Who Didn't Shoot Shinzo Abe?
Updated: Jul 27, 2022
Nothing piques the interest of conspiracists as much as a juicy political assassination, and so it was on 8 July 2022 when controversial former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot while delivering a campaign speech. Now, of course, their attention wasn’t piqued enough to learn anything about the socio-political situation in the country that might have actually led to the assassination, but it was piqued enough for them to round up their usual suspects.
Hillary Clinton
Abe death was, in some quarters, quickly chalked up to the so-called Clinton Body Count. This conspiracy theory, initiated by right-wing activist William E. Dannemeyer in 1994, claiming that Bill and Hillary Clinton have had an ever-growing list of over a hundred associates and rivals murdered, has, in its decades of retelling, entered popular culture to the point of memefication. Celebrity deaths dating back to Gene Wilder (2016), and including Anthony Bourdain (2018), Kobe Bryant (2020) and Ruth Bayder Ginsberg (2020), have been “commemorated” with falsified back-dated tweets reading:
This particular iteration of the meme, seemingly originating from Internet troll Michael Malice was popular enough to warrant a similarly satirical shallow-fake sequel, supposedly showing a responce from Clinton herself:
The body count, however, is of course little more than a Gish gallop of names which while, at least initially, contributing to an overwhelming suspicion and feeling that something must be wrong, are easily explained when investigated individually, by those that have the time to do so. And as such Abe’s name is as fitting as any other on there.
World Economic Forum
Ever so slightly more creative were those conspiracists who concluded that Abe had been murdered by, recurring conspiracy theory villains, the World Economic Forum for not going along with their so-called Great Reset. This assassination theory originates in false claims from the far-right Hal Turner Radio Show in October 2021 that Japan had wiped out COVID-19 in a month by ending its vaccination program and prescribing ivermectin instead.
Ivermectin was, of course, never approved as a treatment for COVID in Japan, although one independent medical officer did once suggest it could be approved for emergency use. Their COVID vaccination program was never halted, although, as in the vast majority of countries, COVID vaccination was never mandated, and 1.6 million doses of the Moderna vaccine were recalled after contamination. And, last but not least, Abe stepped down as PM in September 2020, long before any of this never happened.
Tetsuya Yamagami, the former Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force member arrested at the scene, who has since confessed to the crime, has, as you might have guessed, no apparent connections to either the Clintons or the WEF. And, furthermore, Yamagami‘s expressed motivation of blaming his mother’s bankruptcy at the hands of the Moonies on Abe’s promotion of the exploitative cult, curiously never seemingly came up in all the conspiracist speculation.
We have previously discussed related topics including The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories, The Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theories and The Conspiracy Theory Chart on Cambridge Skeptics: Live!
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