"These MAGA mouthpieces complaining about Candace Owens are just getting a taste of their own medicine."

That's the top-rated comment at the Washington Post article, "Conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s death are still raging, infuriating friends/Right-wing influencers sparred over the case this week as a court hearing laid out detailed evidence in Kirk’s shooting" (gift link).

"Contrast the way UFO belief operates with historical celestial apparitions, such as the aerial phenomena associated with the Virgin Mary in Fátima, Portugal..."

"... on October, 13, 1917. On that day, approximately 70,000 people reported witnessing a variety of celestial phenomena. The people ranged from devout Catholics to atheists and skeptics who were there to disprove the testimonies of witnesses. But the institutional church influenced the interpretation of that event, and the devout welcomed their interpretation. The UFO community is not as trusting. It is characterized by suspicion of conventional authority, be that the Catholic Church or the U.S. government. Rather than being defined by a hierarchy, UFO belief has been shaped by pop culture. For decades, films and television series such as 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars' offered cosmologies populated with advanced intelligences. These stories did not create belief in UFOs, but they helped establish a cultural vocabulary through which anomalous experiences could be understood. Most significantly, 'The X Files' popularized the idea that governments conceal knowledge about nonhuman intelligence.... Each new file release, leaked testimony or declassified video generates further interpretation rather than closure. The two most famous catchphrases from 'The X Files' — 'I want to believe' and 'the truth is out there' — express this perfectly...."

From "The UFO files reveal a hidden truth about a growing religion/Belief in alien life is on the rise — fueled by declining trust in institutions" (WaPo).

"About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged...."

".... according to a survey published Monday. Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans, according to a survey published Monday by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were also more likely than older people to think the incident was staged, according to the report."

WaPo reports, in "Many Americans think Trump assassination attempts were fake, survey finds/About 1 in 4 say the correspondents’ dinner shooting was staged, the poll found, including roughly a third of Democrats, as conspiracy theories spread widely online."

Is it Trump's fault?

"This is the permission structure for violence right there: We know they lie to cover up the crimes. We don't trust anything they say...."

"We're right when we promote conspiracy theories about the people we hate. We're right to do it because it's not our obligation to speak on behalf of truth. It's our obligation to speak on behalf of the way people feel.... People feel that there's something bad going on. Therefore, it's not our obligation to tell the truth about what's actually happening.... "

"I think that rock has been purposely dialed down in the culture.... All I know is I saw the gravity shift...."

"This gets wizard behind the curtain, right? Somebody's going to say, 'Well, how do you know who was the wizard behind the curtain?' All I know is I saw the gravity shift. Okay? If you were at MTV or around MTV in 1997–98, suddenly they decided rock was out—right when rock was still very, very high up—and it was replaced by rap. They immediately changed their standards and practices. Things that weren't allowed were suddenly allowed; people were waving guns. Okay, so some people assert that the CIA was involved in all that—again, above my pay grade—but I saw it happen. I did witness it happen. And of course great music came out of it. So it's not like a barren wasteland where something was pushed in to replace something else. Qualitative things and great artists came in, but there was this overt shift. I saw it happen. And then now... rap seems to be waning in terms of its cultural influence. Pop is completely dominant. Rock is probably the most dominant ticket-selling thing in the Western world, and yet there's almost no representation of rock in culture. So why do we have that schism? I think they purposely dialed down the ability of rock stars to have a voice in the culture...."

Says Billy Corgan:

"Yes, Kim Kardashian, we’ve been to the moon before … Six times!"

Said Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation and acting secretary and acting head of NASA, quoted in "Nasa tells Kim Kardashian: Yes, we’ve been to the moon before/The reality TV star had claimed that the 1969 moon landing was faked, repeating a popular conspiracy theory" (London Times).

Kardashian responded to Duffy’s critique on X, commenting under his post: “Wait … What’s the tea on 3I Atlas?!?!!!!!!!?????”

I've got a few questions:

1. Why is a government official calling out a private citizen who expresses interest in a conspiracy theory? We're Americans. We have our conspiracy theories. Keep your government nose out of our business. You're only giving more ammunition to the conspiracy theorists. Why stick your neck out to deny what isn't true? You're making it more fun to believe the theory!

2. Why did we go to the moon 6 times — 6 times, in rapid succession, and then no more? What was the sense of all those repeated trips and then to stop for half a century?!

3. What is the tea on 3I/Atlas? I just heard Joe Rogan and Elon Musk talking about it — "The thing about the 3-eye-Atlas"/"That's it's a hell of a name... sounds like third eye or something":

"A Russian scientist who is close to President Putin has told a forum of schoolteachers in Moscow that the West is planning to exterminate the majority of the Earth’s population..."

"... leaving a tiny elite whose needs will be serviced by robots. Mikhail Kovalchuk, the head of Russia’s Kurchatov nuclear research institute... alleged that western countries were plotting to unleash a deadly virus to reduce the number of people on Earth. He also claimed the West was using LGBT and child-free ideologies to cut populations because robots would soon be able to work better and more effectively.... 'They introduced the LGBT agenda and for those who didn’t go along with it, they offered a second option — the child-free family. It’s working brilliantly. In a generation or two, there’ll be no continuation of their bloodlines. Only a small elite, the ones they actually need, will remain. As for the rest — the people they don’t even see as human — they’ll be eliminated with biological weapons. A virus or something like that with a 90 per cent mortality rate will come along and mow them down'.... Kovalchuk, who has been described as one of Putin’s close friends, told... the teachers that their country’s only friends 'are the army and the navy'...."

From "Putin scientist claims West will use a virus to kill most humans/It’s all part of an LGBT conspiracy to depopulate the planet, according to a friend of the president" (London Times).

"Who calls their dad 'old man'? It's 2025! That text looks like it was written by my 74-year-old boss."

TikTok is suspicious of those Tyler Robinson/"Tyler Robinson" texts."

Joe Rogan is explaining the destruction of the hippie movement to Charlie Sheen....

"Just the provable actual facts are so nuts, that very likely Charles Manson was a CIA asset.... They had groomed him when he was in prison and taught him mind control techniques when people were high on acid, taught him how to be sober, but pretend he's on acid. And how to interact with these people that are on acid and shape their mind and even get them to commit murder.... Between 1960 and 1970 is like What?! This world is crazy. The music is crazy. The culture's crazy.... Everything is wild. It's very psychedelic.... They were like, We're losing control and power.... They actually pulled it off.... Oh my God, these hippies are murderous.... And our own goddamn government engineered it. They engineered, they stopped what was probably one of the most beautiful cultural shifts in this country's history that would've organically still kept evolving into other things that would've blossomed out of it.... that completely demonized any peace, love, and... any of that kind of movement. Those people became a real problem now, because you're now connected to Manson...."

The phrase in pink is contributed by Charlie Sheen. The rest is Joe. The 2 men are going on and on about conspiracies — and objecting to "this conspiracy theory pejorative" that "they" are "foisting" on us. And then — 2 hours after that clip above — they suddenly encounter the news of the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

The 2 men do not respond with freewheeling conspiracy notions. Sheen says, "Murder for having a different opinion from somebody else, different ideology from somebody else," and Rogan says, "Yeah." They read some of the instant chatter on line, and Joe says, "What a crazy take, like it might not have been someone assassinating someone for the wrong opinion."

The Coldplay Kiss Cam Conspiracy.

Meade told me he thought it was a set up, and I was like, no, how could it be? But I did agree to ask Grok. I asked:

About that Coldplay "kiss cam" couple: I heard speculation that someone inside the company who hated him and wanted him out somehow finagled the situation that brought him down. I said I didn't see how somebody in the company could have gotten control of the camera and set things up to play out the way they did. What do you think? Is there any way it could have been a setup?

Grok, of course, analyzed it in detail, and said, in the end:

"Trump’s Top Aides Spread the Epstein Conspiracy. Now They Are Trying to Kill It.

Today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast — transcript and audio at Podscribe.

Excerpt: "It's one thing to be on the outside when you can say whatever you want. There's no responsibility for proving anything. It's another, when you have to actually run the organizations you've spent years and years beating up and accusing of coverups, it only takes an instant for the outsiders to then turn on you. And I think that's what Pam Bondi is learning. That's what Kash Patel is learning, and that's what Dan Bongino is learning.... The day-to-day responsibilities that these people are bearing forces them to accept realities that folks outside the wall don't have to.... They may have ultimately stood on the path of truth here, but they've weakened their own position in the movement that elevated them...."

"Patel, Bongino and the other leaders are caught in a trap of their own making. The world they helped create, a world in which conspiracy destroys facts, is now the world they have to inhabit."

Said politics professor Russell Muirhead, quoted in "Once Champions of Fringe Causes, Now in a ‘Trap of Their Own Making’/Top leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are struggling to fulfill Trump campaign promises often rooted in misinformation and conspiracy theories" (NYT).

From the article:

The tension between practicing politics based on conspiracy theories and having to govern extends far beyond the F.B.I. and Justice Department’s problems with the Epstein case.... Days after the backlash over his Epstein comments, Mr. Bongino offered other promises — new investigations into other episodes that have gripped the president’s base: the discovery of cocaine in the West Wing during the Biden administration, the leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning abortion rights in 2022 and the discovery of pipe bombs near Republican and Democratic Party headquarters before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, an unsolved crime that has already consumed significant law enforcement resources.... 

Emerald Robinson, a former White House correspondent for Newsmax, made her frustration clear on social media. “Dan Bongino & Kash Patel know they destroyed their credibility by claiming that ‘Jeffrey Epstein killed himself’ so now they’re trying to offer up three investigations you don’t care about to misdirect you from the Epstein files you do care about,” she wrote. “Sad!”

"When asked why he removed classified material on Afghanistan, Biden admitted 'I guess I wanted to hang on to it for posterity’s sake.' That is precisely..."

"... what critics on CNN and MSNBC accused Trump of doing: removing material as types of keepsakes or trophies. One president was indicted for that and one was sent along his way to a second term in office. The real indictment that comes out of these tapes is a type of political racketeering enterprise by the Washington establishment. It took a total team effort from Democratic politicians to the White House staff to the media to hide the fact that the President of the United States was mentally diminished. If there were a political RICO crime, half of Washington would be frog-marched to the nearest federal courthouse...."

Writes Jonathan Turley, in "'For Posterity’s Sake': Why the Biden-Hur Tapes is a Virtual Racketeering Indictment."

But there is no "political RICO crime," Turley assures us. It's a conspiracy to do politics. In short, politics. Do you agree?

Transcending conspiracy theory: "We should instead be figuring out what they’re trying to distract us from with all this conspiracy catnip."

From Bret Weinstein, at X:

These attacks are connected to each other through Fort Bragg, and to the NJ drones, which are connected to gravity manipulation, which connects it all to UAPs for the alien inclined. And it’s all happening between the election and inauguration. It’s clearly designed to be irresistible to “conspiracy theorists.” The smart money is on the Deep State and its partners preparing to vacate their offices and switch modes. They want us chasing our tails, and we are obliging them. We should instead be figuring out what they’re trying to distract us from with all this conspiracy catnip.

"Who planted pipe bombs outside offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees in Washington on the eve of the attack on the Capitol?"

"Hoping to generate new tips from the public, the FBI is releasing more information about its pipe bomb investigation, including an estimate that the unidentified suspect is about 5 feet 7 inches tall. The bureau also is posting previously unreleased video of the suspect placing one of the bombs.... The FBI has assessed over 600 tips, reviewed about 39,000 video files and conducted more than 1,000 interviews over the past four years.... Surveillance video captured the suspect placing the pipe bombs near the committees’ offices between 7:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 5, 2021..... The FBI also is releasing closeup images of the type of Nike sneakers worn by the suspect. Fewer than 25,000 pairs of the same shoe were sold between August 2018 and January 2021, according to the FBI."

From "FBI releases new video of a suspect planting a pipe bomb near DNC offices on eve of the Capitol riot" (AP).

ADDED: Why is the FBI releasing this now? I assume it's part of a defense against the incoming Trump Administration, a way to claim they're been working on this all along. Ridiculous news about the person's height and the shoes they wore 4 years ago!

I see (elsewhere) that the shoes are Nike Air Max Speed Turfs with a yellow logo. If someone wore Nike Air Max Speed Turf shoes 4 years ago, what shoes would they be wearing today? 

"The report... includes details that will almost certainly fuel the 'fedsurrection' narrative that has been growing on the right and amongst Donald Trump supporters..."

"... The false notion that the federal government was responsible for instigating the attack.While the review found 'no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6,' the inspector general's office said that there were 26 confidential human sources in Washington on Jan. 6. None of them were 'authorized by the FBI to enter the Capitol or a restricted area or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6,' the inspector general said. A total of four FBI confidential human sources entered the Capitol, according to the inspector general, including one who testified during the Proud Boys trial in which several members of the far-right group were found guilty of seditious conspiracy. A total of 13 confidential human sources entered the restricted area around the Capitol, the IG report said, while the remaining 9 never entered the Capitol or restricted area...."

From "FBI missed 'basic step' when gathering intel in the lead-up to Jan. 6, DOJ watchdog finds/Investigators found no evidence of undercover FBI employees at the Capitol, but the presence of FBI informants could further fuel right-wing 'fedsurrection' conspiracy theories" (NBC News).

ADDED:

For those keeping score at home, this was labeled a dangerous conspiracy theory months ago. https://t.co/gNJPUuRp5U

— JD Vance (@JDVance) December 12, 2024

"I mean, like, what I think probably happened on January 6th where they withheld the police presence? If something happens, well, this will sink Trump forever."

"I mean, Pelosi, her people knew about this. They knew about possible plans to breach the Capitol. And according to J. Michael Waller, there was not one law enforcement officer present on the west side of the Capitol. How can that possibly be? But of course, the Senate Committee, they didn't investigate that. The House January 6th committee obviously didn't investigate that. I mean, those were also just whitewashes, committees designed to not get to the truth, but to cover up what probably happened. Okay. To get Trump. So I completely understand the suspicion that's out there. It's legitimate suspicion, and that's why this has to be fully investigated. I'm not going to rest until we uncover things. "

Said Senator Ron Johnson (text and audio at Real Clear Politics), asked about the assassination attempt.

"And let's face it, I uncovered an awful lot. I know firsthand how corrupt the FBI's investigation was. I've been a target of their corruption - the recipient of unsolicited briefings where they talked about being a target of Russian disinformation to try and obviously sabotage the revelation of the Hunter Biden laptop. But it kind of worked because we didn't take possession that when it was first offered to us. We went to the FBI to find out what they knew about it. They wouldn't tell us for weeks until the computer shop guy turned it over to Rudy Giuliani's attorney. The rest is history. So, no, these guys know what they're doing. They pre-sabotaged the Hunter Biden laptop. They completely, it was a complete corruption of the Russian collusion hoax. And by the way, has the Washington Post, have these guys given back the Pulitzer Prizes they earned or won for a complete false story, the narrative they promoted that put America in political turmoil, that it's still present to this day. I mean, where's the mea culpas in the media? You'll never get it. Because they're active advocates for the left themselves. That's the problem. Trump is not up against Kamala Harris. He's up against the leftist media."

"The discussion revolves around a video showing a person moving on a rooftop near where President Trump was shot, leading to widespread speculation..."

"... that the incident was an inside job. Many users express disbelief that the Secret Service and FBI could have missed the shooter, suggesting intentional negligence or involvement. The video, obtained by Fox News, has fueled further theories and calls for accountability, with some users pointing to additional suspicious activities and connections related to the event. The overall sentiment is one of deep distrust in government and media, with a strong belief that the incident was orchestrated from within the security apparatus."

Grok attempts to summarize the discussion at X.

Here's the Fox News story: "Video from Trump assassination attempt victim's POV shows figure moving on roof moments before gunfire/James Copenhaver was shot twice and critically wounded during the assassination attempt against Trump." Copenhaver, we're told, took the video (but he was not taking video at the time he was shot).

"[Thomas Matthew Crooks] was a straight A student. He participated in class discussions. He truly excelled in science and math and...."

"... was also known to be very competent working with technical stuff and computers. But he was also kind of isolated and quiet. People say he did not have a large circle of friends and he had virtually no social media presence.... He was online playing video games. And also he did a lot of searches.... he searched famous politicians. He, in addition to President Trump, he searched Joe Biden, but he also searched Merrick Garland, the Attorney General and Christopher Wray, the FBI director. And he looked up the dates of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago along with dates of Trump rallies. And he also seems to have looked into the British royal family.... They have not found a manifesto and they didn't even find any sort of political paraphernalia in his room. So there's a sense, I think, among investigators that he was really interested in famous people more than pursuing any kind of a partisan path.... With the caveat that investigators might find some connection, he looks a lot like the alienated young men that have been responsible for school shootings and other mass shootings.... In many of these shootings we've learned to accept some level of ambiguity. It's less about finding one cut and dried motive than a set of circumstances in a person's life. And I think that's where we're headed on this one."

Says Glenn Thrush, interviewed on today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "How the Secret Service Failed to Protect Trump."

Thrush does have that caveat — he says it twice in the interview — that investigators may find something more, but you see how a lone gunman theory emerges: He was another one of those isolated, alienated young men. It wasn't about ordinary political partisanship. He was looking for famous people, looking for fame. We'll probably never really know and will need to accept some level of ambiguity... that's where we're headed on this one.

"Good Lord. I do not want any of this to be the case. I'd far rather have the whole thing have been simple incompetence."

Wrote Jamie, in the comments to my post "Biden’s Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump’s Security To Allow An Assassination Attempt."

The post title is a quote from a Sean Davis article in The Federalist. Instapundit pulled out Jamie's quote for his post on the Sean Davis article.

Also quoted at Instapundit is a comment from Achilles: "At first glance every trained person in the world said one thing: Bullshit."

So how are you feeling — more like Jamie or more like Achilles? The Jamie position, if I may rephrase it, is: I hope the Secret Service is as bad as it would need to be for this to have all been mere negligence. The Achilles position is: The negligence theory is beyond belief.

I'm not one for jumping into conspiracy theories, but here, the idea that it happened through multiple levels of Secret Service failures feels more like a conspiracy theory. You have to strain and get creative to explain it. If you begin in the Jamie position and desperately hope there was no intent to allow a killer access, you have to struggle to explain how that could be.

Apologies to Achilles and Jamie if I've misstated their thinking or if they don't like their names being used in this way. I'll rename the "positions" if they object.