because the right has bought into the idea that “Real Americans” are rugged individualists, and you’re supposed to go with what your “gut feeling” tells you instead of those evil, bought off experts. No matter how stupid the thing your “gut feeling” tells you to go with.
I will grant that there are probably quite a few liberal Truthers but they are the exception that proves the rule in the sense of testing it. I would grant that the idea that GWB simply let 9/11 happen in order to go to war is a liberal conspiracy theory. But the nuttier the conspiracy gets, bringing in explosions and fake planes, the more likely it is to involve Jews, insurance money, or Jewish insurance money.
The whole notion of ‘war for oil’ was always shaky…these days it has no legs.
This isn’t what she said and you seem to be going out of your way to try to bend Clinton’s words into something that they are not.
Clinton said, “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians.”
This comment is an accurate summary of what is currently happening.
What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To? from a week ago.
It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a thing that is happening.
Yep. Sorry.
Furthermore, this isn’t new. It’s been happening since Tulsi launched her campaign.
Russia’s propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard from Feb 2019.
You’re saying this as if it is an argument against the OP. But in fact, it’s an argument for the OP. Why is there a popular radio show for right wing CTs, and why do prominent and influential media figures on the right promote CTs (Sean Hannity, for instance) to a degree that no one on the left of similar prominence does?
Well, by far the most obvious answer is… because there is more of an audience on the right.
I suppose it’s possible that there are precisely equal numbers of right- and left-wing CT believers, but for whatever reason no one has figured out how to make money off of all those left wingers the same way Alex Jones and his ilk do on the right… but capitalism being what it is, that seems vanishingly unlikely.
So, by Occam’s Razor, unless someone convinces me otherwise, I believe that the right as a whole is more susceptible to CTs because that’s what the media landscape tells me.
Purely anecdotally, the closest I (a card carrying leftist) have come to believing a political Conspiracy Theory was when there were rumors that Sarah Palin’s youngest baby was actually her granddaughter, and Palin was claiming her as her own to protect her daughter (which, by the way, would have been an INCREDIBLY selfless act on Palin’s part had it been true, imho). What happened to that theory? Well, turned out that her daughter was, in fact, pregnant, so couldn’t possibly have given birth to the other baby. And what happened next? 99.9% of anyone who had even entertained that theory said “huh, looks like it was wrong” and moved on with our lives. As I’m sure would have happened just as cleanly had the political ideology of the participants been reversed (sarcasm).
I don’t think this is accurate. Conspiracy theories abound on the right because of a general mindset that tends toward anti-government and anti-institution paranoia and a general sense of distrust, contempt for science, and excessive reliance on individualistic self-sufficiency. The most extreme exemplars of the latter are “sovereign citizen” lunatics and survivalist types, invariably heavily armed, and invariably holding to right-wing ideologies and boundless paranoia. And of course the whole narrative of climate change denial is firmly entrenched on the right. Further evidence for this is that the right is becoming increasingly dissociated from reality; Trump basically got elected based on a pack of lies and now feels free to lie and distort with impunity pretty much every time he opens his mouth. The last I saw the New York Times had compiled a list of over 3000 lies he uttered publicly since inauguration, but that was a long time ago and it’s probably double or triple that by now. The things he says simply have no relationship to reality, but his acolytes believe every word of it, and refutation by the media only “proves” that the mainstream media are lying to them. This is the world that the right wing currently inhabits. Is it any wonder that they’re fertile ground for conspiracy theories?
Of all the things you listed, the only one that has any kind of association at all with the left is anti-vaxers, and I’d say it’s more ideologically neutral as both sides have anti-vax nuts, just for different reasons. The left tends to be suspicious of corporations and of drug and product safety, while the right might tend to be anti-vax based on more conspiratorial theories (“the gubbermint is putting things in them vaccines”) the way they rebelled against water fluoridation because it was a way for the government to control their minds or something.
“‘A small black hole would suck in our entire universe so we know it’s not that,’ Schiavo said.”
Note that “Schiavo” refers to Mary Schiavo, former U.S. Department of Transportation inspector general. Apparently basic science is not her strong point. 
From that level of scientific ignorance I immediately guessed she must be a Republican, so I checked. Sure enough, appointed to the USDOT in 1990 by George H.W. Bush.
I guess you forgot that one of the leaders of the conspiracy confessed.
Security of voting machines was (and is) a big problem.
The head of Diebold raised money for Republicans, something they later banned. So worrying about this is hardly unwarranted, and the uproar perhaps stopped it.
I once read a book of mostly left wing CTs, from 2000. So they exist. However, no significant Democratic politician I know believes in any of them.
On the other hand, the President - your President - is a birther (no reason to think he stopped believing it) and a climate change denier.
But I suppose to you some nutcase who writes left wing CTs is just a worrisome as the President basing foreign policy on conspiracy theories which have been debunked.
There are certainly more avenues for expressing CTs on the right than on the left. Fox “News” or even worse, One America “News”, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, etc. There are simply no equivalents to any of these on the left. The left radio network went belly up because unlike righties, lefties don’t need to have their preexisting opinions continually reinforced. Facebook users, look at your news feed. You’ll see tons of bogus stuff from the right, much less from the left. The right wing has become incapable of critical thinking or analysis, they’ll swallow whatever lies come out of the White House or Fox or Facebook. Lefties are much more discerning and think more critically.
Probably already posted (I’m new to this thread), but in 2016 NPR tracked down a fake news creator. He admits:
In his case, he’s simply profiting off of an easy hook: the right bites and it works, so he just does it.
Clinton called Stein a Russian asset. She called Gabbard a Russian asset. She said Trump could not win without Stein in 2016 (LOL) and that the the Republicans cannot win in 2020 without a third party running.
I’m not sure she said these things. Why don’t you quote her?
She definitely didn’t say what you claimed she said in post #80 (“if you run third party then you’re a Russian pawn”).
232323I’ve definitely encountered plenty of left-wing conspiracy theories both on this board and in other left-wing online circles I’ve dabbled in over the last 20 years. Some of the stranger ones I’ve encountered;
- The government sends plants into chatrooms/message boards to debunk 9/11 truthers
- George W. Bush is about to reinstate the draft (2003)
- George W. Bush is going to cancel the 2004 election
- George W. Bush is going to cancel the 2008 election
- George W. Bush is secretly gay and Jeff Gannon (remember him?) is his secret life-partner
- The 2004 flu vaccine shortage is a plot to kill off seniors so Republicans can cut Social Security
- The government blew up the levees during Hurricane Katrina to kill off black people
I think there may be a definition problem in some of these posts. An idea that involves a conspiracy, no matter how obviously ludicrous it seems, is not what most people mean by a “conspiracy theory.” The term refers only to theories about conspiracies that resist all evidence that they are wrong, and even become stronger because of contrary evidence. A conspiracy theorist is someone who engages in such thing, usually in multiple ways.
For example, it isn’t the fact that antivaxxers believe that vaccines cause autism that makes them conspiracy theorists. It is that they have rejected all the evidence that shows that their belief is false.
Point is, citing something that sounds ridiculous or just any theory that involves a conspiracy is not evidence that those who proposed it are conspiracy theorists. You need to show that they clung to this belief despite the lack of evidence, and started claiming that the people proving it wrong were all just part of the conspiracy.
While the idea that Trump would have lost without Stein is probably wrong, for reasons the FiveThirtyEight team explains here, it’s hardly LOL-worthy. Trump’s margin of victory in MI, PA, and WI was, in fact, smaller than the total number of votes Stein got in each of those states, and in Michigan it was a LOT smaller. If we assume Stein voters are ideologically consistent (they prefer a more liberal candidate over a more conservative one if no far-left candidate is available) and are basically rational about politics, then yes, they do swing the election to Clinton if Stein isn’t on the ballot.
(The real problem with this argument, as I see it, is that if Stein voters were ideologically consistent and rational about politics, they would have voted for Clinton in the first place, just like me and about a hundred million other Clinton voters whose core beliefs are somewhere to the left of the middle of the Democratic party. They are a fundamentally different type of voter with different motivations, and it’s not at all clear how they would have broken – do they stay home, do they vote for some other “protest candidate” like Gary Johnson or Evan McMullen, do they vote for Trump? Who knows?)
Basically the entire edifice of leftist rhetoric rests on the conspiracy theory that thousands upon thousands of employers collude to stifle labor wages. For example many plainly believe that women are paid something like 70% of what a man makes for the same work.
If it was true that labor wages are lower than they would be under market conditions, then a savvy employer could swoop in and make a killing by hiring all women and offering them 80% of the men’s wage.
The only way such a misalignment could exist would be a grand conspiracy. When you talk to nearly any leftist for two minutes you will find that they believe in some form of this conspiracy theory.
It doesn’t require a conspiracy. This was the state of society for decades in the South, with regards to employment of black people. White people and white society valued discrimination and white supremacy more than profit – that was made very, very clear. White employers who tried to buck this system and hire more black people at a slightly higher wage would have found themselves suddenly without white customers, as word spread that they were treating their black workers above their supposed station.
You know you can look this shit up, right?
Yes conspiracies are sometimes successful. Do you believe women are equivalent to Blacks in the Jim Crow South?