The Conspiracy Is the Cover Story

The truth is right in front of your eyes

Iran-Contra was a conspiracy. Members of the executive branch of the United States, operating outside the knowledge of Congress and in direct violation of the Boland Amendment, ran a covert weapons-sales program to Iran and used the proceeds to fund a paramilitary force in Nicaragua. The operation involved Oliver North in the National Security Council, William Casey at the CIA, John Poindexter as National Security Advisor, and, at various levels of awareness, President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. The conspiracy was uncovered, hearings were held, indictments were filed, several of the conspirators were pardoned. The documentary record is in the National Archives. The conspiracy was real. It happened.

The 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh by the Central Intelligence Agency was a conspiracy. The 1974 secret oil-for-security handshake between Henry Kissinger and the Saudi royal family was a conspiracy. COINTELPRO was a conspiracy. MK-ULTRA was a conspiracy. The tobacco industry’s coordinated suppression of cancer research for forty years was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the Master Settlement Agreement filings. The Sackler family’s strategy to addict tens of millions of Americans to OxyContin was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the bankruptcy filings. The NSA’s PRISM program was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the Snowden archive. The Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the CIA assessment that the United States government attempted, briefly, to suppress before having to release.

These are conspiracies. They share a structure. The structure is that an operational coordination existed, the coordination produced an outcome that the participants intended, and the existence and operation of the coordination is supported by the documentary record. They are not theories. They are facts.

Pizzagate was not a conspiracy. The Great Reset was not a conspiracy. The 9/11-as-inside-job theory was not a conspiracy. Chemtrails are not a conspiracy. Lizard people are not a conspiracy. The election was not stolen by Italian satellites controlling Dominion voting machines through Hugo Chávez’s ghost. Adrenochrome harvesting is not a conspiracy. QAnon’s the Storm was not a conspiracy. The moon landing happened. The vaccines were not bioweapons.

These are conspiracy theories. They share a structure. The structure is that an imagined coordination is asserted, the coordination is held to produce outcomes that no actual coordination of the kind described could plausibly produce, and the assertion is unsupported by the documentary record except through a chain of motivated misreadings and outright fabrications. They are not facts. They are theories about facts that do not exist.

The distinction is not subtle. The distinction is the difference between knowing how the world is run and pretending to know how the world is run. The distinction is the difference between Daniel Ellsberg and Alex Jones. The distinction is the difference between James Risen and Steve Bannon. The distinction is the difference between the Panama Papers and Q drops.

But this is not a piece about that distinction.

This is a piece about what the distinction is for. Because the distinction has a function, and the function is what I want to examine.

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In April of 2022, the journalist James Pogue published, in Vanity Fair, a long piece called Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets. Pogue is a serious reporter — a contributing editor at Harper’s, the author of Chosen Country, a writer who has, over the last decade, made it his work to enter rooms most journalists do not enter and to come back with what was said in those rooms. The Pogue piece was the result of months of access. He sat with J. D. Vance during his Senate campaign. He sat with Blake Masters during his. He met with Curtis Yarvin. He attended the National Conservatism conferences. He listened to the men who are now running the second Trump administration describe, in their own words, what they planned to do if they got the power.

What they described, in their own words, was the end of the American republic.

They did not call it that. They called it the postliberal restoration. They called it the American Caesar. They called it the retirement of the administrative state. They called it RAGE — Retire All Government Employees. They called it the founder-king. They called it the national CEO, or what’s called a dictator. They used the words. They used them in front of a reporter. Pogue wrote them down. Vanity Fair published them. The piece has been available on the open internet, behind no paywall stricter than a magazine subscription, for four years.

Vance, asked directly by Pogue why what he was describing was not a fascist takeover, replied that if it worked it would mean that his son would grow up in a world where his masculinity, his support of his family and his community, his love of his community, was more important than whether it worked for fucking McKinsey. Pogue printed the quote. The quote does not deny the framing. The quote answers a question about whether a project is fascist by saying that the project is justified by its hoped-for cultural outcomes. The quote is the kind of quote a careful man does not give a reporter unless the careful man has already made his peace with what is going to be said about him after he gives it.

Yarvin was, of course, the philosophical centerpiece of the Pogue reporting. Yarvin, who has written under the name Mencius Moldbug since 2007, has been arguing for two decades that American democracy is a sham, that the Cathedral — his term for the linked apparatus of universities, prestige media, and federal bureaucracy — runs the country in the name of a managerial-class consensus that has nothing to do with the consent of the governed, and that the solution is the installation of a national CEO with the powers of a dictator, who would retire all government employees, dismantle the constitutional order, and run the country like a startup. Pogue summarizes the position in Yarvin’s own grammar. The position is on the record. Yarvin has spoken it on Tucker Carlson’s show. He has said it on podcasts. He has said it at conferences. He has said it in front of Vance and in front of Thiel and in front of audiences who applauded.

The Pogue piece is therefore not, in any meaningful sense, a piece of investigative journalism that uncovered hidden information. It is a piece of reportorial witnessing that documented information that was already public, because the men who hold the information have not bothered to hide it. They have been describing the project openly for ten years. The project is not a secret. The project is publicly stated, in books — Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change, Adrian Vermeule’s writing on common-good constitutionalism, the entire postliberal corpus that has been produced by Notre Dame and the Claremont Institute and the Edmund Burke Foundation since 2016 — and the books are on Amazon and the conferences are on YouTube and the Twitter threads are still up.

The conspiracy is in plain sight. The conspirators are giving interviews. The interviews are in Vanity Fair.

And almost no one is reading them.

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This is the part I want to get to.

The argument I have been building across the last four days — the relay piece, the Steyer endorsement, the 1953 coup piece, the Hitchens piece — has been that the apparatus operating against the American republic is a coalition of three things. It is the petrostate-derived sovereign wealth flowing through MGX and HUMAIN and the Qatari Investment Authority into the American AI build-out. It is the American technology class — Thiel, Andreessen, Musk, Sacks — that has spent the past decade engineering the political conditions for the build-out. And it is the political-intellectual class — Vance, Masters, Hawley, the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, the postliberal theorists, the Yarvin-influenced network-state writers — that is providing the legal-constitutional-philosophical scaffolding for what the technology class and the petrostate money are paying to build.

The apparatus is a habit at the level of the petrodollar — at the level of the institutional reflexes of the CIA, the State Department, the Treasury, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has been running the empire since 1947. That part is a habit. Habits do not require conspiracies. They require only that institutions act on the assumptions that have produced their incentives for long enough that the assumptions become invisible.

But there is, inside that habit, a new thing. The new thing is the project Pogue documented. The new thing is the conscious attempt by a specific group of named men, working with specific named funders, through specific named institutions, to end the American constitutional order and replace it with something else. The new thing is a conspiracy in the operative sense. It is coordinated. It is intentional. It has documents. It has a strategy. It has, as of January 2025, the executive branch.

The thing inside the thing. The conspiracy inside the habit. The active operation inside the passive structure. The 2026 American Caesarist project lives inside the seventy-three-year-old petrodollar apparatus, drinks from the same fountain, draws on the same money, employs the same men. But it has its own agency. It is the apparatus becoming conscious of itself and trying to seize the steering wheel.

It is documented in a Vanity Fair article from April 2022.

And almost no one read it.

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I want to describe what was in front of America for four years and why America did not see it.

The Pogue piece named John Eastman. Eastman was a founding director of Claremont’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. He authored the six-point memo that proposed the procedural mechanism by which Vice President Pence would refuse to certify Biden’s electoral victory on January 6, 2021. He was present at the command center on January 4 and 5. He spoke at the rally on the morning of January 6 before the crowd marched on the Capitol. He has been criminally indicted. He has been disbarred. The conspiracy is documented. It is in the indictment. It is on the public record.

The Pogue piece named Michael Anton. Anton wrote the 2016 Flight 93 Election essay under a pseudonym, the essay that argued that the 2016 election was the cockpit and that conservatives had to charge it or die. Anton served in the first Trump administration as a deputy assistant for strategic communications on the National Security Council. He returned to Claremont after the first administration ended. He has been a featured speaker at the National Conservatism conferences. He has written for American Mind, Claremont’s online journal, articles describing the necessity of a Caesar-like figure to break the administrative state.

The Pogue piece named Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin has been the philosophical guru of this network for fifteen years. His ideas — the Cathedral, the national CEO, RAGE, the patchwork, the sovereign corporation, the red pill — have moved from his blog into the speeches of senators, the published books of theorists, the campaign rhetoric of presidential candidates, and the operating assumptions of the men now running the United States government. He has been to dinner with Thiel. He has been on Tucker Carlson. He has been at conferences with Vance. The Vice President of the United States has cited him by name.

The Pogue piece named Peter Thiel. Thiel is the funder. Thiel paid for Vance’s Senate campaign. Thiel paid for Masters’s Senate campaign. Thiel has funded the Edmund Burke Foundation, which puts on the National Conservatism conferences. Thiel has been the patron of Yarvin’s intellectual production for at least a decade. The Thiel network is the financial substrate of the entire postliberal project. The conspiracy is not metaphorical. It is the cap table of a specific set of nonprofits, PACs, and political campaigns, and the cap table is public, and James Pogue wrote it down.

The Pogue piece named the Claremont Institute. Claremont has, since 2016, become the institutional spine of the project. Anton is there. Eastman was there. The American Mind is there. The Sheriffs Fellowship, which the Claremont Institute created in 2021 as what its own fundraising letter described as a countervailing network of uncorrupted law enforcement officials — that is, a network of conservative county sheriffs trained to resist federal authority during a contested election — is there. The funding for Claremont in the period 2019-2022 included $800,000 from the DeVos family foundation, which also funds the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the James Madison Center for Free Speech. The donor network is documented in IRS 990 filings, which are public, and which several journalists, including the staff at Accountable.US and the Capital Research Center, have walked through and published.

The Pogue piece, in short, is the document. It is not a leak. It is not an exposé. It is a report. It is a description of an active political project, named by name, funded by named funders, expressed in the words of its named participants, intended to produce the end of the American republic as understood since 1787.

The piece was published in Vanity Fair. The piece has not been retracted. The piece has not been disputed by any of the people named in it. The piece exists, and the four years that have passed since it was published have produced exactly the political outcomes that the people in the piece described they would produce if the political conditions permitted.

The piece was not a warning. It was a roll call.

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I want now to say what this has to do with conspiracy theories.

There is a thing the apparatus needs in order to operate a conspiracy in plain sight. It needs the surrounding ecosystem of conspiracy theories — the wrong ones, the imagined ones, the operationally impossible ones — to be loud enough, prolific enough, and ridiculous enough that the act of identifying any conspiracy at all becomes culturally suspect. It needs the term conspiracy theorist to become a synonym for crank. It needs the structural critic and the lizard-people enthusiast to be classified together in the public imagination, so that the structural critic’s accurate description of a real operation can be dismissed on the same terms as the enthusiast’s fictional description of an imagined one.

This is the function of conspiracy theories. They are the cover story for the conspiracies.

I will say this slowly because the formulation matters.

When Pogue published his Vanity Fair piece in April 2022, the dominant conspiracy discourse in American media was about QAnon. The Q drops had run from 2017 to 2020. The Storm was supposed to have come and had not. The pedophile elite was supposed to have been exposed and had not. Pizzagate had become Frazzledrip had become adrenochrome had become the satanic-panic component of the Trump base’s online life. The cable news ecosystem spent enormous resources covering QAnon — its symbology, its converts, its eruption into the January 6 attack — and almost no resources covering what James Pogue had actually documented, which was that a network of named, funded, credentialed men were planning the end of American democracy from offices in Washington and conference rooms in Florida and the offices of a Senate campaign in Cincinnati.

The QAnon coverage was not wrong. QAnon was a real phenomenon producing real harm. But the QAnon coverage was the part of the conspiracy discourse the apparatus was comfortable with. The QAnon people were not going to overthrow the republic. The QAnon people were going to make videos and storm a Capitol building and end up in federal prison. The QAnon people were a pressure valve. They were a way of metabolizing political fear that produced no danger to the actual operation. Some of them died. Some of them were imprisoned. None of them sat in the seat of executive power.

The men James Pogue interviewed are now sitting in the seat of executive power.

This is the function. The conspiracy theorists are the cover for the conspiracy. The lizard people are the cover for the cap table. The chemtrails are the cover for the petrodollar. The Italian satellites are the cover for John Eastman’s six-point memo. The Storm was the cover for the Sheriffs Fellowship. The function of the conspiracy theory in late-imperial American media is to absorb the political energy of conspiracy-detection and burn it on fictional targets so that the real targets remain inadmissible.

This is not a theory I am proposing. This is a description of what has happened. The four years since Pogue’s piece have been a controlled experiment in what happens when a real conspiracy is published in a glossy magazine and the public’s conspiracy-detection apparatus is too busy with imaginary ones to notice. The men named in the piece are now Vice President, Secretary of State, head of the FBI, head of the CIA, head of the Office of Management and Budget, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, and head of a dozen subordinate agencies. The Pogue piece was the warning. The warning was filed under interesting magazine journalism. The country went back to arguing about whether Bill Gates put microchips in vaccines.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the most precise example of how the cover-story function works, because he straddles the categories.

He is the Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States. He runs an agency with a budget of $1.7 trillion and operational responsibility for the public health of three hundred and thirty million people. He has, by every measure of the operational record, used the position to dismantle the vaccine schedule, defund vaccine research, reorganize the CDC and FDA to prioritize what he calls medical freedom, and accelerate the spread of measles and pertussis and other diseases the country had functionally eliminated. The measles outbreaks that began in early 2025 have, as of this writing, killed more children than any single year since the late 1980s. The deaths are documented. The CDC’s own data, which his administration has not yet succeeded in suppressing, records them.

He is also a man who has spent forty years building an empire on conspiracy theories — vaccines cause autism, fluoride is mind-control, AIDS is not caused by HIV, the 5G network causes brain damage, the COVID vaccine was a bioweapon developed by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci in a Wuhan laboratory paid for by the World Economic Forum. He has said these things in books, in podcasts, in court filings, in interviews. His audience for these things is enormous. His career was built on these things.

The two facts are connected. He could not have become Secretary of Health and Human Services without the audience the conspiracy theories built him. The audience was the political base. The political base was the leverage that allowed his name to be put before the Senate. The Senate confirmation was the operational acquisition. The forty years of conspiracy theorizing produced the political conditions for the actual conspiracy he is now executing, which is the dismantling of the regulatory state’s capacity to oversee American public health.

The cover story became the operator. The conspiracy theorist became the conspirator. The pattern, taken to its logical conclusion, is RFK Jr. running HHS — a man whose entire career has been spent in the lizard-people version of conspiracy detection now sitting in the room where the actual operational conspiracies of public-health policy are run. He is the conversion of cover into function. He is the apparatus’s most elegant demonstration that the cover stories, run long enough, become the personnel pipeline.

The same pattern, slightly less stark, applies to several of the men Pogue interviewed. Vance was, before he was the postliberal philosopher-king of the Senate Republican caucus, a venture capitalist whose intellectual formation included extensive engagement with Yarvin’s blog. Masters was a podcaster and Thiel Capital employee. Tucker Carlson, who has functioned as the New Right’s primary media venue, has spent his post-Fox career laundering the kind of material that used to be confined to InfoWars into prime-time legitimacy. The men who are now executing the actual conspiracy spent the preceding decade marinating in, and amplifying, the surrounding conspiracy-theory ecosystem. The ecosystem was not separate from them. It was the soil they grew in.

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The structural question, then, is this. What is the conspiracy theorist’s psychic function? Why are people drawn to them? What does the conspiracy theory do for the person who believes it?

I am going to say something that is going to sound condescending, and I do not mean it to. The conspiracy theory provides the feeling of having seen through the apparatus without the cost of having actually seen through the apparatus. It provides the agora-experience — the recognition that the official story is a lie, the thrill of the discovery, the bond with others who have discovered it — without the part of the agora-experience that requires you to read primary sources for ten years and to remain wrong about things and to be excommunicated by your tribe and to die in the wilderness like Hitchens. The conspiracy theory is cheap. The structural critique is expensive. Most people, given the choice, take the cheap thing.

The apparatus has noticed this. The apparatus has, accordingly, built a media ecosystem that produces conspiracy theories at industrial scale. The podcasts run twelve hours a week. The substacks publish daily. The YouTube algorithms recommend the next video. The X feed surfaces the new threads. The supply of conspiracy theories is unlimited because the demand is unlimited because the demand is the demand for cheap agora-experience, which is the most reliable consumer demand in late-imperial life. The apparatus does not have to coordinate the supply. The market handles the coordination. The market handles it because the market has been built to handle it.

This is what Bret Weinstein does. This is what Jordan Peterson does in his recent register. This is what Alex Jones does. This is what RFK Jr. did for forty years. This is what the entire wellness-to-fascism pipeline that Jules Evans and Derek Beres and the Conspirituality podcasters have spent five years documenting does. The pipeline produces the agora-experience cheap. The cheap experience trains the consumer to want it cheaper. The cheap consumer is unable to read Pogue. The unread Pogue is the conspiracy the apparatus needed to bury. The buried Pogue is the country we now live in.

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There is one more thing I want to say before the close, because the relay requires it.

The conspiracy I have been describing — the one Pogue documented in Vanity Fair in April 2022 — does not operate alone. It operates inside the older conspiracy. The older conspiracy is the petrodollar apparatus, the one Kissinger and Fahd shook hands on in 1974, the one the 1953 coup secured the conditions for, the one that has been the operating system of American foreign policy and American currency policy for fifty years. The New Right project, the postliberal restoration, the American Caesarist program, the Yarvin-Vance-Thiel-Anton-Eastman conspiracy — all of it lives inside the older apparatus.

It lives inside it because the older apparatus is what funds it. The petrostate-derived wealth that flows through HUMAIN and MGX and the Qatari Investment Authority into the American AI build-out is the same wealth that, indirectly through the technology fortunes it has helped to produce, ends up in the donor networks that fund Claremont and the Edmund Burke Foundation and the campaigns of Vance and Masters and the rest. The Saudi PIF does not write checks directly to the Claremont Sheriffs Fellowship. The Saudi PIF writes checks to xAI. The xAI valuation enriches Musk. Musk donates to America PAC. America PAC funds the campaign infrastructure that elects Vance. Vance speaks at the launch of Deneen’s Regime Change. Deneen’s Regime Change provides the philosophical grammar for the Yarvin-Anton-Eastman project. The project ends the republic. The republic dies. The petro-AI consolidation is permitted to continue because there is no longer a republic capable of stopping it.

This is the chain. It is not a chain of explicit coordination. It is a chain of aligned incentive. Hitchens would call it a habit. He was right. But the habit, this time, has produced a project. The project is conscious of itself. The project is the conspiracy. The conspiracy lives inside the habit. The habit is the cover story for the conspiracy.

I am putting this in writing because the writing is what we have. James Pogue put it in writing in 2022. The writing has been ignored. I am putting it in writing in 2026, on a Substack with a smaller circulation than Vanity Fair, because the writing is what we have, and the only thing the writing requires is a reader.

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I want to end with a request, not an argument.

Read James Pogue’s piece. It is called Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets. It was published in Vanity Fair on April 20, 2022. It is, by my read, the single most important piece of American journalism produced in the last decade. It described, four years ahead of time, the project that has now installed itself in the executive branch. It named the names. It quoted the quotes. It mapped the donors.

It is also, if you read it carefully, a piece of writing that does what writing about conspiracies is supposed to do, which is to make the conspiracy boring. Pogue does not dress the New Right in gothic robes. He sits at the kitchen table with the men. He has dinner with them. He writes down what they say. The men come across, as Pogue presents them, as recognizable American types — slightly nerdy, slightly aggrieved, well-read, well-funded, certain of themselves, occasionally charming. The genius of the piece is that the men do not seem like monsters. They seem like men. Men who happen to be planning the end of the constitutional order. Men who happen to be funded by other men who have decided that the constitutional order has outlived its usefulness. Men who happen to be writing books and giving interviews and running campaigns and now running the country.

This is what a conspiracy looks like. It does not look like the lizard people. It does not look like the Storm. It does not look like adrenochrome. It looks like a Vanity Fair article from 2022 that we did not read carefully enough.

The cover stories worked. The conspiracy theories did their job. The real conspiracy proceeded.

The relay’s job, now, is the job James Pogue did. Read the cap tables. Sit in the rooms. Write down what is said. Name the names. Refuse the cover stories. Distinguish the documented from the imaginary. Hand the document forward.

Pogue did his work. The piece is in the archive. The archive is open. The reader is what the document needed and has not yet received.

Be the reader.

Then be the next writer.

The pen is on the floor.

Pick it up.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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