I would be surprised, yes. I admit here that I am coming from a position of ignorance – I rarely catch Fox News.
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I’m trying to understand more about where you are coming from. Specifically regarding Qanon and Pizzagate … I had considered both to have been pretty much summarily rejected by virtually everyone on both sides of the ailse. I mean, sure, I bet I can Google them and find many fringey blogs and such recounting sordid rumors. But that’s the nature of the Internet in 2019 – everyone has a voice.
Fox News will frequently discuss on their editorial shows conspiracy theories like Sandy Hook, and Seth Rich, and back in the day Vince Foster, if Pizzagate and Qanon are too fringey for you, lets concentrate on these. I’m not saying that all rightwingers are credulous regarding conspiracy theories, I’m saying that conspiracy theory supporters are more likely to be right wing, and that rightwingers with a national audience are more likely to promote them. I only see Fox News when it is on in a public building, but I see its style of reporting on bullshit quoted and referenced in other media constantly.
Pre-Trump, my WAG would have been that the political right is somewhat more likely to believe that there is a vast force of evil that operates in shadowy fashion behind the scenes (not necessarily working in conjunction, but just, that the right is good guys vs. bad guys.) Hence, a death with suspicious timing must be an assassination, etc.
In the Trump era now, though, I’m not sure that is the case anymore.
Specifically: “mainstream reach and large audiences”. I don’t think someone like Alex Jones has that.
I also think that it’s difficult to achieve “mainstream reach and large audiences” via modern social media – admittedly, that may be a reflection of me being old and out of touch. When these conspiracy theories are taken seriously on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, or the Big-Three networks’ evening newscasts, I will be more concerned.
From my time spent on Democratic Underground, I think the political left is now definitely giving the right a run for its money. There are DU-ers convinced that the GOP is rigging elections, etc. I’ve seen a thread on DU in which someone theorized that someone hijacked Malaysian Airlines 370 for the purpose of selling its spare parts on the black market (as if any airline would want to buy fenced Boeing 777 spare parts in such shady fashion.)
The title of the thread is “Why is the Right so credulous when it comes to conspiracy theories?” I took the unqualified phrase “the Right” at face value.
Another reason that the Right believes CTs so much is that a lot of conspiracy theories posited by the Right make “sense” - not in the sense that they would actually be done, but in the sense that their theorized aims or goals make sense. For instance, if illegal immigrants are likely to vote Democratic, then it makes perfect sense that the Democrats would want to bring in as many illegal immigrants as possible, to turn the ballot box blue. If one believes that dead people are voting or D’s are voting multiple times, then it makes sense that the Democrats would try to stymie voter-ID laws so as to enable illegal (D) voting. If one believes that the D’s are trying to make gun ownership look bad, then it makes sense that the D’s would stage some false-flag shooting massacres to make the public think badly of guns, etc. Doesn’t mean it’s factually accurate, but the posited motives make sense.
As others pointed out, those from ‘the left’ are not quite so.
Others form the right or center here like **Shodan **and **XT **are missing one important bit, sure, many from the left do fall for conspiracies too, but at less rates than most on the right, looking back, I do think looking at the issue of fake news is important here since that issue does correlate a lot with the conspiracy theories one:
And then there are very important differences:
And the reason is that, while there is -sadly- a good number from the left that fall for conspiracies and fakery, many do not fall for it because they are not afraid to tell their peers about the fakery by pointing at fact checkers or more accurate media; unfortunately, **many on the right even make a sport of shooting down the fact checkers too **and that points as to why many more on the right do fall for conspiracies and fakery.
The left is absolutely just as bananas when it comes to conspiracy theories.
If right win conspiracy theories seem to be more visible now, that is, in my opinion, due to two things:
Trumpism is an extreme view. Extreme right wingers have more position and pull in the halls of power than they used to, largely because of Trump, who is a conspiracy theorist. This has helped preposterous right wing conspiracy theories latch on to normally legitimate political activities. Look at how many Qanon nuts go to Trump rallies. There is no left wing equivalent to Donald Trump in America today.
and
Extreme right wing views have more efffectively marketed themselves; the left has no equivalents to Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, or Glenn Beck if he’s still a thing.
There ARE left win conspiracy theorists. Lots of them. They have just failed to elect anyone or start a popular radio show. You can find left wing conspiracy theorists all over the place but they’re nobodies.
I could go on with just the Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. As for why the ones on the left haven’t succeeded it’s because as a whole conservatives in the contemporary US are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than liberals are. My opinion is that as conservatives in the US are more susceptible to wishful thinking and seeking out biased sources than liberals are. That’s why none of the kooky liberals have huge audiences.
I do tend to believe that Trump voters are more credulous about conspiracy theories than Clinton voters, but the examples here don’t show that.
Of course Clinton voters are going to be less likely to believe stories (hoax or not) that show Clinton in a bad light or Trump in a good one. In order to get an accurate measurement you need to control for that. I’m also not sure that a measurement of belief in fake news stories is a good proxy for conspiracy theory beliefs. Like, of those two fake stories, only one of them is actually a conspiracy theory. Linking a dead FBI agent to the Clintons is an implication that there’s some vast conspiracy to cover up their imagined misdeeds. But the Pope endorsing Trump, while bullshit, isn’t conspiracy bullshit. There’s no need for a conspiracy for a religious figure to endorse a politician.
I don’t agree that both the left and right wings equally buy into conspiracy theory bullshit. Yes, the extreme ends of both have equally nutty conspiracy theories. But the important question is not how crazy the fringe is (both fringes are crazy), but what percentage of voters buy into the bullshit. The fact that the right is electing actual conspiracy theorists while the left doesn’t isn’t a fluke. It’s because the electorate on the left largely hasn’t bought into the fringe ideas and the right has.
When did Fox News discuss the Sandy Hook conspiracy?
Vince Foster died three years before Fox News was founded,so I doubt they did much conspiracy mongering about him.
In 2007 35% of democrats polled said they believed Bush knew about the 9-11 attacks before they happened.
On this very board there are people who believe that Trump has been a Russian sleeper agent for decades.
The right has a media magnifier; the left has no such thing. BTW, I was unaware that anti-vaxxers, moon landing deniers, chem trail idiots were generally on the left. I know some anti-vaxxers are, but not all. The one conspiracy theory I believe in is that there has been a vast conspiracy lasting 25 years to blacken Hillary Clinton with hardly any objective basis. I say hardly any because of all the high paid talks she gave to bankers and others. The rest all comes from the vast right wing echo chamber: Breitbart, Fox, Drudge,…
My anecdotal experience would tend to dispute that. At least several years back I had several very lefty acquaintances( and one decent, very well-educated scientific researcher friend )that were 9/11 hoaxers( a few were controlled demolition-type nuts, more were ‘the hijackers were stage-managed by the government’ nuts ). The general gist is that it was a planned ops to get mass public support for the schemes of interventionist neocons to get involved in the Middle East. Usually for them it all traced back to oil.
As non-9/11 hoaxer lefty they drove me a little bonkers with their nuttiness at the time and I had to carefully steer around certain meal-time gathering discussions. Much as I have had to do with my friends that were in to “holistic” medicine like homeopathy. The left absolutely has their fair share of credulous believers.
Just FTR, I said the OP was cherry picking because, well, the OP IS cherry picking examples. There are plenty of examples of left wing CTs. What I said was that a large number of AMERICANS, left, right and center believe in CTs. It’s well over 50%.
Personally, I’m with RickJay on this one:
Basically, the Right Wing have been more effective in getting the crazy out than the Left has, at least in recent decades. So, we hear more crazy coming from the Right. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of crazy on the Left, or that a lot of Left Winger types don’t believe in CT’s. Frankly, this board itself focuses more on Right Wing craziness, and tends to brush off Left Wingnutism. You yourself often downplay the Lefts effect on nuclear energy in threads. Myself, I think the the Right is crazier right now, but that’s mainly because they have moved more into the main stream of one of the big 2, while the Left has not gained control of the other party, which is having their own civil war between establishment liberals and progressives. That’s why the Dems are more sane at this time, IMHO. Also, the Dems are still trying to regain their former glory wrt consolidated power in the US. The Pubs have had it and it’s slipping away, so we are in the midst of a sea change wrt politics.