The Unholy Union of Conservatism and Conspiracism
How Fragile Worldviews and Digital Echo Chambers Are Warping the Right’s Sense of Reality.
Hardly a news story crosses my radar without an attached conspiracy theory. COVID was Bill Gates’ attempt to depopulate the planet. 9/11 was an insurance scam. The CIA killed JFK and probably MLK.
In a strange twist of irony, the modern right has adopted a kind of Marxist lens on history: not a struggle between oppressor and oppressed, but between deceivers and deceived.
Charlie Kirk’s murder has been no exception.
“The narrative doesn’t add up.”
“Look! there’s footage of the real shooter!”
“See! the security team grabbed something from his body and ran!”
I’ve watched the footage. All of it. The conspiratorial commentary is so absurd it hardly warrants rebuttal and I’ve neither the patience nor the energy to dignify it.
My purpose here is different: to confront the rampant Conspiracism that now leads many on the right to reject anything labelled “official,” regardless of factual merit. Nothing is allowed to be as it seems; there must always be some darker plot. This mindset is a noxious weed, choking the growth and flourishing of the conservative movement.
My concern here is not to catalogue every wild theory but to understand the psychology of obsessive, compulsive conspiratorial thinking. By Conspiracism I don’t mean the occasional flirtation with a single conspiracy theory; I mean a worldview, one that sees all of history and current affairs not as a tangled tapestry of human will, brutality, tragedy, and triumph, but as a single, ever-expanding web of lies, cover-ups, plots, and treachery.
Even in rudimentary form, the psychological drivers behind this mindset seem to cluster in three places:
A hunger for control when events feel ambiguous or chaotic.
A narcissistic desire for uniqueness and status through holding “exclusive” or “hidden” knowledge.
Deep mistrust of mainstream institutions, which becomes fertile ground for alternate narratives.
We don’t have to look far for examples of each.
Take Candace Owens’ vodka-fuelled tirades, for instance. First came: “Charlie was attending mass and praying the rosary.” A bizarre claim that wilts under Charlie’s own public objections to Catholicism, not to mention the testimony of his closest friends and pastor. It’s a textbook attempt to impose order on an uncomfortable, complicated reality.
Then: “The media narrative is a lie; I will release the real story soon.” Few lines better betray a narcissistic lust for intellectual status than casting oneself as the lone keeper of forbidden truth. If two dots can be connected with a length of red yarn, then surely, so the mindset goes, they must be connected in reality.
And finally: “Tylor Robinson (the murderer) isn’t suicidal!” I’ve followed this story from day one and seen no credible reference to Robinson being suicidal, apart from an alleged comment to his father that he would rather die than surrender, the kind of panicked outburst one might expect from an unstable young man under pressure. Perhaps Owens refers to the suicide vest he appeared in court wearing; yet that’s a precautionary measure, not evidence of chronic suicidal ideation that needs “debunking.” Nothing feeds ego quite like building a straw man and then applauding oneself for spotting the straw.
All of this rests on an almost total erosion of trust in mainstream institutions, at least whenever that suits a conspiratorial narrative. Consider the actual evidence: the murder weapon found where a rooftop figure was seen retreating after the shot; ground imprints from a prone shooter in direct line of sight; DNA on the weapon; a clean trail of CCTV footage placing the killer at the scene; a digital footprint showing motive and planning. And yet the refrain persists: “It doesn’t add up.”
Why, then, does it “not add up” for so many?
My own view is that a large share of self-styled conservatives have pieced together their understanding of the world from fragmented corners of the internet rather than from any serious historical or intellectual tradition. The result is a fragile conception of reality that feels constantly under attack, offers little sense of agency, and imagines dark, unseen forces moving the levers of society.
When something shocking or chaotic happens, pattern-seeking kicks in immediately. There’s no patience for complexity or for the fact that messy situations are, by nature, messy. Instead, the brittle worldview must be protected: someone powerful must be pulling the strings.
This reflex ends up granting a kind of mythic competence to elites and institutions. In truth, most of the people who populate politics, finance, media, business, the military, or law enforcement are far too limited, distracted, fallible, often plain incompetent to engineer vast, flawless conspiracies over and over again. Believing otherwise gives them an undeserved aura of genius and keeps ordinary citizens locked in fear and suspicion.
Recognising this fragility and misplaced reverence for shadowy power is essential, because it prepares us to confront the deeper danger: Conspiracism itself. When distrust hardens into a totalising belief that nothing is as it seems, the conservative movement withers. It stops dealing with facts, abandons prudence and courage, and turns inward, forever defending itself against phantoms instead of shaping reality.
Conservatism has never been a stranger to distrust of power, a healthy scepticism of centralised authority has long been one of its virtues. But there is a difference between principled vigilance and reflexive suspicion. When every tragedy becomes a plot, when every opponent is assumed to be a puppet master, and when our first instinct is to shout “cover up!”, we trade the moral weight of truth for the cheap thrill of intrigue.
This habit does more than amuse the fringe corners of the internet, it corrodes the very movement it claims to defend. A politics built on conspiratorial reflex cannot govern, persuade or reform. It alienates serious minds, drives away young talent, and confirms the caricatures our opponents use to discredit us. It also blinds us to the real forces that shape culture and policy.
If conservatism is to cast a vision of a future worth fighting for, it must recover courage and discernment. Courage to confront uncomfortable facts even when they disrupt our narratives. Discernment to distinguish genuine corruption from internet slop. Only then can the movement speak with moral seriousness, attract trust, and build the kind of future that avoids both Utopian fantasy and paranoid despair.