The problem is that, whilst there are plenty of people who lack critical thinking skills and believe absolutely bonkers things, there are also people at the other end of the spectrum who apparently believe everything that the government tells them and scoff at any whiff of what is described as a conspiracy theory wholesale and/or the people who cite them.
That holds for the UK and US governments, at least, (excluding anything said by Trump); yet oddly enough, the same people often seem to refuse to believe anything that comes from the Russian or Chinese governments isn't lies based on conspiracy. Are people in the UK and US being mad conspiracy theorists if they say "Well, it's Russia - what do you expect?" ? What about if a Russian or Chinese citizen believed the same? Are they crazy and deluded too?
The PPs who've been laughing off the idea of a New World Order - what do you even understand by the term that you find so incredulous? It's a term that is/has been mentioned in speeches by a number of US presidents - it's even mentioned in Latin on the dollar bill - and in the UK, Gordon Brown for one invoked the term and the need for it to happen on a number of occasions. What is fully meant by it is a whole different question - and could it mean something very different to every single president/PM/politician/newspaper editor who mentions it? Either way, it's a very well-used political term, so do we assume that everybody who says "Huh, well my crazy BIL believes that they're planning a New World Order!" simply lacks critical thinking skills/intelligence or has been smoking weed? Does your answer differ depending on whether said BIL postulates other things that you find believable or whether he also comes out with things that you find to be completely beyond ridiculous?
People at both ends of the spectrum can be guilty of lacking critical thinking and/or accusing those at the opposite end of the same. As can a great many of those in between.
Plenty of absurd, crazy things forever remain just that: either proven false or never provable to be true, but how do you know for an absolute fact what could be true and what is unquestionably bonkers? Did the government deliberately manufacture and spread COVID-19 and spread it in their crazy quest for population subjugation, world dominance or other? Would they? Could they? Is your answer different depending on which country's government might be accused of this? Have they ever done this before? Yes - now-unclassified official documents confirm that viruses were released from Porton Down in experiments to observe what effect it would have? Why did they do this? Was it an accident? Was it deliberate? Was it done for ultimately beneficial prevention-based reasons or nefarious ones? Would they do it again or is the very notion laughable? If the latter, was it equally laughable at the time when they demonstrably did do it? Was anybody who suggested that they were doing it then derided and mocked?
Do you believe that Blair and Campbell deliberately promulgated false evidence in an attempt to go to war - maybe one that they'd planned long before and/or Bush had ordered them to join him in or else? If so, why might they have done this? Why did we not find out until much later? Or did Blair make a genuine mistake? Did he falsify the dossier for the gretaer good, because he just knew that we needed to go to war with Afghanistan, but just couldn't make the general population understand the bigger picture without 'fibbing' for the greater good of ultimately keeping us all safe? Was Blair deluded and taken in by a conspiracy theory that led him to do this? Do you trust/accept anything he says now? Did you when he was the PM?
Are some of the rich and powerful people in the world the evil architects of conspiracies or are they themselves deluded in believing them? In David Rockefeller's famous documented declaration, where he thanked the media for helping him to keep his big secrets from the people and proudly admitted that he and his family were indeed "part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States", was he too a pathetic Walter Mitty type letting the money and power go to his head? Was he telling the truth? Was he telling a partial truth? Was he unspeakably wealthy and certainly evil? Is the same true of Bill Gates? Or are he and Melinda, who are also unspeakably wealthy actually among the greatest and most genuinely philanthropic people who ever lived - and the huge wealth is an irrelevant coincidence? Or do they plan to do a great deal of genuine good, but also cash in by making more money/gaining amazing PR/buying themselves karma points?
Critical thinking is required throughout and nobody anywhere on this particular spectrum has all the truth or all the lunacy. Many one-time conspiracies have since been proved and/or admitted by governments (who may be telling us the truth - and why didn't they from the start? - or who may be playing the long game layering it on another strata of smaller lies upon bigger lies, or may not really know the truth themselves in the first place); many have been proven beyond any doubt to be utter rubbish (or is that 'just what they want us to think'?!); most fall somewhere in the middle of a very, very long line.