From COVID Quackery to Groyper Conspiracy: Malone’s Latest Descent

How Conspiracy Theories Shield the Far Right from Accountabilty

If you have ever heard of Robert Malone, it is probably because of his spectacular fall from grace. Once a researcher with credentials, he monetized his the anti-COVID vaccine hysteria and began pushing quack cures and conspiracies.

I have subscribed to his newsletter for years as a temperature check and because of my own journey through vaccine skepticism. It appeals to real fear, plays on legitimate distrust of big pharma, and exploits the tiny fraction of people who experience injury to attack expertise and replace the scientific method with profitable snake oil hucksterism.

His work helped fuel a partisan divide that translated into death. More Republicans died of COVID because they embraced the anti-vax, anti-mask, COVID-hoax rhetoric pushed by Malone and others like him. Fauci hatred killed people in numbers that cannot be ignored.

A New Stage of Extremism

Now Malone has moved beyond medical nonsense to outright political extremism. He is rejecting the plain facts about the latest campus shooting. He posted this outrageous article the day AFTER the shooter was captured and long after absurd rumors pushed by reckless MAGA politicians

The Facts About the Shooter

The truth is not complicated. The shooter was a right-wing religious conservative, a Mormon from Utah, radicalized in Nick Fuentes’ Groypers. Groypers are Fuentes’ white nationalist youth movement, a deeply online network that uses memes, coded slogans, and cartoonish inside jokes as signals of loyalty. The shooter targeted Kirk because he believed Kirk was not fascist enough.

The Codes That Tell the Story

Malone insists otherwise. He claims the killer was part of a “gay or trans Antifa” conspiracy, pointing to the inscriptions left on bullet casings. But those weren’t random scribbles. They were Groyper codes: up and down arrows used in trolling culture, “beta” insults from the manosphere, an ironic twist on the anti-fascist song Bella Ciao, and even “owo” memes that function as juvenile in-group jokes. Calling someone “gay lamo” isn’t proof of a leftist identity; it’s standard Groyper homophobia. These markings are signatures of Fuentes’ movement, not Antifa.

Malone’s Propaganda Spin

Malone’s attempt to spin them as evidence of “Trantifa” is either ignorance or deliberate misdirection. He took the shooter’s fascist fingerprints and tried to launder them into a queer and trans terror plot.

Media Enablers

The Wall Street Journal compounded the damage by treating the same inscriptions as if they pointed left, publishing speculation without verification or context. That isn’t journalism. It’s feeding the outrage machine.

Lies With Deadly Consequences

Malone thrives in this environment. He feeds on confusion and inflames division. Once he undermined trust in medicine and helped convince people to refuse life-saving vaccines. Now he undermines the truth itself. Both lead to needless death.