Heightened Rationality

They hid the role of unicorns in Pizzagate, and what about the invasion of Mexican Chevys?

The 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The Sandy Hook massacre was a staged hoax by the Deep State. High-level democrats participated in a pedophile ring that met in a DC pizzeria. Barack Obama was born in Africa. No surprise then that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was the product of a conspiracy within the MAGA movement, a confrerie of armed queers, and the State of Israel. The Wall Street Journal just reported on the latter sort of stories now advocated by some brilliant people who are seeking the power to decide how you and I shall live (“Kirk Shooting Unleashes Flood of Conspiracy Theories,” September 20, 2025).

There are two reasons why such conspiracies—criminal acts planned and carried by large groups of individuals—don’t make rational sense. The first one is that no ordinary conspirator has an incentive to take such risks compared with the high personal cost he will incur if just one of the conspirators blows the whistle. Vast criminal conspiracies are not incentive-compatible. Look instead for Occam’s razor and look for the simplest hypothesis that explains what happened.

The second reason is that conspiracy theories, by their very nature, can never be disproved. The revelation of any new fact that refutes it is turned into further proof of the conspiracy. No conspiracy can be too complicated. (The equivalent in the Ptolemaic cosmological system was the addition of another epicycle to explain the presence of a newly discovered celestial body.) The Wall Street Journal reports:

“A poster on X with the handle PatrioticBlonde replied: ‘When Netanyahu speaks for two minutes about how Israel did not kill Charlie Kirk, it LITERALLY means Israel killed Charlie Kirk.’”

It should be noted in passing that if vast and complex conspiracies are organized, they are much more likely to come from one of the monstrous and powerful states that dwell among mankind. These states define what is criminal and have a repressive apparatus that can silence the whistleblowers and do the job. (More on this in my December 3, 2020, EconLog post on “Epistemology, Economics, and Conspiracies” and under its hyperlinks.)

In the current atmosphere of heightened rationality, we go from surprise to surprise. Who would deny that, say, an invasion of inexpensive cars from Mexico is threatening the prosperity of Americans and the security of their national state? About the “national security” tariffs targeting automobiles, a Wall Street Journal editorial sarcastically exclaimed (“Trump’s Auto Tariffs Starts [sic] to Bite,” September 10, 2025):

“Oh no, an invasion of Mexican Chevys!”