We’ve been over this a million times. Conspiracies and conspiracy theories are two separate things. Republican state governments are engaging in an ongoing conspiracy to suppress voter participation by groups they don’t think will vote Republican. At the same time Republicans are engaging in a conspiracy theory that tens of thousands, even millions, of false ballots were cast to affect the presidential race - but not lower races - in 2020, a theory not even remotely plausible because their own party officials have adamantly denied large-scale fraud and have carried out multiple audits of the ballots. One is reality; the other is fantasy.
What makes a CT plausible to some people? It all boils down to this, the denial of inconvenient evidence.
My hypothesis (not theory) is that many, possibly most, people, whether technically stupid or not, don’t understand that school is not designed merely to implant a series of facts, but to teach you how to think for yourself about facts or non-facts that you encounter after leaving school.
Thinking is a complex process involving a series of steps. Once a statement is heard, more information must be gathered, the legitimacy of that source of information must be evaluated, the value of the particular piece of information must be judged, and the totality of the information must be sorted into pro and con and then weighed. CTers always stumble over one or more of those steps.
A common taunt by anti-vaxxers is “do you believe everything a scientist tells you?” The correct answer is no. You shouldn’t. But that’s not the issue. When the collected mass of experts around the world, working for different institutions in different countries, come to a consensus that is relayed through the mouth of a scientist, however, you should give it millions of times the weight of a statement made by a single iconoclast.
Not being able to think makes people feel stupid even if they aren’t in other ways. They are lost in a tsumani of need-to-knows, few of which they have to time to study, and many of which are antithetical to their beliefs. The temptation to seize upon the iconoclasts who shout with seeming authority and create a countervailing world order must be overwhelming. Advanced CTers can even use their own ignorance of the subject to provide new “evidence,” which, however nonsensical, will be approved because it builds backwards from the already accepted answer and therefore has to come to the “correct” conclusion.
As I said, conspiracies do occur. Cynicism about public actions is warranted. Nevertheless, cynicism without evidence or worse, with made-up evidence, is invariably dangerous to civil society. Plausibility should mean “with a huge honking pile of evidence.” Without that, all CTs fall into the same rotten barrel and take on each others’ stench.