The Conspiratorial State of America: One Nation Under Extremism

Was Trump’s assassination attempt on Saturday a stage event to create sympathy for his campaign, or was there a sinister plot by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) team to weaken its Secret Service agents and make it easier to shoot down Donald Trump? Perhaps it was none other than every conspiracy theorist’s favorite villain – the Jews and, more specifically, the Rothschilds.

It should come as no surprise that after Trump’s assassination attempt, an explosion of conspiracy theories would follow. It wasn’t that long ago that conspiracy theories about Taylor Swift being a psyops by the Democratic establishment to influence voters to vote against the GOP were being shared by the Far Right, or when the Baltimore Bridge had collapsed earlier this year after being struck by a ship and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and Andrew Tate stating that the ship had experienced a cyber-attacked that was perpetrated by no other than The Globalists.

However, even though conspiracy theories have become more visible in the last decade, studies have shown that conspiratorial thinking is not a new phenomenon and that, contrary to the mainstream media’s belief, we are not living in the golden age of conspiracy theories. Conspiracism has been a part of the human experience for millenniums; we can trace some of the early expressions of conspiratorial thinking back to ancient Rome when the emperor Nero was accused of causing a fire in Rome and celebrated the devastation, or when European settlers believed that the Native Americans were conspiring against them in partnership with the devil while performing their cultural rituals.

This is to say that conspiracy theories have been with us for a very long time, and the fact that some have attempted to create a new name for Democrat conspiracy theories fails to understand U.S. conspiracy culture. In an article, Taylor Lorenz of The Washington Post writes about the phenomenon of “BlueAnon“, which is a play on the right-wing conspiracy theory movement QAnon. While Lorenz did not coin this term, she presents a false equivalence between standard right/left conspiratorial thinking and a conspiracy theory movement like QAnon.

The QAnon movement is a conspiratorial quest where the believer is encouraged to decipher Q-crumbs to help Donald Trump defeat the cannibalistic, satanic, pedophilic Democratic establishment. The ideology behind QAnon transcends the physical world as Q (the leader of the QAnon movement) states in various Q posts that the fight to save America is also a spiritual one. Take into consideration that the QAnon movement also absorbs narratives from the anti-vaccine, anti-5G movement, and antisemitism that it essentially makes QAnon an alternate gaming reality. Conspiracy theories about 9/11 or the Sandy Hook school shooting do not present these characteristics, which is the difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiratorial movement. When researchers attempt to label Democrat conspiracy theories as “BlueAnon,” they essentially try to reinvent the wheel.

That being said, while we are not living in the golden age of conspiracy theories, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Pierre, in an interview, did state that we are living in the dark age of conspiratorial expression. For instance, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory has led to mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, El Paso, Texas, and Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life. The Big Lie conspiracy theory (which is the conspiracy that the Democrats stole the election from Trump) inspired the riots on January 6th, and the QAnon movement led to a father stabbing his two children because of the belief that they were turning into Anunnaki reptilians. I mention this because, after the events on Saturday, many on the Far-Right went onto their platforms to inform their audience members that the assassination attempt against Trump was a plot by The Globalists to kill America’s only savior and that Democrat supporters are to blame for what happened. A black and white framework that is present in many conspiracy narratives.

The right-wing political commentator Ben Shapiro, in a post, went on to blame the Democrats for the increase in political violence that was seen on Saturday. His argument was that by comparing Trump’s rhetoric with that of Hitler, this leads to polarization. However, Shapiro’s analysis fails to recognize that two things can be true at the same time. Considering that Donald Trump earlier this year described migration from the South as dirtying the blood of this nation, which is what Hitler said about the Jews in Germany, or Trump’s statement about the Unite the Right rally that there were “good people on both sides”. One can acknowledge Trump’s usage of racist rhetoric while advocating for peace.

Unfortunately, this has not stopped the far-right from using Saturday’s event to further polarize the nation, even after Biden’s statements that condemn the shooting. In an interview with Jacob Ware, an expert on counterterrorism from the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this year, I had asked whether he was optimistic that the U.S. would be able to reduce political extremism; his response was that regardless of whether Biden or Trump becomes president that the increase of domestic terrorism will rise. After the shootings on Saturday and the vilification of Democrats’ supporters that followed, I fear his prediction might be correct.