PicoBlog

Yes reader, I too am giving my two cents on the recent Kate Middleton debacle, after all, it involves all three of my special interests: conspiracy theories, social media and a touch of True Crime.

Unless you have quite literally been missing yourself, I cannot fathom how you could have escaped the recent news about Kate Middleton being missing since Christmas. As someone who pays almost no attention to the Royal Family (apart from binging every season of The Crown… what can I say, I like good TV!) I tried my best to stay out of the discourse until it simply became unavoidable.

The theory that arose, speculated the whereabouts of The Princess of Wales, Catherine Windsor (née Kate Middleton), who hadn’t been seen since Christmas Day 2023. In all my years looking into various conspiracy theories and how they grow legs, I know that a missing person (especially a missing celebrity) is one surefire way to get people running their mouths online.

If you can think of a theory about why Princess Catherine was missing, the internet has already tweeted it, debunked it, called it a psyop and come full circle into believing it again. Kate either underwent a BBL, a facelift, was prepping to appear on The Masked Singer or had a colostomy bag fit. According to others, she was the victim of domestic violence, suffering from an eating disorder and contemplating divorce.

The theories evolved from silly to quite sinister in a matter of days and while nobody could agree on why she was missing, everyone was sure that the Royal Industrial Complex was covering something up. Then, on March 23rd, a big slice of humble pie was posted from the Prince and Princess of Wales’ Instagram Account, announcing the reason why she had not been seen… Kate has cancer.

There is nothing that will quell rumours and shut up naysayers quite like a cancer diagnosis. Cancer knows no age, race, class or creed; it is a vicious disease that will unfortunately affect us all at some point. The Internet was caught with egg on its proverbial chin and had to back down immediately… and they did, kinda.

Let’s rewind to a simpler time, long before we all suffered from terminal brain rot. The world is in a post-9/11 haze, paranoia is high, BMIs are low and paparazzi are making 6-figures a year, and the public has just about forgotten their involvement in the car chase that would kill Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales.

It’s 2003; husband and wife team Gabrielle and Kenneth Adelman decide to publish their photographs of the California coastline, documenting coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project. They bypassed print publication, publishing on their website instead.

The photographs included some 12,000 California homes, one of which happened to belong to Barbara Streisand, and Barbara was not happy about it. She tried to sue Kenneth Adelman for a whopping $50 million citing anti-paparazzi laws, a lawsuit that she lost in more ways than one.

Streisand’s lawsuit entered the news cycle and as a result, "Image 3850" (the image that contained her house) was viewed more than 420,000 times in the month following. Before she tried to have it removed, it had been downloaded just 6 times.

The real damage was not to Streisand’s wallet, it was to her reputation. She was seen as petty and money-hungry since her inclusion in the project was a mere coincidence, not to mention that the goal was to influence government policymakers, not doxx celebrities.

Unfortunately for Barbs, she became the namesake of The Streisand Effect; a phenomenon where an attempt to censor, hide, or otherwise draw attention away from something only serves to attract more attention to it. Other celebrities who have fallen victim to it would be Hunter Biden and Beyonce.

Before the days of doom-scrolling, hot takes and 8-part TikTok deep dives we would see a story like this as pretty black and white: Barbara Streisand was greedy and precious and felt that she was more important than the noble cause of fighting against the climate crisis.

If this happened in 2024, it would be a different story. Rumours would begin to bubble… just what was Barbara Streisand hiding in there, eh? Evidence of Illuminati rituals? Dead babies? Hilary Clinton’s human suit? And once people remembered that she was Jewish? Forget it. Barbara would be named the leader of the Deep State.

The term “conspiracy theory” has a very loose meaning in 2024, it covers anything from idle gossip to racist dog whistles, and it’s rough terrain to navigate. They have always existed, but in the past, they could be enjoyed on a surface-level basis—you could speculate whether Stanley Kubrick filmed a fake moon landing without having to think George Soros funded it. Likewise, you could bring a conspiracy theory up at a dinner party without friends thinking you’ve been spending time on 4chan.

To speak very broadly, I believe that conspiracy theories are the symptom of a larger problem, not the cause. Conspiracy theories about the Royal Family are nothing new; the idea that there was more to the death of Diana Spencer than the public was told, is written in conspiracy cannon. Bram Stoker also played his part as a conspiracy theorist; in 1910 he wrote Famous Imposters, where he speculated that Queen Elizabeth I was actually a man, by repeating a local rumour. The blueprint is nothing new.

The reality is that there is a recipe for the perfect conspiracy theory and they all begin with a seed of truth. When it comes to the British Royal Family there are many of these seeds.

Diana Spencer’s complicated relationship with the Royal Family has been written about ad nauseam, her vulnerability and free-spirited nature were nothing but a nuisance to the Queen and her court. The same could be said about her youngest son Harry, who caused many controversies in his youth, only to refuse to be another cog in their wheel of misery, leaving his royal duties behind in 2020 along with his American wife Meghan Markle.

Harry and Meghan have since exposed lots about the inner workings of the royal family, like the in-fighting behind the palace walls, where rival PR teams leak stories on other Royal Family members to the tabloids, in a desperate attempt to have the upper hand. Very reminiscent of the “men in grey suits” that Princess Diana opposed.

When these small seeds of truth are mixed with a general distrust in mainstream media—and in a Royal context, a disillusionment in the institution as a whole—people will inevitably draw their own conclusions, with some of the most audacious opinions being posted to social media.

Based on years of observation, I think the most “extreme” of these theorists are simply grifters, who understand that the loudest voice in the room gets the most traction. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they’re right and thus, the conspiracy theories spread like wildfire. In a matter of days, Kate Middleton was said to be everywhere from Turkey for a Mommy Makeover, to dead and buried underneath Kensington Palace, before being cloned by the lizard overlords.

The Royal PR team then took a page out of Barbara Streisand’s book and made matters a whole lot worse. As the world’s most sophisticated Press Team scrambled to show us that The Princess of Wales was alive, they created one of the most catastrophic Photoshop fails in history, publishing the now infamously doctored picture of Kate and her children on Mother’s Day. When everything went tits up, they allowed Kate (who we now know had just started chemotherapy) to take the blame. Nice.

Conspiracy Theories are not a new concept, they’ve just been put on growth hormones since the invention of social media. Theories that usually would have taken years to construct by “alternative historians” or genuine truth-seekers are now thrown out into the void of the internet, for everyone to repost without thinking.

Their life cycle is shorter than a mayfly, but their evolution is much more complex; what usually starts as some funny jokes and memes, quickly turns into insidious speculation and flat-out lies.

The worst part is these theories aren’t even half-baked when they’re put out there, they’re still a big sloppy mess, thrown into the ether of Elon Musk’s Twitter, where unfortunately they stick like dough to an un-floured surface; that little grain of truth that we started with might be in there somewhere, but it’s become impossible to see.

When it comes to #KateGate, the seeds were all there, some sewn decades ago with her late mother-in-law’s death, whereas others were more recent. Many asked why would Kate be unable to be seen in public after surgery when she was more than capable of showing face hours after giving birth—and in full glam!

The reality is that yes, we did have the recipe for a perfect Conspiracy Theory in #Kate Gate, but we also had a press team completely unprepared for a tweet-cycle that moves at the speed of light, met with the tragic circumstances around Kate’s diagnosis. The Royals were doomed from the beginning unless they were prepared to show their Princess hooked up to a chemo machine holding a sign reading “I’m alive”.

It does beg the question of where this cycle ends. Traditional media cannot catch up to the speed of social media without lowering the bar for journalistic standards further into the gutter, and the grifters and meme accounts are going to keep shit-posting until the algorithm no longer rewards them. The rest of us are left trying to read between the lines, trying to separate the kernels of truth from the conspiracy theories.

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