Matthew Yglesias recently articulated what I found a useful formulation: the Democrats have become the party of "credulous conformists" and the Republicans the party of anti-institutional conspiracy theorists.
Now, in a modern American context - where most institutions are mostly trustworthy most of the time - it's generally better to be a credulous conformist than a conspiracy theorist. But being a credulous conformist is still not good, and sometimes on specific issues or in particular moments the conspiracy theorist will have the right of it. I suppose the ideal epistemology would generally default to institutional trust but nonetheless maintain some amount of reasonable skepticism, to be applied on a case-by-case basis. This obviously requires a degree of critical thinking skills, which I guess is where our educational system *should* come in, but obviously doesn't these days.
Interesting formulation but it seems to imply that credulous conformism is mutually exclusive with anti-institutional conspiratorial theorizing. That isn't the case: the biggest source of left wing conspiracy theories is by far the institutions they credulously believe.
Consider one of the most inane yet pervasive: that Trump is a Russian spy. This belief was created out of whole cloth by the DNC and the Democrat press, both institutions the left trusts completely. Yet it's a conspiracy theory about institutions (the Republican party and the Russian government).
Another example is "far right misinformation", manufactured at massive scale by far left institutions like universities, and routinely invoked to explain nearly any claim or fact that's inconvenient to the left. This conspiracy theory posits a conspiracy of major social networks (especially X) combined with any group or party that isn't overtly left wing.
> most institutions are mostly trustworthy most of the time
I think if you classify things like individual county-level fire stations and hospitals as institutions, you can probably win that argument.
But we're not talking about _all_ institutions, nobody is. We're talking about institutions that make factual claims of a non-obvious nature. Also, we're not merely interested in the average case but the most important cases. And there it's much less clear.
Bear in mind that individual universities are classed as independent institutions. There are over 4,000 universities in the USA and none of them are trustworthy. Every single one of them happily rubberstamps a long list of absurd or false claims if they advance a left wing agenda. That by itself creates a huge weight on the "mostly untrustworthy" side.
First, you're going to need to define what you mean by "a conspiracy of major social networks." What sort of coordinated action is being alleged, and to what end?
In a broader sense, you're misapplying the term. Even if the existence of "far-right misinformation" is completely fabricated (which it isn't) that doesn't make it a "conspiracy theory." It just makes it wrong.
They usually claim some variant of social networks deliberately spreading "far right propaganda" (they mean any view that's not left wing) for clicks and profit, or more recently in the case of X, because rocket man bad.
The academic field of misinformation studies is pure conspiracy theory on a ludicrous scale (tens of thousands of papers). Their base assumption is that people arguing with left wing views are not legitimately disagreeing but rather, know they are wrong and deliberately work together for other reasons. For example they regularly argue such people aren't even real at all but are just bots (all claims of using bots to influence politics through social media are conspiracy theories).
How would you define the term "conspiracy theory" such that "all claims of using bots to influence politics through social media" are definitionally conspiracy theories?
Hanania explicitly said in the piece that it's telling that conservatives have to go back seven years to point to a liberal conspiracy regarding Trump vis a vis Russia.
Conformism and conspiracy-thinking aren't mutually exclusive per se, but as Hanania noted, conspiracy theories are usually paranoid delusions about the machinations of the elite. So you can view the current stances of Democrats versus Republicans as being yay elites! (so we believe everything the NYT tells us) versus boo elites! (so everything the NYT says is made-up in order to trick us to get vaccines).
Nate Silver has been thinking along these lines about how a major faultline in politics right now is establishment versus anti-establishment. He's not the only one to have this idea. I know the Moment of Zen guys use this framework a lot, specifically in contrasting the ethos of Big Tech versus Little Tech. (Marc Andreseen likes this framing too.)
>Nate Silver has been thinking along these lines about how a major faultline in politics right now is establishment versus anti-establishment.
I also had this idea but someone on Substack gave me a better one: the right used to be broad and the left used to be narrow, and now the left is broad and the right is narrow.
It is always the broad side who included the pro-establishment people, who trust Big Pharma and expertise and all.
The problem is that people differentiate between different "elites" (I really hate that term, there's often nothing elite about them). Most obviously, one could describe both powerful Republicans and Democrats as "elite" but that doesn't imply people are either for or against both of them at once. Other important fault lines are conventional military vs intelligence agencies, Elon Musk vs Bill Gates, Fox vs CNN and so on.
So it boils down to different people trusting different institutions and for different reasons. Which maybe isn't saying much.
I still think that it's wrong to equivocate credulous conformism with the conspiracism. People simply do not have enough time to thoroughly research every issue, and it makes sense that the absolutely insane conspiracy theorists have poisoned the well for the justified criticisms of institutional beliefs. Take for example, the Covid lab theory. This is something Gribbles often use as a "gotcha" against people who trust institutions, but really it just shows how pressing the problems of floating baseless conspiracy actually is. You can't really blame people for assuming that people who claim that Covid started in a lab were just throwing darts at a conspiracy board when those same people have actually just floated completely insane and baseless conspiracy theories 19 out of 20 times. These conspiracy theorists completely box out legitimate criticisms of establishment beliefs in our information-saturated social media era.
Of course you can blame people. The theory was both obvious and highly plausible given common sense and even five minutes research. One can't blame a generic outgroup for one's own inability to think straight. You are responsible for your own epistemic health, not anyone else.
I think ExpansiveYolk is saying that you really can’t blame non-conspiratorialists for giving the conspirators a pass since the conspiratory-minded seem to be throwing ideas at a dartboard and seeing what sticks, despite the fact that 95% of the time the conspiracies are wrong and damaging.
He probably agrees with your thoughts on the Covid lab theory.
I understand what he's saying, but it isn't really logical. How does he know that 95% of the time these (unnamed) people are just throwing darts? This is a person who just admitted they are poor judges of what's true, hence why they got beaten on a question that wasn't even complex.
Obviously without specifics he can invent a set of straw men and give them any properties he wants. If he named anyone specific the obvious response would be: sure, what about those other times? Wanna debate those too? It's a bold move to take on people who already beat you once on the assumption it was just a fluke. After all, a lot of conspiracy theories target government institutions that just proved themselves to be pathologically dishonest. Why wouldn't you expect to lose again?
What exactly changed after COVID to make our institutions go from mostly right most of the time to something different (mostly right less than half the time, or mostly wrong most of the time?)
Forcing health mandates like vaccine cards, closing private businesses, churches, and schools on false information. Govt pressuring large private communication and social media companies to silence citizens and a sitting US president.
Conspiracy Theories are marginalized on the Left? Surely you jest. No, they dominate the coverage of the NYT, WaPo, and other legacy press for months and years. You handwaved RussiaGate, but let's seriously consider that something like half the country has seriously believed, with essentially no evidence, that Trump is a White Supremacist, that Trump is a Russian stooge, that even the most lurid gossip of the Steele Dossier was proven true, that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was Russian Misinformation Op, that Trump planned to declare Martial Law and stage a military coup to avoid leaving office, that Trump planned and led an insurrection, that Trump is plotting "a bloodbath" in the streets if he loses, that Trump will end elections if he wins again, that the Republican Party are "literally Fascists" who are plotting to create a "Christofascist Tyranny", that if Trump wins then LGBTQ people will be rounded up in camps and women who get abortions will face the death penalty, need I really go on? Hell, I remember during early COVID when the Democrats were pushing the claim that Trump was going to kill people by releasing a placebo instead of a real vaccine because they INSISTED that there was no possible way to produce a vaccine in less than several years, or before even that, when they were accusing Trump of alarmism and anti-Asian bigotry while Nancy Pelosi was still out hugging people in the streets of Chinatown to show how unconcerned Democrats were about "the Chinese virus".
It's hardly a new thing either. Anti-vaxxers have traditionally been found mostly on the left wing, as are the numerous conspiracy theories about GMOs and Monsanto, about Big Oil secretly controlling our foreign military policy, etc. I shouldn't have to repeat this, but objective studies have repeatedly found no significant difference in the prevalence of conspiratorial thinking on either side. The only consistent difference they have found is that liberals tend to have a lower threshold of evidence for changing their minds, often being the majority of early adopters of new conspiracy theories, whereas conservatives tend to have higher evidence thresholds, and therefore are slower both to be talked into them and talked out of them.
As for "racism with racists", that's a nonsense logical contradiction in terms right up there with "implicit bias" (which is itself essentially just an updated "false consciousness"). If you really want them, I can easily provide quotes from DiAngelo, Coates, and others describing "Whiteness" in blatantly conspiratorial terms and advocating for explicit discrimination against Whites. More to the point, you mentioned Hofstadter, but you didn't represent him accurately. With credit to Britannica:
"American historian Richard Hofstadter explored the emergence of conspiracy theorizing by proposing a consensus view of democracy. Competing groups would represent the interests of individuals, but they would do so within a political system that everyone agreed would frame the bounds of conflict. For Hofstadter, those who felt unable to channel their political interests into representative groups would become alienated from this system. These individuals would not accept the statements of opposition parties as representing a fair disagreement; rather, differences in views would be regarded with deep suspicion. Such alienated people would develop a paranoid fear of conspiracy, thus making them vulnerable to charismatic rather than practical and rational leadership. This would undermine democracy and lead to totalitarian rule.
In The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), Hofstadter proposed that this is not an individual pathology but instead originates in social conflict that raises fears and anxieties, which leads to status struggles between opposed groups. The resulting conspiracy theorizing derives from a collective sense of threat to one’s group, culture, way of life, and so on. Extremists at either end of the political spectrum could be expected to develop a paranoid style."
Left-Wing theories of CRT, "The Patriarchy", "Whiteness", etc clearly fit this definition: they originate with groups that feel alienated from the system, they regard another clearly identified group as inherently threatening to them, view the claims of the groups they accuse as inherently deceptive and concealing negative motivations toward them, they do not regard the accused groups or the system itself as legitimate, so they are not satisfied with attempting to resolve the matter with persuasion and democracy within the system, instead they respond by undermining the system itself and resorting to totalitarian measures (riots in the streets, public intimidation, lawfare, weaponizing government agencies, etc). Hofstadter does not require that any small cabal of leaders of the conspiracy actually exist, nor even be alleged to exist, only that the conspiratorial thinkers mischaracterize legitimate disagreements within the system as a collective hostility resulting in alleged illegitimate actions threatening the thinker.
Hanania suggests that one difference is that the people pushing conspiracies on the right are the people at the top. They are Senators and Congressmen and Governors and prominent journalists. On the left, they are dog catchers and the woman who writes a column in a local newspaper in Baltimore.
Looking at your list of conspiracy theories that the left believes, I can't think of a single one that got beyond whispers in a college lunchroom.
Hanania apparently doesn't read the NYT and WaPo or chooses to ignore those since he's running with the 'No True Scotsman Fallacy' that conspiracy theories don't count as conspiracy theories if he happens to believe they are true.
I'd link you Senators, Congressmen, probably Governors (gotta admit I don't pay much attention to Governors outside my state), and prominent journalists pushing any and all of this crap (Prominent journalists are usually the easiest since most left-wing conspiracies appear in the NYT, WaPo, etc at some point), but I'd rather not use up my free articles on this or spend a lot of time finding ways around the their paywalls again.
Hanania also suggests that the right in general are more prone to conspiracy theories, which is likewise proven false by actual studies that he is aware of but chooses to ignore, but also makes the suggestion about whether it's coming from the top or bottom somewhat besides the point. For example, If I link you Democrat members of Congress (falsely) proclaiming over and over in public statements to have seen, in an official capacity, hard evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia, are you going to accept that Democrats push conspiracy theories from the highest levels or are you going to do like Hanania and handwave it?
Can you show me where the NYT, WaPo, or a similar national newspaper have printed the phrases you put in quotes ("literally Fascists" or "Christofascist tyranny" referring to the GOP, etc)? If phrases and thinking like this "dominate coverage" as you say, it shouldn't be hard.
The vaccine example further proves Hanania's point: it used to be associated with the left, but post-2020 is almost entirely a right-wing phenomenon.
You've also rather missed that being anti-mandate isn't the same thing as being "anti-vax". People on the right who don't agree with COVID vaccine mandates as authoritarian overreach aren't necessarily rejecting routine childhood immunizations or blaming vaccines for autism like the traditional leftist anti-vaxxers.
You'll be frustrated with this response but I think it's accurate: this evidence doesn't meet the standard *you yourself* set in your original comment.
Your NYT example studiously avoids saying "literally Fascist," opting for softer phrasings like "there are parallels between Trump's words [and those of fascists]." (I can't access the WaPo article, but I'm pretty confident it does the same.)
Salon, the internet-native, self-styled "smart tabloid" is not in the class of "NYT, WaPo, and other legacy press" that you picked out.
I agree that all the sentiments you described are present on the left. The disagreement is about how common and how prominent they are. This is hard to establish in a comment thread, so I don't really expect to convince you, but I think the fact that you are subtly moving the goalposts here is an indication that your initial comment took an indefensibly strong position.
I think the Paul Pelosi example is very clear: it's not just the Breitbarts of the world that are posting conspiracy theories, it's mainstream, top-tier conservative media figures and elected representatives. "Trump's rhetoric shares some characteristic with fascists" is not in the same category as "Paul Pelosi's attacker was secretly a prostitute he hired."
As for anti-vax: the point of that Atlantic article is again that anti-vax *used to be* a common sentiment on the left, and now the existence of leftist anti-vaxxers is uncommon enough to justify an article.
I agree that anti-vax is not the same as anti-vaccine-mandate (I didn't claim otherwise). But there's clearly lots of straightforward anti-vaccine sentiment on the right: enough that Trump never mentions Operation Warp Speed, his greatest accomplishment as president, because he's concerned he'll alienate his supporters.
Shrug. Not sure why I'm having to repeat myself, but I'm out of free articles now and not particularly willing to invest the time it would take to get around the paywalls to post more links. They're more prevalent and prominent on the left than you seem willing to acknowledge.
I do find it odd that your 'go to' counterexample here would be the Paul Pelosi prostitute thing. For starters, that's not really a "conspiracy theory", so it doesn't particularly fit the topic of discussion. Further, the main claims actually originated with initial factual errors in reporting acknowledged by the NYT and WaPo in their own case studies of how the story got twisted (initial reports said that the intruder was in his underpants and Pelosi referred to him as "a friend" to the police, so that kinda did support the idea). Then somebody cracked a joke about it and, as usual on the Internet, other people didn't get the joke and thought it was a serious claim (despite the initial errors getting corrected fairly quickly). Even so, it was mostly just chatter on social media. The only outlet on the Right I'm seeing that officially published such claims is "One American News", which is a tabloid barely better regarded than RT. Sorry, but Salon is a hell of a lot closer to being widely read and representative of the Left-leaning media ecosystem than OAN is of the right-leaning media ecosystem. Show me the New York Post, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, or even something on par with the Daily Signal pushing that story.
I think it's easy to get low-humam capital people to support pro-market beliefs because it's easy to map them onto appealing "folk" beliefs about the virtues of thrift and self-reliance.
All good points. I think one could posit better examples of left wing conspiracy theories / theorists. People live Oliver Stone and Russell Brand start off on the left but become so conspiratorial and contrarian they get sucked to the right because that is a more hospitable place for their anti-mainstream ideas at the moment. But an example of a leftist conspiracy theory might be the obsession with Russia influencing western elections and with various figures being Russian agents. Im not sure to what extent this is true, rather than a conspiracy theory, but it has some features of a conspiracy theory.
I think claiming that the CIA was behind virtually every bad thing that happened to foreign Leftist regimes over the last 75 years is a clear example of very widely held conspiracy theories on the Left.
It's a fairly easy conspiracy theory to swallow, because the CIA really was behind some bad things that happened to some foreign leftist regimes. Saying that the CIA did a bunch more stuff that we don't know about isn't that big a stretch. It's only when you put all the seperate alleged CIA conspiracies together that they start to sound ridiculous, as they begin to paint the CIA as an omnicompetant organization with unlimited resources.
Yes. I agree that alleging one or two historical instances is plausible, but in my experience many in the Left use it as a default explanation and can give no evidence to back up the claim in the specific instance being discussed.
So you acknowledge that leftists believe these conspiracy theories that lack evidence?
Literally using your own logic, you have just excused everyone on the right for believing *most* (not all) conspiracies by leftists given Russia collusion lie, Lois Lerner IRS, Hunter Biden laptop as fake lie, the media claiming Trump lied about being wiretapped in 2015 when it was true, et.c, etc., etc.
I'm not saying it isn't a conspiracy theory, I'm saying that it's more plausible than other conspiracy theories because all it requires is exaggerating something real. "The CIA was behind this one thing" is fairly plausible because the CIA has occasionally really been behind things. "The CIA is behind everything" is not, because the CIA is not omnipotent. The theory that the CIA is behind all leftist regime failures is a conspiracy theory created by intellectual laziness on the part of leftists. They assert that a single regime failure was caused by the CIA, then do the same the next time another one fails, and so on. What they are too lazy to do is keep track of their statements and notice that they have asserted so many things are the CIA's fault, that they implied that it has unlimited resources and competence. The much more plausible explanation is that leftist regimes are unworkable and corrupt.
Similarly, blaming one failure of Trump's on a Deep State "la trahison de clercs" isn't implausible. Blaming one of the criminal charges against him on leftists out to get him is similarly plausible, since there have been frauds like the Steele Dossier. However, when he keeps failing and keeps having criminal charges leveled against him, eventually asserting that its all the left's fault becomes ridiculous. The much more plausible explanation is that Trump is an incompetent administrator and a corrupt criminal.
Prosecutors did not level charges against previous Republicans like Bush, Romney, and McCain the same way they do against Trump. The reason for this isn't that the left was nicer and less power hungry a decade ago than it is today. The reason for it is that Trump is more vulnerable to such attacks because he is an actual criminal.
Left-wing bias has amplified this, for example, in the case where he was found guilty of 34 felonies it looks like he was actually only guilty of one or two, the other felonies were piled on by some weird legal logic. But he really was guilty of the initial charge of falsifying business records. He is a really bad guy.
The CIA did quite a lot; what makes this a runaway or rogue-agency Deep State conspiracy theory for those on the left, is their overlooking the fact that all of it was yes, approved, authorized by US Presidents.
Depends on how you define "the left". No prominent democratic politician believes this, and there is no viable movement in the party for abolishing the agency. This believe is common though among the ~5% of Americabs that support full blown socialism and believe AOC sold out to the establishment.
From my experience, it is believed by far more than 5% of the Left.
I think the reason why it does not come up with current Democratic politicians is because it is more about historiography of the Cold War at this point. The belief was widespread enough among Democrats in the 1970s to provide the intellectual foundation for the Frank Church committee, which was dominated by Democrats:
Personally, I believe it doesn’t come up from influential Dems much any more is simply because the Dems have become the party of “the government is good and just and can do no wrong and should be believed about everything (at least when we are in charge or ‘civil servants’ are doing the talking”, and so playing that up doesn’t serve their political interest because it is off-message.
Even that is not one you will hear coming from prominent political figures or mainstream talking heads. The people on the left who obsess over CIA involvement in everything tend to be ones who hate the Democratic Party and refuse to support Democratic candidates. Aside from that though, the "CIA deposing leftist governments" thing is another example of a belief that can easily be historically grounded and based in fact, even if it often spills into further conspiracy theories beyond that
I'd say Russiagate is probably the biggest counter-example, but a) it's more the exception that proves the rule, and b) I'd actually posit that it's more emblematic of what is now an earlier iteration of American liberalism. Russiagate is less of a preoccupation on the left these days, and not *just* because 2016 has receded in the rearview mirror - contemporary liberalism is considerably more institutionally aligned than it was even in the mid-2010s.
(edit: And of course, mainstream institutions themselves are not necessarily immune to conspiracist thinking - but they're generally less susceptible to it than individuals, counter-cultures, or counter-institutions.)
“Russiagate” cost the tax payers millions of dollars to investigate and consumed the Trump presidency for two years. In fact, many reputable people on the left referred to Trump as an “illegitimate President” based on what turned out to be opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, where the sources later admitted to having nothing on Trump.
Even worse, the NYT won a Pulitzer(!) based on their coverage of this story. Rachel Maddow actually read the Steel Dossier on the air!
It’s amazing how the breathless coverage from the left who pushed this false narrative for two years(!) is now memory holed.
While I agree with the vast majority of this, I think perhaps a more useful distinction between the kinds of pathological thinking which predominate on the right versus left is conspiracy versus magic.
Take for example CRT's refrain of 'racism without racists.' I agree this is anti-conspiratorial, but the logical conclusion of it is that racism is an aetheric, malevolent, force that people can only be aware of, but not do anything about. This, I think, is where you get ridiculous statements that gained some currency during the summer of Floyd such as that nothing about race relations or racism had changed since Emmet Till, or even since before the abolition of slavery.
As with the two extremes of Russiagate, there is pathological thinking like the above, and more reasonable positions as outlined in the piece. But both versions fail to take into account the extent to which the some of the most egregious, but 'second-line,' stamps of racism on our laws and institutions were scrubbed out during civil rights. The first example that comes to mind here is the unenforceability, and later completely void nature, of racially restrictive covenants running with the land, which had been the original (IIRC) mechanism of redlining. I don't recall exactly when courts stopped enforcing these covenants as being against public policy, but at the latest it was early 70s.
Shelley v. Kramer held racially restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948. Redlining refers to federal agencies determining what areas were eligible for federal mortgage insurance, a completely different process. I suspect its significance in home ownership rates is exaggerated but I don’t really know that.
As Richard pointed out in the article, a belief in structural racism is quite different from, and even hostile to, the idea that racism is an aesthetic, malevolent force that people can be aware of, but not do anything about. The real problem with CRT is that, as a branch of Theory, it exempts its advocates of actually proving its claims.
It seems odd to me that you adopt this definition of a conspiracy (“belief that some secret but influential organization is responsible for an event or phenomenon”) when almost all your examples have no alleged “secret organization.”
Bill Gates is no secret organization.
The DNC is no secret organization.
Pharmaceutical companies are no secret organization.
I think a better definition is a “set of influential individuals or organizations who seek to take action with a large impact on society and whose claimed intentions greatly differ from their stated intentions” or something of that sort.
So if the intended impact on society is small, it is not a conspiracy theory. If the stated desires of the individuals or organizations is aligned with their actual intentions, it is not a conspiracy. If it is a relatively large portion of society who is doing it, it is more of an ideological movement, not a conspiracy. If it is a few clearly non-influential people who could not possibly achieve the desired result, it is not a conspiracy.
I didn’t read it like that. I took “secret organization” as more like an organization behaving in a secretive manner. The DNC that Bret Weinstein imagines is a kind of secret organization because it doesn’t have any connection to the real thing. But you’re right, I should edit.
Thanks. I think the best counter-example on the Left today is to describe anything that they disagree with as a “conspiracy theory.” The most obvious example is the Covid lab leak hypothesis, which by definition was a mistake, not a conspiracy (although covering it up afterwards would be a conspiracy). It was immediately trashed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory by the same people whose emails show that they also thought a lab leak was a very plausible explanation.
The lab leak hypothesis isn't necessarily a "conspiracy theory", but like many things it depends on the details. The idea that there could have been an accidental leak of a virus from a research lab does not even imply any kind of conspiracy took place, just an accident or negligence. The idea that the Chinese government tried to hide this information is, although personally I wouldn't think it's much of a stretch to imagine. I think it's not a stretch to say you think it came from there, the oversight in place wasn't perfect, and an embarrassed authoritarian government did not want the world blaming it for accidentally releasing a pandemic virus across the globe, so they stonewalled any international investigation into it.
But then you can go one step further with claims that international health organisations or even western governments run by the elusive shadowy cabal of elites all conspired to hide this information, and when we've gone that far we can just go one step further and say that it was an engineered bioweapon that deliberately targets certain races more than others, or that it was created by big pharma to sell a vaccine, and we can go further and further.
When I hear folks on the left dismiss a claim as a "conspiracy theory," I don't think they care whether it constitutes an actual conspiracy theory. I hear an implicit threat. The subtext is, "Right-wing conspiracy theorists have no place in sophisticated society or in lucrative technocratic professions. If you don't renounce that fringe idea you're toying with, I'm going to pin the 'conspiracy theorist' label to you, and you will suffer the social and material consequences."
There were some pretty conspiratorial explanations on the left about the Trump assassination attempt being staged. Also a lot of conspiratorial denialism about Hamas's Oct. 7 and following activities.
“But ‘respectable’ mainstream Republicans like Ted Cruz do make comparable claims about right wing conspiracy theories.”
Please name ONE conspiracy theory claim Ted Cruz made?
You CANNOT cite as evidence the one about Biden being ushered out, since that actually did happen, and Cruz called it months in advance (to be clear, he merely gave it a high probability of occurring, he never stated that it was an absolute certainty)!
Can you actually name one? Inquiring minds want to know.
Yes you can cite the Biden thing. If anyone ever spoke about Michelle Obama as a presidential candidate, they are forever discredited. Not even Sidney Powell’s stuff about voting machines can compare to that.
Forever discredited? That’s a bit much. And you here make no effort whatsoever when you cite this case to distinguish between what I would agree are legitimately conspiracy theories and simple educated prognostications about what is likely to occur.
In Cruz’ case, I listened to his podcasts, and so am aware, unlike you, that he described these in terms of probabilities of occurrence, not certainty, let alone a preordained outcome.
And that he cited Michele Obama was with the demonstrably impeccable logic - with which I know you agree - that Michele Obama is the only possible person who could be parachuted in over Kamala without creating a DEI uproar. The other reason that he cited Michele Obama rather than Kamala as the person they would install was the long-established fact that Kamala consistently polled worse than Biden, and that if the Dems had from the beginning simply wanted to replace Biden with Kamala, they could (and would) have simply done so much earlier in the process.
As we all know now, what happened is Dem party leaders had a contingency plan for removing Joe if he got bad enough for the public to see it, scheduled the first debate so as to give them time to replace him, then went the DEI route when it occurred. So Cruz gets a better grade on what happened than almost every prognosticator out there.
Make no mistake, I agree with the main thesis of your piece. But you are wrong to include “replacing Biden” as a conspiracy theory, and dead wrong to accuse Cruz of pushing any conspiracy theory here at all.
> Did ANY FBI agents or confidential informants actively participate in the events [of 1/6]? We know the FBI has been misused in the past to target President Trump and our conservative movement and run interference for the Democrats. [...] What are they trying to hide now about the events of January 6, 2021? I’m working hard to expose the full truth and shine a light on whether there was any FBI involvement on that day… [...] Who is Ray Epps? Was Ray Epps a federal agent or informant?
I generally prefer the right to the left, but unfortunately I think it's true that Republicans have become the stupid party.
Did not see that, but unfortunately not surprised. A systematic treatment of what Republicans are fundraising off and saying to their email lists I’m sure would make my arguments stronger.
Are you ACTUALLY claiming that you know with anything approaching certainty that Ray Epps was not a paid Fed informant? More to the point, are you claiming that suggesting that Ray Epps *might* be working with the feds is an unreasonable question to ask, especially given how his case was handled?
And that somehow that is evidence that Cruz is a conspiracy theorist? If so, I’d suggest 1) you aren’t very up on your facts, and 2) you are stretching the boundaries of the term conspiracy theorist much further than reasonable, and SO much further than how Richard defines it that you are indeed saying that every leftist who believed in the Russia collusion story initially - let alone the ones who still believe it all these years later - are indeed conspiracy theorists.
I think if you merely ask ChatGPT about this - as I just did - you will see that whether Cruz is correct or incorrect, this doesn’t remotely come to the level of conspiracy theory.
…unless perhaps your claim is that “Russia collusion” was a conspiracy theory of 10,000x proportion, and as such, Cruz’ claim fits the 1x conspiracy theory level. Maybe.
Ted Cruz alleged that Ukraine blatantly interfered with the 2016 election. This allegation was baseless (senior members of his own party like McConnell publicly disavowed it) and clearly referenced a conspiracy on the part of Ukraine.
I think it is uncontroversial to say that this qualifies as a conspiracy theory. It is not relevant that there may have been conspiracy theories with less backing or more significance made by other parties.
It is absolutely controversial - and at least mostly inaccurate - to claim that this is a conspiracy theory.
But as I said, I asked ChatGPT:
Prompt: Did Ukraine interfere in ANY way in the 2016 election? Did Ted Cruz claim this? On what basis did he claim this? Right or wrong, is it fair to label Cruz’ claim as a “conspiracy theory” (don’t tell me that SOME people will claim it; SOME people will claim almost anything; I’m asking if it’s fair to brand the claim that)
ChatGPT:
“ Ted Cruz has claimed that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, citing instances where some Ukrainian officials were publicly critical of Donald Trump and actions taken by individuals, like releasing damaging information about Paul Manafort.
Cruz’s assertion is based on these officials' criticisms and their involvement in matters related to Trump’s campaign. However, there is no substantial evidence that Ukraine, as a state actor, engaged in systematic election interference similar to what was reported about other countries.
Labeling Cruz’s claim as a “conspiracy theory” can be debated. While the claim is not supported by substantial evidence of state-sponsored interference by Ukraine, it may be more accurate to describe it as a misrepresentation rather than a conspiracy theory.‘
And the above is from an LLM that is at least somewhat biased to the left in its output.
So for you today your claim is “uncontroversial” is simply wrong.
Nor, for that matter, does it remotely reach the level of the definition that Richard uses for conspiracy theory. There are actual facts about what an Ukraine released about Manafort. Most of all, it’s especially ridiculous to complain about it in the face of 5 years of the MSM claiming that the 2016 election was bogus because of “Russia collusion”
One of the biggest fundraisers made this claim, Dimitri Melhorn. In my experience, the smartest democrats believe the most insane conspiracies, especially about Russiagate.
This really is the big difference to me. I did see a flurry of conspiracy theories alleging the assassination was a false flag online the day after it happened, but not from anyone with institutional power in the party, whether that was national politicians, senior staffers, prominent pundits, or academics/think tanks. Not even in the "just asking questions" format that encourages it while keeping deniability. Consequently, they seemed to quickly disappear and I haven't seen them since.
The same does not happen the other way. Even on that same event, very prominent and powerful figures on the right immediately jumped to alleging this was simply the latest part of a larger plot to keep Trump out of office by his political opponents.
The denialism of the Oct 7th attacks on the left have been disturbing, and have been amplified by some loud voices, but it's worth acknowledging that the people who do this are still firmly outside the party. The people who do think that are generally very antagonistic towards the the Democratic Party, even including it's most left wing members and allies like Bernie Sanders or AOC, because they refuse to sign onto these crazy conspiracies.
I unsubscribed because you have this delusion that every trump supporter a slack-jawed yokel that has trouble tying their shows and that every democrat is a college professor.
Do you think the news media is really gonna show you the inner city minority on welfare with 3 baby daddies?
Well I’m not too hurt you unsubscribed. I mean, you left a comment within one minute of the article being published, and I doubt you read that fast. One of my recurring points is that Trump supporters are anti-intellectual and don’t read, so nice job of proving the point.
We already know the left’s views.r bc The left doesn’t know I’m. Most of us start out as lefties. Not to mention As Winston Churchill once said “If you’re young and conservative you don’t have a heart. If you’re old and liberal you don’t have a brain.”
The liberal in The New York Times. (Maybe someone else can explain to Richard why that’s a bad thing.)
The establishment elite were mass lobotomized in 2016. They’ve become so incredibly dull, intellectually lazy and fragile beyond reason at the hint of dissent. Richard finds this impressive.
The Democrat Party is unrecognizable. I was a Capitol Hill Democrat. I watched the Democrat Party abandon all honesty and integrity the Democrat Party with my eyes wide open.
I’m not interested in selling my principles in return for the approval of cowards or strangers. Richard apparently is and brags about it.
1) Just about everything to do with Monsanto and GMOs.
2) That every climate sceptic is in the pay of Big Oil.
3) That the Koch Brothers secretly control politics.
4) “No Blood For Oil” - That US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was all really about oil.
5) That Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 was a byproduct of Putin psy-ops.
6) That Brexit was a result of Putin psy-ops.
7) That Brexit was a result of Cambridge Analytica doing something MKUltra-like.
8) That Brexit was a result of “disaster capitalism”, in which hedge fund managers like Crispin Odey deliberately crashed the UK economy in order to make huge profits by shorting the pound.
If one side of the political spectrum claims that breathing is bad, you'll have to vote for the other side, no matter how crazy and foolish it is.
The left opposes the foundations of human existence—things like the existence of a state, borders, law, family, and two genders. Therefore, there's no choice but to vote for the right.
Not everyone on the left is that crazy, but there's a dynamic that was very noticeable in the Biden administration. The center-left thinks there's something pure and right about the radicals on the extreme edge, and they always give them the final word. When this didn't happen during the Gaza war, the radicals reacted with extreme outrage, which sent the party into a panic.
I think the idea of hegemony as construed in the postcolonial theory world is a next-level evolution of conspiracy theory - the idea that you don't even need a shadowy cabal of bad actors, because the bad actor is "society" or "culture" or "patriarchy" or whatever abstract concept the theorizer wants to attack.
Going with your framing, conservatives are dumb and at their worst, believe bad mean cabals are making the world worst. Progressives are smarter and can sublimate that impulse into more plausible sociological theorizing that replaces the bad cabal with a bad concept or institution, theorizing which gets ratified by the academic world and elevated from its prole-y origin.
You and Anatoly Karlin constantly make the same error. You think one can infer general traits of conservatives from their leaders or public figures. This is not true. There are actual studies of conspiracy beliefs, and they don't differ much by ideology. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-022-09812-3#Sec2 The way academics obtain the result for the link to American conservatism, is by choosing conspiracy theories for their studies that conservatives are more into. They fool themselves (or cheat, if you want) the same way that the prejudice researchers do it by doing studies asking people to rate a bunch of groups that conservatives like less, and leave out the groups leftists like less. Smoke and mirrors.
You know, my quibbles with some of Richard’s points aside, I more or less agreed with his premise.
And I *think* I still do, but…
Seeing the zeal with which leftists in this comment section continue to defend the “Russia collusion” claim despite the years of the Mueller investigation fishing expedition, all started based on the known lie Steele dossier paid for by Democrats colluding with Russians, kinda undercuts his argument a fair amount.
What makes Russiagate the most damaging is the straight line to the current Ukraine proxy war which is gleefully supported by every elite human capital shitlib. This was not possible in 2014 given Barack Obama’s sane position at that time.
"But the evidence suggests that the idea that Russia hacked the DNC in order to help Trump win the 2016 election is likely true. "
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The only "evidence" for this fake fact was the say-so of the DNC's own private security company, CrowdStrike. There is no way to tell the nationality of a hacker in the first place so the claim was always stupid on its face. The fakeness of the allegation and the FBI's involvement in the fake narrative was confirmed when the FBI very pointedly refused to examine the server itself to verify this allegation -- they just wanted to use the DNC's story. (Remember, we now know the RussiaGate story originated as a secret Hillary/DNC conspiracy to commission a false dossier from Steele and then launder it thru useful idiots like retard McCaine and James Comey).
But Hanania knows nothing and just trusts a 2018 WaPo article to tell give him the true facts. Hey, Hanania if you believe the DNC and Deep State's main propaganda outlet on this, I got a bridge in Crimea to sell you.
Hanania's attempt to brand himself as high "human capital" by rejecting "conspiracy theories" is actually a mid-wit defense mechanism. Because conspiracies are done in secret, by definition, the facts are not always readily apparent. They exist on a continuum of plausibility based on available circumstantial evidence and knowledge about the characters and motivations involved. Smooth-brained people cannot think in such contingencies and probabilities. They need a True/False dichotomy like some kind of retarded Snopes "fact checker" before they can "know" things. So it's always easiest to say "no conclusive evidence" exists until some so-called authority figure certifies a true/false verdict that you are allowed to believe without losing social status in respectable society. Ideological conspiracy-deniers are simply incurious, unimaginative dullards.
Love this. Imagine responding to an article about conspiracy theories being on the right, trying to refute the argument, and then bringing up Seth Rich. The lack of self awareness is truly breath-taking.
I only said it's a "plausible" theory that Seth Rich was the leaker. I'm sorry your little brain can't entertain the concept of a hypothesis, unless the newspaper tells you it's socially permissible for you to think about it. So instead you believe a provably *false* conspiracy theory -- that Russia did it -- because it's an officially approved narrative. Very weak intellectually.
Your first link stressed that it was only a possibility, not a certainty. Your second link says circumstantial evidence, not NO evidence. And I have yet to see anything that points to Seth Rich being killed for this, it's classic conspiracy.
Matthew Yglesias recently articulated what I found a useful formulation: the Democrats have become the party of "credulous conformists" and the Republicans the party of anti-institutional conspiracy theorists.
Now, in a modern American context - where most institutions are mostly trustworthy most of the time - it's generally better to be a credulous conformist than a conspiracy theorist. But being a credulous conformist is still not good, and sometimes on specific issues or in particular moments the conspiracy theorist will have the right of it. I suppose the ideal epistemology would generally default to institutional trust but nonetheless maintain some amount of reasonable skepticism, to be applied on a case-by-case basis. This obviously requires a degree of critical thinking skills, which I guess is where our educational system *should* come in, but obviously doesn't these days.
Interesting formulation but it seems to imply that credulous conformism is mutually exclusive with anti-institutional conspiratorial theorizing. That isn't the case: the biggest source of left wing conspiracy theories is by far the institutions they credulously believe.
Consider one of the most inane yet pervasive: that Trump is a Russian spy. This belief was created out of whole cloth by the DNC and the Democrat press, both institutions the left trusts completely. Yet it's a conspiracy theory about institutions (the Republican party and the Russian government).
Another example is "far right misinformation", manufactured at massive scale by far left institutions like universities, and routinely invoked to explain nearly any claim or fact that's inconvenient to the left. This conspiracy theory posits a conspiracy of major social networks (especially X) combined with any group or party that isn't overtly left wing.
> most institutions are mostly trustworthy most of the time
I think if you classify things like individual county-level fire stations and hospitals as institutions, you can probably win that argument.
But we're not talking about _all_ institutions, nobody is. We're talking about institutions that make factual claims of a non-obvious nature. Also, we're not merely interested in the average case but the most important cases. And there it's much less clear.
Bear in mind that individual universities are classed as independent institutions. There are over 4,000 universities in the USA and none of them are trustworthy. Every single one of them happily rubberstamps a long list of absurd or false claims if they advance a left wing agenda. That by itself creates a huge weight on the "mostly untrustworthy" side.
First, you're going to need to define what you mean by "a conspiracy of major social networks." What sort of coordinated action is being alleged, and to what end?
In a broader sense, you're misapplying the term. Even if the existence of "far-right misinformation" is completely fabricated (which it isn't) that doesn't make it a "conspiracy theory." It just makes it wrong.
They usually claim some variant of social networks deliberately spreading "far right propaganda" (they mean any view that's not left wing) for clicks and profit, or more recently in the case of X, because rocket man bad.
The academic field of misinformation studies is pure conspiracy theory on a ludicrous scale (tens of thousands of papers). Their base assumption is that people arguing with left wing views are not legitimately disagreeing but rather, know they are wrong and deliberately work together for other reasons. For example they regularly argue such people aren't even real at all but are just bots (all claims of using bots to influence politics through social media are conspiracy theories).
How would you define the term "conspiracy theory" such that "all claims of using bots to influence politics through social media" are definitionally conspiracy theories?
A theory that posits the existence of a hidden conspiracy, usually but not always in aid of manipulating the public.
The left don't define it that way and use the term as a generic insult for any non-leftist belief, but I am much more precise than that.
Hanania explicitly said in the piece that it's telling that conservatives have to go back seven years to point to a liberal conspiracy regarding Trump vis a vis Russia.
It's been parroted continuously since then, and it is by no means fringe
That conspiracy theory ran for many years. If you define the end as the Mueller report (arguably that wasn't the end), then it ran from 2016-2019.
It doesn't matter anyway because that example wasn't picked due to recency but saliency.
So, five years. Okay. What is a more recent salient one? Let's say on the scale of the Big Lie.
Conformism and conspiracy-thinking aren't mutually exclusive per se, but as Hanania noted, conspiracy theories are usually paranoid delusions about the machinations of the elite. So you can view the current stances of Democrats versus Republicans as being yay elites! (so we believe everything the NYT tells us) versus boo elites! (so everything the NYT says is made-up in order to trick us to get vaccines).
Nate Silver has been thinking along these lines about how a major faultline in politics right now is establishment versus anti-establishment. He's not the only one to have this idea. I know the Moment of Zen guys use this framework a lot, specifically in contrasting the ethos of Big Tech versus Little Tech. (Marc Andreseen likes this framing too.)
>Nate Silver has been thinking along these lines about how a major faultline in politics right now is establishment versus anti-establishment.
I also had this idea but someone on Substack gave me a better one: the right used to be broad and the left used to be narrow, and now the left is broad and the right is narrow.
It is always the broad side who included the pro-establishment people, who trust Big Pharma and expertise and all.
The problem is that people differentiate between different "elites" (I really hate that term, there's often nothing elite about them). Most obviously, one could describe both powerful Republicans and Democrats as "elite" but that doesn't imply people are either for or against both of them at once. Other important fault lines are conventional military vs intelligence agencies, Elon Musk vs Bill Gates, Fox vs CNN and so on.
So it boils down to different people trusting different institutions and for different reasons. Which maybe isn't saying much.
I still think that it's wrong to equivocate credulous conformism with the conspiracism. People simply do not have enough time to thoroughly research every issue, and it makes sense that the absolutely insane conspiracy theorists have poisoned the well for the justified criticisms of institutional beliefs. Take for example, the Covid lab theory. This is something Gribbles often use as a "gotcha" against people who trust institutions, but really it just shows how pressing the problems of floating baseless conspiracy actually is. You can't really blame people for assuming that people who claim that Covid started in a lab were just throwing darts at a conspiracy board when those same people have actually just floated completely insane and baseless conspiracy theories 19 out of 20 times. These conspiracy theorists completely box out legitimate criticisms of establishment beliefs in our information-saturated social media era.
Of course you can blame people. The theory was both obvious and highly plausible given common sense and even five minutes research. One can't blame a generic outgroup for one's own inability to think straight. You are responsible for your own epistemic health, not anyone else.
I think ExpansiveYolk is saying that you really can’t blame non-conspiratorialists for giving the conspirators a pass since the conspiratory-minded seem to be throwing ideas at a dartboard and seeing what sticks, despite the fact that 95% of the time the conspiracies are wrong and damaging.
He probably agrees with your thoughts on the Covid lab theory.
I understand what he's saying, but it isn't really logical. How does he know that 95% of the time these (unnamed) people are just throwing darts? This is a person who just admitted they are poor judges of what's true, hence why they got beaten on a question that wasn't even complex.
Obviously without specifics he can invent a set of straw men and give them any properties he wants. If he named anyone specific the obvious response would be: sure, what about those other times? Wanna debate those too? It's a bold move to take on people who already beat you once on the assumption it was just a fluke. After all, a lot of conspiracy theories target government institutions that just proved themselves to be pathologically dishonest. Why wouldn't you expect to lose again?
What exactly changed after COVID to make our institutions go from mostly right most of the time to something different (mostly right less than half the time, or mostly wrong most of the time?)
Forcing health mandates like vaccine cards, closing private businesses, churches, and schools on false information. Govt pressuring large private communication and social media companies to silence citizens and a sitting US president.
Conspiracy Theories are marginalized on the Left? Surely you jest. No, they dominate the coverage of the NYT, WaPo, and other legacy press for months and years. You handwaved RussiaGate, but let's seriously consider that something like half the country has seriously believed, with essentially no evidence, that Trump is a White Supremacist, that Trump is a Russian stooge, that even the most lurid gossip of the Steele Dossier was proven true, that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was Russian Misinformation Op, that Trump planned to declare Martial Law and stage a military coup to avoid leaving office, that Trump planned and led an insurrection, that Trump is plotting "a bloodbath" in the streets if he loses, that Trump will end elections if he wins again, that the Republican Party are "literally Fascists" who are plotting to create a "Christofascist Tyranny", that if Trump wins then LGBTQ people will be rounded up in camps and women who get abortions will face the death penalty, need I really go on? Hell, I remember during early COVID when the Democrats were pushing the claim that Trump was going to kill people by releasing a placebo instead of a real vaccine because they INSISTED that there was no possible way to produce a vaccine in less than several years, or before even that, when they were accusing Trump of alarmism and anti-Asian bigotry while Nancy Pelosi was still out hugging people in the streets of Chinatown to show how unconcerned Democrats were about "the Chinese virus".
It's hardly a new thing either. Anti-vaxxers have traditionally been found mostly on the left wing, as are the numerous conspiracy theories about GMOs and Monsanto, about Big Oil secretly controlling our foreign military policy, etc. I shouldn't have to repeat this, but objective studies have repeatedly found no significant difference in the prevalence of conspiratorial thinking on either side. The only consistent difference they have found is that liberals tend to have a lower threshold of evidence for changing their minds, often being the majority of early adopters of new conspiracy theories, whereas conservatives tend to have higher evidence thresholds, and therefore are slower both to be talked into them and talked out of them.
As for "racism with racists", that's a nonsense logical contradiction in terms right up there with "implicit bias" (which is itself essentially just an updated "false consciousness"). If you really want them, I can easily provide quotes from DiAngelo, Coates, and others describing "Whiteness" in blatantly conspiratorial terms and advocating for explicit discrimination against Whites. More to the point, you mentioned Hofstadter, but you didn't represent him accurately. With credit to Britannica:
"American historian Richard Hofstadter explored the emergence of conspiracy theorizing by proposing a consensus view of democracy. Competing groups would represent the interests of individuals, but they would do so within a political system that everyone agreed would frame the bounds of conflict. For Hofstadter, those who felt unable to channel their political interests into representative groups would become alienated from this system. These individuals would not accept the statements of opposition parties as representing a fair disagreement; rather, differences in views would be regarded with deep suspicion. Such alienated people would develop a paranoid fear of conspiracy, thus making them vulnerable to charismatic rather than practical and rational leadership. This would undermine democracy and lead to totalitarian rule.
In The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), Hofstadter proposed that this is not an individual pathology but instead originates in social conflict that raises fears and anxieties, which leads to status struggles between opposed groups. The resulting conspiracy theorizing derives from a collective sense of threat to one’s group, culture, way of life, and so on. Extremists at either end of the political spectrum could be expected to develop a paranoid style."
Left-Wing theories of CRT, "The Patriarchy", "Whiteness", etc clearly fit this definition: they originate with groups that feel alienated from the system, they regard another clearly identified group as inherently threatening to them, view the claims of the groups they accuse as inherently deceptive and concealing negative motivations toward them, they do not regard the accused groups or the system itself as legitimate, so they are not satisfied with attempting to resolve the matter with persuasion and democracy within the system, instead they respond by undermining the system itself and resorting to totalitarian measures (riots in the streets, public intimidation, lawfare, weaponizing government agencies, etc). Hofstadter does not require that any small cabal of leaders of the conspiracy actually exist, nor even be alleged to exist, only that the conspiratorial thinkers mischaracterize legitimate disagreements within the system as a collective hostility resulting in alleged illegitimate actions threatening the thinker.
Hanania suggests that one difference is that the people pushing conspiracies on the right are the people at the top. They are Senators and Congressmen and Governors and prominent journalists. On the left, they are dog catchers and the woman who writes a column in a local newspaper in Baltimore.
Looking at your list of conspiracy theories that the left believes, I can't think of a single one that got beyond whispers in a college lunchroom.
Hanania apparently doesn't read the NYT and WaPo or chooses to ignore those since he's running with the 'No True Scotsman Fallacy' that conspiracy theories don't count as conspiracy theories if he happens to believe they are true.
I'd link you Senators, Congressmen, probably Governors (gotta admit I don't pay much attention to Governors outside my state), and prominent journalists pushing any and all of this crap (Prominent journalists are usually the easiest since most left-wing conspiracies appear in the NYT, WaPo, etc at some point), but I'd rather not use up my free articles on this or spend a lot of time finding ways around the their paywalls again.
Hanania also suggests that the right in general are more prone to conspiracy theories, which is likewise proven false by actual studies that he is aware of but chooses to ignore, but also makes the suggestion about whether it's coming from the top or bottom somewhat besides the point. For example, If I link you Democrat members of Congress (falsely) proclaiming over and over in public statements to have seen, in an official capacity, hard evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia, are you going to accept that Democrats push conspiracy theories from the highest levels or are you going to do like Hanania and handwave it?
Can you show me where the NYT, WaPo, or a similar national newspaper have printed the phrases you put in quotes ("literally Fascists" or "Christofascist tyranny" referring to the GOP, etc)? If phrases and thinking like this "dominate coverage" as you say, it shouldn't be hard.
The vaccine example further proves Hanania's point: it used to be associated with the left, but post-2020 is almost entirely a right-wing phenomenon.
Sure, here's a few examples of lefty press pushing this narratives before I ran out of free articles.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006154922/fascism-leaders-america-trump.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/06/republican-fascism-media/
https://www.salon.com/2024/01/05/kathryn-joyce-on-christian-right-institutions-and-knowledge-the-wrecking-ball/
Incidentally, you're wrong about anti-vaxxers too. Just because some leftists don't fall into line doesn't make them suddenly on the right. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/what-do-lefty-anti-vaxxers-do-now/620092/
You've also rather missed that being anti-mandate isn't the same thing as being "anti-vax". People on the right who don't agree with COVID vaccine mandates as authoritarian overreach aren't necessarily rejecting routine childhood immunizations or blaming vaccines for autism like the traditional leftist anti-vaxxers.
You'll be frustrated with this response but I think it's accurate: this evidence doesn't meet the standard *you yourself* set in your original comment.
Your NYT example studiously avoids saying "literally Fascist," opting for softer phrasings like "there are parallels between Trump's words [and those of fascists]." (I can't access the WaPo article, but I'm pretty confident it does the same.)
Salon, the internet-native, self-styled "smart tabloid" is not in the class of "NYT, WaPo, and other legacy press" that you picked out.
I agree that all the sentiments you described are present on the left. The disagreement is about how common and how prominent they are. This is hard to establish in a comment thread, so I don't really expect to convince you, but I think the fact that you are subtly moving the goalposts here is an indication that your initial comment took an indefensibly strong position.
I think the Paul Pelosi example is very clear: it's not just the Breitbarts of the world that are posting conspiracy theories, it's mainstream, top-tier conservative media figures and elected representatives. "Trump's rhetoric shares some characteristic with fascists" is not in the same category as "Paul Pelosi's attacker was secretly a prostitute he hired."
As for anti-vax: the point of that Atlantic article is again that anti-vax *used to be* a common sentiment on the left, and now the existence of leftist anti-vaxxers is uncommon enough to justify an article.
I agree that anti-vax is not the same as anti-vaccine-mandate (I didn't claim otherwise). But there's clearly lots of straightforward anti-vaccine sentiment on the right: enough that Trump never mentions Operation Warp Speed, his greatest accomplishment as president, because he's concerned he'll alienate his supporters.
Shrug. Not sure why I'm having to repeat myself, but I'm out of free articles now and not particularly willing to invest the time it would take to get around the paywalls to post more links. They're more prevalent and prominent on the left than you seem willing to acknowledge.
I do find it odd that your 'go to' counterexample here would be the Paul Pelosi prostitute thing. For starters, that's not really a "conspiracy theory", so it doesn't particularly fit the topic of discussion. Further, the main claims actually originated with initial factual errors in reporting acknowledged by the NYT and WaPo in their own case studies of how the story got twisted (initial reports said that the intruder was in his underpants and Pelosi referred to him as "a friend" to the police, so that kinda did support the idea). Then somebody cracked a joke about it and, as usual on the Internet, other people didn't get the joke and thought it was a serious claim (despite the initial errors getting corrected fairly quickly). Even so, it was mostly just chatter on social media. The only outlet on the Right I'm seeing that officially published such claims is "One American News", which is a tabloid barely better regarded than RT. Sorry, but Salon is a hell of a lot closer to being widely read and representative of the Left-leaning media ecosystem than OAN is of the right-leaning media ecosystem. Show me the New York Post, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, or even something on par with the Daily Signal pushing that story.
I’d like to see a list from Hanania of the right wing beliefs that are smart and consistent with high human capital. So far I can imagine:
1. Markets are good.
2. Civil rights should mean equal rules not equal outcomes.
I think it's easy to get low-humam capital people to support pro-market beliefs because it's easy to map them onto appealing "folk" beliefs about the virtues of thrift and self-reliance.
Those beliefs evolved for a reason.
Probably a lot of stuff about family.
All good points. I think one could posit better examples of left wing conspiracy theories / theorists. People live Oliver Stone and Russell Brand start off on the left but become so conspiratorial and contrarian they get sucked to the right because that is a more hospitable place for their anti-mainstream ideas at the moment. But an example of a leftist conspiracy theory might be the obsession with Russia influencing western elections and with various figures being Russian agents. Im not sure to what extent this is true, rather than a conspiracy theory, but it has some features of a conspiracy theory.
I think claiming that the CIA was behind virtually every bad thing that happened to foreign Leftist regimes over the last 75 years is a clear example of very widely held conspiracy theories on the Left.
It's a fairly easy conspiracy theory to swallow, because the CIA really was behind some bad things that happened to some foreign leftist regimes. Saying that the CIA did a bunch more stuff that we don't know about isn't that big a stretch. It's only when you put all the seperate alleged CIA conspiracies together that they start to sound ridiculous, as they begin to paint the CIA as an omnicompetant organization with unlimited resources.
Yes. I agree that alleging one or two historical instances is plausible, but in my experience many in the Left use it as a default explanation and can give no evidence to back up the claim in the specific instance being discussed.
It is a “Get out of jail free” card.
You’re talking about dark politics, right?
So you acknowledge that leftists believe these conspiracy theories that lack evidence?
Literally using your own logic, you have just excused everyone on the right for believing *most* (not all) conspiracies by leftists given Russia collusion lie, Lois Lerner IRS, Hunter Biden laptop as fake lie, the media claiming Trump lied about being wiretapped in 2015 when it was true, et.c, etc., etc.
Sorry, ya can’t have it both ways.
I'm not saying it isn't a conspiracy theory, I'm saying that it's more plausible than other conspiracy theories because all it requires is exaggerating something real. "The CIA was behind this one thing" is fairly plausible because the CIA has occasionally really been behind things. "The CIA is behind everything" is not, because the CIA is not omnipotent. The theory that the CIA is behind all leftist regime failures is a conspiracy theory created by intellectual laziness on the part of leftists. They assert that a single regime failure was caused by the CIA, then do the same the next time another one fails, and so on. What they are too lazy to do is keep track of their statements and notice that they have asserted so many things are the CIA's fault, that they implied that it has unlimited resources and competence. The much more plausible explanation is that leftist regimes are unworkable and corrupt.
Similarly, blaming one failure of Trump's on a Deep State "la trahison de clercs" isn't implausible. Blaming one of the criminal charges against him on leftists out to get him is similarly plausible, since there have been frauds like the Steele Dossier. However, when he keeps failing and keeps having criminal charges leveled against him, eventually asserting that its all the left's fault becomes ridiculous. The much more plausible explanation is that Trump is an incompetent administrator and a corrupt criminal.
“ when he keeps … having criminal charges leveled against him, eventually asserting that its all the left's fault becomes ridiculous. ‘
🙄🙄🙄
Amazing illogic. Especially when the reality is 180 degrees the opposite.
Prosecutors did not level charges against previous Republicans like Bush, Romney, and McCain the same way they do against Trump. The reason for this isn't that the left was nicer and less power hungry a decade ago than it is today. The reason for it is that Trump is more vulnerable to such attacks because he is an actual criminal.
Left-wing bias has amplified this, for example, in the case where he was found guilty of 34 felonies it looks like he was actually only guilty of one or two, the other felonies were piled on by some weird legal logic. But he really was guilty of the initial charge of falsifying business records. He is a really bad guy.
The CIA did quite a lot; what makes this a runaway or rogue-agency Deep State conspiracy theory for those on the left, is their overlooking the fact that all of it was yes, approved, authorized by US Presidents.
Depends on how you define "the left". No prominent democratic politician believes this, and there is no viable movement in the party for abolishing the agency. This believe is common though among the ~5% of Americabs that support full blown socialism and believe AOC sold out to the establishment.
From my experience, it is believed by far more than 5% of the Left.
I think the reason why it does not come up with current Democratic politicians is because it is more about historiography of the Cold War at this point. The belief was widespread enough among Democrats in the 1970s to provide the intellectual foundation for the Frank Church committee, which was dominated by Democrats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
Personally, I believe it doesn’t come up from influential Dems much any more is simply because the Dems have become the party of “the government is good and just and can do no wrong and should be believed about everything (at least when we are in charge or ‘civil servants’ are doing the talking”, and so playing that up doesn’t serve their political interest because it is off-message.
Even that is not one you will hear coming from prominent political figures or mainstream talking heads. The people on the left who obsess over CIA involvement in everything tend to be ones who hate the Democratic Party and refuse to support Democratic candidates. Aside from that though, the "CIA deposing leftist governments" thing is another example of a belief that can easily be historically grounded and based in fact, even if it often spills into further conspiracy theories beyond that
I'd say Russiagate is probably the biggest counter-example, but a) it's more the exception that proves the rule, and b) I'd actually posit that it's more emblematic of what is now an earlier iteration of American liberalism. Russiagate is less of a preoccupation on the left these days, and not *just* because 2016 has receded in the rearview mirror - contemporary liberalism is considerably more institutionally aligned than it was even in the mid-2010s.
(edit: And of course, mainstream institutions themselves are not necessarily immune to conspiracist thinking - but they're generally less susceptible to it than individuals, counter-cultures, or counter-institutions.)
I think Brand has more or less successfully rebranded himself as a right-winger now, particularly considering his recent conversion to Christianity.
“Russiagate” cost the tax payers millions of dollars to investigate and consumed the Trump presidency for two years. In fact, many reputable people on the left referred to Trump as an “illegitimate President” based on what turned out to be opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, where the sources later admitted to having nothing on Trump.
Even worse, the NYT won a Pulitzer(!) based on their coverage of this story. Rachel Maddow actually read the Steel Dossier on the air!
It’s amazing how the breathless coverage from the left who pushed this false narrative for two years(!) is now memory holed.
It didn't stop in 2019 either. The Hunter laptop misinfo was a top down conspiracy theory from the Dems
While I agree with the vast majority of this, I think perhaps a more useful distinction between the kinds of pathological thinking which predominate on the right versus left is conspiracy versus magic.
Take for example CRT's refrain of 'racism without racists.' I agree this is anti-conspiratorial, but the logical conclusion of it is that racism is an aetheric, malevolent, force that people can only be aware of, but not do anything about. This, I think, is where you get ridiculous statements that gained some currency during the summer of Floyd such as that nothing about race relations or racism had changed since Emmet Till, or even since before the abolition of slavery.
As with the two extremes of Russiagate, there is pathological thinking like the above, and more reasonable positions as outlined in the piece. But both versions fail to take into account the extent to which the some of the most egregious, but 'second-line,' stamps of racism on our laws and institutions were scrubbed out during civil rights. The first example that comes to mind here is the unenforceability, and later completely void nature, of racially restrictive covenants running with the land, which had been the original (IIRC) mechanism of redlining. I don't recall exactly when courts stopped enforcing these covenants as being against public policy, but at the latest it was early 70s.
Shelley v. Kramer held racially restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948. Redlining refers to federal agencies determining what areas were eligible for federal mortgage insurance, a completely different process. I suspect its significance in home ownership rates is exaggerated but I don’t really know that.
As Richard pointed out in the article, a belief in structural racism is quite different from, and even hostile to, the idea that racism is an aesthetic, malevolent force that people can be aware of, but not do anything about. The real problem with CRT is that, as a branch of Theory, it exempts its advocates of actually proving its claims.
It seems odd to me that you adopt this definition of a conspiracy (“belief that some secret but influential organization is responsible for an event or phenomenon”) when almost all your examples have no alleged “secret organization.”
Bill Gates is no secret organization.
The DNC is no secret organization.
Pharmaceutical companies are no secret organization.
I think a better definition is a “set of influential individuals or organizations who seek to take action with a large impact on society and whose claimed intentions greatly differ from their stated intentions” or something of that sort.
So if the intended impact on society is small, it is not a conspiracy theory. If the stated desires of the individuals or organizations is aligned with their actual intentions, it is not a conspiracy. If it is a relatively large portion of society who is doing it, it is more of an ideological movement, not a conspiracy. If it is a few clearly non-influential people who could not possibly achieve the desired result, it is not a conspiracy.
I didn’t read it like that. I took “secret organization” as more like an organization behaving in a secretive manner. The DNC that Bret Weinstein imagines is a kind of secret organization because it doesn’t have any connection to the real thing. But you’re right, I should edit.
Thanks. I think the best counter-example on the Left today is to describe anything that they disagree with as a “conspiracy theory.” The most obvious example is the Covid lab leak hypothesis, which by definition was a mistake, not a conspiracy (although covering it up afterwards would be a conspiracy). It was immediately trashed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory by the same people whose emails show that they also thought a lab leak was a very plausible explanation.
The lab leak hypothesis isn't necessarily a "conspiracy theory", but like many things it depends on the details. The idea that there could have been an accidental leak of a virus from a research lab does not even imply any kind of conspiracy took place, just an accident or negligence. The idea that the Chinese government tried to hide this information is, although personally I wouldn't think it's much of a stretch to imagine. I think it's not a stretch to say you think it came from there, the oversight in place wasn't perfect, and an embarrassed authoritarian government did not want the world blaming it for accidentally releasing a pandemic virus across the globe, so they stonewalled any international investigation into it.
But then you can go one step further with claims that international health organisations or even western governments run by the elusive shadowy cabal of elites all conspired to hide this information, and when we've gone that far we can just go one step further and say that it was an engineered bioweapon that deliberately targets certain races more than others, or that it was created by big pharma to sell a vaccine, and we can go further and further.
When I hear folks on the left dismiss a claim as a "conspiracy theory," I don't think they care whether it constitutes an actual conspiracy theory. I hear an implicit threat. The subtext is, "Right-wing conspiracy theorists have no place in sophisticated society or in lucrative technocratic professions. If you don't renounce that fringe idea you're toying with, I'm going to pin the 'conspiracy theorist' label to you, and you will suffer the social and material consequences."
There were some pretty conspiratorial explanations on the left about the Trump assassination attempt being staged. Also a lot of conspiratorial denialism about Hamas's Oct. 7 and following activities.
I think you’re missing the point about who it is making the claims.
Did some lunatic professor somewhere say 10/7 was staged? No doubt.
Did Nancy Pelosi or Cory Booker or Chris Hayes or even Rashida Tlaib make such claims? No.
But ‘respectable’ mainstream Republicans like Ted Cruz do make comparable claims about right wing conspiracy theories.
“But ‘respectable’ mainstream Republicans like Ted Cruz do make comparable claims about right wing conspiracy theories.”
Please name ONE conspiracy theory claim Ted Cruz made?
You CANNOT cite as evidence the one about Biden being ushered out, since that actually did happen, and Cruz called it months in advance (to be clear, he merely gave it a high probability of occurring, he never stated that it was an absolute certainty)!
Can you actually name one? Inquiring minds want to know.
Yes you can cite the Biden thing. If anyone ever spoke about Michelle Obama as a presidential candidate, they are forever discredited. Not even Sidney Powell’s stuff about voting machines can compare to that.
Forever discredited? That’s a bit much. And you here make no effort whatsoever when you cite this case to distinguish between what I would agree are legitimately conspiracy theories and simple educated prognostications about what is likely to occur.
In Cruz’ case, I listened to his podcasts, and so am aware, unlike you, that he described these in terms of probabilities of occurrence, not certainty, let alone a preordained outcome.
And that he cited Michele Obama was with the demonstrably impeccable logic - with which I know you agree - that Michele Obama is the only possible person who could be parachuted in over Kamala without creating a DEI uproar. The other reason that he cited Michele Obama rather than Kamala as the person they would install was the long-established fact that Kamala consistently polled worse than Biden, and that if the Dems had from the beginning simply wanted to replace Biden with Kamala, they could (and would) have simply done so much earlier in the process.
As we all know now, what happened is Dem party leaders had a contingency plan for removing Joe if he got bad enough for the public to see it, scheduled the first debate so as to give them time to replace him, then went the DEI route when it occurred. So Cruz gets a better grade on what happened than almost every prognosticator out there.
Make no mistake, I agree with the main thesis of your piece. But you are wrong to include “replacing Biden” as a conspiracy theory, and dead wrong to accuse Cruz of pushing any conspiracy theory here at all.
Ted Cruz sent out an email to his supporters:
> Did ANY FBI agents or confidential informants actively participate in the events [of 1/6]? We know the FBI has been misused in the past to target President Trump and our conservative movement and run interference for the Democrats. [...] What are they trying to hide now about the events of January 6, 2021? I’m working hard to expose the full truth and shine a light on whether there was any FBI involvement on that day… [...] Who is Ray Epps? Was Ray Epps a federal agent or informant?
I generally prefer the right to the left, but unfortunately I think it's true that Republicans have become the stupid party.
Did not see that, but unfortunately not surprised. A systematic treatment of what Republicans are fundraising off and saying to their email lists I’m sure would make my arguments stronger.
Are you ACTUALLY claiming that you know with anything approaching certainty that Ray Epps was not a paid Fed informant? More to the point, are you claiming that suggesting that Ray Epps *might* be working with the feds is an unreasonable question to ask, especially given how his case was handled?
And that somehow that is evidence that Cruz is a conspiracy theorist? If so, I’d suggest 1) you aren’t very up on your facts, and 2) you are stretching the boundaries of the term conspiracy theorist much further than reasonable, and SO much further than how Richard defines it that you are indeed saying that every leftist who believed in the Russia collusion story initially - let alone the ones who still believe it all these years later - are indeed conspiracy theorists.
Is there evidence that Epps is an informant?
Yes, the vastly disparate treatment he received is indeed *evidence*.
Is it conclusive proof? Decidedly not. But it surely is *evidence*
There is no doubt some other evidence, but at this point I don’t really care about further details.
Raising legit questions is NOT being a conspiracy theorist.
“Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election." Ted Cruz made this claim in 2019, referring to the 2016 election.
I think if you merely ask ChatGPT about this - as I just did - you will see that whether Cruz is correct or incorrect, this doesn’t remotely come to the level of conspiracy theory.
…unless perhaps your claim is that “Russia collusion” was a conspiracy theory of 10,000x proportion, and as such, Cruz’ claim fits the 1x conspiracy theory level. Maybe.
Ted Cruz alleged that Ukraine blatantly interfered with the 2016 election. This allegation was baseless (senior members of his own party like McConnell publicly disavowed it) and clearly referenced a conspiracy on the part of Ukraine.
I think it is uncontroversial to say that this qualifies as a conspiracy theory. It is not relevant that there may have been conspiracy theories with less backing or more significance made by other parties.
It is absolutely controversial - and at least mostly inaccurate - to claim that this is a conspiracy theory.
But as I said, I asked ChatGPT:
Prompt: Did Ukraine interfere in ANY way in the 2016 election? Did Ted Cruz claim this? On what basis did he claim this? Right or wrong, is it fair to label Cruz’ claim as a “conspiracy theory” (don’t tell me that SOME people will claim it; SOME people will claim almost anything; I’m asking if it’s fair to brand the claim that)
ChatGPT:
“ Ted Cruz has claimed that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, citing instances where some Ukrainian officials were publicly critical of Donald Trump and actions taken by individuals, like releasing damaging information about Paul Manafort.
Cruz’s assertion is based on these officials' criticisms and their involvement in matters related to Trump’s campaign. However, there is no substantial evidence that Ukraine, as a state actor, engaged in systematic election interference similar to what was reported about other countries.
Labeling Cruz’s claim as a “conspiracy theory” can be debated. While the claim is not supported by substantial evidence of state-sponsored interference by Ukraine, it may be more accurate to describe it as a misrepresentation rather than a conspiracy theory.‘
And the above is from an LLM that is at least somewhat biased to the left in its output.
So for you today your claim is “uncontroversial” is simply wrong.
Nor, for that matter, does it remotely reach the level of the definition that Richard uses for conspiracy theory. There are actual facts about what an Ukraine released about Manafort. Most of all, it’s especially ridiculous to complain about it in the face of 5 years of the MSM claiming that the 2016 election was bogus because of “Russia collusion”
One of the biggest fundraisers made this claim, Dimitri Melhorn. In my experience, the smartest democrats believe the most insane conspiracies, especially about Russiagate.
“the smartest democrats believe the most insane conspiracies, especially about Russiagate”
By smartest, I assume you mean high IQ, as opposed to actually knowledgeable and reason with logic rather than emotion, right?
If so, I surely agree with you
This really is the big difference to me. I did see a flurry of conspiracy theories alleging the assassination was a false flag online the day after it happened, but not from anyone with institutional power in the party, whether that was national politicians, senior staffers, prominent pundits, or academics/think tanks. Not even in the "just asking questions" format that encourages it while keeping deniability. Consequently, they seemed to quickly disappear and I haven't seen them since.
The same does not happen the other way. Even on that same event, very prominent and powerful figures on the right immediately jumped to alleging this was simply the latest part of a larger plot to keep Trump out of office by his political opponents.
I saw a couple of people say this ... but I haven't seen a single politician argue for it. Have you? If not, then this is just nutpicking isn't it?
There were some local mayor and city council types I believe, although I haven't tracked down the stories. Also this guy: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/adviser-democratic-donor-apologizes-saying-trump-shooting-may-be-staged-2024-07-15/. But he did apologize and retract it.
Here's the mayor of Aberdeen, who the headline says apologized but didn't really if you watch the clip: https://youtu.be/pF2Zoc82yvk?si=zrSKL6UsHhdQoRmY
That said I am not arguing that it is equivalent to, say, this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/08/29/trump-assassination-attempt-vance-republicans-lie/74958685007/
But I would argue thatthere is more of this kind of stuff on the almost mainstream left than Richard is acknowledging.
The denialism of the Oct 7th attacks on the left have been disturbing, and have been amplified by some loud voices, but it's worth acknowledging that the people who do this are still firmly outside the party. The people who do think that are generally very antagonistic towards the the Democratic Party, even including it's most left wing members and allies like Bernie Sanders or AOC, because they refuse to sign onto these crazy conspiracies.
I unsubscribed because you have this delusion that every trump supporter a slack-jawed yokel that has trouble tying their shows and that every democrat is a college professor.
Do you think the news media is really gonna show you the inner city minority on welfare with 3 baby daddies?
Well I’m not too hurt you unsubscribed. I mean, you left a comment within one minute of the article being published, and I doubt you read that fast. One of my recurring points is that Trump supporters are anti-intellectual and don’t read, so nice job of proving the point.
You will never get people to “listen “ to your views if you insult them
We already know the left’s views.r bc The left doesn’t know I’m. Most of us start out as lefties. Not to mention As Winston Churchill once said “If you’re young and conservative you don’t have a heart. If you’re old and liberal you don’t have a brain.”
The liberal in The New York Times. (Maybe someone else can explain to Richard why that’s a bad thing.)
The establishment elite were mass lobotomized in 2016. They’ve become so incredibly dull, intellectually lazy and fragile beyond reason at the hint of dissent. Richard finds this impressive.
The Democrat Party is unrecognizable. I was a Capitol Hill Democrat. I watched the Democrat Party abandon all honesty and integrity the Democrat Party with my eyes wide open.
I’m not interested in selling my principles in return for the approval of cowards or strangers. Richard apparently is and brags about it.
The inner city minority you speak of don't run the party. This is where the difference lies.
Conspiracy theories leftists believe:
1) Just about everything to do with Monsanto and GMOs.
2) That every climate sceptic is in the pay of Big Oil.
3) That the Koch Brothers secretly control politics.
4) “No Blood For Oil” - That US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was all really about oil.
5) That Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 was a byproduct of Putin psy-ops.
6) That Brexit was a result of Putin psy-ops.
7) That Brexit was a result of Cambridge Analytica doing something MKUltra-like.
8) That Brexit was a result of “disaster capitalism”, in which hedge fund managers like Crispin Odey deliberately crashed the UK economy in order to make huge profits by shorting the pound.
9) 9-11 conspiracy theories.
"In this house," we believe all those things! ;-)
If one side of the political spectrum claims that breathing is bad, you'll have to vote for the other side, no matter how crazy and foolish it is.
The left opposes the foundations of human existence—things like the existence of a state, borders, law, family, and two genders. Therefore, there's no choice but to vote for the right.
Not everyone on the left is that crazy, but there's a dynamic that was very noticeable in the Biden administration. The center-left thinks there's something pure and right about the radicals on the extreme edge, and they always give them the final word. When this didn't happen during the Gaza war, the radicals reacted with extreme outrage, which sent the party into a panic.
“The center-left thinks there's something pure and right about the radicals on the extreme edge…”
I agree almost wholeheartedly with your comment, except this bit.
IMO the center-left doesn’t think their radicals are “pure and right”, they are mostly just *afraid* to challenge or contradict them.
Fearing - with some rationality - they could be primaried if they do, and/or fearing they might lose the next election if they do.
But the results are just as you say.
I think the idea of hegemony as construed in the postcolonial theory world is a next-level evolution of conspiracy theory - the idea that you don't even need a shadowy cabal of bad actors, because the bad actor is "society" or "culture" or "patriarchy" or whatever abstract concept the theorizer wants to attack.
Going with your framing, conservatives are dumb and at their worst, believe bad mean cabals are making the world worst. Progressives are smarter and can sublimate that impulse into more plausible sociological theorizing that replaces the bad cabal with a bad concept or institution, theorizing which gets ratified by the academic world and elevated from its prole-y origin.
True! In the end, it's merely a sophisticated version of "plausible deniability."
Also, the idea that crack cocaine was introduced to black communities by the CIA to keep them under control.
This seems to have aged badly pretty quickly with the rise of the “Trump assassination attempt was a psy-op” conspiracy theory.
You and Anatoly Karlin constantly make the same error. You think one can infer general traits of conservatives from their leaders or public figures. This is not true. There are actual studies of conspiracy beliefs, and they don't differ much by ideology. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-022-09812-3#Sec2 The way academics obtain the result for the link to American conservatism, is by choosing conspiracy theories for their studies that conservatives are more into. They fool themselves (or cheat, if you want) the same way that the prejudice researchers do it by doing studies asking people to rate a bunch of groups that conservatives like less, and leave out the groups leftists like less. Smoke and mirrors.
But even if one thinks it is true for USA, it is not consistent across countries. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01258-7
Ok, Emil, I refuted you on X and notes, I guess I need to do so here too. See the thread.
https://x.com/richardhanania/status/1829716211069829345?s=46&t=orlVw6DjQN9UUXnw_kVAkA
You know, my quibbles with some of Richard’s points aside, I more or less agreed with his premise.
And I *think* I still do, but…
Seeing the zeal with which leftists in this comment section continue to defend the “Russia collusion” claim despite the years of the Mueller investigation fishing expedition, all started based on the known lie Steele dossier paid for by Democrats colluding with Russians, kinda undercuts his argument a fair amount.
What makes Russiagate the most damaging is the straight line to the current Ukraine proxy war which is gleefully supported by every elite human capital shitlib. This was not possible in 2014 given Barack Obama’s sane position at that time.
"But the evidence suggests that the idea that Russia hacked the DNC in order to help Trump win the 2016 election is likely true. "
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The only "evidence" for this fake fact was the say-so of the DNC's own private security company, CrowdStrike. There is no way to tell the nationality of a hacker in the first place so the claim was always stupid on its face. The fakeness of the allegation and the FBI's involvement in the fake narrative was confirmed when the FBI very pointedly refused to examine the server itself to verify this allegation -- they just wanted to use the DNC's story. (Remember, we now know the RussiaGate story originated as a secret Hillary/DNC conspiracy to commission a false dossier from Steele and then launder it thru useful idiots like retard McCaine and James Comey).
The fakeness of the Russia hack story was also confirmed in 2017 by NSA experts who could show that the download speed for the pilfered files was too fast for an internet connection and had to have been done in-person to a physical device like an external drive. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/
Finally, Crowdstrike admitted it lied and actually has no evidence of any Russian hack. But Adam Schiff (chairmen of the conspiracy to frame Trump) conspired to hide the testimony, while at the same time lying to the public about it. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/11/bombshell-crowdstrike-admits-no-evidence-russia-stole-emails-from-dnc-server/
The "hack" was thus an inside job, presumably by a DNC employee seeking to expose how the primary was rigged against Sanders. One plausible "conspiracy theory" is that it was downloaded by DNC employee, Seth Rich, who was suspiciously murdered. And the FBI is currently defying a court order to disclose the contents of his laptop. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/the_fbi_again_tries_to_block_seth_richs_laptop_from_public_view.html
But Hanania knows nothing and just trusts a 2018 WaPo article to tell give him the true facts. Hey, Hanania if you believe the DNC and Deep State's main propaganda outlet on this, I got a bridge in Crimea to sell you.
Hanania's attempt to brand himself as high "human capital" by rejecting "conspiracy theories" is actually a mid-wit defense mechanism. Because conspiracies are done in secret, by definition, the facts are not always readily apparent. They exist on a continuum of plausibility based on available circumstantial evidence and knowledge about the characters and motivations involved. Smooth-brained people cannot think in such contingencies and probabilities. They need a True/False dichotomy like some kind of retarded Snopes "fact checker" before they can "know" things. So it's always easiest to say "no conclusive evidence" exists until some so-called authority figure certifies a true/false verdict that you are allowed to believe without losing social status in respectable society. Ideological conspiracy-deniers are simply incurious, unimaginative dullards.
Love this. Imagine responding to an article about conspiracy theories being on the right, trying to refute the argument, and then bringing up Seth Rich. The lack of self awareness is truly breath-taking.
I only said it's a "plausible" theory that Seth Rich was the leaker. I'm sorry your little brain can't entertain the concept of a hypothesis, unless the newspaper tells you it's socially permissible for you to think about it. So instead you believe a provably *false* conspiracy theory -- that Russia did it -- because it's an officially approved narrative. Very weak intellectually.
Your first link stressed that it was only a possibility, not a certainty. Your second link says circumstantial evidence, not NO evidence. And I have yet to see anything that points to Seth Rich being killed for this, it's classic conspiracy.