On Conspiracy Theories
And: EU To Fire At Russia, Shoot Self; Tucker Proposes US Shift From Israel To Qatar
Andrew Kolvet, who is a senior leader in Turning Point USA, which was led by Charlie Kirk until his murder, sits down with Ross Douthat for a long interview. They talk about the state of MAGA post-Charlie.
Ross asks him about Candace Owens and her bonkers claim that Kirk was murdered by a conspiracy of his own employees, working with France and Israel. He dodges the question at first — you can tell that he doesn’t want to add fuel to Candace’s craziness — but then there’s this:
[Kolvet:] …And I will say, I will never look at a conspiracy theory the same way again. Because when you’re close to something, and you know what’s true and what’s not — you know, one of the allegations is that Bibi Netanyahu is offering Charlie all this money. That’s not true. There was never an offer. If there was, nobody on the team knows about it. Charlie would’ve had to just privately ——
Well, first of all, I don’t think Charlie would’ve ever taken anything from Israel, just as a matter of principle. Or from Ukraine or from the U.K. He just had a hard and fast no-foreign-money rule.
Douthat: Has this changed how you think about Trump era conservatism? Because, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of conspiracism on the right. And I am, by the standards of The New York Times, more sympathetic to many people about some conspiracy theories. I think there are weird things in the world that are not fully understood. I have interest in everything from Jeffrey Epstein to U.F.O.s.
Kolvet: Same. [Laughs.]
Douthat: Good. [Laughs.] We’ll do a show about those subjects. But it is also the case that there is a wildness to conspiracizing on the right, in the era of Trump, in the era of Covid, with the 2020 election and so on, that it’s just a distinctive part of conservative culture.
Do you regard that more critically, now that you’ve been on the receiving end of theories about yourself that you know not to be true?
Kolvet: Well, I’ve never been a hugely conspiratorial person in general, but I’m very sympathetic to why people are. When you think about the conservative mind-set and the conservative wiring, you realize, I think, even more why this is happening.
What we are living through is an era where conservatives have this bent to conserve our tradition, conserve our culture, conserve our heritage. But those institutions that are supposed to be doing the heavy lifting for us are not in alignment. The institutional capture by the left in America is pretty dramatic. And so I understand that that’s actually fueling a lot of this.
And then you throw in J.F.K., you throw in 9/11, you throw in Covid — all of these things that people question. They question: Are they getting the real narrative or not?
Just having been on this side of a conspiracy theory, and you just realize there’s a pattern to this, where they will allege connections that might have a grain of truth, an ounce of truth, and then they will leap to a conclusion that is so wild and you’re like: How did you put one and one together and then allege this from these two things? Or throw in a third element that wasn’t even true, and then that spun it in a whole different direction, and then all these people believe it and distrust you, and now you have this pall of doubt cast upon your person?
That’s the part that I didn’t fully appreciate, being on that side of a conspiracy theory, as opposed to being on this side of it. And you’re just like: OK, the facts have to matter somewhere in this equation.
And I think, as a conservative movement, we do have to make sure we’re fact-based. We do need to be sure that we police ourselves of some of the zanier, crazier, intellectually lazy conspiracy theories. But when it comes to U.F.O.s, when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, I think there’s some conspiracy theories that we need to dive into.
I get it. I’ve been party in recent years to two particular situations that have sparked wild conspiracy theories online and in the media, that had nothing to do with the truth. It’s wild to see how quick people are to believe things that are clearly not supported by facts, but that suit the narrative they prefer to believe. This has become endemic to our society, which is in a state of Narrative Collapse, which is closely connected to the collapse of authority.
It doesn’t help that sometimes, conspiracies really do happen. We know now from files released by the Trump administration that senior health officials — Dr. Fauci, Francis Collins — worked to silence any critics of the Official Covid Story. At the time, though, the media denounced dissenters as hysterics who refused to “follow the science.” As clinical psychologist and Covid critic Mattias Desmet has written, he knows from personal experience with scientific papers how unreliable “the science” has become in general. This is what made him such a skeptic of Covid policy.
In a fascinating critical essay on Curtis Yarvin, the philosopher Anton Barba-Kay argues that Yarvin is an intellectual huckster, but that his “Dark Enlightenment” project emerges from some discomfiting truths:
“The digital economy has made it impossible not to be aware that one doesn’t just get God’s-eye news anywhere at all, as well as made it impossible not to know that one’s own preferred diet is the thing that ends up swallowing one’s mind whole.”
“[C]onsensus American liberalism—the individualist, democratic, meliorist, progressive, secular universalism that has supplied the mainstream theory of American politics since World War II—has grown stale for many. Part of the youthful energy of Yarvin’s writing is simply that he raises questions about first principles. “Are nation-states, such as the US, even useful?” “Have you ever considered the possibility that democracy is bunk?” “Is this operating system [of global governance] working?” Such rhetorical questions gain purchase to the extent that it is almost impossible to defend the manifestly flawed condition of what exists in the absence of other viable alternatives.”
“[M]ainstream liberalism has become identified with the aspiration to neutrality to a degree that has made it harder to defend. The problem with liberalism as an ideology is not that it is false but that it has ceased to present itself as a political and moral vision of the good among others. … And critics of liberalism have long made the argument that, in presuming to neutrality and universality, liberalism refuses to see itself for what it is: a historically specific and culturally situated political program that relies on the presence of Judeo-Christian mores and Western institutions. But if liberal democracy is to continue to exist, it must be prepared to say what the good is for human beings and what grounds it.”
“[T]his country was founded within a technological context so alien from the present that a dangerous gap has opened up between our material and ideal experiences of the world. Nation-states came to be within a new sense of vernacular identity—our solidarity with other citizens relies centrally on our common care for the Constitution, the letter of the law, and the bookish practices of democratic deliberation. The political imaginary of the Internet is, by contrast, one that, by keeping us all globally in touch, does not conform to our current territorial borders and loyalties.”
Barba-Kay is explaining why people listen to thinkers like Yarvin, even when they don’t make much sense. Whether he intends to or not, Barba-Kay is also casting light on why liberal democracy is not likely to survive de-Christianization and the digitalization of society and culture. In the absence of generally accepted authorities, and having seemingly infinite narratives presented to one on the Internet, it shouldn’t be hard to see why people are drawn to conspiracy theories.
Sebastian Morello argues that Covid’s lies were a watershed for “post-truth”. Excerpt:
Everything was a lie, those who oversaw the social and political operation knew it was a lie, and people had their lives ruined or they died because of the lie. To this day, the regime either pretends none of it ever happened or, when pressed, tells us we must still believe the lies.
The number of lies grew, until it seemed our whole social settlement was based on a structure of lies. And we were informed via countless cases that if we did not believe the lies, we would be punished. We watched women’s sports collapse and women’s prisons infiltrated by predatory men impersonating women, while repeatedly being told that trans women are women. We watched entire towns and cities implode under the tyranny of Muslim rape-and-torture gangs, while we were told that diversity is our strength. Dissenters were hounded by a rogue police force and lives ruined by activist courts, while we were told that kindness is everything.
The effect of all the lies, of course, is that now everything is up for discussion. No one has the monopoly on truth anymore. The credibility of the old powers has gone, and now everything is on the table.
I spoke for a long while yesterday with a German journalist about the collapse of the epistemic structures of the world. I told her that I am haunted by the biggest lesson I learned from working for many years in the mainstream media: that the urge to Not See Things That Violate The Approved Narrative, and not the disinterested pursuit of truth, is the prime directive in most mainstream newsrooms — and nearly all journalists are unaware of it. Convince yourself that something is a “conspiracy theory,” and you can safely ignore it.
This, by the way, is one of the messages of the film Spotlight: that journalists at the Boston Globe, who had no particular desire to protect the Catholic Church, nevertheless ignored the growing scandal for years, because it just seemed too crazy to believe. Hey, I get it: if you were a visitor from the future, and had approached my desk in 2022 to hand me a box full of all the facts I would learn about the church abuse networks by 2025, I would likely have ignored it all as crazy conspiracy. It was simply not possible to believe that the clergy and hierarchy was so corrupt. But it was true.
On the other hand, I think of a smart, educated man I know, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time, but ran into at a wedding in 2019. He was going on about QAnon, and was a true believer. I asked him, “How do you know any of this is true?”
His response: “How do you know that it’s not?”
I struggled with the eagerness of this bright man to surrender all critical faculties to this crackpot Internet movement. Why? What did he get out of it? I never found out.
Having said all that, here’s something dark but important. I don’t believe in trigger warnings, but in this case I’ll make an exception: this discussion involves ritual sexual abuse of kids. If you’d rather not think about it, feel free to skip to the next item if you’re a paid subscriber. I’m going to paywall it for free subscribers.
I wouldn’t post on it, except that its author, John Schindler, is a retired top US spy. His Top Secret Umbra Substack, where this essay appears, is one of my favorites. It’s probably paywalled, though, but I recommend subscribing.
Mostly Schindler writes about spying, national security, and geopolitics. But this time, he leads by writing about some arrests Australian police made recently of an alleged Satanic pedophile ring in Sydney. (Details below the jump.)
