DOES ALT-RIGHT CONSPIRITARDISM HAVE A FUTURE?

by Colin Liddell

There will always be stupid people who understand almost nothing of how the World works but yet want to "explain" it. There will always be emotionally incontinent and hysterical people viscerally attracted to outlandish and frankly childish conspiracy theories. So, the answer to the question in the title of this article might seem to be a resounding "yes."

But actually conspiritardery does not depend purely on such types, and like any phenomenon, it has its seasons, its winters and springs, its high tides and its ebbs.

For conspiritardery to flourish it needs not just the conspiritardial to be on board, it also requires heftier intellects backing it up, and other factors boosting it.

It is my contention here that conspiritardery passed through something of a Golden Age in the last 20 or so years, and that that season is now coming to a close. In short, conspiritardery will have a much more difficult time going forward. In fact it could go the way of the hula hoop, space hoppers, and other past fads.

If we look at an Ngram graph, which details the frequency of the use of the term in books, we see that the actual term "conspiracy theory," a relatively good indicator of the prevalence of the phenomenon itself, had its first upward blip in the period leading up to WWII. It then quickly subsided, as the earnestness of the war and the post-war period took over. It then started to rise again in the 1950s, possibly fuelled by Cold War "paranoia." It then kept on rising through the Culture Wars and Generational Splits of the 1960s, but then dropped from 1972 to 1987, after which it shot rapidly upwards to higher levels than ever.

In recent years, the term seems to be rising exponentially as if the phenomenon is about to become totally dominant. But, really, this looks like any other unstable spike, likely to turn into a two-sided peak with a collapsing down-slope once the smart money pulls out, leaving the idiots carrying the can as usual.

This seems likely to happen with conspiracy theories because the fundamental prediction made by conspiritardery is wrong.

Now, this might seem to be something of a sweeping statement, but not if we approach things from a macro-empirical perspective. In fact, that is the only approach that makes sense. Of course, it is relatively easy to take a micro-empirical approach and find plenty of small predictions or descriptions made by various important and unimportant conspiritards that turned out to be fake, stupid, or just insane, but the conspiritardially inclined are always ready to ignore any number of specific debunkings, and to hide in the chaotic jungle that the world appears to be to so many of them. 

Looked at macro-empirically, however, the one big thing that all conspiracy theorists effectively say is that the World is controlled. It is not even important to go into the detail of who is supposedly controlling it. Take your pick! But the idea of a controlled world is the unifying factor. 

This may not be apparent to the superficial analyst, as many conspiracy theorists cite any crisis or chaotic event as yet further proof of X-group exerting their evil control over the World. Remember Covid was all cooked up to further the control of the globalists and the WEF, yadda yadda yadda...

But even here the formula is {chaos = control by X-group} often with a side order of "just maybe we can use the chaos THEY THEMSELVES have unleashed on us to turn the tables on THEM."

My good friend Richard Wolstencroft is quite skilful at dishing up these kinds of faintly hopeful narratives of slavery with a hint of rebellion. While another friend, Andy Nowicki, is content to escape from the "controlled world of the globalist pedos" through some sort of inner spiritual act of resistance that must seem nice but pretty meaningless to anyone not in his immediate head space.

The link of these two estimable and intelligent individuals to what was once called the Alt-Right is noteworthy, as the Alt-Right in its more intellectually potent early phase (circa 2010-2015) was something that was both a reaction to a World that seemed overly controlled and a philosophical bulwark to conspiritardial interpretations of reality.

In short, the World that gestated the Alt-Right was very different from the World we exist in today.

How could you forget?

While the late decadent phase of the contemporary Alt-Right/ Dissident Right (as showcased on various YouTube channels, like that run by another one of my pals Iron Duke) is an attempt to grasp "order" out of the apparent chaos of everyday life with its drag queen story hours and woke TV commercials, the early virile phase of the Alt-Right was an attempt to create chaos out of what was seen as a stultifyingly ordered world.

The early Alt-Right was the bastard child of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" and its focus on an endless and timeless world of bland Rotary Club values, managerial competence, and stale consumerism, all things that most piqued the Alt-Right's principal founder Richard Spencer, an ex-friend of mine, but someone with whom I still have quite a few things in common.

The World of the Nineteen-Nineties and the Twenty Zeroes, aside from the occasional glitch like a couple of planes crashing into the World Trade Centre live on TV, was a depressingly controlled world, where the Globe did seem to be controlled by a secretive or even cabalistic elite that was well beyond the reach of the average man in the street.

This was ideal soil for creating the intellectual tools of elite critique and a rejection of unipolarity that later degenerated into the conspiritardery we see today. Putin was still a dwarf and China, we were confidently told, was caught in our irresistible "Chimerica" tractor beam. Even the Left caught a flavour of this world and were triggered into their "Occupy Wall Street" movement in 2011, soon after the Alt-Right was launched.

Yes, the strongest underpinnings of a conspiritardial outlook grew out of a hatred and rejection of the order that existed. This was later boosted by external state actors, like Russia and China, as they increasingly took the trouble to prove that Fukuyama was simply wrong by hacking into the Hegemon's social media systems.

The original Alt-Right critique was that everything was run by a relatively centralised global elite, and this made sense, circa the 2002 Gulf War. But now we life in a world where, unless you want to engage in convoluted Ptolemaic thinking, clearly no single group is in charge.

The effort required to hold convoluted
 ideas severely reduces effective IQ

The Chinese are on the side of the Russians at present against the Americans, although who knows when they'll seize their chance to take Siberia, while the Europeans still need the Americans, while resenting them and possibly playing a double game with regard to Russia and China -- just to name a few of the big fault lines. And that's without going into all the various internal clique, class, race, and other differences that seem to be rife everywhere. 

In short, in recent years, the world has returned to its semi-chaotic true nature, while the 20 years or so following the collapse of the Soviet Union was a transient and illusory phase of what seemed like a sinister World Order. It was this mirage that called into being the conspiritardial elements that now repeatedly fail to describe reality and routinely distort history in the process; elements whose only function seems to be to serve as evaporating pans for impotent and pointless emotion.

Much as it may shock the naïve and the historically unlettered, chaos is not the friend of conspiritardery. Order is. And, as it ebbs, so do does conspiritardery as a meaningful force.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).