Bret Weinstein: Conspiracy Theorist in Academic Clothing

The former biology professor weaves grand narratives of shadowy elites plotting a totalitarian takeover by ‘just asking questions’

The UnPopulist illustration.

Bret Weinstein’s path to becoming a conspiracy theorist has been different than the one taken by Alex Jones and Glenn Beck (college dropouts who got their starts in radio), Candace Owens and Mike Cernovich (bloggers radicalized into hard right punditry), Marjorie Taylor Greene (frequenting extremist online communities), and Andrew Tate and Roseanne Barr (sports and entertainment, respectively). Before becoming a professional conspiracy peddler who today boasts a million followers on X and nearly half a million subscribers to his Dark Horse podcast (co-hosted with his wife, Heather Heying) on YouTube, Weinstein was an academic.

When Jones rants about “chemtrails” or the government using the water supply to turn frogs gay, it’s easy to dismiss him as a clown. The same goes for Cernovich’s claim that prominent Democrats were running a pedophilia ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria, Greene’s concerns about Jewish space lasers causing wildfires, or Owens’s declaration that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife is actually a man. Weinstein, by contrast, has managed to coat his conspiracy theories with a veneer of academic legitimacy. He was an evolutionary biology professor who was run off the Evergreen State College campus for resisting an ugly episode of identity politics, which made him an overnight darling of right-wing media. But he was also viewed as a serious academic who was bringing his scholarship to bear on the culture wars. As Bari Weiss wrote in a 2018 essay for The New York Times about the “Intellectual Dark Web,” Weinstein’s national audience “might have come for the controversy,” but it stayed for the “fascinating insights about subjects including evolution and gender.”

But Weinstein’s intellectually elevated origin story has not managed to produce a more refined model of conspiracy theorizing. In the end, it is just a dressed-up version of the same tinfoil-gilded panic-mongering, the same anti-“official-narrative” alarmism that is wreaking havoc in the broader discourse—by provoking distrust in more reputable information sources, by ignoring actual threats to our liberties, and by peddling weapons-grade misinformation at scale.

Weinstein: Biden Is An Anti-Democratic Plot By Shadowy Elites

A little over a month ago, Weinstein posted:

Biden voters should look in a mirror and ask themselves “What have I become?”

I’m being serious, and literal. Go look in an actual mirror and ask yourself the question. Out loud. You’ll either see it, or you won’t. If you do, you can rejoin America outside the cave.

Good luck.

When The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf replied, “I have no idea what this means,” Weinstein responded that his message is actually “pretty simple.” He elaborated: “A party that fields an obviously senile candidate for a second term is replacing a constitutional republic with something … that is not based on the consent of the governed.” So the “simple” explanation turns out to be that the Democratic Party has been captured by a nefarious cabal that is manipulating voters into supporting a cognitively incapacitated Joe Biden in an undemocratic power grab enabling it to rule from behind the scenes. Friedersdorf countered that Biden’s “senility” is exaggerated, Donald Trump poses a graver threat, and voters are free to select whoever they want in November.

Weinstein scoffed at Friedersdorf’s response and accused him of succumbing to the designs of hidden, malevolent forces: “Something is using misdirection to get you to look where it wants your focus,” he said. (Weinstein has used this reply strategy before, rebuking his own brother, Eric, a conspiracy-prone commentator in his own right, for being insufficiently critical of Anthony Fauci: “You are watching an illusionist while standing exactly where he expects you to be.”) Weinstein continued: “If you realize instead that you have been drafted into supporting a corrupt figurehead by a party that actively conspires against all honorable candidates, then you are more likely to realize what time it is.”

Weinstein’s reference to “honorable candidates” is a nod to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Weinstein believes the Democratic National Committee should’ve presumably unilaterally imposed on their own voters in place of Biden—though they didn’t because they fear him too much. RFK Jr., remember, is the candidate who believes childhood vaccines cause autism, HIV may not cause AIDS, 5G was created as a tool of mass surveillance and repression, public health measures during Covid-19 were comparable to Nazism and the Holocaust (and Anne Frank had more freedom under the Nazis than the unvaccinated had during the pandemic), ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for Covid, and Wi-Fi causes cancer.

---

The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers

---

Rather than supporting an “honorable candidate” like RFK Jr., the Democratic Party is propping up a cognitively incapacitated figurehead it can manipulate instead. Weinstein’s term for this anti-democratic manuever is “cryptic coup,” which he believes the party has perpetrated by installing a functionally dead (hence “crypt") nominal leader while they wield power behind the scenes. He tells us that recognizing this is the only way a person may “rejoin America outside the cave”—a reference to Plato’s famous allegory from The Republic, suggesting current Biden supporters are like the prisoners seeing only the shadows projected on the cave wall by the Powers That Be.

The Unfalsifiable Grand Narrative Conspiracy Model

The Weinstein-Friedersdorf exchange is emblematic of a form of conspiracy theory that has become ubiquitous within right-wing discourse: the unfalsifiable grand narrative. This approach involves contrarian influencers weaving unified theories of elite or establishment forces colluding against the masses in far-reaching ways, but somehow managing to do this so secretively and manipulatively that evidence for these plots is hardly ever available. This conspiracy template allows figures with huge followings to formulate ideologically self-serving theories about the corruption and capture of governments and institutions with little pushback and even less of an expectation that they will ever substantiate their sweeping claims. These theories are peddled and refined daily on some of the largest alternative media platforms, such The Joe Rogan Experience (whose host has speculated that Jan. 6 was a false flag operation) and The Tucker Carlson Encounter (whose host recently claimed, on Rogan’s podcast, no less, that UFOs are actually subterranean and underwater “spiritual entities” that have been on earth for thousands of years).

The conspiracists who frequent these programs often spout eye-watering falsehoods, such as Weinstein’s claim, during a recent interview with Carlson, that a “credible estimate” of the number of deaths caused by mRNA Covid vaccines could be as high as 17 million. “This is a great tragedy of history,” he solemnly concluded. But the sheer scale of the various conspiracies Weinstein has constructed makes lies like this—gigantic as they are—seem trivial by comparison. The hour-long Carlson interview gave Weinstein an opportunity to present the condensed version of a master narrative about Covid, the coming age of global totalitarianism, and the heroic dissidents (like himself) risking their lives to stop it.

Weinstein: The WHO Is Using Covid to Create a Totalitarian Superstate

Weinstein told Carlson that pharmaceutical companies introduced mRNA vaccines during Covid to bypass normal safety testing and “normalize” an “incredibly lucrative technology” that is responsible for killing millions of people. He believes this act of “breathtaking evil” came naturally to people in the pharmaceutical industry, who “have to be comfortable with causing a certain amount of death.” But Weinstein suggests the rollout of the Covid vaccines was actually part of a more diabolical plot. It was the opening move in a global scheme to create a “turnkey totalitarian planet.” According to Weinstein, the World Health Organization (WHO) is spearheading a “coup” that will lead to the “elimination of our national and our personal sovereignty.” The vehicle for this global coup is a multilateral pandemic preparedness treaty being negotiated through the WHO—which is allegedly designed to force people to take vaccines and undergo gene therapy, impose censorship, and destroy national constitutions and laws that stand in its way.

Because the WHO is “above the level of nations,” Weinstein argues, it will have the power to “dictate to nations how they are to treat their own citizens; to override their constitutions.” The WHO used Covid-19 as a “Trojan horse” to usher in an age of globalist tyranny. Public health policy is the “sheep’s clothing that has allowed the wolf to go after our rights.”

What makes Weinstein’s theory especially obtuse is that power of this sort is precisely what bodies like the WHO are least capable of exercising. Indeed, the main weakness of international institutions like the WHO is their lack of enforcement power in confrontations with national governments. For example, in the early days of the pandemic, the WHO was criticized for deferring to China too much—such as when it uncritically accepted Chinese government claims about the origin of the virus and when, under pressure from Beijing, the WHO excluded Taiwan from the World Health Assembly.

But Weinstein has an explanation that reconciles the apparent transnational impotence of the WHO with his insistence that it plans to take over the world. Rather than functioning as an outside power forcing nations to do its bidding, Weinstein claims that the WHO is an instrument through which “compromised” governments will impose global tyranny. “I have very little hope that the U.S. will derail this,” he told Carlson. “The U.S. wants something to force it to violate our constitutional protections, and the World Health Organization is going to be that entity.” At one point in the interview, Carlson asks, “You’re saying that an international health organization could just end the First Amendment in the United States?” Weinstein replied: “Yes.”

Why would democratic countries want to shred their own constitutions and subjugate their citizens? Weinstein’s answer gets us back to his exchange with Friedersdorf: “I suspect that some powerful set of forces has decided that consent of the governed is too dangerous to tolerate.” He admits that he doesn’t know who these forces are, but he knows they want to convert the whole world into a totalitarian superstate.

Contradictory Grand Narratives

One problem Weinstein has run into—a problem any grand narrative conspiracy theorist will eventually run into—is that his sweeping narratives have started to conflict with each other. In a more recent interview with Carlson, Weinstein contradicted his claim about the CCP working with the U.S. government and presented an alternative theory about “enemy” infiltration and great power conflict. Weinstein speculated about “overwhelmingly male” and “military age” Chinese migrants in Central America who were part of “an invasion taking place,” and who are “coming to America via Panama” because “it allows them to blend with all of the people who are coming from South America.” He said Beijing is financing infrastructure in Central America to facilitate this invasion. He cited Sun Tzu, the 544 B.C. Chinese philosopher and military general, to suggest that this strategy has old roots in the Middle Kingdom.

---

Does Populism Mean the Death of an Adversarial Media? A Conversation with Matt Yglesias

---

Weinstein even presented a bizarre theory (based on China’s one-child policy) about a potential “evolutionary force” which he described as a “mechanism for producing armies.” As Weinstein sees it, “excess males with no reproductive prospects at home become an effective weapon against neighboring populations”—or, in this case, enemy populations that are thousands of miles away. Weinstein wondered if a “male-biased population in China was produced as a weapon, and if that weapon is now being deployed.”

Just Asking Questions

Weinstein’s conspiracy model is nothing without the Just Asking Questions justification. When conspiracy theorists are criticized for their outlandish claims, they often counter that they are merely asking the hard questions that establishment media entities are too captured or ideologically blinkered to ask. This allows conspiracists to performatively signal their openness to seeking the truth wherever it may be found (interestingly, the truth is never found in mainstream narratives). And, crucially, it provides them with the intellectual license to say unaccountably half-baked nonsense since, in the end, they’re “just asking questions,” not asserting facts.

Weinstein frequently reiterates that his theories are just “hypotheses” which he finds “plausible,” giving him the latitude he needs to speculate as wildly and recklessly as he wants. For example, he suggested that the Chinese government engineered the Covid-19 pandemic, strategically refused to administer mRNA vaccines to its population, and somehow ensured that mRNA vaccines were taken widely in the United States to weaken Americans’ immune systems and make them vulnerable to a bioweapon.

It’s no wonder that conspiracy theorists like Weinstein have migrated to alternative media—imagine taking this “story” to a real publication with evidentiary constraints and editorial review. In Weinstein’s telling, he wouldn’t be able to pitch the story about the CCP infiltrating the United States through Central America to The New York Times, for example, because the Times is either uninterested in covering the Darién Gap, a perilous expanse of jungle terrain between Panama and Colombia from which migrants are pouring illegally into the U.S., or they are interested in misinforming readers about it.

“This is a place we have to be extremely careful,” Weinstein said before presenting his theory about the mRNA vaccines preparing the ground for a Chinese bioattack. “All it is, is possible.” Weinstein uses strategic disclaimers like “this is only a hypothesis” and “I can’t say for certain” to preemptively deflect claims that he’s being intellectually incautious and to spread fear-mongering nonsense on an industrial scale.

Weinstein suspects that the global elites who have “hoarded so much power” are undoing our rights because “they’re afraid of some global French revolution moment.” Given the extent of these claims, you’d think Weinstein was in possession of substantiating evidence—perhaps messages exchanged between American and Chinese officials about the mechanisms of “turnkey totalitarianism.” Or internal U.S. government documents about eliminating citizens’ rights. Since the WHO and governments around the world are apparently working with the pharmaceutical industry to control the population, maybe there’s an email exchange between, say, Pfizer executives and the White House or Beijing that exposes the plot. But no: all Weinstein has is the text of a public health treaty and his increasingly feverish conviction that someone is up to something.

The Viral Conspiracist’s Challenge to Liberalism

Many of the most influential figures in the anti-woke contrarian space use their privileged positions in liberal societies to argue that those societies are, in fact, oppressive and corrupt. They describe themselves as dissidents within global totalitarian systems, despite being among the most obvious beneficiaries of the legal and institutional protections offered by liberal democracy, since they make lucrative careers out of telling falsehoods at scale.

While there have always been paranoid cranks who see tyranny and signs of the apocalypse around every corner—Weinstein believes the West has already “collapsed”—the alternative media ecosystem has given them more influence than ever before. Weinstein blames the “death of journalism” for failing to warn us about the totalitarian machinations of the WHO and its partner governments, and he constantly refers to himself as a courageous dissident who is risking his life to expose the truth. When Carlson asked how he summons the courage to continue podcasting and tweeting, he said “there are fates far worse than death.” He continued:

Humanity is depending on everybody who has a position from which to see what is taking place. … If everybody says, “It’s too dangerous …” then not enough people stand up to change the course of history. Whereas, if people somehow put aside the obvious danger to their ability to earn and maybe to their lives of saying what needs to be said, then we greatly outnumber those we are pitted against.

Weinstein is in awe of his own courage. He wistfully told Carlson that he’s “lived an incredible life” and still has lots of things on his bucket list, but he’s prepared to pay the ultimate price. To use his favorite parable, he’s David facing down Goliath (although the doesn’t mention that David didn’t seek to monetize his clash). He’s doing what he must, because “humanity may well not emerge” from the totalitarian takeover being organized by the WHO. But he’s not working alone. “Goliath made a terrible mistake,” he told Carlson at the end of the interview.

It took all of the competent people—took all of the courageous people—and it shoved them out of the institutions where they were hanging on. And it created, in so doing, the dream team. It created every player you could possibly want on your team to fight some historic battle against a terrible evil. All of those people are now at least somewhat awake; they’ve now been picked on by the same enemy. And yeah … we’re outgunned. … But we’ve got all of the people who know how to think.

The red flags here should be obvious: Weinstein’s epic Cassandra complex, his conviction that humanity is depending on him, his insistence that every courageous and competent person is on his side in a “historic battle against a terrible evil,” his unshakeable belief in his own martyrdom. Yet, amazingly, as his theories become more cartoonishly grandiose and his self-reverence becomes more conspicuous, his influence only continues to grow. His last two conversations with Carlson have a combined total of over 23 million views on X.

We live in an age of collapsing trust—in the media, academia, and even democracy. The previous president condemned journalists as “the enemy of the people” and tried to steal an election. That same president managed to convince one-third of Americans that the current president was not legitimately elected. There’s opportunity in distrust—particularly in a society as polarized as the United States. Weinstein is one of many popular figures in the alternative media ecosystem capitalizing on this opportunity by building his brand around conspiratorially inveighing against “the establishment” and “mainstream” narratives. But this project isn’t just cynical—it is fundamentally illiberal, since it deemphasizes and even downplays actual threats to the republic and directs his audience to the imaginary threats posed by shadowy groups working behind the scenes.

It’s impossible to disprove what Weinstein says because he presents no evidence to assess. He isn’t just a conspiracy theorist—he knows how to make the members of his audience feel like the most important characters in a grand tale about the final confrontation between good and evil. They’re bravely joining him in battle. They’re the only ones who see the truth. They’re risking their lives. At one point, Weinstein told Carlson “We are living in some crazy story.” He’s right.

---

© The UnPopulist 2024. Follow The UnPopulist across the web.