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IN THE BEFORETIMES, when Spring and Summer were pretty much indistinguishable from one another, both being mild, showery with intermittent blue skies, it was another season which heralded the official start of the holliers.
Officially, as the Dáil and Seanad roll down the shutters this week, the Silly Season is now upon us. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression was rather fabulously first deployed in a snarky Saturday Review article in 1861, when the writer bewailed a perceived plummet in the quality of news reportage during the period when London Times journalists headed for the holiday hills once the law courts and parliament had risen for the summer.
“The hands which at other times wield the pen for our instruction are now wielding the gun on a Scotch moor or the Alpenstock on a Swiss mountain. Work is left to feebler hands… In those months the great oracle becomes – what at other times it is not – simply silly. In spring and early summer, the Times is often violent, unfair, fallacious, inconsistent, intentionally unmeaning, even positively blundering, but it is very seldom merely silly,” the author sniffed.
Alas, modern journalism’s demands (and wages) aren’t conducive to most reporters buggering off for a spot of grouse-shooting or swanking around Switzerland for a couple of months, but the story remains the same: no parliament, no courts, and – World Cup or Olympics years excepted – a prolonged sports drought.
These are the bread-and-butter topics in the news business, but every summer the usual brisk flow of surefire headline stories slows to a trickle. However, akin to nature, the news business also abhors a vacuum and will rush to fill it. Modest yarns which at any other time of the year would languish near the end of a bulletin or in a dusty corner online or in print, are magnified, flammed up and thrust centre stage, no matter how frivolous: dogs on skateboards, famous faces found in foodstuffs, jeremiads against robbing bastard seagulls.
It’s no coincidence that some of the most bonkers news stories to spark disproportionate hysteria/angst, invariably explode into the public consciousness during the dog days of July-August and beyond. The Moving Statues of Ballinspittle transfixed us in July 1985; the Garth Brooks Croker Debacle broke us in July 2014, and we – along with large swathes of the globe – flew into a panic over Killer Clown sightings which kicked off in August 2016.
But truth be told, the silly season just ain’t what it used to be. Now the silly season is a permanent, all-year-round, 24/7 presence, looming over us like a giant orbiting planet made from tinfoil whose gravitational pull distorts reality and supercharges conspiracy theories.
Previously, the average conspiracy theorist was banished to the fringiest bits of society, sparking eye-rolls and spinning fingers whenever they cut loose about grassy knolls and fake moonwalks and Roswell’s Area 51. Now the swivel-eyed loons are in the mainstream.. Heck, they’re even running the White House.
Tinfoil, it seems, is the new black.
A quick scroll through news sites and social media right now will underline that it’s unnecessary to voluntarily hurl oneself into the rabbit-hole. Now the rabbit-hole comes to you; news stories aren’t just unadorned reportage, but are accessorised with the fake tan of conjecture, the false eyelashes of conspiracy, the injectables of conjecture, the skinny jabs of denialism.
The unusually hot weather? Earthquakes in Venezuela? Wildfires in France? Nothing to do with so-called ‘climate change’ or the result of natural disasters. They’re all triggered by HAARP’s nefarious activities. HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is a scientific facility located in Alaska which uses high-frequency radio waves to study the ionosphere, an upper layer of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Despite a slew of logical explanations and debunks on how HAARP’s work cannot and does not influence the weather or trigger seismic disturbances, it makes little dent in the conspiracy-industrial-complex: a 2024 study found that HAARP was the subject of more than a million conspiracy-linked posts on Twitter/X from January 2022 to March 2023.
How about the World Cup finals? Match reports and player ratings have been interspersed with multifarious claims that the tournament has been “rigged” – first in favour of the host country’s USA team, and then when they bit the dust (despite President Trump’s best efforts to place his tiny thumb on the scale), in favour of Argentina or “VARgentina” – this latter conspiracy theory fuelled by comments made by Egypt striker Mostafa Zico after his team lost 3-2 to Messi’s Eleven when he declared the trophy is “directed towards Argentina”.
Ah well, you can always escape the soaring temperatures and the football by heading to the cinema…or maybe not. Stephen Spielberg’s flying saucer blockbuster ‘Disclosure’ has turned 2026 into Hot UFO Summer, supercharging legions of alienologists long convinced that the government has been covering up proof that otherworldly creatures walk among us. “People have a right to know the truth,” declares the young whistleblower in ‘Disclosure’, unleashing the mantra beloved by those who still insist that the 3I/ATLAS comet was a galactic Trojan horse.
In the US this week, there is blanket coverage of 23-year-old suspect Tyler Robinson’s preliminary hearing in the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last year; the prosecution presented a formidable body of evidence to bolster their case, including videotaped interviews with Robinson’s former roommate Lance Twiggs, and DNA results linking the suspect to a weapon found at the scene. The conspiracy theories remain undaunted. Kirk had been blown up or taken out by a Mossad hit squad, using an exploding microphone.
Three elderly Republican politicians are also all over the news. 71-year-old Senator Lindsay Graham died of cardiac failure at his home last weekend – police confirmed no foul play is suspected, and according to the chief medical examiner, the preliminary cause of death was an “aortic tear”. Nope, insist the conspiracy brigade. The Iranians killed him. Or more likely the Russians – after all, Graham had just returned from Ukraine, where he announced a deal to impose sanctions on those buying Russian oil. “Was he poisoned by a foreign adversary either abroad or upon returning to the US?” serial conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer pondered on X in a post viewed 1.8 million times, without providing evidence.
Then there is 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell, whose hospitalisation without explanation several weeks ago sparked a fevered storm of speculation that he was actually dead, but was being kept alive for electoral reasons. McConnell finally released a long message and a photo of himself upright in a bed clutching a copy of that day’s newspaper, in order to quash talk he had joined Monty Python’s deceased parrot in the choir invisible. Uh-uh, demurred the conspiracists – looksee here, the photo is clearly an AI deepfake.
All of the above is in this week’s news, mind.
And the best/worst is still to come. The third elderly politician is, of course, Donald Trump, about whom conspiracy theories have swirled like a toxic miasma since he amplified the baseless, ugly ‘birther’ conspiracy that Barack Obama had not been born in the US and was therefore an illegitimate president.
On Monday, he announced he would address the nation this Thursday evening, apparently to claim that newly declassified intelligence has revealed foreign interference in the 2020 election, reportedly via voting machines.
That the 2020 election was “rigged” in Joe Biden’s favour is Trump’s biggest obsession and his greatest lie. He has relentlessly promoted conspiracy theories and dangerously undermined trust in the electoral process, even as his own Justice Department, lawsuits and independent studies have failed to find evidence of significant anomalies.
He is once again whaling on the pillars of democracy, willing it the same fate as the east wing of the White House.
And the midterms are coming. Suddenly the silly season isn’t a laughing matter any more.
Lise Hand is a journalist and writer, and a columnist for The Journal.
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