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In death, Charlie Kirk reaped what he sowed.
It's the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. On his death, there were many in the Right who believed he could serve as the martyr that would finally force the Right to "get serious". This meant very different things to different people from retaliating for cancel culture, to aggressively implementing Trump's immigration agenda, to turning the US into an outright dictatorship and instituting the Day of the Rope. In the end, none of this happened since his death got bogged down in endless conspiracies.
It's no secret that the Republican party under MAGA really likes conspiracies. They let you substitute wishcasting for evidence. Kirk pushed a lot of conspiracy theories from big ones like [The 2020 election was stolen] to [Aghanistan's collapse was engineered to import D voters] to [J6 was instigated by the FBI/Antifa/BLM]. He also pushed smaller ones that are closer to simple misinformation, like implying the Covid vaccine makes you blind and paralyzed. But for Kirk, all of these conspiracies were instrumental. They all pointed in the same direction: helping the Republican party, or more specifically Trump.
But conspiracy theories have a tendency to mutate. When you let in epistemological rot like this, some of it might end up being turned against you during the course of factional infighting. That's exactly what happened in the case of Kirk's death. Sure, the official report from the mainstream media (bah!) is that he was killed by some rando named Tyler Robinson. But... isn't that just a little too convenient?
Tucker Carlson eulogized Kirk by presenting the Biblical narrative as a story powerful people in Jerusalem “sitting around eating hummus,” adding that “there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let me just kill him.’”
Candace Owens opened her show the day after Kirk's memorial by mocking Erica Kirk and claiming Charlie had been "betrayed" by someone within the TPUSA, either Jewish donors or Erika Kirk herself because golly gee, didn't Charlie's wife seem a little too enthused about going on camera after his death?
Both sides' independent media pundits are captured by conspiracy theories because they pay the bills. This is just the new normal, not something that Kirk especially sowed in his career. The admin failed to use his death in a productive way, and we don't know why.
To me, Tyler's motives, to the extent that we've understood them, are more personally motivated rather than political. Of course they're political too, but he strikes me as someone who was protecting the honor of his partner more than he was sending a political message. Why not go for Trump instead?
It seems to be hard to react to these kinda things for modern conservative movements. Australia's Bondi Beach shooting has definitely moved the overton window electorally, but actual investigation/outcomes seem to be less than zero for conservative causes, since even ideas around increasing investigation into radical groups just led to immediately trying to use them on Australian Far Right groups rather than really censuring the Islamic community.
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Conspiracism isn't nearly as big of an issue on the Left today compared to the Right. At least not without sneakily changing the definition of a conspiracy theory to "partisan fact I disagree with", which is different.
What's your source for these claims?
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Antisemitism, with all the conspiracy theories and blood libel that implies, is more openly practised on the left than it has been for decades. The sitting mayor of New York City openly claims that the NYPD have only committed police brutality because they were trained to by the IDF. The New York Times uncritically ran an opinion piece claiming, with no real evidence, that the IDF trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. Leftists are disproportionately likely to claim that the October 7th attacks were false flags, or that most of the civilians were actually killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal doctrine. Leftists seem just as likely as groypers to believe the specific conspiracy theory that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent, and that the only reason for continued support for Israel among American politicians is because Mossad is blackmailing them using footage secretly filmed on Epstein's island.
Outside of Jew-hatred, American leftists are disproportionately likely to believe that a literal genocide of trans people is either imminent or already ongoing. They believe that numerous people have been successfully acquitted of killings they admitted to committing using the "trans panic" defense. Some would not characterise the BLM narrative as a conspiracy theory, but I think it bears a strong enough familial resemblance to be considered an honorary member at the bare minimum.
Obviously, there's the whole Russiagate thing. Many leftists believe that the assassination attempt against Trump was staged.
Many popular conspiracy theories (the moon landings were faked, vaccines cause autism, JFK was killed by the government) are equally popular among Democrats as Republicans.
I think conspiracy theories are at least as much of a problem on the American left as on the American right. The average American believes that at least one of the last three Presidential elections was illegitimate.
I dislike Mamdani but I've never heard him claim that before so I double checked it
I think it bad faith to assume it the way you do. There is an Israeli-NYPD partnership, this is verifiable fact. He did not say the boot of NYPD is only the IDF, as you claim, just that it was "laced" by them. Even in the literal reading of the analogy, laces are only a part of a shoe so the reading of "only" doesn't work there either.
As another comment pointed out, this isn't a conspiracy so much as it is The Worst Argument In The World. Most leftists I've talked to and see online don't believe the death camps are starting up anytime soon, just that legal discrimination/banning of hormones/etc will happen.
I agree that it's wrong to call it a genocide, but it's not a conspiracy theory to misuse words! Same way I disagree with the unfair and human rights abusing treatment of Ughyurs being labeled genocide for there has not been a mass death of them, but someone considering their treatment as genocidal is not a conspiracy. I just think they're too loose with the term and should not call it that.
That's somewhat a conspiracy theory, but Trump is also openly friendly with Putin and there's plenty of strong evidence that Russia tries to influence our elections. Any conspiracy theory there is just in how much Trump/Trump allies could have engaged in open collusion.
Good job, you found an unequivocal actual conspiracy theory.
I'll be more willing to believe that once a Democrat anti vaxxer runs the HHS.
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Some of this is just The Worst Argument in the World, more than it is conspiracy thinking.
I think if you tried to drill down into what American leftists thought a "trans genocide" meant, they wouldn't bring up death camps or an imaginary Kristallnacht, but some states banning youth gender medicine or banning trans student athletes, or black trans prostitutes who meet bad ends, or the federal government switching to birth sex for ID's. They're catastrophizing more than they are imagining vast conspiracies.
I think BLM is based on a number of false assumptions, but I don't think it's a conspiracy theory exactly. More like a moral panic, similar to the AI datacenter panic, or fracking, or Dungeons and Dragons in the 80's. There's definitely a mistake being made, and a warped interpretations of the facts taking place, but it isn't about projecting a conspiracy out into the world. (In the case of BLM this is especially true, because advocates usually assume the issues are systemic, and not the result of a shadowy cabal, which is what a conspiracy would require.)
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Are you sure about that? Leftist conspiracy theories are arguably much worse because they tend to be held by people in positions in power, compared to the powerless yokels who have right-wing conspiracy theories.
Example conspiracy theory: African-American test scores are the result of systematic racism. And the higher you go up in the Democratic Party structure, the more common this belief is.
Dingbats like Tucker and Candace, on the other hand, have low status audiences.
That's not exactly a "conspiracy" though, is it? It might be wrong-headed or incorrect, but where is the shadowy cabal who planned everything out?
Like, if the 2020's election was stolen, it was stolen by a specific group of bad people, who could, in theory, be rooted out or put on trial. I think believing false things about how the world works is slightly different from a conspiracy theory. There's probably some better word for it, at the very least.
ESR's coinage of "prospiracy" might fit this case. There's no shadowy cabal of racists conspiring to squelch African-American test scores, but if there's e.g. a lot of racists in the education system who each neglect African-Americans (and who might admit this to each other after building trust, but don't need to discuss it with each other and wouldn't dare discuss it with non-racists) then (in that version of the theory, anyway) that could explain the observed gap.
IMHO, all other things being equal, believing in a prospiracy requires a lower burden of proof (and thus is more forgivable when it's a mistake) than believing in a large conspiracy. "Racists control public education" has some obvious contrary-evidence issues but it's not as bad as "a cabal of racists regularly meets to plot their control of public education".
If one conspirator breaks and admits their secrets to the public, the conspiracy would be revealed! The secrets would be out in the open! And depending on the size of the conspiracy, the biggest secret would be: how do you get that many people to keep a secret without anybody cracking earlier?
If one prospirator breaks and admits their secrets to the public ... not much would change, right? Everybody knows some people are jerks who are motivated by self-interest rather than principle, but that doesn't mean 90% or even 0.9% of people in similar positions will be jerks too. Just one bad apple, am-I-right? The "secret" is vastly more robust.
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Republicans hold power approximately 50% of the time in the US. Like... uh... you do know who's president now, right?
Not a conspiracy, as I explained to FCfromSSC
They're big audiences though. Tucker and Candace are regularly near the top of the biggest podcasts in the US. They're very influential within MAGA.
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"Trump is a Russian asset."
"The police routinely kill unarmed, innocent black men."
"The wage gap is a real measure of sexist discrimination."
"Billionaires control the government."
"Billionaires got their money by stealing it from ordinary people."
"Appropriating Billionaire wealth could pay for all/most/any significant number at all of good things people want."
"High health care costs are a conspiracy by greedy capitalists."
"Capitalism is at fault for [insert social problem here]."
Or is it time to convolute the borders of "conspiracy theory"?
These largely aren't conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are typically things that allege multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public.
Some of these like "Trump is a Russian asset" are borderline I suppose, where weak versions are just normal partisan attacks while strong versions definitely do veer into conspiracism.
Pam_they're_the_same_picture.jpeg
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...Not convoluting the definition, but leaving it to obviously include most of the examples given while simply asserting that it does not fit them is also a strategy, I suppose.
"Trump is a Russian Asset" alleges that Trump and many members of his staff are working for the Russian government, their cooperation being secured through some combination of kompromat, bribes and ideological alignment. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". This is your reminder that this particular conspiracy theory was a paid op by Hillary Clinton, that Obama appears to have been at minimum aware of it and declined to intervene, that Obama's senior officials were directly involved in its implementation, and that it was pushed to the hilt by every major media organization in the country for multiple years, with devastating political consequences and zero accountability.
"The police routinely kill unarmed, innocent black men" claims that police routinely cooperate to murder innocent black men and then to cover up these murders as legitimate police actions, aided and abetted by other elements of the criminal justice system such as judges, prosecutors, etc. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". Engagement with this conspiracy theory is universal within Blue Tribe, and conformity is policed viciously.
"The wage gap is a real measure of sexist discrimination" claims that business owners secretly coordinate to violate black-letter federal anti-discrimination law, artificially depressing wages for women by 30% economy-wide and with sufficient cunning that they never, ever get caught doing it, because they hate women and want to exploit them. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". Less prevalent that the racialized conspiracy theories at the moment, Feminism peaked early and largely exhausted itself, but we could tack on "Rape Culture/Believe All Women/Justice Kavanaugh is a rapist" as further examples as well.
"Billionaires control the government" claims that Billionaires have secretly subverted democracy through various legal, quasi-legal and illegal actions to put themselves beyond the reach of law and bend the government to their will. It universally involves claims that multiple actors are secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public. How could you possibly argue otherwise?
"Appropriating Billionaire wealth could pay for all/most/any significant number at all of good things people want." This one does not fit your definition of conspiracy.
"High health care costs are a conspiracy by greedy capitalists." "Conspiracy by greedy capitalists" is literally in the belief-statement, and is by no means a straw-man. Millions of people observably believe this, and are willing to endorse murder as a plausible solution.
"Capitalism is at fault for [insert social problem here]" likewise observably involves claims of malign coordination by rich villains in a large and highly central proportion of real-world instances.
I do think /u/TheAntipopulist is wrong, but I would only class the following as conspiracy theories:
Those are the only ones that really require secret coordination by a small group. The others are just false beliefs about reality. Like, where is the secret coordination mechanism for police killings or the wage gap? Even advocates of those ideas think they come from unconscious biases picked up over a lifetime of living in a racist and sexist culture, not because of specific coordination on the parts of the actors doing it. Similarly, the idea that billionaires are stealing money is often based more in the Labor Theory of Value, which is wrong but not a conspiracy.
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"Trump is a Russian asset" is a definitive example of a conspiracy theory, given that it's directly borrowed from one of the most famous conspiracy films of all time. People who believe this conspiracy theory are not shy about where they got their inspiration from.
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