Schismogenesis Spectator Sport
Lone Nut Assassination ARGs & Mimetic Violence in the Parasocial Media-Sphere (The Big Candace Owens Soap Op # 3)
(Audio at the end)
Lone-Nut Assassination ARGs
“To the extent that someone is an absolute fool, he will accept everything the conspiracy theorist says is true. To the extent that someone is only a half-fool, he will disregard it all as untrue. The great majority of working journalists, editors, and producers are half-fools. They have heard of the Bilderberg group from someone who claims it to be a subset of the Illuminati or what have you, and they determine that it must be one of those silly conspiracy things that are not worth looking into at all. This vicious cycle builds on itself over time.” —Barrett Brown, My Glorious Defeats1
The architectural lure of the 2nd Matrix (as with the 1st) is that it offers easily-grasped narratives to make sense of (some of) the facts.
It is human tendency to pick those facts that bolster our preferred narratives, rather than objectively gathering as many facts as we can, and allowing whatever narrative, if any, to emerge, organically, from those facts.
Nobody has time for this, in our current hyper-mediated climate. The OODOR loop moves fast.2 Not to have a tight and tidy narrative (usually provided by some parasocial quasi-authority) is to risk getting left behind.
In The Kubrickon, I presented the thesis that consciousness is the ultimate currency in all meme warfare.
The goal is to technologically reconfigure our consciousness and convert it into a format that can then be commoditized and harvested.
Central to my thesis was the way in which Kubraphiles obsess over the minutiae of every frame of Kubrick’s films. Kubrick’s entire oeuvre (at least from Dr. Strangelove) was designed to create a kind of Alternate Reality Game (ARG) via the internet, to draw as many consciousnesses as possible into playing it, and thereby create hubs on the internet to act as “AI landing pads.”
The JFK assassination (which occurred the day Dr. Strangelove was scheduled for release), described by David Ferrie as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” set the template, with hindsight, for obsessive and sustained attention to endless detail in the quest for meaning.3 It was even the reason the CIA “weaponized” the term “conspiracy theorist” as a form of derision, and ensured it was used that way from the start.
Of the many templates for creating an ARG for memetic and cognitive warfare in 2026, it’s reasonable to suppose that a public assassination and the resultant conspiracy theories would be one of the more likely go-tos.4
To posit an ARG around an event is not to say that the event was staged as an ARG. Organic events can be seized upon and turned into ARGs later.
One example of using ARGs for social engineering is to amplify incidents of mimetic violence so as to inspire actual “lone-nuts.” These “lone-nuts” would, in a way, be just as programmed to kill as Sirhan Sirhan was (or programmed to patsy-shoot), only that, via the ARG-shaped techno-culture, they would be generated within (emerge from) the parasocial media sphere.
“The media need not be fixed. It can simply be directed via a sort of alchemy of spectacle.” (Barrett Brown, My Glorious Defeats)
He Said/She Said (The Story So Far)
Mrs. Horsley and Guy D (her brother) are arguing over Candace Owens and the Charlie Kirk assassination.
He says: “Owens is awesome! A spiritually awakened earth goddess talking truth to power about Jewish Kabbalistic Freemasonic murder plots!”
She says: “Eww! You’ve been captured by a controlled op, 2nd matrix, parasocial media demon-trap of delusion and false hopes, bro!”
[Editorial: What repels us also compels us. Owens is as attractive to Guy as she is repellent to Mrs. Horsley and myself. Faced with a family member positively fixated, there is the danger of becoming negatively fixated as an abreaction.5]
He says: “Look at all the smearing Owens gets as anti-Semitic! She is rattling cages and being persecuted!”
She says: Look at Owens lobbing the most foul, sneering accusations at that poor woman whose husband has just been horribly assassinated.
[Editorial: Owens not only asserts Israel’s shadowy hand in US affairs, but a deeper, darker, occult agenda regarding a “Jewish Freemasonic group B’nai B’rith—who practice occult mysticism—[and] have been ruling America since the Civil war [for whom] Judaism or Christianity is merely a mask they wear” (source). Guy has followed suit with a number of references to “Kabbalistic sorcerers.”6 Neither Mrs. Horsley nor I are saying there is no truth to this idea. In fact, it is precisely because I believe there is some (much subtler and complex) truth here that I am questioning this sort of 2nd Matrix alt-media-slop. Both Mrs. Horsley and I believe that the Judaic conspiracy narrative (“noticing”) has moved in recent months (via people like Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Owens) from the dangerous margins closer to the center of alt-media memetics. QAnon 2.0.]
He says: “Erica Kirk is obviously involved in the hit. It’s Mossad and Israel! Tyler Robinson is an obvious patsy!”7
She says: Where’s your evidence?
[Editorial: Parasocial relations are a powerful tool in the arsenal of psyop. My impression of my brother-in-law in this affair is reminiscent of the Gerrit Graham character in Brian de Palma’s film Greetings, made back in 1968: i.e., neurotically obsessed with conspiracy minutiae around a high-profile public assassination (e.g. the extremely tame and lame Charlie Kirk-assassination equivalent of a “magic bullet theory”).8
But Charlie Kirk is not JFK.9 Compared to Mrs. Horsley and myself, Guy is a late arrival to the field of conspiracy research. Notwithstanding a (since-renounced) penchant for Noam Chomsky (!), his paranoid awareness began in the covid years. His perception of a collective “awakening” is based on people he knows who have become (slightly more) paranoid-aware, post-covid.10]
He says: “Kirk’s murder was a public execution set-up within a pentagram and festooned with occult/freemason symbology!”
She says: “Urm . . .”
[Editorial: The stage Kirk was on at the time of the murder was a pentagon, and even then, not one that corresponds with the Pentagon, much less with a pentagram, much less with freemasonry (which is not especially associated with pentagrams or pentagons).]
P.S. Until recently, Guy was following, admiring, and recommending the public debater and Eastern Orthodox advocate Andrew Wilson, which is how Mrs. Horsley and I heard about him.
Lately however, Wilson has publicly challenged Owens to a debate for her statements about the Kirk murder. Though the offer is now up to $200,000, Owens has not risen to the challenge. Skeptics believe this is because she knows she will not be able to hold her own in a live debate with Andrew Wilson.
Ever-loyal to Candy’s cause, Guy has now revoked his endorsement of Wilson and dismisses him as “delusional.”11
A dramatic example of how a punter gets played by pundits? The parasocial art of schismogenetic spectator sport in action?12
When done here, be sure and visit the companion essay by Mrs. Horsley, on the parallels between the Candace Owens op and Glenn Greenwald’s Intersect:
Mrs. Horsley
Trans Violence & Charlie Kirk
There are two ways in which a “lone-nut” idea can be deemed false.
1) There were other shooters, as in JFK and RFK.
2) There were other forces behind the shooter, as with Mark Chapman or John Hinckley, Jr.
Via memetic engineering, a third possibility is that a “lone-nut” can be created by soft, remote or other subliminal forms of influencing on social media.
“Data-driven behavior modification” technology = something everyone is exposed to. It only takes one individual (out of potentially millions targeted) sufficiently susceptible to data-nudging to attempt an actual assassination.
Thus the idea that an apparent “lone-nut” could assassinate a public figure (provided that figure was sufficiently under-protected) is no longer as “absurd” as it once was.
This is not to say that Tyler Robertson is such. Only that he could be.
I have written about the growing reality of Trans violence in “The Men Who Would Be Queens” for the Cultural Engineering Studies magazine. Relevant passages here 13:
Children of Job: Where Faith & Hubris Meet