I keep running into the same logical fallacy around conspiracy theories. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, the argument uses the same strategy.
Say that the scientific community (the vast majority of individual scientists who are expert in the field in question) come out with a finding that says, oh, I don’t know, “the Earth is round”. Now, say that there are some conspiracy theorists who argue against this claim.
What is the strategy they use? Well, we will asume that they can’t say “the earth is flat” because they can’t prove it is flat. So instead of proving their assertion that the Earth is flat, they retreat to a position of attacking the assertion that the Earth is round.
They cast doubt on the established truth.
Note that isn’t the same as proving their truth. They will find one of the “Round Earthers” and dig up some dirt on him and say “Look, he used to work for the NSA. We can’t trust him.” Casting doubt on 1 scientist, leaving the remaining 9,999 scientist to assert that the earth is still round.
But then they’ve inserted doubt on the truth. And they might win a few converts who want to believe that the Earth is actually flat. They make no attempt to prove the Earth is flat, because they don’t have the proof. But they believe the Earth is flat, and as long as they feel they’ve inserted sufficient doubt on the established fact that the Earth is round, they will take that as sufficient to believe that the Earth is indeed flat.
If you attempt to call them on the fact that the notion of the Earth being flat is patent, unproven nonsense, they won’t argue with you. Instead they will change the topic back to the Round Earth assertion and quote something that attempts to cast doubt on the assertion.
They cannot prove the Earth is flat, so they have to stick to inserting doubt that the Earth is round.
Now, if the Round Earth evidence contained some error but the result of correcting that error was that the Earth was in fact slightly egg shaped instead of round, the Flat Earthers won’t bring you to that conclusion. They will poitn out the error and shout “See! See! This proves they lied about this particular subject. What else are they lying about?”
They will take a single mistake in the “Round Earth” theory as cause to suspect the entire work. They won’t try to prove “Flat Earth” because it is unprovable, but by raising doubts, they justify the fact that in their minds they are ardent believers in “Flat Earth”.
The other tactic is to play dumb and say something like “Prove to me the Earth is round”. The problem is that some topics in science actually require, well, science. And most people who play dumb don’t know science. So explaining to them the proof that shows that the Earth is round ends up like trying to teach quantum mechanics to a dog. A very stupid dog. It is sometimes handy to have some links and URL’s ready to point the middle-ground folks to something to read. But the die-hards conspiracy nuts, the ones who say “Prove it to me” with an implied “It isn’t true until I believe it” footnote, well, they’re just using the “Prove it to me” to stall.
So, those are some of the strategies of a conspiracy theorist.