A Conspiracy Theorist is a person or persons who subscribe to generally marginal explanations for all kinds of events, natural and man-made, that differ from mainstream explanations, both scientific and theoretical, in that they usually posit conspiratorial plots and cover-ups to explain those events.
During the 1960's there was skepticism that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was solely behind the assassination of John F Kennedy. In order to control the public, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all of its field offices requesting that they enlist assets in the media to ridicule and attack critics as "Conspiracy Theorists". [1]
Categories: [Sociology]