In Today’s Conspiracy Theories, the Lack of Evidence Is the Evidence
In Nick Shirley’s mega-viral YouTube videos alleging social-services fraud in Minnesota, the important piece of evidence was — in a literal sense — the absence of evidence. Shirley and his crew drove around Minneapolis pulling up to Somali-American-owned day cares that had received state funds and knocked to request entry. Notionally, they were trying to see if there were legit child care businesses inside. They were denied entry; what day care, after all, would let a camera-brandishing crew of YouTubers inside?
Once a door was shut in their face, all they could film was the building’s facade. Brick. Covered windows. And crucially, no children: a fact they latched onto with great energy. “Where are the kids?” they asked. “The children are missing!” They took what could easily be viewed as banal — a nondescript business — and transfigured it into evidence of something nefarious. At one point, Shirley even pointed to a lack of footprints in the snow outside a day care as evidence that something was off.
As Shirley’s footage became an online sensation, helped along by posts on X by JD Vance and others, it spawned a wave of imitations: copycat influencers nationwide started filming their own “investigations” of social services. Much of the footage they produced was like Shirley’s, with the everydayness of business exteriors presented as a potential sign of wrongdoing, often underlined by some variation on the same observation: Something’s wrong here; something’s missing.
Whether imitating Shirley or not, Mehmet Oz, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, made a similar contribution, posting a video in which he drove around a Los Angeles neighborhood that has a high density of Armenian-American-owned hospice care agencies. Gazing skeptically at their storefronts, he suggested that the lack of visible activity was a sign of possible fraud. “I don’t know how many patients are getting care,” he said. “There are either a lot of people dying here or you’ve got a lot of fraudulent activity.”
This new aesthetic seems to have come of age in the hothouse conditions of the Covid pandemic. As the virus spread worldwide, skeptics who didn’t believe that it was actually having the effects claimed by journalists and public health officials began sharing footage of empty hospital parking lots and waiting rooms, often tagging the posts with #FilmYourHospital. If things were really so bad, these videos suggested, then where were all the patients? Rather than elaborate a grand theory of the deceiving parties and their motives, these videos simply let the eerily quiet footage speak for itself.
In retrospect, #FilmYourHospital feels like the progenitor of the still-mutating genre of videos in which an image of a bare shelf in a grocery store is presented as straightforward evidence of, well, whatever you want to see: the dire effects of Covid-era policies on food-supply chains; the foolishness of Trump’s tariffs; an imminent economic collapse coordinated by global elites. Since Covid, videos of cargo ships at sea — apparently sitting still — have been posted as evidence of coordinated supply-chain shenanigans. The clips ask: Why? What explains the absence of motion? Who is keeping the ship still? During a recent government shutdown, chemtrail theorists posted pictures of empty skies, as if they proved that chemtrails were, in fact, a government op.
The political scientists Russel Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum have a neat term for this mode: “conspiracy without the theory”: conspiratorial content that traffics less in spiraling explanations and more in vague assertion and coy insinuation about what, exactly, is being argued by whom (“a lot of people are saying”). This new mode dovetails neatly with the incentives of the online video economy: assembling an elaborate account of how the Illuminati actually control the world takes work — you have to write out your argument. Posting, say, an empty grocery store shelf captioned by a raised-eyebrows emoji or a simple semi-assertion — “more fraud?” — takes just a couple of minutes, and gives the viewer the satisfaction of having something mind-bogglingly complex reduced to a single potent image that appears to say it all. Much easier to hit your weekly upload quota and stay on schedule. “Nothing” — a blank facade, an empty street — is easier to track down than anything resembling actual evidence; nothing is everywhere, and fits perfectly into short clips.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/magaz...clues.html
In Nick Shirley’s mega-viral YouTube videos alleging social-services fraud in Minnesota, the important piece of evidence was — in a literal sense — the absence of evidence. Shirley and his crew drove around Minneapolis pulling up to Somali-American-owned day cares that had received state funds and knocked to request entry. Notionally, they were trying to see if there were legit child care businesses inside. They were denied entry; what day care, after all, would let a camera-brandishing crew of YouTubers inside?
Once a door was shut in their face, all they could film was the building’s facade. Brick. Covered windows. And crucially, no children: a fact they latched onto with great energy. “Where are the kids?” they asked. “The children are missing!” They took what could easily be viewed as banal — a nondescript business — and transfigured it into evidence of something nefarious. At one point, Shirley even pointed to a lack of footprints in the snow outside a day care as evidence that something was off.
As Shirley’s footage became an online sensation, helped along by posts on X by JD Vance and others, it spawned a wave of imitations: copycat influencers nationwide started filming their own “investigations” of social services. Much of the footage they produced was like Shirley’s, with the everydayness of business exteriors presented as a potential sign of wrongdoing, often underlined by some variation on the same observation: Something’s wrong here; something’s missing.
Whether imitating Shirley or not, Mehmet Oz, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, made a similar contribution, posting a video in which he drove around a Los Angeles neighborhood that has a high density of Armenian-American-owned hospice care agencies. Gazing skeptically at their storefronts, he suggested that the lack of visible activity was a sign of possible fraud. “I don’t know how many patients are getting care,” he said. “There are either a lot of people dying here or you’ve got a lot of fraudulent activity.”
This new aesthetic seems to have come of age in the hothouse conditions of the Covid pandemic. As the virus spread worldwide, skeptics who didn’t believe that it was actually having the effects claimed by journalists and public health officials began sharing footage of empty hospital parking lots and waiting rooms, often tagging the posts with #FilmYourHospital. If things were really so bad, these videos suggested, then where were all the patients? Rather than elaborate a grand theory of the deceiving parties and their motives, these videos simply let the eerily quiet footage speak for itself.
In retrospect, #FilmYourHospital feels like the progenitor of the still-mutating genre of videos in which an image of a bare shelf in a grocery store is presented as straightforward evidence of, well, whatever you want to see: the dire effects of Covid-era policies on food-supply chains; the foolishness of Trump’s tariffs; an imminent economic collapse coordinated by global elites. Since Covid, videos of cargo ships at sea — apparently sitting still — have been posted as evidence of coordinated supply-chain shenanigans. The clips ask: Why? What explains the absence of motion? Who is keeping the ship still? During a recent government shutdown, chemtrail theorists posted pictures of empty skies, as if they proved that chemtrails were, in fact, a government op.
The political scientists Russel Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum have a neat term for this mode: “conspiracy without the theory”: conspiratorial content that traffics less in spiraling explanations and more in vague assertion and coy insinuation about what, exactly, is being argued by whom (“a lot of people are saying”). This new mode dovetails neatly with the incentives of the online video economy: assembling an elaborate account of how the Illuminati actually control the world takes work — you have to write out your argument. Posting, say, an empty grocery store shelf captioned by a raised-eyebrows emoji or a simple semi-assertion — “more fraud?” — takes just a couple of minutes, and gives the viewer the satisfaction of having something mind-bogglingly complex reduced to a single potent image that appears to say it all. Much easier to hit your weekly upload quota and stay on schedule. “Nothing” — a blank facade, an empty street — is easier to track down than anything resembling actual evidence; nothing is everywhere, and fits perfectly into short clips.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/magaz...clues.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
