Scarcely had the last warmth drained from Charlie Kirk’s body than the theories began to take shape. It wasn’t a leftist killing, as common sense and all the recent evidence would tell us: it was something else entirely.
In the 11 months since, an entire Charlie Kirk-truth industry has sprung up; a whole ecosystem of podcasters, armchair theorists, exaggerators, suspicious and conspiratorial fantasists, all trading in tendentious, half-baked, outlandish fairy tales about how and why the most important young conservative in America was murdered in cold blood.
With freedom and the march of progress, anger and resentment don’t diminish. Paradoxically, they grow
At the centre of this tangled web sits Candace Owens, who may or may not have the largest podcast in the world, depending on who you believe. Ask Grok for a list of the things she’s said about the killing and your head will start to spin. The suspect, Tyler Robinson, is a patsy. He wasn’t even on campus that day, and the messages he sent his friends, including several confessions, were all faked by the feds. Charlie Kirk was killed by Israel. He wasn’t shot at all. He was killed with an exploding microphone. Freemasons were involved. Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, was also involved, and so were prominent members of Turning Point USA. Oh yeah – the Egyptian military and French First Lady Brigitte Macron (actually a biological man) were in on it too…
The “paranoid style” is back in a big way. As if you needed reminding. Richard Hofstadter identified it in his 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” as a “persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population.” Under the right circumstances, however – with the help of a religion, say, or “certain historical catastrophes or frustrations” – that mixture of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy” could become a mass movement or a political party.
Irruptions of that kind have been a feature of American life from the very beginning, Hofstadter said. In his own time, that meant “extreme right-wingers” like Barry Goldwater and Senator McCarthy finding Reds in every closet and under every bed, but before that there was the populism of William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic brouhahas of the early 19th century.
It’s hard not to see this deranged paranoia rising up again – just look at the response to the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the mother accused of killing her three children. Over the last month, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of American women have consumed and created social-media content about the trial that’s every bit as bonkers as anything Candace Owens or your local pizza-delivery boy would say after taking a massive rip from his jumbo bong.
Inside the courtroom, prosecution and defense are in total agreement: Lindsay Clancy killed her three young children (Cora, Dawson and Callan). The basic facts of the case are not in dispute. On the evening of January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy asked her husband to go out and get some takeout food and medicine, and while he was gone she strangled the children to death in the basement with a set of rubber exercise bands. She then slit her wrists and jumped from a second-story window. When Patrick returned, he found her outside – still alive – called 911, before making a far worse discovery downstairs.
Beyond the courtroom, however, those agreed facts mean nothing. Go to Instagram or TikTok and you’ll discover the trial is a sham and a coverup. Lindsay Clancy was framed: forced into a confession. Her husband killed the children, and then threw her out of the window. He did it so he could start over with a new woman (his current wife, a fertility doctor from New York). It was all planned, and the authorities are going along with it, for some reason.
Women are filming videos of themselves hanging out of windows to prove Lindsay didn’t jump; they’re daubing their wrists with dish-soap to demonstrate why the blood-spatter evidence is wrong. They’re consulting astrological charts to show the Clancys were a “toxic” match (Gemini and Leo, heaven forbid). They’re obsessing about Patrick Clancy’s footwear. And some are just working entirely off, well, vibes. One user posted a picture of Patrick Clancy and explained that “thousands of woman [sic]” are “triggered” by it, “because those are the eyes of a covert narcissist, and we’ve all looked into those before.”
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as just another sordid little episode on social media, and it is pretty sordid. Attention-grabbers, people looking to profit from misery with likes and shares, and of course the way to do that is by being as sensational as possible. But there’s more to it than that, I think.
Far-fetched theories help us make sense of a world that eludes our comprehension and our grasp. That was Hofstadter’s basic argument. In particular, when groups are shut out of the political process, “they see only the consequences of power… and have no chance to observe its actual machinery.” And so they make stuff up to explain it.
What’s so strange about today is that the right – the main target of Hofstadter’s essay – aren’t shut out of politics at all. America has the most radically right-wing government since at least World War Two. And yet the paranoid style is back with a vengeance.
And what about America’s women – what are they trying to make sense of right now? Perhaps it’s just the scarcely believable idea that a mother could murder her own children. The Greek story of Medea, who murdered her children to spite her husband, Jason, has lost none of its terrible force over 2,000 years in the telling. But why, then, do they find it so much easier to believe a father would do it? Why does this version of the story apparently make so much sense that, in the face of all the evidence and the testimony of Lindsay Clancy herself? Why does it have to be the father?
The overwhelming sense I get is that the women of social media want it to be Patrick Clancy. That’s why all the mental convolutions and twists and turns. Patrick Clancy is the patriarchy, that omnipresent, untouchable structure of oppression that still determines every aspect of women’s lives, or so we’ve told for decades and decades. But here’s the rub. Rather than being shut out of power, women have more than they’ve ever had. The patriarchy simply doesn’t exist, if indeed it ever did in the form feminists describe.
With freedom and the march of progress, anger and resentment don’t diminish. Paradoxically, they grow, becoming more diffuse and more subject to stimuli of the kind described by Richard Hofstadter. This was a tic Ted Kaczynski diagnosed in the “oversocialized” leftist. Even though objective conditions are in alignment with their values – the Developed World becomes fairer and more equitable; anti-racism, gender equality, environmentalism are sacred causes guiding society – somehow the leftist’s discontent and desire for revolt increase.
Women are so in control they don’t know what to do with all that anger and resentment.
Oh, wait, yes they do: destroy another innocent man!
Or am I the one being paranoid?
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