Here’s a banger of a tweet from Christopher Rufo, one of the aspiring Grima Wormtongues of the emerging American dictatorial theocracy:
Golly gee, the Right has begun leaning into conspiracy theories, has it? Nobody could have predicted that, it’s completely unprecedented.
Rufo might easily be the most bad-faith and disingenuous figure in Trumpworld but he’s not the dumbest. He knows full well that the spiritual genesis of his movement was Trump’s accusation as far back as 2011 that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and there was a very elaborate high-level conspiracy to cover it up. He knows that half or more of the most significant figures in MAGA, including some high in the administration, give at least some credence to something called QAnon, which resembles the X-Files mythology canon with more imageboard memes.
He knows that a significant driver of Trump’s 2016 success was driven by a story that Hillary Clinton was literally eating children in the basement of a DC pizza restaurant, a comical “Satanic Panic” offshoot that was pushed very seriously by close Rufo associates Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec.
Screenshot credit to ⚯ Michel de Cryptadamus ⚯
Make no mistake, Rufo has no qualms whatsoever about the far-right media apparatus being “consumed by conspiracy” in cases where this benefits him and the narrative he takes care to construct. He himself made a valiant and hilariously far-reaching attempt to manufacture an investigative journalistic basis for the infamous “Haitians eating cats in Ohio” lie, a story that was pushed by JD Vance last year after it was made up and suggested to him by Canadian neo-Nazi Geoffrey Martin.
The crisis that Rufo, and several other notable MAGA figures like Matt Walsh, are struggling to deal with right now isn’t the absurd notion that the right are only now being “consumed by conspiracy.” The crisis is that the conspiracy narrative has spun out of their control.
If you’re fortunate enough to have no idea what Rufo is on about here, this is essentially a further development in the Nick Fuentes civil war that I’ve been writing about, but calling it a civil war is a bit of a misnomer for what is essentially a structural collapse. Wars tend to have two sides, while this is much harder to follow.
The main problem is this: Right wing conspiracy culture doesn’t believe Charlie Kirk was killed by a lone gunman.
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This is very predictable. The number one rule of conspiracy culture is that every major event is a false flag. The official narrative is always wrong, and nobody who is behind any major event is actually the person behind that event. This is a desirable belief to propagate when the accused isn’t politically useful, as the vast majority of times they are deranged nobodies. For example, the theory goes that Trump’s would-be assassin was a patsy and the hit was ordered by Biden himself. You can see how people like Rufo have no problem with that one whatsoever.
The trouble in this case is that Kirk’s alleged assassin is a kid who is associated with and rumored to be the lover (this is super unclear) of an individual who might be transgender (this is also unclear). If these allegations are true then the suspect is absolutely, one hundred percent the ideal person, for Trump and his loyalists, to have killed Charlie Kirk. The only better scenario for them would be if he was transgender himself and/or Hispanic.
But here’s the thing about conspiracy culture: It’s like a very large herd of very big animals. I know how ironic that is given that’s their metaphor for us—sheeple—but it applies to them more properly when you envision them always in stampede. And not sheep, but bigger, like the dinosaur stampede in Jackson’s King Kong.
With a lot of effort and a large enough platform, you can sort of aim it, like Alex Jones did against the parents of the slain Sandy Hook schoolchildren, but you can’t stop it.
This herd forms the bulk of Trump’s core base. The QAnon herd, a boiling mass of twisted logic and cynicism that knows only anger and force. The self-styled thought leaders of the MAGA right, people like Rufo, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, have gleefully and with abject recklessness groomed and fed this monster for over a decade to use it a weapon against the fabric of society. At one point they famously got it to smash into the Capitol.
Rufo in particular has been especially brazen about just making shit up to sort of engineer a trench for the paranoid herd to follow. But this is what they all do, and they are conscious of it, even if they’re not as open about it as Christopher Rufo. The post-truth world of MAGA is the consequence of the far-right establishment ceasing to see the Masses as a social entity and beginning to see them as an engineering problem.
It’s not that the social engineering project they’ve smugly manicured over the past decade is falling apart or unravelling, it’s just that it’s grown out of control in a bunch of obvious and predictable ways that a thousand prophetic stories about monsters turning on their hubristic masters have tried to warn about.
So the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk is someone who either has or can be portrayed as having strong pro-transgender views, which is exactly what the Rufo-axis of the MAGA movement want to be the case. Problem is that’s also the Official Narrative.
Enter Candace Owens, a figure who has become phenomenally popular for the same reason Nick Fuentes is—the right’s recent project of laundering their furthest fringe figures into the core movement.
Owens is also bugshit. If there’s anyone who can come up with an enticing alternative to the Official Narrative of Charlie Kirk’s killing, which conspiracy culture expressly forbids considering, it’s Candace. She does have such a theory: Israel did it.
This is a five-alarm fire for people like Christopher Rufo.
Let me skew off on a tangent for a bit to tell you about the intricate, symbiotic, unstable system of relationships that is the Christian far-right, Israel, and Nazis.
Nazis are really good at smashing windows, tackling Hispanic people and throwing them into concentration camps. They make for a welcome addition to the extended MAGA family for this reason. But they also unfortunately tend to have this thing against Jews.
The Christian far-right, the Heritage Foundation evangelical types who make up the majority of the Trump administration’s inner circle, on the other hand… okay look, they don’t particularly like Jews either. None of these people are great about Jews. But politically they need a strong bond with Israel, which means putting on a big disingenuous show about fighting antisemitism.
The reason they need to strengthen and protect Israel, and why their isolationism doesn’t apply to Israel, is because Israel needs to exist for long enough to overpower Palestine and Jordan, who currently control a particular hill in Jerusalem, knock down the mosque that’s on it, and build a Jewish temple. This will infuriate the Muslim world who will rise up in unison, led by some dude named Mog, and they’ll obliterate Israel. This, in turn, will make Jesus absolutely livid, and he’ll come down to Earth (Daddy’s home, Tucker Carlson would say) and murder everybody.
This doesn’t go well for the Jews, at least those who don’t convert to Christianity.
Therein lies the dilemma. Nazis, Nazi-adjacents, and other flavors of antisemite don’t tend to believe in that prophecy, which is very American-evangelical stuff. They’re a mixed bag of Christian denominations who have a different interpretation of the Bible (there seem to be a strong contingent of extremist Catholics, like Fuentes) as well as weird Pagans and more secular racists. So they’re pretty cool with leaving Israel and the greater Middle East alone and letting it fend for itself, and if it all goes up in nuclear smoke then whatever. Jesus is gonna do whatever he’s gonna do.
The narrative that the Candace Owens contingent are pushing out into the MAGA world, to great compatibility with the mindset of conspiracy culture, is poison to the Christopher Rufo contingent. Open, mainstream antisemitism is a very dangerous contaminant to introduce into their delicate system.
However! They cannot straightforward condemn the Nazi stuff, for a very important reason: The no enemies to the right principle. Outside of their opinions of Jews and Israel, these groups share almost every other bigotry in common. They hate immigrants, they hate LGBT, they violently disagree with the scientific mainstream on anything even remotely contentious like climate science and vaccines, and they hate anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan’s fingertips as he’s doing a two o’clock Roman Salute.
Now, let me be clear on one thing:
I mentioned earlier that this whole thing has grown out of the Nick Fuentes rift in the American right, which is true—he hammered in the peg that cracked the boulder—but it might surprise you to learn that Fuentes is not on Candace Owens’ side on this issue. This has a lot to do with the fact that Owens is a black woman, two categories of human that he hates more than anything, but also her theory is so bonkers that it makes him look bad.
In actuality, Owens’ theory is an expansion of an increasingly deranged fiction that began with her accusing the wife of the president of France of being transgender. This led to her being sued by…. fucking… France, I guess, which has led to Owens slipping further into a paranoid fantasy in which Macron ordered her assassination, and she has subsequently spun this off into a theory that the French also collaborated with the Israeli government to take out Charlie Kirk, and this developing story also implicates Kirk’s widow Erika, Jeffrey Epstein, and the nation of Egypt for some reason.
This is one of those scenarios where you shouldn’t be tempted to side with any of the sides on the table. But to be aware of the situation, the Rufo/Walsh/Pool/Johnson syndicate of MAGAland appear to be losing their fight to a different, slightly more 1930s flavor of bigotry. The infection of conspiracy culture within the mainstream right is so pervasive that even more centrist figures like Matt Taibbi are having to fight off attacks from their own fanbase about how they’re not taking Candace Owens’ international John Wick style assassination syndicate story seriously enough and demanding he investigate it.
Nobody who can win this debacle is the good guy, but the optimistic view, the one I’m subscribing to with my New Years Resolution Leaning Toward Optimism (unpronounceable acronym NYRLTO) is that smart evil people consistently losing arguments to dumb clearly wrong people amidst the lowest presidential approval rating since Watergate might put a dagger in the heart of Trumpism for the next hundred years.
Or else there’s a marginal chance of 2028 President Elect Nicholas J. Fuentes swearing in after his historic reconciliation and partnership with VP Candace Owens.
This rollercoaster gets wilder from here either way, but every ride ends.
I’m writing a book that goes into more depth about how the rise of the internet propelled far-right toxic masculinity to the American Presidency in the space of a single generation. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
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The Internet is An Ever Expanding Graveyard
Something has been bothering me for a little while now. It was exacerbated recently by a short essay by Dave Karpf about the fact that Bluesky isn’t taking off. Like, at all.
Boggling.
I assume you aren't aware of the origin of the "I think everyone involved in this story should die," which was a news story about a trans person being raped, and Norm saying the trans person and the rapist both deserve to die. That's the context: Norm McDonald being incredibly transphobic and bigoted.