Conspiracy Theorists Are Conspiring to Be Stupid

The Epstein papers have dropped, and, of course, as anyone with the brain power exceeding that of your common garden snail could’ve told you, it turned out to be more disappointing than a Bulwark staffer’s wife’s wedding night. If you were looking for a giant Trump conspiracy, all you got was Bill Clinton floating in a tub with some bimbo. And if that surprises you, I can only assume that someone accompanies you everywhere you go, reminding you to breathe.

 Out at AmFest, the Turning Point USA convention, one of the big topics was the USS Liberty incident from 1967. That’s another IQ test that takes the form of a conspiracy theory. It’s a perennial favorite among dumb people who blame Jews for everything, from war to pestilence to their own inability to perform sexually with another person in the room. And, of course, we’ve also recently seen the relitigation of 9/11 – my friends who were literally in the Pentagon when it was hit by the airliner are always thrilled to be told they don’t know what they’re talking about by some Internet rando who’s never known the loving touch of another human being who took a deep dive into Reddit subforums and understands that it was really a scheme pulled off by a combination of the Trilateral Commission, the Rand Corporation, the saucer people, and, of course, the Jews.

We’re through the looking glass here, people.

At least no one is currently talking about JFK, other than by demeaning Trump by adding his name to that of the failed president, but highly successful pervert, on the Trump-Kennedy Center. I’m old, and I’ve had to deal with people all my life coming up with complex and intricate theories as to how JFK got shot that all ignore Occam’s Razor – a communist jerk who knew how to shoot shot him, and a bunch of leftists hated the fact that a leftist shot him, so they decided to blame everybody else but leftists. Many are just bored with their lives, while others are delusional, imagining they were the special ones capable of peeling the onion of a giant plot that no one else had the insight to detect.

As I said, conspiracy theories are IQ tests, and far too many people are failing.

But we ought to define our terms. A "conspiracy theory" is a conjecture about a plot in which a large group of people work together to achieve an invidious result while also blaming someone else to support their narrative. A conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory if it’s a result of idiocy. That’s an idiocy theory. And we shouldn’t underestimate the power of stupidity because it’s essentially the cold fusion of human endeavor powering almost everything bad that’s going on through history. This is not to say that sometimes people don’t get together and try to do something bad, then blame it on someone else. It’s just to say that it’s unbelievably hard, to the point of implausibility, to do it effectively regarding something substantial and important over time.

Why is that? Well, first of all, there’s the basic competence problem. If you’ve ever worked for the government, and I worked for the government for about 27 years in the military, you come away distinctly unimpressed with the capabilities of most of the bureaucrats. This is true of all institutions; they are only as smart as their dumbest functionary. A massive conspiracy is hard to pull off. Now, it is possible, but usually only for a short time. Look at the scam the Allies pulled off on the Germans about where D-Day was going to happen. They convinced the Germans that the invasion would take place many miles from Normandy. But they only had to do that for a relatively short period. When a conspiracy theory involves significant numbers of people, every single one of them is a potential leak. And people talk, all the time. They can’t help it. You’re not going to keep a major secret secret for long. That’s just the way things work.

Plus, it’s also hard to coordinate a massive scheme. Giant conspiracies have many moving pieces. If you have ever moved a lot of pieces around the board – I have as a commander – you know that every one of them is a potential point of failure. As a commander, your job is not to manage success. It’s to manage these little failures as they add up and create friction that makes even things that superficially look easy difficult. So, your conspiracy theory must rely on people not talking, when they talk all the time, and on problems not arising, when they arise all the time. It’s not that a conspiracy theory is impossible. It’s just that a conspiracy theory about a major issue is improbable. They fall apart – look at the whole Covid thing.

But let’s face it – they’re fun to listen to, if not for the families of the dead who have to listen to this nonsense. Conspiracy theories make good movies, and for those obsessed with them in real life, they provide a ray of sunshine into their dreary little lives. Conspiracy podcasts can be amusing. I’ve been amused by them, at least ones involving harmless subjects like the American government keeping space aliens at Area 51 – the ones that involve people being killed are not fun for me, but your mileage may vary. An episode of "The X-Files" is a pleasant way to kill an hour, but you don’t have to embarrass yourself by believing it.

The other thing about conspiracy theories, besides how hard they would be to pull off and how you must ignore the most likely explanation, is that you must actively reject contrary evidence. In other words, when conspiracy theory theorists try to figure out the truth, they must also screen out facts that undermine their complex hypothesis.

Let’s look at the Epstein files. Does someone think that Epstein sat there and typed up a list of his victims and a monologue detailing his nefarious deeds, like some Bond villain explaining his whole plan to 007 before sending him off somewhere to be killed, thereby facilitating his escape? And does anyone imagine that if Joe Biden’s DOJ had even the hint of Donald Trump mingling with jailbait that wouldn’t have been on the front page of The New York Times in 2015 or thereafter? To even start with the Trump/Epstein conspiracy theory, you must begin by refusing to acknowledge these most obvious and basic facts. It’s not an auspicious beginning, and that’s why no one but fools were shocked that the newly open files were so free of incriminating material on Trump that the nuts and liars had to either start creating incriminating photos or pretending that Trump cavorting with Hawaiian Tropic models was some sort of scandal rather than another reason he’s awesome.

How about the USS Liberty incident, where Israeli fighters attacked an American ship in the Mediterranean during the 1967 war? You must start by refusing to acknowledge that friendly fire incidents happen in wars all the time. You also must ignore that the Egyptians had similar ships. And then you must ignore the fact that there’s literally no reason for Israel to attack an American vessel in the first place. Yes, it was a spy ship. No, the Israelis didn’t care about that. It was gathering signals intelligence on both sides, and that routine activity was certainly not enough to potentially start a war with a friendly superpower, especially when the unfriendly superpower was helping its enemies. To believe that conspiracy theory, you must boil down Israel's motivation to “Jews are bad,” which, of course, is the classic explanation offered throughout history by people with the concentrated brainpower of a turnip.

As for 9/11, it’s not even clear what the goal of that conspiracy would be. Al-Qaeda had a goal, which was to kill Americans. Who else had that goal? What pressing objective was to be obtained by somehow sneaking into a building and planting a bunch of explosives in it for some reason? Again, to believe the conspiracy theory, you must set aside the most obvious solution and construct a rickety scaffold of assumptions, suppositions, and outright stupidity to answer a question no one is asking.

And as for JFK, you’ve got to ignore that Lee Harvey Oswald was a damn communist and that he went and shot a cop. That's probably not something he would’ve done if he wasn’t afraid of being arrested for having just done something like, you know, shooting the president. And if you’ve ever been to Dealey Plaza, you know it’s not that big. It’s not the hardest shot in the world. 

Then there's the convoluted and baffling Candace Owens theory regarding Charlie Kirk. Her ridiculous conspiracy theories are just plain evil. She's garbage. But as a guy who’s won multimillion-dollar defamation cases, I don’t think Turning Point USA ought to sue Owens for her disgusting slanders. No, I’m not worried about what discovery would uncover – it's not going to lead to proof that Erika Kirk is working with the Egyptian Air Force, the French Foreign Legion, and the reverse vampires to murder her husband. There’s a more practical reason for not suing that nitwit: There’s going to be no money to recover from Candace Owens because she is going to be bankrupted by Mrs. Macron in the lawsuit she drew for her bizarre and creepy obsession with her theory that the French first lady is a secret dude.

Oh, and UFOs? Here’s the answer, and you’re not going to like it. There are no saucer people. The government is not keeping ET in a vault beneath the Nevada desert. Some of what people claim to see out there are just regular drones and aircraft. Some sightings are faked. Others are American secret aviation projects; people have been thinking our aerospace research platforms have been flying saucers since they were testing the U-2 in the 50s. No, I have no special knowledge of that stuff, nor would I tell you if I did. I’m just someone who tends to believe that the most likely answer is probably the correct one.

That may make me boring, but OK. Conspiracy theories are a lively and interesting diversion, but that’s all they are. They shouldn’t be the basis for policy, and we shouldn’t be wasting time on them right now as we’re struggling to keep our country. So, let’s file this stuff under “Entertainment,” put away childish things, and start acting like adults. We’ve got a country to save, and arguing over nonsense just gets in the way.