American Conspiracy
I fell down a rabbit hole the other day and found myself staring for too long at this image.
This happens about once every year or so.
If you’ve never seen the image before, chances are you don’t see much of anything in it. Perhaps some clouds. Perhaps you wonder if this is an aerial shot over an ocean, maybe an island.
But this is, ostensibly, the man that shot JFK. This is “Badge Man”. Supposedly found within the Mary Moorman photograph of JFK’s assassination, the badge man image is an extreme blow up of a very tiny portion of the Mary Moorman photograph.
Now I’ve told you that this is the assassin on the grassy knoll, chances are you can see him. The hint of what may be a police badge, the outline of his head, the discharge from the gun as he fires at the president. If you go further down the rabbit hole, you might come to believe that “Badge Man” was Officer J.D. Tippit who was later shot by Lee Harvey Oswald1.
This is of course, pareidolia. There is nothing in that image above, your brain just wants to make sense of visual information (in the same way our brains tend towards apophenia when faced with overwhelming systems). Even if there was something there, the part of the image that has been blown up would have such limited visual data in it that it would be near impossible to tell what was there.
This is the full Mary Moorman photograph, “Badge Man” is is supposedly where the small red circle appears near the top-middle of the image.
I was reminded of all of this while watching American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders this week. The story is something I had been aware of for decades. As a documentary series, it’s okay. It’s certainly well made and has an interesting hook in but I suspect it will be too amorphous for the general Netflix viewer that wants that next true crime hit. It’s vague, shambolic in its target. Which makes it a good overview of the Danny Casolaro murder given the way the murder has a tendency to shift and take on a kaleidoscopic refraction depending on how you look at it.
It is however, limited in its scope. There is far more to the proposed Octopus cabal than the series even hints at.
What it does do well is situate the viewer in the point of view of a conspiracy theorist.
It also talks about a supposed ‘real’ Zapruder film and suddenly I’m looking at the badge man image again for the umpteenth time in my life and falling down a rabbit hole of the three tramps, triangulation of rifle fire, the change in the parade route and thinking about how I need to finish American Tabloid, again.
It seems odd to say in the present day but I love conspiracy theories. I’ve loved them since I was a teenager.
Not in the sense of believing them but more being fascinated by them and their theorists. I love the world building, I love the idea (though not the actuality) of the secret histories they concoct. I love the way they tell us things about, particularly, the United States that aren’t true but reveal deeper truths (indeed, the number of things that have been at one time a conspiracy theory involving shadowy arms of the US that have ended up having a great deal of truth to them is astounding to put it lightly).
Indeed, some of the formative texts for me as a writer as laced in conspiracy theory. The Illuminatus Trilogy by Wilson and Shea. Foucault’s Pendulum by Eco (which really is where the thread in his work that the written word creates reality comes to the fore). The World’s Greatest Conspiracies by Vankin and Whalen (which sounds like a book by cranks but takes an ironic, detached view on its various conspiracy theories that I find amusing).
But what American Conspiracy most reminded me was that once upon a time there was rigour conducted by those that theorised. Casolrao spent years interviewing people, putting together the jigsaw puzzle that was unfolding in front of him. Yes, ultimately the majority of conspiracy theories are untrue but they are constructed by people putting together a dataset and then arriving at the, generally, wrong conclusion. There is work that is being undertaken.
Which all seemed to change with 9/11.
The conspiracy theories that sprung up, essentially as the attack was unfolding, was based on nothing or in some cases a simple gross misunderstanding of how things work. It is not worth out time to try and dismiss the various theories that it was an inside job or that the whole anti-semitic thing about Building 7. What is more fascinating about the 9/11 theories is that they are not based on much of anything at all except a wilful disregard for logic and reality.
As Vinkin and Whalen say in The World’s Greatest Conspiracies:
This willful, almost gleeful flight from all rationality is exasperating, to say the least. When those airliners crashed into the WTC, the towers collapsed and along with everything else in their path, crushed a noble American tradition of creative suspicion. The greatest conspiracy theories, represented throughout this, represent the sincere pursuit of truth by minds that refuse to follow the party line, even when the party line seems like the only route through the darkness.
The 9/11 theories are essentially a pro American, America is the sole superpower theory. That something so severe, so psychically scaring for the nation could only have been carried out by itself.
Of course, the public was primed for this sort of theory given The X-Files and the increasing use of the internet.
So it should be almost no surprise that the end point for all of this American conspiracy theory would be QAnon. For the uninitiated, QAnon is a theory based on an intelligence agent in the US (or possibly even Trump) that has Q clearance (essentially the top level of security clearance based on the Department of Energy’s clearance schema) posting on 4chan (and later 8kun) in a cryptic fashion and detailing a secret war where everyone on the left, including politicians and Hollywood elite, are paedophiles.
Except it is so much more than that. In many ways, QAnon is a meta-conspiracy theory. It happily accepts almost all other conspiracy theories within its bounds and has grown to be a beast of a theory that isn’t so much about anything as it is about other things that can fall under its banner.
I mean, look at this thing:
But more than paedophiles, which is essentially just a remix of Pizzagate (wherein DNC emails leaked by Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign were considered to have code words pertaining to the ordering of children for nefarious purposes, which lead to a guy storming a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. with a gun), QAnon captures some wild elements.
Adrenochrome (famously a drug invented by Hunter S. Thompson for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).
JFK Jr is alive and will be Trump’s running mate.
Mole people.
Deep Underground Military Bases.
COVID denialism.
The Wayfair company shipping children in cabinets.
Bug eating.
And The Deep State.
It is here that QAnon departs from other conspiracy theories. Generally, conspiracy theories demonstrate a deep mistrust in power and government institutions. The government is the one covering things up, they are withholding the secret knowledge of alien visitations, super advanced technology and that squirrels have been able to speak English since 1984.
While there are still elements of that present, certainly the deep state is the main foe, it inverts itself and sees Trump as the saviour figure. Not just Trump now, post presidency and insurrection, but Trump while he was president. Here was the most powerful man in the world and he was at war with the deep state for the future of America.
Let’s take a moment to speak on the deep state. Like many terms we hear in 2024 (‘woke’ being the other big one), the right wing has co-opted the term and dissolved it of its meaning. The deep state is a thing that often occurs in developing nations (and some developed nations) most often when there is an outsized military that cannot be constrained by the bureaucracy. This will often mean that nexii of power will form outside the bureaucracy that can then leverage that power for political gains.
This is not the case in the US. The US has a vast bureaucracy but it isn’t a deep state. Really what’s happening is that the right wing just doesn’t like the policy settings that exist in the country at present.
But none of this theory has been developed by any sort of work or rigour. Someone that pretends to have Q clearance makes cryptic statements on the internet and then adherents of the theory try and make sense of what is being said.
I have to believe that there are two elements that have led to the explosion of the theory and the fact that despite there not being any new posts from Q for months people are still believing.
First, QAnon is far more interactive than most conspiracy theories. In the past (accepting if you were one of the people chasing threads down a rabbit hole to craft a theory), consumption of conspiracy was largely a passive experience. You read about the JFK assassination, or you read about theories to do with 9/11, or aliens, or those damn squirrels.
But QAnon has audience participation baked in. “Q” posts online and the audience needs to decipher the message (and yes, like all churches, there are schisms based on meaning in this one). Which is a pretty good way to hook people in.
It also serves as a means of understanding why QAnon has seen considerabe uptake outside the US as well (which leads to awesome situations where dumbasses in places like Australia try to quote the US constitution as a defence for their actions).
Second, QAnon is about Trump and about his grievance politics. Think about it for a second, Trump was president, waging a secret war and yet at every turn the deep state managed to defeat him. For all “Q’s” predictions, Hilary wasn’t arrested for sacrificing a young child to harvest their adrenechrome. Trump didn’t usher in a golden age where he served as president/Orange God-Emperor for eternity (cause he lost the 2020 election, hell he couldn’t even stop the deep state stealing that election from him).
Which reflects the grievance politics of his base. Those that fear that they are becoming a minority demographic. That a woke agenda is being pushed on their kids so they will all grow up to be drag queens. That America has lost its way and needs to return to a simpler, better time (which in actual fact was far worse for a lot of people).
In the same way that Trumpism is the logical end point of the GOP project over the past four decades, where the other side is an existential threat to the nation; QAnon provides a logical framework to understand that particular brand of grievance politics. There is a saviour but they are locked in an eschatological battle, and only through the efforts of concerned patriots deciphering internet messages and memes will they be victorious.
Its a politics that denies reality, that believes itself to be the victim in all cases.
It is something that provides insight into the current state of the GOP as we head towards the 2024 election (which is going to be a mess and will almost certainly have another January 6 like event at some point I’m sure).
Plus Biden is both a hologram and also a guy wearing a Mission Impossible style mask.
Before you get too confused, it would have worked like this. Tippit was the assassin who shot Kennedy and was in league with whatever conspiracy was at play. Meanwhile, Oswald was the patsy for the JFK assassination but his part in the plot was to kill Tippit so that the real assassin would never be able to speak.