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Various predictable facts have emerged about the would-be White House Correspondents’ Association dinner assassin: A young man marinated in leftist propaganda, nursing delusions of grandeur that have now been comically dashed. No doubt to his disappointment, no cult is rushing to spring up around him comparable to the cult of Luigi Mangione. He is simply too dull, and, as Jim Geraghty amusingly drives home at National Review, too average-looking for anyone to care. His smug hotel bathroom selfie is already being dubbed the “most millennial pre-assassination selfie ever.”
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However, his old social media posts have provided some entertainment for internet sleuths. One retweet has an especially bizarre hilarity: A conspiracy theory about the Butler assassination attempt. “HOW YOU GET SHOT WITH NO SCAR????” reads the caption for a close-up of the President’s ear. Our hero evidently thought this was worth pondering.
Of course, the pattern is a cliché by now: It didn’t happen, but it’s great that it did. While first reports were still trickling out of the disrupted dinner, the cycle was perpetuating itself all over again. Screenshots emerged from a “mass psychosis event” on Reddit as one poster after another started spinning out the theory that Trump had staged the incident to distract from the Iran war.
The psychosis wasn’t limited to Reddit s***posters. Rick Wilson quote-tweeted a pre-dinner clip of Karoline Leavitt jokingly predicting “shots fired,” insinuating this was more than a deeply unfortunate accidental pun in hindsight. Adam Cochran, an “independent journalist” with “professor” and “policy consultant” in bio, immediately commenced “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…” posting, and kept it going even through the release of the suspect’s manifesto. For one especially bizarre moment, British Muslim journalist Sulaiman Ahmed circulated a doctored image of Allen in an IDF sweatshirt. Because naturally, no conspiracy-mongering cycle is complete without somehow involving the Jews.
Here at the Washington Examiner, Tiana Lowe Doescher analyzed the shape of anti-Trump conspiracist brain rot, noting that the Manhattan Institute found nearly half of all Democrats considered Butler “definitely” or “probably” a false flag, while another two-thirds believed Putin was pulling Trump’s puppet strings. She further observes that this tendency is shared by an anti-American right that has turned on the President, including shape-shifting figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson (although Owens and Carlson have yet to comment on this incident, a much-circulated clip of Carlson appears AI-generated). Conspiracism, it turns out, is a bipartisan mind virus.
It’s predictable enough that left-wingers would want to shift the blame away from left-wing radicalism. But why is this an increasingly shared feature of both “blue” and “red”-coded conspiracy-mongers? Why are they all so bent on creating fantasy narratives that ignore the forces actually underlying our current wave of political violence?
Perhaps it’s because the target is too diffuse. What defines conspiracism, red and blue, is a fixation on easily identifiable entities: a person, a government, an ethnic group. That fixation becomes so all-consuming that these entities can do no good thing and must bear at least partial blame for all bad things, whether they are named Donald Trump, Erika Kirk, or Israel. It then gives the conspiracist more of a dopamine rush to keep ominously nodding in their direction than to do the boring work of analysing what actually motivates boring characters like Cole Tomas Allen or Tyler Robinson.
After the Kirk assassination, I struggled to understand why the right didn’t unilaterally accept the narrative Robinson had handed them on a silver platter: crazy messed-up gay kid with trans partner shoots beloved conservative pundit in broad daylight. But for some people, that narrative couldn’t be real, because that would be so dumb, so random. No, the truth had to be something bigger than any of us. The actual truth was a glass of beer, but the conspiracists craved vodka. It was weed, but they craved cocaine.
As an example, consider the curious case of influencer priest Fr. Calvin Robinson, who once aimed his firebrand rhetoric mainly at the Left but has taken stranger recent turns, boosting figures like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, Robinson has repeatedly tweeted endorsement of Candace’s “questions,” particularly her accusations of Israel. This is part of his overall hard turn into antisemitic conspiracism.
When Laura Loomer noted that Owens was accusing Israel of carrying out 9/11, Robinson replied, “Is this news to you?!” In a new interview clip, he asserts with a straight face that indeed, “all the conspiracy theories … are true,” that there is in fact “an elite Jewish cabal that are raping, murdering, and essentially eating babies,” and we as a country need to do something about this. More entertainingly, he has also blamed the Jews for rap music.
Like the rest of the conspiracist class, Robinson has also taken repeated swipes at Erika Kirk, joining the pile-on under a clip of her being escorted out of the WHCD in tears. She could be heard saying, “I just want to go home,” to which some mockingly replied that they wanted her to go home too. As if that wasn’t enough, she’d already drawn mockery before the event for posing with a young correspondent, setting off unsavory speculation about their purely hypothetical dating life. This particularly nasty mind virus also appears bipartisan, with posters left and right eager to get their punches in.
For some, perhaps Kirk appears as the archetypal high-achieving, gorgeous blonde everyone envied in high school — fair game then and fair game now. In the case of Owens, evidence seems strong that the envy is personal. Envy, of course, festers at the heart of much anti-Semitic conspiracism as well. And perhaps to some extent it also lurks unspoken behind anti-Trump conspiracism. This is not to make any comment on the relative virtues of Trump, Erika Kirk, or the Jews. It is merely to observe that we humans — all of us, if we are honest — are tempted to fixate jealously on those who have attained heights of success or status we haven’t.
WHCA IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CONSPIRACY THEORIES TELL LUNATICS TO KILL
Perhaps this is how the pathetic losers, the dangerous “weak men,” so often slip under the radar. They are so unremarkable that no one will fixate on them. Indeed, no one will bother to notice them at all until it is too late.
Bethel McGrew is a freelance journalist based in Michigan. She writes on Substack at Further Up.
