War of the Worldviews
The Trump Shooting and Epistemic Divorce
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These gods had the same interests as the citizens themselves, and in times of war marched to battle in the midst of them. [...] In the combat the gods and the citizens mutually sustained each other, and if they conquered, it was because all had done their duty.
Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, p. 123.
Within hours of the Trump shooting, the internet had burst into a general inferno of conspiratorialism, some of it more fantastical, some less. As the dust begins to settle, it is clear that this is bad news for the liberal democratic machine, who can’t seem to stop losing no matter what happens. But we will get to that. The dust has not yet quite settled, and the situation is still volatile.
As always, we are here to help you zoom out and take the long view of what’s happening. In this article we will draw together a few threads that we have been working out on this Substack. By the end you will see that what has happened is a very big deal indeed. But let us begin from the beginning.
The End of History
We are, almost all of us, civic nationalists today. We have spilled a lot of virtual ink laying out the groundwork for an alternative to civic nationalism, but this has met with some resistance even by the right, and even by the ethnonationalist right. Old habits die hard.
The basic formula of civic nationalism is that your tribe is your belief. You are more connected to someone because they, like you, believe in equality, the divinity of Jesus, or for that matter, in Odin. Blood might matter, sure. But for the civic nationalist, blood without belief can be abandoned.
Liberals are the ultimate civic nationalists. Even if they’re not nationalist at all, they still have a “tribe”, and that “tribe” is what we call propositional—their core identity is a set of propositions which they affirm as true.1 Their real family is a community of shared belief. This is why liberals are much more likely to end friendships and even families over politics.2 Their tribe is their belief.
Liberals exist only epistemically. Once you grasp this, liberal intolerance becomes perfectly rational, and not at all a contradiction—questioning their ideology is questioning their existence, because there is nothing behind them but a set of beliefs.
Epistemic pluralism is an existential threat to the liberal. Because he exists only epistemically, for people who reject his core propositions to live near him is as threatening to him as it is for you to live with hostile foreigners who want to kill you. In fact, he is far more extreme than you on this count. Because ideas are not geographically bound and spread virally,3 the fact that even one person who rejects his core propositions exists at all somewhere in the world, is an existential threat. All propositional identity is like this—to feel secure, it must hunt down and exterminate everything that is not itself.
Liberalism, as the ultimate propositional identity, waged this war of extermination from the French Revolution to what we call the “End of History” in the 1990s. The fall of the Soviet Union marked the fall of the last alternative to liberalism.4 At that point, no real opposition to liberalism existed—we lived in what we shall call the epistemic longhouse. Sure, China was nominally “communist”, but even Deng Xiaoping didn’t care if the cat was black or white as long as it caught mice. From the beginning of time to the End of History, each political great power had its own set of concepts, imperatives, and political language, and none could truly understand the other. By the turn of the 21st century, even a Chinese communist, a Muslim theocrat, and a secular humanist spoke the same political language, obeyed the same basic imperatives, and framed the world by the same concepts. The epistemic worlds of mankind had been growing fewer since at least the Axial Age,5 and now we had finally collapsed them all into one, which we call “modernity”.
But it is not given to man to know the gods’ will. Somehow, inexplicably, impossibly, the epistemic longhouse of modernity began to fracture.
Epistemic Divorce in Real Time
Liberalism cannot survive pluralism. Conventional wisdom considers liberalism pluralistic, but this is to misunderstand it. It is ethnically pluralistic. But it is epistemically absolutist—it can brook no ideological opposition. Any serious questioning of liberal ideology is a “threat to democracy”, even when that threat is elections themselves.6 Liberalism responds allergically to questioning of any kind.
Ironically, modernity itself has produced conditions that the epistemic longhouse which we call liberalism, cannot survive. It is important that we understand these conditions before moving on to Trump.
Some of the conditions that undermine the epistemic longhouse result from the triumph of liberalism itself. Liberalism is allergic to pluralism, so the barest whiff of ideological opposition sends it into a sneezing fit, trying to expel the virus. The machine is thin-skinned, so in response to even the mildest threat it overreacts like a hypochondriac in a hospital ward. It may enact totalitarian measures such as those seen in 2020, or it may import loyal voting blocs en masse from the third world.7 These reactive measures then undermine social trust in elites and social institutions more generally.8 This collapse of social trust pushes normal people into “echo chambers”, which makes the machine yet more insecure, so it enacts totalitarian measures, etc.—we have here a vicious circle brought on by liberalism itself, a circle which balkanizes people into separate epistemic communities and breaks the hegemonic hold on information.
Other conditions that undermine the epistemic longhouse are technological. Before the 2000s, mainstream media enjoyed a monopoly over public opinion. But the rise of web 2.0, which blurred the line between information creators and consumers, broke this monopoly. The rise of Myspace, YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms provided people with alternative sources of music, video, news, etc. And as it turned out, vestigial media such as cable TV and The Guardian were woefully overpowered by millions of superior creators. Mainstream platforms began haemorrhaging money, and in a bid to survive, they developed the paywall model which rewarded paying customers with premium content. The effect was that the likes of The Guardian paid less and less attention to normal people, as it had done in the golden age of monopoly. The nature of the paywall model forced them to kowtow to only their most committed and fanatical user base, causing these mainstream platforms to themselves become more fanatical and extreme.
By the mid-2010s, the growing divide between separate epistemic domains could not be ignored. The 2016 campaign and election of Donald Trump exacerbated this divide by prominently platforming someone whose political beliefs were from a generation before, someone who was opposed—however mildly and inoffensively—to the liberal consensus of infinite “progress” forever. The result was a reflexive convulsion that forever undermined Americans’ belief in civil political discourse. In the totalized proposition nation—where belief is identity and identity is belief—half the country came to regard the other half as mortal enemies. We had arrived at the epistemic divorce.
The left understands the epistemic divorce in its own crude and hysterical way as the ‘post-truth’ era, which it thinks was inaugurated by Trump talking about “alternative facts”. In reality the epistemic divorce has been a long time coming, and the Trump presidency was simply when the differences became irreconcilable. At this point it became clear that divorce was inevitable, and the ‘post-truth’ era has been one prolonged spasm of a dying civilization, an animal twitching at the side of the road.9
By the middle of Trump’s first term, social trust was on life support. All this was bad enough until the development of AI, which has acted as a force multiplier for social distrust. It’s bad enough that different epistemic communities have their own fact-checkers, think tanks, and media silos. But at least a neutral observer could, in principle, evaluate the facts objectively. AI makes even that impossible. Now it is possible to create fake audio and video that is just as convincing as the real thing. Now all facts—real or “alternative”—sink down under a cloud of suspicion. Because humans suffer confirmation bias, everything you see that threatens your worldview is immediately suspected as a “deepfake”. Social trust was already on life support—AI has pulled the plug and thrown the body into a wood chipper.
And the liberal democratic machine has finally gotten the memo about AI.
The question is no longer whether AI deepfakes could affect elections, but how influential they will be, said Ajder, who runs a consulting firm called Latent Space Advisory. […]
As the U.S. presidential race heats up, FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned about the growing threat, saying generative AI makes it easy for “foreign adversaries to engage in malign influence.”10
The machine is not worried about Russia or China—it is worried about the “malign influence” of its own people. Big Tech companies have signed an “AI Pact” agreeing to restrict the use of AI on their platforms to maintain a unipolar narrative.11 The World Economic Forum released a “Global Risks Report” citing AI as one of the main risks to the epistemic longhouse.12 This year, the FCC banned certain uses of AI for normal political purposes.13
This wave of anti-AI sentiment by elites is happening not primarily because AI can be used to fake information, but because it confers a relative advantage to those without institutional power—it democratizes spreading misinformation, which the mainstream media has had a monopoly on for decades. What AI does, as social media and web 2.0 did before it, is to level the playing field for epistemic communities outside the mainstream. Any narrative emerging from these communities that contradicts mainstream narratives has a special name—conspiracy theories.
Is the Conspiracy Theory in the Room With Us Right Now?
The right-winger has been much maligned as a conspiracy theorist. Some of this is undeserved. What counts as a “conspiracy theory” is selectively defined by the security state in order to prohibit certain ideas by law.14 Truth or falsehood does not seem to be an element in the definition—the COVID “lab leak” hypothesis is widely considered a conspiracy theory but is actually true;15 the theory that Trump won the 2016 election because of help from Russia is false but “not a conspiracy theory”.
But there is something to the stereotype of the right-winger as conspiratorial.
A study by Stephan Lewandowsky in 2013 found that people tend to engage in conspiracy theory a) when they feel disempowered, and b) when they don’t like where things are going.1 Those who are the most disempowered and the most upset about direction of society are, today, people on the right. So, this alone would predict right-wing conspiratorialism. But there’s another side to this too—conspiracy theories are also highly correlated with religiosity. This makes a great deal of sense given our agency-sapience hypothesis, and Ed Dutton explains why.
Quite how we came to believe in gods is unclear. One possibility is that there is an evolutionary advantage to over-detecting agency. When you hear a sound in the forest and you assume it’s a wolf then if you are wrong you have lost nothing and if you are right then this will have saved your life, so there is an advantage to over-detecting agency and so perceiving evidence of it everywhere, even behind the world itself.16
The political right has agency-sapience—it sees agency in the world, even when it is not there. The political left has agency-blindness—it sees no agency in the world, even when it is there.
The political right consists mainly of people who are traditional in their outlook, usually because they are religious, and they are religious because they tend to see agency everywhere they look, even in nature itself. The left is the opposite. This is also why the right tends to believe in the “great man theory of history” whereas the left believes in “trends and forces” theories—if you see will behind everything that happens, you are more likely to be right-wing.
Agency detection is also correlated with pattern recognition.17 If you see patterns in nature (including even imagined patterns), you are more likely to detect agency, thus to be right-wing. This is likely evolved behaviour, arising from a suite of adaptations protecting human populations from threat, which right-wingers are also more attuned to.18 The takeaway is this—when people engage in unfounded conspiracy theorizing such as with QAnon, they are essentially overdosing on pattern recognition and agency detection.
So there is substantial truth to the stereotype of the right-winger as conspiratorial, just as there is substantial truth to all stereotypes. And the liberal democratic machine despises conspiracy theories—first, because it is biased toward the far left, which has no feeling for pattern recognition or agency detection; and second, because the hegemonic power in society is threatened by so-called “conspiracy theories”, because they strengthen epistemic communities outside the mainstream and push the epistemic divorce along. The liberal democratic machine is essentially a form of technocracy—rule by expert—and conspiracy theories of any kind undermine the cult of the expert that this technocracy relies upon as its legitimating myth.19
But as we have alluded to, the left has been increasingly conspiratorial since Trump’s election in 2016. The Mueller probe failed to turn up anything but minor, coincidental, and ineffectual links between the Trump campaign and supposed “Russian interference”. However, this did not stop a widespread conspiracy theory—one that utterly dwarfs the influence of QAnon on the right—that Trump had Putin to thank for his election to office. Conspiracy theory is no longer confined to the political right, but has spread to the left.
The Trump Assassination Attempt
On July 13, 2024, Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, when he was shot by a gunman perched on a low roof at a distance of about 175 yards. The bullet grazed Trump’s ear, leaving him with only minor injuries. This was no minor event—had the gunman aimed a hair to the right, he would have killed Trump and we would be in a very different timeline right now. But it was not long before the internet turned a serious incident into a mythic one. Everyone, except the mainstream media it seems, saw wilfulness and agency in what happened. The only disagreement was “to what end?” The war of the worldviews had begun.
Some of the views expressed were neutral and sane. In response to Jack Posobiec asking “how was a sniper with a full rifle kit allowed to bear crawl onto the closest roof to a presidential nominee”, Elon Musk tweeted that this was “extreme incompetence or it was deliberate. Either way, the [Secret Service] leadership must resign.”20
Other, more conspiratorial views, leaned right. Quoting Joe Biden saying “we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye”, US Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia said “Joe Biden sent the orders.”21
But the real story here was the vast number of left-wing conspiratorial views. Posting an AI-doctored image with no apparent awareness of it, user “Lakota Man” tweeted “Fake blood. An upside American flag. I ain’t buying it. Too perfect.”22 Implying that it was staged. Many others agreed, deciding that Trump had used a gel pack to fake the injury. User “the Old Man Ebro” tweeted “When did Secret Service start allowing the President under duress to tell them “to wait”, then stand up to be seen by the crowd fist-pumping? Can you blame me for thinking this is fake?”23
The conspiracy theorizing was not limited to anonymous users either, but parts of the Democratic Party’s machine:
The top political adviser to Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman suggested that the attack on Donald Trump could have been “staged,” even as Hoffman was criticized for joking before Saturday’s attack about Trump becoming a “martyr.”
The adviser, Dmitri Mehlhorn, apologized for his remarks after Semafor published this story, and said his email laying out his claims was “drafted without consultation from team members or allies.”24
Adjacent to the left-wing theorizing, completely unhinged takes gained traction too. User “Brother Berg” tweeted “Trump "shot" on 13/7 (137 the 33rd prime #) That's 3030 days after his tombstone appeared in Central Park, as well as 3333 days after Beau Biden died, 33 weeks 3 days after the JFK anniversary, and 3 months 3 weeks 3 days before the election.” though it was unclear from the context what we are supposed to do with this information.
Schizophrenic breaks aside, the left has grown just as conspiratorial as the right, maybe more so. And the security state has sat up and taken notice.
Karl Folk, a researcher studying authoritarianism and radicalization at Augsburg University in Minneapolis and founder of the Institute of Unreality, a disinformation research initiative, said this “more conspiratorial mind-set has become more pronounced in liberal circles over the last eight months.” [...]
“What you’re seeing now is both political parties in the U.S. showing signs of heightened conspiracism,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.25
The political right has long accused the left of hypocrisy in calling the right “religious”. The right is indeed traditional in its religiosity. But the left is no less religious, if by religious we mean a leap of faith acceptance of the mystical and unfalsifiable. The liberal believes in the supernatural—equality and human rights. The liberal believes in blasphemy—political correctness. The liberal believes in eschatology—a great battle against the far right followed by multicultural utopia. The liberal even believes in sainthood, miracles, and baptism—see the outpouring of religious fever at the site of the criminal George Floyd’s death.26 The white liberal also sees agency in the world once again. He sees conspiracy behind the Trump assassination. He sees conspiracy behind the Trump election. He sees all these things because he is becoming religious again, and Trump is his Satanic figure.
War of the Worldviews
The left and the right are locked in what is essentially a religious struggle. Each is attempting to craft an eschatological myth, and Trump is emerging as the central figure in both.
For the left, Trump is a Caesar figure who must be slain by a virtuous republican Brutus. Shortly after his election, the Shakespeare in the Park festival put on a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar play with a thinly-veiled Trump figure cast as Caesar, who was gleefully butchered to rabid approval.27 In the mind of the Keith Olbermanns of the world, suddenly, for no reason at all, Middle America was bamboozled by a smooth-talking huckster into taking its own side, whereupon it undertook to roll back all the progress that sassy feminist retarded dwarfs fought and died by the millions for in the Great Battle of Berkelingrad in 1967, and that wouldn’t be very groovy at all, man.
The myth that the right has crafted is quite different. On this view, the American civil service has been infiltrated over generations by unelected, hostile elements that wish to change America’s values to “socialism”.
The mainstream political right being oafish and naïve, has believed until now in some sort of compromise. But the attempt on Trump’s life threatens to change that myth to something much more volatile, and this is the true danger of the epistemic divorce—until now, the security state has been able to get a handle on its more extreme elements and boil the frog slowly. But recent developments threaten to communicate to the political right that the solution is no longer political.
A new myth is emerging. Yes, the civil service has been infiltrated over generations by unelected, hostile elements that wish to change America. But according to this embryonic myth, the change this “Deep State” wishes to bring about is to erase America’s founding stock as a sort of penance for imagined crimes against humanity. According to this myth, the Deep State is driven by resentment against the biologically healthy, has arrayed itself against normal people, and wants them dead. And according to this myth, just as in the left-wing myth, there can be no negotiation—this is an existential struggle of absolute good against absolute evil. Your boomer Dad is beginning to think this way. And that is a very dangerous thing.
The Trump shooting has put some rhetorical ammunition in the right’s belt. Many facts about the shooting simply do not add up. Shortly after the shooting, spokesman for the Secret Service Anthony Guglielmi stated that “Theres an untrue assertion that a member of the former President’s team requested additional security resources & that those were rebuffed. This is absolutely false. In fact, we added protective resources & technology & capabilities as part of the increased campaign travel tempo”.28 However a video then surfaced showing bystanders pointing out the shooter crawling with full rifle kit on the roof from where he shot Trump:
After the shooting, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle issued a statement, part of which read as follows:
Secret Service personnel on the ground moved quickly during the incident, with our counter sniper team neutralizing the shooter and our agents implementing protective measures to ensure the safety of former president Donald Trump.29
But the counter-snipers were in place well before the incident and held off firing until after the shooter opened fire. This plus the fact that bystanders had alerted the police long before this, meant that were aware of the shooter and ignored him. What’s more, this was all known to the Secret Service (as evidenced by the counter-sniper team) and Trump was still allowed to continue his speech rather than being pulled off the stage as a basic security measure.
Not long after the shooting, a streamer calling himself “Destiny”, a prominent figure on the left, began gloating and cheering over the death of Corey Comperatore, the innocent bystander who was killed by the gunman while protecting his family, with Destiny sending a barrage of tweets such as “This is the fucking retard that got killed at the Trump rally? FUCKING LMAOOOOO”.30
With rhetoric like this, which is anything but uncommon, with a Secret Service who stands down as a presidential candidate gets shot, and with a mainstream media that begins headlines with “Nothing justifies an assassination bid, but…”,31 the right’s myth that the left wishes to biologically exterminate them is becoming dangerously persuasive.
The risk is that the boomerish myth of “socialism replacing our democracy” will itself be replaced with the stronger myth of “hostile foreign elements replacing our children”. Moaning about “malevolence and division”,32 denunciations of “political violence”,33 and laments over conspiracies “to the detriment of civil discourse”34 ring especially hollow when trumpeted by the side stoking all the division, engaging in all the violence, and putting forth conspiracies in mainstream news. All this serves to legitimize the right’s more edgy narrativizing.
The war being waged is a war of narrative, and the left is losing ground hand over fist. But we might ask ourselves—if mainstream media is so far to the left, why are they complaining about the “more conspiratorial mind-set [that] has become more pronounced in liberal circles”?35 And we are now in a position to answer. There is nothing more dangerous to the epistemic longhouse, as we have been calling it, than a wide Overton Window. When the range of allowable opinion is narrow, opinion can easily be contained. When the range is wide, opinion balkanizes and becomes impossible to control. Left-wing conspiratorialism, driven by the left’s reawakened religiosity, is as much a threat to the liberal democratic machine as right-wing conspiratorialism.
The epistemic divorce is underway and nothing can stop it. Neither side will back down. It is too late to call for rapprochement. This is a war of narratives. A war between myths. A war between gods.
They Carried Their Gods Into Battle
Carl Schmitt wrote a book called Political Theology in which he showed, quite decisively, that liberalism is anything but a form of secularism. Liberalism, like all ideology, is at bottom a stunted theology—in liberalism’s case, a kind of deism that grows out of Christian metaphysics.36 We are seeing the return of overt theology to political discourse. At long last, the kabuki mask of secular political theatre has been thrown aside.
But war is not carried on today as it was in the days of theology. It is not even conducted today the way it was in Schmitt’s time. War has become ever more abstracted from the battlefield.37 No longer do we live in the days of 3G blitzkrieg warfare, nor even in the days 4G of guerrilla warfare, where the battle front was already blurred but at least “over there”. We live in the age of 5G informational warfare, where the battle front has moved to home, and anyone could be an enemy combatant. War has become abstracted from violence, but war has become more totalizing, and as the left tells us, “words are violence”. That is a dangerous brew that threatens to spill over into bloodshed.
This is a war of ideas, a war of ideals. At long last, after thousands of years, men again carry their gods into battle with them. War is so abstracted it could be decided with a single shot, maybe none at all.
Postscript
If you want to dig deeper into the ideas put forth in this article, here is a list of links with more:
Your tribe is your belief — https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/deep-civic-nationalism
Ideas spread virally — https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/viral-vs-organic-propagation-27f
The epistemic divorce — https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/the-epistemic-divorce
The Axial Age as a collapsing of epistemic worlds — https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/the-axial-turn
The generations of warfare — https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/out-of-the-barrel-of-a-gun
What myth is and why you need it to win — https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/trump-as-myth
Imperium Press, Deep Civic Nationalism. You will notice that Imperium Press Substack articles are not linked in the footnotes. This is because Substack has a stupid way of handling these links in footnotes. See the Postscript at the end of the article for the links.
Imperium Press, Viral vs. Organic Propagation.
In reality, communism is just liberalism made consistent, but let us put that aside for now.
Imperium Press, The Axial Turn.
Adam Grant, “Elections Are Bad for Democracy”, New York Times. https://archive.is/JGzhs
For the impact of ethnic diversity on social trust, see Alesina and La Ferrara 2002; Hero 2003; Delhey and Newton 2005.
Imperium Press, The Epistemic Divorce.
See the creation of the “Disinformation Governance Board” as part of the Department of Homeland Security, an advisory body used to police speech if so-called “private” companies would or could not do so on the security state’s behalf.
Imperium Press, Foundations of the Right I: Agency.
For more on this, see Josh Neal’s Understanding Conspiracy Theories (Imperium Press, 2024).
Ibid.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (University of Chicago, 2010), p. 59.
Imperium Press, Out of the Barrel of a Gun.
This is tangentially related, but I feel the need to comment on J.D. Vance. He is married to a Brahmin with whom he has children. It's hard to imagine him going against civic nationalism; I doubt he will willingly push for anything the regime can't ultimately contain. I've seen Americans bigging him up, but I would hope that's merely out of politically expediency. We can't forget that things will not improve until power is vested in our own folkish leaders.
Question is what happens when Trump, the myth, accomplishes mass amnesty and brings in millions of Indian migrants, and then tries to cajole his base into supporting it.