How "Noticing" Works—And What It Misses

In the last several days, I’ve seen many Charlie Kirk conspiracy theorists post pictures of a menorah next to the courtyard at Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was killed. Indeed, from a certain perspective, it does resemble one. To them, this is just more evidence that Jews conspired to have him murdered because he was going to turn on Israel. The location proves the intent: a traitor sacrificed ritually, in a spot shaped like their own symbol.

But flip the image 180 degrees—it looks like an Amish barn.

Nobody thinks the Amish did it, because nothing connects them at all. But nothing connects a courtyard’s shape to anyone’s guilt either. Yet that’s the whole mechanism in one picture. The Jews are already guilty in the viewer’s mind, on the strength of facts that have nothing to do with the shooting but are read as motive: Charlie’s disagreements with some of his Jewish donors, his comments on Oct. 7, and his position against war with Iran.

So the barn is a coincidence and the menorah is a sign. Same image. The only thing that changed is the story someone brought to it.

Picture the absurdity of trying to use this as evidence in the court of law.

“Your Honor, Exhibit B. The UVU Courtyard is shaped like a menorah; therefore, the Jews did it.”

The court asks the obvious things: Who chose the location? What are their names? When did they decide? What did they do, and how do you know?

And the answer comes back: “Just look at it!”

Most conspiracy theories would never survive ten minutes in court, because they’re coincidences stacked on coincidences, and the stacking is what makes them feel strong. It’s a house of cards.

Some people in the JQ movement call themselves noticers. They do land on some real patterns in reality, but these noticers will fix on certain patterns while passing over everything that cuts against the narrative.

To understand how this works: If I told you to look around the room you’re in that’s filled with a certain color you didn’t notice that much of—let’s say red—and find everything that’s red, you’d see red everywhere, more than you’d have before. But what would you miss? The blue, the black, the white, all of the other colors that you weren’t focused on. If I asked you to look for blue, you would have missed the red instead. Your eyes found what you went looking for, and the room obliged.

That’s what noticing really is. It feels like discovery, because you never counted the misses.

Watch what happens when the misses get pointed out.

It’s true that Karl Marx was Jewish. But what about Friedrich Engels, who funded him and co-wrote the work and wasn’t a Jew?

“Oh, he was a Jew puppet.”

So, Engels loses his agency, and the pattern survives.

There are Jewish capitalists and Jewish communists on both sides of the same fight, the way White people and Black people and everyone else are on both sides of everything.

“Yeah, but they don’t control the banks.”

Show them the non-Jewish bankers, who are most of them.

“The Jewish ones are the important ones.”

There’s always an explanation, and it never costs the noticer anything, because the conclusion arrived first and the evidence is being sorted to match.

Larry Silverstein didn’t go to work on the morning of 9/11. Neither did ~33,000 other people who worked in those buildings. Are they all in on it? Of course, Larry isn’t just some random person who didn’t go; he owned the Towers and insured both for acts of terrorism. That isn’t suspicious either—the buildings had already been bombed in 1993.

Some noticers bring up Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. He wasn’t in the building either, because he was dropping his son off at school. However, his brother Gary was, and died there along with 658 of the company’s employees. Why wouldn’t he warn his own brother?

People have an answer for that, too.

“He sacrificed him to Moloch.”

At that point you’re being asked to prove a demon exists before you’re allowed to doubt the theory. And that’s another answer that costs the noticer nothing. It’s a claim made to protect a claim.

Now the case I know best: myself.

In late 2023 and early 2024, at the peak of my time in that movement, I told my audience on stream that if I ever changed my position, if I ever flipped or spoke favorably about Israel, they should assume I’d been bought off, threatened, or compromised.

Think about what that did. I wrote the explanation for my own future change of mind in advance, and I wrote it so that the one explanation that mattered was ruled out ahead of time: that I might have learned new things and had new experiences that changed my mind. My explanation acted like a deadman’s switch, ensuring that even if I left the movement, the movement was left intact.

Since I left, I’ve seen and heard every conspiracy imaginable: paid off, blackmailed, threatened, an agent all along, mentally ill, even a clone. Yes, you read that right—people think I’ve been cloned. Every explanation except the simplest one. Maybe after fourteen years he checked the stories that never added up.

Notice what’s missing from all of it. Almost nobody says here’s why his new position is wrong. They don’t argue with what I believe now. They explain away the fact that I believe it.

Let’s be honest: even without my own words from that time, the explanations would be the same. The mechanism doesn’t need my help; it was already built to account for anyone who walks out.

So the question isn’t whether you’d fall for a menorah in a courtyard. It’s more uncomfortable than that: are you taking everything into account, or are you only counting what keeps the story alive?

If you can’t name the last piece of evidence that cost you something, you already know the answer.

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