The Inverted Conspiracy Theory
There used to be a time when believing in conspiracy theories actually took some amount of mental gymnastics. It didn’t matter, generally speaking, how outlandish or wild the theory was, or to what degree most of its believers actually considered it true; the unifying principle for most of the term’s life was one of complexity and its adversarial relationship with the official narrative.
It took work to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t merely a communist sympathizer and Soviet agent recruited to assassinate the sitting US President. It took work because on its face, that’s exactly what happened. That the decade of cultural revolution that followed was thrown into high gear by Kennedy’s successor, that Israel got its hands on nuclear weaponry, and that the CIA became a domineering force of foreign relations—those were mere happy accidents. Whatever was going on with Jack Ruby, and the absolutely absurd trajectory of the bullet that ended Thirty-Five’s life, well. The less said, the better.
You can apply the same mode of reasoning to the bombing of Oklahoma City. Most Americans didn’t watch the very first broadcasts live on the scene, when it was known that there were multiple perpetrators. The media successfully shaped what was a mostly airtight narrative: a lone ex-military right winger took revenge on the federal government for perceived crimes against the American citizenry at Ruby Ridge and Waco. How exactly that translated to bombing a building in Oklahoma, much less how exactly the alleged cause of the explosion could possibly have resulted in the observable damage, well. Again, the less said, the better.
It took a little less work to believe in conspiracy theories in the wake of 9/11, though. If there was a point at which this trend began to shift, the cover-up behind the 9/11 official narrative was probably it. What was saw in front of our eyes, both in live broadcast and in the countless replays in the coming years, clashed too obviously with what we were told occurred. And the 9/11 Commission Report’s very obvious half-truths and fabrications didn’t help. That it was used to justify the longest and least-fruitful military engagement in American history, well. The less said, the better.
Nonetheless, the official story was enough for most Americans to shrug their shoulders and accept what would become the most absurd two decades of American foreign policy in living memory. We accepted the permanent entrenchment of TSA and the implementation of an unprecedented surveillance state at home, in addition to the deployment of our own states’ National Guards abroad.
The All-American Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy theories tend to come in three kinds, though they’re commonly all dismissed as only one. You have the theories that are probably true, or at least approximately as such. You have those that aren’t true, but are close enough that they seem believable—sometimes these are disinformation efforts to further muddy the waters, and sometimes they’re just mistaken conclusions from the original premises. These two tiers of conspiracy blend, by design, into one another.
And then you have the more fantastical theories that are usually only believed by those who tap into a much more surreal framework of information processing. Those are usually referred to as cranks, though nowadays that terms generally means any of the above. Sometimes these people are bad actors who intentionally try to hijack otherwise sound or mostly-sound investigations. Sometimes these people are just attention-seekers or looking to esoteric literature to find answers for what is ultimately a failing in their own lives. And sometimes these people are just drug-addled, insane, or otherwise off the reservation.
We’ll use JFK’s assassination as an example. The official narrative was that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Soviet agent who shot JFK from the sixth floor of a book depository warehouse. Reasonable theories as to what was going on behind the scenes include Mossad’s involvement in the interests of nuclear proliferation, international financial involvement in the interests of cementing the move to fiat currency for market manipulation, the CIA, and even Johnson himself. Any one of these could be true or true enough, while the others would be some combination of the second kind that was referred to above. Third-tier conspiracies would involve something like Men in Black killing a president to prevent some sort of alien disclosure event, or this being an endpoint of some reptilian takeover of the American government.
The thing about tiers one and two is that they work from the same general deposit of information and both tiers involve theories that sound plausible enough. Successful disinformation campaigns should, by design, craft narratives more believable than the truth. That’s the whole point, but in cases where that’s not possible, they should at least muddy the waters of investigation while simultaneously provided a good enough narrative for the general public.
It’s why the official story of the JFK assassination worked for most Americans for generations. They had a body, they had a perp, they had a motive, and they had a coherent-enough set of events both before and after the shooting to have an open and shut narrative. All the dots seemed to make sense and they all connected to form a picture everyone could recognize. Sure, there were a number of people who didn’t buy the official narrative, which is why the term “conspiracy theorist” was coined in the first place, but enough of them did that terms like “grassy knoll” or “lone gunman” became quirky installments of memed popular culture.
This is the second side of conspiracy theory: it’s a meme.
For the JFK assassination, there’s the tacit admission that the official story doesn’t totally fit together, but the simultaneous position that nothing fishy was going on. Most huge events that were subjected to intense cover-ups end with this phenomenon. “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.” “Controlled demolition.” It’s hard to say how much of the general public still accept the official version of 9/11’s events at face value, but enough of them very obviously do—and they’ll meanwhile parrot these phrases under the pretenses of irony, despite these same phrases being cues to recognize that the official story doesn’t really add up.
The best example of this is probably the “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself meme” from 2019. In less than a week, the Regime’s most notorious bag man in the public eye was arrested and detained, only to get suicided by performing some sort of back flip off of his bunk bed. The security cameras caught nothing. The guards were out for those five minutes. Everybody knew he didn’t kill himself, which is what prompted the meme to be born in the first place. And yet, the meme was enough to satisfy whatever public interest there was in the story. Not the flight logs, not the blackmail he had, not the ongoing investigation into the rest of his network. His right-hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, was caught a year later, and there’s been zero press and almost as much public interest in that investigation.
What’s interesting, however, is that this phenomenon isn’t universal. Some conspiracies end up with memeable phrases that doom them to irrelevancy, while others don’t. It remains a mystery as to why this is the case, but if I had to guess, it has something to do with how big the cover-up is, how relevant it is to practical changes in peoples’ lives, and how easily the phrases can be forced into memes.
For instance, 9/11 resulted in massive changes in people’s personal and public lives, none of which make any sense if 9/11 was not at least mostly what it appeared to be: a terrorist attack perpetrated by Islamic extremism. The Epstein case likewise threatened to vindicate—or at least lend credibility to—the otherwise absurd narrative of the Q-Anon enthusiasts, and moreover, it directly threatened the legitimacy of many key members of the government, media, and academia.
But all of this was different from what came about just a year or so later.
“Trust the Pl—uh, Science!”
An inversion has occurred in how conspiracy theories are pitched. As mentioned above, the official narrative is supposed to be easier to believe, even if it has holes, than whatever alternative narratives are offered by conspiracy theorists.
A narrative fails when it stops having answers to basic questions, so the best official narratives are ones that don’t have obvious avenues to question in the first place. For this reason, official narratives tend to be simple, address main concerns, and don’t leave much room for imagination. By contrast, even conspiracy theories that are probably true are almost always more complex than the official story. This is simply because life tends to be more complex than what can be packaged up as a soundbite for mass media coverage.
Once you start digging, of course, you find out that the cover-up is itself unreasonable to believe, which is usually what gets someone branded as a conspiracy theorist. As more information comes to light, the understanding of the events in question naturally changes, so it becomes more reasonable to believe an alternative narrative. But the key here is that you have to have a reason to start digging in the first place, and the best official narratives don’t offer up anything of the sort.
But something weird has happened in the past year or so. It’s hard to tell when it started, but the way the media behaved since the beginning of the COVID crisis has shown a startling reversal of these somewhat intuitive ideas. This applies to more than just how COVID and its aftermath has been handled, but it’s the most obvious example of this inversion.
The official story is harder to believe than what we’re told are the conspiracy theories.
This applies to almost every aspect of the COVID narrative. The Wuhan lab leak theory made more sense than spontaneous genesis from questionable dietary practices. The fact masks don’t work and are just a means of demoralization or control makes more sense than saying that wearing pieces of cloth that can’t even keep ambient odor out is going to prevent the transmission of an airborne virus. That the vaccines seem like a terrible idea makes more sense than trusting the roll out of experimental mRNA technology developed to combat what is effectively a new strain of the flu.
And this is all forgetting the first lie that was peddled back in early March of 2020: that no matter what we did, COVID was going to claim the lives of millions of Americans by the end of April that year. The death toll was expected to be catastrophic, a plague that would have made the 1918 flu look like a joke. And that didn’t happen.
To repeat: the official narrative is supposed to be easy to believe. COVID’s official narrative, from its genesis to its projections to its remedies to its vaccines: none of it has been easy to believe. It is in fact a mental chore to take the official narrative at face value.
Just to be clear, I’m not of the opinion that COVID itself was something inflicted on the American people the way JFK’s assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, or 9/11 were. It probably wasn’t a specific attack, despite what some early Sino-alarmists claimed in January and February of last year. Although it has come out that COVID-19 bares the marks of artificial tampering, it seems obvious that if it was intended to be an engineered bioweapon, it’s a remarkably lame one with an absurdly high rate of failure. Like the flu and just about any other seasonal illness out there, the only populations it significantly affects have been the at-risk, the immune-compromised, the obese and unhealthy, and the elderly. The chances of having serious symptoms or dying of COVID for healthy people under sixty-five have always been quite low.
So with that in mind, there’s no reason to believe in some great conspiracy about the virus’ genesis. That it came from a lab in Wuhan speaks more to a well-established history of Chinese worker incompetence than to direct international maliciousness. There should be no doubt that worse plagues can be engineered for the purposes of biological warfare than the bad flu season we’ve been experiencing so far.
The conspiracy comes into play when we see what the American Regime did with this information during an election year. They blew a potential threat wildly out of proportion, aided by an already hyper-politicized and sympathetic army of media-hypnotized drones, and double-, triple-, and quadruple-downed on their lies in order to justify obvious blunders. It went from an opportunity to hijack what was originally an election year talking point to a brazen power grab that happened also to enrich the wealthiest people in the world. That the same elite who inflicted the lock down culture on us just happened to have a Great Reset waiting right off stage, well. The less said—you get it.
A narrative that gets out of hand. One intimately wrapped up with the movers and shakers of the American empire. One that keeps people in a perpetual state of complacency and at the behest of their presumed intellectual superiors. This should all sound familiar. The experts tell you to “trust the science!” Well, “science” means “plan”.
Modern Conspiracy Framework
The COVID official narrative bizarrely reads like the Q-Anon narrative for white liberals. Although it’s not wrapped up in the enigmatic dressings of conspiracy theory mainstays, it has preyed upon liberal consciousness and fears in much the same way that Q-Anon did for fringe conservatives. And the message, at the end of the narrative, is the same for both: trust the experts; trust the people in power. COVID’s is perhaps a little more dangerous only because Q-Anon cultists, as radical as some of them may have come across, never demanded we start taking hastily-developed drugs that alter our messenger RNA. Nor were Q-Anon cultists so numerous and positioned so highly as to successfully shut the entire country down for months in the interests of doubling Amazon’s net worth.
Q-Anon was also a controlled-op probably from the beginning, or at least very close to it. COVID wasn’t.
The reason the COVID narrative worked on white liberals is because of how they understand science. For Q-Anon, the secret ingredient was patriotism. Patriotism was the key factor in legitimizing authority, which is why their narrative was held together under the presumption of a secret patriotic Trumpian government working inside the Shadow Government that ran the United States political apparatus. It’s convoluted, but bear with me. The COVID narrative works along similar grounds, but replace patriotism with science—something even less clearly defined under their own model, and therefore more heavily invested with authority.
A second point of note is this: Q-Anon’s interpretive method was decentralized. You had your grifters, but there was very little authority over interpreting the Q messages themselves; this played into the decentralized manner of the Q-Anon cult mentality, since decentralization was a mark of foundational pride. There was no “trust this interpreter of Q”, there was only “trust Q, trust the plan.” It reinforced their patriotic impulse.
The COVID narrative is the exact opposite of this, because the COVID narrative’s audience is one whose worldview functions totally differently. The foundational pride of the white liberal is not his autonomy but his intelligence. And consider where staking one’s pride on one’s own intelligence gets you: skepticism. The COVID narrative relies on the belief that the truth of any given situation isn’t merely complex, but utterly incomprehensible to any save specific elect interpreters known as experts. That’s what they mean by “science”. They function with a practical sense of judging ambiguous probabilities, but they immediately surrender this agency to the rulings of experts on given subjects when those experts begin speaking.
That these experts could be liars is beyond the scope of their imagination; rather, experts can only be wrong and, demonstrating a contorted sense of humility, they admit that everyone’s been wrong a few times in their lives. Thus, “trust the science” includes an ancillary clause: “the science evolves.”
Granted, a sane person parsing this out will recognize that the full statement here is “trust this that constantly changes”, a seemingly Heraclitan impulse that actually devolves into utter relativism in the modern world. In the end, the only way to properly understand it is to rephrase the sentence: trust what is certainly uncertain. When the experts change their minds so completely, the white liberal that believes the COVID narrative simply wants to be on whatever side those experts are on, so they change their minds as well. Authority decides which way the wind blows, even if personal experience or individual conscience declares otherwise. And this is because authority is the only way to even attempt maintaining coherency of a narrative when one’s worldview is so riddled with relativism and self-doubt.
Their experts, by the way, probably don’t believe most of this stuff in the first place. Most of their experts are either unscrupulous in their carrying out whatever ideology they’re possessed with, or otherwise cynically hopping in to pillage what’s left of American prosperity before the curtain call.
Inverted Conspiracy Theory
We’re told to follow the science, but when we cite their own studies or point out the obvious, we’re called conspiracy theorists. We’re told they’re only looking out for our best interests, but when we point out that we’re grown men and we don’t need to be treated like we’re four years old, we’re called conspiracy theorists. We’re told we can spread a virus even if it doesn’t make us sick, that the experimental vaccines do nothing to stop the spread of this virus, and that the best we can hope for after we get the jab a lower likelihood of getting severe symptoms. And if we then ask, “well, then why should we get the vaccine?” we’re called conspiracy theorists. Or murderers.
Living healthier is a conspiracy theory. Getting a vaccine that the people who designed it barely understand is expected to be normal. Taking common sense precautions during flu season and expecting that to be enough is a conspiracy theory. Wearing a mask that can’t even stop fine particulates is normal. Expecting people who are sick to take proper precautions and do their best to recover naturally is a conspiracy theory. Forcefully locking down entire states and discussing mandatory vaccinations for healthy people who have no symptoms is normal.
I’d like to say the Regime is pushing its luck by pitching an official narrative that walks and talks like a conspiracy theory, but the fact that it’s worked well enough for almost three-quarters of adult Americans to get the jab seems to indicate otherwise. Granted, as I’ve written about before, it’s less a matter of how many people believe this absurd new reality so much as who, specifically believes in it, and what positions of authority they occupy.
Unlike in the Soviet Union, where everyone tacitly understood that Pravda was fake, there are true believers in America and almost all of them are part of the managerial class. White liberal and coastal elite class of American society really are powerful enough to coerce the rest of the country into compliance, and most of their mask-wearing, vax-maxxed sycophants don’t even realize it. They still consider themselves the sympathetic underdogs beneath the yoke of a vast right wing conspiracy, even while the people they take orders from gleefully pillage and undermine the rest of American life right in front of them.
To recapitulate: conspiracy theories are supposed to be alternative narratives to whatever is presented as official by the ruling class. The official narrative is supposed to be easier to believe. Although backed by the authority of those who present it, the official narrative itself is supposed to at least look like it makes sense, so as not to invite prying questions that end up blowing holes in its legitimacy.
The COVID official narrative—and you’ll find, if you look at the rest of what was given to us to chew on last year—is the opposite of this. What we see and what we’re told are too jarring. The authority that presents this narrative rests on its laurels and presumes (correctly) that the white liberal class of this country will go along with it, and doesn’t care much as to whether the rest of the country does or not. “Conspiracy theorist” is actively turning into a phrase to mark not merely an out-group, but an out-group that is an open enemy to the Regime.
