Occam's Butterknife and Assassinations

Lots of people like dreaming up implausibly complex conspiracies, such as that Mossad Murdered Charlie.

A friend who was close to Charlie Kirk texts:

Thanks for your writing about Charlie the past week. I appreciate all of it. The Nicholas Hoult post was a laugh I needed in these times.

I wonder if it’d be worth commenting on the online obsession with finding a way to blame Israel even when we already have a clear villain with a left-wing motivation. It’s just baffling and upsetting to me.

In reality, of course, this murder is just about the most simple, slam-dunk Occam’s Razor case imaginable. A guy with a transgender amour shot Charlie while he was answering a question about transgender shootings, then later texted his boyfriend/girlfriend: “Why did I do it? … I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out:”

Occam’s Razor says: Trans Terrorism.

But some people sure love Occam’s Butterknife: they can’t resist making up absurd complications.

I suspect a lot of this cultural tendency goes back to the JFK assassination, which really was complex, confusing, and suspicion-engendering, especially once Jack Ruby stepped in. Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union, had defected back, been to see both the Cubans and CIA in Mexico City, had contacts with pro-Castroites and anti-Castroites, had vague indirect links to the Mafia through his bookie uncle, etc. Going down numerous JFK rabbit holes was not irrational.

But once people got into JFK theorizing, they couldn’t stop themselves when the next thing came along. For instance, the 1968 assassination of RFK Sr. didn’t engender many conspiracy theories at the time since it was such an open and shut case. For example, Sirhan Sirhan had been tackled and disarmed by three of the most trustworthy, personally admirable celebrities of the era: writer George Plimpton, football star-turned-minister Rosie Grier, and America’s 1960 Olympics hero, decathlete Rafer Johnson (who was chosen to light the torch at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics).

But a half decade later during the paranoid Watergate era, RFK became popular grist for complex conspiracy theories

As a teen years later, a friend of mine was once snooping through his dad’s work files, hoping to find a Playboy magazine. He stumbled upon a huge manila folder labeled “RFK.” In it were floorplans of the Ambassador Hotel, photos of a gun, interviews with witnesses, and so forth.

“Whoa!”

It turned out that long ago in the mid-1970s the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, hearing all the RFK conspiracy rumors, had assigned his father, their sharpest prosecutor, to review the entire RFK case.

Dad’s conclusion: Of course Sirhan did it. It was perhaps the clearest case he’d ever analyzed.

Keeping in mind Occam’s Razor is by no means a universal tendency among humans. For example, in Turkey, the smartest guy in the room is assumed to be the one who can dream up the most convoluted conspiracy theory.

In defense of the Turks, they sometimes do experience events that turn out to be huge balls of twine. For example, when the Polish Pope was shot by a Turk, Ali Agca, in 1981, many in the West assumed, not absurdly, that a Warsaw Bloc intelligence agency must have been behind it. After all, eight years later, the events set in motion as much as anything by the papal election of St. John Paul II in 1978 did bring down the Soviet empire.

But all these years later, it’s still not clear what was going on other than that a lot was going on in Turkey. The killer, for example, had been in Turkey’s far right Grey Wolves when he’d previously murdered a center-left editor in 1979. A year and a half before the hitman shot the Pope, the New York Times had reported that he, personally, was a threat to the Pope’s upcoming visit to Turkey:

The seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by 600 Islamist crazies at about the same time as the hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Iran has largely been forgotten in America, but at the time it was an alarming event indeed. What was going on in the world?

Who was Agca working for when he shot the Pope, if anybody?

After all these years, it still beats me …

But conspiracy hobbyists in the U.S. don’t seem terribly interested in researching murky questions like why was the Pope shot where there’s still a tiny chance that outside researchers might turn up something valuable.

They aren’t into analysis. They much prefer simple, obvious cases to exercise their creativity upon, such as the assassination of Charlie Kirk.