Are We All Conspiracy Theorists Now?
When questioning the right-wing conspiracy theory about a left-wing conspiracy sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory.
1.
I am fascinated and repulsed by conspiracy theories.
For years, I had an unhealthy fixation on the anti-vaxx movement, long before it metastasized during Covid to become the institutionalized insanity it is today. Admittedly, it was always as much repulsion as fascination; as the parent of a young child, I was enraged by the lies, the opportunists, the extremely bad pseudo-science, and the way the phrase “do your research” became an auto-oxymoronic invitation to defame scientists and listen to cranks on the internet.
But repulsion and fascination often go together, don’t they?
And not only conspiracies: I’ve always loved, and often written about, ‘weird religion’: cults (though in the academy, we tend to avoid that term), messianic movements, and ostensibly secular theories that become quasi-religions of their own. But also weird religion more broadly, as Noah Feldman and I talked about in this conversation a couple of years ago, which many of us practice: ways of imagining, being, and storytelling that invoke the non-rational, the magical, and the strange.
The baroque nature of today’s conspiracy theories is similarly bizarre, and thus, to me at least, endlessly interesting. Conspiratorial thinking reveals a variety of bugs in human nature: how we form opinions socially, mistake correlation for causation, engage in verification bias, and have a yearning for coherence and meaning that enables us to believe just about anything, no matter how preposterous. This is true for mainstream religion too, of course, including my own. The absurdity of a belief has no bearing on its success: what matters is how well it capitalizes on the flaws in the human mind, how well it explains away what is impossible to accept.
Chief among these: that most of our lives are shaped by random causes and conditions that have no particular reason for being. And others: that we won’t really die, that there is justice and order to the universe, that other people are either like us or are are bad people.
And so on. If there’s enough cognitive dissonance in the fact that a majority of American voters rejected Donald Trump in 2020, then any preposterous account of the election becomes preferable to the truth. Sure, mail-in ballots were all fraudulent and ballots were burned in Philadelphia. Whatever. A lie becomes true when it protects an important enough belief.
Thus autism isn’t a feature of neurodiversity (with increased rates due to increased diagnosis); it is due to human error, and thus correctable. Thus your failure to attain wealth and status isn’t a feature of macroeconomics, changing social mores, and and socio-economic systems; it’s due to a conspiracy of bad guys (often Jews).
I’ve had tangential encounters with conspiracy theories over the years. I wrote a book about a failed messianic leader in 18th century Poland, only to have that figure – Jacob Frank (1726-1791) – emerge as a central hub in Candace Owens’ antisemitic counter-history, which itself derived from the work of a Jewish militant named Marvin Antelman as morphed by the lizard-people antisemite David Icke and transmitted to Owens, Kanye West, and others. Talk about a dark, twisted fantasy.
I even played a cameo role in the “Chemtrails” conspiracy, which alleges that the government (or other malefactors) are keeping us all docile by planting chemicals in airplane contrails: in 1998 I wrote a law review article discussing proposals for geoengineering to mitigate climate change, one of which was allowing airplanes to fly a bit dirtier and scatter more dust in the atmosphere. That was close enough to merit a mention on some Chemtrails message boards.
But it’s not really fun anymore.
Not when the president of the United States, spreads the Big Lie about the 2020 election, puts violent insurrectionists in government posts, and weaponizes the government to go after his perceived enemies. Not when RFK Jr. makes anti-vaxx nonsense into government policy, which will harm tens of thousands of people. Not when QAnon — which on its face is hilarious, really — drives families apart and leads to violence.
And not when, as the saying goes, every conspiracy theory eventually ends in antisemitism, which, in the case of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, inspired the murder of Jews praying at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
And now, the Trump regime is using the military to occupy American cities (as Kamala Harris told us he would, and was derided for saying so) on the basis of conspiracy theories straight out of 1984: that there are ‘radical left’ ‘antifa’ conspiracies against America.
Which ironically, has turned me into a conspiracy theorist.
2.
My personal red pill was the series of text messages allegedly sent by Tyler Robinson, who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, to his roommate/partner, who may be gay or trans or both or neither.
At first, there were signs suggesting that Robinson was an extremely-online nihilist or perhaps a ‘Groyper,’ a far-right follower of Nick Fuentes. But then the FBI made public this series of text messages. Below is a scan of the charging documents themselves, posted by a Washington Post journalist Evan Hill on TwitterX:
Then, a bit later:
The first thing I want to say about this is that I asked a friend of mine who works for a well-known, left-leaning news outlet whether anyone in the mainstream media was doubting the veracity of these texts. He said no. For the messages to be fake, even in part, the FBI and probably the Utah Police would have had to forge evidence in the highest-profile murder case of the decade, basically in broad daylight. No one respectable believed this, he said.
Meanwhile, here is a CNN debunker of a variety of other conspiracy theories about the Kirk assassination: that he was shot from behind, that there were multiple shooters, that (of course) Israel was behind it, and so on. It’s obvious that there’s a lot of misinformation, guesswork, and speculation swirling around.
Okay, but some of these text exchanges make no sense.
First, what 22-year-old — let alone one conversant enough with online culture to use a well-known troll phrase — texts like this? I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out. This from the same person who engraved a joke on a bullet casing saying ‘if you read this you gay’ and referenced a video game on another? The casings and the texts don’t match at all: the first suggests the writer is a ironic gamer, the second suggests he is a sincere crusader against discrimination. As one Twitter user put it, “It’s basically ‘hey honey, i just want to let you know that i admit the murder’ ‘omg why did you do it?’ ‘for whatever reason the prosecution wants to hear.’
These messages read as if someone asked ChatGPT to write a series of self-incriminating texts.
Are the messages fake? I have no idea. All I can tell you is that they seem fake to me.
And that is disorienting enough. I feel like the Trump takeover of the government and much of the media apparatus (now including CBS News) has happened so quickly, it’s hard to know who to trust. All I need is a tin hat.
After all, it’s obvious that I’m in the same position as a MAGA election denier. For someone with my politics, it really sucks that the murderer may have killed Kirk because of Kirk’s hateful statements about trans and gay people. And so, of course, my own cognitive dissonance is impelling me to doubt this incriminating evidence.
And look at the company I’m keeping. On his frequently-conspiratorial podcast, Steve Bannon said it was ridiculous that someone who just murdered a celebrity would be texting that his dad would be upset about the rifle:
You just murdered the most important young person in the conservative movement, you shot him down like a dog, and you’re telling me you’re texting, ‘Dad’s going to be very upset I lost grandpa’s rifle.‘ Are you kidding me? You expect me to believe that?... How did the guy have time to write a sonnet? How did he worry about ‘Dad’s really going to be upset about grandpa’s rifle‘? Dude, I think your father may be upset that you shot a man in cold blood in front of the world.
Bannon also said:
I’m particularly not buying those text messages, it just seems too stilted, too much like a script – actually, like a bad script. So we got to get to the bottom of it.
I hate to say it, but Bannon makes some good points here. (The video is here.) Are these really the text messages of a kid running for his life, having just shot a major political figure in front of three thousand people?
To be clear, Bannon also alleged the government’s own conspiracy theory: that Robinson was part of some vast left-wing terror network — and, for good measure, that Utah Governor Spencer Cox was “part of the problem.” So, respectable journalists, the government, and the police are saying these messages are real, and crazy people say they are not. I get it.
Meanwhile, my head hurts to be agreeing with Steve Bannon.
3.
Please allow me to step back from the brink here, because I wonder if any of this is really “believing in a conspiracy theory” as opposed to having a healthy skepticism of evidence presented by a far-right government stacked with loyalists, “patriots” and lackeys who are themselves conspiracy mongers.
First, saying that cops tampered with evidence is not the same as a conspiracy theory. In fact, police misconduct is responsible for around half of wrongful convictions that were later overturned. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.
Second, these “cops” are FBI agents supervised by Kash Patel who was, himself, a conspiracy theorist podcaster who proudly says that he answers to Trump and to the MAGA agenda, and who has no clue about the basics of criminal procedure.
Third, these text messages are themselves part of a conspiracy theory: the absolutely baseless claim, repeated by JD Vance and Stephen Miller on a “guest-hosted” posthumous episode of Charlie Kirk’s radio show, that Robinson was part of, or at least radicalized by, a left wing “NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.” That is the real conspiracy theory and it has already begun dictating government policy, thanks to NSPM-7, the soon-to-be-infamous Trump memo targeting political activity.
Finally, the leading actor in this drama is himself a conspiracy-monger who has lied many times in the past. For God’s sake, Donald Trump used a sharpie to modify a National Weather Service map so that he wouldn’t look like he made a mistake about the path of a hurricane. Years earlier, Trump impersonated a non-existent publicist on phone interviews in the 1980s — the guy actually disguised his voice and said he was “John Baron” or “John Miller” when it was obviously Donald Trump. Here, listen:
And just a few months ago, Trump insisted that Kilmar Albrego Garcia had “MS 15” tattooed on his fingers, when that was obviously an annotation added in photoshop. And the election denial — which, let’s recall, court documents have shown that Trump knew to be false — and all the rest, right down to the Haitian immigrants who were not eating pets and never were. The guy lies all the time, and he is surrounded by obedient yes-men. It seems entirely plausible that the cops would mess with evidence to tell the political narrative directed by the White House. This is hardly QAnon.
So maybe I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Maybe I’m just a little paranoid. Which honestly feels pretty justified, as tanks are rolling into Portland, which is not yet a warzone, and Chicago, which is also not yet a warzone, and children who are not in any way connected to Tren de Aragua, are being ripped out of their beds and thrown naked into ICE vans:
I began this post talking about weird religion, and end it by reposting videos of naked children being abducted by government agents. Ironic, isn’t it, that QAnon and the endless conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking are fake, but here the government is literally kidnapping children from their homes, right on video. Ironic that the National uard is being sent in to control a fake warzone that only exists in conspiracy theories, but will now create a real warzone where none had before existed.
This is the disorientation of 2025, in which, to coin a cliché, truth is stranger than conspiracy theory.
Welcome to the rabbit hole! It’s cozy in here.
Here’s some good stuff I’ve read lately:
Rebecca Solnit ( Meditations in an Emergency ) has written the definitive analysis of Hegseth’s and Trump’s unbelievably stupid, bizarre, fascistic, and yet also quite scary speech to military generals. Please read that.
DeSmog did a great summary of actual climate scientists debunking the Trump administration’s “climate report.”
Robert Reich predicts the shutdown will end when the air traffic controllers strike.
Michelangelo Signorile is up to his old tricks, in a good way, helping to maybe out an anti-gay gay member of Congress. I won’t say who, since I don’t want to get sued, but Mike does and he brings the receipts. Decide for yourself. (It’s not Lindsay Graham.)
Adam Tooze has a two-fer in his newsletter: what CEOs really think about Trump, and the transmogrification yet again of San Francisco.
Finally, a lovely essay by Sean Illing on “the cult of certainty.”
Lastly, I want to recommend this video by Jon Favreau of Crooked Media, who does a really excellent job of summarizing the worst of the Trump offenses, explaining how they do get lost in the blur for non-political-junkies, and arguing that Democrats should make the shutdown about more than just a policy disagreement on healthcare. If you have relatively-not-plugged-in friends, this is a great, easy thing to watch:
Thanks as always for your support. Thanks to several of you who upped from free to paid subscriber this week — this newsletter depends on your support!
is it a conspiracy theory when you're the victim of disinformation campaigns? :/
Jay, you probably know about Hans Vaihinger and his Philosophy of “As If.” Particularly relevant to the first part of your post.