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Hey guys, a hot new conspiracy theory just dropped: Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, got a Brazilian Butt Lift for Christmas but it went terribly wrong, and her butt exploded, and that’s why no one has seen her since December of last year.
“That’s ridiculous,” you’re thinking, “because the Middletons are very well known for their natural fine asses. For instance, Kate’s sister Pippa has such a tasty can that a previous popular conspiracy theory claimed she wore a fake butt to Kate’s wedding.”
2014 was ten years ago now so I don’t remember, did we have a completely different definition of “ass” back then? Hmm. Anyway.
Yes, it IS a ridiculous conspiracy theory but to be fair, it is slightly more believable than the initial version that claimed Kate was dead. That didn’t hold up after papparazzi snapped her in a car driving around with her mom in March. So she’s still alive, and it DOES take two to three months to recover from a BBL, so…I mean yes, it does also take two to three months to recover from generic “abdominal surgery,” which is what the Palace claims has happened to her, but where’s the fun in that?
And that’s why I wanted to talk about this today: I was reading about all this in Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter, in which he comes out as a Kate Middleton truther, not because he believes all this but because, well, “misinformation is fun.”
Case in point: this conspiracy theory wasn’t really on my radar at all until this week, when the palace released a photo of Kate and her kids, supposedly snapped by her husband William, that was really, really obviously fake. This escalated things dramatically, taking the conspiracy theory from obscure meme to terminally online shitposter Christmas, a true Streisand Effect for the ages. Here are just a few problems with the pic: Kate’s zipper disappears, one kid’s knee blurs into the background and her sleeve is all wonky, and then of course there’s whatever the hell this other kid is doing with his fingers, which yes does look like how AI thinks fingers always look but to be fair little kids are super weird and as a childfree person I just assume that kid is either secretly shouting out his gang membership or summoning a demon.
Seeing that photo, and then seeing news agencies frantically issue kill orders to stop spreading the Photoshopped image, and then reading the hilarious follow-up from “Kate” really pulled me in. I mean seriously, Kate following this up with “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C,” that is the least believable part of all of this. The idea that Princess Kate Middleton is spending her time fucking around with the stamp in GIMP, or even worse signing up for an Adobe subscription, is BONKERS. My favorite part of it is that nowhere in this statement does she actually say she edited THIS photo.
Oh, and don’t get me started on how they tried to claim that William TOOK that photo but made Kate apologize for manipulating it. Frankly I’m shocked that this outdated monarchy is implicitly sexist.
The photo is deeply weird, but why do people spread weird BBL conspiracy theories instead of just accepting the Occam’s Razor explanation? Kate had some kind of illness requiring abdominal surgery, and while recovering she looks like shit and doesn’t want to spend Mother’s Day in hair and makeup for a professional photo shoot with three young and rambunctious children, so some intern whipped this up using older photo shoots that they doctored to hide the fact that that’s what happened.
I’ve talked about conspiracy theories enough times on this channel that there’s a whole playlist you can go watch if you’d like to learn more, but in brief there are many reasons why people would rather believe the absurd than to accept the mundane: conspiracy theories can make people feel like they have more control over their lives, that their lives have meaning and purpose, that they’re important, that they’re smarter or better than everyone else, and even like they have a community, as two sociologists describe when discussing the “call and response” conspiracies of Taylor Swift and her fans.
But yes, that same research shows that a huge component of conspiracy theories is that they are in fact fun. I don’t talk about that aspect often, because I usually cover conspiracy theories that cause immediate and obvious harm, like those who think mass shootings don’t actually happen or that Democrats are running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza place. It’s hard for the everyday non-asshole to find the fun in that stuff, but you can maybe see it here. I personally care very, very little about the Royal Family, besides finding wealthy people born into power disgusting, and also besides my concern over Charles’s love of pseudoscientific medical treatments like homeopathy and a mild curiosity over whether he will use it to treat his cancer. But an obviously untrue story about a wealthy person with undeserved amounts of power getting botched surgery to make her ass bigger? Yeah, I can see how that’s funny. Maybe a hint of sexism, in there, but funny.
It’s unfortunate that even these low stakes conspiracy theories usually have a cost of some sort. I may find the monarchy immoral and outdated but Kate Middleton is still, you know, a person, and it probably sucks for her to see people joking about her while she’s (apparently) recovering from surgery, though also she could just pay someone to make a fake social media site where she never sees any bad thing said about her, ever, so it’s probably not that big of a deal.
But it’s 2024, and who knows where this shit can end up? The child sex trafficking pizza place seemed a bit funny until a man showed up at Comet Ping Pong pizza with an AR-15. Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities, and by “those” I also include, like, yourself. Your own silly brain can make you commit atrocities if it first makes you believe absurdities. So yeah, enjoy this lighthearted conspiracy theory, these silly BBL memes, this idle speculation about the secret lives of the immorally wealthy, just please don’t show up at Buckingham Palace with an AR-15 demanding to see Kate. She’s fine. Really. She’s probably just going through her regular 5-year molting and will return to the public eye once she has consumed the final piece of her own sloughed off skin.
