The tragic extinction of the conspiracy theorists

A still from Conspiracy Theory

After looking at Trump’s inauguration speech, I would like to point out that the United States will fall like any other evil empire in history and the whole world will breathe a sigh of relief when it does. The fall tends to be imminent when its leaders are most delusional and arrogant, like when the president promises a new golden age that will come from liquid gold after enriching himself through two cryptocurrency scams two days apart.

The Golden Days of the Conspiracy Theorists

I guess what annoys me the most right now, is to see low status white males now cheer on the sort of things they always argued against back when it was all still hypothetical and pretty far fetched. Between 2001 and 2016, the United States was home to a kind of libertarian/paleoconservative conspiracist demographic that is now effectively extinct. These were the golden days of the conspiracy theorists.

And I have to emphasize, that this phenomenon was just kind of more broadly accepted as a kind of masculine niche, a kind of normal functional aspect of what at least some guys have to be doing: Maintain a deeply hostile and distrusting attitude towards power. It was a bit like being a male version of a prostitute or a stripper, someone with a stigmatized role on the societal fringe.

It wasn’t a particularly prestigious niche to occupy, but there were no women or college professors out there who saw you as inherently morally reprehensible for thinking the government commits medical experiments on human beings. It was pitied more than resented.

You had black women call into the Alex Jones show to ask about this sort of stuff. The conspiracy theorist functioned de facto as a kind of comfort for the deeper sense of unease and distrust that everyone feels at some level about our society.

Although there have been adherents of the Grand Unified Conspiracy theory at least since the days of the French revolution (which conservatives at the time didn’t like either), the Clinton years saw the rise of this cultural phenomenon among American low status white males in the form of the militia movement. It was a pretty marginal thing, you generally had to be pretty bitter and down on your luck to feel attracted to it, as there simply wasn’t that much stuff going wrong yet for American low status white males at the time.

Back then, these types were mostly very angry about civil rights violations suffered by people in very unusual situations (like religious cults that abused children like the Branch Davidians) and concerned themselves with perceived threats that ultimately proved to be entirely hypothetical (FEMA camps, North American Union, the Amero currency, microchips in your hand to pay for everything).

With 9/11 things changed, as suddenly everyone came face to face with something that had real world relevance, the prospect of a kind of orwellian forever war (how do you win a war against terror?) and an emerging surveillance state in response to a terrorist attack that remains shrouded in mystery to this day. You could still have a pretty normal life as a young man, but it was clear that dark stormclouds were gathering on the horizon.

The conspiracy theorist, was in a sense, an endearing phenomenon. He was a participant in a kind of global live action role play adventure for low status white males, who had to go out onto the streets and annoy politicians with questions about the Bilderberg group and shout with bullhorns on the street about Building 7 at random passerbys, lest we all end up suffering under a globalist “new world order”.

Listening to the Alex Jones radio show about FEMA concentration camps and mass bioweapon releases intended to depopulate the planet and shadowy secret Germanic death cult societies in the woods of California was in a sense the best kind of horror: The horror that feels real to you. You could immerse yourself as deeply as you wanted and there was always new darkness to uncover, if you really wanted to scare yourself.

The Grand Unified Conspiratorial Narrative

I’m not referring here to any particular conspiracy theories, but rather, to the Grand Unified Conspiratorial Narrative, which tends to be very similar in its overall layout regardless of the adherent you talk to. They tend to differ in the group they place at the top of the conspiracy. Often those are the Jews, sometimes the Freemasons, in some minor groups the focus lies on the “Illuminati” or the “Black Vatican nobility”, or even the “Jesuits”.

It is a kind of universal myth, a horror story told by low status white males on obscure Internet forums in which only subtle details differed. What is surprising is how consistent the myth was. There were a number of recurring ingredients. There is the “world government”, the “global warming hoax”, 9/11, the “new world order”, and generally the Georgia Guidestones, along with references to families like the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, as well as the idea that elites seek to “depopulate the world”.

If you brought this stuff up to a woman it would probably interfere in your ability to get laid, but so would bringing up Black Metal, Star Trek, the Insane Clown Posse, Dungeons and Dragons or any other sort of subcultural phenomenon that serves to make life bearable for disenfranchised low status white males. It was ultimately just another thing that filled the vacuum.

Maybe it’s because I’m older and wiser now, but I think it’s hard to explain to people who are young now how real the grand unified conspiracy narrative felt, as long as you read enough about it. This was at least in part, because politicians were just part of a different social class. You could never become a George Bush or a John Kerry and they genuinely seemed to have far more in common than either had with you, as both were Bohemian Grove members.

It was thus very easy back in 2004, to get the impression that you just don’t have a real choice. It was very easy to get the impression that it was all rigged. The European Union also at the time seemed like something elites were really eager to have, despite reluctance among the general population. But today, politicians don’t feel that alien anymore. Their corruption and hypocrisy don’t feel incomprehensible anymore, it now all feels strangely familiar, painfully even so.

To really understand how that era felt, there’s an amusing fake documentary from 2012 that pokes fun at it. I watched it today, it’s called The Conspiracy. It starts out with two young guys interviewing an elder low status white male type, whose favorite thing to do is going out onto the streets with his megaphone to tell everyone they’re brainwashed sheep. Ultimately he disappears, they look into what he was researching and discover the world is run by a 4000 year old religious cult.

Now again, it feels very cheesy looking at it today. But it’s hard to explain that people believed in this sort of stuff and it did’t really feel that weird. You had these long lists of photographs of politicians throwing devils horns into the air, seemingly signaling something. It was just pretty obvious that something was off about 9/11, but none of the mainstream media would even bother to talk about it, despite reporting themselves about various strange military exercises and warnings. Back then, the Georgia Guidestones were still standing. Now they have unfortunately been knocked down and the county (which flipped from blue to red over the decades) has no intention to repair them. Again, conspiracy theorists became victims of their own success.

It didn’t take mental illness, to see dots that had to fit together. The problem is that when you started connecting dots, you never really ran into a point where you would think to yourself “now the picture is complete”. You could keep digging and find new dots, then you could connect those dots as well, on and on. Was 9/11 an inside job? Alright, well then you had to look into Operation Gladio, which was pretty much admitted to be a false flag! Oh and Operation Northwoods of course. And while you’re at it, Israel was caught staging a terror attack in the Lavon Affair. And then there’s the USS Liberty. Oh and don’t forget the Oklahoma City Bombing of course!

Conspiracism as Bizarro Environmentalism

The Grand Conspiracy Narrative is also interesting in the sense that it takes the environmentalist narrative and actively inverts it. Ideas peddled by college professors and hippies living in vans became the inventions of globalist elites in the eyes of the conspiracy theorists. To me it is now obvious that CEOs and politicians mostly reluctantly pay lip service to environmentalist ideas. To the CEOs at the World Economic Forum, ideas like global warming are the elephant in the room, rather than what gets them out of bed in the morning.

You might wonder, how you end up moving from “elements in governments stage terrorist attacks” to “a shadowy group of elites want to kill us all”. I think the answer to this is that anyone who really starts thinking about our world eventually finds himself confronted with the paradoxes of industrial capitalism, like the fact that we live in a way that is inherently unsustainable. The Grand Conspiratorial Narrative emerges as a coping mechanism for a deeper more pervasive sense of discomfort with the way our world works today.

Environmentalism taken to its natural conclusion, takes you to a much darker place than conspiracism does. To really understand Environmentalism you can read authors like Peter Wessel Zapfe, Pentti Linkola and Paul Chefurka. They recognize our species as fundamentally mismatched to our environment, at a very deep level, a problem that ultimately seems to inevitably culminate in our extinction, along with that of most other life on Earth.

It is ultimately a much darker message than the conspiratorial narrative, because that at least leaves room for hope: Conspirators can be exposed and defeated, but a kind of error inherent in our very human essence can not.

Environmentalism and conspiracism both kind of thrived in the same fringe circles and so you saw an interaction. Peak oil became a kind of “myth” pushed by the oil companies. Global warming became an invention meant to push for a “global carbon tax”. And overpopulation was a myth peddled by elites so they could have the world to themselves.

The Demise of Conspiracism

The problem the conspiracy theorists suffered is that they ended up as victims of their own success. Their first favored candidate, Ron Paul, a principled man with a kind of autistic devotion to a small government, went nowhere. But then eventually Donald Trump emerged on the scene and there was a kind of crisis moment, as he effectively sent all their tribal signals and to their shock, ended up winning the Republican nomination and even the presidency.

The worst thing that can happen to a conspiracy theorist is to have people believe him. You subscribe to these theories because you want to have special secret insights into how things really work. Conspiracy theorists tend to be burnouts with an innate desire for power that exceeds that of the average burnout. You compensate for your ultimate powerlessness in society through a kind of narrative in which you have the unique gift of insight, that allows you to see how you never really stood a chance of attaining power to begin with, because everything is rigged against you by people who are evil.

American prosperity declined with the great recession, which led to a growth in the number of angry low status white males and thus an explosion in conspiracism. This ultimately triggered its demise through overpopulation, as the whole phenomenon simply became the new republican party. The MAGA Republicans have less in common with Wolfowitz or Cheney than they do with Alex Jones and the militia movement of the 90’s.

The conspiracy theorists and the environmentalists from before global warming became a very obvious problem have more in common than they realize. Neither side really wants power. Like leftists, they want to critique power. But unlike leftists, they don’t even really want people to rally behind their ideas, they don’t try to setup a mass movement, they don’t really want to see mass protests.

No, they both want more than anything, a sense of moral or intellectual superiority. They want to be able to say: “If only you had listened to ME! It didn’t have to be like this! I tried warning you about this!”

But the conspiracy theorists are now stuck with the tragic situation, in which the world answers to them. Elon Musk’s brain is filled with their twitter memes. Donald Trump depends on them as his base. And so when things go wrong now, they’re forced to deny being in control. Instead of Donald Trump now genuinely running the United States, there is a shadowy “deep state” that prohibits him from “making america great again”.

A future for conspiracism

Some try to wean themselves loose from Donald Trump, but this is difficult, as he speaks their tribal language very well. I wish them all the best however.

I think society has a kind of inherent need for this form of critique of power. You need this kind of fringe phenomenon, as evidenced by the fact that it has been around at least as long as the Bavarian Illuminati itself. To get the most out of it for everyone involved, I think there are some general principles that should be followed:

-To start with, conspiracism should be more or less explicitly understood as a form of entertainment. Guys like George Carlin and Bill Hicks were good at this, so good in fact that some people think Bill Hicks IS Alex Jones, instead of just both coming from the same small Texan gene pool. When you want to cover really dark topics, it has to be done with some humor, as otherwise certain taboos just can’t be breached.

-You have to resign yourself to the idea that nobody is ever going to believe you. In fact, the worst possible thing that could happen is for some sort of critical mass to emerge in the population around your ideas. You become a conspiracy theorist because you yearn for access to a kind of private truth. You take the principles of occultism and apply them to politics.

-You have to always stick to critiquing power, instead of the powerless. Criticism of the powerless is necessary. You have to point out to poor people that they’re fat because they eat shit food and they’re stuck in poverty because they spend money on cigarettes and lotteries. But that’s not your natural niche as a conspiracy theorist, the powerless benefit more from a stern mother than an “anti-woke” autistic crusader.

And most importantly, I think you have to understand your role and fully internalize it. It’s not so much the case that the conspiracy theorist is wrong about there being conspiracies. Rather, he is too innocent. He refuses to accept that society depends at least to some degree on conspiracies to function and for those conspiracies to remain invisible to most of the population. The Netherlands today has a constitution for example, because our second king was blackmailed about his homosexuality.

Henry Kissinger said that it was “an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.” And it’s hard to argue he’s wrong. The United States is the world’s most powerful country. You don’t end up running the world by being nice.

You have to see your role as that of the medieval court Jester. The conspiracy theorist is never told he’s right. Nobody will ever acknowledge believing him. But he corrects society, by pointing out the obvious. “Hey it’s kinda weird how we suddenly had no air defenses on 9/11 due to a bunch of weird exercises redirecting airplanes.”

Nobody ultimately benefits from 9/11 being exposed as an “inside job”. Cheney going to jail for the rest of his life may feel satisfying, but it ultimately doesn’t make your life substantially better. It would almost inevitably mean the end of NATO and probably a kind of irreversible lack of trust in the United States Federal governent, it might very well mean the end of the country altogether.

No, understand your role like that of the court jester who just saw a duke beheaded who dared to flirt with the queen. Your role is to point out this is excessive, so that the king never does it again. As the court jester you are generally right, but we’re better off when nobody acknowledges it.

The worst thing that could happen to everyone would be for people at the royal court to say: “Well the court jester is right, the king is a tyrant and it’s time to appoint his retarded orange cousin to the throne.”

20 Comments

  1. What happened to Biden is really odd. He seems perfectly fine now. I am ashamed I supported Trump though. And now #Melania coin? USA is so fucked up. On days like today I think of a flemish couple who sold everything they had to go to the US and open a motel on route 66. After a while the woman returned to Belgium because she found out the US wasn’t what she thought it was. She committed suicide. Her partner who had stayed in the US to run the motel later did the same.

  2. It sort of funny your basically writing a conspiracy blog. How the government, for some strange reason, is actively hiding the coming massive monkeypox, bird flu, mutated covid deathpocalypse. The pot calling the kettle black.

  3. >No, understand your role like that of the court jester who just saw a duke beheaded who dared to flirt with the queen. Your role is to point out this is excessive, so that the king never does it again. As the court jester you are generally right, but we’re better off when nobody acknowledges it.

    Interesting analogy.

    I used this exact same analogy in response to a Jewish friend of mine when he asked me why I was “acting a fool”, back when I was sperging about the JQ on Facebook a few years back.

    He gave me a big thumbs up emoji when I told him that, and we never discussed it again.

  4. Somehow this blogger has failed to notice most western euro countries are actively engaged in suppressing political parties they don’t like. Even actively imprisoning people who disagree with them. Go to the UK and be raped by a few dozen migrants, then try calling the cops.

    Alex Jones was too trusting. You can act smug and act superior, for now, because you are spouting the party line.

    • Not only that.

      CS was swallowed by the state.

      Anybody knows what really happened? Hey, dipshits, that was a system bank, systemically relevant, and it was just …. written off – or over – or rewritten. By fiat.

      Ans nobody in Europe asks how. Why. And really, how??? Without any consequences whatsoever? And now tze national bank has some billions to redistribute and one major power company hands out half a billion. Just like that? And Rintrah thinks that is normal? Right now?

      Wow.

    • Agreed. You look at Trumps first executive orders on day one and they include guaranteeing free speech, getting out of the WHO that has become a political tyrant and arm of big pharma, stopping DEI nonsense, and ending the weaponization of government against political adversaries of the previous administration.

      These are good steps that other governments should consider.

  5. Conspiracy theorist: “The government is taking hundreds of poor black me who have syphilis and not treating them even though there is a treatment and letting them suffer horribly and die needlessly!”

    Normie: “Oh, you silly. Our good leaders would never allow that.”

    See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study (The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male[1] (informally referred to as the Tuskegee Experiment or Tuskegee Syphilis Study) was a study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a group of nearly 400 African American men with syphilis.[2])

    The problem with your account is that the U.S. government really has done hideous things in secret. You only have to learn about one instance to realize that Americans who have power are capable of doing these things, and there is no reason to think that all of them have suddenly repented, or that it is just Americans. Once you know that it is stupid to not look around and see where such things are presently going on. A person can be wrong about the particulars but there are in fact evil conspiracies.

    • Growing up is realising that you are living in the Matrix.
      The “people” around you fully support what the people calling themselves “the government” are doing.

      Some of them may mewl about blowing up brown children in the middle east, but ultimately, if given the choice between that plus a state-enforced justice system, or no state at all, will chant “bomb, bomb, bomb iraq” louder than their own leaders.

      • Traditional Quakers, and even most liberal Quakers, and Amish and Mennonites and members of Church of the Brethren are very consistent in their adherence to the Peace Testimony. Other than that, with a few random exceptions, yes, you’re right.

  6. With the US leaving the WHO is it finally time for the virus death wave we’ve been waiting for to rip? Can lswm can get the blame for it? This is going to be a fun time or at least I hope so. Bored with the doom snooze-a-thon. Need more entertainment for dopamine scrolling.

  7. I miss Ron Paul conspiracy people, fuckers still alive too. Social media was fun then, unusable at certain points from the spam, but fun.

  8. >Ideas peddled by college professors and hippies living in vans became the inventions of globalist elites in the eyes of the conspiracy theorists

    Why do you subscribe to the imperial Freudian gobbledegook?

  9. Here’s the overarching conspiracy theory for you Rin:

    Governments foster conspiracy theories, because it causes artists to chase rabbit holes and discredit for normies the very idea of viewing the government as the enemy.

    If the government instead went around killing or imprisoning these people, that would lend the ideas some credibility.

  10. Some conspiracy theorist types are jesters. Others really do want to be caliph instead of the caliph. That being said they can’t handle power, nor do they understand it. They just want to be vindicated. Not to mention they’re generally awful people: angry incels, race traitors, emotional masochists.

  11. There you go, Rin. Most of your readers think you are hopelessly out of touch. Time to grow up and learn about the real world. How old are you???

  12. In case someone cares:
    “The left is concerned with trivial matters because it has politically ended after its alliance with the great financial capital during the period of the “third way.” Similarly, conservatism ended when it did the same thing in front of the rise of socialism (Thatcherism can only be viewed as a joke when seen as conservatism). This is because the evaporation of reality or, if you prefer, aestheticism, is a fundamental result of money, which is inherently abstract (with the same amount, you can buy different things). That’s why the left no longer claims to be socialist, but simply leftist, which is a scentless label, a form without content. The problem, however, is more general and concerns politics in the age of liberal democracy, where political factions are cloaked in theoretical discourse. For example, in the past, there were the Welfs and the Ghibellines, who were essentially opposing groups that just supported a different face for the seat of power. With the retreat of the monarchy, the question had to be answered: “Why are we better than the others?” Hence, an idea emerged to replace divine legitimacy. However, this idea, no matter how scientific it tried to be (which would always solve problems – a primitive flaw in Western thought in general), could not withstand the complexity of a theory. Thus, it was shaped as ideology, a set of propositions that could not be subject to reflection because they gained a political hue, but logically they had to submit to politics, which is exactly the division into factions regardless of ideological content. Political conflict will always be a dynastic war, no matter how much we decorate it with colorful ideas.

    I make this introduction to turn to Trump, to whom various people try to attribute an ideology so that they psychologically feel like winners, while they are nothing but footmen who will water down their exact ideology. And we already see this in the “libertarian” case. Before the rooster crowed three times, we heard libertarians who until yesterday accused “Keynesianism” of being “against free trade” and that tariffs do not cause inflation. Have they read Bastiat? The Bastiat whose family business went bankrupt because of the protectionism of the Julian Monarchy, which attributed the dire economic situation to protectionism. France did not import things it lacked and had a shortage of goods – because it is not the abundance of money that raises prices by itself, but together and relative to the abundance of goods. After all, the “neoliberal miracle” of reduced inflation was achieved due to globalization and overconsumption. It only took a fall in supply chains to show the reality. The whole West borrowed to import goods, enriching the banking capital and destroying the trade balance and the balance of payments. And now the same libertarians are saying that with austerity (a solution for every ailment and stupidity), we will solve the problem. Austerity, of course, means recession and underproduction, and here lies the vicious cycle of neoliberalism.

    On the other side are the Europeans who shudder at the idea of American tariffs, like whores called whores. The European VAT (Value Added Tax) is nothing but a tariff extended to domestic products. Let us remind that at least until the 18th century, every city had customs at its walls (fermes générales) to collect consumption taxes, and you can still see their buildings at the old boundaries of Paris. So if they wanted their consumers to withstand American tariffs, they should remove VAT. The tax would simply go to the USA, not Europe. And that’s their problem.

    That is, Trump’s moves do not belong to any ideology; they are simply AMERICAN moves. The fact that the USA produces economic ideologies is because they benefit them (see the Argentine agent). The USA, contrary to liberal mythology, became what it is due to high tariffs, as Trump himself correctly said. Indeed, the internal division between the industrial North and the agricultural South existed because of tariffs. The Southerners didn’t want tariffs but wanted laissez-faire with foreign countries to sell cotton cheaply without increasing prices domestically because of industrial tariffs. F. D. Roosevelt, during the Great Depression, did not accept a global trade agreement to keep agricultural prices high so that Americans wouldn’t abandon farming. Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” is such an ahistorical text, not looking at the fact that whatever Germany and Italy did with their national economies at that time, the very same things were done by the most democratic USA. Not by chance, the war was won by the USA and the Soviet Union, not the British and French empires. Post-war, with GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), founded by the Americans themselves under Bretton Woods, the first to violate it were the Americans themselves. For example, let’s say a product came to the USA at a price of $10, and the Americans would say, “We price the same product at $12, so you’ll pay the tariff on the $12.” Free dumping! And of course, there were trade wars between the USA and the EEC, always due to the USA’s fault. As for the German and Japanese miracles, it was the favorable tariffs to the USA market that created them. When these were threatened, they made sure to end them. So we understand why the USA is rich while others are not, or why there is no communism in the USA. If the worker is well paid, who cares about Marxism? Economic inequality in the USA emerged when they decided to lower tariffs, favoring a financial economy (FINANCE) over industrial and agricultural production. In other words, “We’ll print money and import, others will buy our bonds and play on our stock market.” Thus, with communist China, they did what they feared doing with the USSR: lifting the embargo they had on the Soviet bloc and allowing it to export (the USSR was dangerous because, as a state economy, like the USA, it had absolute control over exports and imports).

    Trump’s move to return to the old economic style (and the geopolitical interest of the USA in the American continent) comes in response to something that many pro-Americans miss: the upcoming de-dollarization of international trade. So it’s not Trump who is creating a new world, but others from the East. Trump is trying to smooth the end of American hegemony for Americans. Those who don’t understand this don’t get it because, on one hand, they perceive the world through the eyes of the mercenary, and on the other hand, they don’t know that the basic question in Western (Republican) political thought has always been: “Is hegemony ultimately good or bad? Hegemony brings wealth (which we are poor) but corrodes the state.” Gibbon’s book was one such. The American clumsy hegemony was the proof that you cannot be a republic and hegemony simultaneously.”

Leave a Reply

Comments should be automatically approved again. People who misbehave will be banned.

Your email address will not be published.


*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.