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So ask. You're here, you're more thoughtful than most, I'm happy to explain. I'll explain now, I hate power. Look at history, it's always the same story. Titans of men raise great nations and their people enjoy golden ages. But those men die, their power must be passed on, and inevitably, every single time, someone reigns who is wholly unfit to rule. Often they kill nations outright, at best they sow ruin for their children or great-great-great-grandchildren to suffer through or else die by. Some intrinsic inadequacy in our specific personage births tyrants, petty and brutal, and the more the population grows, the more tyrants appear and for the last century they have grown enough to infest the American government at all levels. I am cynical of them to a man, I know their crimes, certain ones I'd give you as "conspiracies" for the sake of magnanimity in this discourse, but there is a laundry list of abominable deeds perpetrated by the American government that there is absolutely no debate happened. Iraq at the top of the list. We started a war and maybe a million people died over a fucking lie. The perpetrators are still around, they weren't elected to begin with and they weren't fired, they weren't jailed. They're still working, or enjoying comfy retirements. Same as the generation before them, same as the generation before them. The machine never changed. The Company never changed.
The disposition isn't specific, it's broad. There are powerful career individuals in the United States government and I do not believe there is a single action they consider unacceptable to their morals because the evidence cries thunderous, they have no morals.
Last November Vivek Ramaswamy was giving speeches to tiny crowds where he was saying there's no chance Biden is on the ballot for 2024. A month ago this was still a "right-wing conspiracy", before the debate, Biden's obvious lack of fitness for office was a "right-wing conspiracy." Now we know for sure how the people running the executive were not elected, and they were enabled in their deceit and their necessary tyranny by an effective state-media establishment.
Now, the party who brands themselves as the "protectors of democracy" are by all appearances going to run a candidate for President who nobody wanted, and if truly democratic primaries had been held this year, a candidate who indeed no one would have voted for. The party, the media, the state, have justified extraordinary measures targeting President Trump under justification of him being a "threat to democracy", they fight tooth and nail against anything and everything they perceive as a move to disenfranchise voters, yet their most recent major move was to disenfranchise their entire constituency. This is a fact, I describe reality.
I also describe reality when I say if there was no conspiracy at work in the attempt on Trump's life it was neither for lack of motive nor opportunity.
Isn't there a bit of a vocabulary disconnect here? "Conspiracy" is obviously a bit of a slippery term and often used in a colloquial sense to refer simply to unpopular opinions. "Actual" conspiracies involve multiple people and a knowing deception of some sort, I think those are generally the two innate ingredients.
Like, take Iraq. What we currently understand about the flow of information in the lead-up to war was that indeed Cheney and a few people around him, probably including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, not only hid info that didn't match their desired conclusion but even manipulated the report-writing process by assigning top CIA analysts to other things and protecting their pro-WMD from challenge. This meets the definition of conspiracy easily. However, we should probably mention two things -- one, George W Bush was elected, along with Cheney who he chose himself after winning the primary democratically (basically, the people in representative democracy style are saying they trusted his judgement) but also Rumsfeld was confirmed by the Senate. I have often claimed and continue to do so that the buck probably does stop with Bush in the sense that he chose bad people to trust, but more direct blame can accurately be laid at Cheney's feet and the people around him who, and this has also been documented, wanted a war in Iraq for their own reasons (a mix of corrupt motives, such as oil and personal feelings, but also probably at least a little bit of ideology). Note that a lot of people in the government did in fact oppose this Iraq push, not everyone was corrupt, but they sadly did not win the day. It must be said however that at least in a loose sense, the Iraq war's legacy lost the Republicans the presidency for the next 8 years almost single-handedly, so even though that's obviously far short of the accountability we wanted, and the accountability we deserve, there was some change at least in a moving-forward sense. Also, quite frankly, it is actually worrying that not enough people acknowledge that Iraq does in fact meet the classic "conspiracy" definition. I am in total agreement in that respect.
Does Biden's age count as a conspiracy? While in a sense there's a knowing deception yes, some of the actions of his aides and close circle also resemble regular "spin" and clever politicking. Biden is probably still capable of performing 95% of his job even in his current diminished state, so even though we were clearly lied to, and I'm upset about it, I am not quite willing to say it was completely corrupt -- I think claims that Biden was/is actually incapable and that his inner circle wanted it that way so that they could control the strings or something is ridiculous. So of course "spin" can come quite close to a lie -- in fact we just heard something of that nature tonight in Biden's address where he at once claimed to never lie to the public and in the same breath talked about how he is stepping aside to be a bridge and protect democracy, which is an obvious falsehood as it's manifestly clear he was forced out by public and private pressure. It's a total farce. However, I think it's still useful on some level to distinguish between these sort of spin-lies and more corrupt ones.
Anyways all of this as a long-winded way to say that while I think the spirit of your answer was excellent and directly in line with what was asked, answering with substance which I applaud, I don't like the original question very much. There's a difference between being generally mistrustful about the government, and regularly placing trust in implausible conspiracies involving a ton of people. Like, specifically, the Iraq conspiracy only required a few useful idiots in the CIA (see for example this posthumous interview which talks about what I mentioned about the less-skilled analysts being assigned the WMD analysis and the lack of internal challenge) and only about 2-5 administration officials in the defense department (chosen by Bush, however) to effectively cut the President off from critical info. Contrast this with 9/11 conspiracies, which in their most popular form (the famous jet fuel can't melt steel beams) require a very large circle of complicit and perfectly secretive people across many areas of government. Basically, a good rule of thumb is the more localized a group, the more likely the conspiracy is, and the converse is a strong argument against many popular theories.
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