the latter: the more
crises, the more conspiracies! Hence, it is no surprise that the recent, extended and multi-level
crises have been accompanied by a cacophony of ‘trending’ stories that see conspiracies behind,
e.g. COVID-19, climate change, migration, economic stagnation and military conflicts. These
conspiracy stories link up with global master-conspiracies (e.g. Great Reset, QAnon) as well as
with localised violent protests based on conspiracy stories at national or regional levels.
Despite their oft-lamented factual and logical deficiencies, conspiracy stories have two
important assets. One asset is their narrative structure that presents a ‘solution’ to the narrative
‘problem’, which is identified with the topical crisis. They tell a supposedly secret back-story
that ‘explains’ the current crisis and, based on it, provide a glimpse of an innovative solution.
Their second asset is their figurative, non-literal formulation in terms of metaphor scenarios
and metonymies, which enables users to mentally cancel part of their stories when they are
exposed as untrue, and thus to maintain the story as a whole.
The article provides a corpus-based analysis of metaphor use in conspiracy stories about
COVID-19 in the UK, America and Germany. It explains their function and sketches
perspectives for further research. It also discusses the chances of “reframing” metaphor-
enhanced conspiracy stories during (perma-)crises and argues that such an endeavour must not
restrict itself to fact-checks and -corrections. Instead, the narrative appeal of conspiracy stories,
based on their figurative structure, needs to be taken into account, in order to expose their
potentially disastrous political and social consequences.
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