The Preference for Conspiracy Infects Us All
Uncertainty is difficult to exist with. As human beings, we prefer clarity. We want to know how to feel about something as it is happening, to not have to struggle with the chaos-infused fog of “we just don’t know.” We’d rather be diagnosed with a serious disease than linger in hesitation about whether we’re sick. We’d even rather believe something horrifying if it affirms our cynicism than be told to not instantaneously leap to wild conclusions. After all, everyone else is leaping all around us, and we don’t want to be left behind. It can feel like waiting for information before forming concrete opinions isn’t even an option. It’s also what makes the pull of conspiracy so attractive in the immediate wake of an event like last night’s attempted attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
In the hours after it became clear that an attack had happened, the internet roiled in its typical, partisan turbulence of knee-jerk reactions. Republicans who were physically at the dinner, like Tennessee House Rep. Andy Ogles, a persistent contender for the title of the most virulently racist guy in Congress, didn’t waste a moment in beginning to describe the attacker as a liberal, despite the fact that this was before literally a single thing was known about the suspect, including his name. But at the same time, a counter-conspiratorial reaction was fomenting in real time, decrying the entire event as a false flag hoax orchestrated by the Trump administration. I watched this style of reaction pour in across every social media venue imaginable; anywhere that a person could lodge a comment online. On Twitter, on Reddit, on Bluesky, on mainstream news agency comment sections, people were leaping into frenzied speculation framed, in an exceedingly familiar fashion, as something akin to “I’m just asking questions.” Thousands of posts, thousands of upvotes, more or less zero information of value.
I never cease to be amazed at the granular details these kinds of posts will key into, to use as evidence of malicious conspiracy. On Twitter, I read as an account claimed that in the photo of the prone assailant eventually posted by Trump, because the shirtless man didn’t have a visibly distended vein in a certain location of his face, he was “not under stress” and this was therefore evidence that he was a complicit agent playacting as a gunman. Trump’s inevitable mention of his garish White House ballroom project in the following news conference inevitably kicked off another wave of certainty in those reveling in conspiracy: Obviously, the entire attack was planned just as a PR stunt for the sake of the ballroom! Right-wing media and influencers latching on en masse to the same “the ballroom would have prevented this” talking point–which should be considered inevitable and obvious–was advanced as further proof that this must have been the true goal of the federal psyop. Because potentially influencing public opinion about a stupid ballroom is clearly worth attempting a monumentally dangerous hoax involving live ammunition in a crowded D.C. hotel.
Hold on, let me scan for suspicious veins, or the lack thereof.
Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum. And in the immediate moments after a chaotic event of this kind occurs, the natural state is nothing but the vacuum of uncertainty. The human brain races to fill in that blank space with something, anything that makes sense. And what makes sense to one person or the other is typically what affirms whatever they already believe. It’s the path of least resistance.
As a result, people sweep through all of the information fired at them like a would-be assassin’s buckshot, and they look to select only those bits and pieces that fit the narrative starting point they favor, while telling themselves that they’re employing some kind of rigorous, level-headed, logical sieve to sort out the truth from the garbage. Actually employing a genuinely nuanced reading, however, would reveal something obvious: The moments following such an event are rife with misinformation to such a degree that almost none of it can be trusted, and to think that you can divine the objective truth is just another form of arrogance.
The misinformation I refer to isn’t even all malicious in nature, by the way, although some of it certainly is. Rather, so much of it is just the product of conflicting, contradictory accounts given by people who have no idea what they just experienced, bits and pieces of which are then adopted by the online commentariat and wielded as weapons against those who have gathered up contrasting bits and pieces to champion. The fact that the reports contradict each other (and they always contradict each other) is itself adopted as evidence that a conspiracy is happening. Oh, first the assailant was reported to be dead, but then we hear he’s alive? Oh, Trump wasn’t moved from his dinner table within the first seconds after gunshots were heard? Oh, Karoline Leavitt used the phrase “shots fired” earlier in the day? Oh, a panicked Wolf Blitzer happened to be nearby and wasn’t sure who the target was? Let me tell you why those details fit my brand new certainty that this was a false flag to manipulate ______, which just so happens to be one of my pet causes by complete coincidence.
The embrace of conspiracy breaks down everything we would otherwise believe, encouraging us to throw what we would have considered rational yesterday out of the window to embrace what we now want to believe. If you asked the person currently wildly theorizing online about a federal assassination hoax two days ago whether the Trump administration was hyper-competent and capable of keeping delicate information secret, what would they have said in that moment? In an administration ever rife with leaks and plain old-fashioned incompetence on every level, this is the one thing that they can perfectly organize and silence?
Conspiracy theories are an absolute menace.
Whatever your opinion of Trump, why would they "stage" an attempted attack on the White House and get hundreds of people to play along?
Seriously, get a grip on yourself if that's what you're allowing yourself to believe.
— Otto English (@ottoenglish.bsky.social) Apr 26, 2026 at 4:44 AM
No one is immune to this, and certainly not “the left” as a whole, as some of us are all too often able to convince ourselves. If anything, we increasingly see conspiratorial thinking as fighting fire with fire–if they’re going to indulge in believing that every event in the news secretly reflects their worldview, then why not your tribe as well? Make no mistake, the right has made this kind of knee-jerk certitude a hallmark of the highest levels of what is meant to be a dignified federal government: Look at the killings of American citizens by ICE and Border Patrol in Minnesota, where the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security didn’t hesitate a moment to label the likes of Renee Good and Alex Pretti as “domestic terrorists” before a single fact was known about them, and then refused to retract those statements months later. The lack of repercussions for jumping to these kinds of conclusions, however, has only made people of any political alignment more likely to continue doing so, an “ends justify the means” cynicism that extends ever outward as we rationalize that any actions we take to pummel our enemy are all justified. A year into Trump 2.0, and we now find ourselves cheering intentional Democratic gerrymanders necessary to combat intentional Republican gerrymanders, without even enough time to mourn our dismantling of American democracy performed in the name of necessity. What will we be rationalizing in another year?
That Donald Trump continues to drive extreme reactions should not strike us as some kind of surprise, nor do we need wild conspiratorial confabulation to understand what could be possibly driving a person like this attacker. Our President remains a dangerous, narcissistic lunatic with access to the world’s largest nuclear weapon stockpile, an unpredictable egomaniac who is still liable to get us all killed at some point. He is hated to a degree that few Presidents have ever been hated, and that’s during a period of unprecedented political polarization, when breaking away from your tribe is seen by many as a fate worse than death. Even in that setting, 70% of Americans say that life is getting worse on a daily basis, and they overwhelmingly blame Trump. And our society is as violent as it is angry.
The past 18 hours has featured the typical slow drip of details emerging about the perpetrator of this crime, the man who may in fact be named Cole Thomas Allen, and who may have sent a “manifesto”–because this is the one situation where we ever use that particular word–to friends and family in the moments before he made an incredibly ill-advised sprint past some seemingly lackadaisical Secret Service members. It would be pointless to wade into the details here, and we will no doubt learn far more about him in the days to come. But the chance that you or I, as American denizens of the internet, could possibly know exactly what compelled this man to travel across country (by train???), to embark on an assassination plot that had seemingly zero chance of success, is a probability that approaches zero. It may be comforting to embrace that certainty, but it doesn’t do us any good. Sometimes we just need to sit in the tortuous ambiguity and accept all that we don’t know.