Doff your tinfoil in solidarity, for these are dark times for the truther movement in celebrity pregnancy. Of course, we know that truthing is always a lonely path, which the dedicated conspiracist is fated to tread with only countless other wingnuts and the odd US presidential hopeful for company. But advances in technology, coupled with regressions in self-esteem, mean that it has never been easier for our celebrity rulers to counter claims that they are faking their pregnancies.  Only this week, Kim Kardashian decided to crack down on speculation that she was doing what so many celebrities do: faking a pregnancy using an ever-expanding set of state-of-the-art prosthetics for all trips out of the home for at least six months, while the real baby is incubated remotely, either in an indentured civilian girl or a laboratory birthing pod in Area 51.  For weeks, the truthseekers have been convinced Kim is engaged in just such a conspiracy against the public. Their corners of the internet teem with snaps of her bump looking a bit smaller on a day after it has looked a bit bigger, with QED captions that tantalisingly decline to address the fact that the only thing more of a hassle than being pregnant would be faking a pregnancy. Consider this batshit form of picture research the Loose Change of the pregnancy truther movement, and realise that the less supportive of Kim’s Spandex separates are just more lies put out by the Pentagon.  Related: Why Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy selfie would turn Titian on  In response to this growing body of evidence that her body is not growing at a remotely credible rate, Kim responded the best way she knows how: by stripping in a sparse modernist setting, positioning her iPhone at the precisely calibrated number of degrees to confirm her status as the greatest master of Dutch angles since Carol Reed, and capturing her naked form in a selfie heralded as some kind of landmark moment in the women’s movement by people who seem to understand such things.  Luckily, the lighting is easily dim enough to give the truthers hope: I doubt they’ve seen a less convincing shadow than the one across Kim’s belly since those created by the lunar module in 1969.  In the meantime, let’s remind ourselves that Kim is far from the first celebrity to have masterminded a false flag gestation: she was preceded most recently by Beyoncé. The evidence that Beyoncé and Jay Z faked Beyoncé’s pregnancy with their daughter Blue is overwhelming, as long as you haven’t been playing with a full deck since the Roswell incident. It comprises: some awkward creasing in Beyoncé’s dress when she stood up during a chatshow appearance; the (admittedly) stunning fact that she contrived to give birth in a New York hospital without any number of members of the caring professions selling the details of it to the media, and some uncertainty about a shifting due date. Plus the suggestion that it was Jay Z’s lovechild with someone else, or Beyoncé’s dad’s lovechild with someone else.  But inevitably, as far as celebrity pregnancy conspiracies go, the mother of them all – or rather, of none of them – was Katie Holmes, whose union with noted Scientologist Tom Cruise created the perfect storm of circumstances to render the idea of an ordinary pregnancy as outlandish as any of Daddy’s beliefs.  A rundown of all the theories about the Cruise-Holmes progeny would be impossible in this space: suffice to say that little Suri Cruise was widely accepted, among people who widely accept such things, to have been spawned in some quasi-magical way, as you might expect of Scientology’s destined messiah. Biggest traction was achieved by the idea that she was carried by a brainwashed surrogate out at Gold Base, the Church’s heavily fortified international headquarters in the California desert. You probably think the fact that Suri emerged after nine months looking an adorable cross between her parents as a counter to several of these assumptions – but then, you probably think the CIA didn’t invent Aids.  Encouragingly, this sort of sophistication no longer separates us from the animals. Barely a couple of weeks ago it was revealed that a notable giant panda in a Taiwanese zoo had staged a phantom pregnancy, only to be rumbled on the ruse when experts gave her an ultrasound. Yuan Yuan is the second giant panda believed to have faked her pregnancy, with last year’s effort by a Chinese one resulting in an expert suggesting that the animals are now pulling this stuff to get extra food and better accommodation. “After showing prenatal signs, the ‘mothers-to-be’ are moved into single rooms with air conditioning and around-the-clock care,” he told the Chinese state news agency. “They also receive more buns, fruit and bamboo, so some clever pandas have used this to their advantage to improve their quality of life.” With only a single breeding Kimye couple in the world, the parallels are too obvious to state.  Elsewhere in celebrity pregnancy mania, meanwhile, there are important philosophical developments. The practice of journalists falsely implanting babies in celebrity wombs has been going on for decades, but this week Leonardo DiCaprio won damages against a French magazine for a story headlined: “Rihanna pregnant with Leonardo’s baby: he doesn’t want the baby.” The publication is called Oops!, which I am pronouncing in a sarcastic French accent even though it doesn’t have the local duck-feet quote marks round the title, and its owner has been ordered to run an apology over a third of the front of its next issue.  Yet this Frédéric Truskolaski must be short of a coverline for the issue after that, because instead of sucking up his punishment, he doubled down on the offence with a declaration that Leo is “a pervert” with “a racial issue”. “DiCaprio almost systematically goes out with Aryan-type girls, always blond hair,” he justified. “He could not stand the fact that our magazine was saying he was having a baby with a black girl.” Oof. As for the veracity of his original tale, as far back as June, Frédéric was opining of Rihanna’s pregnancy: “We didn’t know. We thought she might be. We were not sure, of course.”  Clearly, Frédéric is an enemy of racial stereotyping in all its forms, but he does seem to be making an idiosyncratically French point – probably while enwreathed in Gauloises smoke – about existentialism and celebrity pregnancy. I would like to see his teaching adopted as expert canon by the celebrity truther movement, whose rational relationship with the search for meaning could probably use a bit of a leg-up.  Finally, before we conclude, I must inform any truthers tempted to dash off a quick 323 communiques to me – sent two to three minutes apart throughout the night – that I make a special point of passing on all email addresses to the secretive world government, which comes round and puts a surveillance implant in one of your upper molars while you’re sleeping. So please: before you put jabber to keyboard, work out if you can afford to compromise the movement’s security in this way.
The truth is out there, but it’s pretty hard to detect, what with all the theories about the stars and the way their offspring suddenly appear after nine months