Truth, Truther, Trutherer

Has conspiracy thinking come full circle and gone back to sleep?

A few months ago, I made a video called How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Normie. The gist of the video was that in a post-truth era, the relatively grounded views and opinions of normies in the real world were comforting and concrete. Numerous commenters disliked my direction of travel; it was “de-radicalizing” and others argued that it is possible to sift golden nuggets of truth out of the mountains of cyber-slate; it just required dedication. When the epistemic chasm between yourself and the individual whose entire worldview amounts to “whatever the government says” is so vast as unbridgeable, all that remains is to enter a de-politicised frame and return to the organic and close-to-hand. One re-enters that most precious and rapidly dwindling of places, a pre-internet mindset.

A year or two ago, I heard someone in this sphere on a podcast explain that he (possibly Thomas777) believed the JFK assassination happened exactly as the mainstream said it did. The narrative was all true: Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone commie loser who murdered Kennedy because he was a lone commie loser, and that was that. The conspiracy was, well, the conspiracy because the establishment didn’t want people thinking Communists were dangerous sociopaths who should be kept under watch. Whatever the truth, it highlighted to me that in the popular imagination, the conspiracy had become the orthodox view; the dissident, free-thinking opinion was that the system’s narrative was actually true!

Similarly, it’d be a brave man who fired up his social media accounts and stated without equivocation that the 9/11 Commission Report was a monumental achievement and an ungarnished example of truth and objectivity. The critical point of view has long since attained parity with or supplanted the orthodox narrative, so the starting point is skepticism. This represents a problem for people on the “cutting edge” of commentary because the unorthodox position is crowded and banal. The incentive is to break out and plant your flag on greener discursive pastures without folding back into the mainstream opinion. In the past, invoking Lucius Cassius’s legalistic question “Cui Bono” (Who Benefits?), was considered revelatory because the most obvious answers were deeply uncomfortable.

Who benefited from the JFK Assassination? Contenders include the Federal Reserve, the Military Industrial Complex, Cold War hawks, The CIA, etc.

Who benefited from the 9/11 attacks? Israel, The Zionist lobby, the Military Industrial Complex (again), The intelligence agencies (again), and the Neoconservative movement generally.

Inevitably, then, we come to the question: who would benefit from Donald Trump being assassinated? The list is long. The Democrat Party, the Biden family, Hillary Clinton, the intelligence agencies (again), arguably the Military Industrial Complex, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukraine Warhawks (including within Europe), open borders advocates, abortion advocates, trans advocates, feminists, the mass media, DEI recruits, Mexican drug cartels, Palestinians, the nation of Poland, probably the nation of China, the nation of Iran, NATO, Marxists, Breadtubers and Stormy Daniels.

Needless to say, the baseline assumption that the would-be assassin was a 20-year-old kid acting alone has come under a substantial degree of skepticism. To ask Cui Bono? is the normative foundation of the discourse, not its revelatory conclusion. Again, we can see that this poses a problem for conspiracy theorists because the space that they formally inhabited has become overwhelmed and colonised; it is mundane.

So, what to do?

In his article If You Think The Trump Thing Was Real Let Me Tell You About This Beautiful Bridge I’m Selling, James Delingpole claims that everything related to the assassination attempt was fake, mere theatre for the rubes being played out and orchestrated by actors. Delingpole and Miri F, a writer he quotes, have changed the criteria for what constitutes a “normie” and those who are “awake”.

The good thing about events like this is that they are very revealing litmus tests that allow us to identify who’s an honest, reliable commentator and who’s not.

Anyone high-profile taking this “assassination attempt” seriously and telling us it’s “proof” of just how threatened the establishment / Democrats / random 20-year-olds are by Trump is just playing into the performative Punch ‘n’ Judy political theatre and working to keep you neutralised by platforming people like Trump as real opposition.

At the very least, these kind of commentators are guilty of gullibility and still, after all this time, not grasping how the world stage really works and that - when sensationalist global events are literally performed on a stage by actors, they’re probably not real.

The new iteration of the conspiracy frame appears to have unburdened itself entirely of logistical concerns, motivations, and critical questioning. On the contrary, asking, for example, why the Secret Service did not prevent the kid from climbing across the roof or highlighting the mad rhetoric deployed by the media would merely mark you out as a gullible dupe falling for the show’s plotlines.

The initial default position is not one of skepticism but belief. The belief that superhuman elite world planners orchestrate everything that transpires with such consummate ease that it is utterly pointless to concern yourself with logistical questions. In this rather gnostic worldview, the people who investigated what temperature-burning jet engine fuel would need to melt steel would be considered normies because they have not immediately concluded that everything is planned. Likewise, whether or not JFK actually died slumped across Jackie’s perfectly fitted Chanel suit with his brains dripping out or went on to live in the Bahamas is moot because, again, the world planners achieved their ends anyway.

Consider the Ukraine/Russia war and the ramifications of a Trump presidency within this context. Zelensky is indeed an actor, and he’s also deeply involved with various interests within the defence establishment and wider geopolitical entanglements of the West, which are, in reality, the different tentacles of American power. Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that he will end funding to Ukraine and has told the Europeans they have to step up and fight for themselves. Hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and what could be construed as compromising the Eastern flank of the Western Empire all would be placed in jeopardy under a new Trump Presidency. Is it so far out of the bounds of possibility that agencies with vast resources and intelligence decided it simply wasn’t worth the risk and that Trump should be “neutralised” lest the boondoggle ends?

Such a conspiracy theory is not too different from some of the earlier theories surrounding the murder of JFK, namely that powerful forces wanted the Vietnam War to go ahead regardless of costs. It is also, by today’s standards, relatively banal.

In the hyper-cynical, super-connected, and politically saturated 2020s, conspiracies involving a plot to whack a politician because he may threaten geopolitical aims and financial lucre are relatively thin gruel. They are a mere play or a distraction, theatre for the sheeple, the truly enlightened having moved on long ago to contemplate weightier matters. I would be filtered out of Miri F’s mechanism of separating the awake from the chaff.

In direct contrast to Delingpole’s idea that the purpose of the theatre is to further divide and conquer the masses as they squabble among themselves, is Academic Agent’s thesis that, on the contrary, the regime will be taking the opportunity to clamp down on the crazies, usher the adults back into the discourse and advocate for unity and calm:

The narrative The Slop wishes to paint is that the regime is upset that the shooter missed. In reality, every world leader in the GAE immediately condemned the violence and wished Trump a speedy recovery. These leaders included Joe Biden himself, who later rang Trump, Barack Obama, Sir Keir Starmer, who also later rang Trump, Justin Trudeau and virtually every other high-profile leftist leader of note. Dozens of celebrities and billionaires declared their support for Trump, including a few rappers and black sportspeople, but perhaps most significantly, billionaires Bill Ackman and Elon Musk. The firmware update sent by the ruling elite was immediately picked up by their underlings in the non-ruling elite, with Brian Stelter, at one time the Lord High Priest of Trump Derangement Syndrome, saying that, actually, Americans are not divided over politics after all.

From the perspective of the conspiracy lens, Academic Agent is simply naming the actors on the stage and alluding to their motivations, which are presumably all fake, too. The “realist” approach to understanding events is, in almost every metric, the opposite of the conspiracy approach. The world planners are not out-of-touch Gods whose motivations are pure evil but real people with names, incentives, and power centres that, in turn, have clients attached to them. What incentives might the regime have to calm down the rhetoric and, in some way, de-politicise the masses? Curiously, the outcome is the same as that via the conspiracy lens: stability for the system.

It’s worth considering that what today is called “Elite Theory” or “Realism” would, by the standards of a few decades ago, be considered a conspiratorial lens because the focus is squarely on elite groups of people networking and working toward achieving their aims. Yet, this, too, is apparently mere normie talk now.

The curious direction that so much conspiracy thinking has taken is one in which, fundamentally, everything is under control because our rulers are infinitely competent and capable. They are magicians, Gods; they create plays for our amusement, but in the end, everything, absolutely everything, is going according to a script. The Ukraine war is planned, or perhaps just all AI. If China and the BRICS create a new currency that could torpedo the dollar, then it must by virtue of it happening, be part of the plan. Long-time followers might recognise that we’re back on old and familiar terrain: History as planned or History that runs in cycles. I, of course, believe in cyclical history.

I do not see The Gods firing fake bullets at Donald Trump, who swiftly daubs his ear with a squib. I do not see infinite degrees of competence or manipulative expertise. I see a corrupt, venal, and petty-minded cabal of squabbling shysters presiding over the decaying husk of a once great civilization currently deploying a dementia patient as its figurehead.

The irony of neo-conspiracy thinking is that, in common internet and pop culture parlance, to be “awake” or “red-pilled” was to be conscious of the harsh reality confronting you without the safeguards and fluffy comforts enjoyed by the normies. In this frame, Donald Trump didn’t actually come within an inch of having his head blow out like a melon on television; everything was under control, padded out. The safeguards remain intact; nothing happened. Just sleep, don’t fret.

The world planners are in control. They can take care of everything… can’t they?