When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth

Was Trump's Dinner with Antisemites Actually an Intra-Far-Right Plot to Sabotage his 2024 Run and End his Shameful Political "Career"?

This post is the third in an ongoing series on antisemitic culture. See the first two installments here: What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites and What Causes Someone to Be an Antisemite? These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.

In my first post in this series, I noted how far-right white nationalist conspiracist Laura Loomer was now pushing a seemingly bizarre idea: she claimed that Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was actually, secretly anti-Trump and that she was trying to sabotage him through her former intern and ally, the alt-right hate monger, pedophilia defender, and now “ex-gay” Milo Yiannopoulos.

At the time the idea seemed ludicrous, but now I wonder if perhaps she’s on to something: Yiannopoulos appears to be so satisfied with his arch-trolling efforts that he can’t help but admit his intent with bringing the Gen-Z neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes to dine at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, here’s NBC News reporting:

As advisers to Trump have attempted to quell the backlash, some have insisted that the former president was essentially tricked by the rapper and his guests — a suspicion backed up by Milo Yiannopoulos, the anti-Trump, far-right provocateur who is now acting as a political adviser to Ye.

Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor who was banned from Twitter in 2016 for inciting a racist campaign against the comedian Leslie Jones, told NBC News that he was “the architect” of the plan to have Fuentes travel with Ye in the hopes of slipping him into the dinner with Trump. The intent, according to Yiannopoulos, was for Fuentes to give Trump an unvarnished view of how a portion of his base views his candidacy.

…

“I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” Yiannopoulos told NBC News. 

“I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end,” he added. 

And, Yiannopoulos said, he arranged the dinner “just to make Trump’s life miserable” because news of the dinner would leak and Trump would mishandle it. 

Could Loomer actually be on to something? Might Marjorie “Traitor” Greene, as Loomer has christened her, actually be seeing the writing on the wall that the era of Trump dominance on the Far Right (and the “mainstream” Right!) could be coming to a close? Does she perhaps think that if Trump can fall, she will be the heir-apparent to his populist-nationalist crown? It’s a more plausible theory in light of Yiannopoulos’s claims that he arranged the dinner specifically to harm Trump’s candidacy.

In pondering this possibility of a conspiracy within the Far Right to bring down Trump through exploiting his own ignorance and vanity, one of my favorite fictional characters came to mind: the conspiracy-chasing vigilante Rorschach from Alan Moore’s Watchmen comic series and its 2009 movie adaptation.

Watchmen begins with Rorschach investigating a murder and discovering the victim is one of his former masked hero colleagues: a tough, nihilistic man who went by the name The Comedian. From this fact Rorschach, who sees conspiracies everywhere, comes to believe that there’s a conspiracy to murder other masked crime-fighters. His efforts to warn others of the potential scheme and investigate further then drive the plot of the story, and lo and behold, he turns out to be right. There is a global conspiracy afoot by the wealthy and powerful, and the murder was the first effort to take out those who might stop it.

I’ve studied the conspiracy world a bit too much since college. My favorite author, Robert Anton Wilson, used those themes a lot in both his fiction and non-fiction works, not to promote any particular conspiracy theory as the answer, but rather as a teaching tool to get people to evaluate claims not in a true/false, black/white way, but in terms of probability and degrees of truth. “How much of this theory of the world is based in facts and what percentage of it is feelings-driven speculation and which pieces are flat-out crazy garbage?” “How probable is it that this guess at the truth is accurate? 50-50? 75-25? 90-10?”

That’s really the way to evaluate conspiracy theories and, well, almost everything in general. As I studied the conspiracists and their realm (starting back in 2003) I began to notice something again and again: there were virtually always a few real, verifiable, historical facts undergirding them. The problem was simply that the conspiracy theorist was then so overwhelmed with those facts that they made wild emotional leaps well beyond what they could prove.

Once I came to understand this (around about when I graduated from college in 2006), I began to shift to be pretty militant against the “conspiracy theory culture” I’d seen emerging on this earlier iteration of the internet. Then, as I got out into the working world and started at my first full-time editorial job in 2009, I saw how these tendencies had bled over into the political realm, most noticeably on the far left and the far right. Then, as I began to start focusing on the political ideology Islamism, I saw how conspiracy ideas infused with antisemitism had long fueled the terrorism and cultural subversion engaged in by Jihadists and their stealthy non-violent political allies in organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

THEN, I began to notice how even within the movement I’d joined, the little Counter-Jihad and Counter-Islamist contingency of think tanks, activist organizations, and independent writer-researcher-troublemakers, there were often conspiracist tendencies among its most zealous members, like Loomer. The extremes of this movement - which I dabbled in early on - saw all of Islam and all Muslims as part of a grand conspiracy to spread Sharia law over the entire planet. Muslims who protested that they were moderate and wanted to live in the pluralistic West were either liars or fools. Eventually the extreme, bigoted voices prevailed, and then with the rise of Trump they became some of the president’s most vocal supporters with a platform much bigger than those of us who wanted to talk about “Islamism,” framing the threat as a political ideology rather than 1.97 billion Muslims.

So, in other words, even though Rorschach is a cool anti-hero and very entertaining, I deeply despise the real world versions of his way of thinking in conspiracies and certainties.

But we can’t just dismiss everything the conspiracists say, because, as mentioned earlier, usually they’re at least starting from verifiable facts that have just been largely ignored, maligned, or misunderstood.

And in tomorrow’s post I’ll provide my favorite example. The JFK assassination is one of the central topics of the conspiracy theory culture. While it’s never been one of my favorite themes to research or pontificate about, at this point I have selected my preferred conspiracy theory of the lot which seems to have the most facts on its side and the greatest originality. I don’t believe in it enough to fully advocate for it, but I will explain it tomorrow and why it’s so relevant in today’s culture.

In the meantime, check out Watchmen, both the graphic novel and the film, if you haven’t already: