All The Conspiracy You Can Handle

Image: William Eggleston

---

Editor’s Note:

Happy Wednesday. The government is shut down, angels are looming, and conspiracy is thriving.

Last night I pushed past my studio nerves and spoke briefly on NewsNation about autism as a national conversation. I’ll be live again later today with Vicky Ward to talk about life as working moms (to boys) and the very specific stresses that come with it.

Cassie and I are also arranging a third sweep of conspiracy vs. narrative surrounding Charlie Kirk’s murder — a necessary catch-up for those struggling to keep up. The PAID chat has now surpassed 14,000 comments (and counting). Tensions do rise at times, so consider this a friendly reminder to keep an open mind. We’re navigating heated topics in the midst of grief. People are rightfully fired up.

Later this week, I’ll share a special (lighthearted) edition of Housekeeping (what I think is the best new show on TV) along with a Turning Point memorial post.

In the meantime, welcome back Aaron!

---

AARON EVERITT:

Fine, I’ll bite. I have watched the drama play out for the last several weeks on X and other places about what happened in the Charlie Kirk assassination and murder. For what it is worth, I actually have not decided for myself what I think about the whodunit aspects of this, but I generally start from the premise that the most obvious story is the real story. It seems like a fairly cut-and-dry case of murder carried out by a deranged individual who has been radicalized by the media. I know that there are a lot of questions that surround it, and I think it is worth exploring them all until there is a definitive conclusion or the Kirk family says to end the speculation. That said, the biggest issue in the entire episode is the lack of trust that foments these rampant wildfires of cogitations. I, for one, do not blame the Scooby Doo gang for asking the questions that are swirling around this. Do I like all of the actors involved in this? No chance. I don’t listen to Candace or Ian much at all, because frankly, their shtick is a little tiresome. It feels a lot like the boy who cried wolf every time I see the mustachioed Idahoan pop up from the bottom of his screen. The squinting Candace, scrunching her brow as she asks the deep questions about who could be behind all of it, has run its course for me, too. The amateur investigators have every right to jump into their mystery machine and discuss whatever they think is going on. In many ways, we should be thankful for their doggedness about all the issues they find troubling in government and politics. Skepticism is the highest mark to me of a citizen. I give Candace a lot of grace on this one. Everyone grieves the loss of a friend differently, and so her pressing into the investigative space might just be her way of coping. She clearly wants an answer, and sadly, she may never get one that is satisfactory. I feel for people in that place. Murder is the short circuit of the natural way of things, and so that will manifest for people close to the one who was taken in myriad ways. Deeper than just the hurt of one individual, however, is a track record of the powerful that has built an atmosphere of distrust that encourages this race to proclaim authoritative alternative possibilities as facts.

After all, it’s not like we don’t have a plethora of examples from the last 80 years of people in government and power making a mockery of what our own eyes have seen. There is 9/11 and JFK in the most obvious light, but there are plenty of others, like vaccine liability immunity or the Great Recession bailouts, that turn the average person into a worn-out schizophrenic trying to keep up with all of the lies. Nothing is trustworthy. Wikipedia is a machine shoved down every American’s throat, propagating itself as the truth, when in actuality, it has become a corrupted, intelligence-agency-driven bullhorn. The mainstream media? Forget about it as any kind of reliable source. From nearly any angle that you look from, you can sniff out the lie. And then there is the latest Israel stuff. Influencers sitting in a room, being able to ask the Prime Minister about how they can help get the narrative back on track with evangelicals. So when the Scooby gang makes a plea with the American people to be a little skeptical about what they are being told, I don’t blame people for biting.

---

---

Do I think that Charlie Kirk was in a bad spot trying to reconcile the youth of America’s quickly turning opinions about Israel against his personal beliefs while he tried to explain it to his donors, who are completely sold on the current government’s decisions? Absolutely. I have four young men who raise more than their eyebrows anytime that country’s government is mentioned. The youth that Charlie was talking to were probably even more tuned in than my own kids about the situation, and the numbers are not lying about what is happening. They see it as a strange, overly influential voice in an America that is failing to work for them. They are asking about why the economy isn’t designed for their generation, while we still find a way to endlessly push forward in our foreign policy of aid and weapons funding, while they watch housing and gas prices make their lives reconciled to a strange serfdom. They conflate all of this as another place where trust is lost. The youth voted in wide swaths for Donald Trump, and they see that Netanyahu has been to Washington four times since the inauguration. That’s four times more than our other allies, and so the people paying attention and posting about it online are inclined those state visits aren’t just because Bibi happened to be in Trump’s neck of the woods. The appearance of it all brings up the questions that they are asking through a lens of distrust that all the other bad actions of government have created for them.

Put yourself in the shoes of a twenty-five-year-old American. They have seen exactly zero days in their entire lives in which our country has not been at war, or participating in the funding of a proxy war. They have watched housing prices double in five years. The best years of their youth were stolen by a government that lied to them about a pandemic and made them get vaccines to go back to school or miss prom night or graduations. They have lived through the Great Recession, where they watched their Boomer grandparents double down and get wealthier, and their own parents have their savings and work evaporated because of greedy bankers and governments that rescued the worst offenders. They have seen cities burn down from their phones. They have seen the atrocities, real or fabricated, by the people in Gaza and Israel. They have watched presidents lie about weapons of mass destruction and punish their political enemies. They have been told that there is a blackmail syndicate where rich men were flown to an island and exploited with film and pictures of sexual acts of themselves with underage girls. There are people in jail for those crimes, but no end user has ever seen the dark underside of a prison bunk bed. They have seen tall buildings implode after plane crashes, and a government that has made surveillance the way-du-jour of their generation. I have a lot of sympathy for their skepticism.

So as I see it, is it any wonder that the super-sleuths of X are the media outcome of that moment?

Trust is earned, and right now, all of the institutions that are supposed to be the trustworthy ones have siphoned off any last remnant of it from the people of this country. The media has spent the last 10 years telling everyone that Donald Trump and people like him are Nazis. They have said that a popular independent candidate was a kook and a crank. The media told everyone that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack and that Kamala was the best thing we could possibly hope for. The youth of our country wake up every day and can watch the manipulation dripping off their feeds and their parents’ televisions like a spilled bottle of maple syrup on the counter. And the worst part of it to that generation is they see what is happening right in front of them on their glass-faced portals to hell. The less voice the media or a government has, the more they double down on the manipulation.

---

---

I don’t want to make this about Israel’s current government and PR battle with the American public, but it is the most readily available example of what everyone is seeing. They see a room of “influencers” asking how they can help a government with its image problems, and they immediately move to the cynical side of their highly tuned-in predispositions. They see Trump with RFK Jr. one day talking about vaccines and autism, and within a news cycle, the President is cozied up to the next billionaire with AI face implants. It is driving the American public mad. They believed that they elected a whole group of people who were going to tell the truth about what was really under the hood in Washington, and what they seemed to get was something very different. To be sure, this group of politicians has far more good moments than any other batch of plastic bananas that have come before, but the modern iteration of Washington is built on a foundation of lies, so what they are able to actually revise or fix is limited. Generation Z gets that terrible reality better than anyone else, and they are having nothing to do with the “narrative building” that is par for the course in that sparkling white citadel of crap.

---

---

When I was young and learning how to fall in love with a woman, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to put the best version of myself in front of her. The trouble was that as soon as she found out that most of what I was presenting to her was manufactured from what I thought she wanted to see of me and was fake, she was expediently tucking a triangle-folded note in my locker and headed away from me as fast as she could. That same phenomenon is what we are witnessing at the most basic level in all of our institutions. Anything from law enforcement to the medical system, all the way up to the most powerful offices in the world, have all trained themselves that the curated image they present is the best possible outcome for them to remain in power. But the American people are quickly, and in huge numbers, folding up their triangle notes for the breakup. Most of us have had it with the deceit, and those decades of disingenuousness are coming home to roost in how people are reacting to every situation that remotely touches politics. If truth is the last resort for the powerful, then conspiracy will be the people’s first instinctive reaction. Ian and his mustache are exactly what America turns to in moments like these, because what they have tuned in to for information in the past has been a farce and a phony presentation of what is actually happening. If you are abused of trust long enough, you decide not to trust any longer. It’s an anthropological reality that has been built into our species for survival. In the great words of George W. Bush, “Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”

I have said for a long time that you cannot hate the media enough, and now social media is finding its way into the loathsome bucket too. But we have to understand that these are the tools of communication that we have to work with, in order to figure out what media and the dissemination of information are going to look like going forward. I have a strong feeling that it isn’t going to be done with social media “influencers” asking government officials how to tell their stories better. It also won’t be the traditional media presentations that come in one-minute segments with botox-filled presenters that help the Boomers stay comfortable in their recliners at their condos in South Carolina as they yell at their televisions. It is going to take a lot of work, and we are going to have to solve this if we are to have a functioning citizenry and nation.

The post-World War era has been about control: control of the people, the narratives, the rebels in Thenextistan, the evening news, the semen stained dresses. It was all done to craft a world that really doesn’t, and can’t functionally ever exist. Peace through messaging manipulation and intelligence agency meddling, covered up by a suit-dressed Dapper Dan Man on television, isn’t a real peace at all. The people instinctively know that this way of life is coming to an end, and it has made them turn to the unpredictable. They are seeking God and asking about the church. They are finding new ways to hear about information. They have killed their televisions, and they are learning who is trustworthy and who isn’t in the new media. The public has certainly made their pronouncements about the powerful, and they want nothing to do with them and the curated images they have plastered all over the media outlets. Charlie Kirk was on the front line of this learning. He was hearing how the winds were shifting about all things in the American government, as well as how the actions of foreign actors were changing longstanding opinions held by the conservatives and the youth of America. He was at the forefront of understanding how seismic the shifts were that are under the institutions, and he was shouting loudly that those who are in power better understand what is going on if they don’t want the pitchfork treatment.

Governments have thought that because they controlled the institutions, trust could be easily manufactured. What they have found out as each new episode of the news plays out on the whirlwind spinning feeds of social media is that it is, instead, easily broken. No amount of yelling, belittling, soft peddling, image making, story crafting is going to work this time. The tools the powerful have had are broken and it isn’t something that will get fixed with enough duct tape or soundbites. The cameras are perpetually rolling, and there’s no where for the powerful to hide any longer. They would be best to figure that out and own up to the moment because the old methods are not going to work any longer.