Conspiracy Kitchen Sink

Green Arrow: Does everything have a sinister motive in your world?

The Question: Yours too; you just don't know it.
—Justice League, "Fearful Symmetry"

Everything you've heard is true: The Illuminati rule the world, the moon landings were faked, JFK was assassinated by a bunch of gray aliens, and you surely don't think the Cuban Missile Crisis was about Cuban Missiles, do you?

Yes, that's right: In this setting, every conspiracy theory you've ever heard of is true. And some you haven't. A closely related subtrope to Fantasy Kitchen Sink, but conspiracy-minded, rather than fantastic; like its parent, there is a certain tendency towards self-contradiction, but given the source of the trope (paranoid conspiracy theories), not that surprising.

Following things are a must-have for any Conspiracy Kitchen Sink worth its salt (for required tropes, see The Index Is Watching You):

Compare All Myths Are True, the fantasy-specific version of this trope.

Occasionally leads to a Gambit Pileup, but not nearly as often as it should. Naturally, in all of these conspiracies there are No Delays for the Wicked.

This trope covers Settings and entire series/works. For the characters who believe they live in a Conspiracy Kitchen Sink, see Conspiracy Theorist.

Examples of Conspiracy Kitchen Sink include:

Comic Books

  • A lot of Grant Morrison's other work, features loads and loads of conspiracies. The Invisibles deserves special mention though, since it takes place in a world where pretty much every single piece of conspiracy literature scrawled out in the last 60 years was all true. Simultaneously.
  • The main protagonist of Hunter-killer (written by Mark Waid) has been home schooled, and what he's been taught (as far as recent history is concerned) is all conspiracy theories. And not surprisingly, all he's been taught is true, except the part about the week having six days. One major turning point, as it turns out, was indeed the Cuban missile crisis.

Film

  • The Matrix: Reloaded. The Oracle tells Neo that the Matrix is full of programs controlling its individual elements.

Oracle: The ones doing their job, doing what they were meant to do, are invisible. You'd never even know they were here. But the other ones, well, we hear about them all the time.
Neo: I've never heard of them.
Oracle: Oh, of course you have. Every time you've heard someone say they saw a ghost, or an angel. Every story you've ever heard about vampires, werewolves, or aliens, is the system assimilating some program that's doing something they're not supposed to be doing.

  • The Men in Black movies seems to represent a peculiar version of this—every conspiracy theory you've ever heard is on to something big, but the truth behind all of them is the same, in this case aliens.
    • One example is a small ball that seems to be similar to rubber, except it GAINS energy with each bounce making it incredibly destructive. Apparently it caused a massive New York blackout. The alien diplomat who did it? he thought it was funny as hell.
    • Elvis' death? He was an alien who just went home. Or so K claims, anyway; maybe he was just messing with J's head?
    • Slightly subverted with this exchange when J finds out how many aliens currently inhabit New York City:

J: Cab drivers...
K: Not as many as you'd think.

    • J's theory about that one grade school teacher of his being an alien, though? Spot on.
  • In the early-'90s Captain America (comics) movie, the Red Skull, who went underground after World War II, is revealed to now be the head of a Nebulous Evil Organization which basically secretly runs the world, and was responsible for the assassinations of both the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, among other dastardly acts.
  • Undercover Brother runs through the list of stereotypical black conspiracy theories, with each and every one being true. Until it finally culminates in:

Undercover Brother: And O.J. really didn't do it.
*awkward silence*
Chief: Let's move on...

Literature

  • James Ellroy's American Tabloid answers the question "Who killed JFK?", with a pretty resounding "Everybody".
  • The Illuminatus! trilogy of novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. FNORD
    • Why did someone put in a spoiler block with nothing in it?
      • That's what they WANT you to think.
  • 1963 had several conflicting theories on the JFK murder, involving everything from aliens to the Illuminati to mind-controlling government officials.
  • Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum has the main characters invent their own synarchic plot (for fun) to explain all of the various conspiracy theories in the world. You can guess what happens next.
  • Pretty much everything written by Thomas Pynchon runs on this trope, especially Gravity's Rainbow.
  • In Conspiracies, Repairman Jack attends a Conspiracy Theorist convention. Subverted in that there really is a conspiracy happening behind the scenes ... but it's against Jack himself, not anything the convention's attendees dreamed up.
  • I, Claudius is a hodgepodge of pretty much every half baked conspiracy theory about the time of the Judeo-Claudian emperors, both then and since.
  • The world of Good Omens ends up turning into something like this. Thanks to Adam Young's growing Reality Warper powers, all the crackpot theories he reads about in Anathema's New Age magazines (like Tibetan tunnels, alien visitations, Atlantis, and the hollow Earth) start becoming true.
  • Anything written by Dan Brown.

Live Action TV

Music

  • "Everything You Know Is Wrong" by Chumbawamba, where the narrator claims responsibility of e.g. "taking scissors on the black vote down in Florida", "I was there when they landed on the moon, in a studio in Kentucky in June", "at the canteen down in Columbine, with the bags they never found", "and I hid those missing WMD's"...
  • "Sympathy for the Devil". Seriously. Think about it.
  • The Crucial Conspiracy, The Dingees' third album, had references to chemtrails, government mind-control experiments, and Majestic Twelve; and even has lyrics that could be interpreted to mean that Satan himself is involved in UFO activity.

Tabletop Games

  • Conspiracy X is an RPG (by Eden Studios) based around the concept of some or all of the conspiracy theorists being onto something.
  • Delta Green is a modern-time setting for the Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game) RPG. Not only is every possible conspiracy staged by either Nyarlatotep, Mi-Go, or some other Eldritch Abomination, but the playable organization, Delta Green, is an illegal conspiracy. Why? Because official paranormal investigators are controlled by aliens, of course.
    • What's even funnier is that, in the official setting, Delta Green doesn't believe in aliens, only monsters, magic, and ghosts. Of course, anyone who's up on the source material know that all the monsters, aliens, and magic reside at the same address. (It's also worth mentioning that the aliens who are controlling the official MIB aren't actually aliens, but artificial constructs created by the real aliens who wanted a weird but still recognizably human appearance.)
  • Steve Jackson Games has at least three products set here:
    • The various Illuminati card games (inspired by the above trilogy).
    • GURPS Illuminati (inspired by the success of the card games).
    • GURPS Warehouse 23 (inspired by playful Internet speculation on what else might be found in the government storage facility seen at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark).
    • Depending on how you look at it, In Nomine (and its offshoot, GURPS In Nomine) also qualifies.
      • In Nomine Anime, a small and obscure supplement, definitely has one foot in this territory.
    • Also GURPS IOU. The "I" does stand for "Illuminati" after all. (The "U" stands for "University", and the "O" stands for YOU'RE NOT CLEARED FOR THAT INFORMATION! ...seriously speaking, it's never explained.)
  • Paranoia, an RPG originally by West End Games, though it's set in a futuristic dystopia and not the present day, definitely falls under this trope.
  • The Old World of Darkness. Everything is being manipulated by and has always been manipulated by the Vampire Elders, the Technocracy, Pentex, and various evil spirits. At the same time. With the organizations never interacting, conflicting, or sometimes even being aware of each other.
    • This is largely because early books weren't necessarily written with crossovers in mind, and gave you a world populated by one supernatural threat, later books in oWoD got better about enabling crossovers and finding niches for the various creatures.
      • The Technocracy, in particular, seemed to have a handle on vampires and werewolves better than anyone else... then it turned out the Technocracy contained several competing conspiracies.
    • The New World of Darkness is getting there, too, except none of the conspiracies control everything, just a specialized area. The Seers of the Throne make sure that magic stays out of the Fallen World so they get it all to themselves. They have their own phony Men in Black, Division Six... and we say "phony" because the real Men in Black, Task Force: VALKYRIE, operate out of the US Treasury. Then you have the medical corporation that performs experiments on supernatural creatures to find out how useful their parts are, the Catholic Church's crack monster-hunting squad, and the FBI bureau staffed with psychics who hunt down supernatural serial killers and stick them in a Midwestern Guantanamo. And so on. (It's worth noting that all of the listed examples, excluding the Seers of the Throne but including Division Six, come from Hunter: The Vigil.)
      • And in the Fanmade Gameline Genius: The Transgression, Lemuria used to be in charge of this, but now only thinks they're in charge of it. (Bizarrely, the Lemurians and the Seers of the Throne are unable to detect each other, and no-one knows why.)
  • This is one of the founding premises of Over the Edge. Seriously, there are hundreds of them, all interfering with each other's plans...
  • The following example has been deemed classification level Viridian Gamma by The Holy Inquisition of the Imperium of Man: You know too much. *BLAM*
  • Dark Matter lives this trope, including dimension-traveling lizard people, Atlantis, the Illuminati, Modern Magic, alien bigfoot, and of course government conspiracies.

Video Games

  • Deus Ex.
    • One character claims the maintenance men at his workplace are plotting against him when he gets a lemon-lime soda from a vending machine when he was almost certain he pressed the orange button. His partner is skeptical, to say the least.

Anna: Are you sure you pressed the right button?
Gunther: I do not make mistakes of that kind!
Anna: Your hand might have slipped.
Gunther: No, I wanted orange. It gave me lemon-lime.
Anna: The machine would not make a mistake.
Gunther: It's the maintenance man. He knows I like orange!
Anna: So you think the staff has some kind of plot?
Gunther: Yes! They do it on purpose!

      • Entertainingly, this is confirmed in the sequel by a NPC.

Bum: Someone here must have really liked lemon-lime soda.

    • Let's see... Area 51, Majestic 12, the Illuminati, lab-designed plague to cull the lower classes, the Greys, black helicopters, Men in Black (much closer to the original concept than the ones in the above movie), Chupacabras (called "greasels" in the game), FEMA as a black organization, New World Order, corporate takeover of government...
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 parodied itself at one point by having one of the on-disc supplementary story recaps being a book written by the most hilariously deranged conspiracy theorist you could possibly imagine. (To give you an idea; we don't get to read it, but the title of his previous book was Rays From The Loch Ness Monster -- The True Power Source Of UFOs.) To his credit, he was extremely good at identifying conspiracies—unfortunately, he never blamed the events on the right conspiracies, attributing The Omniscient Council of Vagueness-caused disaster of the previous game to the island it was on being "an Ellis Island for the Greys". The whole farce ends with him being rescued by an invisible man whom he proudly, loudly declares is a noble Sufficiently Advanced Alien who had taken pity on him, when it's clear to the reader that it's Solid Snake in active camo.
  • ~Assassin's Creed rapidly became an amalgamation of all sorts of conspiracy theories, incorporating everything from the Tunguska Event to JFK's assassination to the entirety of World War II and tracing them all back to the Templars, the Assassins or both trying to cover up or seize something or other. It's not exactly necessary to understand how it all fits together to make any sense of the plot, fortunately, because any attempt to do so is doomed to failure, particularly when time travelling god aliens get involved. Generally it's best to simply accept that the Assassins and Templars have been at each other's throats for a really long time and move on.
    • Gets especially crazy and paranoia-inducing in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. Alan Turing? Murdered to prevent him from inventing too powerful computers. Cable TV? A method for transmitting brainwave altering signals and monitoring citizens. Cell tower surveillance? Tracking all communication.
  • Though it's not essential to play the game, the hidden messages in The Conduit meshes together just about every conspiracy theory under the sun.
  • The Secret World positions its setting as a world where "Everything is true"... which includes both every conspiracy theory and every fairy tale. Except aliens.
  • Perfect Dark presents a variety of alien conspiracies as being true as the basis for its plot.

New Media

  • The SCP Foundation is basically a collection of inexplicable objects and phenomena, and is essentially all the conspiracies no one has thought of rolled into one.

Real Life (?)

  • The Church of the Subgenius (a tongue-in-cheek parody of both New Age mysticism and Fundamentalist Christianity, fused together) includes a deliberately mixmastered hodgepodge of conspiracy theories in its whacked-out "cosmology".
    • Take two shots Discordianism, three ounces of unadulterated conspiracy theory, shake together with a splash of Bay Rum, a pinch of Dianetics, and a heaping helping of LSD, and you might be able to approximate it. Drink straight from a Klein bottle for maximum effect.
  • David Icke will tell you that the Anunnaki, ancient Babylonian gods, were in fact Reptilian aliens who are still among us, among them the Windsors, Bushes, and Habsburgs, and are behind every conspiracy ever alleged, including Kennedy, 9/11, the Pyramids, anything involving Illuminati, etc. (especially the antisemitic ones), authors of the past using then-acceptable antisemitism to pass coded references to Reptilians to others "in the know."

Meet David Icke. He is a fucking loon.

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