Last month, at a Saturday afternoon open-air rally in rural Pennsylvania, former U.S. President Trump was grazed by an assassin’s bullet, which left three others injured and two dead, including the shooter.
The FBI quickly identified the gunman as Thomas Matthew Crooks, an intelligent but friendless young man with an affinity for firearms. Investigators have so far been hesitant to ascribe a clear motive to his actions. This has encouraged many to fill the knowledge gap with assumptions, gossip, and dubious conspiracies.
In such a politically charged context, it is routine for sensationalist conspiracy theories to proliferate quickly.
But as with Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman who killed John F. Kennedy in 1963, it appears the July 13th would-be assassin acted alone. Whereas conspiracy theorists often place too much faith in government and others to organize behind the scenes, the truth in many cases like this is more banal.
In the July 13th case, multiple law enforcement agencies were responsible for security that day, and some, tasked with covering the building shot from, were inside due to the heat. Others, like the Secret Service, busily texted each other about the suspicious individual, but differing responsibilities meant a gap in security opened up. The shooter exploited that.
Similarly, in 1963 in Dallas, Oswald, an ex-marine marksman, perched at the window of a nearby schoolbook depository overlooking Kennedy’s open motorcade. Gaps, opportunity, and a lone gunman coalesced to kill Kennedy, not a conspiracy.
While conspiracies do exist – such as the Nixon White House’s conspiracy to cover up the Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters – incompetence and luck exist, too.
But the other interesting angle in all this is the Trump shooter’s profile: he is reminiscent of umpteen lone offenders who have perpetrated assassination attempts, vehicular attacks, and mass shootings over the past decades. More often than not, these are troubled and lonely young males who feel powerless and ridiculed, who, with little warning, transmute their feelings of shame and despair into shocking attacks against accessible victims.
Their targets are often symbolic, chosen for their proximity, vulnerability, and representative value and for the level of media attention the act will elicit. Like countless others, the Trump shooter suffered from social isolation, enjoyed gunplay, studied the tactics of other shooters, and planned his attack in advance.
Such acts are often imitative of other lone offenders and influenced by cult films, fringe political ideologies, or conspiracy thinking. Though they lose their lives in the process, they “win” by becoming a national headline or an historical icon. Case in point: Sixty years after the death of President Kennedy, is anyone not familiar with the name Lee Harvey Oswald?
Violence perpetrated by alienated loners is nearly impossible to prevent. It also leaves onlookers perplexed. Moreover, sociological explanations often leave us with no clear solutions or culprits to blame. These are not the sorts of answers people find meaningful and uplifting, nor will the major media wish to bore their target audience with complicated analyses by long-winded academics and finger-wagging social critics.
Stories about nefarious plots have always found fertile ground in public discourse, not just on the political fringe.
But speculative conspiracy claims would not gain so much traction were it not for a widespread culture of victimhood that runs on both sides of the political fence. Though the substance of our nightmares may differ, the rhetoric of paranoia displays a similar set of symptoms across the political spectrum.
These include interpreting every anomaly or enigma as proof of deception, projecting one’s fixations onto the mind of one’s rivals, demanding more freedom than one is willing to give others, demonizing one’s opponents, refusing to empathize with “the enemy,” and rejecting compromise at all costs.
Conspiracy theories are useful crowd-sourced myths that emerge and evolve to meet the cognitive needs of people in an emotional crisis. They help us simplify a complex reality into an understandable narrative. They help explain unpleasant events and separate the world into unambiguous categories of “good” and “evil.” They give us a sense of purpose and help us justify our actions. Most importantly, they allow us to claim the moral high ground in our life story – the conspirators are powerful, evil men behind the scenes, while the rest of us are innocent lambs. In short, we crave a simplistic take.
But because conspiracy theories are by nature speculative, born of a mixture of rumours, assumptions, and known facts, it can be very hard for their proponents to distinguish truth from fiction. If the theory offers a more satisfying explanation of reality than a dispassionate expert can offer, they will continue to shape the worldview of those whose emotional needs depend on them being true.
In short, conspiracy theories are empowering and self-affirming narratives, but they are also dangerous buck-passing devices that invite self-delusion and social conflict.
Michel Jacques Gagné is a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, author of Thinking Critically About the Kennedy Assassination (Routledge, 2022), and host of the Paranoid Planet podcast.
