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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?
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.
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 killed 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.
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.)
The left is more likely to restrict language because they understand the power of language, yet also has many members that continue to use maximalist inflammatory language with terms like "defund the police" and "Islamophobia" and "trans genocide" and labeling their political opponents as "fascists" and "nazis" as well as pushing slogans like "words are violence". And I have not seen much pushback against this type of rhetoric from people on the left, but instead I've seen those on the left play defense for usage of these terms. And why would they stop? They face little to no consequence for it and it only serves to push their agenda and rile up their supporters.
Can you get more intelligent left leaning people to acknowledge that they don't actually believe those terms literally? Yes, but it seems to me that there are enough supporters that actually take those terms literally enough to have real world impact. Defund the police actually did defund the police instead of reforming police like the apologists argued it would and only after it's disastrous impact lost nearly all support. It's likely that type of language played some role in Tyler Robinson's decision to shoot Kirk. We've also had multiple assassination attempts on the President and this has been met with cheers from many of his detractors. Conservative speakers literally need extra security if they want to host an event at a college/university and there are at least several examples of events being cancelled due to security concerns.
It turns out many people are prone to being influenced by the messaging they constantly receive, and that most of their beliefs are not derived from first principles. It's why they cannot adequately defend the positions they hold and why it's often easy to find contradictions in their belief system - they never had to consider it before. Or if they have, they choose to ignore it because it's easier to pretend the contradiction doesn't exist than grapple with the possibility that their beliefs are wrong.
Actually a really great observation, since a lot of leftist beliefs on issues hinge on the idea that the problem is systemic in nature, so perhaps it is a major contributing factor to the left being less prone to conspiracy theories. There are likely other factors such as where these ideas can fester and how much push back these ideas usually get that can contribute to the growth and existence of conspiracy theories.
Also I think the term conspiracy theory itself is often used to dismiss ideas without discussing their merits. Alex Jones was right is a meme for a reason. The idea that Covid was leaked in a lab (and many other issues around covid), or that Hunter Biden laptop story was real, or that government was pressuring social media to suppress speech, or that the investigations on trump (e.g. Steele Dossier) were politically motivated and conducted via improper means, were just some of the "conspiracy" theories from the right that turned out to be true or had elements of truth within the claims, but were instead dismissed by opponents by labeling them as conspiracies. How many "conspiracies" from the left turned out to be right? I can't think of any from the last 10 years, I asked AI and the examples were all from the previous century. Maybe you can count the Russia 2016 election interference theory as having an inkling of truth to it? The lack of examples is to be expected since the left has much less conspiracy theories for the reason stated previously, but I think this is a contributing factor to the right's propensity for conspiracy theories, since some of the most impactful of them have turned out to be true.
Speaking of the worst argument in the world, I think it also applies to labeling Jan 6th as a coup, which is something Hanania does in his article.
Doesn't that just shift the conspiracy up to who created and maintains the system? In the same way that a lot of conspiracy theories get tied back to Israel/Jews, only this time it's White People/Men?
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