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In conspiracism, what’s more important – the idea or the person who communicates it?
While it’s impossible to run every single conspiracy through the lens of this question, generally speaking, for the last two decades or so, the conspiracy sphere has increasingly created celebrities out of its biggest influencers. Crossover media and political figures like Alex Jones, David Icke, Andrew Wakefield, Naomi Wolf, Joe Rogan, Mike Flynn, RFK Jr., Lara Logan, and of course, Donald Trump, have all built brands as trusted communicators of fringe ideas and conspiratorial nonsense. If one of these people says something, a massive group of fans is poised to believe it, spend their money on it, and share it with others.
Notably, many of the ideas these people share are not only obviously false, but directly contradict other ideas they’ve shared. Conspiracy influencers are constantly touting things they used to oppose, opposing things that they used to support, opposing AND supporting things at the same time, and feuding with other people who say the same things they say.
These contradictions and inconsistencies would doom any legitimate journalist. But because contradiction is inherent to conspiracism, nobody minds if a trusted and cherished influencer says something wildly at odds with something they said another time. Sure, Mike Flynn can support QAnon while also saying QAnon is nonsense, or Alex Jones can get unreasonably excited about Trump seizing total power despite having spent years decrying presidents who sought total power. It doesn’t matter, because these people are trusted. And trust is everything among people who don’t trust anyone.
But that might be changing, and recent adventures in contradiction haven’t gone well for major figures in conspiracism. We might be going back to a time when certain ideas in fringe spheres are so ingrained and taken as infallible gospel to the point where even these trusted figures can’t go against them.
As Trump 2.0 grinds on, and the brain-rotting of the west accelerates at Ludicrous Speed, even major figures in the world of cranks and frauds are running up against the immovable object of their conspiracies moving past the need for the people who popularized them. The idea is starting to outweigh the person who communicates the idea. And it’s a shift that doesn’t bode well for many major figures in the intersection of politics, conspiracy, and commerce.
This is exactly what happened with QAnon. The Q drops created a real-time movement of decoders and proselytizers, influencers who would interpret the bizarre and meaningless utterances of “Q” by running them through the filters of news events and wishful thinking. Those interpretations – “crumbs” as they were called in Q lingo – would be “baked” into “breads” that could be shared with believers who weren’t as hip to the goings on of the deep state, lacked the prophetic dreams and visions that some gurus claimed to have, or just maybe had a life or a job or something normal occupying their time.
But once Q was totally consumed by the GOP at large, there was no need to go back to the drops looking for more conspiracy theories to bake. And there was certainly no need for new Q drops – when Q returned a few times in 2022, most believers shrugged. A few even called the new drops fake. To be fair, they were at least as fake as the old ones.
Q promoters who have stuck to the gospel of the drops now increasingly pick through them looking for new interpretations of old riddles. But while theologians can find new meaning in old Bible verses, the Q drops aren’t as well written or compelling. Most are pretty stupid. And so they get left behind. Whatever QAnon is now, it’s left behind many of its earliest promoters, who have faded into semi-obscurity. But it’s ideas live on in virtually every piece of wild bullshit Trump or his acolytes spread to the public.
The ideas became more important than the communicators of the ideas. And it’s happened not just to QAnon itself, but also to many key figures in that movement
There was a big stir in both conspiracy and legitimate media when FBI Director Kash Patel (I still can’t believe I have to write that) and his deputy, podcaster Dan Bongino, made it clear during a Fox News interview that Jeffrey Epstein, who their millions of followers believe did not kill himself, actually killed himself.
“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth,” Bongino said. And the truth was that after reviewing “all” the evidence, Epstein had killed himself in his prison cell. He reiterated it in both the interview and on social media afterwards.
The post received over 10,000 comments. The vast majority of them were some variation on calling Bongino a stooge or bought off. They were covering up why the security cameras were off around his cell. And they were lambasted again and again for not releasing the much ballyhooed “Epstein Files” that they had made a big deal out of making public just a few weeks earlier.
Major right wing content creators essentially took the same tack – attacking Patel and Bongino, begging them to stop saying things like “Epstein actually killed himself,” and calling them sellouts and disappointments. Nobody came around to their endorsement of the official story simply because they were well-liked figures who supported Donald Trump.
No matter how much the conspiracy faithful like or trust Patel and Bongino, it’s not enough to override their belief in the idea of Epstein being murdered (probably by the Clintons) and his death made the subject of a coverup. That idea is sacrosanct to them. It is unshakable. And it’s telling that even two of the biggest purveyors of conspiracy theories in American politics didn’t embrace it in an official capacity when they had the chance to.
And now they’ve lost the trust of their audiences, at least for now. They can probably recover from this and sweep it away with some kind of justification, but the two are finding that it’s a lot easier to spout nonsense from the sidelines than it is to have to deal with it personally – particularly when your boss is connected to the guy at the center of the conspiracy theory.
The same thing happened with RFK Jr. and the measles vaccine. When confronted with the growing measles epidemic spreading through Texas and the southwest, Kennedy first offered up a bunch of nonsense and unscientific quack treatments, such as megadosing vitamin A and taking a certain antibiotic – while also acknowledging the efficacy of the vaccine. Finally, in early April, when two children had died from the diseases, he admitted the “truth” – that the MMR vaccine is overwhelmingly effective, and that measles didn’t stage a comeback until it began spreading in unvaccinated communities.
The fury of the antivax community was quick, sharp, and powerful. Kennedy was attacked by longtime allies, many of whom are similarly popular influencers. He was called a parrot of the pharma establishment, a shill, and complicit in the murder of children by medical doctors through inoculation. Sure enough, Kennedy was solidly back on the antivax train just a few days later, claiming the vaccine hadn’t been properly tested (as if half a century of safe usage wasn’t evidence enough of its safety) and that its immunity was short-lived. Less than a month after his endorsement of the MMR vaccine, he was making official plans to find “alternative” treatments for measles, rather than simply endorsing the vaccine that was overwhelmingly effective in the first place.
The Trump community adores RFK Jr., but not enough to absolve him of endorsing vaccines – because they hate vaccines more than they love either Kennedy or Trump. Remember when Trump got booed at a townhall with Sean Hannity in Dallas in 2021 after he admitted he got a COVID-19 booster? Now guess who is among the most virulently antivaccine politicians in America? The same Trump who championed the quick development of the COVID vaccine in the first place.
Trump himself isn’t immune to being thrown overboard – recall that QAnon started in the first place because Trump’s first term wasn’t seeing the results his supporters wanted in terms of locking up Hillary Clinton. There had to be a reason why this stuff wasn’t happening – and it turned out to be that it was happening, just in secret.
Certainly, the far right conspiracy world hasn’t broken entirely with Patel and Bongino, just as it didn’t break with RFK Jr. The reference to Epstein killing himself will likely be swept aside or justified as necessary for the greater payoff to come. But right wing influencers are learning that when they step afoul of the sacred ideas of their movement – ideas they’ve spent years touting – their status doesn’t give them a free pass to be contradictory.
Ultimately, the idea always wins.
Mike Rothschild 