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Conspiracy theories are the orderly consolations of a disordered mind. The reality is far worse. There is no consolation, only disorder. History is one damn thing after another, but no one understands the narrative sequence in real time. The only people who think they do are the intelligence services, who see their task as managing the disorder; the lone gunmen, who want to unleash real chaos; and the media, who these days mostly land in the former camp, because at least it’s a living. However, to get close to understanding events, you need distance: dispassion and the passage of time.
Historians restrain themselves by saying, “Coincidence isn’t causality.” What a coincidence that Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh, the lone gunmen who have tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump, had both donated to the Democratic fundraising machine ActBlue and also appeared in promotional videos. Crooks was a face in the crowd of AP students when the BlackRock investment firm filmed an ad at his high school in 2022. In the same year, Routh volunteered in a promo film for the Azov battalion, a Nazi-nostalgic Ukrainian militia.
This is a fact. Three facts, in fact: donation, performance, and shooting. How you fit them together, or if you think they belong together at all, shows if you are holding up wilting under the bad-faith information barrage of an especially meretricious electoral season or whether years of meme warfare have finally sent you info loco.
These three facts resemble three pieces of a jigsaw, floating in the multidimensional space-time continuum we call “past, present, and future.” The pieces lack color or form. They acquire narrative meaning through congruence. We don’t know how many there are, and there is no box with a finished image on the cover. Many are only perceptible from a certain angle. Some may not yet exist. Others will exist but never become visible to us. Real-time narrative-making is like Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: You can plot information as a point or a vector, but there’s a limit to plotting both accurately at the same time. Yet here we are, plotting three strikingly congruent points as we move through a single electoral season.
What caused the crackpots Crooks and Routh to coincide, first as Democratic donors, then as actors in the imagery of corporate finance and foreign policy, and then as lone gunmen aiming at the same target? As Walter Kirn mused, if this were the 1970s, Alan J. Pakula or Sydney Pollack would make a paranoid thriller about it, with the breadcrumbs leading Robert Redford to the truth about who really runs America. In those days, liberal Hollywood saw the intelligence services as an enemy within (All the President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor), the mass media as a brainwashing machine (A Clockwork Orange, The Parallax View), and spooks and assassination plots as a reality (The Conversation, The Candidate).
Today, it’s conservatives who detect a “deep state” and feel paranoid, though not thrilled. Hollywood exposes nothing but its implication in secrecy and the cover-up: George Clooney calls time on Joe Biden’s presidency in a New York Times op-ed. Most American media are so tight with the Democratic Party that their reportage is mere propaganda. The intelligence services are always around, too, because political media are either a generator of chaos or a means of managing it.
In April 2023, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell testified to the House Judiciary Committee that Antony Blinken, the current secretary of state, “played a role in the inception” of the statement by past and current intelligence officials that Hunter Biden’s laptop and related claims of influence peddling were “Russian disinformation.” You don’t have to be paranoid to work here, but you really should be.
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Social media fills the gap. Historians compose narratives in retrospect, and journalists file down their facts to a deadline, but social media falls somewhere between real time and retrospection. This explains the schism between social media and the rest of media, and the sense that reality, should it still exist, has fallen into it. The online conspiracist clings to a COVID-masked Bill Gates, taking Jeffrey Epstein’s jet to a WEF conclave at Mossad HQ. It’s a consolation, a fantasy of order. At least someone is in charge.
The reality is that the managers are struggling to manage the chaos, and not least because the media-political information field incentivizes them to incite it. Media and politicians tell us to “fight” to “save our democracy,” but people don’t run on software. The soft-brained take the metaphors literally. The suckers donate to ActBlue. The sick act it out and chase the cameras. Looking for the curtain and who’s behind it, they fall into the screen and their own reflections. Memetic overload and misfiring synapses detonate real-time disorder and generate weird patterns. Like Lou Reed said, “Sometimes, man, they don’t act rational. You know, they just think they’re on TV.” Crooks’s and Routh’s actions are real enough. It’s just that we’re not yet in a position to plot what is happening and where we are heading.
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