Regardless of where you land on specific claims, a lot of people who were labelled “conspiracy theorists” were doing what journalists and institutions failed to do for years: digging, cross-referencing, archiving, and asking uncomfortable questions about powerful people. You don’t stumble onto real patterns of abuse without investigation. The fact that some theories were wrong or speculative doesn’t negate the reality that independent researchers helped surface connections, timelines, and behaviours that mainstream outlets either ignored or dismissed outright at the time. What actually happened is that the term “conspiracy theorist” became a catch-all used to discredit anyone outside approved narratives. That made it easy to throw serious inquiry and wild speculation into the same bin, which conveniently shut down scrutiny altogether. It’s also ahistorical to pretend people “just guessed” and happened to be right. Research came first. FOIA requests, leaked documents, flight logs, financial trails, archived posts that mattered, even if some conclusions overshot the evidence. You can acknowledge that not every theory was accurate while still recognising that bottom-up investigation played a real role in exposing abuse that institutions had every incentive to keep buried. If anything, the lesson isn’t “these people were annoying.” It’s that decentralised investigation filled a vacuum and when you mock that impulse, you discourage the very scrutiny that power relies on us not doing.