Everyone talks about right wing conspiracies, but left wing conspiracies are just are bonkers and don’t really get as much traction on the internet these days in discussion circles.
A weird American left wing conspiracy theory I saw a lot on left wing blogs about 12 or so years ago was the idea that due to “Stolen Valor” laws that ANY piece of visual media (from movies to video games to TV shows) that has somebody dressed in a US military uniform was LEGALLY forced to have the Pentagon/Department of Defense review their program and add their own comments/ideas if the content producers wanted it to be distributed in the United States thus making pretty much all American media that involved the military genuine propaganda. I still see it pop up from time to time on Twitter today from non-Americans who still believe this to be true. I have no idea where or why this started but it’s amusing to think there there’s a branch of the Pentagon that basically has to watch every single piece of media produced in the United States, ever.
Yeah I remember that, it was even claimed the Bush administration already had a secret agreement with the Canadian government to immediately turn back any draft dodgers.
I’ve seen a number of inchoate assertions from left wingers that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was somehow about oil (despite Afghanistan not, y’know, actually having any). I did see one that actually put forward a quasi-coherent explanation about how it was about oil. You see, in the 1990s, the U.S. State Department issued an almost entirely unnoticed white paper on economic development in Afghanistan proposing a trans-Afghan pipeline, from Central Asian oil-fields to ports in Pakistan. After the invasion, the State Department re-issued the paper. So, you see, the invasion had nothing to do with 9/11, the Bush administration just used that as an excuse to invade Afghanistan in order to let Dick Chaney’s cronies in Halliburton build a oil pipeline. I saw this theory advanced years after the invasion, as the Bush administration was trying to minimize U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and had done nothing to lay the groundwork for such a project. But, hey, ground was broken on a trans-Afghan pipeline in 2018, so maybe there was something to the whole thing after all…
On the left I remember stuff like: The CIA is facilitating the spread of crack cocaine, and George the first was ok with that. The differences between that kind of thing and what we’re seeing today from the right, is that in the nation of the Tuskegee Experiment, the CIA thing isn’t exactly far-fetched. And, it’s 30 years old.
And I’ll bet that, like their right-wing brethren, the people that believed that still won’t admit they were wrong, Even nearly 20 years later,
I have one of my own.
After 9/11, the government made an agreement with Hollywood to make TV shows more “aggressive”, more “fascistic”, in order to make support for a more big brother American government. Fisrt they made the Orwellian-named Patriot Act, allowing domestic spying. Then TV shows like 24 get people used to the idea of “the ends justify the means” and “you’re with us or you’re against us”. No nuance allowed. “I must cut the head off this guy or MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE!!”
Whether or not I actualy believe the government is actively doing this, I do believe it came to pass. The path is directly from 9/11 through Jack Bauer into Proud Boys.
There’s the theory that efforts to control the pandemic are a war on biodiversity, spearheaded by Bill Gates in his attempt to subjugate the human race.
“The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us…
The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control.”
You see, Covid-19 is paying us back for being mean to other species.
“We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and greed, and cultivated monocultures.”
"As we clear-cut forests, as we turn farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering…we are connected through disease…
“There is no “life” in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer.”
Not sure how Gates giving away billions of dollars makes him richer, but whatever.
“The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies, colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organising and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and to the violence it unleashes. The extended coronavirus lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanity…
But that’s not the totality of Gates’ vision. In fact, it is even more sinister—to colonise the minds, bodies, and spirits of our children before they even have the opportunity to understand what freedom and sovereignty look and feel like, beginning with the most vulnerable.”
Interpreting efforts to control and end the pandemic as a plot to control/enslave humanity is something we’ve come to associate with right-wing bizarros. It seems this conspiracy theory is also popular out on the leftist fringe.
How about all of the “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theories? To the extent that they were (mostly) blaming the Republican administration, I think it’s fair to call those “left-wing”.
That’s not a left wing conspiracy. It’s a right wing one claiming that Bill Gates is saying this sort of thing. It’s an attack on the left-wing values he has stated.
Gates features heavily in right wing conspiracies.
My understanding is that GMO conspiracy theories (i.e. “Monsanto are deliberately hiding evidence that GMOs are harmful”) tend to be more popular on the left than on the right.
This may be a left-wing conspiracy theory in the US, but it’s true of many Arab/MidEast countries. If a TV show, film or any other production depicts a person in military uniform, or so much as tells a story that includes references and or discussion of the military, the screenplay must get a Ministry of Defense approval before the first scene is filmed.
I don’t know if this qualifies as a conspiracy theory but I know a lot of people believed that George W. Bush was essentially a figurehead while President and that Dick Cheney was actually running the country and telling Bush what to do.
I never believed that. I believe Bush was actively running things. He had a good cop/bad cop routine going with Cheney. Bush would use Cheney as his front man for the darker things his administration was doing so he could maintain his “good old boy” public persona.
That is because they don’t get much traction with left wingers at all. I can’t think of any that are/were close to the size and popularity of any of the Qanon Qonspiracies that came out in the last few years.
I don’t think so. First, when people blame a Republican administration for something that doesn’t make them left-wing, there were schisms in the GOP then, and still are now. Second, there aren’t just two wings, if something is not right-wing it’s not automatically left-wing. We’ve seen that situation a lot lately also. Two wings aren’t enough for the modern world.
First, as the science about GMOs is better established, these are less frequent.
Second, compare two ideas:
The world is controlled by a secret cabal of pedophile Satan-worshippers who kidnap tens of thousands of children every year and extract a longevity potion from their blood.
A major corporation is concealing science that shows their product is harmful.
One of those theories is a little more “exceptionally weird” than the other.
not sure if it is left wing but some people say LAPD framed OJ for murder because he made a movie about a fake trip to Mars. They said that proves moon landing was also fake. Movie came out around 76 so it took them a long time to frame him