Detail, Rembrandt, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, ca. 1661-62.
1,575 words
There has been a lot of talk lately about the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. They are catching on among people who are not the usual conspiracy theory “type”: eccentric, slightly autistic, and with an overactive imagination. Now, conspiracy theories are beginning to catch on with normies and neurotypicals.
In three years, QAnon has gone from an obscure message board phenomenon to an unstoppable cultural juggernaut. QAnon videos continue to rack up massive numbers of views as Q devotees wait around for The Great Pumpkin to arrive. Before that, half the country spent a couple of years obsessing over Russiagate, a conspiracy theory promoted by our own elites about how Russia, essentially a Third World country with an economy the size of Spain, rigged the election of the most powerful nation in the world.
It’s not surprising that people took Russiagate seriously. “Respectable” people and ”legitimate” sources promoted the theory. QAnon, however, is a real enigma because it is so loopy, yet it has been embraced by an extraordinary number of normal people — some of them even quite intelligent people. Lin Wood may be a goofball, but the guy made it through law school, which requires a few brain cells. But that’s what makes this all the more surprising. You would think that a lawyer would understand the concept of evidence and know how to scrutinize claims.
I’ve heard some people say that Donald Trump appearing on the Alex Jones show was a significant turning point because it lent credibility to people like him, bringing them into the national conversation.
That said, America has a long tradition of conspiracy theorizing. The American Revolution wasn’t all about taxes and the principles of the Enlightenment. Before and during the Revolution, all sorts of conspiracy theories circulated regarding nefarious plots the British government was cooking up that we now know were never going to happen. One rumor suggested that the Church of England was scheming to have other denominations outlawed. The first major third party in American history was The Anti-Masonic party, which was entirely dedicated to ending the influence of secret societies that they believed were controlling the country.
And of course, all governments will promote conspiracy theories about their enemies during wartime as propaganda. During WWII, the government promoted a conspiracy theory about the Axis powers’ plan to take over the entire world. Once Hitler was done conquering Europe, he was going to conquer Africa, then South America, and then North America until they controlled the planet. 60 years before the Iraq War, the elites were playing the “We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” card.
Conspiracy theories are not new. Conspiracy theories becoming mainstream, while rare, is not unheard of either. And yet, I can’t help but feel like something different is happening this time.
During the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, the Left claimed that widespread Antifa violence were false flags by white nationalist infiltrators in the crowds who caused mayhem in order to discredit the movement. I saw several social media posts from people claiming to have seen busloads of Nazis and white militias arrive at BLM rallies. “And they were like ‘Alright guys! Let’s get out there and start a civil war.’”
Similarly, after the January 6 Capitol riots, the knee-jerk response from normie conservatives was to claim that the people who stormed the Capitol were actually Antifa trying to make them look bad.
In both cases, people jumped straight to conspiracy theory. They didn’t try to justify it. They didn’t wait for the facts to come in. They didn’t say “Sure, there are some bad apples, but they are a tiny minority.” No. They went straight to conspiracy theory.
This is bothersome.
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Now, I do not dismiss conspiracy theories on principle. Conspiracies do sometimes happen. Our institutions lie to us, and everything they say should be scrutinized. Sometimes things happen to leave loose ends and unanswered questions, and you have no choice but to engage in a little conspiracy theorizing. Even if you believe the establishment explanation that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, we still don’t know why he shot JFK. We still don’t know who he was meeting on his trip to Mexico City. We don’t know the answers to a lot of questions, and so in that regard, theorizing is all you can do.
But “conspiracy” should not be your default assumption. You should assume that any event is exactly what it looks like and only entertain alternative explanations when the facts don’t add up or if anomalies emerge.
For example, there are good reasons to think there might have been a conspiracy behind the January 6 Capitol storming; that it was something the establishment wanted to happen. There are videos of cops waving people in, et cetera. But that theory did not gain traction until a few days later when more evidence emerged.
The disturbing trend is that of people going straight to conspiracy without passing go and collecting $200. There has always been a small class of people who did that — now a lot more of them are doing it. This is what is new.
People are also beginning to turn to conspiracy theories as a coping mechanism. Before, I think many people approached conspiracy theories as entertainment. You’ve got a couple of hours to kill, so you watch a 9/11 Truth video. It was just a way to kill time. I was never a 9/11 truther, but I still enjoyed watching the videos. Some of them were very well done. There was some really good storytelling. It was bullshit, but it was very entertaining bullshit.
But those videos didn’t make you feel better about the fact that 9/11 happened or that the Iraq War was going on. That was never their intent or their appeal. If anything, they might have made you angrier. If there was any emotional reward, it was that they made the world you live in a more interesting place.
Some of the new conspiracies, however, seem to exist or became popular because they make people feel better. Russiagate was popular because, among other reasons, liberals didn’t want to believe that their country was as racist (or at least as indifferent to racism) as it is. Russiagate was a soothing balm. QAnon is pure, unadulterated hope porn, promising a happy ending while asking nothing from the viewer in return.
This is happening all across the political spectrum. Democrat conspiracy theories tend to not be as loopy as hologram Presidents or Satanic pedophiles drinking baby blood, but they are more paranoid. The Left is currently obsessed with the idea that our government, police, and military are riddled with white supremacist infiltrators.
I don’t doubt that there may be some closet Daily Stormer readers in the government, but that’s not what most people think when they see the word “infiltration,” which connotes espionage. It suggests these people signed up for the specific purpose of advancing the cause of white supremacy and are regularly reporting back to KKK Headquarters, sending top-secret government documents to the Grand Wizard.
It’s odd that the more repression and censorship white nationalists get, the more paranoid the Left gets about it. The Left seems more paranoid about white nationalism now than they were in 2016-17, when the Alt-Right was spreading all over the internet like a virus. Back then it was all “small penis,” “mom’s basement,” and “can’t get a girlfriend.” Now they think that we have this elaborate network of spies throughout all levels of government. Prior to the mass censorship, Leftists were at least able to keep an eye on us. Now that white nationalism has been pushed more underground, they don’t know what we’re up to anymore and have let their imaginations run wild.
It’s a shame. Our country — indeed, our entire civilization — is heading into the abyss. Now more than ever, people need to be sober, level-headed, and willing to look reality in the eye. And yet people are sprinting in the opposite direction of reality as fast as they can.
I wish I could end this on a more upbeat note, but I can’t find an upside. I have no answer to this problem. It’s depressing. We’ve always hoped that once things started getting worse, people would have no choice but to confront reality. Well, things are getting worse, and people are retreating deeper and deeper into fantasy land. They want to believe that anything other than what is happening is actually happening.
I’d like to believe that, too. I wish I could. But I’m too autistic for that kind of self-deception.
* * *
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27 comments
A purple pilled libertarian civnat friend of mine was full bore engaged in the Qtard trust the plan bullshit. On Nov. 4th I told him that while I agree that there appears to be considerable oddities with the election and I do believe it was “rigged,” Blarmpf is too weak to do anything about it and Biden will be inaugurated. Nothing I said could crack his dim-witted fantasy of daddy trump outmaneuvering the satanic pedophile elite and saving us from total ruin.
He bet a lefty lib-shit coworker of his $3,000, yes 3 grand, that Daddy Blarmpf would overturn the fraudulent election results and be righteously sworn in on Inauguration Day. I told him I give that outcome somewhere between 0-1% chance. My brain dead friend was flabbergasted that I could speak such blasphemy. He was like a child watching a movie in which the bad guy kills the good guy and the credits roll, only it was in slow motion spread out over 2 and a half months. He even proposed that we attend Don the Con’s Jan. 6th rally. I laughed and explained the futility of it. I’m still counting my lucky stars on that decision. Inauguration Day came and went. He hasn’t spoken of Trump, the election, or anything related since. It’s mind boggling how someone can be so enraptured by it all and then so quickly dispose themselves of what they claimed to be the most important event and political movement in one’s lifetime. When I speak ill of Trump he’s just deer in headlights. I know he doesn’t agree with my assessment of Trump and his phony movement but he has no rebuttal, only silence.
I estimate my friend to be of average intelligence. I’m no genius but I sure do feel like one when talking politics, race, jews etc with him. Mind you, this is a guy that I’ve painstakingly educated and dragged, kicking and screaming for the past 11yrs! to understand all of the core tenets of which we WN’s discuss here. I feel as though I rigorously studied for the White race’s final exam and aced it. I gave him the cheat sheet and yet he’s still at best a D student. To quote the Chinaman from Empire of Dust, “it’s all so tiresome.”
So did he pay his bet?
So what’s next? The steal of the election and the weakness of everyone around Trump was obvious. And I don’t mean more obvious stuff like they kill off Biden and put Harris in his place. What’s coming next that no one else is seeing? Do tell.
When I was 18 and setting off to California to see my love and spread my wings a 50yr orl find gave me the advice “Things Aren’t Always as They Appear” and this certainly has proven to be true and 20 yrs ago I left the States because through mostly non mainstream publications I was able to formulate what a lie most of the history of America was and saw that it was only getting worse.
The one thing that I did not question was the near saintliness of the Jews and it was not until the internet came along that enabled me to see which ethnic group was responsible for so much treachery in the world. I now hold firm beliefs in things that 15yrs ago I would have taken as utter foolishness.
To help make sense of our world I highly recommend theoretical Physicist Ron Unz’s website where he and other brave and honest Jews and others discuss the Jewish Question and numerous other topics, start with “Oddities of the Jewish Religion” and others in his American Pravda series. If you find things hard to believe search youtube for the BBC or AlJazzera documentary about the USS Liberty, a real eye opener in regards to just how bad things are.( if you can’t find it there try bitchute)
Are the “Protocols” a conspiracy theory?
Hey, how does the subscription thing work? I submitted, but I can’t figure out how to pay or anything. Will I receive an email or what?
Yes, you will receive an email with more instructions on how to send in payment soon.
Oh thankee!
“You should assume that any event is exactly what it looks like and only entertain alternative explanations when the facts don’t add up or if anomalies emerge.”
I cannot agree with this. This is how I used to think and it is what conservatards still claim. As one who used to dismiss every conspiracy theory as fanciful thinking, I now assume any one of many and mutually contradictory theories is actually what happened, rather than what something is made to ‘look like.’
I still believe we landed on the moon, but who knows what may emerge to challenge that view? There’s very little I hold to as ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ any longer other than the existence of God and biological reality.
There are some fascinating explanations for how the moon landing was faked. I’m not sure if I believe them or not, but they are fascinating. There are no stars in any of the shots, for example. Who is photographing the lander as it lands, since they haven’t landed yet? Why are the videos of such high quality when such a high quality camera at that time would weigh 100+ pounds but no such camera is listed amongst the cargo? etc.
A podcast on the subject:
https://therightstuff.biz/2019/04/13/the-paranormies-present-the-moon-landing-hoax-part-1-s4-ep23/
Yeah, after I wrote that, I started having seconds thoughts because I can think of scenarios when that might not apply.
Sometimes things happen which are a little too perfect. They look TOO MUCH like what they look like. Like the recent spa shootings TOO perfectly fit establishment narratives that I have to pause for second.
We live in an environment of conspiracy. You have to weigh things by the actors and motives. If I read a tornado in Kansas killed 11 and destroyed a building, I would not question because there is no motive and the people in question probably don’t have control of the weather yet. If I read that an unarmed black man was shot 50 times while reading his Bible by racist cops in wherever, I would know it’s not true. Likewise if I read that Iran or some Muslim country used poison gas on an orphanage, I would know it was merely neocon propaganda to get us to commit acts of war against them. Context.
Pressure can turn coal into diamonds, but this only happens rarely, so rarely in fact that diamonds are actually valuable. Normally, things unravel under pressure, get ruined, destroyed. Many people think they’re diamonds, but they’re really zits. You apply pressure and they pop.
This is all well and good, but I think that very often it is in our interest that conspiracy theories float around, or else people really do become too complacent and accepting of everything that happens.
The left has PLENTY of conspiratorial thinkers. In fact, the entire premise of institutional racism is one of the grand-daddy of all conspiracy theories.
I’ll give you an example. A friend of mine was telling me about a libertarian-tier video she saw on YouTube, a “man on the street” thing that was conducted at the beach. One young woman was convinced that black people are given fewer choices when they go to vote. As if there was a special booth set up, just for blacks, where the only candidates listed were white republicans or some such nonsense. This was an extreme example, but I know without a doubt that a ton of young, naive, spoiled and sheltered liberal white women really do believe that old white men are forever plotting and scheming ways to oppress minorities. They believe that lynching is pandemic in southern states. They truly believed that Donald Trump has the Grand Wizard of the KKK on speed dial.
We balk at their looney ideas, but guess what? Those ideas were given legs by the media and infiltrated the minds of a significant number of centrists and moderates who swung the vote.
The problem isn’t that the right engages in conspiracy theories nearly as much as the powerlessness of our position to give them oxygen because of lack of institutional control.
The right in American politics exists in a negative feedback loop and the left exists in a positive feedback loop. Their wacky ideas give them inertia, while our wacky ideas tend to retard our efforts in the areas that really matter. But again, this is, imho, more a matter of lack of institutional control than anything else. If we had real power, the wacky ideas would only serve to mobilize a large portion of the people who agree with the good ideas, but who otherwise wouldn’t find a lot of motivation to act upon their beliefs.
Hmm now, what are you calling 9/11 truth? I agree with you about the remote control airplane level crap, but the Ryan Dawson/Justin raimondo level stuff seems spot on to me.
I think we have become so divided as a people and nation that we have no regard for the truth anymore. We hate each other too much, and will show one another no quarter. Trumps win was written off as Russian collusion, ie treason. The democrats are satanic pedophiles in our eyes. There’s no middle ground. Lying was sanctioned in the public sphere with the weapons of mass destruction propaganda in the Bush years and the white supremacy/black lives matter propaganda in the Obama years.
I believe Obama started this, but he was a tool of another power. During the Bush years, lower caste whites and nonwhites began to form a vague coalition against the global elites through such separate but joining threads as the anti war/911 truth movement, the tea party/ libertarian movement(which contained most of the foot power of the nascent altright), and the related occupy Wall Street movement. Obama rose from the wreckage as a refreshing corrective to crazy neoconnery. Towards the end of his second term, the promise of “racial justice” was not being fulfilled—I think these people really believed they were going to get in there, flip a few switches, and black social pathology would be corrected—so there was a massive push to create a new civil rights movement through ginning up anti white hysteria through a few unfortunate police incidents. The global elite welcomed this to draw attention from the overseas wars and their financial chicanery. They divided the coalition against them by creating conflict within it over the incurable fundamental differences between whites and blacks. Also the tranny thing plays into this but I’m not sure how.
I think much of it has to do with the fact that polarization has reached to near-maximum levels. It’s not that they believe there was a conspiracy, it’s that they don’t care if there was a conspiracy: they know who the enemy is, and they are to be vilified and destroyed at every opportunity. Because that is how you win wars, and we are at war.
Also:
Most of the things you list as “wacky conspiracy theories” are more likely than not true. Like Masonic influence in our government, 9/11 was an inside job (how did 2 planes bring down 3 buildings?), etc.
You can either have official, bureaucratic press releases, various ‘commission reports’ and mainstream press ‘analyses’ based on that.
OR
Revisionist literature that rearranges the facts and put forward questions challenging the ‘official narrative’ thereby breaking the amnesia loop on which the Deep State(s) usually banks on.
Either have faith on the official, heavily redacted conspiracy theories OR come up with your own.
Conspiracies are gossamer structures, and they grow more gossamer as they increase in conspirators.
“Open conspiracies” are far more durable. The internal enemies of the West are operating on an open conspiracy model.
Paranoia is a stress-induced mental state. Persons under stress seek to causally connect disconnected events in order to relieve their stress. Conspiracy theories result.
Consider the behavior of a flock of birds or a school of fish. They move in unison, in concert, toward a common destination. Conspiracy? The point being, there are other animal dynamics that resemble conspiracy but are something else.
We on the Right may not like it, but economics is the leading cause of human events. Follow the money. Things go the way they go largely because somebody somewhere benefits financially from that way and not some other way.
Money talks, and we are thus justified in first suspecting a Soros behind the day’s events. Because that’s where the big money is. But big money is not conspiracy, it is just big money doing what big money does, which is getting people to behave in prescribed ways.
Both Alex Jones and Trump nullified any credibility they may have had by electing to behave like public buffoons. Who needs enemies if we have such allies?
“[…] We on the Right may not like it, but economics is the leading cause of human events. Follow the money. Things go the way they go largely because somebody somewhere benefits financially from that way and not some other way. […]”
Naive. You are ignoring the will to power (which is sui generis, power and money are NOT synonyms), the sexual motive (which has ruined many a rich man) as well as religious or at least ideological conviction. Think Maslow’s pyramid – in the grand scheme of things and on the level where history is made, money is actually only important as a tool.
I replied to you with a very long comment in the “Playing Dress Up” post.
The Will to Power can be exerted only by Kings with plenty to eat and no worry about where their next meal comes from.
“I sing the song of they whose bread I eat” explains 99 percent of human motive. Even the motives of men who charge across no-mans land into the teeth of death.
I do wish it were otherwise but the Right needs to understand human motives better.
There can be an entertainment aspect to convoluted, batshit-crazy conspiracy theories. A good ‘un was Adam Gorightly’s Tuesday Weld fantasy.
Being a witch, Weld had it in for a rival current centered on Sharon Tate’s circle and so manipulated Charles Manson to murder her enemy. The underground magazine Tuesday’s Child [geddit?] had Manson on the cover proclaiming him ‘Man of the Year’.
As high priestess, Weld was the driving force behind the psychedelic sixties. She’s “Ruby Tuesday” by The Rolling Stones*, and gets a nod in The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” in which the lyrics refer to “…stupid bloody Tuesday” and a “pornographic priestess.” Also “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” has the line “Tuesday’s on the phone to me.”
The details go on and on and on . . . the fun comes from the ingenuity by which links can be suggested. The goal is to get the reader to hesitate for just that one moment and think, “Might there actually be something to this farrago?”
And there may be a more rewarding pay-off: The Red Pill.
Having seen the cunning used in concocting a spurious conspiracy theory, it may get one to question the everyday narratives we are taking for granted.
* I thought of a ‘link’ that Gorightly missed. The lyrics for “Ruby Tuesday” include:
Goodbye Ruby Tuesday
Who could hang a name on you?
‘Tuesday’ is a nickname Weld adopted, in preference to her given name ‘Susan’, when she was in her late teens.
I’ve seen only one actual QAnon believer in my personal life and they are an extreme Schizophrenic that could barely string together a simple coherent sentence. Last summer my girlfriend and I went to Hollywood for an afternoon out, to see what a hellhole it turned into post-Covid and there was a QAnon rally, a block away from a “Black Trans Lives Matter” that looked more like a gay pride party complete with half naked street dancers and shitty techno music blasting. Needless to say, it was a glimpse into hell.
Anyway, I clearly remember telling my GF and others that something about the Qanon rally looked off. There was something very fishy about it. None of the people looked like the stereotype. They looked like the sort of people I’d assume were leftist. Maybe it was just the second wave of Trump voter, the multi-cultural, “we’re all in together, Democrats are the real racist” types. But I don’t know.
When doing a Google search of Qanon. The vast majority is from liberal/leftist outlets. I’ve read and seen more about Qanon from MSM and shit like Huffington Post than anything.
Point is, they are a tool of the enemy. Real Qanon believers are probably a very small amount of lunatics who are most likely so mentally ill they couldn’t figure out how to vote.
We all know what our real problem is who and who our real enemy is. QAnon types should be shunned.
Biden’s resurgent gun control psy-ops are no fake; he is going to get gun control legislation passed while the dems control the house, and senate–if he can!
The psychoanalyzing isn’t very convincing and the epistemological assertions are weak as well (everything is exactly as it appears unless it is not.)
If any emotional self-comforting is going on it is from the people decrying how everyone sees conspiracies everywhere.
The term is simply propaganda, hardly different than “white supremacist” which it is often paired with.
It’s also really surprising how no one has recognized “QAnon” as the sort of double-ironic tongue-in-cheek inside joke that it has always been. Mostly people just liked Trump because he was a celebrity.
It seems that even Americans who are among the most marginalized by the system because of their dissenting views on race display the characteristic arrogance toward other countries. The US of 2021 has crappy, crumbling infrastructure; ineffective, often dangerous schools; a health care system that is uneven at best and doesn’t cover the whole population; a banking system that amounts to a Ponzi scheme; dirty, blighted, and unsafe cities; and, of course, blatantly fraudulent and a grossly corrupt political system. The pride of every true American patriot remains the lavishly funded US military. That’s the same military that is chock-full of sodomites, transvestites, and low-IQ ghetto trash; can’t win any war, not even one against illiterate Afghan peasants.
Have those who blather things like, “America is the greatestest country God has ever graced the world with!” ever actually been to other countries. I have and I will say this: if an unbiased observer were to visit, say, Shanghai and then a ghettoized American pile of crap like, say, Chicago, you would never guess Chicago is supposed to be the much richer, “First World” city. Shanghai is cleaner and free of graffiti and other vandalism. It has no run-down ghettoes. Its Hermès and Prada stores are not boarded up for fear of feral blacks. Its public transportation system is new and safe. Its airport is a showcase. Its skyscrapers are taller, newer, and more architecturally interesting. Its public schools are some of the best in the world.
I will go farther and say this: Mexico City gives a better impression than any of the leading US cities. It’s cleaner and more orderly than New York, L.A., Chicago, or San Francisco. Its stores are not boarded up. Its streets are not covered in feces. Its public parks are impeccably maintained and not choked with tents inhabited by derelicts.
If the US is really “First World”, then the term is self-referential, which is to say, the US is “first” not based on any objective criteria but simply because the US is the US.
An article like this should begin with the words “Found among the articles of the late Francis Waylon Thurston, of Boston…”
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