Why the New Right Can’t Quit Conspiracy Theories

And how it exploits anti-censorship to spread falsehoods for political ends.

The phone rings again. A frightened babysitter answers it a final time, only now realizing that the menacing stranger on the other end of the line is calling from inside the house. She panics and flees, but it’s too late.

It’s one of the most recognizable horror tropes in cinema, “the sitter and the man upstairs.” It’s also a recurring theme in politics: the greatest threats political movements face often come from within, and their leaders are incapable of recognizing that until it’s too late.

The new right is currently having its call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house moment as several of its most prominent members struggle to figure out how their camp has been overtaken by belief in conspiracy theories. A few individual problem children have been identified, suggesting that smoothing out these rough edges will suffice. But that is wishful thinking. The rot goes all the way to the foundations of the movement, and cutting it out would mean bringing down the house.

The new right’s affinity for conspiracy theories raises more fundamental questions about its relationship with knowledge. I think the reason it cannot help but indulge in these beliefs is that it constitutes what Florian Primig, a research associate at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, calls a “counter-knowledge order,” that is, a movement self-consciously oriented in opposition to established “presuppositions, internal regulations and external conditions for the production, application, distribution, administration, implementation, utilization, etc., of knowledge in society.” That’s a fancy way of saying that the new right has a very different relationship with the concept of truth than most people.

There are really two groups currently engaged in this discussion. One is genuinely troubled by the current information environment, and the other is essentially just looking for scapegoats. I understand both because I once defended conspiracy theories by telling myself and others that each contained a kernel of truth that somehow justified its fetid exterior. I refused to push back on them because I operated under the maxim of “No Enemies to the Right,” a delusional and dishonest concept. And I looked the other way because I told myself that the political utility of these conspiracy theories, insofar as I saw them as conferring my faction with an advantage, outweighed any concerns. I regret these things profoundly and hope that I can at least offer insights into why conspiracy theories are features rather than bugs on the new right.

Last month, around the time that conspiracy theories about the death of Charlie Kirk began to reach a fever pitch, Christopher Rufo published an article in which he singled out Candace Owens as a main offender:

Owens, whose YouTube channel has more than 5 million subscribers, has raised questions about camera angles and underground passageways near the shooting site; suggested that Israeli cellphone signals detected on the day of the shooting might have had something to do with the assassination; and argued that the alleged shooter’s chat messages, released by the FBI, are, in fact, fabrications deployed in service of a grand cover-up.

In a podcast with Jonathan Keeperman, Rufo revisited the substance of that article. During their hour-long discussion, Keeperman pushed back on historian Richard Hofstadter’s thesis that the politics of paranoia that give rise to conspiracy theories are a distinctly right-wing phenomenon, arguing instead that it is a “phenomenon that tends to capture whatever side is out of power.” There is some truth there, and it actually connects to Primig’s theory of counter-knowledge orders and how they emerge. More on that later.

“So you don’t have control of the sort of apparatuses that produce knowledge, these sort of epistemic authorities,” Keeperman said. “You don’t know where sort of or how even consensus reality gets made. And so you start to kind of spin up these ideas, these answers to to questions that can fill the gaps.”

Keeperman said that he ultimately isn’t worried about people like Owens and believes that the solution to her conspiratorial content is “better,” presumably truthful content. Rufo more or less agreed and concluded that the “liberalization of the online sphere” that has tipped the scales in favor of people like Owens has been a “net positive,” despite some turbulence along the way.

About a month after that episode aired, and once Tucker Carlson threw in behind Owens with his following, Rufo and Keeperman took a more critical tone on the matter.

“The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts,” Rufo tweeted. “If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.” Meanwhile, Keeperman chafed at the elimination of gatekeepers and guardrails. “The conventional wisdom circa 2010: ‘The open, disintermediated internet will finally bring about the purest expression of democracy the world has ever known!’” he wrote.

“>monkey paw curls.”

It is true that belief in conspiracy theories is neither new nor is it a phenomenon relegated to people who happen to vote Republican. It is also true that people like Owens have always existed; there have always been kooks who profit from disseminating nonsense and falsehoods to large audiences. However, two aspects of our situation are arguably novel: conspiracy theories now have more influence on mainstream thought, discourse, and politics than ever before, and the president of the United States—and the head of the new right—is a prolific conspiracy theorist.

Trump has made paranoia and lies cornerstones of the movement to such a degree that we hardly think of it anymore. It’s just sort of a fact of political life now that he not only rejects truthful, accurate information but also the way most people arrive at the truth. And yet, even though we have been completely inured to it by now, it is impossible to discuss the new right’s trouble with reality without acknowledging that this is a fish that has been rotting from the head down.

I think there are different kinds of conspiracy theorists. There are people who, for whatever reason, are drawn to and prefer them over fact and are sincere in the sense that there is no ulterior agenda motivating them. I do not believe there is actually anything wrong with this. Competing and even contradictory knowledge claims are normal and not particularly harmful in a democracy. People are entitled to their views, including outré ones that they may only subscribe to as a kind of cognitive hobby—a pseudo-belief. But the presupposition there is that of a common reality and common ground, two things that the new right, more than any other faction in the United States, has actively worked to erode. When all culture, all politics, all life are reduced to a zero-sum game, any information, in any context, that does not support their framing is subject to being contested and discredited by any means necessary, including and especially through conspiracy theories.

Even now, with complete control over the awesome power of the federal government, the new right continues to declaim against the “swamp,” “the establishment,” “the globalists,” and a myriad of other malevolent forces that are somehow capable of undermining and overpowering Trump, who promotes these conspiracy theories himself as a means of consolidating and strengthening his hold over his base. Indeed, a hallmark of his long reelection bid, one that perhaps went under-appreciated, was just how much Trump’s messaging intentionally drew from conspiracy theories like QAnon, which holds that he is spearheading a subterranean war against a cabal of child abusers. He has gone so far as to share on Truth Social so-called “q drops”—cryptic messages that a deep-state insider with top-secret clearance supposedly disseminates to those with eyes to see.