This world is full of conspiracy theorists, from those who have swallowed all the claims about the Moon landings being fake, to those who have done about the 9/11 attacks being an inside job, to those believing that extraterrestrial beings regularly visit the Earth and governments are hiding it, to creationists claiming that the entire scientific community is in a huge conspiracy against them, to flat-earthers thinking that the scientific community is in an even larger conspiracy against them. There are also lots of conspiracy theories related to politics.
One thing is common to all of them: They all have an arsenal of claims and arguments, and they pretty much never, ever go of a single one of them, no matter how easily and clearly it can be explained and shown that the claim has no basis to it.
Year after year, decade after decade, creationists cling to and repeat all the same old tired claims, even those that are very easy to explain and show as false. Decade after decade the Moon landing conspiracy theorists keep repeating all the same old tired claims, including those that are very easy to explain (and which they could even test themselves). Flat-earthers are perhaps the most obnoxious of them, repeating over and over and over the same old silly arguments, even those that they could even themselves demonstrate as false.
This is, of course, the opposite of how actual scientific research and study operates. Science, rather obviously, also regularly presents myriads of hypotheses, ideas and questions. The difference is that scientists don't cling to them, and instead just discard them, when they are clearly shown as incorrect. There's no use in clinging to them, to keep them, to keep repeating them over and over. It's not the goal of science (actual genuine non-politically-driven science) to push for a particular agenda, but to find out how the universe actually works, not cling to how we believe it should work. (Yes, there are certain sectors of science that are pushing political agendas, but let's forget about those activists here.)
The reason why conspiracy theorists cling to all their claims, even the sillier and weakest ones, is that their entire ideology and conspiracy theory relies on the sheer amount of "evidence" that they have come up with. They need a long list of "evidence", of assertions and claims, in order to support and strengthen their beliefs.
The conspiracy theory would be very weak if they only had two or three claims about their particular pet subject. However, have a list of two or three hundred claims, and suddenly you have a convincing argument! Certainly there must be something to it, given the sheer amount of evidence that something is going on!
There's also another reason for clinging to the sheer amount of arguments, without letting go of any of them: And it's a form of shotgun argumentation.
And that is: The more claims you have, the chances that at least one of them will convince someone is higher. If you only have two or three claims, then none of them will convince a large amount of people. However, have two hundred of them, and at least a few of them are surely to resonate with most people.
It can work in two ways: Firstly, one or a few of those claims might be of the sort that intrigues someone, making them curious and more susceptible to find out more. The more claims there are, the more likely it is that some of them will do this to the average person.
Secondly, if you only have two or three claims, many people will just know the answer to those riddles. However, if you have two hundred such claims, most people will not know the answer to all of them. And this plays strongly on the argumentum ad ignorantiam, in other words, "I don't know the answer to this, thus there must be something behind it, there must be some truth to this conspiracy theory."
The "shotgun argument" analogy is very fit in this case: If your shotgun shot just a couple of tiny pellets, the chances that neither of them hits the rabbit is very high. But have it shoot hundreds of pellets and the chances that at least some of them will hit the rabbit is much higher.
Both just the sheer amount of arguments, as well as the credibility of a few of them, can work on convincing as many people as possible.
That's why they cling to every single claim, no matter how ridiculous and easily explainable. They need every single argument and can't afford discarding any of them. That's the only way that the conspiracy theory can work.
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