Dale Gribble Proves That QAnon Has Nothing on the OG Conspiracy King

The real-life conspiratorial world of corkboards and string that came to define Dale Gribble during King of the Hill’s original run looks a whole lot different today than during the show’s 1997 premiere. Ramblings on CIA drug experiments and organ harvesting that surged throughout the ‘90s and early aughts have been replaced by darker and more consequential conspiracies. Pizzagate, the belief that prominent Democrats ran a child sex ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria, led to gunfire within the restaurant. More notoriously, baseless claims of election fraud during the 2020 Presidential Election led to the January 6th insurrection, which left five people dead and hundreds more injured. 

But instead of graduating to these increasingly alarming ideologies, Dale has done what Dale does best — whatever he gottdang pleases. As his modern-day counterparts wait for Q’s latest drop, Dale marches to the beat of his own drum. And so, Arlen’s resident tinfoil-hat sporter has managed to achieve the impossible — emerging as an unexpected relic of the golden age of non-terrifying conspiracy theories. 

Despite a brief slip into anti-masker rhetoric during the show’s cluttered first episode, Dale’s conspiracies have evaded the MAGA machine by just being too weird. 

Dale’s original theories of choice, including weather control and the logistics of the JFK assassination, have been replaced with ideas best described as Mad Libs with political buzzwords. MS-13 gang members are invading the United States, as Dale explains early on in Season 14, but they’re doing so through “secret tunnels from Acapulco to the Denver airport.” He, like many MAGA folks, does believe in election manipulation, though his views come with a few caveats. The 2000 presidential race was rigged by the “United Nations,” but then again, so “has every election and Miss Universe since 1979.” 

When approached with other slightly less unhinged theories — “I heard on Newsmax that Chief Justice William Renquist was actually a double agent,” one tourist tells him during his trip to the George W. Bush Presidential Center — Dale turns their suggestions into a demented improv exercise, yes and-ing their ideas beyond rational, or partisan comprehension. 

“That’s old hat! He was a double agent, but not for Russia; he was working for the Vatican,” Dale fires back. 

These subversions are no accident. During a recent interview with Cracked, writer Norm Hiscock revealed the key to modernizing Dale was simple: outweighing the weirdos even in this political landscape. “The thing is, Dale trusts no one, even the conspiracy theorists,” Hiscock explained, describing this distrust as a “safety net.” “It’s like he thinks everyone’s crazy, but that he’s not crazy. He believes in conspiracies. He’ll go down rabbit holes, but he doesn’t trust anybody.”

Even from its early days, King of the Hill was never meant to be a scathing political commentary, according to co-creator Mike Judge. “I try to not let the show get too political,” Judge said of KOTH while promoting Idiocracy, back in 2006. “To me, it’s more social than political, I guess you’d say, because that’s funnier.”

I think, though, that Hank said it best. “Dale has an active imagination,” he notes in one of the show’s inadvertently fourth-wall-breaking moments. “He’s for entertainment purposes only.”