How conspiracism corrupts everything

On Erika Kirk and the return of medieval politics

Here’s a video of Erika Kirk rushing from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner after someone tried to shoot Donald Trump. You can hear her tearfully saying ‘I just want to go home.’ Remember: her husband Charlie Kirk, the father of her kids, was brutally murdered on stage in a similar attack not long ago. It’s hard to watch.

The sane response to crimes like these, which are becoming shockingly commonplace, is sympathy for the victims and outrage at what amounts to a brazen assault on democracy itself. It is also to be disturbed by the increasing normalisation of political violence, and to seek to counter the groupthink and dogma (especially of the woke and ‘liberal’ varieties) that have resulted in high-profile conservative figures, including the president of the United States, being repeatedly targeted.

But in the rapidly growing and increasingly unavoidable cesspit of Conspiracy Land, none of that matters. Rather these horrendous events are instantly seized upon by grifting ‘influencers’, distorted, and weaponised to inject paranoia into the public sphere. And so, in a twist that will surprise literally nobody, they’re blaming Israel and the Jews. And the ‘deep state’. And the Trump administration. And nondescript nefarious dark forces. Nothing new there, then.

24,000 likes for a post implying the assassination attempt was a false flag to enable Israel to build something very scary (‘lord knows what’) under the White House ballroom because the ballroom’s architect has a Jewish name…

There’s so much of this poison out there that it’s impossible to begin to cover all of it. So I’ll focus on the treatment of Erika Kirk in particular, which should give a sense of the wider rot.

Here’s a typical post:

And here’s another:

And another:

4.6 million views and hundreds of thousands of ‘likes’ for a tweet mocking a traumatised, recently bereaved mother fleeing an unknown gunman, shortly after her own husband was shot in the neck for his political beliefs, and died. Lovely.

There are thousands of other examples I could have chosen from, obviously. But by now you get the picture.

At this point it’s worth clarifying why Erika Kirk is the focus of such hatred. In short, it’s because online nutters (e.g. Candace Owens) have spent almost every day since Charlie Kirk lost his life pumping out lies about her: that she was complicit in his death, that she’s a Mossad agent, that she’s covering stuff up, that she’s involved in the rape and torture of kids (yes, they actually claim to believe this), and much more besides. There are no words.

Candace Owens suggesting we’re governed by ‘machines’ or ‘sentinels that look like humans’, and that Erika Kirk is a ‘hybrid’.

I rarely use the term ‘evil’ when discussing ideas but this stuff is, actually, evil. It rests on the deliberate dissemination of falsehoods designed to bully and vilify innocent people for personal gain. It sows mistrust and doubt, exonerates the true perpetrators, and shields genuinely harmful political trends from scrutiny.

I’m not sure I’d have believed it possible for this mindset to gain significant traction in the modern West if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes. In hindsight, that was naive; the same impulse has surfaced repeatedly throughout human history, from medieval witch trials through to Nazi Germany. What is striking however, is seeing it re-emerge so swiftly, and in forms that show signs of creeping more broadly into mainstream political life.

Until recently, Maoist wokeism was probably the most repulsive political movement I'd seen take hold in my country. But this psychotic conspiratorialism is now giving it a run for its money. As I’ve described elsewhere, its proponents cannot be reasoned with, and their impact on society is ~100% negative. It takes the very worst aspects of various worldviews—the vindictiveness, cliquiness and dogmatism of the left, Islamist-style bigotry and deceitfulness, and the delusional tendencies of the dumb right—and unifies them all under a single umbrella.

It needs to be put back in its box quickly, or the consequences won’t be pretty.

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FURTHER THOUGHTS

What has given rise to this conspiratorial thinking?