Is everything a conspiracy? A response to James Delingpole
James Delingpole sounds like the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (from 'Brave New World') in his recent article here on Substack, ‘Yes. Everything Is A Conspiracy. Even Trump.'
‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’
'“I trust this lying liar with a long, proven track record of lying isn’t going to lie to me because…”, you can begin your defence. I leave the rest to you and your evidently fertile imagination.’ — James Delingpole
Those who say that ‘everything is a conspiracy’ congruously remind me of the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World — the way, in the opening chapter, he turns on a visiting student who asks a naïve question about the operation they’re being shown around, which relates to the application of the production line method to biology, demanding, ‘My good boy! Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’
I also wonder if the increasing microaggressiveness of the Resistance in this connection is not a symptom of the undoubted failure to wake up a sufficiency of ‘normies’ — so now we’re working out our superiority complexes on each other, in a kind of Conspiracist Olympics that seems to announce the end of evangelisation and the emergence of a new battle to be the Most Right About Everything.
James Delingpole is actually among the least offensive of these, as well as being the most articulate and light-hearted. But he still sounds like the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in this recent article here on Substack, ‘Yes. Everything Is A Conspiracy. Even Trump.’
I disagree with James, though not vehemently. My argument against him is not necessarily on the facts, though I do sometimes dispute some of those he adumbrates. It is possible that he is substantively correct, and that I am as yet unready to face or accept some of the implications of where we have fetched up. But far more relevant than that, I believe, is that I have radical reservations about this new trend within the ‘freedom movement’ to deconstruct virtually everything that happens, even before the full facts become known. One of the baneful effect of this, I believe, is a fragmentation of the movement, or what there is of it, rooted chiefly in semantics. I don’t need to win this argument; but I believe we do need to ask ourselves what our purpose is: to win medals in the Conspiracist Olympics or win the hearts of minds of our as yet unconverted ‘normie’ neighbours to the approximate truth about the destruction of the world we have been living in and the eradication of most of its population.
James starts with a straw man. It relates to ‘people sometimes’, who say to him, ‘Not everything is a conspiracy.’ I don’t say it is the main flaw in his argument, but it does, to a high degree, become the opponent which he then proceeds to lay low.
He then moves to a reductio ad absurdum: ‘Horses, for example. They’re probably not a conspiracy. Nor, I don’t think, are flowers, honey, the Book of Psalms, swimming in the sea or dogs. Cats might be: I’m not so sure about them, the way that they have persuaded us to stroke them and wait on them hand and foot while they lounge around doing absolutely sod all except dragging the occasional dead bird or mouse into the house which we’re supposed to welcome as a gift.’
James writes well, always has. He’s engaging and funny in a way journalists rarely are. Not that I’m accusing him of being a journalist; I seem to remember us solemnly disowning out former profession in a podcast we did a couple of years ago.
We know what he means: Everything that isn’t made by God is a conspiracy. Perhaps not a perfect encapsulation of his meaning, but something along those lines.
Everything really is a conspiracy and we need to deal with this fact rather than seek to persuade ourselves otherwise with cosy pieties that are about as helpful as clinging to your childhood comfort blanket when you’re about to be devoured by a lion.
Not an ideal analogy, in all the circumstances. Everything really being a conspiracy is actually more serious — and more unlikely — than a child finding himself ‘about to be devoured by a lion’. For one thing, everything really being a conspiracy affects everyone, and almost everyone adversely, which in many instances (as we have observed about conspiracies) may mean terminally. It affects not just those living now, but those as yet unborn. It’s not at all like one child being in mortal danger, however much more effectively that idea might pluck at our empathy strings. Everything really being a conspiracy means the end of the world as we knew it, and not just that: it means that the world as we knew it probably ended a long time ago and we didn’t know it then, and — James Delingpole and a few others aside — we still don’t.
Moreover, if you’re a child and find yourself confronted by a hungry lion, there’s probably not much you can do except cling to your comfort blanket, however useless this is likely to prove. This raises an important question: does everything being a conspiracy place all of us in a similar situation? Does the analogy endure to its analogical limit? Are we, in fact, as helpless as a child facing a ravenous lion when confronted, whether in childhood or adulthood, by a world in which everything is a conspiracy? If yes, then James is wrong, and a little cruel, in dismissing the notion of our (metaphorically) clinging to our comfort blankets. Is there anything else we might usefully do? If so, then James (or anyone else who adopts a similar position) ought to be telling us what that might be. But he (and they) stop at the moment when they imply the all-embracing nature of their own cleverness, leaving us clutching our comfort blankets all the more desperately. Maybe there is something we could do with the comfort blanket, like throwing it over the face of the lion and then legging it? But I cannot think of the equivalent of a comfort blanket in a situation whereby we are confronted not by a ravenous lion but the fact that everything is a conspiracy.
Donald Trump, as advertised, is at the centre of James’s argument. Trump has indeed been the most visible and recent focus of the question as to whether or not everything is a conspiracy. James thinks that Trump is not merely the focus of this question but an actual conspiracy in his own right, this notion arising from the (alleged) attempt during the (alleged) summer to (allegedly) assassinate him. This, James alleges, was all a scam, and Trump himself was in on it.
Do I disagree?
I don’t know.
Do I hope James is wrong?
With all my heart and soul.
Is this because I’m an idiot or, as James implies, ‘under a spell’?
Possibly the former, but there is a defence I would like to submit before we jump straight to the verdict.
Fine, but what if James turns out to be right?
I shall carry his laptop bag, walking six feet behind him, for the rest of my life.
James goes on to list several other personalities that people who dispute his assertion that everything is a conspiracy might be enspelled by. The only one on his list that I would at any point have been, let us say, enraptured by is Jordan Peterson, and I have myself made several attempts at, if not demolishing Jordan’s plinth, at least taking it down a centimetre or two.
Am I enspelled by Donald Trump?
No, but that doesn’t mean that James, though perhaps mistaking things somewhat, is entirely wrong. I am, possibly, enraptured by the idea of the Deplorables, who would still be asleep and finding themselves confronted by something much worse than a hungry lion had this weird egomaniac orange-headed billionaire not happened along and offered to lead them back to sanity, relevance and self-respect.
So I distinguish between Trump the man and Trump the ‘redeemer’ of the Deplorables. Three weeks ago, the morning after he was re-elected President of the United States, I wrote the following in my Unchained Diary in response to some people who were making points similar to what James is saying in the article linked above:
My MAGA cap is slightly askew, in that, being from 2020, it says, ‘KEEP AMERICA GREAT’ rather than ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT’ or ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN’. Still, blind man, galloping horse; I’m going out this morning with it on, come what may. On my head be it!
I’ve gone through this, and still people send me the same old cliches — as if all I need to do is read one text and decide, ‘Oh no, I’m all wrong about everything (again!)!’
A good friend sends me a meme from a guy called Jeff Berserk or something (at least he’s prepared to put his name to it) that starts off ‘If voting changed the nature of the control system they’d make it illegal’ (Mark Twain, who has been dead for 114 years, is probably still collecting royalties on that one), and goes on: ‘But they do it to keep people entrapped in the system with the illusion of choice. You don’t have a choice. They own you.’
Yes, and . . . ? Is there something we ought to be doing? Is there something YOU ought to be doing? Do we just sit in the corner and wait to die or be killed? Or ask Bono for a lift when he heads out to keep his promise of driving his car off a cliff if Trump got elected?
Another know-all writes in response to my tweet in which I welcome the fact, arising from Trump’s re-election, that at least we now know that there are democratic ways of getting rid of bullies, liars, perverts, warmongers, and genocidists, and that there are consequences for politicians who ignore their electorates. ‘Nonsense!, s/he (pseudonymously, almost needless to say) rules. ‘It’s all theatrics, part of a script. Every major politician is owned by the Jewry, regardless of what side they lean toward. Voting within a globalist controlled system is futile.’
How does s/he know this? S/he doesn’t. It’s just the same old tropes that’ve been going around the place for donkeys. Even if it is true for a majority of politicians, it is not necessarily true for all. There is such a thing as honour, and integrity, and principle, and I for one am not prepared to write those things off just to make myself sound smarter than everyone else.
(I may well be proved wrong in time, or may be required to change my tune, but either of these possibilities is better than blindly reciting lines I’ve picked up without understanding in other people’s videos. In my experience, most of those who come out with these kinds of sneers are utterly incapable of explaining why they believe what they claim to believe. This may be a function of the media they communicate in, these being unconducive to elaborate explication. So, they may, in time prove to be right about much or all of what they say. I just can’t say. But at the moment it’s no more than a contagion of repetition, and so I’m sticking to naturalism for now.)
I’ve said and written it until I’m blue in the face: I know all about WarpSpeed and all the rest. I’ve been writing about the Combine and its machinations for over four years. I stuck my neck and my name out there, in an attempt to put a stop to all this, when most everyone else was hiding under beds. I understand that we cannot get carried away. But DJT is still the only trace of hope on the horizon now, and I’m not about to rule out the possibility that he will tell the Combine to get out of his face and let him get on with the job he’s been elected to do. Why not?
Have these people even been paying attention to what is happening. Do they prefer to be vindicated in their pessimism rather than entertain one shred of hope in the future? And if not Trump, then who should we place our hopes in? Or do they even care, as long as the ‘likes' from other depressives keep coming?
[This article may be too long for the Substack newsletter format. If you’re reading it as an email and it tails off unexpectedly, please click on the headline at the top of the page to be taken to the full post at Substack.]
There’s too much at stake not to place a little of my hope and trust in Donald Trump, with all his faults and foibles. I have faults and foibles of my own, and I’ve no doubt that, were we to go on holiday together, we would pretty soon get sick of one another. But, let us at least celebrate the misery of the Worst People In The World whom he’s just stuffed on our behalf, leaving them bereft and enraged. And let us dare to place a little of our hope on his substantial shoulders. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that he’ll tell the emissaries of the Combine to go stuff themselves for a change, and when they say, ‘We’ll kill you’, reply: ‘You’ve already tried that!’
Donald Trump is seventy-eight years of age. What has he got to lose by doing the right thing? Very little.
What has he got to gain? A legacy behind the wildest dreams of any man who ever lived.
What have we got to gain? Our civilisation becomes stalled at the cliff-edge, with a chance of being towed back to safety; our country [Ireland] in with a chance that he might pull the plug on its cuckoo-in-the-nest economy and that, as a result, we might have a chance of reclaiming our country from the diabolical grip of Woke globalism.
Is it not possible that the God we claim to believe in will exercise Mercy and use Donald Trump to deliver us from Evil?
Can we not wait and see?
Can we not allow him the customary one-hundred day honeymoon?
Can we not hope that something like this is possible?
I hope we can, because if we don’t, it sure as eggs is never going to happen.
Am I totally happy to claim that this entry reflects fully my outlook and perspective? Not entirely. I may have over-egged it due to sleeplessness and a certain euphoria. It makes some important points, but overall it’s too combative and angry, brought slightly above the level of reasoned commentary by fatique and a vicarious triumphalism. This happens sometimes.
I should say here that I’m a bigger fan of James Delingpole than I am of Donald Trump. If he were to state a movement called MJGA (Make Journalism Great Again) I would join it in a heartbeat, despite its lack of an acronymistic future.
In advancing his argument that ‘everything is a conspiracy’, James postulates a hypothesis concerning two ‘understandings’ — one he describes as ‘Macro’, the other as ‘Micro — which he claims lie at the root of his certainty. The ‘Macro’ one is:
‘They lie to us about everything’.
By ‘They’ he means what he often calls the Predator Class, and also, one supposes, all their earthly puppets. I cannot argue with him about this since this is almost verbatim the first of my Four Rules of Covid Reality (or “Four Rules for Remembering Reality), initially coined nearly four years ago: Every word from their mouths is a lie.
I agree also with him on this:
We are many; They are very few. If we had the knowledge They do it would be over for Them in a trice. But just so long as They keep deluding us that the system is fair, that it has our best interests at heart, that a better world is just one election cycle away, we’ll never rise up and take charge of our own destiny. The most effective form of slavery, They have long since realised, is one where the slaves imagine themselves to be free.
This is goodish stuff, except he doesn’t say what form our taking charge of our own destiny should take, since hes ruling out voting for orange-haired redeemers.
I’m not so sure about the next bit, which is somewhat of a non sequitur:
Deception, in other words, is their business model, which They apply relentlessly to every conceivable aspect of our existence.
Every conceivable aspect? I don’t think so, and this, more or less, is the core of the argument.
For example, I used to be a total wage slave. When I started working first, at the age of 18, I had a boring and rather menial office job, which I hated but put up with for several years because it gave me the means to have an ostensibly ‘free’ life that would not have been attainable without the income I was getting from prostituting my mind chasing missing bales of bacon all over Ireland on behalf of the national transport company. I bought a car, had money in my pocket, went to dances and whatnot. I didn’t feel enslaved. I felt I was exchanging a number of my weekly hours (say 40ish) in order to enhance the freedom-quality of several others (maybe 15 or 20), and subsist for the remainder. I thought this a fair enough deal. Later, after much struggling, I got to do what I had wanted to do from childhood, and have been about ninety per cent free ever since.
James comes at me from a different angle: mostly what you might deem a ‘public’ direction rather than a personal or private one:
They have lied to us, inter alia, about: the Beatles and the Stones; vaccines; the Moon Landings; the shape of the Earth; ‘Evolution’; global warming; chemtrails; liberal democracy; demons; cancer; terrorism; Israel; the sex of sundry ‘female’ movie stars and presidential wives; dinosaurs; the date of the Turin Shroud; the Second World War; people in the alternative media who look like they are our friends but are secretly working for Them…
What do I say about all that?
Maybe, maybe; yes; maybe; dunno; dunno; yes; yes; definitely; probably; hope so; some; probably; don’t care; who cares?; does it matter?; almost certainly; 100 per cent certainly.
I also agree with the ‘inter alia’ part.
Some of these issues I have been aware of for years; some I have never investigated, some I am much too old to begin investigating; and some I couldn’t care less about. Some of these — like the Beatles issue, which we’ve discussed here previously — have implications for my personal/private existence, since what James is getting at here may well undermine most of the soundtrack of my youth, my memories of pretty much everythign that matters, and the ‘movie’ of my life from about the age of five.
Sure, I still have a lot to think about there. I’ve listened to a couple of relevant podcasts on James’s channel and found them semi-convincing on the Beatles especially.
But most of these issues should not, of themselves, be articles of faith, whereby we must accept a particular line or understanding, even though we have not had time or inclination to pursue an investigation. Are we expected, as though at some kind of ‘sacrament' of Confirmation, to accept the contents of some Creed of Conspiracy, whereby we are to be recognised as worthy members of the Church of Awakedness? In what sense is this semantically different from the conditions being imposed upon the world by the 'Church of Woke? There is some value, of course, in being alert to patterns, but we have more than enough to be going on with in the events surrounding Covid, mass-replacement and Climate Changism, and seeing these in the context of a radical democratic betrayal in my own country has been the focus of my efforts. If everybody did their bit from the same premise, I believe, we would pretty sharpish find ourselves turning these evils around.
Then James picks up his straw man and lead him forward by the prickly hand:
Why is it, then, all you ‘Everything is a conspiracy’ sceptics, that you believe there are loopholes in this comprehensive, superbly organised, long established system of diabolical control?
My answer: Because some things we just know because we have verified them using our senses, and/or our common sense, and because, if we must stop trusting this, how can we possibly evaluate anything, not excluding James Delingpole’s opinions? Most of what we ‘step out’ from in reality is personal/private, and it is by the criteria developed in those zones that we come to judge the public world. Most of the matters James lists are public matters, which may (or, in some cases, may not) be subject to interference and manipulation. But much of our understanding of reality we acquire before leaving home, where the influence of Them has been somewhat restricted.
The second — the ‘Micro’ — reason for believing that everything is a conspiracy, James give as follows:
Let me ask you a question: if you knew someone to be a proven liar, cheat and faker would you go on trusting them?
Of course not, I respond.
James links to a video, which he considers ‘to be quite an eye-opener’. He also says I might need a VPN to watch it, but ‘in case you can’t see it’ (I couldn’t: all I got was a message saying that is was unavailable in my area), he’ll provide ‘a very brief summary’, which in due course he does, as far as I can tell.
James makes clear that he is one-hundred per cent convinced not only that the ‘assassination attempt’ was faked but that Trump was in on it. On this latter score I wold say that, obviously, the two go together: it would be impossible to fake it if Trump did not cooperate. I agree that, if the first is established, the second follows. As it is, by my estimation, the ‘fake’ theory is merely improbable, or ‘not proven’.
He then describes — citing directly from — some of the abuse he got ‘from Trump supporters’ when he published his first article on this subject, about three weeks ago.
Ah: ‘from Trump supporters’. See, this is where James’s argument gets a bit disingenuous. The subtle implication that only ’Trump supporters’ might find the ‘fake assassination’ hypothesis a bridge too far is shifting the weight of the argument on to the invertebrate back of the straw man. He then, citing the video that I at least haven’t been able to access, goes on to deal with what he says the (alleged) death of the fireman Corey Comperatore at Butler, Pennsylvania, that day that Donald Trump was stretched, which he says is the factor most frequently cited as refutation by the ‘“the assassination was real, you dumbass!” types on social media’. Again: ‘Watch me knock down this powerful opponent with the strange straw-coloured face so he doesn’t get up again!’
Repeat: I’m not (necessarily) by any of this stating a definitive view that James is wrong in saying that the assassination was faked. It’s not impossible. My problem is a different one: that proving this falls a long way short of proving that ‘everything is a conspiracy’.
Actually, the section that follows, in which James sets out the broad territory of his case on the Trump ‘assassination attempt’, is solid and (somewhat) persuasive, even without the video.
He describes the (alleged) orchestrators of such operations as people who ‘know exactly what they are doing’.
He adds:
Innocent victims apparently dying horribly and tragically are a key part of the deception because they produce such a visceral, emotional response from the public. Not only are lots of people inspired to contribute generously to crowdfund appeals — which is how, incidentally, these operations are funded: the crisis actors get to enjoy a new life with millions of dollars kindly donated by people who think they are dead — but also their judgement is clouded by vicarious grief and outrage.
I do not dismiss the possibility that this might be true.
He then adds:
Anyway, thanks to the video to which I’ve linked we now have a much better idea what did happen to ‘Corey Comperatore’.
I have only James’s word for it, but that word is good with me.
He goes on to confide that the video sets out that the ‘fireman’ was never there in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the day in question.
He continues with his summary the video contents:
[The video} takes us step by step through the process in which Comperatore’s death was faked by a team including actors dressed as cops, a (presumably) paid-off real doctor or someone pretending to be a doctor, a make-up artist, a line-of-sight/crowd-positioning guy, some (possibly fake) Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) and lots and lots of rent-a-crowd actors in MAGA hats.
This might sound far-fetched until you watch the footage taken at the rally, mostly focusing on one of the stands flanking the Trump podium where Comperatore was supposedly shot.
One of the things you immediately notice is how incredibly bad at acting the rent-a-crowd actors are. They resemble a Democrat’s cruellest fantasy of what Trump fans look like: garishly dressed, overweight, incredibly dumb — like refugees from the movie Idiocracy. It’s so pastiche-y and parodic you can’t help feeling that you, the viewer are being mocked by whoever staged this farrago. And you probably are. When a man is supposedly shot dead in their midst these people behave not remotely like you would under such circumstances. One guy actually sits down casually on the blood smear left behind after Corey Comperatore’s body is dragged off by medics.
Except it’s not Comperatore’s body, it’s a mannikin. [Sic. He means mannequin, probably a spellcheck error.] You can tell from its lightness — visible from the lack of muscular tension in the arms of the people carrying it — that no way is this the real body of a hefty firefighter. Another giveaway is that the leg actually has a visible carrying handle attached to it which, so far as I’m aware, no real person actually does. There are lots of other tells: the remarkable lack of blood from someone who has supposedly just been splattered with a headshot (bad make up artist!); the behaviour of the various specialist team members responsible for slipping the mannikin [sic] in through the railings, ready for the make-up artist to do her job, and for the line-of-sight guy to make sure there’s a gap in the crowd so the camera filming the event can snatch a shot of ‘Corey’ the mannikin’s bloody face.
I really wish I’d been able to watch this video, because it sure sounds like it might just be persuasive on the ‘faked assassination’ hypothesis in a way that nothing else I’ve seen or heard about has been.
James continues:
If we accept the footage as genuine and the analysis as cogent, then I think it is now impossible to draw any other conclusion than that the entire Butler ‘assassination’ incident was staged and that Trump was definitely in on it.
Now comes an even more interesting bit. James ‘concedes’ that ‘for some Trump supporters this might still not be a problem; he hears them reciting an ‘ends justify means’ logic whereby Trump, the ‘rightful president’ beleaguered by corrupt opponents, adopts ‘desperate measures’ to even out the odds. James takes a dim view of such logic, describing it as ‘amoral.’ I agree: but that is not the ground on which a reasonable person might still argue that nothing of what James has described, even if it were all to be vindicated by a public inquiry, goes any more than a tiny incremental quantum to establishing that ’everything is a conspiracy’.
He asks:
if Trump is prepared to lie so shamelessly, so repeatedly, so deliberately about what really happened that day in Butler, Pennsylvania, why would you trust him on anything?
You wouldn’t. At least, I wouldn’t.
So, yes, we should proceed from here with caution on account of the possibility that Trump may have been involved in a radically sinister deception. And James is right, too, when he says that, even if nobody was killed in Butler, PA, there remains the bad darts implicit in the idea that the future President of the US ‘might be a stone-cold liar’.
He doesn’t just maybe fib a bit about the odd detail, or embroider his anecdotes, or exaggerate for effect (though obviously he does all these things too). He actually participates in the planning of his Big Lie, possibly months in advance; he stages the lie like the practised actor that he is; he goes on television for days afterwards to reinforce the lie. This is a man so comfortable with lying it seems not even to occur to him that there might be any moral issues involved.
Then James throws down the gauntlet that I’m picking up here:
I’m not saying that Trump is any worse than any of the other Deep State actors we’ve come to loathe, fear and despise. But if you think he’s any better than them I’d love to hear your counterargument. “I trust that this lying liar with a long, proven track record of lying isn’t going to lie to me because…”, you can begin your defence. I leave the rest up to you and your evidently fertile imagination.
One of the problems I have with James’s cramming of ‘everything’ into his ‘Everything is a conspiracy’ idea is that he is conflating all kinds of things that might logically belong under another heading, which he implicitly hooks up to this hypothesis — this being the proposition that everything in public life now is subject to invisible manipulation that misleads, befuddles and otherwise impacts adversely on the individual, which I would say is what he is really saying. His Trump-(non)-assassination theory, for example, would be a grotesque instance of such interference, if true; but virtually everything that public figures do or have happen to them — other than what the Predators have a deep and special interest in — does not fall under this rubric, and (as far as we know) nothing that Trump was involved with previously has been definitively shown to exhibit signs of such interference or puppeteering. Is it suggested that the same forces allowed Trump to win in 2016 and blocked him doing so four years later? Just asking.
Moreover, not only do I believe that James’s construction of a category termed an ‘Everything is a conspiracy sceptic’ is deeply tendentious, since it renders conspiracy the default reality and accuses (some of) us of failing to see or accept it. I accept that his list of manipulative interventions is not intended to be exhaustive, but it is, it must be observed, a list of things that, though in some instances seismically important, are still just a selection of the things he suggests are being interfered with or lied about, which is way short of amounting to ‘everything’. Most of them are not even core to the everyday lives of most human beings, which revolve around things like family, earning income, romance, meals, health and exercise, chores, work, and sleep. And, yes, I know that some of these areas are subject to dubious and unwelcome interference (health being the most obvious), and this, we know, often involves conspiracies, but they do not necessarily amount to blatant twisting of reality in order to achieve an outcome desired by the Combine/Predator Class, which I take as the implication of James’s argument. This means that there is the potential for a demarcation line to be drawn somewhere between events which are clearly and meaningfully manipulative and things that might fall under the heading of common or garden deceptions, such as the quotidian nonsense about the 'far right’ or the idea that cholesterol is bad of itself. And, yes, I know that there is manipulation in these areas also, but it is more ambiguous than the kind James is talking about, and — frankly — of a kind that is nowadays to be found in, yes, virtually everything. It’s just the nature of what we call ‘reality’.
James’s argument goes way further than merely acknowledging this. He is, as I interpret him, saying that the Predator Class holds the world by the short and curlies, and by dint of its quasi-omnipotence and omniscience, holds all of us in what Elvis Costello dubbed a ‘griplike vice’. This is the part of the everything is a conspiracy hypothesis that I really object to and argue against, not least because it seems to render impossible the chances of our — to adapt James’s phrase — ‘rising up and taking charge of our own destiny.’ If all of us ever come to invest in the everything is a conspiracy hypothesis, the Predators’ victory will be a penalty kick away.
The article linked above repeats some of the contents of an earlier article, titled ‘Sorry. Donald Trump Is Not Gandalf’,
which I read at the time it was published, about three weeks ago. (This article is currently paywalled, but you may be a subscriber or have other means of accessing it. In any event, it presents pretty much the same essential argument as the one posted above, which is not currently paywalled.) Just the day before, I had just received an email from James suggesting that we needed ‘to do another podcast. Soon!!’ Before I had time to reply, he had posted this article expressing his views about DJT’s assassination and election.
Having read it, I responded as follows:
I just read your piece about Trump. I kind of don't agree with it, or kind of do but don't want to. But I think we could knock a very entertaining and even amusing discussion out of it, with you being the clever clogs and me being the slightly half-awake dupe who can’t make the leap over the final abyss to the even more final abyss. I won't go into the details (no spoilers!) but I have several grounds of resistance to your position, which it seems to me trades hope and innocence for a kind of bleak certitude, or something. Anyway, I like it and found the ending funny, because it seemed to be addressing me directly, even though I'm not, as far as I know, 'on' anything. [James had invited sceptics of the Trump (alleged) assassination attempt to let him know what they were ‘on’ so he could try it.] I don't dispute that my position is naive and somewhat unreasonable, not to mention self-contradictory. But, still, I think it preferable to being reconciled to the idea that the darkness is coming and will be total.
He hasn’t answered, three weeks on, but he can be like that sometimes, so it’s not impossible that we’ll get to talk publicly about these points of difference, which I feel we definitely ought to. I’m very far from having a closed mind on the subject, being quite prepared to be persuaded that the Trump ‘assassination attempt' was faked, together with most or even all of the obvious implications which James adumbrates. I’ve seen quite a few videos by other commentators, claiming as much, but none that convinced me. I wrote of the ‘incident’ at the time that I believed it had been a genuine assassination attempt. I’m not sure anymore that this is a watertight hypothesis, but even if it isn’t, that doesn’t mean that everything is a conspiracy.
See, James is leaving out of his calculations a particular category of objection to his thesis that is much harder to knock over than Trump supporters made of straw, or ‘“the assassination was real, you dumbass!” types on social media’ (made of straw). The ‘facts’ of the fake assassination do not of themselves establish that everything is a conspiracy, because doing to is a question not of fact, but of the deep meaning of facts and actions and statements and circumstances. The image James posits here — of the possibility that Donald Trump is a recidivist liar, taking his supporters for a ride, building their hopes up in order to lead them to the slaughterhouse of dreams (and possibly themselves) — that is territory upon which I become open to these arguments about what are called ‘conspiracies’. But there are deeper issues here about our capacity to continue utilising the ‘skills’ we learned in our private/personal realms — our homes and neighbourhoods mainly, our schools to an extent, our playgrounds, pubs and discos — and go on using them to interpret the public world. This, more than anything else, is the danger of the everything is a conspiracy hypothesis: that we will lose faith incur capacity to decipher reality at all.
Throughout the Covid episode, we — all of us — observed the miens of our ‘leaders’ and were, at first, confounded by what we saw. What had happened to these people we once thought of as mere harmless idiots? Now they looked on their own people with contempt as they ordered them into the abattoirs of inoculation, or explained that those among them in need of housing would receive their due once the entirely of Africa and the Middle East had been accommodated. To be truthful, we had not expected much of them, and this was before we got to hear about the kompromat ‘conspiracy’, whereby politicians were (allegedly!) deliberately compromised so as to make them into amenable puppets. Then we were somewhat less surprised.
Trump is different. Trump has charisma, a personality, a certain rough-and-ready likability, and a way with words that is unique to himself. Beyond that are his supporters — the Deplorables. As I’ve made clear many times, I was never a huge fan of Trump as a man, public figures, billionaire or even politician. The way i used to crunch it from the beginning was to say that, if I was choosing someone as a holiday companion, he’d be way down the list. I didn’t say that to disparage him, but simply to signal that I was somewhat equivocal about him. I may throw on a MAGA hat at opportune moments and walk around my neighbourhood just to annoy all the right people, but this is, in a rather arcane way, ironic. I am, however, a ‘fan’ of Trumpism, and it’s the Deplorable I’m mostly mad about. I want them to win. I actually pray that they’ll win, They have to win — otherwise the entire human race is doomed. That is my belief. This is not just about Trump, or even mostly about Trump — it is about those who follow, love and vote for Trump, for all kinds of mad and sane reasons — a segment of humanity whose cause is just and good and holy. I truly believe that, if the Deplorable do not win, our world is lost.
And it is for this reason rather than any forensic scrutiny of facts or circumstances that I do not believe Donald Trump is faking it — as he would need to be for the total conspiracy theory to apply here. That would make him just about the most wicked, cruel, amoral, despicable and dislikable human being I’ve ever heard of. That’s right: more so than Mr Hitler, or at least Mr Hitler by reputation. And that would render open the possibility that, one day before too long, Donald Trump might have to face his accusatory people, shrug and say, ‘Aw shucks, folks, you shouldn’t’ve gotten so carried away!’
I just can’t see it. This, for me, is among the most implausible aspects of the everything is a conspiracy scenario.
It is in this nexus of reflection that I find myself unable to go all the way with James Delingpole. Should Donald Trump double-cross his people, I shall be the first to condemn him. But right now I cannot believe that this is remotely possible. Whatever people say about the crudeness of his manners, his neocon nightmare ‘picks’, his history in relation to the poison shots, his undoubtedly altered (toned down) personality this time around (to the extent that some people I know and respect believe this Trump to be just as much an AI-generated phenomenon as Joe Biden), I actually believe he is a pretty decent kind of guy. Moreover, I need to be able to continue to trust my capacity to read people, and my reading of Trump is that any double crossing he is likely to attempt will be directed, if and when the time comes. at the Combine/Predator Class.
Remember, too, that there are higher levels of ‘conspiracy’ than even James Delingpole dares to contemplate. One of these would be that the Donald Trump we’re seeing now, awaiting his inauguration as the 47th President of the USA, is an AI-generated ‘human avatar’, and that this was the entity that ‘got shot’ in Butler, PA. This may seem to ascend to a whole new level of implausibility, but does it? Is it really more implausible than what James is suggesting? It would certainly dispose of the conundrum arising from the possibility that Trump is a congenital liar — albeit by imposing an even more unacceptable possibility: that the real Trump may have been imprisoned or vaporised and replaced by a robot or AI-enhanced double. And this raises a further, and even more ‘improbable’ scenario: that this has been achieved by no earthly intervention, for it seems to me that, if the current Trump is an AI puppet, then this can only have been achieved by beings or entities operating at a far more advanced level of science/tech than — as far as we can tell — human beings have yet attained. While I think it possible that the issue of Joe Biden’s senility was managed in that way for brief speeches and short interviews, it would have required a radical upgrade on the kind of tech we’ve seen so far to take it to the levels of performance we have observed in Trump during the recent election. Consider that he did three hours with Joe Rogan pre-election, and almost nobody seems to have smelt a rat, including Joe, which is unlikely if rat there was, unless he too has been ‘converted’. This implies (since we’re here, let’s go all the way!) something like an input by extra-terrestrials with access to technology we haven’t yet dreamed of. This is only barely more implausible than James Delingpole’s thesis, and also raises an even more electrifying possibility: that these aliens might not necessarily be evil or hostile, but may have come to rescue us from the maniacs and invertebrates currently assailing us from within.
The notion that everything is a conspiracy is a dizzying one. It changes everything. It cannot be just a rhetorical flourish, and in James Delingpole’s delivery it most certainly is not. If we pay heed to what he says and are convinced, then the implications are dumbfounding. Without that notional line of demarcation, it must be concluded that the line ‘everything is a conspiracy’ (leaving out horses, dogs, et cetera) means that we can no longer (and never ought to) take anything at face value, and therefore cannot trust anything, and should never have. That means anything at all. Of course, semantically it isn’t true. When I feel with my foot for the floor in the morning as I get out of bed, I have a reasonable expectation that the floor will still be there. When I call my wife’s telephone number, I never worry in case her phone will be answered by a stranger who has never heard of me. Some things in reality are solid and reliable; others are not. The danger resides in creating a thoughtstream with potential for virality that might convince people that nothing is any longer reliable, or trustworthy — including their own capacity to discern truth from lies and meanings from nonsense — a way of thinking that spreads by contagion and attacks each and every development of a certain kind in the public realm and instantly seeks to debunk it. This is one of my main problems with the everything is a conspiracy hypothesis: it takes away our ownership of our own understandings, our memories, our intuitions, our beliefs, our ability to ‘read’ one another, our store of knowledge and our capacity to engage in a meaningful conversation with another human being about pretty much anything relating to the public realm without tripping over landmines at every step.
Can’t I see? Can’t we see? What they really mean is ‘Can’t you see through . . . ?’
And it’s not simply that people refuse to ‘wake up’ and ‘see’, but that they have been deprived by (I would say) a relatively recent total corrupting of our channels of information-getting, and before that by a process of dumb-making of the humanly-situated apparatus necessary to go beyond certain levels of understanding, as a result of technological devices that were gradually degraded from their first-stated ambition to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. The escalating advance of the Combine/Predator Class’s march on reality has been paralleled by a programme of de-education, which has disabled people in their capacity to use their minds at the very time they are most in need of them. These processes have all contributed to the present situation whereby people are duped by far less ambiguous scenarios than the Trump ‘assassination attempt’. People are also deprived of plumping devices to go beneath the surface of things, which means that, for example, they cannot properly understand evil, because they have mostly not directly experienced it personally, and indeed have been inoculated against such understanding by bad movies and worse TV shows, which depict wickedness as characterised by evil leers and bad moustaches.
Giving people in these circumstance mere ‘facts’ gets you nowhere. On the contrary, it works a little like using the wrong size of screwdriver to remove a particular screw: it slips and slides until the internal drive is so damaged that even the correct screwdriver will be unable to gain a viable grip. The more and more forensically you feed people the ‘facts’ about matters that might conceivably lack plausibility within their altered imaginations, the less they hear because they have ceased to listen to what they instantly understand to be ‘conspiracy theories.’ As with the screwdriver analogy, there is no way forward here. You need to get the proper tool and start over with the issues that are most vital, those displaying glaring breaches or inconsistencies by those in power. The Covid episode provided lots of those, but they were under-exploited by the Resistance because many of its key voices were branching out in search of sexier subjects and more shocking revelations, which became important for themselves rather than for their place in either the overall jigsaw or the process of undoing the deficits in the public intellect and imagination. The result is that the cleverer the debunker gets to feel, the lower his chances of making an impact on public consciousness.
Telling people that they’re behind the eight-ball and need to smarten up is not effective, especially when you are dealing with people whose version of things is utterly counter to not merely the mainstream narrative but also even the mainstream alternative narrative. Maybe both of these narratives are wrong, and if so it would indeed be important to get that message to people who might not otherwise hear it, but lecturing and haranguing them isn’t going to work, and still less is crowing at their naïveté or stupidity. In order to communicate what they know to be the true versions of events, alternative communicators need to remember that they speak to an audience that has been brainwashed and browbeaten for decades, and therefore cannot attain anything like the kind of receptivity that is necessary even for an audience sitting in a theatre waiting for a play to begin. Mostly, such people are hostile, by definition, to the voices seeking to tell them these things. This condition requires to be approached with pragmatism, tenderness and a trayful of salami sandviches.
And there may be other forces in the world capable of overcoming these dark ones. Well, indeed, we Christians (of whom James is an enthusiastic example) believe decisively in this. Why would we adopt a totally negative position on anything with an outward appearance of positivity unless the possibilities offered by this proposal had utterly collapsed? Why would we believe it beyiond the scope of our Creator to use Donald Trump in a useful and holy manner?
As already stated, I like James a lot, even though we’ve met only a couple of times in real life, and them a couple of other times electronically. He’s smart and funny and, in my view, intensely ethical. He has mounted a remarkably brave and otherwise impressive stand for the past few years, having at an early stage called out the Covid scam and its attendant crimes.
I’d like to be in his gang, but here I cannot, much as I might wish to. In fact, I have a vested interest in becoming convinced by what James and others are saying. I have a book nearing completion, a collection of my essays/articles/pieces in this platform over the past four years and counting, for which I have decided upon the title The Abolition of Reality. This relates to several metaphorical, metaphysical and quasi-literal contexts in which, in writing these ‘pieces’ since late 2020, I found myself describing contexts in which reality had either been destabilised, half-demolished or replaced by something I have been calling ‘pseudo-reality’.
For the past few months I have been racking my brains for a means of tailing-off the book with an essay concluding with a sentence incorporating the words of the title — ‘Blah-blah . . . the abolition of reality’. Joining the ranks of the ’everything is a conspiracy’ gang would therefore be most convenient and enable me to knock out a final article outlining this conversion, and pressing Send. Alas I cannot do it. I wish I could, but I cannot. It’s not exactly that I disagree vehemently with anything James or others have been saying, except that (a), I do not accept that their methodology is as solid as it would need to be and (b), I believe they are working to a burden-of-proof that barely scrapes past the balance of probabilities, with ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ a distant shimmying of lightbulb moments in the murk of misdirection and background radiation; and (c), I am fearful that the outcome of their line of inquiry may well mean the final disintegration of the cohesion of whatever grip on reality we have remaining, and our chances of selling this to our brothers and neighbours.
The point of this is not to disagree, or to find fault, or to dismiss, but, in a sense, to plead naïveté, or innocence, or encroaching despair. It is to ask a question, or a hundred questions, and hope against hope that the answers, however bleak, will come back loud and clear. The point is not to create a new rupture in the world, but to heal one I observe developing.
The question is not ‘Is everything a conspiracy?’ but ‘What could a conspiracy possibly amount to?’, for if we go to the logical conclusion of James’s argument and decide he is correct, then, since it is ‘reality’ (as we understand it) that is false, the ‘conspiracy’ must ipso facto emanate from somewhere else, in which case it is an emanation of the supra-reality the has been invisible to us, which takes us a very long way from our conventional understanding of what a conspiracy might be. This, far from encouraging us to rise up, may very well be the prompt for a likely terminal lying down.
In other words, if we cannot believe the ‘reality’ that we have taken for granted, how do we even begin to describe who or where we are?
Although the mode of expression of this essay may occasionally seem hostile, it really isn’t. It’s inquisitive and cautionary, yes, but not, I think, antagonistic, at least not gratuitously so.
It is directed, too, at a target much wide than James Delingpole. If they’re telling us, as many of these witnesses appear to, that the world is nothing like it seems, that everything is faked, like a theatre show; that (virtually?) every public figure is an actor; that we are the captives and victims of technologies way beyond the capacities that we imagine to exist, that none of the soundtracks of our formative years were produced as we are led to believe; that, in short-form, the arse has fallen out of what we might have deemed our ‘perception’ of reality, then those witnesses need to stand in the witness box and answer our questions rather than simply declaring, ‘Can you not see?’ and heading smirkingly away to their perches in High Dudgeon.
The problem is the usual one: if everything’s a conspiracy, then nothing is.
Is there any definitive statement we can continue to make without fear of attracting patronising smiles and metaphorical pats on the head disguised as sprays of laughter-generated spittle to the face? Once upon a time, for example, we could say something like, ‘What is happening cannot possibly not be happening’, and know that this statement, for all its paucity of elaboration, could not be logically or semantically refuted. But now what? What can you say when ‘what is happening’ is, we are assured, almost by definition, not happening?
Must we jump to the default assumption that what is happening is the semantic opposite of what appears to be happening — that each benign face in our purview is actually that of a demon, and every doorway the ingress to a treacherous pit, and every beach a stretch of quicksand? Where does it end? Where, indeed, does it begin? What is there now to hold to, to step or sit upon, to lay down a sleeping bag and steal some slumberous respite from the non-existent or disintegrating world?
My objectives as I say, is not to disparage or dismiss, but to emulate Oliver and ask for more. Not just more facts or information, or even more meaning, but — more, much more than that — more public rumination about the end of the world as we knew it and the beginning of . . . . what? Before asking how we might put Humpty Dumpty together again, I want to ask who pushed him and why. Or, was it all faked and did Humpty ever even exist? Is that pile of shattered eggshell on the ground and the yellow left by his haemorrhaging merely a subterfuges to cast us into sorrow and despair? Was Humpty Dumpty an actor and did he imagine in his naïveté that he was going to get a seat on the ark but, when push came to shove, was nudged off the wall by members of a certain Abrahamic religion which shall be nameless?
What they appear to be saying now does not seem to stop at the idea that certain political and cultural events are ’staged’ but that the entire world we have imagined ourselves to be living in does not exist other than as something we have been inveigled into believing in. They therefore cannot simply be permitted to stop at their descriptions of how Trump was allegedly not shot at, but must also be required to construct a new version of the world in which this was successfully faked and set it before us so that we may consider whether it stands or floats or flies. James has gone some way in this regard, but there is a great deal left to be spoken of.
It is they, not we, who must step up and explain. It is not enough to imply that we are all ‘flat-earthers’, especially when it is they who are the actual flat-earthers.
What we need to become convinced is not more facts, nor even meaning, but something akin to public rumination. We need to be convinced that they are convinced, and why — convinced, that is, not by their implied certitude but by the granular detail of their new understandings of the world. How are their perceptions of reality evolving as a result of their new-found (if so) capacity to see through everything? And what remains after all this deconstuction?
And isn’t there a danger that our scepticism and growing cynicism about reality, history, cultural truth and media veracity may be delivering to the tyrants precisely what they are striving for? If we doubt or suspect everything, what have we left to hold on to, to stand upon, to say of: This much is true?
They need to approach this not in broad-sweep basis, but in a granular fashion that might stand a chance of engaging the imagination of the audience they would rapidly find. What we need is a novelistic treatment of things. Who are these people who construct our world and when do they do it? Do they wait until we are asleep before emerging like foxes to erect stage-sets that we will move through tomorrow believing them to be real?
Can everything really be bogus? Is the music we loved, far from being the creation of our heroes, something engineered by cultural manipulators, using bored geniuses to yawningly dupe and delude us plebs? Are our democracies and republics really simply corporations? If the Earth is flat, why do we fret also about globalism?
If everything is a hoax or a psy-op, what exactly is there of reality that we might trust, or count on, or even remember as the ‘reality’ we grew up in? Was that even reality? If not, what then is ‘reality’? A continuous, interwoven lie, from beginning to now? How big is the Big Lie? What’s left that is really true?
Would these people, James included, just before bedtime on Christmas Eve, gather their children together in the library and inform them that not only does Santa Claus not exist but actually neither does the Tooth Fairy, and — by the way — all that stuff they’ve been telling you in school, that’s all been made up by indentured clerks working under the direction of alien lizards, before heading out to the pub? I think they might need to stay a few minutes and comfort their ‘audience’, perhaps explaining the logic of mythology and metaphor and the beautiful lie, before running through again the bit about the world having really all the time been a tyrannical shit-tip.
Of course we should pursue facts and truth, but neither of these is especially useful unless they are accompanied by explication and consolation. Scepticism about the mendacious forces that assail our lives is a necessary and useful tool to help us to go beyond the constructs of man's inevitable tendency towards naïveté and self-delusion — perhaps under ceaseless brainwashing and manipulation — under the attrition of relentless wickedness and power-abuse.
But there are no prizes here for being the Smartest Boy (or Girl) in the Class. If we turn resistance against tyranny into a Sceptical Olympics are we not at risk of giving our tormentors what they desire? Are we not doing to ourselves what they seek to do to us: discrediting or eliminating our pasts, our formative experiences, even our memories, so that we have no histories, no reliable understandings about what is true or not true, even about ourselves?
It seems prudent to be cautious and sceptical about what we are told from quarters and sources which manifestly sustain themselves by telling lies; but therw is also the danger of getting carried away by the desire to be up with the conspiratorial Joneses. Are we in danger of being worn down by constant dismay about such discoveries to the extent that we believe nothing and no one?
And as Christians (when we are), how does it work? If the world as it has been described to us by our parents and teachers, and every crumb of information we’ve swallowed from the cradles, is utterly false, and nothing we can see with our eyes or hear with our ears can be taken on trust, where does that leave the two-thousand year-old story of the Son of Man manifesting miraculously in His mother’s womb, and then more or less disappearing for three decades before resurfacing as a wedding in a place called Cana, for which the sole source is a report written up in papyrus by a man whom no living person has ever met or seen? And, for that matter, can we really be all that certain about the Book of Psalms?
It’s worth quoting C.S. Lewis again on the drawbacks of the capacity to ‘see through things’:
‘You can't go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It's no good trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.’
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