Home

🔒 So, The Right Suddenly Isn't Into Conspiracy Theories Anymore

S Peter Davis

12 Dec 2025 — 9 min read

Something has disturbed the "authorized heterodox narrative"

Here’s a banger of a tweet from Christopher Rufo, one of the aspiring Grima Wormtongues of the emerging American dictatorial theocracy:

Golly gee, the Right has begun leaning into conspiracy theories, has it? Nobody could have predicted that, it’s completely unprecedented.

Rufo might easily be the most bad-faith and disingenuous figure in Trumpworld but he’s not the dumbest. He knows full well that the spiritual genesis of his movement was Trump’s accusation as far back as 2011 that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and there was a very elaborate high-level conspiracy to cover it up. He knows that half or more of the most significant figures in MAGA, including some high in the administration, give at least some credence to something called QAnon, which resembles the X-Files mythology canon with more imageboard memes.

"You're not going to believe this, Scully, but the whole thing began with a frog man who pulled his trousers down to his ankles to pee standing up. Said it felt good, man."

He knows that a significant driver of Trump’s 2016 success was driven by a story that Hillary Clinton was literally eating children in the basement of a DC pizza restaurant, a comical “Satanic Panic” offshoot that was pushed very seriously by close Rufo associates Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec.

Make no mistake, Rufo has no qualms whatsoever about the far-right media apparatus being “consumed by conspiracy” in cases where this benefits him and the narrative he takes care to construct. He himself made a valiant and hilariously far-reaching attempt to manufacture an investigative journalistic basis for the infamous “Haitians eating cats in Ohio” lie, a story that was pushed by JD Vance last year after it was made up and suggested to him by Canadian neo-Nazi Geoffrey Martin.

The crisis that Rufo, and several other notable MAGA figures like Matt Walsh, are struggling to deal with right now isn’t the absurd notion that the right are only now being “consumed by conspiracy.” The crisis is that the conspiracy narrative has spun out of their control.

If you’re fortunate enough to have no idea what Rufo is on about here, this is essentially a further development in the Nick Fuentes civil war that I’ve been writing about, but calling it a civil war is a bit of a misnomer for what is essentially a structural collapse. Wars tend to have two sides, while this is much harder to follow.