They correctly identify some problems and there are problems with certain institutions. Their net is just too wide and they have a global skepticism rather than one focused on issues that have more evidence to support them. Their default position is that some elite is trying to screw a pleb in some way, and they'll always favor this over a more simple and obvious explanation. A good example is housing. They will gladly blame private equity for buying up all the houses and sitting on them as a sort of conspiracy against the middle class instead of the simple explanation of regulations choking supply.
I don't think this is unique to Republicans though. Traditionally anti-vax people were on the left and Democrats have their own slew of conspiracies, usually stemming from anti-market bias and economic illiteracy.
not sure I'd agree that "regulations choking [housing] supply" is necessarily the "simple explanation". It is the more plausible one to anyone who is educated in economics - but by definition here, we are talking about the opposite sort of people from that. To the Dale Gribbles, anything that can be simply blamed on an amalgamated mass of (sinister, of course) people, some group you can name, is a simple shorthand to explain the problems of the world. Occam's Razor, for them, optimizes for something that can be explained in the fewest number of words possible. Dealing with the world as it is is boring and frustrating, and actually understanding how it works / how it can be influenced or improved requires a ton of focus, learning and determination. Who has time for that - just listen to a podcast!
Remember that cartoon showing two queues of people, and the line for "Comforting lies" is enormous, while the line for "Unpleasant truths" is nearly empty? That same phenomenon is very much at play here, in how These People decide on their points of view.
Economist makes measurements/ estimates without considering time or distance to come to their conclusion. No one in the real world can do that because both are essential to calculate the cost.
The whole point of secret soccieties to keep their secrets and rule by subversion from the shadows. Kenny made a great speech about this before having his head blown off.
In trying to distill the Gribblesque persuasion as much as possible, I've realized it boils down to taking the folk saying, "Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity," and simply inverting it.
At minimum, this is assumed strictly in the context of established elites, but it often gets generalized to the point of knee-jerk assuming that any layperson who disagrees with the Gribblesque view is directly corrupted by Them.
Excellent point. Lot of overlap between Gribbles and MAGAs. It’s very common among these types to try and find a hidden motivation behind people with different views instead of taking them at face value.
You see these trends everywhere. For instance, Dems and Republicans were once about equally irrational, but about different things.
Now, the Republicans are getting less rational across the board, becoming a kind of equal opportunity conspiracy melting pot. Whereas Dems are becoming more rational even on areas where they had previously been irrational. For instance, I was surprised to learn that Dems have almost converged to Republicans on nuclear power support in the past few years: https://x.com/scienceisstrat1/status/1827866219644432456
I have my doubts here, the Democrats are currently anchoring their presidential campaign to the issue of price controls, one of those policies that basically zero economists support - it's the definition of irrational.
I think that the two parties are still irrational about different things, but observers of the two parties are becoming less rational in their ability to discern that as election season marches towards its conclusion.
They aren’t really, the price-gouging thing was just something that polls well and signals concern about inflation. The campaign has made it clear they aren’t doing price controls or, indeed, probably anything meaningful
Where did they make that clear? Noah Smith made the same claim, but his evidence was a quote where an anonymous official simply confirmed that they still plan controls on "price gouging" for groceries and food (which is the same thing). Smith somehow managed to interpret that as a walkback.
Here’s an advisor saying very clearly ‘it isn’t price controls’ and being very vague about what it is.
Also, the idea that this is pandering makes far more sense than that it is a radical proposal right when everything else in Harris’s campaign is trying to appeal to swing voters.
She's made a lot of radical proposals. You don't normally pander to your base during a regular election, you do it during primaries or after you get into power, exactly because before the election you're trying to woo swing voters by appearing moderate.
America hasn't had a very left wing President for a long time, relative to other countries you could argue it never did. I see a lot of denial about what such leaders are really like. Of course they will implement these sorts of policies. Why do you think America is wealthier than the rest of the world? It's because other countries regularly get trashed by voting in genuinely left wing politicians who promptly implement very left wing ideas and break everything. Look at Britain. Starmer ran on a moderate platform and in his first speech promised a government "unburdened by doctrine". Sound familiar? Yet within weeks he was awarding the unions massive pay rises and handing out multi-year jail sentences for posting on Facebook. This is typical, not the exception.
Personally I find this behavior both extremely annoying and highly dubious. I treat it as slightly less trustworthy than Trump's proclamation that he will be a pro-choice president.
But Trump really is pro choice! I mean, he's not Mike Pence who genuinely thinks that Christ himself wants to ban abortion, and that failure to do so is a sin. He's a thrice married philanderer, who has no sexual restraint whatsoever. Of course he's in favor of abortion. His appointing Justices who voted to overturn Roe was wholly opportunistic.
As others have noted, while Dem economic obscurantism is regrettable, the Republicans/Trump have proposed 10% tariffs including NATO allies, mass deportations, and letting Trump have an input on setting interest rates. So I don't think the Dems are more deranged than the GOP even on economics these days. (This would not ofc be true under, say, a Romney GOP. But at this rate we will sooner get an RFK GOP and then things will get really magical).
The ten percent tariffs are a bad idea, agreed -- I mean, I took Econ 101, and I even got an A. I had my Road to Damascus experience on free markets when I saw Milton Friedman's PBS (!!!) series, Free to Choose. But as a historical matter, the US has had tariffs over 10% during much of its history, even during periods of high economic growth. Tariffs are bad, agreed, but it's not like price controls or massive wealth redistribution, or taxes on unrealized capital gains.
As for mass deportations of illegal aliens, I'm not sure I think the economic objection is that strong. I mean, I get the allocative efficiency argument for open borders, but the countries that have had mass Third World immigration don't seem to have realized that many economic benefits from them. It's not clear that, on net, low skill immigrants end up benefitting us more than they cost in various social services.
I appreciate your attempt to push back, unfortunately, even on this issue MAGA has no leg to stand on. Trump just recently announced a 10% tariff on all imported goods, a policy plan that would be orders of magnitude more harmful than price controls. Yet he has seen little to no push back from the right -- at least none that I am aware of. Meanwhile, Kamala has received plenty of criticism from media figures on her own side - Washington Post, CNN, the New York Times - a consequence of being the party of high human capital.
Yeah, Trump's economic plans are also a grab bag of rational and irrational, tariffs, "industrial policy", and trying to completely stop immigration (including high-skill visa programs etc.) being on the far end of irrational. I'm just saying that the idea that Democrats are embracing "rationality" while Republicans eschew it is wrong.
It's probably that people have less direct experience to compare with. Price controls have numerous cases where people can point directly to them and resulting shortages. Shortages of food is a scary thought. Also, the link between price controls and shortages is quite simple and intuitive.
In contrast, it's hard to understand what a 10% tariff would do. If you look around at nearby equivalents, then the EU had average tariffs of 6% in the 90s but it's fallen steadily since. Clearly the EU survived in the 90s, in fact it was doing better back then economically. 10% is higher, but not massively so. So what's the immediate impact on people's lives of this policy likely to be? The obvious claim would be that most manufactured goods would get 10% more expensive, but then of course some manufacturing would relocate to the US to avoid it, so real price increases would be lower than that. It'd need some proper analysis.
Additionally, idk if "receiving criticism from your own side" is a good signal of the presence of high human capital - the entire traditional media is run by Democrats, many of them partisan Democrats, so any criticism of Harris from those outlets is definitionally "criticism from her own side." Outlets like National Review still excoriate Trump for his economic illiteracy, but unless you're marinating in the right leaning media ecosystem you miss those examples.
How are you measuring to come to that conclusion? Are you taking into account the near universal belief in conspiracy theories like the patriarchy, white supremacy, Russian misinformation, oil companies funding skeptics of climatology etc?
My perception is that the left (not just in America) is routinely gripped by an astounding number of conspiracy theories, they just don't get identified as such because the media is full of leftists who aren't self-reflective enough to realize. Whereas my experience has been that many of the "Gribbles" are well aware they're promoting conspiracy theories, and will defend it on those terms (i.e. "yes there's a conspiracy why can't you see that").
None of those things you mentioned are conspiracies. They are narratives with varying degrees of validity. The only one that clearly strains to explain anything (adjusting for HBD realism) is white supremacy. The other three have aspects that are substantially true.
Yes yes. We know. You have rational narratives that are true, they have irrational conspiracy theories that are false. It's easy to tell which is which, just read the New York Times.
See, this is why the people who use the term conspiracy theorists have become laughing stocks over the past years. The terms "elite" and "human capital" are well on their way to the same fate. The people who use these terms are just so intellectually incurious that they become a pastiche of their own ideas.
Opposition to nuclear power is rational. It is much more expensive than the alternatives (even large-scale solar and wind are cheaper), as well as being extremely slow. And that's not even considering the lack of a high-level waste site after 80+ years of the industry.
The recently completed reactor in Georgia was $17 BILLION over budget and 7 years late. A ridiculous waste of ratepayers' (and taxpayers') money.
Comparing degrowth (an ideology telling getting poorer is based) with tariffs (an economic tool wich is supposed to increase domestic production) is not the giant cope you imagine it is...
Systemic Racism and critical theory more generally. The efficacy of market institutions. Two areas where Dems have become far less rational in the last decade.
Nice to know they are embracing sanity on nuclear power, though.
Kamala Harris is literally running a campaign purely based on vibes( which Richard Hanania has praised her for), but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? Kamala Harris has not done any interview or news conference because she wants to avoid talking about policies, but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? There is still no policy page on her campaign website, but it's Republicans that don't care about policy?The fundamental truth is that in this election, it is the Democrats that are running on vibes.
Coming up with an insulting nickname for people you disagree with is a gimmick. This one is unlikely to catch on. People don’t trust our institutions because they have in far too many cases become untrustworthy. There are plenty of well educated people who see serious problems with our major institutions. Recognizing this problem and fixing it is essential. Vilifying and insulting the people who point out to the problem, no matter how unsophisticated they may be, does not move us toward a solution.
While I agree that this nickname won’t catch on, I think Richard did a *fantastic* job here of both distinguishing and showing the overlap between the generalized RFK crowd and the general MAGA crowd.
Not even Richard claimed that just because they’re Gribbles does that mean they are wrong on everything. If your point is he was less sympathetic towards and understanding of their POV, specifically given what’s happened over the last few years, than you or even I might be, well… that’s Richard.
I was going to say he shouldn't use an insulting nickname because it makes him look dumb and low class. I certainly don't find Trump's nicknames particularly endearing, though they do add to the absurd humor of the man.
But now that I know they are disrespectful of sensitive people, I'm all in on the nicknames.
Expert opinions are entitled to some deference. But you still need to use common sense. In the legal business, there’s an expert on both sides of every major case. They have great credentials and they reach opposite conclusions. Experts have agendas, they are motivated by status and money and ideology like everybody else. Experts often attempt to leverage their expertise in a narrow and focused area into a general intellectual superiority, this happens all the time, and it deserves no deference. Further, the corruption and incompetence of many of our institutions these days is systemic, it’s not just a matter of a few bad apples, which would always happen when you have a big sample.
I’m 60 years old and I’ve dealt with these institutions my whole life. Call that a vibe, or call it direct experience. Conversations with countless people, many sophisticated people, many people involved in politics, senior bureaucrats, people involved in the legal business, people who deal with government, people who are both older and younger than me who are observing similar phenomena. Countless anecdotes, which are some evidence, but are not dispositive, as you correctly point out. If I were a professional political scientist, it would be interesting too come up with a way to test it.
I’ll just address one point in your edited comment. Pretty sure it’s not personal to disillusionment on my part. If anything, I’m less cynical now than I was as a young man. The problems are real, and it will take a while to get them sorted out.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the term “corruption,” but I think it is more about Ideological group-think and increasing centralization of power, particularly in the federal government. I believe that so many of our leaders within organizations are more interested in managing perceptions rather than solving problems.
Financial corruption was likely much worse earlier in American history, but what I said above is relatively new. I generally trusted American institutions until about 2020, but since then my trust has collapsed. I believe that is due to real changes in American institutions since 2010, not my perceptions.
There are plenty of problems, including what you mention here. The problem of government falsifying its own statistics probably goes back to the Egyptian Pharaohs. But in the USA the Bureau of Labor Statistics used be considered highly professional and reliable, within living memory. No longer true, sadly.
“ that institutions are more corrupt nowadays than in the past, seems like a conclusion that you're making solely based on vibes. ”
Have you not paid attention to events of the last 9 - 15 years? Lois Lerner? Russia collusion? Hunter Biden laptop disinformation? etc.
If you want to claim that it was just as bad all along we just didn’t know about it, I suppose that could be correct, but that would make *you* the conspiracist!
Otherwise, it’s just prima facie absurd to claim the conclusion is based solely on “vibes”
Though I concede that it’s possible that you are a leftist who only gets information from the even-more-left side of the MSM and that other than “Russia collusion” you are unaware of all the unveiled corruption. But given that you read Richard, that seems extremely unlikely.
You can plot graphs of people's trust in institutions. That's the aggregated judgement of many thousands of people per poll. Every time you do this, you find trust has been falling for decades and and it's falling across the board. That seems like a highly objective way to measure something vague like levels of "corruption" (which in a modern society is mostly not about direct bribe taking).
Kamala Harris is literally running a campaign purely based on vibes( which Richard Hanania has praised her for), but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? Kamala Harris has not done any interview or news conference because she wants to avoid talking about policies, but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? There is still no policy page on her campaign website, but it's Republicans that don't care about policy?The fundamental truth is that in this election, it is the Democrats that are running on vibes.
> institutions, on average, make worse decisions than laypeople operating off gut feel.
Government institutions do. This experiment was run already, it was called the USSR and they decided that every decision should be made by a state institution. They got crushed by a competing society in which decisions were made primarily by people just going with their gut feeling (or as we call it, participating in markets).
On the topic of the CDC, given that you by your own admission only noticed their mistakes in hindsight, perhaps it's worth giving more deference to the opinions of those who noticed at the time. Such people will tell you that the CDC is of no value, and you can beat their expertise easily with even a small amount of effort. This is exactly what you should expect - it's no different to how your individual non-expert judgement about what something specific should cost is much better than the weighted expert judgement of a committee of price setters.
They would do a better job of anticipating the future under different possibilities, and making choices accordingly. They would tax bullshit and subsidize the provision of accurate info.
What would prediction markets use as determining a result as true or false? For instance, climate scientists endlessly redefine the results of climate change I mean global warming.
Prediction markets have their terms set in advance. In practice I don't hear of many complaints about how they resolve. The exception is play-money markets where the person who creates the question has discretion over how to resolve it, in which I've heard of people doing so in a way to rip off participants, though even that seems to be the exception.
I find it amazing that the "Gribbles" get accused of vibes-based thinking and yet when they try to engage in rational debate, it's their opponents who refuse to engage, instead opting to belittle and censor. The problem for the "wonks" is that their positions are wrong and fail over and over again.
The vaccine case is instructive. All the Gribbles do is point to the real side effects that are listed in vaccine inserts. The pharma industry cant actually debate these points because it would be illegal for them to hide or refute the side effects they are legally required to disclose. So instead they just accuse "anti-vaxxers" of being crazy.
And besides, if "vibes" are what matters, how is it that the side that controls all the major institutions and media can't win on those terms? You're telling me a ragtag team of housewives and dissident doctors is winning the vibes race against billion-dollar marketing budgets? Actually, the problem is that those billion-dollar vibe campaigns to label all dissent as crazy are losing because their vibes can't compete with the evidence and common sense of the Gribbles despite all the obstacles put in their path. If they greatly outmatched side is winning, that should tell you something. Why don't you employ your elite human capital to figure it out? The only explanation you can come up with is that stupid incompetent people are crushing the elites in the war of ideas because they are stupid?
I remember Greg Cochran betting against such antivaxers during the pandemic. He won every time, because he knows what he's talking about and they are always full of BS. You haven't won anything, you've just achieved a higher death rate than the people who got vaccinated.
Eugenicists are winning as people with whatever genes make you believe this gibberish wipe themselves out. To think people once worried about the dysgenic effects of civilization!
You people are crushing no one, you are just a bunch of delusional low iq losers. The stepchildren of slave morality. Stop crying and find a black woman.
Delusional low IQ losers that manage to persuade regular people when they are allowed to speak freely. Again, I'll ask, if dissidents of the regime are so stupid, why does the state need to ban, censor, and imprison them? If your people are so intelligent, why do you resort to insults?
Nobody gives a shit about you. Chill out Billy, you are not so special as you and your pals believe. If someone find you annoying is just for the same reason the average people find a guy farting inside on an elevator annoying as well. That’s what you actually are, some chuds believing to be the next Founding Fathers because someone taught you farting on an elevator is something brave and revolutionary. WOW!! BASED!! AMAZING!! Too bad Founding Fathers became the Founding Fathers not farting but fighting on a battlefield the enemy, but since from my personal experience I could figure out the vast majority of you guys are even incapable to fix a toilet seat we can all sleep well with you all talks and badge losers.
He's right. You guys are losers. I don't actually think of you are low-IQ, though. Rather, you're generally of above average intelligence but haven't amounted to much in life but you all think you're the smartest guys in the room. You're not. You're gullible losers.
It doesn't surprise me that conspiracy theorists have found more of a home on the right in recent years, because both conspiracy theories and many conservative or traditional worldviews stress the role of individual agency and conscious intent in shaping the world, whereas hard leftist views have always emphasised structural explanations.
Just compare the right-coded Great Man Theory to Marxist Historical Materialism. Where the former sees the thought and action of individual figures as primary, the latter gives much more weight to larger social and economic forces. Conspiracy theories likewise assert that world events are not the unintentional product of larger socioeconomic forces but part of a secret agenda being deliberately carried out by small groups of highly agentic, influential men working behind the scenes.
You can go further and connect this more individualist worldview to right-coded perspectives on issues like crime and prejudice, and I think it could even be worth noting how Animism, perhaps the most traditional worldview, sees the influence of hidden agentic forces absolutely everywhere; every tree, river or mountain is a conscious agent intentionally exerting its will over the world. Something as simple as it raining is attributed to the deliberate act of a god.
But anyway, to the extent conspiracy theorising used to be a more bipartisan pastime I think it's because mainstream liberalism used to be more individualist, which is why more libertarian leaning, live-and-let-live types like Joe Rogan used to be somewhat aligned with it. Once more structural worldviews like intersectionality grew to become more prominent among liberals, it pushed the individualist types over to the right, leaving only structuralists among modern liberals, who aren't as prone to conspiratorial thinking.
I would counter that, Conspiracy Theories, almost by definition, tend to imply heavily structural worldviews, simply because large organizations are implicitly necessary for any small group to exert undue influence BEHIND the scenes. You can't have a hidden cult leader figure manipulating events without likewise assuming the existence of a widespread cult to serve as his instruments. Accusations against "The Deep State", The World Economic Forum, the United Nations, even against individual National Security Agencies, are explicitly accusations against organizations, not single "great men". For an obvious example of Left-coded conspiracy theories: "structural racism", "Whiteness", every accusation of "dog whistling" or other "coded speech" made against conventional Republicans speaking to ordinary voters... Marxism assumes conspiracy on the part of "oppressor" classes. The very idea that any observed discrepancy between races or sexes MUST be attributable to discrimination is itself a conspiratorial mindset.
OTOH, Great Man theory explicitly requires a leadership in the open, that publicly inspires the mass movements. A cult of personality driving history is blatantly obvious. It implicitly rejects examining the many people in supporting roles who helped make things happen. Someone with a Great Man individualistic view of history might single out obvious opponents like Soros or Obama, but blaming "the Deep State" would be a foreign concept that requires giving far too much credit to nameless drones behind the scenes.
I would suggest rather that as the Left becomes more openly associated with authoritarianism and censorship, then conspiracy theorists on both Left and Right increasingly find common cause AGAINST that version of the Left, simply because conspiracy theorists in general are distrustful of authority and natural targets for censorship. They don't need to agree with the Right on their issues to necessarily ally against a Left that is actively silencing internal dissent just as much as they are silencing external dissent.
I dislike the modern left as much as anyone in Hanania's comment section and so I'd like to believe that the core of something like Marxism is a baseless conspiracy theory, but honestly, from what I know of it, that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm not saying it's correct necessarily but it is not a conspiracy theory as I would understand the term.
It does assert that a class of capitalist elites collectively oppress an ordinary, working-class proletariat, yes, but not via a conspiracy. The charge is not that they actively conspire with one another to plot against the working class, but that they are all subject to similar material incentives that push them towards independently taking the same exploitative actions in order to compete with one another. If one capitalist pays his workers $2.50/hr and the other $1.50/hr, all else equal the latter will outcompete the former, which forces the former to also lower his workers' wages to the same level to stay in business. That's a simplification obviously but those kinds of ideas are what it's about. It's actually not even a choice capitalists are making to exploit workers, necessarily, although they do benefit from it of course; they couldn't choose not to exploit workers even if they wanted to.
Other leftist ideas like structural racism similarly do not necessarily assume an intentional, coordinated effort to oppress this or that group is required for people to do so.
Contrast this with a more classic conspiracy theory like that detailed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to be a record of a meeting of Jewish elites in which they discuss an intentional plan to subvert and oppress gentiles. Even if you would consider both Marxist ideas and the Protocols to be examples of conspiracy theories I think you can see at least that they are not of the same kind.
That said, there are actual conspiracy theories that, true or false, leftists have endorsed in the past, such as the Business Plot, in which it was alleged a group of wealthy businessmen were actively conspiring to conduct a coup and install a pro-business Fascist regime in the US, or the Doctors' Plot in the USSR. I would consider those to be examples of actual leftist conspiracy theories, but concepts like Marxism, Patriarchy and what have you, true or false, do not meet my definition of conspiracy theory.
The problem with this breakdown though is that well its perhaps a convincing sounding map to analyze the world, it doesn’t matchup well with the terrain of what one experiences.
Actor-less (systemic) Left wing theory sounds smarter than Actor-present (conspiratorial) right wing theory, but both approaches generate the same end experience of paranoia, irrationally, and hostility towards some poorly defined causal agents, out to take everything from you. The boomer right wing version is a cabal of actors (a glitch in their otherwise perfect union) the post-modern left focuses on the implict effects of an insidious machine—society itself.
It just is the left wing version does so in a way that is aethestically more pleasing to the rational mind, which makes it more of a danger, since high IQ rational gate keepers (aka the people that trend towards elite status) will always be prone to a certain level of blindness—or perhaps even sympathy—towards understanding the world as a machine product of rational structures and systems (that they also happen to have created and manage).
And you can see this in the final destination of Marxism. Sure, its technically not a conspiracy theory, but when you’re sitting in a gulag accused of membership as part of a state-defined “problem class”, the distinction doesn’t feel very meaningful, and you might find yourself rolling your eyes at the academic sitting next to you, who continues to argue pedantically about the topic.
And I find this true in my low intensity interactions with both wokies and right wing conspiracy theoriests. The righties sound magnitudes dumber, and it feels easy to punch at them, but wokies feel just as paranoid and insane at the end of the day, once their patina of rationality starts to thin. However, its much, much more difficult to punch at them, because they at least have that thin patina.
For instance, you might find yourself falling into a technical discussion about what constitutes a conspiracy. The issue should be the phenomenon itself; but instead, its being occluded by concerns over the precise language being used to describe it.
This is something that I find interesting about the whole thing: I don't think the left-wing versions are really "Actor-less" in any practical sense.
To me, they show all the signatures of anthropomorphizing. From left-wing Greens characterizing mining as "humanity r*ping Mother Earth", to "Whiteness" being described as having a sort of Will and Agency in itself opposed to "Blackness", they frequently describe these conflicts in language better suited to mythological battles between personified natural forces rather than a mere matter of misconfigured incentive structures due for a realignment. Get into a debate with a leftist on most of these topics and the response you'll get much more closely resemblance an offended pagan defending their Gods than a pair of engineers diagnosing a malfunctioning machine.
This is a recurring theme in Leftist theory: that individuals are best understood as instantiations of greater classes or incarnations of broader forces. Individual identity as little more than the intersection of Group Identity. This is why we see numerous calls for even innocent men to accept false convictions because "women have been oppressed by men for centuries", why "whites" who have no connection to past slavery are called to pay reparations to "Blacks" who have no connection to slavery either, etc. They talk about history as if it is not simply the serial accumulation of events happening to distinct individuals who are born and die, but rather as an ongoing narrative with the same characters throughout, like a long running TV drama that merely replaces actors occasionally while maintaining the same characters (like Dr. Who).
Sure, their elites are better at employing sophistry (liberal communication styles are much more likely to deliberately employ ambiguity than conservative communication styles), but you get essentially the same arguments in their crude form from their voting base. "Whitey got it out for me cause I'm black" isn't a bad summary of numerous sociology papers and legacy media articles given undue respect for saying essentially the same thing with more syllables. It also isn't "Actor-Less" in any meaningful sense, the person saying it clearly believes that the individual white people he encounters serve as proxies of "Whiteness" keeping him personally down, even if they aren't aware they are doing so.
Treating impersonal forces and structures as agents in their own right is illogical, but that's what they do. "Whiteness compels you to racism through implicit bias" is a claim logically equivalent to "The Devil made you sin through temptation"; both rest their warrant on the premise that an unseen external power is secretly controlling the actions of unwitting individuals toward detrimental outcomes. They're equally "Actor-Present".
Of course they assume intentional, coordinated efforts. That's why leftists are so fond of laws that explicitly ban the activity they think is harmful (versus changing incentives), so fond of "allies" (non-evil people who don't engage in discrimination), freak out so much about speech (they think it'll recruit more people to the conspiracy), and so on.
The idea that Marx is about market incentives is whitewashing. Adam Smith was about incentives. Marx posited that all you had to do to solve injustice was ... overthrow the existing rulers in a violent proletarian revolution. Nobody who thinks the root cause is structural incentives suggests a solution like that.
With due credit to Britannica, here's an excerpt that I consider relevant to defining "Conspiracy Theory" for purposes of this discussion:
START QUOTE: Explanations of conspiracy theories
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. END QUOTE
I believe this definition applies quite well to Marxism, "Whiteness", "The Patriarchy", etc. These ideas each originate from individuals who feel alienated from the system, who clearly identify another group within the system as a collective threat to themselves, who do not regard the public statements and activities of that group as honest or fair towards them (frequently assuming malicious intent, deception, and discrimination instead), and who do not regard ordinary persuasion or democratic processes as sufficient measures to deal with the perceived threat, hence requiring measures outside the democratic system (generally violent or otherwise coercive, whether that be extrajudicial criminal conduct or authoritarianism varies based on their access to power).
In short, every time the Left cries that an institution or organization of society is "illegitimate" because of its white/male/conservative/etc members, that IS conspiratorial thinking. They are not treating political disagreements within a democratic system as legitimate political disagreements, but rather as a malicious conspiracy against them, with all arguments to the contrary taken as bad faith deception.
You are welcome to post your own definition for comparison. Mine does not require active collusion between members of the accused group to qualify, merely that their independent actions are alleged to share the same illegitimate means and/or goal.
For a reasonably contemporary example that ought to be relatively non-controversial, ISIS terrorist cells rarely had any central coordination, but they shared a single methodology and goal towards which they independently worked against the same enemy (US). From the US perspective, blaming ISIS for a terrorist attack IS a conspiracy theory: we're blaming a group from a system to which we don't belong of actively cooperating against us in secret illegitimate ways and therefore we resort to coercion and violence in response regardless of the systems governing the countries they are in. It just happens to be perfectly true that ISIS actually IS a conspiracy against us. Attempting to argue that a terrorist organization doesn't count as a conspiracy merely because each cell operates independently should obviously be incorrect. The same logic applies to your defense of Marxism, etc.
I mostly agree. But I would emphasize that some leftists do think about capitalism, systemic racism, patriarchy as conspiracies of wealthy elites against the poors, minorities, women, etc. But it’s mostly grassroot militants who thniks that way, not educated leftist elites.
It's a bit like the Great Replacement. Base rightoids and some influencers think it's a plot by the rich (possibly Jewish, depending on who you ask) to replace whites for mystical purposes. Others, less stupid, will think it's simply the natural conclusion of massive migrations of younger higher-fertility non-Whites into lower-fertility aging Western countries, without it necessarily being the fruit of a coordinated will to achieve this result
>If one capitalist pays his workers $2.50/hr and the other $1.50/hr, all else equal the latter will outcompete the former
Kind of, but it is still not getting the point. This is a CORE mistake why people do not understand Marx, and people do not understand Adam Smith either, who was the first to point this out.
Smith pointed out, that the division of labour does not require and cannot make use of high skills. It divides complex processes into simple tasks, each of the kind a trained monkey could do. It drives skills DOWN, not up.
The core capitalist competitive advantage is “how can I make this task even dumber, so that I can hire any warm body and pay less” ?
I agree that the core leftist worldview, which explains the society's failings by structural reasons, isn't as amenable to conspiratorial thinking. And yet left-wing conspiracies can still be found - usually involving Jews, for some reason. You mentioned the Doctor's Plot in Stalin's USSR - these were Jewish doctors. Closer to home, opponents of the US's support of Israel, which is now coded as antiprogressive, used to accuse the "neocons" (mid-level officials that have in common that they are mostly Jewish) for enmeshing the USA in its forever-wars after 9/11 on behalf of Israel, even though the actual decision makers were called Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. 9/11 itself is routinely believed to be a Mossad plot on both extremes of the spectrum. AIPAC, which is one of many lobbying groups in Washington, and certainly not the most influential, is always singled out by the left for its supposed nefariousness and outsized behind-the-scene influence. So I guess that there is one conspiracy theory that is so ingrained that even leftists can't let go of it.
I know exactly the type of person you're talking about, and it's essentially every republican I know. However, it's honestly not as simple as this group suddenly being seen and felt by Trump, and I think the brain rot goes far deeper into the republican electorate.
My cousins who have voted republican forever, at the time, would talk about their main gripes with Obama being things like "overregulation" or the Iran deal not being tough enough. In 2016, they justified their vote for Trump in terms of lesser evilism, arguing Trump would be unlikely to do anything in office which would actually be a good thing. Now, all their political grievances are targeted at the World Economic Forum, vaccines, and low effort conspiracies (Boeing had a lot of accidents, must be intentional sabotage by the elites) (The WEF is destroying chicken farms one by one for mass starvation population control).
What I think most likely happened is social media. It's funny, I may have found myself agreeing with them more often 10 years ago, and I'm sure I would care about these things too if I thought they were happening.
Can't imagine what changed their minds on vaccines. It's not like anything vaccine-related happened in the last eight years. Guess it must be Twitter's fault indeed.
Boeing is having a lot of accidents because they have become incompetent. This is well documented by the investigations into what's been going wrong. The question is why. The leading theories are either due to being run by MBA types who outsource everything because they don't care about engineering, or diversity hiring. There's plenty of evidence for both. Whether you describe these as "sabotage by the elites" or not will depend partly on your ideological background, but it could be taken as a fairly factual description of either possibility.
No, but you're mixing together multiple things there into a single über-theory. "The WEF" is usually used as a shorthand for powerful globalists who decide what they think by attending conferences rather than talking to voters on the doorstep. I've not yet met anyone who literally thinks the WEF itself, as an institution, controls anything.
There are people who do conform to the stereotype of the arch-conspiracist, the sort who end up with lots of red string on a wall plotting out how everything is connected to everything else. But these people are super rare. You see them in movies and TV shows but almost never in real life.
social media is an accelerant, it lets us arrive at more evolutionarily virulent (in a non-judgmental use of the word) ideas faster. It increases the generation rate, like how bacteria that lives for a day evolves faster than elephants.
Kamala Harris is literally running a campaign purely based on vibes( which you have praised her for), but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? Kamala Harris has not done any interview or news conference because she wants to avoid talking about policies, but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? The fundamental truth is that in this election, it is the Democrats that are running on vibes.
Or Vance, I should say, if Trump wins. He’ll spend four years pandering to those folks to ensure them plus enough Rs makes the 2028 primary non-competitive.
I'm surprised at the imperceptiveness of some of the more Gribble-aligned comments here. It's fine to show some incredulity towards mainstream epistemic institutions, but these institutions are more reliable than the Gribbles who illiterately rail against them. Conspiracy theorists tend to make poor predictions about everything (not just conspiracy theories, which overwhelmingly turn out to be fake), and since Tim Pool was mentioned, I'll bring up that he thought Trump would win in a 50-state landslide. I mean, this is a guy who makes a living commenting on politics, and he predicted something so stupid that it should be disqualifying. You could repeat a similar claim for other charlatans who have become trusted sources for low-trust (ie, dumb and gullible) voters. Guys, if you want to be imbued with forbidden knowledge that no one else has access to, just read the news. I promise it will make you 100 times more informed than someone whose income is derived from reading other people's tweets and headlines.
Respectfully, one could also say that "the 'moron' label is calculated to flatter non-morons and incense morons" - that's the whole point of a disparaging label. I realize we've seen the rise of mostly fake labels that serve no purpose other than to drive mockery of an imagined enemy (like "Catcher in the Rye-bros"), but "Dale Gribble voter" describes a real, extensively documented phenomenon that deserves to be ridiculed.
I sadly think that the best thing for Western civilization right now is to be ruled temporarily by those with lower IQs until those with higher IQs regain their sanity from the crazy woke religion.
Objective studies show no particular partisan lean in conspiracy theorists, similar tendencies toward conspiracy beliefs on both sides of the aisle, and the only significant difference in conspiracy theory transmission being that liberals generally show a lower threshold for belief than conservatives, both in being talked into conspiracy theories and talked out of them. So your fundamental premise is flawed.
It is still objectively a conspiracy theory if the NYT believes it, but since the main reason anyone believes in a conspiracy theory in the US today is to signal distrust for the status quo worldview, and NYT is the avatar of that, it would certainly be a not very useful conspiracy theory for that purpose.
Very disappointed in the author. In a fairly short time, he has gone from fairly scholarly analysis to ad hominem declarations of the one side against the other with little specific foundation. A similar pathway to many of the alternative media who make a name for themselves and then must become more and more partisan and extreme to stay relevant. This will not end well.
In one term: it's status quo bias. Those who are pro-status quo sort into one camp, and those who are anti- into the other. There's a lot of confusion because status quo doesn't have an objective meaning, but that just makes the theory more explanatory - whatever people THINK is the status quo, regardless of the reality of it, is what they support/oppose.
I find this group to be as high t or aspiring high t males that believe in their ability to provide for their family. Some aspire to be Dale Gribble, others want much much more health and wealth wise. They actually can take a lot of shit but after so many questionable rules and barriers on what they're trying to do, they slowly start to question things. Then they realize something is BS and it gets them farther down the rabbit hole.
I have a good friend in this category and since COVID he's turned out to be right a lot more than he's been wrong.
They correctly identify some problems and there are problems with certain institutions. Their net is just too wide and they have a global skepticism rather than one focused on issues that have more evidence to support them. Their default position is that some elite is trying to screw a pleb in some way, and they'll always favor this over a more simple and obvious explanation. A good example is housing. They will gladly blame private equity for buying up all the houses and sitting on them as a sort of conspiracy against the middle class instead of the simple explanation of regulations choking supply.
I don't think this is unique to Republicans though. Traditionally anti-vax people were on the left and Democrats have their own slew of conspiracies, usually stemming from anti-market bias and economic illiteracy.
not sure I'd agree that "regulations choking [housing] supply" is necessarily the "simple explanation". It is the more plausible one to anyone who is educated in economics - but by definition here, we are talking about the opposite sort of people from that. To the Dale Gribbles, anything that can be simply blamed on an amalgamated mass of (sinister, of course) people, some group you can name, is a simple shorthand to explain the problems of the world. Occam's Razor, for them, optimizes for something that can be explained in the fewest number of words possible. Dealing with the world as it is is boring and frustrating, and actually understanding how it works / how it can be influenced or improved requires a ton of focus, learning and determination. Who has time for that - just listen to a podcast!
Remember that cartoon showing two queues of people, and the line for "Comforting lies" is enormous, while the line for "Unpleasant truths" is nearly empty? That same phenomenon is very much at play here, in how These People decide on their points of view.
Economist makes measurements/ estimates without considering time or distance to come to their conclusion. No one in the real world can do that because both are essential to calculate the cost.
Fair point
The whole point of secret soccieties to keep their secrets and rule by subversion from the shadows. Kenny made a great speech about this before having his head blown off.
The fake state is the problem. Get wise to the Statism Deception in my podcast here:
https://soberchristiangentlemanpodcast.substack.com/p/s1-statism-deception-1-of-3-rebroadcast
Hi, Dale!
What pretend state do you live on that gives them power over you without your consent? A.k.a Slave.
LOL, moth, meet flame.
In trying to distill the Gribblesque persuasion as much as possible, I've realized it boils down to taking the folk saying, "Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity," and simply inverting it.
At minimum, this is assumed strictly in the context of established elites, but it often gets generalized to the point of knee-jerk assuming that any layperson who disagrees with the Gribblesque view is directly corrupted by Them.
Excellent point. Lot of overlap between Gribbles and MAGAs. It’s very common among these types to try and find a hidden motivation behind people with different views instead of taking them at face value.
You see these trends everywhere. For instance, Dems and Republicans were once about equally irrational, but about different things.
Now, the Republicans are getting less rational across the board, becoming a kind of equal opportunity conspiracy melting pot. Whereas Dems are becoming more rational even on areas where they had previously been irrational. For instance, I was surprised to learn that Dems have almost converged to Republicans on nuclear power support in the past few years: https://x.com/scienceisstrat1/status/1827866219644432456
I have my doubts here, the Democrats are currently anchoring their presidential campaign to the issue of price controls, one of those policies that basically zero economists support - it's the definition of irrational.
I think that the two parties are still irrational about different things, but observers of the two parties are becoming less rational in their ability to discern that as election season marches towards its conclusion.
They aren’t really, the price-gouging thing was just something that polls well and signals concern about inflation. The campaign has made it clear they aren’t doing price controls or, indeed, probably anything meaningful
Where did they make that clear? Noah Smith made the same claim, but his evidence was a quote where an anonymous official simply confirmed that they still plan controls on "price gouging" for groceries and food (which is the same thing). Smith somehow managed to interpret that as a walkback.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/08/22/kamala-harris-price-gouging-proposal-isnt-about-price-controls-former-economic-advisor-mike-pyle.html
Here’s an advisor saying very clearly ‘it isn’t price controls’ and being very vague about what it is.
Also, the idea that this is pandering makes far more sense than that it is a radical proposal right when everything else in Harris’s campaign is trying to appeal to swing voters.
She's made a lot of radical proposals. You don't normally pander to your base during a regular election, you do it during primaries or after you get into power, exactly because before the election you're trying to woo swing voters by appearing moderate.
America hasn't had a very left wing President for a long time, relative to other countries you could argue it never did. I see a lot of denial about what such leaders are really like. Of course they will implement these sorts of policies. Why do you think America is wealthier than the rest of the world? It's because other countries regularly get trashed by voting in genuinely left wing politicians who promptly implement very left wing ideas and break everything. Look at Britain. Starmer ran on a moderate platform and in his first speech promised a government "unburdened by doctrine". Sound familiar? Yet within weeks he was awarding the unions massive pay rises and handing out multi-year jail sentences for posting on Facebook. This is typical, not the exception.
Its not pandering to her base, its pandering to uncommitted voters.
I don't think you have any actual analysis, your opinions here reek of confirmation bias. Woo-woo, dangerous lefty! Socialism!
I just tried searching for it and came to the same conclusion. Apparently this is some insider rumour that she won't really implement the policy. Publicly her stance hasn't changed. (Here is a news article along similar lines: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/08/25/kamala-harris-price-gouging-plan-will-never-happen/)
Personally I find this behavior both extremely annoying and highly dubious. I treat it as slightly less trustworthy than Trump's proclamation that he will be a pro-choice president.
But Trump really is pro choice! I mean, he's not Mike Pence who genuinely thinks that Christ himself wants to ban abortion, and that failure to do so is a sin. He's a thrice married philanderer, who has no sexual restraint whatsoever. Of course he's in favor of abortion. His appointing Justices who voted to overturn Roe was wholly opportunistic.
As others have noted, while Dem economic obscurantism is regrettable, the Republicans/Trump have proposed 10% tariffs including NATO allies, mass deportations, and letting Trump have an input on setting interest rates. So I don't think the Dems are more deranged than the GOP even on economics these days. (This would not ofc be true under, say, a Romney GOP. But at this rate we will sooner get an RFK GOP and then things will get really magical).
The first two seem pretty dull rather than deranged.
The ten percent tariffs are a bad idea, agreed -- I mean, I took Econ 101, and I even got an A. I had my Road to Damascus experience on free markets when I saw Milton Friedman's PBS (!!!) series, Free to Choose. But as a historical matter, the US has had tariffs over 10% during much of its history, even during periods of high economic growth. Tariffs are bad, agreed, but it's not like price controls or massive wealth redistribution, or taxes on unrealized capital gains.
As for mass deportations of illegal aliens, I'm not sure I think the economic objection is that strong. I mean, I get the allocative efficiency argument for open borders, but the countries that have had mass Third World immigration don't seem to have realized that many economic benefits from them. It's not clear that, on net, low skill immigrants end up benefitting us more than they cost in various social services.
I appreciate your attempt to push back, unfortunately, even on this issue MAGA has no leg to stand on. Trump just recently announced a 10% tariff on all imported goods, a policy plan that would be orders of magnitude more harmful than price controls. Yet he has seen little to no push back from the right -- at least none that I am aware of. Meanwhile, Kamala has received plenty of criticism from media figures on her own side - Washington Post, CNN, the New York Times - a consequence of being the party of high human capital.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/cracks-wall-media-praise-harris-multiple-outlets-eviscerate-vp-over-price-control-plan
Yeah, Trump's economic plans are also a grab bag of rational and irrational, tariffs, "industrial policy", and trying to completely stop immigration (including high-skill visa programs etc.) being on the far end of irrational. I'm just saying that the idea that Democrats are embracing "rationality" while Republicans eschew it is wrong.
It's probably that people have less direct experience to compare with. Price controls have numerous cases where people can point directly to them and resulting shortages. Shortages of food is a scary thought. Also, the link between price controls and shortages is quite simple and intuitive.
In contrast, it's hard to understand what a 10% tariff would do. If you look around at nearby equivalents, then the EU had average tariffs of 6% in the 90s but it's fallen steadily since. Clearly the EU survived in the 90s, in fact it was doing better back then economically. 10% is higher, but not massively so. So what's the immediate impact on people's lives of this policy likely to be? The obvious claim would be that most manufactured goods would get 10% more expensive, but then of course some manufacturing would relocate to the US to avoid it, so real price increases would be lower than that. It'd need some proper analysis.
Additionally, idk if "receiving criticism from your own side" is a good signal of the presence of high human capital - the entire traditional media is run by Democrats, many of them partisan Democrats, so any criticism of Harris from those outlets is definitionally "criticism from her own side." Outlets like National Review still excoriate Trump for his economic illiteracy, but unless you're marinating in the right leaning media ecosystem you miss those examples.
How are you measuring to come to that conclusion? Are you taking into account the near universal belief in conspiracy theories like the patriarchy, white supremacy, Russian misinformation, oil companies funding skeptics of climatology etc?
My perception is that the left (not just in America) is routinely gripped by an astounding number of conspiracy theories, they just don't get identified as such because the media is full of leftists who aren't self-reflective enough to realize. Whereas my experience has been that many of the "Gribbles" are well aware they're promoting conspiracy theories, and will defend it on those terms (i.e. "yes there's a conspiracy why can't you see that").
None of those things you mentioned are conspiracies. They are narratives with varying degrees of validity. The only one that clearly strains to explain anything (adjusting for HBD realism) is white supremacy. The other three have aspects that are substantially true.
Yes yes. We know. You have rational narratives that are true, they have irrational conspiracy theories that are false. It's easy to tell which is which, just read the New York Times.
See, this is why the people who use the term conspiracy theorists have become laughing stocks over the past years. The terms "elite" and "human capital" are well on their way to the same fate. The people who use these terms are just so intellectually incurious that they become a pastiche of their own ideas.
Are the versions promoted and commonly believed in substantially true, or substantially deranged?
Opposition to nuclear power is rational. It is much more expensive than the alternatives (even large-scale solar and wind are cheaper), as well as being extremely slow. And that's not even considering the lack of a high-level waste site after 80+ years of the industry.
The recently completed reactor in Georgia was $17 BILLION over budget and 7 years late. A ridiculous waste of ratepayers' (and taxpayers') money.
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64
Can’t wait to see Republicans promoting degrowth just to own the libs
Comparing degrowth (an ideology telling getting poorer is based) with tariffs (an economic tool wich is supposed to increase domestic production) is not the giant cope you imagine it is...
Systemic Racism and critical theory more generally. The efficacy of market institutions. Two areas where Dems have become far less rational in the last decade.
Nice to know they are embracing sanity on nuclear power, though.
Kamala Harris is literally running a campaign purely based on vibes( which Richard Hanania has praised her for), but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? Kamala Harris has not done any interview or news conference because she wants to avoid talking about policies, but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? There is still no policy page on her campaign website, but it's Republicans that don't care about policy?The fundamental truth is that in this election, it is the Democrats that are running on vibes.
Coming up with an insulting nickname for people you disagree with is a gimmick. This one is unlikely to catch on. People don’t trust our institutions because they have in far too many cases become untrustworthy. There are plenty of well educated people who see serious problems with our major institutions. Recognizing this problem and fixing it is essential. Vilifying and insulting the people who point out to the problem, no matter how unsophisticated they may be, does not move us toward a solution.
> Coming up with an insulting nickname for people you disagree with is a gimmick.
I had to read this three times to realize you were talking about Richard, not Trump.
I expect more from Richard.
Fair. Trump is only running for the most powerful office in the most powerful country in the world, Richard is writing Substack articles.
Trump is a politician, so I don’t expect much from him. Richard is a genuine scholar, which I respect, even though I frequently disagree with him.
While I agree that this nickname won’t catch on, I think Richard did a *fantastic* job here of both distinguishing and showing the overlap between the generalized RFK crowd and the general MAGA crowd.
Not even Richard claimed that just because they’re Gribbles does that mean they are wrong on everything. If your point is he was less sympathetic towards and understanding of their POV, specifically given what’s happened over the last few years, than you or even I might be, well… that’s Richard.
“Coming up with an insulting nickname for people you disagree with is a gimm”
Muh… don’t use funny nicknames. It’s so insult and disrespectful to sensitive people…
If Richard is a partisan, then it's fine. If he is a scholar being objective, which his book was, for example, it is incongruous.
I was going to say he shouldn't use an insulting nickname because it makes him look dumb and low class. I certainly don't find Trump's nicknames particularly endearing, though they do add to the absurd humor of the man.
But now that I know they are disrespectful of sensitive people, I'm all in on the nicknames.
Expert opinions are entitled to some deference. But you still need to use common sense. In the legal business, there’s an expert on both sides of every major case. They have great credentials and they reach opposite conclusions. Experts have agendas, they are motivated by status and money and ideology like everybody else. Experts often attempt to leverage their expertise in a narrow and focused area into a general intellectual superiority, this happens all the time, and it deserves no deference. Further, the corruption and incompetence of many of our institutions these days is systemic, it’s not just a matter of a few bad apples, which would always happen when you have a big sample.
I’m 60 years old and I’ve dealt with these institutions my whole life. Call that a vibe, or call it direct experience. Conversations with countless people, many sophisticated people, many people involved in politics, senior bureaucrats, people involved in the legal business, people who deal with government, people who are both older and younger than me who are observing similar phenomena. Countless anecdotes, which are some evidence, but are not dispositive, as you correctly point out. If I were a professional political scientist, it would be interesting too come up with a way to test it.
I’ll just address one point in your edited comment. Pretty sure it’s not personal to disillusionment on my part. If anything, I’m less cynical now than I was as a young man. The problems are real, and it will take a while to get them sorted out.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the term “corruption,” but I think it is more about Ideological group-think and increasing centralization of power, particularly in the federal government. I believe that so many of our leaders within organizations are more interested in managing perceptions rather than solving problems.
Financial corruption was likely much worse earlier in American history, but what I said above is relatively new. I generally trusted American institutions until about 2020, but since then my trust has collapsed. I believe that is due to real changes in American institutions since 2010, not my perceptions.
There are plenty of problems, including what you mention here. The problem of government falsifying its own statistics probably goes back to the Egyptian Pharaohs. But in the USA the Bureau of Labor Statistics used be considered highly professional and reliable, within living memory. No longer true, sadly.
“ that institutions are more corrupt nowadays than in the past, seems like a conclusion that you're making solely based on vibes. ”
Have you not paid attention to events of the last 9 - 15 years? Lois Lerner? Russia collusion? Hunter Biden laptop disinformation? etc.
If you want to claim that it was just as bad all along we just didn’t know about it, I suppose that could be correct, but that would make *you* the conspiracist!
Otherwise, it’s just prima facie absurd to claim the conclusion is based solely on “vibes”
Though I concede that it’s possible that you are a leftist who only gets information from the even-more-left side of the MSM and that other than “Russia collusion” you are unaware of all the unveiled corruption. But given that you read Richard, that seems extremely unlikely.
If the question is corruption in the government? Versus your claim of “vibes”? At least as much, yes.
Japanese internment was a terrible policy, but it was not “corruption”.
What Lois Lerner did was. What the Steele Dossier wielding, texting each other FBI agents did, was….
You can plot graphs of people's trust in institutions. That's the aggregated judgement of many thousands of people per poll. Every time you do this, you find trust has been falling for decades and and it's falling across the board. That seems like a highly objective way to measure something vague like levels of "corruption" (which in a modern society is mostly not about direct bribe taking).
Kamala Harris is literally running a campaign purely based on vibes( which Richard Hanania has praised her for), but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? Kamala Harris has not done any interview or news conference because she wants to avoid talking about policies, but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? There is still no policy page on her campaign website, but it's Republicans that don't care about policy?The fundamental truth is that in this election, it is the Democrats that are running on vibes.
> institutions, on average, make worse decisions than laypeople operating off gut feel.
Government institutions do. This experiment was run already, it was called the USSR and they decided that every decision should be made by a state institution. They got crushed by a competing society in which decisions were made primarily by people just going with their gut feeling (or as we call it, participating in markets).
On the topic of the CDC, given that you by your own admission only noticed their mistakes in hindsight, perhaps it's worth giving more deference to the opinions of those who noticed at the time. Such people will tell you that the CDC is of no value, and you can beat their expertise easily with even a small amount of effort. This is exactly what you should expect - it's no different to how your individual non-expert judgement about what something specific should cost is much better than the weighted expert judgement of a committee of price setters.
What we should actually be doing is replacing institutions with superior institutions. Prediction markets, for instance.
What exactly would this accomplish?
They would do a better job of anticipating the future under different possibilities, and making choices accordingly. They would tax bullshit and subsidize the provision of accurate info.
What would prediction markets use as determining a result as true or false? For instance, climate scientists endlessly redefine the results of climate change I mean global warming.
Prediction markets have their terms set in advance. In practice I don't hear of many complaints about how they resolve. The exception is play-money markets where the person who creates the question has discretion over how to resolve it, in which I've heard of people doing so in a way to rip off participants, though even that seems to be the exception.
Leaving aside the rest of the analysis, RFK's voice is sufficient to block him from winning the nomination in 2028.
I find it amazing that the "Gribbles" get accused of vibes-based thinking and yet when they try to engage in rational debate, it's their opponents who refuse to engage, instead opting to belittle and censor. The problem for the "wonks" is that their positions are wrong and fail over and over again.
The vaccine case is instructive. All the Gribbles do is point to the real side effects that are listed in vaccine inserts. The pharma industry cant actually debate these points because it would be illegal for them to hide or refute the side effects they are legally required to disclose. So instead they just accuse "anti-vaxxers" of being crazy.
And besides, if "vibes" are what matters, how is it that the side that controls all the major institutions and media can't win on those terms? You're telling me a ragtag team of housewives and dissident doctors is winning the vibes race against billion-dollar marketing budgets? Actually, the problem is that those billion-dollar vibe campaigns to label all dissent as crazy are losing because their vibes can't compete with the evidence and common sense of the Gribbles despite all the obstacles put in their path. If they greatly outmatched side is winning, that should tell you something. Why don't you employ your elite human capital to figure it out? The only explanation you can come up with is that stupid incompetent people are crushing the elites in the war of ideas because they are stupid?
Talk about cognitive dissonance.
I remember Greg Cochran betting against such antivaxers during the pandemic. He won every time, because he knows what he's talking about and they are always full of BS. You haven't won anything, you've just achieved a higher death rate than the people who got vaccinated.
Why dont you go look at the trends in childhood vaccine uptake and get back to me about who is winning?
Eugenicists are winning as people with whatever genes make you believe this gibberish wipe themselves out. To think people once worried about the dysgenic effects of civilization!
You people are crushing no one, you are just a bunch of delusional low iq losers. The stepchildren of slave morality. Stop crying and find a black woman.
Delusional low IQ losers that manage to persuade regular people when they are allowed to speak freely. Again, I'll ask, if dissidents of the regime are so stupid, why does the state need to ban, censor, and imprison them? If your people are so intelligent, why do you resort to insults?
Nobody gives a shit about you. Chill out Billy, you are not so special as you and your pals believe. If someone find you annoying is just for the same reason the average people find a guy farting inside on an elevator annoying as well. That’s what you actually are, some chuds believing to be the next Founding Fathers because someone taught you farting on an elevator is something brave and revolutionary. WOW!! BASED!! AMAZING!! Too bad Founding Fathers became the Founding Fathers not farting but fighting on a battlefield the enemy, but since from my personal experience I could figure out the vast majority of you guys are even incapable to fix a toilet seat we can all sleep well with you all talks and badge losers.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
He's right. You guys are losers. I don't actually think of you are low-IQ, though. Rather, you're generally of above average intelligence but haven't amounted to much in life but you all think you're the smartest guys in the room. You're not. You're gullible losers.
It doesn't surprise me that conspiracy theorists have found more of a home on the right in recent years, because both conspiracy theories and many conservative or traditional worldviews stress the role of individual agency and conscious intent in shaping the world, whereas hard leftist views have always emphasised structural explanations.
Just compare the right-coded Great Man Theory to Marxist Historical Materialism. Where the former sees the thought and action of individual figures as primary, the latter gives much more weight to larger social and economic forces. Conspiracy theories likewise assert that world events are not the unintentional product of larger socioeconomic forces but part of a secret agenda being deliberately carried out by small groups of highly agentic, influential men working behind the scenes.
You can go further and connect this more individualist worldview to right-coded perspectives on issues like crime and prejudice, and I think it could even be worth noting how Animism, perhaps the most traditional worldview, sees the influence of hidden agentic forces absolutely everywhere; every tree, river or mountain is a conscious agent intentionally exerting its will over the world. Something as simple as it raining is attributed to the deliberate act of a god.
But anyway, to the extent conspiracy theorising used to be a more bipartisan pastime I think it's because mainstream liberalism used to be more individualist, which is why more libertarian leaning, live-and-let-live types like Joe Rogan used to be somewhat aligned with it. Once more structural worldviews like intersectionality grew to become more prominent among liberals, it pushed the individualist types over to the right, leaving only structuralists among modern liberals, who aren't as prone to conspiratorial thinking.
I would counter that, Conspiracy Theories, almost by definition, tend to imply heavily structural worldviews, simply because large organizations are implicitly necessary for any small group to exert undue influence BEHIND the scenes. You can't have a hidden cult leader figure manipulating events without likewise assuming the existence of a widespread cult to serve as his instruments. Accusations against "The Deep State", The World Economic Forum, the United Nations, even against individual National Security Agencies, are explicitly accusations against organizations, not single "great men". For an obvious example of Left-coded conspiracy theories: "structural racism", "Whiteness", every accusation of "dog whistling" or other "coded speech" made against conventional Republicans speaking to ordinary voters... Marxism assumes conspiracy on the part of "oppressor" classes. The very idea that any observed discrepancy between races or sexes MUST be attributable to discrimination is itself a conspiratorial mindset.
OTOH, Great Man theory explicitly requires a leadership in the open, that publicly inspires the mass movements. A cult of personality driving history is blatantly obvious. It implicitly rejects examining the many people in supporting roles who helped make things happen. Someone with a Great Man individualistic view of history might single out obvious opponents like Soros or Obama, but blaming "the Deep State" would be a foreign concept that requires giving far too much credit to nameless drones behind the scenes.
I would suggest rather that as the Left becomes more openly associated with authoritarianism and censorship, then conspiracy theorists on both Left and Right increasingly find common cause AGAINST that version of the Left, simply because conspiracy theorists in general are distrustful of authority and natural targets for censorship. They don't need to agree with the Right on their issues to necessarily ally against a Left that is actively silencing internal dissent just as much as they are silencing external dissent.
I dislike the modern left as much as anyone in Hanania's comment section and so I'd like to believe that the core of something like Marxism is a baseless conspiracy theory, but honestly, from what I know of it, that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm not saying it's correct necessarily but it is not a conspiracy theory as I would understand the term.
It does assert that a class of capitalist elites collectively oppress an ordinary, working-class proletariat, yes, but not via a conspiracy. The charge is not that they actively conspire with one another to plot against the working class, but that they are all subject to similar material incentives that push them towards independently taking the same exploitative actions in order to compete with one another. If one capitalist pays his workers $2.50/hr and the other $1.50/hr, all else equal the latter will outcompete the former, which forces the former to also lower his workers' wages to the same level to stay in business. That's a simplification obviously but those kinds of ideas are what it's about. It's actually not even a choice capitalists are making to exploit workers, necessarily, although they do benefit from it of course; they couldn't choose not to exploit workers even if they wanted to.
Other leftist ideas like structural racism similarly do not necessarily assume an intentional, coordinated effort to oppress this or that group is required for people to do so.
Contrast this with a more classic conspiracy theory like that detailed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to be a record of a meeting of Jewish elites in which they discuss an intentional plan to subvert and oppress gentiles. Even if you would consider both Marxist ideas and the Protocols to be examples of conspiracy theories I think you can see at least that they are not of the same kind.
That said, there are actual conspiracy theories that, true or false, leftists have endorsed in the past, such as the Business Plot, in which it was alleged a group of wealthy businessmen were actively conspiring to conduct a coup and install a pro-business Fascist regime in the US, or the Doctors' Plot in the USSR. I would consider those to be examples of actual leftist conspiracy theories, but concepts like Marxism, Patriarchy and what have you, true or false, do not meet my definition of conspiracy theory.
The problem with this breakdown though is that well its perhaps a convincing sounding map to analyze the world, it doesn’t matchup well with the terrain of what one experiences.
Actor-less (systemic) Left wing theory sounds smarter than Actor-present (conspiratorial) right wing theory, but both approaches generate the same end experience of paranoia, irrationally, and hostility towards some poorly defined causal agents, out to take everything from you. The boomer right wing version is a cabal of actors (a glitch in their otherwise perfect union) the post-modern left focuses on the implict effects of an insidious machine—society itself.
It just is the left wing version does so in a way that is aethestically more pleasing to the rational mind, which makes it more of a danger, since high IQ rational gate keepers (aka the people that trend towards elite status) will always be prone to a certain level of blindness—or perhaps even sympathy—towards understanding the world as a machine product of rational structures and systems (that they also happen to have created and manage).
And you can see this in the final destination of Marxism. Sure, its technically not a conspiracy theory, but when you’re sitting in a gulag accused of membership as part of a state-defined “problem class”, the distinction doesn’t feel very meaningful, and you might find yourself rolling your eyes at the academic sitting next to you, who continues to argue pedantically about the topic.
And I find this true in my low intensity interactions with both wokies and right wing conspiracy theoriests. The righties sound magnitudes dumber, and it feels easy to punch at them, but wokies feel just as paranoid and insane at the end of the day, once their patina of rationality starts to thin. However, its much, much more difficult to punch at them, because they at least have that thin patina.
For instance, you might find yourself falling into a technical discussion about what constitutes a conspiracy. The issue should be the phenomenon itself; but instead, its being occluded by concerns over the precise language being used to describe it.
This is something that I find interesting about the whole thing: I don't think the left-wing versions are really "Actor-less" in any practical sense.
To me, they show all the signatures of anthropomorphizing. From left-wing Greens characterizing mining as "humanity r*ping Mother Earth", to "Whiteness" being described as having a sort of Will and Agency in itself opposed to "Blackness", they frequently describe these conflicts in language better suited to mythological battles between personified natural forces rather than a mere matter of misconfigured incentive structures due for a realignment. Get into a debate with a leftist on most of these topics and the response you'll get much more closely resemblance an offended pagan defending their Gods than a pair of engineers diagnosing a malfunctioning machine.
This is a recurring theme in Leftist theory: that individuals are best understood as instantiations of greater classes or incarnations of broader forces. Individual identity as little more than the intersection of Group Identity. This is why we see numerous calls for even innocent men to accept false convictions because "women have been oppressed by men for centuries", why "whites" who have no connection to past slavery are called to pay reparations to "Blacks" who have no connection to slavery either, etc. They talk about history as if it is not simply the serial accumulation of events happening to distinct individuals who are born and die, but rather as an ongoing narrative with the same characters throughout, like a long running TV drama that merely replaces actors occasionally while maintaining the same characters (like Dr. Who).
Sure, their elites are better at employing sophistry (liberal communication styles are much more likely to deliberately employ ambiguity than conservative communication styles), but you get essentially the same arguments in their crude form from their voting base. "Whitey got it out for me cause I'm black" isn't a bad summary of numerous sociology papers and legacy media articles given undue respect for saying essentially the same thing with more syllables. It also isn't "Actor-Less" in any meaningful sense, the person saying it clearly believes that the individual white people he encounters serve as proxies of "Whiteness" keeping him personally down, even if they aren't aware they are doing so.
Treating impersonal forces and structures as agents in their own right is illogical, but that's what they do. "Whiteness compels you to racism through implicit bias" is a claim logically equivalent to "The Devil made you sin through temptation"; both rest their warrant on the premise that an unseen external power is secretly controlling the actions of unwitting individuals toward detrimental outcomes. They're equally "Actor-Present".
Of course they assume intentional, coordinated efforts. That's why leftists are so fond of laws that explicitly ban the activity they think is harmful (versus changing incentives), so fond of "allies" (non-evil people who don't engage in discrimination), freak out so much about speech (they think it'll recruit more people to the conspiracy), and so on.
The idea that Marx is about market incentives is whitewashing. Adam Smith was about incentives. Marx posited that all you had to do to solve injustice was ... overthrow the existing rulers in a violent proletarian revolution. Nobody who thinks the root cause is structural incentives suggests a solution like that.
With due credit to Britannica, here's an excerpt that I consider relevant to defining "Conspiracy Theory" for purposes of this discussion:
START QUOTE: Explanations of conspiracy theories
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. END QUOTE
I believe this definition applies quite well to Marxism, "Whiteness", "The Patriarchy", etc. These ideas each originate from individuals who feel alienated from the system, who clearly identify another group within the system as a collective threat to themselves, who do not regard the public statements and activities of that group as honest or fair towards them (frequently assuming malicious intent, deception, and discrimination instead), and who do not regard ordinary persuasion or democratic processes as sufficient measures to deal with the perceived threat, hence requiring measures outside the democratic system (generally violent or otherwise coercive, whether that be extrajudicial criminal conduct or authoritarianism varies based on their access to power).
In short, every time the Left cries that an institution or organization of society is "illegitimate" because of its white/male/conservative/etc members, that IS conspiratorial thinking. They are not treating political disagreements within a democratic system as legitimate political disagreements, but rather as a malicious conspiracy against them, with all arguments to the contrary taken as bad faith deception.
You are welcome to post your own definition for comparison. Mine does not require active collusion between members of the accused group to qualify, merely that their independent actions are alleged to share the same illegitimate means and/or goal.
For a reasonably contemporary example that ought to be relatively non-controversial, ISIS terrorist cells rarely had any central coordination, but they shared a single methodology and goal towards which they independently worked against the same enemy (US). From the US perspective, blaming ISIS for a terrorist attack IS a conspiracy theory: we're blaming a group from a system to which we don't belong of actively cooperating against us in secret illegitimate ways and therefore we resort to coercion and violence in response regardless of the systems governing the countries they are in. It just happens to be perfectly true that ISIS actually IS a conspiracy against us. Attempting to argue that a terrorist organization doesn't count as a conspiracy merely because each cell operates independently should obviously be incorrect. The same logic applies to your defense of Marxism, etc.
I mostly agree. But I would emphasize that some leftists do think about capitalism, systemic racism, patriarchy as conspiracies of wealthy elites against the poors, minorities, women, etc. But it’s mostly grassroot militants who thniks that way, not educated leftist elites.
It's a bit like the Great Replacement. Base rightoids and some influencers think it's a plot by the rich (possibly Jewish, depending on who you ask) to replace whites for mystical purposes. Others, less stupid, will think it's simply the natural conclusion of massive migrations of younger higher-fertility non-Whites into lower-fertility aging Western countries, without it necessarily being the fruit of a coordinated will to achieve this result
>If one capitalist pays his workers $2.50/hr and the other $1.50/hr, all else equal the latter will outcompete the former
Kind of, but it is still not getting the point. This is a CORE mistake why people do not understand Marx, and people do not understand Adam Smith either, who was the first to point this out.
Smith pointed out, that the division of labour does not require and cannot make use of high skills. It divides complex processes into simple tasks, each of the kind a trained monkey could do. It drives skills DOWN, not up.
The core capitalist competitive advantage is “how can I make this task even dumber, so that I can hire any warm body and pay less” ?
This is innovation.
I agree that the core leftist worldview, which explains the society's failings by structural reasons, isn't as amenable to conspiratorial thinking. And yet left-wing conspiracies can still be found - usually involving Jews, for some reason. You mentioned the Doctor's Plot in Stalin's USSR - these were Jewish doctors. Closer to home, opponents of the US's support of Israel, which is now coded as antiprogressive, used to accuse the "neocons" (mid-level officials that have in common that they are mostly Jewish) for enmeshing the USA in its forever-wars after 9/11 on behalf of Israel, even though the actual decision makers were called Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. 9/11 itself is routinely believed to be a Mossad plot on both extremes of the spectrum. AIPAC, which is one of many lobbying groups in Washington, and certainly not the most influential, is always singled out by the left for its supposed nefariousness and outsized behind-the-scene influence. So I guess that there is one conspiracy theory that is so ingrained that even leftists can't let go of it.
I know exactly the type of person you're talking about, and it's essentially every republican I know. However, it's honestly not as simple as this group suddenly being seen and felt by Trump, and I think the brain rot goes far deeper into the republican electorate.
My cousins who have voted republican forever, at the time, would talk about their main gripes with Obama being things like "overregulation" or the Iran deal not being tough enough. In 2016, they justified their vote for Trump in terms of lesser evilism, arguing Trump would be unlikely to do anything in office which would actually be a good thing. Now, all their political grievances are targeted at the World Economic Forum, vaccines, and low effort conspiracies (Boeing had a lot of accidents, must be intentional sabotage by the elites) (The WEF is destroying chicken farms one by one for mass starvation population control).
What I think most likely happened is social media. It's funny, I may have found myself agreeing with them more often 10 years ago, and I'm sure I would care about these things too if I thought they were happening.
Can't imagine what changed their minds on vaccines. It's not like anything vaccine-related happened in the last eight years. Guess it must be Twitter's fault indeed.
Boeing is having a lot of accidents because they have become incompetent. This is well documented by the investigations into what's been going wrong. The question is why. The leading theories are either due to being run by MBA types who outsource everything because they don't care about engineering, or diversity hiring. There's plenty of evidence for both. Whether you describe these as "sabotage by the elites" or not will depend partly on your ideological background, but it could be taken as a fairly factual description of either possibility.
Surely you wouldn't argue covid vaccines are a conspiracy for population control by the WEF, would you?
No, but you're mixing together multiple things there into a single über-theory. "The WEF" is usually used as a shorthand for powerful globalists who decide what they think by attending conferences rather than talking to voters on the doorstep. I've not yet met anyone who literally thinks the WEF itself, as an institution, controls anything.
There are people who do conform to the stereotype of the arch-conspiracist, the sort who end up with lots of red string on a wall plotting out how everything is connected to everything else. But these people are super rare. You see them in movies and TV shows but almost never in real life.
social media is an accelerant, it lets us arrive at more evolutionarily virulent (in a non-judgmental use of the word) ideas faster. It increases the generation rate, like how bacteria that lives for a day evolves faster than elephants.
Kamala Harris is literally running a campaign purely based on vibes( which you have praised her for), but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? Kamala Harris has not done any interview or news conference because she wants to avoid talking about policies, but it's the Republican voters that don't care about policy? The fundamental truth is that in this election, it is the Democrats that are running on vibes.
As a normie R this is a rough read but strikes me as probably correct. Though the obvious Gribble 2028 non-Trump candidate is Tucker.
Or Vance, I should say, if Trump wins. He’ll spend four years pandering to those folks to ensure them plus enough Rs makes the 2028 primary non-competitive.
I'm surprised at the imperceptiveness of some of the more Gribble-aligned comments here. It's fine to show some incredulity towards mainstream epistemic institutions, but these institutions are more reliable than the Gribbles who illiterately rail against them. Conspiracy theorists tend to make poor predictions about everything (not just conspiracy theories, which overwhelmingly turn out to be fake), and since Tim Pool was mentioned, I'll bring up that he thought Trump would win in a 50-state landslide. I mean, this is a guy who makes a living commenting on politics, and he predicted something so stupid that it should be disqualifying. You could repeat a similar claim for other charlatans who have become trusted sources for low-trust (ie, dumb and gullible) voters. Guys, if you want to be imbued with forbidden knowledge that no one else has access to, just read the news. I promise it will make you 100 times more informed than someone whose income is derived from reading other people's tweets and headlines.
my gribble-esque take is the 'gribble' label is calculated to flatter non-gribbles and incense gribbles, thereby driving engagement
Of course. Everything is a nefarious plot! Nailed it again, bro.
Respectfully, one could also say that "the 'moron' label is calculated to flatter non-morons and incense morons" - that's the whole point of a disparaging label. I realize we've seen the rise of mostly fake labels that serve no purpose other than to drive mockery of an imagined enemy (like "Catcher in the Rye-bros"), but "Dale Gribble voter" describes a real, extensively documented phenomenon that deserves to be ridiculed.
I sadly think that the best thing for Western civilization right now is to be ruled temporarily by those with lower IQs until those with higher IQs regain their sanity from the crazy woke religion.
High IQ elites abandoned woke since 2022. Now the thing closer to woke are the low IQ you praise so much
Do high iq people support koala Harris?
Remember how Hillary ran on being a women? Kamala isn't doing that any more.
To the extent that Kamala makes decisions, she’s going to staff the government with woke conformist people.
Not Ezra Klein.
That time is coming sooner than you think. When the woke protesters revealed themselves to be anti-Semites last year it was a huge tipping point.
Objective studies show no particular partisan lean in conspiracy theorists, similar tendencies toward conspiracy beliefs on both sides of the aisle, and the only significant difference in conspiracy theory transmission being that liberals generally show a lower threshold for belief than conservatives, both in being talked into conspiracy theories and talked out of them. So your fundamental premise is flawed.
"It's not a conspiracy theory if the NYT believes it" as Sailer put it.
It is still objectively a conspiracy theory if the NYT believes it, but since the main reason anyone believes in a conspiracy theory in the US today is to signal distrust for the status quo worldview, and NYT is the avatar of that, it would certainly be a not very useful conspiracy theory for that purpose.
Very disappointed in the author. In a fairly short time, he has gone from fairly scholarly analysis to ad hominem declarations of the one side against the other with little specific foundation. A similar pathway to many of the alternative media who make a name for themselves and then must become more and more partisan and extreme to stay relevant. This will not end well.
In one term: it's status quo bias. Those who are pro-status quo sort into one camp, and those who are anti- into the other. There's a lot of confusion because status quo doesn't have an objective meaning, but that just makes the theory more explanatory - whatever people THINK is the status quo, regardless of the reality of it, is what they support/oppose.
I find this group to be as high t or aspiring high t males that believe in their ability to provide for their family. Some aspire to be Dale Gribble, others want much much more health and wealth wise. They actually can take a lot of shit but after so many questionable rules and barriers on what they're trying to do, they slowly start to question things. Then they realize something is BS and it gets them farther down the rabbit hole.
I have a good friend in this category and since COVID he's turned out to be right a lot more than he's been wrong.