Conspiracy theories (CTs) and the communities who espouse them share several similarities with high-control (i.e., cultish) religious groups. CTs also serve as powerful vehicles for the disempowered and disenchanted to “speak truth to power.” Like many cultish groups, communities of self-identified “conspiracy researchers” frequently indulge in various forms of disinformation to assert their moral outrage and vindicate their feelings of victimhood, namely through distorting and mythologizing the past and scapegoating their perceived enemies. This essay explores the relationship between political paranoia, stigmatized knowledge, and feelings of helplessness through the lens of the French-American literary anthropologist René Girard’s theory of mimetic violence (also known as his scapegoating theory) and addresses some of the causes and solutions that can help those attracted to conspiracist explanations avoid the traps of cultish epistemology.