The Assassination Conspiracy Discourse Is Fantasy, Not ‘Theory’

It’s a relief that the bullet intended for Donald Trump merely grazed his ear and that he survived. But it’s to everyone’s misfortune that the bullet still hit a vital target: the thin skin of American political discourse. When that skin burst, what immediately spilled forth was a torrent of irrational conspiracism.

For anyone morbidly curious to learn how discourse devolves, it’s fascinating to watch the two political tribes devise totally incompatible conspiracy claims in response to the same event.

Soon after the news of the shooting broke, Trump supporters vocally speculated that the shooting was an “inside job” somehow orchestrated by Biden or the leftist deep state to eliminate their political rival. Meanwhile, opponents of Trump divined that he had staged the assassination attempt to generate iconic imagery of his strength and thereby cinch the upcoming election.

This reaction should have been expected. Assassinations have long been the fodder of American conspiracism (as decades of speculation about JFK bear witness). When a presidential candidate is almost killed in a hotly contested election year in the age of social media, we should expect all hell to break loose.

But especially because of social media, it is possible and instructive to observe conspiracist speculation evolving in real time. It’s an opportunity to learn something about what fuels so-called conspiracy theories and what (if anything) can be done to combat their spread. Is the remedy better fact-checking or is the sickness deeper than ignorance of the facts?

The pretense of evidence and cognition

A cursory look at history shows that conspiracies — secret, joint plots — sometimes really happen (nota bene the killing of Julius Caesar, the Watergate break-in, al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack, etc.). And we surely can collect and interconnect evidence to expose secret plots (as Woodward and Bernstein and the 9/11 Commission did). So it’s possible to formulate a rational theory that a conspiracy occurred.

Yet “conspiracy theory” is typically used to refer to irrational speculation about conspiracies. This pejorative use leaves no name for rational attempts to identify real conspiracies. So I use “conspiracism” to refer to the irrational mindset exhibited by “conspiracy theorists,” who are better termed conspiracists.

The problem with conspiracism is not that it seeks to theorize about conspiracies, which can be done rationally. The problem is that its products are not theories in the logical, scientific sense. They’re not even the formation of rational hypotheses. Something about the conspiracist mindset is deeply unscientific. The challenge is to show exactly what.  

Most people understand what’s flawed about brazenly asserting the existence of conspiracies in the complete absence of evidence. So it’s useful that the New York Times documented how quickly charges of conspiracy were flung after news of the attempt on Trump.¹ An anonymous X account alleged Biden’s involvement a mere four minutes after the first report, with a noteworthy right-wing provocateur (Laura Loomer) spreading the same claim to her million followers only thirty minutes later. That’s precious little time for gathering facts, let alone for logically analyzing them.

But most conspiracism is not as easily dismissed as baseless assertion. Most conspiracists usually offer some semblance of evidence and argumentation, which lends a sheen of credibility to the notion that they are “theorists.” For instance both the left- and right-coded “theories” about the assassination attempt point to the surprising failure of the U.S. Secret Service to prevent the shooter from climbing to the roof of a structure with a clear line of sight to the former president’s podium. How could this happen without some intent to let it happen, they argue?

The shooter’s unlikely success at getting so close to killing a ward of the Secret Service is a real and verifiable fact. So it’s not the complete omission of facts that is the signature of the conspiracist mindset. To understand the destructive appeal of this mindset, it’s crucial to see how a sheen of credibility is exactly what conspiracists try to create, by faking the look of real thinking.

The fact of the shooter’s success is a fact, but facts aren’t evidence for a hypothesis unless they logically support it to at least some degree. But conspiracists are only pretending that the shooter’s unlikely success is evidence for their claim. The fact of his success, by itself, does not speak to what could have made his success possible, let alone that it must have involved someone helping him (a conspiracy).

Anytime a mystery needs to be solved, there’s an effect with an unknown cause.  If simply not yet understanding how something happened is evidence of a conspiracy, every mystery is evidence of a conspiracy. That’s of course ridiculous — as is every deployment of the fallacious argument from ignorance (supposing that some positive conclusion follows from a mere absence of knowledge).

Finding evidence of a conspiracy means finding some evidence of joint secret plotting. Here it would mean finding likely traces of another agent’s knowing involvement in the shooter’s actions, for instance: information or resources or money likely given to the shooter by someone else. And even then if one finds evidence that someone must have helped him, it requires even more and specific evidence to determine who and why.

But conspiracists don’t care about whether their facts really are evidence for their claims or not. They think if they muster enough facts and wave their hands to connect various dots, they can create that sheen of credibility that they’re actually trying to discover the truth using these facts. But there’s a difference between playing with facts and using them to know the world.

The arbitrary dismissal of counterevidence

Another sign of conspiracists’ pretense of cognition is how they react to criticism of their claims, specifically how they react to counterevidence.

When arguing with an honest inquirer posing a rational hypothesis, it makes sense to inquire about whether there’s enough evidence to ground a particular hypothesis, and so to point to other evidence of better explanations of the phenomenon in question.

So if an honest inquirer is trying to explain why the shooter wasn’t stopped sooner, we could point to the fact that there are numerous plausible reasons that don’t involve conspiracy. We could point, for example, to the inherent difficulties of identifying a threat that is by its nature surreptitious, of coordinating the multiple agencies involved in a response to it, of doing all of this in the presence of a massive crowd that could pose other threats.² We could point out that countersnipers may have had good reason to hesitate before shooting another human being (especially in light of the repercussions of being wrong). We could point to the adage that one should “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”³

We do need real investigation into what enabled this shooter to get as far as he did. But the reason it’s needed is precisely because we don’t know what happened. At the beginning of most investigations we don’t even know enough to ground any particular hypothesis.

But conspiracists aren’t engaging in honest inquiry, and no attempt to point to alternative explanations for puzzling phenomena will satisfy them. With the same zest that they pretend to have evidence for their claims, they’ll pretend to have reasons to rule out alternative explanations.

Could the delay in taking out the shooter be just because of a lack of information or the need for confirmation? No, conspiracists claim, because one of the countersnipers himself claimed (on conspiracist den 4chan) that he was given orders not to shoot even after he’d identified the sniper. Of course there is no evidence that this easily manufactured internet post is from a real police sniper, and a real person with such a message would find a more credible outlet.⁴ But that doesn’t stop the conspiracist from circulating it.

Isn’t it unlikely that this was a left-wing plot to kill Trump given that the sniper was a registered Republican? No, conspiracists claim, because his voter registration could have been faked, and because he once appeared in a 2023 commercial for the investment fund BlackRock, and so must have been groomed by the deep state to be a secret assassin. There is of course no reason to think his voter registration was faked, or that involvement with the commercial provides any evidence of being a leftist (let alone that he was part of a plot). But some people don’t like investment firms, so conspiracists bring up his fleeting connection with some larger organization to distract from the original point (that there is evidence that the killer doesn’t quite fit the profile of a disgruntled leftist).

Left-leaning conspiracists function the same way. Doesn’t the fact that Trump came close to death undermine the idea the shooting was staged for propaganda value? No, conspiracists claim, because an actress thinks he could have faked his injury with a Hollywood blood capsule.⁵ There’s no evidence that he did this — and a bystander was actually killed by the bullets that didn’t strike Trump. But the leftist conspiracists don’t want to talk about that.

Honest inquirers, when faced with counterevidence, usually abandon or at least reduce the probability they assign to their hypotheses. Conspiracists, by contrast, double down on their “theory” by baselessly asserting what would have to be true to dismiss the counterevidence.

Neither true nor false

All of this helps show why “conspiracy theories” are not even rational hypotheses, let alone real theories.

Whether conspiracists brazenly assert there’s a conspiracy, or claim this using only a pretense of evidence, or dismiss counterevidence using similar pretenses, the underlying mindset is the same. There’s a conclusion they want to believe, and they’re willing to use their imagination rather than actual evidence to arbitrarily manufacture the appearance of intellectual confidence and cognitive processing.

It’s this mindset, driven by political wishful thinking and the imagination rather than honest assessment of the evidence that accounts for the immediate proliferation of multiple, incompatible “theories” about the same assassination attempt.

Partisans of both camps want to be able to blame their political enemy, and they can imagine scenarios from which their enemy would benefit. So they generate the simulacrum of evidence that such a scenario exists and put their imagination into overdrive to insulate their claim from refutation. This especially helps show why their claims are not conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracy fantasies.

The problem with the conspiracist’s willingness to insulate their claim from refutation goes well beyond being “unfalsifiable” and thus merely unscientific. To falsify a claim you have to understand the meaning of what you’re falsifying. But fantasies masquerading as theory have no definite meaning to be confirmed or falsified in the first place. They’re not based on the only source of definite cognitive meaning: evidence derived from the senses.

If you ask me to imagine a flower and then ask me how many petals it has, there’s no answer to this question. It doesn’t have any until I’ve arbitrarily decided how many. The same goes for prophecies and conspiracy fantasies. When someone sees an event he wants to blame on a favorite enemy but has no specific evidence of his enemy’s involvement, most of the details still need to be filled in as well. So it’s no surprise that there can also be wildly incompatible conspiracy fantasies about the same event. And it’s no surprise that they can formulate wild explanations on the fly to dismiss counterevidence. Nothing about their original “evidence” constrains them.

Arbitrarily generated fantasies can’t be falsified because they aren’t strictly speaking false. To be false they’d need to be trying to make a meaningful claim about reality that doesn’t line up with reality. But fantasies don’t claim something meaningful about reality in the first place. As some philosophers have alleged of string theory, the fantasies are “not even wrong.” They’re of course also not right. They’re cognitively meaningless, neither true nor false.⁶

Conspiracists sometimes try to defend their practice by saying that there are claims once dismissed as “conspiracy theories” that ended up being proved true. There have, of course, been real conspiracies for which evidence has emerged. But even if evidence did emerge someday of Biden’s or Trump’s or some other nefarious party’s involvement in this assassination attempt, it wouldn’t show today’s conspiracists are “right.” They’re not justified advancing their baseless claims, and because their claims have no definite meaning, any claim eventually proved would not be theirs. One man’s fantasy does not transform into another’s evidence-based theory.

Don’t help them pretend

You don’t fight a fantasy with facts. This is why the solution to the spread of conspiracism is not better fact-checking.

To an unsuspecting audience interested in the truth but unaware of the conspiracist mindset, it can be helpful to point out alternate explanations for the puzzling anomalies conspiracists point to as “evidence” for their claims. But this is only a courtesy to the honest, and futile unless it’s accompanied with a condemnation of the baseless dishonesty of the conspiracist claims that cause confusion for people trying to be rational.

Conspiracists engage in the pretense of cognition not just because they want others to believe their claim, but also because they want to convince themselves that it’s okay to believe it, that they’re not dishonest hacks ginning up fantasies. So to engage in argumentation with the conspiracist as though he’s really honestly gathering evidence is to assist him in his pretense, to help him pretend to himself and others that he really cares about the truth when he doesn’t. This is why conspiracists need to be dismissed as dishonest, not argued with.

The psychological defect that gives rise to conspiracism wouldn’t drive public discourse if it weren’t empowered unwittingly by rational people. So stop trying to debunk conspiracists as though they care about the truth. Stop calling them “theorists,” a term that ought to be reserved for practitioners of the scientific method. Start calling them out for the dishonesty of spreading baseless claims. And work to resist the temptation to let wishful thinking drive your view of the world — including about the motives of conspiracists.

Images credits: Marko Aliaksandr/Shutterstock.com and Damir Khabirov/Shutterstock.com.

1. Tiffany Hsu, Sheera Frenkel and Ken Bensinger, “The Gunshots Rang Out. Then the Conspiracy Theories Erupted Online,” New York Times, July 15, 2024.
2. Tim McMillan, a security expert, outlined multiple considerations about how difficult it would have been to coordinate multiple law enforcement agencies at an event like Trump’s on July 13.
3. Robert J. Hanlon, in Arthur Bloch, Murphy’s Law Book Two (Mandarin, 1981).
4. There’s of course no way and no reason to show that there is no evidence for a claim that’s been arbitrarily asserted. The problem is that none has been offered. But it is meaningful to check obvious places that could confirm the story. Snopes.com did this and came up with nothing. See Anna Rascouët-Paz, “4chan Poster Was Police Sniper at Site of Trump Assassination Attempt?,” Snopes.com, July 15, 2024.
5. Kelly Rissman, “Trump spokesman calls HBO star ‘mentally disturbed’ for claiming assassination attempt was staged: ‘A moronic take’,” Independent, July 17, 2024.
6. For more on this conception of the arbitrary as neither true nor false, see Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Median, 1991), 163–172.