What are exceptionally weird left wing conspiracy theories you've seen?

In My Humble Opinion
203

I don’t think you understood me correctly. When I sat conservatives are vulnerable because they’ve been groomed to be, that’s exactly what I mean. I’m not saying they were groomed because they were vulnerable. I’m saying they’re vulnerable because they’ve been groomed. I’m saying conservative media has whipped up fear and false narratives in an organized concerted manner for profit.

It’s been going on for a long time, as described in this comprehensive article from 2012 - I’ve posted this article on the SDMB before and I’m hoping someday more than a few people will click the link and read the whole thing, because it really explains it all.

It’s quite possible that if there had been a cohort of high profile liberals that deliberately set out to enhance misleading narratives in order to enhance fear and fleece liberals, they might have succeeded. Or not.

But that’s not what happened. Only one side decided to be the party of grift. Only one side pulled their constituency down a rabbit hole for the sake of profit.

I’m not saying it couldn’t happen to liberals. But it didn’t happen to conservatives overnight, it was a concerted decades long effort, and I haven’t seen any evidence that any liberal “thought leaders” are interested in executing anything comparable.

204

Let’s not get crazy - a lot of dumb people still have sufficient morality to reflexively reject modern american conservatism. And you don’t have to be a generalized moron to believe in crazy things on specific topics - compartmentalization is definitely a thing.

I’m surrounded by people who believe in that specific brand of craziness called theism. Most of them are quite intelligent - I don’t hang around stupid people, and I got my brains from my parents. So I’ve had the opportunity to observe that if you talk to a smart person about something stupid they actually believe, their critical thinking visibly shuts down. It’s actually kind of troubling to watch - not only do their arguments become crappy, their emotions become hair-trigger when they have no solid counterarguments.

This is why I don’t lunge toward the assumption that all conservatives are morons - an ardent trump supporter could be a magician with a car engine for all I know. And you provably don’t have to be a moron to fall for that shit. However you do need to be exposed to an environment that encourages you to be credulous towards it.

205

This is about as far as we can go down this line of discussion without opening a Great Debates thread, but Ibram Kendi charges $20,000 an hour (and people PAY it!) to tell white people (specifically, the kind of white people who are already willing to listen to this and willing and able to pay $20,000 for it) that they are incorrigibly racist, and Robin DiAngelo charges $20,000 for a three-day retreat to do the same.

206

Except when it comes to woo (crystals, new age stuff, etc), alternative medicine (naturopathy, homeopathy, acupuncture, etc.), dangers of GMOs, antivax, and lots other false beliefs. These just tend to be non-partisan conspiracy theories and magical beliefs.

Look at all of the conspiracy theories that bounced around when George W Bush was president about his motivations and who was really in control. I still don’t have a good understanding of why we invaded Iraq. I know what they said (weapons of mass destruction, fighting terrorism, etc.) and I know why liberals thought they did it (oil money, revenge for GHWB, “fun to kill Muslims” racism), but what were the real reasons?

207

Oh yeah, absolutely. I totally agree that conservatives have been taken down this path for a long time. I think one important difference that let it happen to conservatives is that they are a much more cohesive group than liberals. Or is that just a liberal lie that I believe?

Anyway, conservatives tend to value loyalty and authority, which means that as much as they might disagree about details, they will follow the authority. Look at Ted Cruz. It wasn’t that long ago he and Trump were in a bitter primary battle. Then Trump won, and Cruz became one of his lapdogs. Meaning that when Fox News became the authority for conservative thought, they all followed.

Liberals are not nearly as cohesive. Liberals don’t generate thought leaders. Lots of progressives might like Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez, but they don’t bow to them, and would like nothing more than to debate with them. Much of this has been to the detriment of the Democratic Party who have big splits between the progressives and the corporatists (at least that’s how I see them).

There is lots of talk about splits in the Republican Party now, but it’s like people forget just a few years ago when the Republican Party was divided into the Tea Party and the rest. But then they all came together again behind Trump. Republicans will all come together again, whether it is behind Trump or somebody else.

208

This illustrates the point brilliantly.

To give an example of liberal credulity in the US, we need to make a misleading summary of an author and professor (so not politician)'s lectures. Ok, two professors.

To give an example of conservative credulity right now we can look to… The former president，the house, the Senate, state governments and all of the major right wing media outlets.
Oh, as well as a bunch of academia too like Jordan fucking Peterson.

Both sides :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

209

I’ve written about this quite a bit in other threads, but most evangelical and conservative Christian communities have a very authoritarian power structure where the kids obey the parents, the wife obeys the husband and the husband obeys his pastor and God. When you get to the more fundamentalist evangelical groups, criticial thinking is considered bad or even evil, the devil’s work.
They expect simple and clear answers from their leaders. Good or Bad, Yes or No. Nuance and equivocation are considered signs of weakness.

Then, underneath it all there is a ton of dark money working to advance the causes of these religious groups politically and to politically bind them to the conservative movement.

This is getting way off topic, but it’s a subject I’ve been interested in for some time, and the bottom line is that I don’t think the liberals are as vulnerable to the same type of manipulation.

210

I guess I just want to argue with you, even though I think we both fundamentally agree. Maybe we’re both liberals?

I do think it is on topic, in that I read the unwritten question of this thread as “we all know about the nutty conservative CT, why aren’t there a bunch of nutty lefty CT, too?” which is what you’ve been addressing.

I guess my main point, which keeps changing as I think about this topic more, is that even if the left hasn’t suffered from the kind of pervasive, political CTs that have gotten the right, it is important to remain vigilant for them.

211

I’ll agree that liberals should remain vigilant, but I think the biggest the danger is not in theories themselves, but the actors that seek to amplify and exploit them. And I haven’t seen much evidence of that on the liberal side.

When I was researching politically motivated grift, I made an effort to look for equivalent behavior on the Democratic side, but for the most part it seemed to be one side only - there was one grifter that ran a couple of progressive scam PAC’s in addition to several conservative scam PAC’s, but that was it.

But I found lots of wrongdoing on the conservative side. Lots.

212

There are a number of CT theories of various levels of weirdness within the black activist community related to various schemes by the government to exterminate black people, whether through AIDS, Crack cocaine, sterilization, abortion, etc.

This community is particularly susceptible to this sorts of CTs since they have in the past been subjected to some seriously bad treatment by the government in the past. Also it is easy to ascribe direct nefarious motives of active persecution to what in many cases is simply lack of concern and neglect (i.e. going form black lives don’t matter to actively trying to kill blacks).

213

Somebody like Andrew Wakefield was definitely a grifter, and I consider the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow grifters. Is Bikram Choudhury a grifter or just a rapist? They might have predominantly preyed on the left (I’m open to be shown that the whole political spectrum is vulnerable to their crap). The difference is none of those people are politically motivated, and the grift doesn’t exploit partisan differences.

214

I’m not saying that liberals are impervious to cults, I’m saying the problem is worse on the right by several orders of magnitude, which makes it a cultural problem on one side only, until the political stability of our country is threatened by millions of yoga hippies that think Joe Biden is an illegitimate President.

There’s a bunch of yoga cults in the US. I hesitate to guess at a number, because of scale - there are probably a lot of smallish groups that meet the definition of cult, and a few large generational ones that I know of. There are self-empowerment groups that go full cult. But you’re maybe talking 10K people or so nationwide at most ( that’s my very fuzzy guess) if you are counting the people that adhere to the cult’s lifestyle doctrines.

On the other hand, probably 5% - 10% of Americans are in a fundamentalist religion strict and isolated enough to qualify as a cult or something really close to it ( and I may be understating, especially if you count prosperity churches), Those groups are almost universally conservative, and they are highly politicized. That’s millions of people.

One thing that will make you susceptible to disinformation is “already being in a cult”, and Republicans have that voter demographic locked up tight.

I’m a yoga hippie, I know people that have joined yoga cults. I’ve taken classes taught by yoga cults. I have new age hippie friends that have gone off the deep end.

They are liberal, I guess, in the sense that they aren’t conservative and believe in equal rights and wear blue jeans and have long hair, but in my experience most of these people, the ones that buy Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop and join yoga cults, are of the “I am neither Democrat or Republican, they are all the same” political party.

Sometimes, ironically enough, they start to slide right as they get more enmeshed in the cult. There’s an anti-government bent to all cults, whether they are following the prophecies of Pastor Bubba or the teachings of Yogi Swamiwami, and that anti-government slant ties into right wing politics.

So I think there are multiple factors other than cohesiveness and unity that make conservatives more susceptible to disinformation. For some, it’s the years long grooming by right wing media. For others, it’s the endorsement of these theories by the cult they are already in. For some it may be some combination of these factors.

ETA - I’m not disagreeing with you really, just expounding

215

I heard the right-wing version of this at work, from the Trumper in my department. Apparently BLM people and Antifa were setting off fireworks every night to desensitize people, so that when they started shooting or seizing the city (I’m in NYC) or whatever they were going to do, nobody would notice.

216

They probably would be if Mengele were the one giving them the vaccinations.

217

Skeptical Inquirer has a new article by a U. of Miami political science professor who studies conspiracy theories. He makes the claim that 1) conspiracy theory beliefs aren’t significant more prevalent now than before the age of social media, and that 2) many conspiracy theories are believed equally by left and right-wingers, including those promulgated by QAnon.

I think he’s got it wrong about QAnon, but not by that much.

According to one set of recent polling, as of October 2020, the number of Republicans believing that QAnon’s beliefs were at least partly correct was 38%, declining to 24% by the end of January. Pretty disturbing. However, over that same time period the number of Democrats polled who agreed that QAnon’s beliefs were at least partly accurate went from from 18 to 19%, essentially stable but also disturbing.

An NPR/Ipsos poll in December found similar numbers, with more Republicans than Democrats buying into QAnon, but by less of a margin than we should find comfortable.

I’d prefer it was “orders of magnitude”.

218

I didn’t find this article very compelling.

I felt like the author cherry-picked a couple of CT’s that have a fair amount of liberal support and ignored the right wing ones, like the one that 20-30 million conservatives and virtually no Democrats believe about Joe Biden stealing the election through massive organized fraud.

I wonder if he would’ve still presented QANON as a “both sides” theory if he had written the article of January 7th instead of January 5th.

219

I’ve definitely known some conservative Democrats. I worked with a guy who was an outrageous white supremacist and homophobe and believed all sorts of nonsense about faith healing and such. He voted Democrat 100% of the time because he was in a labor union that got broken by his previous employer in a very ugly dispute and that’s the issue he cared about in the polling booth. It may be less common these days but certainly there are some people like that, aside from people for whom belief in nonsense actually grows out of leftist premises.

220

I just want to point out that Democrat does not equal left wing. There are people who never changed their registration, for example, but reliably vote Republican (and the other way, no doubt).

221

This is factually incorrect.

222

It’s likely that Zoster is misrepresenting Kendi’s speech to Fairfax County School’s nearly 25,000 employees. This contract, circulating online, sets the fee for a 1-hour speech at $20,000. The idea that this was a speech solely for white people, and that it was telling solely white people about racism, and that it was telling them that they were incorrigibly racist, is contemptibly absurd, to the degree that it almost qualifies as a right-wing conspiracy theory (albeit a depressingly unexceptional one, part of a long tradition of fighting back against antiracist work, the same sort of vitriolic nonsense that was thrown at MLK Jr. and Frederick Douglass and other figures throughout our nation’s history).

Zoster did not source his claim, of course. Whether this was a deliberate attempt to keep people from seeing how false it was, or whether he just forgot to do so, I’ll not venture to guess.