Unfortunately, as conservatives position themselves for the post-Trump future, there are indications that what is coming is likely to be much worse: more conspiratorial, hostile to institutions, and beholden to a pinched and angry nationalism. If anything, Trump has been a moderating force against these tendencies. After him, the deluge.

Consider that last month, the surgeon general of Florida, Dr. Joseph Lapado, and allied legislators announced a sweeping plan to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates. Lapado declared that even long-established requirements for diseases like chickenpox, hepatitis B, and the like “drip with disdain and slavery.” Within days, the proposal began to collapse under political pressure, especially after Trump himself criticized the idea. This forced Sunshine State health authorities to backtrack, converting the plan into a more limited rollback of a few optional immunizations, while leaving core school-entry vaccines intact for now.

The idea of Trump as a moderating force within the GOP might seem absurd at first glance. Yet this is only one of many data points suggesting that he is, in fact, holding back some of the worst impulses and brainstorms pushed by figures who have now gained control over American conservatism.  

There are two indicators we may look for in forecasting the future of a movement. The first involves examining areas in which the base and its spokesmen show resistance against the ultimate leader. There is a natural tendency to defer to the leader of a party, but tensions always exist between him, those in the middle ranks, and the base, and where the pressure points are can tell us something.

This method would have accurately predicted the Republican Party’s hard turn against immigration in the aftermath of the Bush and McCain era, during which talk radio helped dash proposals for a grand bargain supported by GOP elites. We’ve seen something similar on the Democratic side over the last year, with the party mainstream abandoning support for the Israeli war effort in response to pressure from the Left flank.

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The other method involves assessing a movement’s information ecosystem. I would argue that this is a more useful guide than general public opinion within a party, since most people aren’t thinking about most issues most of the time, and it is the opinion-forming class of today within each that shapes what normies will care and vote about tomorrow. On the Democratic side, the relevant elites are the prestige press and the liberal activist class; for Republicans, it’s Fox News, major podcasts, and the community of Right-wing influencers on “X” (formerly Twitter).

Both indicators suggest that the post-Trump GOP will be more conspiratorial, more deeply in thrall to pseudoscience, and more likely to hold uncompromising attitudes toward immigrants and political opponents.

Consider how the GOP base itself has often resisted Trump when he has strayed from its instincts. At the height of the pandemic and for years after, he touted the success of Operation Warp Speed, which invented the mRNA vaccines used against Covid. Trump also encouraged his supporters to take the jabs, only to be met with boos at rallies and open defiance from talk radio and online influencers, forcing him into a sheepish retreat.

More recently, conservative media have been buzzing with demands to release the Epstein files, a subject Trump has largely ignored, given his past associations. Yet the online Right remains unrelenting in its obsession with the issue, even generating memes that characterize Trump as a “pedo protector.”

When it comes to high-skilled immigration, meanwhile, Trump has sometimes gestured toward Silicon Valley’s and corporate America’s desire for more engineers and programmers. Yet grassroots activists, talk-radio hosts, and social-media influencers have maintained fierce anti-immigration pressure, ensuring that any liberalizing reform will be met with an immediate backlash.

Such episodes highlight that there is more to Republican politics now than simple deference to Trump himself. There is a populist current that will outlive him, and it rewards conspiracy-minded narratives and punishes any gesture toward compromise on the immigration issue.

Note that the backlash isn’t coming in response to Trump’s glaring corruption, such as engaging in crypto scams and accepting a private jet from the Qataris. Nor does the base seem all that exercised by cuts to Medicaid and other entitlements, contrary to the expectations of disappointed populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass. That’s not where the GOP base’s heart lies. Instead, it’s immigration and the threat posed by shadowy, vaccine-pushing elites, which include all Democrats and any elected Republicans who fail to go full-bore MAGA. 

The trajectory of Right-wing media is similarly instructive. According to Spotify, the top-four news podcasts today are The Tucker Carlson Show, The Daily from The New York Times, Candace, and Up First from National Public Radio. This supports the general conclusion that Democrats listen to traditional media elites, while Republicans have influencers.

What distinguishes the Right’s influencers at the most basic level isn’t policy outside the aforementioned exceptions of immigration and vaccines — when was the last time you heard Candace Owens’s position on the size of government? — but a general conspiratorial outlook. Carlson has argued that UFOs are interdimensional demons and has spent the weeks since Charlie Kirk’s death hinting that Israel was behind the assassination. Owens is being sued by Brigitte Macron for promoting the idea that France’s first lady was born a man.

Right-of-center influencers who want to climb the rankings must follow this deranged path. Megyn Kelly is also among the top-10 news influencers, albeit toward the bottom at No. 9. Perhaps to boost her audience, she has begun to warn about demons interfering in earthly affairs and implying that vaccines cause autism, deep truths supposedly covered up by the mainstream media. She also declares that she does not care about reports that border czar Tom Homan was allegedly caught on tape receiving a $50,000 cash bribe, as long as he is tough enough on illegal migrants. A once sensible media voice detects which way the wind is blowing, and has changed her views accordingly. 

To be sure, the GOP will be better off without some of Trump’s worst flaws. The cult-like aspect of his movement meant that large numbers of people could look past any level of personal corruption and even storm the Capitol on his behalf. It is difficult to imagine JD Vance or Ron DeSantis acting this way after losing an election, or inspiring thousands of people to risk their physical safety and freedom in a misinformation-fueled effort to keep either of them in office.

But Trump also has a pragmatic streak and common sense when it comes to issues like vaccines and immigration, and whether conspiracy theories are credible. His base, in contrast, makes hostility to foreigners and distrust of the liberal establishment central to its worldview, and the figures that are most successful among conservative audiences reflect the kind of content that Republican-leaning listeners and viewers find compelling. 

If there are countervailing forces within the Republican Party they remain mostly hidden for now. In fairness, mainstream Republicans have put pressure on RFK over his anti-vaccine positions, and likely have stopped the Department of Health and Human Services from embracing pseudoscience even more than it has. When Trump has tried to prosecute his enemies on flimsy pretexts, he has encountered resistance even among his appointees. In order to get his indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, the president had to push out his own US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and replace him with one of his personal lawyers, over the objections of his top-two officials at the Department of Justice, one of whom had also served as his personal lawyer. 

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As with Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it, it is difficult to imagine a similar story involving any other Republican leader. Trump is an outlier both in terms of how flawed he is as an individual, and also in the kind of personal grip he maintains on the GOP base. Top attorneys in the executive branch aren’t Twitter influencers, and have their own code of ethics and professional norms. They will resist a leader who tries to get them to do things that are too far outside of the bounds of legality and established norms. Still, working under Trump makes the ability to draw red lines much more difficult.

Yet when it comes to conspiratorial thinking and anti-foreigner scapegoating, the demand is organic and likely to persist even after Trump. Partly, this is the result of a more general political realignment of which Trump is both a cause and symptom. While people with less formal education and low levels of trust, two predictors of conspiratorial thinking, used to be somewhat divided between the parties, they have now consolidated on the Right, as the decline of gatekeepers allows them to have more of a voice in our politics. The Trump cult in certain ways puts a lid on such instincts, but even as he maintains control over the GOP, divisions between the leader and the base still occasionally rise to the surface. 

 After Trump, the conservative movement will find itself at a crossroads, but one that is unlikely to point back toward moderation or institutional responsibility. Trump’s departure, whenever it comes, won’t mean a simple reversion to pre-2016 norms, because the forces he has unleashed and the informational environment that sustains them are larger than the man himself.

The two lenses for understanding the party’s trajectory — pushback against the leader and the informational ecosystem — reveal the general direction of travel: namely, conspiratorial populism. Elites who try to resist their base, as we saw with immigration reform under George W. Bush or Trump’s attempt to promote vaccines for the sake of his own ego gratification, are quickly punished, and those who play to fanatical audiences are the most richly rewarded.  

When Trump exits the stage, what remains will be a Republican Party still driven by grievance and suspicion — minus a major check on where those impulses can lead.

We are still haunted by the ghosts of last summer. This month, rolling demonstrations have taken place outside a so-called “migrant hotel” in Epping. The unrest follows accusations of crimes committed by an immigrant against a child. Like last year, demonstrators scream “Save our kids!”, and again, journalists write about “disinformation” and the “far-Right”.

We have had a year to pick through the rubble of the riots — to plot out the chain of cause and effect, ruminate about the role of social media, and self-loathe in the mirror of national reflection. But are we any closer to understanding what is really going on?

For the past nine months, I have been working on a documentary which traces the story of last summer from start to finish. The commissioners wanted to know, in their words, “What the fuck happened?”. And so I thought our mission was simple: to piece together a single ugly event which took place over 10 chaotic days.

But the more I worked on the project, the clearer it became that tracking the sequence of events only took you so far. To tell the story of the riots is to glimpse the deep veins of unease that run through our country. I wanted to understand what motivated ordinary people to commit destruction and violence on such a massive scale, and to examine whether the simple logic of cause and effect was enough to make sense of what had happened.

I first visited Southport in December, five months after the riots. Along Hart Street, pink ribbons were tied around lampposts and front gates in memory of the murdered girls. At one end of the road, I found a scrap of police tape still knotted to a bush. A five-minute walk away, tradesmen were fixing metal bars to the downstairs windows of the mosque.

I wanted to speak to Norman Wallis, who runs Pleasureland, the town’s historic fairground. Norman knows everyone, so I hoped he might open some doors if I could get his blessing for the work I was about to embark on, which would inevitably involve asking difficult questions of people in town.

I was immediately disappointed. “What we need now,” he said, “are happy stories.” His message was clear: if we’re not careful Southport will become Dunblane, defined by its worst day. So don’t dwell. Don’t talk about The Southport Stabbings or The Southport Riots. This town was, is, and will be a happy place. Nothing to see here.

Normally, you begin making a documentary with access to someone who is keen to tell their side of the story. You leverage that access to encourage others to talk. Not so here. No one wanted to talk, and everyone had a good reason not to.

The rioters wouldn’t go on camera because they thought they’d get locked up; their victims wouldn’t because they feared reprisals from the rioters; online provocateurs because they had no faith in the mainstream media. The police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the Government all refused to take part. I figured they wished it would all just go away.

The team decided that the heart of the documentary must be an interview with one of the families of the innocent children who were attacked that morning. The whole story stems from what those children endured. But it was way too soon to make an approach.

So we talked to whoever would talk to us: local journalists, residents who watched the riot from their bedroom windows, tradesmen in caffs who may or may not have been there. Conversation about the murders and riots often dried up fast. But people spoke freely about Southport as a place — about the town they grew up in and the town they have now.

If you’re born in Southport, you’re a Sandgrounder, and Sandgrounders have a proud history. Southport used to be advertised as “The Paris of the North”. The story goes that Lord Street — the town’s main high street — inspired Emperor Napoleon III’s plans for the boulevards of Paris.

Now the beach is turning to mud and no one can explain why. Deer can be spotted where there were once sunbathers. Lord Street still impresses, but the shops keep closing down. The town’s bathing lake was closed and then demolished in the early Nineties, and people fear the same will happen to Southport’s iconic pier. It has been closed since 2022, a mile-long finger of rust jutting out to sea, pointing nowhere.

“It used to be beautiful,” Tim, a local reporter, told us. “But if my parents came back now they’d be mortified.”

Sandgrounders can feel their home gently rotting. The beach, the pier, the closed shops are daily reminders that Southport is there and not there at the same time.

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This sense of drift is not new, nor is it unique to Southport. It is felt in towns up and down the country, especially in England’s deindustrialized north and along the coast — places haunted by a loss of meaning as much as prosperity. But this unresolved mourning is now being exploited by a predatory ecosystem of online conspiracists, who paint a picture of a nation in freefall.

They say this: England is not yours anymore. The things you cherish are gone. You have been betrayed by globalist elites, and humiliated by immigrants who profit from that betrayal; “two-tier” police stamp down on patriots, while minorities and woke mobs get away with open revolt; you can no longer fly the England flag without being called a Nazi; you are witnessing an invasion of millions of “fighting-age males” on small boats, intent on preying on your women from the comfort of luxury hotels which you’ve paid for. Patriotism, pride, the fabric of your democracy and your justice system are falling apart like wet tissue.

There is something primal in the story, and appealing to a certain kind of man. Your house is falling down, with rising damp and peeling wallpaper. A stranger strolls in uninvited, raids the fridge, and curls up in bed with your daughter. You are the man of the house in name only.

The complicated truths of our uneven justice system; the real but not existential threat of small-boat migration; the truths of Islamist terrorism and urban ghettoization; the decaying of proud places — it all concertinas into a single, compelling story.

And last July, in the days leading up to the Southport stabbings, a rapid succession of events seemed to show this story reaching its tragic climax. First came the Harehills riot on 18 July. The local Roma community took to the streets after social services tried to take a family’s children into care. A police car was overturned. The narrative spread that the police had retreated in an act of “two-tier” leniency. There were whispers that the rioters had actually been Pakistanis.

Five days later, on 23 July, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Teeton was allegedly stabbed by Anthony Esan, a black man. To some, this looked like the murder of Lee Rigby all over again.

That same day, a video was released showing a police officer stamping on a British Asian man at Manchester airport. Men chanting “Allahu Akbar” gathered outside Rochdale police station to protest against police brutality. The officer in question was pilloried in the media, only for more video to emerge which recast his actions as a response to a brutal attack on his colleagues. Cue accusations of “lying media”, “two-tier justice” and Islamic extremism.

On 27 July, thousands of Tommy Robinson supporters rallied at Trafalgar Square — the event was called “Unite the Kingdom”. The next day, Robinson was arrested using powers afforded under the Terrorism Act for failing to comply with a police search. His followers quickly connected his detainment with the rally the day before.

Less than 24 hours after Robinson’s arrest, Axel Rudakubana walked into the Southport dance workshop with a knife. To many people, this felt like an escalating pattern of rapid deterioration. England was losing her mind before their eyes.

The cacophony of conspiracy and half-truth was prelude to everything that followed. So it is unsurprising that some people felt they knew who to blame for the Southport attack almost instantly — they were working to a script.

I scoured X for audio recordings of discussions going on in the immediate aftermath of the attack. That evening, in an X Spaces chatroom titled “THE TIME IS NOW UK NATIONAL ACTION”, users were hardly able to contain themselves. “People keep saying oh wait till the name comes out, even by the one percent chance it’s not a Muslim or a black man,” one user mused. The emotion was raw: “I’d rather die on my feet than fucking live on my knees to these fucking ratbags,” another user said.

And then a name did come out — “Ali Al-Shakati”. He had apparently come to the UK by boat, was known to mental health services, and was on an intelligence watchlist. The name sounded Muslim. The name was a complete fabrication, but it didn’t matter. The misinformers and the misinformed were partners in one dance. “Shakati” made sense of their grief — he was the nemesis in England’s national tragedy.

Andrew Tate grasped the tenor of the moment. He posted a rant on X from his sports car: “The soul of the Western Man is so broken that when the invaders slaughter your daughters, you do absolutely fucking nothing.” The provocation was clear: “Prove me wrong.”

We began sifting through the online archive of those hours between the murders and the first brick being thrown, searching for the moment that Southport’s tragedy was destined to become a national catastrophe. The tipping point was streamed live to a huge audience by a YouTuber called DJE Media, who is notorious for videos where he flies his drone over private property and trolls anyone who tries to stop him. That day he was filming on Hart Street.

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It was late afternoon in Southport, the day after the murders. News had just come through that a third child, Alice da Silva Aguiar, had died overnight in hospital. The crowd had been waiting for Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the baking sun and the tension was rising. DJE Media’s camera was trained on Starmer as he arrived to lay flowers. “Is it my children next?” an onlooker asked. The mood soured. Instead of turning to address the crowd, Starmer retreated to his black car without saying a word. “Make a real change, Prime Minister! You’re not wanted! Go away!” The camera pivoted to a woman in tears — “I’ve just found out that my friend’s nine-year-old daughter has died — the child I held in my arms, and you can’t do shit! He can’t do shit!” She was now wailing, bent over. “He’s meant to be the prime minister!”

The whole thing lasted about a minute. Unedited footage of a local community grieving their children was being fed to a national audience who thought their homeland was unravelling. The lines between local loss and collective loss were blurring into one. A critical mass of emotion had been reached, and there was no going back.

By 8pm, hundreds of people had gathered on St Luke’s Road outside Southport Mosque chanting “Who the f**k is Allah”, setting fire to a police carrier, and injuring more than 50 officers. Was the mosque targeted because the rioters made a cold causal calculation that the killer had been a worshipper there? Or did the killing of those girls and the presence of the mosque both remind the rioters that their homeland no longer resembled itself?

As the bricks flew, they chanted “We want our country back! We want our country back!” Their words were a lament just as much as a threat.

It became clear that I would need to spend more time in Southport if we were going to make any headway finding people to go on camera. Driving up from London, I stopped overnight at my grandmother’s house in Ellesmere Port. The next morning, I reminded her I was heading up to Southport.

“Oh we’d go to the beach there. It has a wonderful pier,” she said.

I had explained my plans the night before, and twice already over breakfast. At the front door, she asked me again where I was going. “Southport, Nanna,” I said.

“Oh we’d go to the beach there. It has a wonderful pier.”

Driving away from her house, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was angry at my grandmother. I was struggling to accept who she had become because I couldn’t let go of who she had been.

In 1999, the psychologist Pauline Boss first wrote about something she called “ambiguous loss” — situations of unresolved mourning. Something terrible has happened but it is unfinished and indeterminate. It is “frozen grief”. It baffles and immobilizes and gnaws at you. It gnaws at me when I speak to my grandmother, who is there in flesh and blood and at the same time no longer there at all.

Could the logic of frozen grief help me make sense of what had happened in Southport too? Nearly everyone we met, to some degree, shared a feeling that English people were becoming estranged from themselves and their homeland — their very identity was hollowing out. They felt cut loose from a proud history, and condemned to watch the ensuing decline.

Ambiguous loss can cause what some therapists call “complicated grieving”, distinguished by its intensity, duration, and its tendency to trigger severe dysfunction. It can provoke violence. You fixate, freeze, and spiral. And in the era of the echo chamber, it is easier than ever for ordinary people to become trapped in the grievance vortex. As the fires in Southport burned into the night, online spaces came alive with discussion of what was unfolding.

The disorder spread: Hartlepool, Aldershot, Whitehall, Sunderland, Nottingham, Hull, Liverpool, Tamworth. Over 10 days, nearly 30 towns and cities erupted. At Manvers, near Rotherham, rioters tried to burn down an asylum hotel with more than 200 residents still inside.

We spoke to one of them — a man who had fled Central Asia more than a decade ago and had been drifting through our immigration system ever since. His room was on the first floor of the Holiday Inn. “We smashed the hotel up,” he told us. “Some of us broke furniture, others grabbed fire extinguishers, or knives. We were ready to fight.”

Had police not managed to drive the rioters out of the ground floor lobby, the battle through those smoke-filled corridors would have been brutal and bloody.

Watching the footage of the riot, we found that this wasn’t just a mob of hardcore, masked-up thugs. While the most violent rioters were universally young men, the crowds of baying onlookers were more mixed: you could spot teenage girls, OAPs, and mums with their kids.

We wanted to understand what could make hundreds of ostensibly ordinary people cheer on such extreme violence. So we drove to Manvers to meet Katie Edwards, a writer who had grown up a stone’s throw from the estate.

Like Southport, Manvers is a place that has lost its way. “The center of the universe, if you’re from here,” Katie said, pointing at a Costa Coffee near where the riot took place. The estate, she told us, was built on top of the old Manvers Main colliery, part of a trio of pits which together made up a vast mining complex. The pit was closed in 1988 and in its place came call centers. Then they closed. Now there’s an Amazon packing warehouse. “There’s a very strong sense of having been something and now there’s nothing,” Edwards told us. “There’s that sense of kind of being lost.”

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Manvers was planned as an aspirational newbuild development, all trim gardens and picket fences. There was going to be a supermarket in the center — an upmarket one: Sainsbury’s or Waitrose perhaps. It turned out to be an Aldi. Next to the Aldi was a hotel, which started life as a Radisson Blu. Then the Radisson became a Holiday Inn. Then, without announcement, the Holiday Inn stopped taking public bookings. To begin with it housed Afghan refugee families. But families are prioritized for re-housing so within a couple of years the hotel was home to men only. The residents were given about £8 a week and weren’t allowed to work. So they sat in their rooms, played cricket in the car park, and wandered around the lake. By the summer of 2024, then, Manvers was home to a glorified low-security concentration camp.

If you watch videos from the Manvers riot, you’ll hear shouts of “paedo” and “nonce”, reflecting the painful legacy of Rotherham’s grooming scandal. But the rioters also chanted “Yorkshire! Yorkshire! Yorkshire!” as they launched their assault on a building which in a very real sense signified the community’s fading away. It was a stupid, cruel and futile attempt to recapture their dream of a happier past.

Does Keir Starmer understand that this is a problem of the emotions, just as much as a problem of policy? Boss writes that “the greater the ambiguity surrounding one’s loss, the more difficult it is to master it”. What has the Prime Minister delivered but greater and greater ambiguity? In May, Starmer gave a major speech on immigration, presumably designed as an exercise in listening with a capital L. “Fair rules,” he said, “…give shape to our values.” Without them, he claimed, “we risk becoming an island of strangers”. Two months later, however, he doubled back and said he deeply regretted saying “island of strangers” at all.

The people I have met over the last nine months believe they are already living on that island of strangers: estranged from an older, better version of England. It does not matter that the country they mourn is half-remembered and half-imagined. What matters is that they feel the loss deeply.

The past year has seen a steady drip of concessions to the rioters on immigration, delivered by Starmer with all the vigor of a hostage reading a list of ransom demands. Until last year, the center-left had clung to the belief that, for all its faults and frictions, Britain was a non-violent, multicultural place. The rioters tore that utopia to shreds. And now liberals feel like their prime minister, maddeningly, is picking up where the rioters left off. Disenchanted and estranged, they mourn their fragile utopia and scream “Far-Right” just as their enemies scream “illegal immigration”.

Under Starmer, Britain is becoming a begrudgingly tolerant country. It will never satisfy the Right but it dismays the Left. And so this island of strangers gets stranger, as we sink deeper into collective bewilderment at who we have been, who we are, and who we may become.

There is, however, nothing ambiguous about the loss suffered by the victims of last year’s knife attack. One family agreed to give us an interview. Two of their daughters survived that day, though their eldest suffered serious internal bleeding from multiple wounds. She has to sit in a special chair at school because the normal ones hurt her scars.

Six months before meeting her, we stood outside Liverpool Crown Court listening to her victim impact statement on the trial’s livestream. She was the only child to address the court in person and did so against the advice of adults who were worried about her wellbeing. She overruled them, and addressed her words directly to her would-be killer: “I hope you spend the rest of your life knowing that we think you are a coward.”

On the day of her interview with us she had that same stubborn dignity, making us wait while she did her makeup and showed off her new nails: squared ends and black tips. She cried only once, quietly and briefly, when she said she wished she could have saved Alice’s life. She said she thinks about it every day. And then she stopped crying and raised her eyes back to the camera. A victim’s power often lies in refusing victimhood. That is her power.

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We asked her mother if it mattered to her that the man who stabbed her daughter was the son of immigrants, or that he was not white. “I choose not to make that a reason,” she replied.

Driving away from their house, I wished the rioters had been there at those interviews and witnessed the raw power of responding to loss with grace.

Nine months spent examining last year’s riots has left me with a profound sense of unease. I met many people who were pessimistic about Britain’s future while grieving an irretrievable past. For this hungry audience, conspiracists will continue to spin wild tales from the real threads of our national decline.

While we work out how to arrest this decline — something that could take the political equivalent of geological time — we will have to come to terms with our unresolved grief. The idea of ambiguous loss can help us understand the chaotic, self-destructive, and compulsive behavior exhibited by normal people last summer, and today. To recognize the riots as a phenomenon of frozen grief as much as politics is to recognize their staying power.

“If we ask the fundamental question, ‘Why did this happen?’ we must be prepared to look beyond the neat equations of cause and effect and learn to live with uncertainty,” Boss writes. “This is a frightening thought for many.” It frightens me. The program I helped to make lays out the neat equations of cause and effect. But it does not get to the bottom of the unresolved mourning.

My grandmother will watch the documentary. After the end credits, she will turn to me and tell me that she used to visit Southport. That it has a wonderful pier. I cannot make her remember, any more than the rioters can make their England feel like it used to.

We have entered a period of complicated grieving, and we must brace ourselves for what that means.

***

One Day in Southport was broadcast on Channel 4 on 24 July, and is available to watch online. James Parris is writing in a personal capacity, and not as a representative of Amos Pictures or Channel 4.

Were women being exploited by the Suits? Everyone was. The agents were lying both to their clients and to the Studios; nobody knew what a “manager” did. Very few artists got anything like a fair count, and the awards were generally for sale, as were the results of audience surveys.

Many a studio Head (I will name no names) rose to the gig through training as a pimp. Those who could offer sweet young things to The Money from Back East became The Power. (See Marilyn Monroe, herself, infamously enlisted to extend birthday greetings to JFK at Madison Square Garden: “Happy Birthday, Mr President.”)

Nothing fails like success; and when the studio system’s long decay accelerated in the Eighties, sharp-eyed hustlers observed that films unencumbered by infrastructure could be made for a fraction of the studio costs. Many of these independent producers came to film through expertise in other shakedowns and hustles: arms and drug dealing, money laundering, and racketeering.

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Those hep to the jive saw the incredible waste of the studio film, the lack of oversight and the resultant possibility of fraud, both in production costs, and in accounting. Film, additionally, contained the Best Present Ever; artists manipulable through appeals to their ego, many of whom would, finally, either work for nothing, or accept a promise in lieu of a payment. It was (and is) standard practice, for example, for independent producers to come to the director just before shooting and confess that the budget is short, and that the director will have to waive his fee.

The Independents also employed the traditional sexual amuse-bouches to attract or please talent and investors. Being nekulturny thugs, however, they were not averse to resorting to the not-quite-sporting. The fellow they got laid could be in their debt not only for the nice workout, but for the tapes of his unlicensed encounter.

Now, power.

Way back then, I was friendly with various politicians in an unnamed eastern city on Boston Harbour. I have never seen such a collection of devoted whoremasters. Show business may bring out the worst in people, but politics, it seemed, turned them into randy swine. “Gimme that one, and gimme that one…” was their entertainment’s name. They were enjoying not only young companionship, but the exercise of power and the thrill of its exemptions.

It’s easy to take older guys to the cleaners. In fact, we’ll take ourselves. As men age, sexual desire and performance decreases, they’re attracted by what’s forbidden.

The short-eyes of the lustful, aged male are drawn to the women who looked-like-that when he was young; if they excite him, must he not, then, in some sense be “young” too? His fantasy is equal to that of the woman who devotes her mature years to cosmetics, surgery, and so on. They do not make her young, but assert that she is aware of the problem, is addressing it — and must that not be worth consideration? Ageing is a bitch.

How many do we know who firebombed a home, wife, and kids, to run off with the pilates instructor? Their act of male folly seems, to them, to be not the most but the sole important thing in the world. At that time.

Sadder than the spectacle of the drooling old goat with the nymphet is the upcoming butcher’s bill: not only will they have nothing to talk about in the morning, but, should he wed, in 10 years he’ll be napping, she’ll be legitimately unfulfilled, and he’ll be old, divorced, and broke.

Which is why there used to be whorehouses.

Our age’s most brilliant proponent of these was Hugh Hefner. His Playboy clubs were the bourgeois’ dream of a bordello. They offered good food and drink, superb entertainment, and scantily clad and pleasant young women servers. Most attractively, to the middle-aged businessman clientele, they sold the promise of sex, which the customer (deep down) knew would remain unfulfilled — for which he was grateful. He could delude himself that one of the Bunnies was going home with him; indeed, they were schooled to create that illusion. When his quest failed, he could assure himself of his manhood in that he’d “tried”, and, most importantly, go home without adultery guilt.

Louis XV had his own private whorehouse, The Deer Park, staffed by underage girls recruited throughout the land by his pimps. Just as with Hollywood. It seems that Jeffrey Epstein knew French history, or anyway human nature, and flew his powerful friends down for a bit of surf and turf offering the irresistible: protected sin; just as Hefner sold the (unstated) protection of continence.

Were Epstein’s guests aware of the possibility of blackmail? Perhaps they were, but the old Yiddish proverb has it, when the putz rises the brains bury themselves in mud. Men are stupid. Each, myself included, is foolish about this or that, and all are foolish about sex.

Epstein was shooting fish in a barrel — exploiting contacts who had relied upon him for cooze, and shaking down those who were more exploitable as victims than as debtors.

Did he kill himself? If ever there was one begging to be offed it was he. If we assume the powerful whose lives Epstein could ruin by videotape would do anything on earth to retain their position short of killing him, we need to get out more.

Alternatively, perhaps Epstein could not face decades of (well-deserved) incarceration for sex trafficking. My cop friends inform me that he’d made several previous suicide attempts, and that conditions in the lockup were so wretched that the conjunction of various lapses in oversight was not only probable, but by-the-book laxity. Perhaps.

Will we ever know?

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The power of the Kennedy Myth

By David Mamet

The Trump DOJ assures us that all the info on the Kennedy Assassinations, and on that of Martin Luther King will be forthcoming. They do not, however, define forthcoming, leaving us to supply our own definitions. This is called a “cliffhanger”.

I love a mystery; you, dear reader, do too.

We saw it during the Biden jollity. Those astounded by various government conspiracies were denounced as “conspiracy theorists”. But those conspiracies existed: the Russian collusion hoax; the fraudulent FISA warrants; the ginned-up impeachments, the placement of Candidate Trump on the Spot. They were no less conspiracies because those decrying them were dismissed as “theorists”.

All governments are potential conspiracies against the governed. Those in power may now oppose and now collude with warring groups for momentary leverage over the governed (us saps).

Our Constitution exists solely to address this human tropism. Might we, the governed hope for complete transparency from any government? Yes. Will we receive it? Likely not. Even if we did, our legitimate love of salacious gossip would induce us to discount any “final” revelation. If we accepted it, after all, wouldn’t we just have ruined a good mystery?

Epstein’s death — however caused — creates a well-deserved entertainment. All men are fools for sex, and our various inducements (legitimate and otherwise) and our transgressions have always existed simultaneously with our exploitability by both the badger game, and political and social shakedowns.

Human nature is a bitch. Were it not, we’d be spending our evening reading Jane Austen rather than watching the news, for the thrill of decrying the sick savagery of both our political opponents and our neighbors.

At around the same time, shit-posting Disney action hero and mixed martial artist Gina Carano spotted a grand historical pattern: “Mao attacked farmers. Stalin attacked farmers. Now, world governments are attacking farmers. Same group throughout history. It’s a playbook, it’s not a chance happening. Wake up.” Then Wide Awake Media posted an image of thousands of acres of “prime agricultural land” squandered by solar panels, captioned with a rhetorical question: “is this one of the reasons for the globalist war on agriculture?”

The global famine conspiracists lurk on X and Facebook and YouTube. They are the ones who repeatedly remind us that Henry Kissinger said “control foods and you control the people”, despite the fact he never said such a thing. They will try to convince you that lab-grown meat and red dye 3 and bird flu are all part of the same plan, and that the best defense against a cosmopolitan elite intent on confiscating your farm and foisting crushed beetles down your throat is a gun.

The conspiracy theorist is generally dismissed as an irrational animal, yet the preachers of global famine are obsessed with logic and reason. Their dystopian vision emerges from a complex yet idiosyncratic understanding of history that ranges from Joseph in Egypt to the German multi-national Bayer, engineers of genetically modified Roundup Ready wheat that can only be grown with the aid of their own patented Roundup Ready insecticides — thereby guaranteeing corporate control of the world’s bagels and buns.

Lately, their cup of evidence has runneth over: spiking commodity prices of coffee and cocoa, the mass death of bees, and the fact that a dozen companies own more than 500 consumer brands. Why else would the World Economic Forum force us to consume insects if they were not plotting to make farmers obsolete? Then there’s Tucker Carlson, who registered his famine fears during the Netherlands farmer protests in 2022: “Messing with the food supply tends to cause food crises, and then famine,” he surmised. “We should be worried with the big things. And the food supply is the biggest thing.”

One might be tempted to dismiss all this as the latest chapter of a longstanding story that historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed the “The Paranoid Style in American History”, a narrative that lays all our woes at the feet of covert operations. Yet when it comes to global famine, the theorists and their longstanding nemesis — the CIA — are on the same page, along with another unlikely ally, the United States Department of Defense. They all agree on one thing: how fast civil society can crumble when starvation knocks.

The espionage professional knows two truths about hunger: the first is that people do not starve because there is not enough food, but — as Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen has proven over and over again, from the Bengal famine of 1943 to Bangladesh in 1974 to Somalia and Sudan several times over — they starve because they cannot afford the price of food. In his groundbreaking work, Poverty and Famines, Sen showed that during the worst period of the Irish famine of the 1840s, ships packed with wheat, oats, cattle, hogs, eggs, and butter sailed south from the hardest hit areas to the markets of London. Similarly, during the worst of the Ethiopian famine of 1973, the country’s food production did not decline. The problem was that the food that could have saved famine-struck regions like the Wollo province and Tigray went to more affluent purchasers in Addis Ababa instead. Such food “counter-movements” led Sen to conclude that famines had as much to do with money and politics as with agricultural output,  which in turn indicated that direct cash supplements, for instance, could help solve the problem. No matter how many poor people starved, the rich never lost their most basic entitlement: a full stomach.

The second truth is that one of the quickest paths to massive popular demonstrations — and even regime change — is food inflation, hashtag the 2011 uprisings and conflicts throughout Syria, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, collectively known as the “Arab Spring”.

These ideas have defined American government policy. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the newly formed United States Department of Homeland Security defined the food sector as one of 17 federally recognized “critical infrastructures”. War games ensued, such as the “Silent Farmland” exercise in North Carolina, the “Silent Prairie” exercise in Washington, and “Exercise High Stakes” in Kansas. “Food defense” became a term of art, closely followed by a stream of white papers that introduced the idea of “agroterrorism” — that is, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats to the food supply chain. Such concerns gained credence in 2018 when swine flu swept China, the home of around 400 million pigs — half the world’s supply.

That same year, an eclectic group of academics from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (in other words, the CIA), the United States War College, the Department of Defense, Los Alamos, and NASA’s Earth Observation for Security and Agriculture Consortium published an in-depth study on the risks of catastrophic failure. “Consolidation has become a defining characteristic of the evolution of the global food system,” noted the report. “Capturing any individual concentrated node within the global food system can have widespread and lasting ramifications.”

The way to strengthen the system was clear: build a more complex and resilient web of supply chains, originating from a widespread network of farms. Buying produce from your local green market had become as valuable an asset as signal intelligence from the Mossad. No one noticed the irony that the DOD had come around to the same set of social imperatives as the radical Left La Via Campesina, aka, the Global Peasant Movement: support local farmers.

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A food apocalypse is coming

By James Rebanks

All of a sudden, everyone agreed — from the tinfoil-hat basement dwellers to cloak-and-dagger spooks to the overalls and pick-up crowd. And today, as American food prices ratchet up hand in hand with Trump tariffs levied against Canada, Europe, Mexico, and just about any food importer anywhere, food security has become an even bigger unifier.

For the person who benefits the most from unaffordable guacamole on Super Bowl Sunday is Vladimir Putin, a man who has made it his life’s work to study the dynamics of regime change — and has now put it in action. As a recent white paper from the Center for Strategic & International Studies noted: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the greatest military-related increase in global food insecurity in at least a century.” The Russian president has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure — its farms, fields, food processing facilities, and agricultural labor force — causing more than $40 billion in losses. The CSIS report concluded that the ensuing trade tensions “undermine European support for Ukraine.”

All this means that food security has become a hot topic in the mainstream media. The faux populists at The New York Post have been all over the food inflation story, noting that since the first of this year, egg and poultry price gouging reports were up more than 840%. The New York Times delivered its inimitable bourgeois version of the crisis, mapping the rising price of beef bourguignon at Le Bouillon Chartier in Paris, thereby revealing the untold story of buttered carrots (the price of the root vegetable has skyrocketed 20% in the last five years, and butter 30%).

Trump isn’t helping the matter. Already, his USDA has canceled one-billion dollars’ worth of funding for local food purchasing for schools — that is, money to buy produce from nearby farms. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s DOGE has attempted to defund the World Food Program. And Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, is doing his best to stop lawsuits against Bayer for their Roundup-induced cancers. If hunger spreads because people can’t afford the price of food, why is the Trump administration tinkering with social security benefits and the SNAP program for school breakfast and lunch, both of which are now in the sights of the DOGE minions?

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We're running out of eggs

By James Rebanks

Yet, for once, the conspiracists don’t want to hear it. At a time when food security talk consumes the mainstream media — with The New York Times headlining famine in Sudan and Gaza, and even the staid Economist writing of “The coming food catastrophe” — the global famine conspiracy theorists have gone silent. Since Trump came to office, Ted Nugent has been content to hock 50th-anniversary autographed Stranglehold t-shirts. Wide Awake Media is back to analyzing the hidden truth bombs dropped by internet paint-by-numbers phenomenon, Bob Ross, RIP. Illuminatibot has reverted to publicizing the evils of Frazzledrip — the “elites drug of choice”.

Concerned that after 5,000 years the global hunger conspiracy might have gone silent, I dropped into the DMs of my old friend, Jacob Angeli-Chansley, aka the Q-Anon Shaman (the tattooed young man who wore horns to the January 6 insurrection, then went on hunger strike until he was provided with organic prison food), with whom I had spent some quality time in Phoenix last April. I was gratified to learn he had recently acquired his own cryptocurrency, $haman. Perhaps this was a hedge on food inflation?

I wanted to know how long the MAGA mafia could continue to harness the social media machine before the price of bacon and eggs took down the administration. After all — and just as the Department of Defense and Ted Nugent predicted — it was food inflation (plus a shot or two of senility) that took down Biden.

As usual, Jake was happy to provide the media with true facts: “Whether it’s to make people obese and die early or deathly thin and die early, hunger is the weapon used by tyrants and psychopaths to get their way, when all other means have exhausted themselves.”

Of course, after Trump pardoned him, the Shaman’s first move was to trade in his bullhorn and spear for something far more effective when it comes to protecting his daily bread. As is his wont, he posted it:

“NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA F— GUNS!!!”

The debauchery was like something out of The Great Gatsby, recalled Elisabeth Ovesen, best-selling author of Confessions of a Video Vixen: “Men in tuxedos, topless women in angel wings, champagne and synchronized swimmers on the outside, with group sex in the bathrooms, trays of hors d’oeuvres and drug pills being passed around on the inside.” One Diddy party allegedly took place on a private jet that flew around the world for days — an innovation which would have tickled the imagination of Fitzgerald.

While the rags blabber on about the sexual shenanigans, the international set of A, B, C and D-listers — from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lopez to Derek Jeter and Nicole Richie — have all grown eerily quiet, petrified of what might come out as details of the “freak off” sessions come to light at what promises to be the most sensational trial since Johnny Depp and Amber Heard debated whose faecal matter stained the sheets. That’s not to mention the scores of ex-Diddy friends and relations on tenterhooks in anticipation of the upcoming Diddy Abuse Netflix Docuseries — “A Complex Narrative Spanning Decades”, according to the headline of a Variety exclusive. Already, the tentacles of the scandal have touched some of the most powerful names in the music industry — from Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons to the legendary Clive Davis.

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The Hollywood liberals who rule America

By Frederick Kaufman

The unseemly circus has led comedian Bill Maher to conclude that “the music industry is this open cesspool of misogyny, and frankly, rape and sexual harassment, and somehow, the Angel of Death has flown over them”. And, as usual, Maher is onto something — albeit something unsettling. Traditional media may be well equipped to cover sex, drugs and celebrity downfall. But their training in what their professors deemed “verifiable truth” doesn’t help them much when it comes to supernatural evil dating back to the Knights Templars, much less the angel of death and his earthly consorts.

By contrast, the scandal has sent the far-Right conspiratorial crowd into a tizzy of “I-told-you-so” Satanic hysteria. The truthers now possess what they believe is positive proof that what they have been saying all along is true: there is a cabal of subversive elites whose stock in trade is trafficked children. The age-old idea has been given fresh life within the imagination of those individuals that FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver and Ipsos can never quite manage to get their minds around, the men and women who’ve suspected all along that Doja Cat, Megan Thee Stallion and every other rock star who has ever dressed in red are members of the diabolical Illuminati — along with Tom Hanks, Beyoncé and the British Royals.

Facts are facts: the Illuminati were a real thing. Its first meeting was on 1 May 1776, in the tiny Bavarian town of Ingolstadt, led by an obscure university professor of law named Adam Weishaupt. Within a matter of years, he would become one of the most reviled men in Europe, accused of adultery, murder, rape and conspiracy to overthrow the government.

Unlike Diddy, Weishaupt wasn’t much of a criminal. He created the Illuminati because he couldn’t afford the dues to be a Freemason. He kept his society a secret because the Enlightenment ideas he professed were unpopular among the Jesuits then in power: that women might possess intelligence equal to men; that a human from Africa might be as human as one from Europe; that there might not be an orthodox Catholic god.

These were not only widely palatable but popular liberal ideals, and in a few years the ranks of the Illuminati would expand to more than 2,000 members of the social elite — aristocrats, bankers, barons, diplomats, doctors, writers and wits. Had Adam Weishaupt lived in America, we might revere his name alongside Adams, Jefferson and Madison. Instead, the Jesuits convinced Karl Theodor, the Duke of Bavaria, to declare the Illuminati a subversive organisation. A tranche of government-sponsored pamphlets proliferated, declaring that the Illuminati were debauched sodomites, that they ran prostitution rings, that they drank the blood of trafficked children and were working under the auspices of the Angel of Death.

The barrage of sensational media horrified the reading public of Germany, France and Britain, then crossed the Atlantic to the United States, where Illuminati hysteria soon ignited waves of political fear and eventually energised Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s presidential campaign. None of which is news to anyone who’s been following conspiratorial social media accounts dedicated to the Omniwar, the Clinton murders, the goings on at Epstein Island, or raw milk. Clearly, Diddy had joined the ranks of the Diabolicals who populate the IMF and World Economic Forum. This is obvious to everyone.

Everyone, that is, except the so-called “mainstream media” who continue to ignore the salient fact of the alternative facts:

Exhibit A: The memoirs of Diddy’s ex-wife, Kim Porter, recently salvaged from the dung heap of discarded digi-trash, which recently topped the Amazon charts — despite concerns that they are fake, and despite the fact that Porter is dead. Discovering the hidden logic and rhetoric of conspiracy within these pages is a no-brainer for the inflamed wingnuts poring over subreddits and Parler.

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The mythical masculinity of Donald Trump

By Frederick Kaufman

Exhibit B: Ashton Kutcher, darling of the tech entrepreneurs and erstwhile bosom buddy of the notorious Did, who has been widely quoted as saying he can’t be quoted about some of the things that went on. Which leads the red-pilled crowd to believe that the freaks offs delivered something far freakier than the run-of-the-mill Wall Street launch-the-midget-from-a-cannon bacchanal.

Exhibits C, D, E, and F: Snaps of Kamala and Diddy, Oprah and Diddy, Taylor Swift and Diddy, Prince Harry and Diddy…

Then there’s the unsettling matter of Justin Bieber, images of whom crowd the postings of the Q crowd. Here he is shirtless, more than likely wasted, clearly subservient to Diddy, who holds the since-traumatised star in what can only be described as a loved-up headlock. In the years since, Bieber has retreated to the manifold comforts of Jesus, although he did emerge tearfully seeking to “protect” Billie Eilish from evil. Nothing to see here, nor in the ever-creepier videos that have been surfacing on a daily basis, such as the long-neglected 10-year-old segment of Keeping Up featuring Khloé Kardashian bubbling about the Biebs at a naked Freak Off — although Khloe, too, has decided to say no more about it and simply hope the whole thing will go away. Which it won’t.

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Letby Truthers want a good story

By Sarah Ditum

Typical of the feverish response among the theorists has been the feed of the infamous American celebrity journalist, O’Reilly Factor alumni and shit-poster, Liz Crokin, who took the opportunity to amplify Vladimir Putin’s accusation of cannibalism among American elites: “Putin has been calling out the elite Satanic pedophile cabal for years,” she wrote on X.

“I wonder if Hunter ever went to [a] Diddy party,” posted Jake Angeli-Chansley, the Viking-horned Q-Anon Shaman who stormed the Capitol on January 6.

To be sure, Diddy’s lawyer, Marc Agnifilo (whose previous clients include a bevy of convicted Satanic cabal members, such as sex trafficking NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere) has promised that Combs will take the stand and tell his side of the story (“It’s a human story. It’s a story of love.”), which of course will do nothing to convince anyone of anything, as the narrative has metastasised to the point that the public at large now accepts the man who insists we call him “Ye” as a reliable witness to the fact that Diddy was, among other things, a Fed — thus bringing the Illuminati to the highest echelons of power.

Still, the editors scratch their heads, wondering who, what, when, where, and how such fictions could ever be embraced. Aside from personal tragedy and triage, what’s sad is that the rumblings of the Diddy Conspiracy present the last, best opportunity for traditional network television and the print establishment to help to save their industry from extinction, not to mention democracy itself, by admitting to the prevalence and power of conspiracy theory.

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The two women who define Trump

By Rosie Gray

If they haven’t learned from Donald Trump, QAnon and January 6, conspiracy theory possesses a powerful and persuasive logic and rhetoric. On the strictly empirical level, the tale of Diddy’s malfeasance has been delivering to the purveyors of conspiracy theory precisely what the philosophers call “objective reality”. The critique of conspiracy theory falters here, as inductive and deductive reasoning both lead the sober “independent researcher” (aka, digital bottom feeder) to the same conclusion: it’s the Illuminati. And people believe it. Lots of people believe it.

Instead of ignoring the Diddy Conspiracy, the mainstream media should admit its power and presence as an artefact of our suspicious and sorry moment. It should examine its history, consider its reasoning, count its adherents. The editors will be shocked to discover that the story of the story is somewhat different to rock and roll’s “Me Too moment”, as The New York Times recently concluded. They will have to admit how mainstream conspiracy has become.

Of course, for establishment media to face up to the Illuminati version of the story would not only mean dragging themselves through the mud of popular mythology, but entail a great deal of discomfort for Hollywood and the music industry, not to mention walking the tightrope of the morass of racial and sexual politics that helped to enable Diddy in the first place. But to do otherwise at this fraught moment would be political malpractice. The Diddy Conspiracy explains a great deal about the way the world outside the mainstream media bubble thinks. The New York Times and the Washington Post and the Atlantic and the New Yorker and CNN and MSNBC and all the rest can ignore the siren song of conspiracy for as long as they like — but then they should not wonder where all those Trump votes come from.

We liberals like to shake our heads at the unfortunate circumstance, sigh, and leave it at that. Which is a mistake we’ve made before. For if there’s one thing the last few centuries should have taught us, it’s that what we refuse to acknowledge can bite us in the ass. That said, traditional outlets will no doubt remain content to stand above the fray and ignore the rustlings of the conspiracists — which is yet another reason why Donald Trump will most likely re-settle into the Oval Office, nuclear codes nestled between his Diet Coke and McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish, phone in hand, poised to post.

It was the Kamala conspiracy: her nomination was part of a dastardly master plan, a carefully orchestrated bait-and-switch hatched by those who were really running the show — that is, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand and Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria. Here was proof positive, bloviated headlines of The New York Post, of “a sinister plot to swap the octogenarian commander-in-chief at the top of the ticket for Veep Kamala Harris without voter approval”.

Exhibit A came from @EndWokeness, which tweeted: “Biden’s presidency ended the same way it began: Under a thick cloud of cover-ups, irregularities, and suspicion.” Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe adumbrated suspicions, demanding that Joe Biden resign in shame for his role in “this un-democratic coup” — a soundbite she immediately beamed out to her quarter-million followers on Instagram. America had witnessed the “coup of a puppet regime“, declared Representative Thomas Massie, of Kentucky. A “massive cover-up”, added Ron DeSantis. “They’re publicly admitting that they are an oligarchy,” harangued a hyperventilating Stephen Miller, a former White House adviser. “This is as full-frontal an attack on American democracy as we’ve ever seen in the history of America’s major political parties.”

Well, not exactly. As anyone who has been paying attention to the recent spate of Kamala memes knows, “everything is in context”. Nothing falls “out of a coconut tree”. And that includes rumours of coup and coverup.

This particular species of accusation — “the largest political cover-up in history”, as House Speaker Mike Johnson pontificated — has appeared over and over again throughout American history, and from both sides of the aisle. After the Watergate scandal, the country’s Left-wing waxed outrage when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, seething over what they were convinced had been a secret deal for clemency. A bit farther back, the centennial of the country was clouded by similar suspicions, as in 1876 the House of Representatives delivered the Presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. He held up his end of the dark deal by removing federal troops from the South, thus earning for himself the Trumplican nickname, “Rutherfraud” — and enabling decades of Jim Crow.

As per usual, the strongest antecedent can be traced to the days of Andrew Jackson, who anticipated Donald Trump in many ways — from his penchant for scorning central authority and his contempt for the political and banking establishments to conspiratorial ideation regarding the economy. Way back in the 1820s, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay, observed that Jackson “lives by excitement”, and was never “without some object of attack”. Likewise, today’s MAGAverse has unleashed an unending stream of vitriol against Harris, calling her a “radical Left lunatic”, a “bum”, “a failed vice president”, a “demon”, “dumb as a rock” and a “co-conspirator” in the bloodless coup.

While Trump declared he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not “lose any voters”, Andrew Jackson actually did commit murder — and went on to occupy the Oval Office. But he failed on his initial attempt, which was when charges of a “corrupt bargain” entered the American political tradition.

When Jackson took a run at the White House in 1824, he faced nepo baby John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts (John Adams’s son), Washington elite William Crawford (James Monroe’s Secretary of the Treasury), and firebrand House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky. Among this crowded and prestigious field, the Populist Army General did not manage to pick up enough electoral college votes to win outright, so the outcome of the race fell into the hands of the House of Representatives, which at the time was led by Henry Clay, who had come in fourth place.

In the nasty stew of political intrigue that ensued, two certainties emerged: the first was that Clay would not throw his support behind (third-place) William Crawford, who had just suffered a stroke. No one believed Crawford would survive the summer, much less possess the wherewithal to lead the country for the next four years. The other certainty was that Clay despised Jackson.

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Kamala Harris, triumphant cat lady

By Kat Rosenfield

Such things considered, everyone knew that John Quincy Adams would soon be inaugurated as the sixth President of the United States. At which point an anonymous letter appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper called The Columbian Observer, accusing Clay of selling his votes in return for being offered Secretary of State. Such a bargain, the author claimed, was “one of the most disgraceful transactions that ever covered with infamy the republican ranks”.

As waves of outrage over the “corrupt bargain” grew, the writer of the anonymous letter identified himself as a Jacksonian by the name of George Kremer, Representative from Pennsylvania, who promised to substantiate his accusations before the House Investigations Committee. But when the appointed hour arrived for his testimony, Kremer was nowhere to be found.

Clay threw his support to Quincy, who became president despite having received only 33% of the popular vote. When the newly installed chief executive subsequently appointed Clay Secretary of State — at the time, the traditional stepping-stone to the presidency — an infuriated Andrew Jackson railed at the Speaker, calling him “the Judas of the West”.

In those days, as in ours, charges of corruption were par for the electoral course. They would have soon dissipated had it not been for the efforts of a man whose name has been almost entirely lost to history — but who may be more responsible than any other citizen for the eight-year reign of Andrew Jackson. In the aftermath of the 1824 election, Duff Green became editor of The United States Telegraph and for the next four years devoted himself to assailing the Adams administration for “bargain, intrigue, and corruption” — the same insinuations making the rounds among the trolls of Gab, Parler, Truth Social and X in the aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal from the race, and Kamala’s bloodless coup.

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MAGA Republicans are nothing new

By Frederick Kaufman

The “corrupt bargain”, then, has been going on for more than 200 years and has yet to run its course. Indeed, the current narrative will soon enter its second stage — namely, litigation. Despite delirious Democratic visions of Kamelot, Republican National Committee gun-for-hire Charles Spies recently filed a complaint to the Federal Election Commission accusing Biden and Harris of violating campaign finance laws by shifting Biden’s campaign funds to Harris. The case may eventually end up in the hands of that all-too-familiar Right-wing law firm, aka the Supreme Court. Nothing new here, either, as at the end of Jackson’s second term he made it a point to expand the number of Supreme Court judges from six to eight — adding two of his own, just in case.

As for Jackson’s favourite newspaperman, Duff Green blithely continued ever further along the road of conspiracy, becoming one of the first to articulate the now notorious “Great Replacement Theory”, targeting hordes of evil immigrants from Ireland and Italy whose “imported Catholic votes” would promote the anti-slavery agenda of the North. His career reached a sorry climax on an afternoon stroll when he was caught off-guard by an opium-addled Congressman from South Carolina named James Blair, who could have been offended by any number of Green’s vicious editorials. Blair bludgeoned the journalist to the sidewalk with his cane, kicked him into the gutter, then jumped on him, thereby breaking Duff’s arm, collarbone and a few ribs. (Point of information: Congressman James Blair weighed 350 pounds.)

The savage absurdity of Green’s life is mirrored in the manner of Andrew Jackson’s death. His only regret in life, he declared on his deathbed: “I didn’t shoot Henry Clay.” Here was a man who encapsulated the abusive spirit of 19th-century American politics that has endured to this day. Scholars from Bernard Bailyn to Richard Hofstadter have traced America’s history of hysteria and false accusation from the pamphleteers who fed the flames of patriotism in the years prior to 1776 through the anti-immigration and anti-press laws of the Adams’s administration, and long after. They have concluded that paranoia was an essential component of America’s revolutionary ferment — and beyond.

All of which is to say that MAGA’s charges of a “corrupt bargain” serve a pragmatic purpose: the political jujitsu of distracting from the party of the January 6 insurrectionists led by a character who has been involved in more than 4,000 legal cases in United States federal and state courts — from tax disputes to personal defamation lawsuits to sex abuse. Not to mention stashing top-secret documents in the gilded bathrooms of Mar-A-Lago. A man whose son-in-law has made a $2 billion deal with the Saudis. Nothing to see here.

Of course, if charges of corruption don’t harm Harris, there’s always her race and sex. But here’s the rub: the attacks against Harris have yet to land. Perhaps, after long centuries, a strange and unprecedented coconut will fall out of the blue — and Kamala and her legions will herald a new age in American politics.

I still remember her magnificent tail vanishing into a tangle of leaves. Or at least, I think I do. It’s all slightly hazy. But I don’t believe she was just a large badger, as one incredulous friend suggested. Though as a Londoner, my idea of a panther (or a badger, for that matter) is probably rather like Carpaccio’s idea of the lion of Saint Jerome. Neither of us had much experience to work with.

Perhaps I was willing it to be true, but no other explanation seemed to fit. And I wasn’t the only one to think so. Only yesterday, a construction worker claimed to have seen another legendary leopard, the Beast of Cumbria, while strolling across a field. The British Big Cats Society, meanwhile, receives reports of between 300 and 500 sightings per year, the vast majority regarding black panthers. But though I was in good company, it was still bewildering for me — a liberal “normie” in every respect — to face such a mystical assault on my Common Sense.

Believers squabble over how big cats ended up roaming the Cotswolds, but most trace the story back to the Sixties. Then, exotic pets were the height of fashion, with Harrods stocking a fine range of big cats, alligators, and even a baby elephant, which Ronald Reagan bought in 1967. But that all changed with the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, when, at least according to big cat enthusiasts, bohemians secretly released their pets into the wild to dodge the new ownership fees. Some later confessed. And in 1980, a puma was captured in the Scottish Highlands.

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Conspiracies are the price of freedom

By Terry Eagleton

This theory does, admittedly, have one slight flaw: there has never been any conclusive evidence of a big cat colony in Britain. And that’s not for lack of state cooperation. In 1983, 50 of our toughest Royal Marines, aided by a pack of beagles, went hunting for the Beast of Exmoor — but they found not a whisker. Later, in 1994, after a grisly sheep massacre was blamed on the Beast of Bodmin Moor, the then-junior agricultural minister, Nicholas Soames, commissioned a six-month inquiry into the matter. The report concluded that there was “no verifiable evidence for the presence of a ‘big cat’”. More recently, in 2012, a National Trust-commissioned DNA test into a suspicious roe deer carcass, which bore the marks of a ravenous feline, pointed to a lowly fox.

And while there is some talk among Big Cat trackers of state cover-ups and leopard corpses in government freezers, this is limited to an extreme fringe. What is fascinating, in fact, is how this theory has remained largely localised, unpoliticised, and untainted. Unlike UFO sightings, it has not yet cascaded into a sinister global conspiracy, nor has it set the internet aflame with coded talk of malign forces: the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset and the global capitalist elite.

This isn’t because Big Cat theory lacks the right components. If I were to conjure my own conspiracy, I dare say I wouldn’t find it too difficult. I would simply invent a cabal of rogue Rewilders, living in splendid stately homes in the Cotswolds, who had concocted a Plot to release panthers into the wild to wipe out local livestock — and, in the spirit of the Highland Clearances, drive honest farmers from the land. These wicked Rewilders — all Davos Men, of course — would then appropriate the empty farmland, fill it with enormous peat bogs, and live royally off the lavish government Net Zero subsidies that would soon roll in. Given the scarcity of land and livestock, the poor would be herded into packed cities and forced to eat mealworm porridge instead of meat, while the rich would feast on free-roaming venison and frolic in fields of wildflowers.

As with all the best conspiracies, mine would contain an acorn of truth. Many British farmers now fear for their livelihoods, as the Government rolls out a radical post-Brexit farming subsidy scheme that rewards green initiatives such as planting woodland or rewilding. In other words, it pays farmers to cease farming. Indeed, in order to meet the Government’s environmental targets, a quarter of UK farmland will need to be reassigned. All I’d need to do is pour this very real crisis into my potion of venomous half-truths. And there is no shortage of rage to ignite: farmers are already blockading European cities and hurling eggs at the European Parliament. How long until British farmers join the resistance?

My fantastical Plot would perfectly embody Richard Hofstadter’s definition of the “paranoid style”: “a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life”. But as the real Big Cat theory has not yet spiralled in this manner, it seems more like a lost fragment of folklore than a conspiracy.

There is a certain romance in this idea. While British folklore largely died out after the Enlightenment, it still evokes a pre-industrial age before trains, television and 4G stripped the nation of its cultural diversity, belittled its local beliefs, customs and dialects, and forged a Great British Monoculture. Those were the days when Britain’s peripheries weren’t pining to resemble its centre; when people didn’t drink from the same fountain of knowledge, but from their own unwieldy springs. And if hobgoblins were said to wander the forests of one remote county, an outsider would hardly dare to suggest otherwise.

It was a time most tenderly depicted by George Eliot in Silas Marner. She writes that, “to the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery”. And her heart aches for those rare few who are forced to leave their native towns for a “new land where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas — where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished”. It was as if other realms were ruled by different gods.

This dappled land didn’t just vanish. It was crushed by middle-class Victorians in their quest to rid the nation of uncivilised superstition, and to forever replace the scourge of Magic with Enlightenment Science and Reason. The idea that “primitive” belief systems lingered not just in the colonies, but at home too, haunted the intellectuals of the age — and led to the creation of folklore as a field of study. It ultimately came down to class: the historian Thomas Waters argues that there was a “growing sense that supernatural credulity was a distinctly proletarian trait”. And that middle-class Victorians, having been enfranchised in the 1832 Great Reform Act, were seeking to define themselves through their devotion to reason.

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We can see Big Cat theory, then, as a vestige of this bygone world; a bottled cry against industrialisation. After all, as The Economist’s Jem Bartholomew argues, “the mythical beasts of the British imagination often appear at moments of modernisation”. Early sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, for instance, coincided with an upgrade to the Highlands road network. And after the Second World War, fearsome felines seem to have kept local tabloids in business, from the Beast of Bodmin Moor and the Cougar of Cupar to the Fen Tiger, the Nottingham Lion and the Sydenham Panther. Nowadays, when most British children will never know the song of a turtle dove or the scuffling of a hedgehog, the image of a panther padding over a neurotically well-tended lawn is a bewitching one.

Yet what if we have lost something more than folklore? By eroding local beliefs, ridiculing superstition, and insisting on uniformity of rational thought, we have perhaps made ourselves more, not less, vulnerable to conspiracy. Of course, the paranoid style is as old as time, its long cast of villains assuming many masks: Jesuits, Templars, Freemasons, global Capitalists, Communists. But I can’t help but wonder whether we have created a belief system so rigid and coherent that the slightest doubt can cause it all to crumble.

There once was a time when you could believe in witches, fairies, and hobgoblins, and still have absolute faith in God, Science, and your King. There were many contradictory authorities and infinite ways of seeing. But now, truth has become an all-or-nothing game: if you start to question the “Establishment” in one respect — whether over Covid vaccines, 5G or urban planning — the chances are it won’t be long until you’re drawn into an upside-down, Manichean world of conspiracy. And in this dark wonderland, as Hofstadter describes, there is “no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities”; everything is evidence of malicious intent. To the paranoid soul, the flick of a panther’s tail at twilight is enough to cast doubt over the entire system.

Bird is right about the need for faith in scientists as we hurtle into a technological revolution based on artificial intelligence — and indeed, to point out how their efforts depend on rigorous testing of theories with facts. Unfortunately, the behaviour of a few key scientific figures in the pandemic, seemingly desperate to appease China and protect their ties to high-risk research, has done the precise opposite.

This is, one prominent US biologist told me, “the biggest scientific scandal of our lifetime”, involving a deliberate attempt to suppress debate on a health catastrophe that killed almost 15 million people in two years. It revolves around a landmark commentary in Nature Medicine stating firmly that the five authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This was published in March 2020 — barely six weeks after the stumbling World Health Organization had declared an international emergency.

Now, hundreds of private messages between four of these five scientists, exchanged as they wrote and published this article, have emerged — and they are astonishing. The “super secret” discussions show this arrogant quartet boasting about success, misleading the media, sneering at journalists and making fun of other experts, even a world-renowned epidemiologist co-opted as the fifth author. They condemn China “for trying to rewrite what happened” and disclose Beijing sequenced the genome for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes Covid — just before the rest of the world discovered from a Taiwanese tip-off that the disease had erupted in Wuhan.

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Most significantly, these discussions on Slack expose the quartet’s deep fears that Sars-CoV-2 could have been tied to laboratory research — along with overt signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such suggestions. Clearly these scientists were concerned the disease was engineered. They dismiss the well-worn theory about the virus arising in a Wuhan animal market on several occasions, one calling it a “red herring”. Yet they abruptly switched direction in public despite the lack of discernible new evidence. They carried on debating their suspicions in private after the article’s publication — even as they attacked claims about a possible lab leak in public and their statement was used to condemn such “conspiracy theories”.

“Let’s face it, unless there is a whistleblower from the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] who is going to defect and live in the West under a new identity we are NEVER going to know what happened in the lab,” wrote Eddie Holmes, a British virologist based in Australia with strong contacts in China, at one point a month after publication. “That’s my thinking too,” responded lead author Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist — although he admitted that he was “worried” US diplomatic cables showing concerns over biosecurity in Wuhan, which had been disclosed by The Washington Post, “might have something”.

It is hard to overstate the influence of this single article, accessed almost six million times and cited by 5,942 other specialist papers. The journal’s editor João Monteiro tweeted out a link saying: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation.” China’s ministry of foreign affairs welcomed its “evidence” — as did the Communist Party chief at WIV. It was highlighted in the White House by Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and adviser to several presidents. Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, told me it was “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus” more than one year later as he insisted “no scientific evidence I have seen to date points to outbreak linked to a laboratory”.

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It subsequently emerged through leaks and freedom of information requests that this pair, along with Francis Collins, head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved behind the scenes in the article. Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, was tasked with hosting a teleconference on February 1 involving the five authors and six other experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser until three months ago. After the call, Farrar confessed he was “50:50” on whether Covid came from a lab — and later was found to have told Collins that Wuhan engaged in “Wild West” research practices. His office admitted to me eventually, after a barrage of emails, that he helped “convene” the Nature Medicine authors.

As Vallance once wrote in another science journal, “inferences should be drawn from attempts to hide interactions”. Unfortunately, the lab leak theory was snarled in tribal politics after it was flagged by Donald Trump, creating a toxic climate for those of us probing the origins in the pandemic’s early days. Now, this article is at the centre of a House subcommittee investigation after Republicans summoned the two US-based authors — Andersen and Bob Garry, a microbiologist in New Orleans — to answer questions earlier this month on their deliberations. Afterwards, the cache of documents and messages were detected in the committee papers and on its website by members of Drastic, a group of independent researchers that has uncovered many key nuggets in this quest for the truth about a deadly disease.

Andersen set up what he called the “super secret” Slack group under the intriguing original name of “project-wuhan-engineering” with Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, on the day of the teleconference. Farrar, portrayed as a driving force behind the paper, urged everyone to keep their deliberations confidential in that first discussion. A few days later, he signed a letter with two Wellcome Trust colleagues in The Lancet journal hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a body that funnelled substantial US funding for research into bat coronaviruses to WIV.

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The Dane declared to his colleagues that the question they needed to answer was whether Covid emerged due to “evolution or engineering” since both were “really rather plausible” — as remains the case today. Andersen added that Garry would not want the virus to have arisen from “GOF escape” — a reference to controversial Gain of Function research, which boosts the infectivity of viruses and was banned for four years in the US. “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” he said.

The fact they were discussing the concept of a lab leak “shows how plausible it is”, added Rambaut the next day. But the Scottish-based expert urged them to change tack. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need to be irrefutable evidence. My position is that natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

Rambaut said revealingly that due to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes”. Andersen responded that he agreed this was “a very reasonable conclusion” despite hating “when politics is injected into science”. And this seemed to become their eventual template.

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Much of their subsequent discussion, interspersed with banter, is technical. They discuss RaTG13, the closest known relative to Sars-Cov-2 that was collected by scientists at WIV from a mine hundreds of miles from Wuhan and is linked to the deaths from a mysterious Covid-like respiratory virus of three miners clearing bat guano from a cave. They puzzle over the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses. “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add,” wrote Holmes. “Yeah,” responded Andersen. “The furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”

Garry even explains at one point how easy it would be — even for a graduate student — to make such a virus by inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat virus such as RaTG13 in cell culture. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening,” he adds.

Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the advocacy group Biosafety Now, said he was struck by how strongly the Slack messages made the case for a laboratory origin for Covid. He pointed to a decade-old paper shared among the quartet detailing experiments on bovine coronaviruses, which found that when inserted in different human cells they developed a strikingly similar furin cleavage site. Kinney claims knowledge of this paper flew in the face of their claim in Nature Medicine that such cleavage sites had only been observed after prolonged experiments on avian flu. “Bovine coronavirus is much more closely related and this took place after minimal passage in cell culture,” he said.

The discussions show how Farrar strengthened one key phrase — and that the force of their entire argument was beefed up after an initial draft was rejected by Nature, a more prestigious journal. Last month, Garry admitted to a BBC podcast “maybe we went a little too far” by taking such a strident position. Kinney, who wants the paper to be retracted, believes they succumbed to the intensity of pressure from a variety of directions, including from funders with the cash and power to determine the future of their careers — and that this cover-up could have disastrous consequences for their profession. “Science must be honest,” he said. “The logic in the paper is so weak, the conflicts of interest are not revealed and it now seems clear that the authors did not fully believe their own claims.”

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Emails show the team consulted with Ron Fouchier, a Dutch scientist who pushed the boundaries of Gain of Function work with experiments on avian flu. “Molecular biologists like myself can generate perfect copies of viruses without leaving a trace,” he told them baldly. There is also mention of “intel” in the background — and at one point, members of the quartet accuse “Ron” of leaking details of their activities to a journalist.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of these revelations is how their private debate over the origins carried on after publication of their seismic statement. The March article stated that their “analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. Yet Andersen wrote on 16 April that he was “still not fully convinced that no culture was involved”. When Holmes pushed back, warning such fears could lead to an end of Gain of Function research, the Danish biologist replied that the top bat researcher at WIV was carrying out “a lot of work that involved isolating and culturing SARS-like viruses in BSL 2” — a reference to the sort of low-level biosecurity comparable to that found in a dental surgery. He linked to four papers on this “concerning work”. And he said again the next day that “we can’t fully disprove [cell] culture… we also can’t fully rule out engineering”.

Later that month, this same scientist told a journalist that the odds of Covid’s accidental release in Wuhan were “a million to one”. And he told those politicians that after considering all the evidence, their group concluded that “culturing” — which can make a virus more infectious and better-adapted for human transmission — had not occurred since the virus most likely spilled over naturally from wildlife. “By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin I no longer believed that a culturing scenario was plausible,” he stated in written evidence. The evidence now seems to challenge this pivotal claim to Congress.

Andersen claimed they reached this conclusion through scientific inquiry rather than under pressure from Fauci or other funders. Yet he told the others at the outset “it’s well above my pay grade to call the shots on a final conclusion”. The messages show that just before the paper was submitted for publication it was shared with Farrar and Collins, at the time heads of the two most significant funding bodies in Western science. They were “very happy”, reported back Holmes. Coincidentally, Andersen works at Scripps Research in California, a non-profit lab given $8.9 million for work on infectious disease outbreaks from the grant body headed by Collins five months after the statement’s publication — although he insisted to the Congressional subcommittee that this funding decision was agreed before the pandemic.

We still do not know for sure the origins of that destructive pandemic. But we do know it was an extraordinary coincidence that Covid emerged in the Chinese city containing the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia, a place with known safety concerns conducting high-risk research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. We know China covered up the outbreak, hid key data, lied to other countries and refused to allow proper investigation. And we know that accidents and human error can occur during research. So as Andersen said to his pals, the possibility of some kind of lab incident was “friggin’ likely”.

It looks beyond doubt that Beijing’s cover-up was aided by an outrageous attempt to suppress global debate, led by the Western scientists we should have been able to trust to search for the truth and guide an unshackled debate based on hard facts. They were assisted by patsy politicians, supine journalists and complicit scientific publications. This murky affair appears to be the most terrible betrayal of science — and indeed of democracy — that was far darker and more disturbing than those sinister events that felled Oppenheimer seven decades ago.

But who? There’s evidence that Ruby was a low-level sidekick of the Mafia, so maybe it was the Mafia who shot Kennedy. But why kill Oswald as well? It’s here that my devilishly ingenious theory comes in. There’s no real evidence that the Mob killed the President, but they might have been incensed that someone else had. Not because they had any love for their leader, but because they had intended to assassinate him themselves. After all, they threatened the lives of both Kennedy brothers several times. Before they could get round to it, however, a private entrepreneur called Oswald stepped in and did it instead. By having Oswald bumped off by a known associate of theirs, the Mafia made it look as though Oswald, had he lived, could have revealed their guilt. My theory, then, is that the Mob bumped Oswald off because they didn’t kill Kennedy. They just wanted people to think they had.

Is this true? Probably not. When it comes to the death of JFK, the hardest question is who didn’t do it. There’s a comically long list of possible candidates: Oswald, the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police, Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s driver or his bodyguard, Right-wing Cubans, the Teamsters Union, perhaps (who knows?) a 21-year-old Harrison Ford. Members of QAnon probably believe they were all in it together. As with equality and diversity programmes, genuine conspiracies must leave nobody out.

One shouldn’t be too cynical about conspiracies. After all, as new UnHerd polling has shown, more people in Britain are conspiratorially-minded than aren’t. But it’s true that there isn’t One Big Conspiracy, largely because there doesn’t need to be; it’s also true that people regularly gather together in private to plot the downfall of their enemies. On the whole, however, liberal capitalist states, like dishwashers, work all by themselves (when they work at all). They don’t depend on people meeting in missile-proof bunkers to plot how to stay in power. Modern societies don’t rely on some kind of collective consciousness to keep themselves afloat, partly because modern citizens are atomised rather than collective. In fact, consciousness or belief hardly comes into it. As long as you don’t try to overthrow the state, you can believe pretty much what you like. This is known as liberalism.

Besides, the more individuals are in the know, the more fragile a conspiracy becomes. One reason why the US moon-landing wasn’t a put-up job is that it would have involved too many people, any one of whom could have blown the gaff. And if the truth (as conspirators see it) had got out, the United States would have suffered the most calamitous loss of credibility in its history. Its reputation would have been trashed beyond repair. Fear of being discovered is a primary reason why some events can’t be faked, just as one reason why most politicians try not to lie is not because they are more angelic beings than the rest of us, but because the consequences of being found out mean that it just isn’t worth it.

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If great masses of people maintain a certain belief over long periods of time, one can be fairly sure that there is something in it. This doesn’t mean that the belief in question is true, but it’s unlikely to be complete nonsense either. Myths tend to have a core of truth. For many centuries, everybody thought that the Sun moved around the Earth, which isn’t true; but it was a rational belief all the same, because the evidence seemed to support it. Much the same goes for paranoia. It isn’t true that creatures from Saturn have placed a secret device in your skull to beam your every thought to a control centre in the Glastonbury Tor, but it’s true that a mighty amount of surveillance goes on, much of it secret. Or to put the point more pithily, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you. No civilisation in history has ever spied on itself so relentlessly.

Those who genuinely go off the deep end are those who imagine that we live our lives in private. The idea that what we do is covertly directed by a cabal of obscenely wealthy paedophiles is a delusion — but if you drop the “covertly” and “paedophiles”, it us not far from the truth. We are indeed governed by an elite, but there’s nothing particularly secretive about it. You can see them strolling around Davos or read about them in the newspapers. The phrase “Masters of the Universe” isn’t just a piece of flashy science fiction. There is a sovereign superpower whose presence can be felt in every nook and cranny of the globe, but its name is capital, not the Knights Templar. Like all power, what it needs to sustain itself is knowledge. Knowledge is no longer just what is conveyed in seminars, but priceless stuff which people are prepared to kill for.

Conspiracy theorists are convinced that everything hangs together, which is indeed a symptom of paranoia. For the paranoid, nothing happens by chance. Even a gust of wind is secretly intended. The fact that the Prime Minister has five letters in both his first name and surname must surely be trying to tell us something. Freud thought that the nearest thing to paranoia was philosophy, because philosophers (he was thinking of the Hegelian type) also see connections between apparently unrelated items. There must be some way in which my left foot and the Vatican are secretly interrelated.

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Once again, this isn’t complete nonsense. Even the most trivial of our actions send ripple effects through the thick mesh of social existence, breeding unexpected consequences in unpredictable places. None of our acts is purely our own. Reading this essay may cause you to tear great clumps of hair from your head, thus making you look too frightful to attend the dinner this evening at which you would have been offered the Governorship of the Bank of England. And don’t just blame me: blame the editors, sub-editors, technical assistants and so on. We all had a hand in tearing your hair out. It was a conspiracy, but not a conscious one.

These ripple effects are random. None of them needed to happen, or to happen in exactly the way they did. And this is where they differ from conspiracies. For the conspiratorial mind, nothing whatsoever is random, any more than it is for the paranoid. This is an alarming thought in one sense but a consoling one in another. A world of chance and contingency is a bewildering one, upending our schemes and thwarting our purposes. Far better to imagine that there’s a plot to it all, in both senses of the word, than accept the fact that a lot of things just happen, without any particular rhyme or reason, and that this is part of the price we pay for freedom. This was presumably what Harold Macmillan had in mind when he remarked to a reporter that the hardest thing about trying to run the country was “events, dear boy, events”.

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Ironically, however, American conspiracy theorists are lovers of freedom. “Liberty or death!” ranks among their slogans, and by refusing to wear masks during the Covid pandemic some of them ended up with both. Among other things, conspiracies are symptoms of the anxiety which comes from freedom — from living in the precarious, unpredictable world of late modernity. They are antidotes to the open-endedness of history. Those who spin these yarns are for the most part on the wrong side of that history — those washed up by so-called modernisation, men and women who need someone to blame for their lousy living conditions but who point an accusing finger at fantasises of their own creation.

Conspiracy theories are also reactions to a diffuse, fractured, conflictive society in which there are just too many competing narratives around, so that falling back on a grand narrative which makes sense of everything is profoundly appealing. For a blessed moment, the whole lot falls neatly into place, as an opaque, impossibly complex world becomes luminously simple, purposeful and transparent. Because these myths spring from insecurity, which in turn breeds hatred, the grand narrative in question is almost always a sinister one. Anyone with an eye to how the world is going will have no quarrel with that, even if they don’t believe that Nancy Pelosi is a North Korean spy. They will have no quarrel either with the central assumption of the QAnonites and their ilk — that behind the surfaces of social life there lurks some exceedingly nasty realities, and that the official story is rarely the whole truth of the matter. What you see is most definitely not what you get. The good news is that no conspiracy can be entirely successful, since if it were we wouldn’t know about it.

At one stage he even says: “When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting.” But he continues to do it, and frequently segues into lengthy digressions about how stupid and harmful the idiots’ beliefs are. Presumably you would not feel that the author had really taken his own advice on board

This is very much how I feel about How to Talk to A Science Denier, by the Harvard philosopher Lee McIntyre.

McIntyre wants to help us change people’s minds. Specifically, to help us change the minds of these strange, incomprehensible people called “science deniers”. He addresses five main groups of “deniers”: flat earthers; climate deniers; anti-vaxxers; GMO sceptics; and Covid deniers.

This is, on the face of it, an important project. It’s a truism that the world is polarised, and our sense of shared reality is under attack. If there is some way of learning how to talk across difference, and to persuade without attacking, that might go a long way to bridging our various divides, not just the five he discusses.

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The framing is that McIntyre goes and meets representatives of these groups and tries to persuade them out of their wrong beliefs. He goes armed with social-psychology research about how best to persuade people. His big trick (which I think is a good, if limited, one) is asking: what evidence would it take to make you change your mind?

But the whole book is premised on one idea: McIntyre is right, and the people he is “talking to” are wrong. 

And it’s true that all five groups are wrong, or at least their central claims are. The earth is in fact an oblate spheroid; the climate is warming, due to human influence, and will likely have severe negative impacts; vaccines work; GMOs are safe; and Covid is real.

The trouble is that by using these groups, McIntyre is playing on easy mode. When your example of a “science denier” is a literal flat-earther, it’s easy to say “look over there at the crazy deniers”.

Even with climate change scepticism, sure, there are people who literally don’t believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet. But those people are relatively rare. People who believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet, but that the emissions are going to be hard to stop because of economic growth in the developing world and it would make more sense to concentrate on adaptation rather than mitigation, are much more common. Are they “deniers”? Certainly they’re often called deniers. But McIntyre himself acknowledges that China is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and that the IPCC says the sweeping global changes required to cut emissions sufficiently to avoid a 1.5°C warming are unprecedented.

McIntyre constantly wants to make a clean distinction between “science deniers” and non-deniers. So, for instance, he says that there are five “common reasoning errors made by all science deniers” [my emphasis]. They are: cherrypicking, a belief in conspiracy theories, a reliance on fake experts, illogical reasoning and an insistence that science must be perfect. If you don’t make all five of those errors, you’re not an official McIntyre-accredited science denier.

Hang on, though. A “belief in conspiracy theories”? McIntyre spends a lot of time talking about the tobacco firms who manufactured doubt in the smoking/lung cancer link, and the oil firms who did the same with the fossil fuel/climate change link. He says that the spread of Covid denialism through the US government was driven by Republican desire to keep the economy open and win the election. Aren’t these conspiracy theories?

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Ah, but for McIntyre these aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracies. The distinction is “between actual conspiracies (for which there should be some evidence) and conspiracy theories (which customarily have no credible evidence).”

So, since some anti-vaxx conspiracy theories like the polio vaccine giving children polio, or the CIA using fake vaccination stations to take people’s DNA, are true, does that mean anti-vaxxers don’t believe in “conspiracy theories” but “conspiracies”?

Obviously not. But the point is that there’s not some clear line between “real conspiracies” and “conspiracy theories”. When Alex Jones says that chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay, he’s referring to real claims that endocrine disruptors are affecting sexual development in lots of animals. It’s not easy to draw a line between real and fake, evidence-based and not evidence-based.

I think the basic problem is that McIntyre is a Popperian. That is, in hugely oversimplified terms, he believes that no amount of evidence can confirm a theory: but evidence can falsify it. “If we find only evidence that fits our theory, then it might be true,” he writes. “But if we find any evidence that disconfirms our theory, it must be ruled out.” 

I, on the other hand, am a Bayesian. I have some prior belief and I assign some level of probability to it: “climate change is real and dangerous”: 90%; “the world is flat”, 0.1%. And then each new piece of evidence shifts my belief a little: if next year NASA say “we got new photos in, looks like Earth is sitting on the back of a turtle”, then I’ll upgrade my belief in a flat earth to, I dunno, 1.5% (but also upgrade my belief in there being mad people at NASA to 95%).

So I don’t need to draw a bright line between “denial” and “reality”. I can say: “I think it’s likely that tobacco firms conspired over lung cancer, but I think it’s pretty unlikely that NASA faked the moon landings.” And I can update my beliefs as new evidence comes in. I don’t have to “rule anything out”, I can simply downgrade how likely it is.

McIntyre, though, is stuck with two categories: things that might be true; and things which have been “disconfirmed”. If you believe things that have been disconfirmed, then you must be a “denier”. And so he needs to find ways of explaining why these “deniers” are so different from the rest of us. 

He has various ideas about “inflated self-confidence, narcissism, or low self-esteem”. But if you reject the idea that there are two groups of people, “deniers” and “non-deniers”, then you can avoid the need to explain it at all, beyond saying “some people are better than others at working out what’s true”. 

But we’re not just here for his epistemology: we’re here for a masterclass in how to persuade people out of false beliefs. Over the course of the book he meets various people — the flat earthers; two coal miners; a couple of hippyish friends of his — and tries to talk to them about their beliefs, using the methods he has learnt. His solution is to listen, to be respectful, to meet people face to face, and to do so over several meetings. Does his approach work?

In short: no. Hilariously, both of the coal miners he meets cheerfully accept the reality of climate change, but say that the economic value is worth the potential damage to the climate. His first hippyish friend is entirely pro-vax and only slightly GMO-sceptical; the other one is anti-GMO but on anti-corporate grounds rather than safety ones. 

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So he falls at the first hurdle: he not only doesn’t convince anyone, he doesn’t meet anyone who unambiguously disagrees with him, except the flat earthers. (He also struggles to be respectful, at least in the book itself. There’s an astonishing line on p77 in which he says “When speaking to them, we should remember that it is an insult to use the word ‘anti-vaxxer.’” There are 109 uses of the term “anti-vaxx” in the book. Occasionally he remembers and says how important it is that we listen and pay attention, then he immediately reverts to calling, say, Covid scepticism “ridiculous conspiracy theories and partisan nonsense”.)

But there’s a bigger problem. McIntyre’s big question, as mentioned, is asking: What evidence would it take to change your mind? But at no point does McIntyre ever ask himself what it would take to change his mind. 

For instance: when he was talking to the Pennsylvania coal miners, he accepted that they were just trying to feed their families. I assume he’d also acknowledge that Chinese coal mining is allowing that country to get richer and improve its citizens’ way of life. But I don’t think I’m misrepresenting him when I say that he thinks coal mining is a disaster.

When he talks to a friend of his about GMOs, though, that friend says that even though GMOs can save lives now (in the form of golden rice), they’ll cause disaster in the future. McIntyre says, OK, so the kids who can’t get the golden rice now, they’re just going to die? And his friend says yes. McIntyre says that’s easy for him to say, “because he had money and wouldn’t be one of the ones who suffered”.

The exact same question, though, can be asked about coal mining. Sure, McIntyre can say stop using coal, and it’ll help prevent future disasters. But it will also presumably mean some number of tens or hundreds of millions of Chinese people losing electric lights and functioning hospitals, and a smaller number of Pennsylvanians losing their jobs. McIntyre himself would be fine, except for somewhat higher electricity bills. 

Is the tradeoff worth it? McIntyre clearly thinks so (and I think I do too): but what would change his mind? I can tell you: I would update my beliefs significantly if you showed me a utilitarian calculation showing that more people would be harmed by ending coal mining than by continuing it. But McIntyre never asks himself the question. He is stuck on transmit, never on receive.

What’s sad is that he sometimes comes close. He recognises that beliefs are part of people’s identity, and that that makes it hard to change them – but again, applies the lesson only to the weird, wrong, other people, not to himself and people like him. The near-total lack of introspection renders the whole grand project largely meaningless. I am right, you are wrong, the only thing we need to discuss is how to make you realise how wrong you are. The idea of working together to establish a shared reality is hamstrung by his certainty that the reality that needs to be shared is his one.

It’s mainly a book designed to tell readers that people they already think are dumb are, in fact, dumb. It is, really, How to Talk to A Contemptible Idiot Who Is Kind of Evil.