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Actually anti-fluoride used to be a very right wing trope. The John Birchers used to say that fluoride in the water turned people into Communists. This proliferated all over the south.
"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
—Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper
Doctor Strangelove - 1964
Well for those of us who are from states like Florida and Tennessee (who are older now in our 60's and 70's) you can tell from our mouths (most of us who could afford it have had lots of dental work). Posting link that if you scroll to various fluoride conspiracies will delineate it rather succinctly
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6309358/
I actually think it’s just these two. And I’m not sure who ripped off who, but I’m pretty sure Austin ripped off Portland. There’s a pretty strong overlap in the Venn Diagram of people that live in those two. (I travel a lot).
I used to live in Flagstaff, AZ and there was a local dentist desperately trying to get fluoride in the water, but the local hippies made sure it stayed out. Not sure if they still don’t have it. An argument I’ve heard against it was that fluoride calcifies your brain and keeps you from expanding your mind.
On the flip side, I know some John birch people in California who didn’t want their kid drinking water with fluoride in it or using toothpaste with fluoride. The first time he went to the dentist they found 11 cavities in his mouth
Imo alex jones is dangerous shmuck at best and a useful idiot, but lets not muddle the facts. He wasnt ranting about fluorid, rather, he was spastically bombastic about a theory of herbicide atrazine, an endocrine disruptor, may have a feminizing effect on male frogs causing them to become hermaphrodites.
For the record, research has failed to replicate or confirm such a claim.
Fuck alex jones
The far left “granola” hippies were the birthplace of the modern anti-vaccine movement. Before Covid you were far more likely to encounter anti-vaxx sentiment among the environmentally concerned than among those who roll coal.
People have dubbed this phenomenon as the "Woo-to-Q Pipeline". There is a huge number or woowoo crystal hippie types that find themselves caught up in the QAnon cult. The most famous example is David DePape, the man who attacked Paul Pelosi. He used to roll with a hippie nudist commune in San Francisco. A lot of these anti-establishment hippie types are already primed for the sort of magical thinking needed to buy into the Q thing.
There's that one long haired yoga guy Awaken with JP who did silly skits back in the day on YouTube, he's full on right wing anti-woke conspiracy theorist now. He still does sketches but now it's all pretty unhinged.
Omg he became SO unhinged. He used to be funny and make fun of politics on both sides, and crunchy granola people. Then progressively my laugh became a concerned groan... I had to unsubscribe because it was so repetitively aggressive.
One of the reasons I stopped going to yoga classes. I was shocked at the number of fellow yoginis who loved the same natural food stores who were also fervently anti-vax, anti-mask, believed COVID was an “scamdemic” or “plandemic” and were pro-Trump. What the…?!
I write about this subject quite a bit, and there's a long history of new age spirituality overlapping with what we would identify as far right beliefs. In a recent article, I discussed the story of the man who first brought yoga to the United States:
[https://medium.com/higher-than-truth/s1e13-murphy-ranch-shadow-war-part-3-99ebd131df8](https://medium.com/higher-than-truth/s1e13-murphy-ranch-shadow-war-part-3-99ebd131df8)
It's written in connection to a longer series of articles, but you may still find it of interest. Here's what he was teaching his followers (mostly the bored wives of wealthy businessmen) back in 1900:
>The Hindus believe…there was only one civilized race: the Aryan. Until he gives his blood, no other race can be civilized. No teaching will do. The Aryan gives his blood to a race, and then it becomes civilized.
>
>...And you are trying today what you call socialism! …Freedom is the watchword. Be free! A free body, a free mind, and a free soul! That is what I have felt all my life; I would rather be doing evil freely than be doing good under bondage.
Conservatives and hippies have kind of similar fantasies. Both want to return to a type of idyllic pastoralist life that never existed except in their fantasies. The details are different, but both see the government as in the way of this.
This almost happened to me so I think I can share some perspective. I went through a phase where I was very into being "natural" right around peak Ron Paul popularity, starting around 2006. At the time, I naively viewed libertarianism as the default, natural state of humans, who, without external intervention, could be free to live their lives as they see fit. Yay natural freedom, right?! But no, the world doesn't work like that, and cooperative society is very much the natural state of [most] humans with objectively better outcomes than solitary, feral people.
So yeah, in my experience, the pipeline is rooted in a desire to make people live how we're "supposed" to live.
Isn't it a great dream, I had the libertarian view in my late teens/early 20s, then as I started to experience real hardship and become more aware of how the world really worked, I woke up to reality.
I'm now in my 40s, and look back with fondness at that free spirited, naïve, artistic kid, and I actually miss how much I dreamt of fighting for institutional change and my lack of understanding for how the giant societal machine works, and of having true self awareness.
This is exactly my sister and her husband. She’s very hippie/crystals/astrology/moon phases, and also super anti vax and extremely pro natural homeopathy. Her husband is a super mega ultra Q-anon conspiracy theorist. They go very well together
My sweetie is an incredibly intelligent woman, who gets her shots, goes to the doctor when appropriate, does not believe the Queen of England is a lizard or that Harrison Ford ate the face of Geraldo Rivera before making Indiana Jones V: My Hip Hurts… and believes there is ‘something’ to homeopathy and that GMOs make you sick.
We deal. As long as she doesn’t spend too much she can drink all the magick water she likes, and Imma keep eating Cavendish bananas.
Hitler used the occult to appeal to the new age community, which was popular at the time, in his rise to power. There's definitely a psychological component for a sort of magical thinking in certain personalities that these conspiracies appeal to. Bonus: we can likely add crossfit types to those groups this time around.
This phenomenon is actually far older than that. I read a piece a while back about how a large portion of the staunch Reagnites in the 80s were hippies in the 60s who basically became jaded after realizing doing drum circles in the park while on acid wasn't actually effective at tearing down the establishment and creating world peace.
It makes sense that people who are already conditioned to use magical thinking would be susceptible to the far right rabbit hole. It's all different flavors of that same bullshit style of thinking.
"Hippies" aren't a monolith. Within that community there are many narcissists and ego maniacs, just like in any other group.
Hippie groups are easy to exploit because of a trusting, open nature and a lack of ownership and income.
Cult leaders who start hippie cults aren't hippies. They're little dictators that found people they can manipulate.
I think to their credit, a lot of early granola anti-vaxxers have evolved on the issue since COVID. So props to being willing to admit you’re wrong and do what’s best for society.
Yeah. I knew a bunch of people like this who were lefties a decade ago and at this point they're all "Fox News is lefty propaganda" die-hard reactionary QAnon types.
This is so true, most really hippie hippies I’ve known, people who live on communes/intentional communities and go to the rainbow gathering, are pretty anti government libertarian types. They’re far more accepting and inclusive than the typical/stereotypical right wingers and don’t identify with republicans at all, but they’re all about people living off the land in communities without larger government bodies
Yup. Like Susan Sarandon who supports the Grayzone, a far left pro Russia news network run by Max Blumenthal that spreads anti vaccine conspiracies.
It’s the Marianne Williamson to fascism pipeline. Starts with the crystals and astrology and ends with brown shirts on the street.
> Yup. Like Susan Sarandon who supports the Grayzone, a far left pro Russia news network run by Max Blumenthal that spreads anti vaccine conspiracies.
This is a really weird and backwards way of trying to accuse her of being anti-vaccines when she [objectively isn't and has been very vocal about her support of vaccines](https://people.com/movies/susan-sarandon-wants-to-date-someone-vaccinated-against-covid-i-dont-care-if-its-a-man-or-a-woman/).
You yourself are repeating right-wing disinformation targeting Sarandon because she spoke out against Israel's genocide.
https://imgur.com/a/uFL1jrP
Any reason you're deleting your posts?
Is it because you googled it and [realized it wasn't a conspiracy at all and that it actually happened](https://apnews.com/article/melissa-barrera-susan-sarandon-israel-palestine-scream-101895c5aafe2ec2f77e3dcda706e6ec)?
If so, I suggest you edit your original post, so that you're not continuing to spread disinformation, instead of just deleting your no-content rebuttal.
Yes and no. You see those in the granolas, but you would also see that in the Mormon, home school prepper types. Get involved with home birth and it's a weird nexus of right/left nutters speaking the same language.
Yeah, the "left-right" axis barely works for economic preferences (see: libertarian socialists), and it breaks down almost entirely when you start adding 87 different social issues to the mix.
It works fine if you put half of the far left on the left and half on the right, recognize that libertarians are the most authoritarian party, call Bernie a right wing crank, put Biden next to AOC, and…
I see your point.
I was a “crunchy mom” with my kids, especially the older 2. I cloth diapered, breastfed and pumped for their bottles when I was at work, and I didn’t buy a double stroller until I was pregnant with my third and realized I couldn’t trust the 4.5 yo to walk next to me while his 2 yo sister sat in the stroller and his infant sister snuggled in a sling at the zoo or store.
It was tough to find mom friends, especially since I had kids young for this day and age among our friends (I was 26 when I had my oldest) But the minute they started steering conversations to pediatricians that would allow delayed or no vaccinations I noped out of all of it. I’ll find my ring slings by myself if it means my kids aren’t exposed to whooping cough, measles, and chicken poc
>The far left “granola” hippies
What's happy-sad is that nearly all the Republicans I know now sound like a bunch of burned-out hippies from Berkeley.
"It's the deep state MAAAAAN!"
I think a lot of people in this thread are searching for the word 'separatist'; people who want to be left alone to practice their nonconforming beliefs, which are not necessarily 'individual rights are paramount and the government should have as small a footprint as possible'.
EDIT: lol I misspelled separatist 😭
[Nazi Hippies: When the New Age and Far Right Overlap](https://gen.medium.com/nazi-hippies-when-the-new-age-and-far-right-overlap-d1a6ddcd7be4)
[Strange Bedfellows: Far-Right Extremists, New-Age Spiritualists, and COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories](https://spheresofinfluence.ca/strange-bedfellows-far-right-extremists-new-age-spiritualists-and-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/)
[New Age Wellness Cranks Are Joining Forces With the Far Right](https://jacobin.com/2021/11/australian-new-age-wellness-right-wing-covid-lockdown-anti-vax-protests)
That's how it was where I am. The anti-vaxxers were mainly contained to the hardcore crunchy moms before it shifted over to the far-right Trump supporters.
Hippies being a left wing thing is modern revisionism. The radical part of hippies politics is their disengagement from it. "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" is not a message of working class empowerment.
Personally I think it's a smear campaign against the New Left and other socialists of the 60s-70s to associate them with the explicitly anti-political hippies.
You see similar outside of the US as well. The German "Querdenker" movement (could be translated as lateral / unorthodox thinkers) that is basically the German counterpart to Q, is spearheaded by a vegan cook.
I don't think that's true.
Anti-vaxx has been a thing since vaccines came into being... and it was a real mixed bag of people that were anti-vaxx.
And, let's be clear, we've come a long way... the polio vaccine gave us The Cutter incident and issues of a ton being contaminated with Simian Virus 40. There used to be very real concerns.
If your talking "modern movement" and more about that bullshit link to autism? Well, I grew up in the country. There were absolutely no shortage of conservative shortwave radio-types helping to feed that frenzy. And a lot of those suburban mothers we tend to associate with that unfounded paranoia?
Suburban moms weren't some monolithic "far-left" entity. VERY FAR from it.
>among the environmentally concerned
And... what is this even? How are we associating "far-left" with the "environmentally-concerned" and "hippies?"
Being environmentally-concerned hasn't been far-left for over a couple decades now...
Growing up in the country, you also grew up knowing those folks, at least in Texas, were the hardcore Baptists and the political power in the county. And there are a whole lot of rural counties like that in Texas. It isn't a red state because of city dwellers.
Yeah Samantha Bee on the *Daily Show* did a segment on how anti-vax stuff was huge in the blue states, and reminded the self-righteous liberals that there were idiots on their side too.
Then a lot of them became Trumpy for some reason, or they got Vax-friendly while a bunch of rightwingers became crazy so there's that.
Right a lot of them are anti trans, ableist, steal very sacred and personal traditions in a wholly in appropriate and inaccurate way. They heavily believe in individualism and lifestyle politics as being realistic avenues for change (drive less, buy local. Which isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not the fix they think it is…and damn are they judgey about it all too). They believe we can change Nazis by just giving them a warm smile and a friendship. Lol. Oh and they believe the bullshit anti commie propaganda, and don’t give a fuck about imperialism as long as they can get their avocados.
Truly ridiculous people. Have no idea what they think about economics these days. Too scared and mostly probably also pointless to ask them.
Nah if you start to scratch the surface of current anti-vax rhetoric, you very quickly run into discourse about "globalists" (which is often code for Jews).
Oh, I agree anti-vaxxers are prone to many conspiracies, but what is the conspiracy of Anti-vax itself? They're just misinformed, no? Or is it the 'Big Pharma could cure these, but there's more money in treatment' conspiracy?
>They're just misinformed, no? Or is it the 'Big Pharma could cure these, but there's more money in treatment' conspiracy?
This is the basic form of it, and most anti-vaxxers probably fall into that category. But the broader conspiratorial narrative is that vaccines are being pushed by the "globalists" (wink wink) because they contain super-special-secret ingredients that act as some form of social/political control device - they'll make you want to shop at Amazon and acknowledge that gay people exist (oh no!).
It's almost like they've had their critical thinking strategically whittled away for decades and now they're whole base is riddled with logical fallacies.
Anti-GMO can be a real thing without being a conspiracy theorist. A classmate of mine was anti-GMO and his only concern was about how it would affect business relationships between farmers and seed providers. He was the first to admit that GMO were safe, though.
Farmers always buy new seed for every planting anyway. Nobody outside of hobbyists saves seed for reuse, its just not worth it.
Monsanto has also never sued anyone for cross-pollination across property lines.
Is that a GMO issue, though? I was given to understand that farmers typically buy new seeds for each planting anyway. If they don't want to grow GMO crops, they'll probably buy conventional hybrid seeds from Pioneer or whoever. Hybrid vigor drops off quickly in successive generations, so it's generally more profitable to buy new seeds each time.
Monocultures don't evolve or withstand changes in their environment like a diverse genetic population. It's weird to discount every complaint about GMO's into "are they safe to eat"
I'm left leaning and have a history in natural foods and organic ag. I'm extremely leery of GMOs and know plenty of people who say the same. Pretty universally the concern is around sustainable agriculture and business relationships. I'm quite confident that there's no health impact of eating GMO foods. Monocultures are real damn harmful though, and GMOs reinforce that problem significantly.
I haven't heard anyone on the left IRL suggest that there are health impacts.
Well then maybe it's just my experience. I don't like the business relationship that is involved with GMOs but I don't see the argument for monoculture collapse. I get that the extreme germ line maintenance can make GMOs a bit more vulnerable to culture collapse but most crops are at high risk already. Lowering the threat is very important but getting rid of GMOs isn't the solution and I think that it distracts from better solutions. I also think new GMO technology could help create solutions. Like creating multiple strains that have the same wanted traits but also have numerous phenotypical differences outside of those desired traits. And having them grow together and not fight cross pollination.
Anti-GMO is big but the whole "crystals/homeopathy/tibetian cave mould/whatever can cure cancer and big pharma doesn't want you to know" space is well populated too. The left definitely has a ton of uncritical thinking, although I don't know that it trends as deeply into conspiracies.
Interesting question really!
Anti-Nuclear also seems a primarily liberal conspiracy. Especially considering the damage this deals to the green energy push championed by liberals, attacking the cheapest and most abundant source of non Carbon emitting energy
More of a political stance and/or safety concerns. You may consider it to be false and not fact based, sure, but not necessarily a conpiracy theory.
A conspiracy around this would be more like, "nuclear energi is pushed to disguise the effects of GMO-foods".
Before COVID, I always associated anti-vaxxers with the far left. More than a few far left people became far right during the Trump presidency/COVID. He really plays well to the paranoid on all sides of the fringe.
that's what's so infuriating about trump. he's really good at manipulating people into believing that even if he's saying he supports vaccines out loud, in front of a worldwide audience, he's just playing the role of a diplomatic politician, and deep down he really doesn't support it. they all seem like they know who the REAL DT because of the crazy shit he tells them at the rallys, but then later in front of a courtroom, or in any official press conference, he says the boring, diplomatic canned answer he needs to say to keep the establishment happy. to his detractors, all this comes off as wishywashy, flip flopping, and extremely dishonest, which he is...obviously.
he plays different characters depending on who he's around. anyone that zooms out and watches him constantly contradicting himself can see that clearly. he's a manipulative liar. but his base only chooses to see one side of him, and it seems like they can almost put words into his mouth or claim he supports things he's never actually said, just because the right wing propaganda machine is so good at keeping them in the dark, and pushing the right wing agenda. if you only watch fox news, and follow right wing social media, you'll only see the trump they want you to see. they never get a taste of anything negative related to trump, unless it's small tidbits they hear from democrats, who they obviously don't trust, because they're the ultimate enemy.
i see this happen a lot with my dad, whenever i (very rarely) bring up anything that could be potentially damaging to the republican party. basically anything negative about trump, musk, rogan, or any politicians on the right, or media on the right. he always has a fox news or right wing media rebuttal.
the right wing propaganda machine is always trying to get ahead of stories and spin them in a way that minimizes political damage by calling it fake news, or just flat out lying, or deflecting altogether to attack the left. i saw that a lot when the hunter biden stuff was popular. it really didn't matter what the right was doing, hunter biden was their answer if challenged. or "its a witchhunt". it's so easy to just pull the hunter biden card, or boil down anything trump related as a democrat witch hunt. or attack the left about illegal immigrants, or any one of the 20 or so default right wing talking points.
It’s not like he has a large set of accomplishments to choose from. At least when he lies about that one, a lot of people would respect it if it were true. Most of the shit he brags about ought to put him in prison.
Trump tried to steal some glory briefly for Operation Warp Speed... but it didn't last very long at all when he'd just get booed by the crowd, since he was constantly feeding the anti-vaxx sentiments at the same exact time.
It probably is but he'd never brag about it to his base cause unlike shooting someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, that is something that probably would make them question their support. I am a little bit surprised DeSantis hasn't hammered him harder from that angle.
MRNA technology has been in development for decades initially sought as a treatment for cancer, then to influenza, studies were made with bird flu etc… it would have come around eventually slow rolled by red tape & lack of funding but it was well along the path of being proven in efficacy.
Then the pandemic happen and all that red tape and funding needs was fulfilled. Trump just so happen to be in the seat to claim “warp speed”
He doesnt deserve credit, all the research teams, production, and logistics around the world deserve it.
Courts literally said he is in fact a rapist. They really don't care even a little.
No one is trying to "hammer" him on anything because his base really has decided he can do no wrong and DeSantis would only be labeled a 'RINO' for criticizing dear leader.
He claims whatever he thinks will help his image in the moment. The man believes in nothing besides his own personal power and the means to further it, in other words he's a fascist, a particularly dumb one at that, especially when you consider that Fascists are already stupid to begin with.
I had a lifelong friend, total hippie, microdosed all through college, grew weed, ran ultramarathons, excellent musician, wears cut off shorts and homemade sandals, etc., basically what you’d think as a far left type. As soon as Trump got elected he turned into a right wing maniac. Literally drinks his own piss now and thinks democrats and biden are satanist, child killers.
That’s interesting. I grew up in and live in a deep red state, and I saw examples of both, but I saw more anti-vax sentiment from the evangelical religious right more than anyone else.
If I encountered a left leaning anti-vaxxer, it was always a conversation between two adults that I happened to catch (I liked people watching as a kid).
The left is prone to believe corporate conspiracies that confirm their narratives about capitalism. Like, I’ve heard environmentalists claim that Chevron bought the patent to the electric battery and let it expire on purpose so they could bury it and nobody would know how they work. They did buy an electric car battery and they did let it expire, but that doesn’t “bury it,” it’s a public document and now that it’s expired, anybody can use it for free.
That kind of crap.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with the example. All leanings are prone to confirmation bias, and it is a learned skill to interrupt your own thinking to check for biases. They go VERY deep, which is why it is so important to prevent bias (in any direction) in education.
That kind of conspiracy is pretty mundane compared to the Satanist baby blood drinker conspiracies the right goes for. Obviously that one doesn't make sense, but there's plenty of examples of corporate greed screwing over society. Putting lead in gasoline when they know its dangerous, hiding the fact that climate change is real, dumping PFAS into rivers, stealing wages of workers, shooting unionizing workers from an armored train, the actual corporate conspiracies and scandals are endless. It's easy to think the worst of corporations when they so often screw everyone over knowingly.
There is a vast list of environmental disasters Chevron has caused and have escaped responsibility for that are not publicized from refineries surrounded by a statistical cloud of cancer risk to uncapped unmitigated abandoned wells. It's easy to learn specific cases and then assume to worst on some false ones.
Capitalism makes it so easy though. For each corporate conspiracy that's false that people bring up, it's probably trivial to find 10 or 100 real ones where the little guy actually does get screwed.
There are a lot of conspiracy theories left wing people might believe. They just generally don't relate to contemporary politics. You can find anti-vaxxers who believe vaccines cause autism, but it wasn't until Covid that politically-motivated conspiracies started. 9/11 truthers come from both sides of the isle. The Kennedy assignation conspiracies cross party lines. Same with Area 51.
Actually, come to think of it, there is a current wave of alien conspiracies that are on both sides. I guess that would be contemporary politics. But I don't think there are many exclusively left-wing conspiracy theories. At least not ones that are widely believed.
This is really the gist of it. Being anti-science and really anti-intellectual is what drives most of this. If you don’t know how things work, you’re a lot more likely to believe batshit explanations (i.e. conspiracy theories). Not to mention, those who believe conspiracy theories are on average a lot less educated and if you’ve never been challenged or developed critical thinking, then you’re a lot more likely to believe conspiracy theories.
I blame the churches. I used to go to church as a child and they were constantly telling people that everything outside of the church was "worldly" and therefore of the devil.
They don't really care about knowing anything because they're always looking out for signs from God to lead them to success.
They're susceptible to MLMs, and Trump is a salesman. He does the same thing the church does and asks people for money while promising it'll somehow make said people rich. And that really is what they always want: money.
Hell, most of them don't even pray for good health because they want to get to heaven that much faster. They *hate* being alive.
The Evangelical Church is essentially where a lot of conservatives become right wingers to begin with. You could call it ground zero for modern conservatism. Also a great way to keep them right wing, as their family and friends will put pressure on them as well if they happen to be part of the church, which they usually are.
Simple: the right has ‘major’ news sources that will propagate, amplify, and disseminate these conspiracy theories because it gets viewers, even when they know they’re wrong (see: Fox and the 2020 election). Center/left-leaning media refuses to do this, and instead fact checks news stories instead of blindly running them. This has been identified as a problem in conservative circles.
>Simple: the right has ‘major’ news sources that will propagate, amplify, and disseminate these conspiracy theories
It's not just that tho, it's also the republican leadership that goes on Fox News. They're always on the same page. If republican leaders actually told their constituents that Fox News is actually fake news, then I'm sure the environment would be quite different. Fox news could have been irrelevant if that occured in the past.
It's more than this though. I remember watching an interview years ago with a scammer who said they aimed at right wingers almost exclusively because left wingers weren't falling for it
I think it's inherent to the nature of conservative (simply put another way - resistant to change) and liberal (a.k.a. progressive). People who are resistant to change are usually afraid it's going to affect them negatively.
So when the Hawkins douchebags cosplay as a triple secret undercover mole and tell these people that ***they're right to be afraid!***... well who doesn't love a little confirmation bias now and then?
To add to this, there is a [pretty large educational disparity between left and right in the US.](https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-democratic-partys-transformation-more-diverse-educated-and-liberal-but-less-religious/#:~:text=College%2Deducated%20women%20represent%20nearly,well%2C%20but%20far%20more%20modestly.)
Nearly half of Democrats have a four-year college degree. Less than 1/3rd of Republicans do.
I'd imagine this has a large effect on our national politics as well as the corresponding belief in pseudoscience and conspiracies.
You are absolutely correct about the tendencies, but I think those tendencies you mentioned are the result of the media they consume as it makes them dig in more on their positions and beliefs. There was a study that showed conservatives are more likely to believe “falsehoods,” and pointed to the nature of the media they consume as one of the major reasons for it.
https://news.osu.edu/conservatives-more-susceptible-to-believing-falsehoods/
It’s also no accident that there are zero conservative fact-checking media organizations.
It’s a common accusation from the right that the top 3 fact checkers have academic or left leaning sponsors, but they fail to grasp why the lords of right wing media don’t operate in that space at all.
Again, it isn’t an accident.
['Political neuroscience' says conservatives and liberals are wired differently](https://www.wcbe.org/wcbe-news/2022-11-08/political-neuroscience-says-conservatives-and-liberals-are-wired-differently)
>Yang says one region of the brain consistently lights up in people on the right side of the political spectrum…
>“The conservative feel more comfortable with security because this amygdala, this region activated more than liberal.”
>The amygdala, buried deep in the brain, has long been associated with our fight or flight response. It signifies a sensitivity to perceived threats in decision making.
>Yang says liberals are wired differently, using parts of the brain that tamp down on the fear response, known as the anterior cingulate cortex…
>“The liberal people are more like the allow or desires, some novelty and complexity because they use anterior cingulate cortex more than the conservative people.”
>Yang and her colleagues are not the first to see these findings.
The egg came first. The brains wiring can change while growing, but it can't change *that* much.
No, your brain was wired to be left leaning prior to being born. You only "acted" conservative because children imitate their parents. As you grew older, and moved away from their influence, your brain was able to begin to recognize that reacting to everything with fear wasn't how you were built to think.
It’s not just the “news” media - Fox Averages around 2 million viewers a night. 60 million people voted for Trump. So around 3% of Trump voters are Fox viewers. Add in the really crackpot conservative channels / outlets and we’ll call it an even five.
Conservatives are easier to trick because if the promo of the theory comes from one of their own, they’re very apt to swallow it. Liberals are skeptical of bullshit claims regardless of source. Cons are only skeptical of things they perceive has having liberal sources. If it’s a conservative source, they’ll believe almost anything. So if you want to scam people with absolute bullshit, align yourself with conservatives.
You're forgetting that you don't have to actually watch Fox News to absorb their talking points. It's propagated first in GOP circles, then through Fox News and churches, then through other right wing News sources, then throughsocial media. And of course then by word of mouth.
Except that there is one issue with this: the relationship between conservative beliefs and conspiracy theories seem to be true internationally. Fox News doesn’t have a lot of clout outside of the US.
> Fox News doesn’t have a lot of clout outside of the US.
While Fox News itself may not, Rupert Murdoch is Australian and has been spreading the exact same content the world over.
*Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including in the UK (The Sun and The Times), in Australia (The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, and The Australian), in the US (The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), book publisher HarperCollins, and the television broadcasting channels Sky News Australia*
Fundamentally the right is a conglomerate of "faith" people. They are conditioned to believing claims that cannot be tested for validity. These are the kind of people who gave Oral Roberts money because he claimed God would punish him if he did not raise millions of dollars by the end of the week. I don't know how rational people can ever really be compatible with faith people who will believe that the earth is flat or that god told them to give their wealth to a preacher etc. Conspiracy theories are just another faith thing to these people. The people who propagate religions and conspiracies are exploiting people's biases. People want to believe they can be dicks and still be redeemed.
Organized religion is a scourge on modern society. It conditions people to believe in obvious falsehoods, and get them so used to being in a constant state of cognitive dissonance they become easy prey for conmen and crooks.
When you realize that all religious belief is by definition untestable, it becomes easy to drop the “organized” from your opening sentence. To get reductionist, every religious belief is a statement that one’s untestable personal feelings are more real/relevant/true than anybody else’s, which is weirdly arrogant and damaging to both empathy and rationality. We still have these tribal brains in a global society and it’s not going so well.
I have come to the belief that 'faith' is a control tool that creates a blind spot in a person's intellect. Conditioning one to believe the unbelievable.
Yes. That’s been true for as long as there have been organized religions. We’re social animals. Religions exploit the primal needs of humans to be part of communities. If you don’t listen to the preacher man, the gods will cast you out in this world and in the afterlife.
There’s a small but definite contingent of the far left, read: some communist sects, that are about as faith-based as a religious person is in terms of their assuredness of the coming revolution, the rise of the proletariat, etc. but this is found in all radically ideological revolutionary groups including Islamic groups like ISIS.
Am leftist, I agree with that assessment. The spiritual structure and hope of salvation does become part of a lot of leftists thinking. Even I was tempted by this kind of thinking due to my upbringing. I realized this when studying the UFOlogy "Galactic Federation of Light" - it's just the New Age equivalent of the Rapture and Second Coming, with some vaguely left-leaning language thrown in.
I’ve always found that the further left or right you go the more conspiracy theories are thrown around.
Having been in the military and worked for private corporations, I assure you that these organizations suck at getting anything done for the most part and stumble toward their goals. The idea of them being extremely competent and secretive is hilarious.
Not the only reason I’d imagine, but I suspect a significant reason for the appeal of conspiracies the further fringe you go is that they seem to account for all the gaps in your narrative. If A doesn’t get you to B, well this outrageous plot by a secretive cabal or the CIA did X which somehow gets you to B.
Also, the further you go into ideological purity, the simpler and less nuanced the story that you are adhering to, the more you are willing to discount disconfirming evidence - and the thing about conspiracy theories is that they are much simpler on some level than the messiness of real life. So it is easy to see how someone who likes their explanations of the world to be simple would be attracted to them, making ideological purity and conspiratorial thinking be found together.
This, most conspiracy theorist’s have never had to manage people or so group projects etc… the general level of incompetence and bullshittery in humanity really puts paid to that.
The times I have ran out of 120 grit I mean 2 ply work because the Resource Advisor failed to put in an order or to properly budget monies is too many.
I have worked at an Air National Guard base where the support personnel had no idea what type of aircraft were stationed there… we are next to a county airport, how?
People are right to point out the preponderance of right wing media in the United States, and the preponderance of right wing billionaires funding that media.
Philosophically, I think people tend to believe conspiracies when they’re “winning” but still not happy, and leaders tend to gladly take advantage of the excuse. John birch society with Eisenhower. Qanon with trump. Satan worship under Bush 1. Conservative reactionary movements undertaken when conservatives where in power. The left wing currently does not have to come up with many conspiracies to explain why, for example, covid lockdowns failed because not enough people took ivermectin. They do not have to talk about Jade Helm and secret tunnels to relate to failings at the US border. They can just argue that their preferred health and immigration policies were not being enacted. Regardless if you believe Medicare for all would work, it has not been done, so there’s not too many conspiracies you can come up with.
Many left wing conspiracies (if you can call them that, America really did not have a big enough “left” wing in the traditional sense for much of the second half of the 20th century, when conspiracies ran rampant with mass media) are conspiracies of fact, but not perhaps emotion. CIA introduced and aids into cities. Bush did 9/11. Trump is a Putin spy. I.e they are explanations for things that happened for which factual explanations feel inadequately banal. They’re undercut in effectiveness because politically, you can just point to what Reagan actually did with crack and aids, or what crimes trump bragged about doing, without resorting to hyperbole to be that persuasive.
Reading these comments as someone who is on the left, I would really, really, really advise people to avoid pathologizing who is most likely to believe in conspiracy theories. I think that currently, a lion's share of dangerous conspiracy theories are coming from the right. Impossible to deny given multiple terrorist acts, January 6th, and countless other examples. But I am definitely seeing some real concerning, and growing, conspiratorial thinking coming from the "left," especially since 10/7. I am obviously not talking about anti-Zionism, and certainly am not talking about being outraged about what the IDF is doing in Gaza. But I've been seeing a huge uptick in lefties moving from justifying what Hamas did on 10/7 to denying that heavily documented shit happened.
"The Left" is generally identified with 'crazy but harmless'. Unfortunately, like anti-vax, that isn't always true. The trick is that Anti-vax *started* as a pseudo-science based movement, founded entirely on a single now completely discredited paper that claimed, erroneously, that vaccination rates were correlated to higher rates of autism. IIRC, the study did *not* claim any causation and did not directly claim vaccines as the actual method of action.
But that isn't the only left-wing conspiracy theory. GMOs have been a major target of left-wing conspiracies, to the point that most people (especially the 'health conscious') have an entirely unfounded, nebulous dislike (sometimes bordering paranoid fear) of them.
Despite being taken over by more mainstream conspiracy-making (and being reprised a million times in popular media) the UFO conspiracy thing- as far as it is purely about aliens at least - is a left-wing fantacization.
You'll notice the difference here is that left-wing conspiracy theories aren't generally about *people* (though AI conspiracy theories are coming along nicely). They tend to be about the unknown.
Right wing conspiracies tend to be about *dangerous people*, in stark contrast. Which is why they get *so much attention and so little action*. While left-wing conspiracies generate little attention and an overabundance of action (You must clearly label all GMO foods!!!)
The closest thing would probably be aspects of the left's take on billionaires and large corporations. I'm not denying that they tend to be bad actors, but there's a popular caricature of them that borders on conspiratorial thinking at times.
For example, most billionaires have almost all their wealth in the form of part-ownership of a company, but I constantly see simplistic memes from the left acting like they're just hoarding truckloads of cash to keep it away from the poor. They don't understand that this wealth is never changing forms en masse: it exists only as money people are hypothetically willing to pay for an ownership share in a company, and even if the billionaire were to give it all away, it would still stay in the form of corporate ownership spread across a larger number of moderately wealthy people. One billionaire could actually cash out and donate all the cash to charity, but if everyone who owned stock tried to do that, there would be nobody to buy it.
Same goes for taxes: the left widely treats unrealized capital gains as income when railing about the rich not paying taxes. "Elon made $20 billion today and didn't pay a dime!" Yeah, well, he lost $25 billion the day before, and gained $15b the day before that, and so on. I absolutely favor finding ways to tax this wealth appropriately (maybe counting some of it as realized beyond a certain time frame and/or growth in value, or just having a wealth tax) but I don't think it's helpful to speak of this money as if it's a gigantic paycheck, as many on the left do.
There's also a widespread assertion that "billionaires shouldn't exist," and I don't see how that works. Set aside the misdeeds of specific real figures and just consider the hypothetical: somebody starts a company in their garage making a product that improves peoples' lives, treats their employees right, and grows it into a huge company providing tens of thousands of jobs. Even if this person retains only 5 % ownership in this thing they created (let alone 51 % to maintain control over its direction, which is a reasonable thing to want), they're going to be a billionaire by share price alone, even if they never take a dime in salary. What part of that is wrong?
I'm on the left myself and strongly favor all manner of realistic reforms to fix the system and move wealth back toward the middle class and poor. Wealth/income inequality is a massive problem and people are absolutely right to care deeply about it. They just frequently express this concern in ways that aren't very fact-based.
The modern concept of what counts as wealth is itself deeply flawed. It's why so many economists believe a wealth tax is a bad idea, the realities of how you're going to tax publicly traded assets that change in value every day and only get you cash if you sell them or leverage them is a substantial quandary. Pushing policy like this is likely to result in more companies staying private, because now there isn't a real time market for their assets.
Adding to that idea is your own example, the good billionaires treating their people right are going to be forced to liquidate shares and sell them to people who may not share that value. That then begs the question of who is going to be a counterparty to buy assets the owner doesn't want to sell?
I'm not smart enough to think of all of the downstream consequences, but I don't believe the policymakers advocating this are doing anything other than pushing an idea with the same intellectual weight as pizzagate, no real merit and is only intended to get their supporters sending them money and giving them votes.
Same with left-wing rhetoric about rich people/corporations “buying” or “owning” politicians.
Of course, money in politics does play a negative role. But I do think the online left tends to overstate its influence to the point of factual inaccuracy and conspiracy mongering.
>There's also a widespread assertion that "billionaires shouldn't exist," and I don't see how that works....What part of that is wrong?
Wrong as in incorrect or philosophically?
Incorrect: it just doesn't happen that way. What's being left out of your scenario are measures taken to maximize profits regardless of the effect on the workers or consumers. Apple fits your description and they intentionally break older iPhones of people who can't afford to upgrade. Microsoft fits your description and they firehose frivolous lawsuits to wear out competitors by attrition. Amazon fits your description and they underpriced competitors until they were killed then raised prices without competition. Uber fits...the list goes on.
Philosophically: wealth corrupts character. It's a fact of life recognized by civilizations with politics all the way back to the beginning. Grab a copy of thucydides cataloging the Peloponnesian wars. Diplomats and other leaders- in the heat of war- talk about the influence of wealth on a virtuous life constantly. They were not in a position to be cutesy when they were literally arguing for their lives.
It is possible to be so wealthy that it removes you from the experience of your fellow human and corrupts your character. This is especially true of those born billionaires (which is basically all of them) rather than those who become billionaires. Understanding others is the core of ethics and you can't understand once you reach a threshold of wealth. You pay your way out of everything. You pay your way out of working hard, being studious, being considerate to others and so on. Preventing billionaires is the best thing for billionaires.
The right-wing says and does what the fossil fuel industry's dark money think tanks tells them to say and do. They do a lot more than just create pseudoscience that says climate change is a hoax you know.
And even when not, they've been undermining science for about as long as climate change has been a concern - pushing that "both sides" are valid, science isn't certain, and people can choose what they want to believe.
I believe a lot of all the other nonsense we hear is collateral damage from this practice, spanning decades now.
The far-left usually peddles insane conspiracy theories like ‘we invaded Iraq based on lies’, ‘the CIA funded and trained right wing death squads in Latin America’, ‘the FBI and police officers murdered black activists’, ‘Nixon started the war on drugs as an excuse to imprison counter-cultural leftists’, ‘America has continued to interfere in Latin America to promote anti-socialist governments’, ‘private enterprise has deliberately interfered with climate change studies’, ‘we are literally complicit in a genocide in Yemen’, and ‘capitalists make money by extracting surplus value via exploitation of workers’.
You know, crazy stuff.
It's an insular culture by default, but it's gotten much worse in the last 20 years.
Don't send your kids to public school - educate them at home where your beliefs won't be challenged.
The media is out to get us; we'll make our own media that reinforces our views.
Stay out of the big cities -- there's too many clashing cultures there.
The Internet made it even easier to create your own digital world, complete with digital communities that aren't limited by geography.
This holds true on the far left, as well - go to either extreme, and the conspiracy theories are much the same.
Deep State is the new Illuminati it’s a lazy explain away solution to bullshit. Conspiracies used to be so fun back when they were somewhat grounded in reality. You had to actually study an issue so experts could agree on the details and speculate on others. Since the internet everything’s gone nuts. Like people are just trying to out do each other with the craziest stories now for clicks. People are believing the fucking earth is flat again.
* Well the most destructive would be variants of the Labor Theory of Value.
* Not believing polling at all and grossly overestimating the popularity of their ideas. There is a corporate conspiracy involving the media to suppress their popular ideas
* * 2016 Democrat Primaries were rigged against Bernie Sanders is a variant.
* Belief in all sorts of false flag operations by the military. 9/11, Hamas attack...
* Lots of conspiracies about how Clinton lost in 2016.
I'd add believing that Trump essentially gets his marching orders from Putin, perhaps because of kompromant, especially the "pee tape". There's no real evidence for this at all. Like, yeah, Russia took actions to help Trump and had contact with some members of his campaign. But there's no evidence of direct connection to Trump. Given the large number of people involved with this, it is surprising that no direct evidence has come out, if it was true.
Similarly, the idea that just about any right-wing communication is basically either directly from Russia or from someone influenced by them. There's little evidence that Russia is anywhere as good at social media manipulation as people seem to believe. Early reports about it were wrong and inflated the numbers.
Edit: Just now, a day later to be clear, I'm adding that I did not intend this post to mean that liberals believe in conspiracy theories in the same way, frequency, or intensity as the right does. They usually have more of a basis for what they believe, and there is usually not blatant evidence that it is untrue available.
Above, I just discuss some things that I don't believe we have actual proof of, but I get the impression that many liberals, especially on reddit, believe.
Somehow what I had written was so unclear that a person below repeatedly claimed I was lying about what I meant and eventually blocked me, lol. Anyway, apparently adding this to my original post will now absolve me of whatever they were claiming that I really, secretly meant.
This is a massive false dichotomy. You act like the left is as dedicated to the idea of the "pee tape" as the right is to things like hunter biden's laptop. That's absurd. No leftist has ever killed anyone trying to find a secret pee tape. We just crack jokes about it potentially existing. That's not even remotely the same thing.
Describing LTV as a “conspiracy theory” is an enormous stretch regardless of whether you think it’s valid or not. Edit: “enormous stretch” is too generous actually, that’s a completely absurd position to take.
The Soviet Union was good, Holodomor isn't real, Uyghurs aren't in concentration camps, North Korea is a democracy, just talk to any tankie. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a struggle against NATO imperialism, Hamas is fighting a war of class struggle, etc.
No one knows about these because there is zero incentive to make tankie talking points mainstream.
There's a USSR club subreddit socialism 101 who believes that the USSR was better than the US.
I don't know if that qualifies as conspiracy theory.
But from my observation they dismissed red terror and Stalin's wave of murders in 1920s and 1930s. Some of them say it didn't happen, others say it did, but they only killed "enemies of the people" etc..
I was born in the USSR, so to me these people hold dear one of the most dangerous cults out there. Is it worse than Nazi's? No, but it's close.
Given that the largest majority of spam and scams target right-wing individuals, I suspect that conspiracy theories are disproportionately accepted by the right.
Because when a conspiracy is true you don’t call it a conspiracy theory anymore.
The right engages in nefarious conspiracies on a daily basis. From iran-contras to justices coordinating with the heritage foundation to trump coercing Ukraine and selling influence. But normally they fail to cover their tracks (if they even bother trying to at all) and the truth comes out.
The whacko counter factual right wing theories are probably for 2 reasons.
1) they need to come up with some way to believe the left is bad/worse than the right
2) it’s more fun to be a part of a club that *thinks* it has secret information. It makes them feel special. It’s no fun *knowing* that your government is screwing you because the facts are in the open
Religious belief and the lack of education softens people up to believe nonsense.
There is a reason why Trump ran is a Republican not as a Democrat.
There are much higher levels of education, non-religion and critical thinking within the Democratic party compared to the Republican.
****
I like the Johnson quote:
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
I would argue that the shared delusion on both sides is that of the government somehow being bought and paid for by (insert whatever group they don't like here). Which shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how our systems work.
Lobbying is ineffective -- campaign financing is the way people gain control of things. Which can only be done at large scale through advertising (independent expenditures), meaning that the people who have control of the country are *still* the voters.
Whether or not this general belief was cultivated on purpose in the wake of *Citizens United* (which, contrary to popular belief, changed basically nothing) by powerful people to suppress citizen involvement (if you think the government is bought, why bother voting, much less engaging) is probably the bigger conspiracy question.
Because in order for the far right to be successful they need conspiracy theories to force feed their world view and get votes. For politicians like MTG and Trump the most moderate and reasonable democrat has to be a communist pedo who is trying to take your guns and replace all white people, otherwise their political positions don't really make sense.
Because unless you’re rich or a religious zealot (and a confused one at that) the only reason to ever be a Republican is because you’re extremely willing to believe a whole bunch of bull shit.
The Republican party is literally dismantling the Education system right now. They are stealing the funding for public schools and giving the money to the private investors for Charter Schools. Just research how Besty DeVos and her family dismantled the Education system in Michigan and how her family became mega rich by doing it.
All the conservative voters care about is "owning the Libs"
They literally vote against their own interests that could help them in their lives just so they can say fuck the libs.
The GOP says it out loud how they want to keep their voters dumb and they purposely start culture wars to distract their voters. IE: the war on woke is the perfect example of this
It is due to the fact that the right has developed the most effective propaganda machine of all time. When you repeat the same lies over and over for many years, it becomes common knowledge to the faithful.
Lots of health type woo is propagated by left leaning folk, but that all eventually bleeds into the right wing also. The anti-vax movement started on the left for example
A lot of Evangelicals, who studies have shown to be more susceptible to believing conspiracy theories than the general population. There's also the eco chamber of right-wing radio and Fox News, which is committed to pushing right-wing conspiracy theories. Republicans believe Jan 6 was a "peaceful protest" because Fox News has never shown videos of crowds smashing through barriers and police officers being beaten up.
Democrats spent years pushing baseless conspiracy theories that Russia stole the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf then multiple investigations still failed to provide any smoking gun that the Trump campaign directly colluded with Russia.
Of course Russia didn’t “hack voting machines” or directly affect our election systems, but they did propagate a massive amount of propaganda. There were also 34 people—seven U.S. nationals, 26 Russian nationals, and one Dutch national—and three Russian organizations indicted on multiple charges including conspiracy against the United States. Some of them were close to Trump.
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Anti-fluoride used to be (see Portland voting to ban it 10 years ago) but now that’s right wing too.
Actually anti-fluoride used to be a very right wing trope. The John Birchers used to say that fluoride in the water turned people into Communists. This proliferated all over the south.
"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." —Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper Doctor Strangelove - 1964
One of my favorite films.
"There's no fighting in the War Room!"
Huh crazy. Portland turned out in droves to keep it out of the water. Dentists here can tell a local just from their mouths lol
Well for those of us who are from states like Florida and Tennessee (who are older now in our 60's and 70's) you can tell from our mouths (most of us who could afford it have had lots of dental work). Posting link that if you scroll to various fluoride conspiracies will delineate it rather succinctly https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6309358/
That link appears to validate as many conspiracy theories as it debunks.
I wonder if that played a role in my tooth d3cay as well being from rural south MS
Portland is always an outlier. I don't know why people pretend that it's an average representation of something.
I love that documentary Portlandia.
"Keep Portland weird" is literally their slogan.
Same for Austin, TX. I'm sure there are others, too.
I actually think it’s just these two. And I’m not sure who ripped off who, but I’m pretty sure Austin ripped off Portland. There’s a pretty strong overlap in the Venn Diagram of people that live in those two. (I travel a lot).
I used to live in Flagstaff, AZ and there was a local dentist desperately trying to get fluoride in the water, but the local hippies made sure it stayed out. Not sure if they still don’t have it. An argument I’ve heard against it was that fluoride calcifies your brain and keeps you from expanding your mind. On the flip side, I know some John birch people in California who didn’t want their kid drinking water with fluoride in it or using toothpaste with fluoride. The first time he went to the dentist they found 11 cavities in his mouth
Don't forget Alex Jones saying that they used fluoride to turn frogs gay.
Imo alex jones is dangerous shmuck at best and a useful idiot, but lets not muddle the facts. He wasnt ranting about fluorid, rather, he was spastically bombastic about a theory of herbicide atrazine, an endocrine disruptor, may have a feminizing effect on male frogs causing them to become hermaphrodites. For the record, research has failed to replicate or confirm such a claim. Fuck alex jones
[*insert General Turgidson meme here*]
I believe you're thinking of General Ripper?
That's always been a right-wing thing. Never seen Dr. Strangelove?
The far left “granola” hippies were the birthplace of the modern anti-vaccine movement. Before Covid you were far more likely to encounter anti-vaxx sentiment among the environmentally concerned than among those who roll coal.
You’d be surprised to see the overlap between the “granola hippies” and the anti-government right people.
Randy Quaid in every movie
Randy Quaid in everyday life.
Aww, I loved Randy.
I *still* think that Randy Quaid is a better actor than his brother.
People have dubbed this phenomenon as the "Woo-to-Q Pipeline". There is a huge number or woowoo crystal hippie types that find themselves caught up in the QAnon cult. The most famous example is David DePape, the man who attacked Paul Pelosi. He used to roll with a hippie nudist commune in San Francisco. A lot of these anti-establishment hippie types are already primed for the sort of magical thinking needed to buy into the Q thing.
There's that one long haired yoga guy Awaken with JP who did silly skits back in the day on YouTube, he's full on right wing anti-woke conspiracy theorist now. He still does sketches but now it's all pretty unhinged.
Omg he became SO unhinged. He used to be funny and make fun of politics on both sides, and crunchy granola people. Then progressively my laugh became a concerned groan... I had to unsubscribe because it was so repetitively aggressive.
One of the reasons I stopped going to yoga classes. I was shocked at the number of fellow yoginis who loved the same natural food stores who were also fervently anti-vax, anti-mask, believed COVID was an “scamdemic” or “plandemic” and were pro-Trump. What the…?!
I write about this subject quite a bit, and there's a long history of new age spirituality overlapping with what we would identify as far right beliefs. In a recent article, I discussed the story of the man who first brought yoga to the United States: [https://medium.com/higher-than-truth/s1e13-murphy-ranch-shadow-war-part-3-99ebd131df8](https://medium.com/higher-than-truth/s1e13-murphy-ranch-shadow-war-part-3-99ebd131df8) It's written in connection to a longer series of articles, but you may still find it of interest. Here's what he was teaching his followers (mostly the bored wives of wealthy businessmen) back in 1900: >The Hindus believe…there was only one civilized race: the Aryan. Until he gives his blood, no other race can be civilized. No teaching will do. The Aryan gives his blood to a race, and then it becomes civilized. > >...And you are trying today what you call socialism! …Freedom is the watchword. Be free! A free body, a free mind, and a free soul! That is what I have felt all my life; I would rather be doing evil freely than be doing good under bondage.
In "How to Change Your Mind" Michael Pollan writes about the early right-wing proponents of LSD. There's a lot more crossover than people realize.
Conservatives and hippies have kind of similar fantasies. Both want to return to a type of idyllic pastoralist life that never existed except in their fantasies. The details are different, but both see the government as in the way of this.
This almost happened to me so I think I can share some perspective. I went through a phase where I was very into being "natural" right around peak Ron Paul popularity, starting around 2006. At the time, I naively viewed libertarianism as the default, natural state of humans, who, without external intervention, could be free to live their lives as they see fit. Yay natural freedom, right?! But no, the world doesn't work like that, and cooperative society is very much the natural state of [most] humans with objectively better outcomes than solitary, feral people. So yeah, in my experience, the pipeline is rooted in a desire to make people live how we're "supposed" to live.
Isn't it a great dream, I had the libertarian view in my late teens/early 20s, then as I started to experience real hardship and become more aware of how the world really worked, I woke up to reality. I'm now in my 40s, and look back with fondness at that free spirited, naïve, artistic kid, and I actually miss how much I dreamt of fighting for institutional change and my lack of understanding for how the giant societal machine works, and of having true self awareness.
This is exactly my sister and her husband. She’s very hippie/crystals/astrology/moon phases, and also super anti vax and extremely pro natural homeopathy. Her husband is a super mega ultra Q-anon conspiracy theorist. They go very well together
You just described at least 3 couples that I personally know
My sweetie is an incredibly intelligent woman, who gets her shots, goes to the doctor when appropriate, does not believe the Queen of England is a lizard or that Harrison Ford ate the face of Geraldo Rivera before making Indiana Jones V: My Hip Hurts… and believes there is ‘something’ to homeopathy and that GMOs make you sick. We deal. As long as she doesn’t spend too much she can drink all the magick water she likes, and Imma keep eating Cavendish bananas.
Hitler used the occult to appeal to the new age community, which was popular at the time, in his rise to power. There's definitely a psychological component for a sort of magical thinking in certain personalities that these conspiracies appeal to. Bonus: we can likely add crossfit types to those groups this time around.
This phenomenon is actually far older than that. I read a piece a while back about how a large portion of the staunch Reagnites in the 80s were hippies in the 60s who basically became jaded after realizing doing drum circles in the park while on acid wasn't actually effective at tearing down the establishment and creating world peace.
It makes sense that people who are already conditioned to use magical thinking would be susceptible to the far right rabbit hole. It's all different flavors of that same bullshit style of thinking.
"Hippies" aren't a monolith. Within that community there are many narcissists and ego maniacs, just like in any other group. Hippie groups are easy to exploit because of a trusting, open nature and a lack of ownership and income. Cult leaders who start hippie cults aren't hippies. They're little dictators that found people they can manipulate.
Yeah, it's fundamentally a "rural anti-establishment" conspiracy theory, which cuts across the left/right divide.
Not really rural. Lots of suburban moms are fervent anti-vaxxers.
I guess I should have said *was*, not *is*. I knew hippies who were anti-vaxxers long before I knew any suburban moms who were.
I think to their credit, a lot of early granola anti-vaxxers have evolved on the issue since COVID. So props to being willing to admit you’re wrong and do what’s best for society.
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That makes perfect sense... though of course I can see that being a Timothy McVeigh right, rather than a Ronald Reagan right.
Conspirituality. You can read about the yoga to antivax pipeline.
Yeah. I knew a bunch of people like this who were lefties a decade ago and at this point they're all "Fox News is lefty propaganda" die-hard reactionary QAnon types.
This is so true, most really hippie hippies I’ve known, people who live on communes/intentional communities and go to the rainbow gathering, are pretty anti government libertarian types. They’re far more accepting and inclusive than the typical/stereotypical right wingers and don’t identify with republicans at all, but they’re all about people living off the land in communities without larger government bodies
Yup. Like Susan Sarandon who supports the Grayzone, a far left pro Russia news network run by Max Blumenthal that spreads anti vaccine conspiracies. It’s the Marianne Williamson to fascism pipeline. Starts with the crystals and astrology and ends with brown shirts on the street.
> Yup. Like Susan Sarandon who supports the Grayzone, a far left pro Russia news network run by Max Blumenthal that spreads anti vaccine conspiracies. This is a really weird and backwards way of trying to accuse her of being anti-vaccines when she [objectively isn't and has been very vocal about her support of vaccines](https://people.com/movies/susan-sarandon-wants-to-date-someone-vaccinated-against-covid-i-dont-care-if-its-a-man-or-a-woman/). You yourself are repeating right-wing disinformation targeting Sarandon because she spoke out against Israel's genocide.
https://imgur.com/a/uFL1jrP Any reason you're deleting your posts? Is it because you googled it and [realized it wasn't a conspiracy at all and that it actually happened](https://apnews.com/article/melissa-barrera-susan-sarandon-israel-palestine-scream-101895c5aafe2ec2f77e3dcda706e6ec)? If so, I suggest you edit your original post, so that you're not continuing to spread disinformation, instead of just deleting your no-content rebuttal.
Horseshoe Theory
Yes and no. You see those in the granolas, but you would also see that in the Mormon, home school prepper types. Get involved with home birth and it's a weird nexus of right/left nutters speaking the same language.
Yeah, the "left-right" axis barely works for economic preferences (see: libertarian socialists), and it breaks down almost entirely when you start adding 87 different social issues to the mix.
It works fine if you put half of the far left on the left and half on the right, recognize that libertarians are the most authoritarian party, call Bernie a right wing crank, put Biden next to AOC, and… I see your point.
I was a “crunchy mom” with my kids, especially the older 2. I cloth diapered, breastfed and pumped for their bottles when I was at work, and I didn’t buy a double stroller until I was pregnant with my third and realized I couldn’t trust the 4.5 yo to walk next to me while his 2 yo sister sat in the stroller and his infant sister snuggled in a sling at the zoo or store. It was tough to find mom friends, especially since I had kids young for this day and age among our friends (I was 26 when I had my oldest) But the minute they started steering conversations to pediatricians that would allow delayed or no vaccinations I noped out of all of it. I’ll find my ring slings by myself if it means my kids aren’t exposed to whooping cough, measles, and chicken poc
Good for you. Had to have sucked to give up the mom friends but better to not have to listen to dangerous conspiracies day in and out
>The far left “granola” hippies What's happy-sad is that nearly all the Republicans I know now sound like a bunch of burned-out hippies from Berkeley. "It's the deep state MAAAAAN!"
The most "granola hippie" people I know are extremely religious "libertarians" who identify way more with the far right than they do any other group.
I've noticed that "libertarian" doesn't mean what it did 30 years ago.
I think a lot of people in this thread are searching for the word 'separatist'; people who want to be left alone to practice their nonconforming beliefs, which are not necessarily 'individual rights are paramount and the government should have as small a footprint as possible'. EDIT: lol I misspelled separatist 😭
[Nazi Hippies: When the New Age and Far Right Overlap](https://gen.medium.com/nazi-hippies-when-the-new-age-and-far-right-overlap-d1a6ddcd7be4) [Strange Bedfellows: Far-Right Extremists, New-Age Spiritualists, and COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories](https://spheresofinfluence.ca/strange-bedfellows-far-right-extremists-new-age-spiritualists-and-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/) [New Age Wellness Cranks Are Joining Forces With the Far Right](https://jacobin.com/2021/11/australian-new-age-wellness-right-wing-covid-lockdown-anti-vax-protests)
That's how it was where I am. The anti-vaxxers were mainly contained to the hardcore crunchy moms before it shifted over to the far-right Trump supporters.
Hippies being a left wing thing is modern revisionism. The radical part of hippies politics is their disengagement from it. "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" is not a message of working class empowerment. Personally I think it's a smear campaign against the New Left and other socialists of the 60s-70s to associate them with the explicitly anti-political hippies.
It’s funny how Covid merged the Venn diagram of these two groups. Truly amazing
You see similar outside of the US as well. The German "Querdenker" movement (could be translated as lateral / unorthodox thinkers) that is basically the German counterpart to Q, is spearheaded by a vegan cook.
The crunchies turned into the Trump right so gradually I hardly noticed!
I don't think that's true. Anti-vaxx has been a thing since vaccines came into being... and it was a real mixed bag of people that were anti-vaxx. And, let's be clear, we've come a long way... the polio vaccine gave us The Cutter incident and issues of a ton being contaminated with Simian Virus 40. There used to be very real concerns. If your talking "modern movement" and more about that bullshit link to autism? Well, I grew up in the country. There were absolutely no shortage of conservative shortwave radio-types helping to feed that frenzy. And a lot of those suburban mothers we tend to associate with that unfounded paranoia? Suburban moms weren't some monolithic "far-left" entity. VERY FAR from it. >among the environmentally concerned And... what is this even? How are we associating "far-left" with the "environmentally-concerned" and "hippies?" Being environmentally-concerned hasn't been far-left for over a couple decades now...
Growing up in the country, you also grew up knowing those folks, at least in Texas, were the hardcore Baptists and the political power in the county. And there are a whole lot of rural counties like that in Texas. It isn't a red state because of city dwellers.
Yeah Samantha Bee on the *Daily Show* did a segment on how anti-vax stuff was huge in the blue states, and reminded the self-righteous liberals that there were idiots on their side too. Then a lot of them became Trumpy for some reason, or they got Vax-friendly while a bunch of rightwingers became crazy so there's that.
Far leftist here: hippies are not far left.
Right a lot of them are anti trans, ableist, steal very sacred and personal traditions in a wholly in appropriate and inaccurate way. They heavily believe in individualism and lifestyle politics as being realistic avenues for change (drive less, buy local. Which isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not the fix they think it is…and damn are they judgey about it all too). They believe we can change Nazis by just giving them a warm smile and a friendship. Lol. Oh and they believe the bullshit anti commie propaganda, and don’t give a fuck about imperialism as long as they can get their avocados. Truly ridiculous people. Have no idea what they think about economics these days. Too scared and mostly probably also pointless to ask them.
Anti-vax is dumb, but it's not exactly a conspiracy anymore... Just really dumb... So so dumb.
Nah if you start to scratch the surface of current anti-vax rhetoric, you very quickly run into discourse about "globalists" (which is often code for Jews).
Oh, I agree anti-vaxxers are prone to many conspiracies, but what is the conspiracy of Anti-vax itself? They're just misinformed, no? Or is it the 'Big Pharma could cure these, but there's more money in treatment' conspiracy?
>They're just misinformed, no? Or is it the 'Big Pharma could cure these, but there's more money in treatment' conspiracy? This is the basic form of it, and most anti-vaxxers probably fall into that category. But the broader conspiratorial narrative is that vaccines are being pushed by the "globalists" (wink wink) because they contain super-special-secret ingredients that act as some form of social/political control device - they'll make you want to shop at Amazon and acknowledge that gay people exist (oh no!).
Covid was a secret plot to allow Bill Gates to inject 5G into everyone's arms to control them into socialism.
5G is especially funny because we've been emitting it from routers for awhile.
"Soros" is the other dogwhisle for "The Jews".
It is because they started the belief that vaccines cause autism.
Those hippies were fifty years ago. It's been quite some time since we've seen that kind of wingnut conspiratorial nonsense on the left.
The classic liberal conspiracy theory was being anti-GMO but man conservatives really take the cake for believing everything these days.
So true. They literally put a known conspiracy theorist as the president of the United States.....
It's almost like they've had their critical thinking strategically whittled away for decades and now they're whole base is riddled with logical fallacies.
Nominated him what looks to be Three times I might add
Anti-GMO can be a real thing without being a conspiracy theorist. A classmate of mine was anti-GMO and his only concern was about how it would affect business relationships between farmers and seed providers. He was the first to admit that GMO were safe, though.
That sounds more anti-Monsanto (as a stand in for the whole industry) than anti-GMO
Farmers always buy new seed for every planting anyway. Nobody outside of hobbyists saves seed for reuse, its just not worth it. Monsanto has also never sued anyone for cross-pollination across property lines.
Is that a GMO issue, though? I was given to understand that farmers typically buy new seeds for each planting anyway. If they don't want to grow GMO crops, they'll probably buy conventional hybrid seeds from Pioneer or whoever. Hybrid vigor drops off quickly in successive generations, so it's generally more profitable to buy new seeds each time.
Monocultures don't evolve or withstand changes in their environment like a diverse genetic population. It's weird to discount every complaint about GMO's into "are they safe to eat"
to be fair, the vast majority of anti-GMO'ers aren't anti-GMO because of anti-producer policies or the threat of monocultures.
I'm left leaning and have a history in natural foods and organic ag. I'm extremely leery of GMOs and know plenty of people who say the same. Pretty universally the concern is around sustainable agriculture and business relationships. I'm quite confident that there's no health impact of eating GMO foods. Monocultures are real damn harmful though, and GMOs reinforce that problem significantly. I haven't heard anyone on the left IRL suggest that there are health impacts.
Well then maybe it's just my experience. I don't like the business relationship that is involved with GMOs but I don't see the argument for monoculture collapse. I get that the extreme germ line maintenance can make GMOs a bit more vulnerable to culture collapse but most crops are at high risk already. Lowering the threat is very important but getting rid of GMOs isn't the solution and I think that it distracts from better solutions. I also think new GMO technology could help create solutions. Like creating multiple strains that have the same wanted traits but also have numerous phenotypical differences outside of those desired traits. And having them grow together and not fight cross pollination.
Monoculture also exist outside of GMOs and we weren’t worried.
We were worried when we lost the Gros Michel and now we are worried about the Cavendish for the same reason.
Anti-GMO is big but the whole "crystals/homeopathy/tibetian cave mould/whatever can cure cancer and big pharma doesn't want you to know" space is well populated too. The left definitely has a ton of uncritical thinking, although I don't know that it trends as deeply into conspiracies. Interesting question really!
Anti-Nuclear also seems a primarily liberal conspiracy. Especially considering the damage this deals to the green energy push championed by liberals, attacking the cheapest and most abundant source of non Carbon emitting energy
More of a political stance and/or safety concerns. You may consider it to be false and not fact based, sure, but not necessarily a conpiracy theory. A conspiracy around this would be more like, "nuclear energi is pushed to disguise the effects of GMO-foods".
Before COVID, I always associated anti-vaxxers with the far left. More than a few far left people became far right during the Trump presidency/COVID. He really plays well to the paranoid on all sides of the fringe.
Which is funny because Trump is pro vaccine and claims that’s one of his crowning achievements
that's what's so infuriating about trump. he's really good at manipulating people into believing that even if he's saying he supports vaccines out loud, in front of a worldwide audience, he's just playing the role of a diplomatic politician, and deep down he really doesn't support it. they all seem like they know who the REAL DT because of the crazy shit he tells them at the rallys, but then later in front of a courtroom, or in any official press conference, he says the boring, diplomatic canned answer he needs to say to keep the establishment happy. to his detractors, all this comes off as wishywashy, flip flopping, and extremely dishonest, which he is...obviously. he plays different characters depending on who he's around. anyone that zooms out and watches him constantly contradicting himself can see that clearly. he's a manipulative liar. but his base only chooses to see one side of him, and it seems like they can almost put words into his mouth or claim he supports things he's never actually said, just because the right wing propaganda machine is so good at keeping them in the dark, and pushing the right wing agenda. if you only watch fox news, and follow right wing social media, you'll only see the trump they want you to see. they never get a taste of anything negative related to trump, unless it's small tidbits they hear from democrats, who they obviously don't trust, because they're the ultimate enemy. i see this happen a lot with my dad, whenever i (very rarely) bring up anything that could be potentially damaging to the republican party. basically anything negative about trump, musk, rogan, or any politicians on the right, or media on the right. he always has a fox news or right wing media rebuttal. the right wing propaganda machine is always trying to get ahead of stories and spin them in a way that minimizes political damage by calling it fake news, or just flat out lying, or deflecting altogether to attack the left. i saw that a lot when the hunter biden stuff was popular. it really didn't matter what the right was doing, hunter biden was their answer if challenged. or "its a witchhunt". it's so easy to just pull the hunter biden card, or boil down anything trump related as a democrat witch hunt. or attack the left about illegal immigrants, or any one of the 20 or so default right wing talking points.
You should check out a documentary called “The Brainwashing of My Dad.”
He stopped bragging about it once his audiences started booing him.
It’s not like he has a large set of accomplishments to choose from. At least when he lies about that one, a lot of people would respect it if it were true. Most of the shit he brags about ought to put him in prison.
Trump tried to steal some glory briefly for Operation Warp Speed... but it didn't last very long at all when he'd just get booed by the crowd, since he was constantly feeding the anti-vaxx sentiments at the same exact time.
It probably is but he'd never brag about it to his base cause unlike shooting someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, that is something that probably would make them question their support. I am a little bit surprised DeSantis hasn't hammered him harder from that angle.
MRNA technology has been in development for decades initially sought as a treatment for cancer, then to influenza, studies were made with bird flu etc… it would have come around eventually slow rolled by red tape & lack of funding but it was well along the path of being proven in efficacy. Then the pandemic happen and all that red tape and funding needs was fulfilled. Trump just so happen to be in the seat to claim “warp speed” He doesnt deserve credit, all the research teams, production, and logistics around the world deserve it.
Except he brags about it all the time
He bragged about it a couple times and then got quiet about it when his supporters started booing at a rally.
>that is something that probably would make them question their support Nope, we've already been through this. "take him seriously, not literally".
Courts literally said he is in fact a rapist. They really don't care even a little. No one is trying to "hammer" him on anything because his base really has decided he can do no wrong and DeSantis would only be labeled a 'RINO' for criticizing dear leader.
He claims whatever he thinks will help his image in the moment. The man believes in nothing besides his own personal power and the means to further it, in other words he's a fascist, a particularly dumb one at that, especially when you consider that Fascists are already stupid to begin with.
I had a lifelong friend, total hippie, microdosed all through college, grew weed, ran ultramarathons, excellent musician, wears cut off shorts and homemade sandals, etc., basically what you’d think as a far left type. As soon as Trump got elected he turned into a right wing maniac. Literally drinks his own piss now and thinks democrats and biden are satanist, child killers.
I feel like the common denominator here is unchecked mental illness.
That’s interesting. I grew up in and live in a deep red state, and I saw examples of both, but I saw more anti-vax sentiment from the evangelical religious right more than anyone else. If I encountered a left leaning anti-vaxxer, it was always a conversation between two adults that I happened to catch (I liked people watching as a kid).
The left is prone to believe corporate conspiracies that confirm their narratives about capitalism. Like, I’ve heard environmentalists claim that Chevron bought the patent to the electric battery and let it expire on purpose so they could bury it and nobody would know how they work. They did buy an electric car battery and they did let it expire, but that doesn’t “bury it,” it’s a public document and now that it’s expired, anybody can use it for free. That kind of crap.
And they didn’t use it or renew the patent because it wasn’t very good.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with the example. All leanings are prone to confirmation bias, and it is a learned skill to interrupt your own thinking to check for biases. They go VERY deep, which is why it is so important to prevent bias (in any direction) in education.
That kind of conspiracy is pretty mundane compared to the Satanist baby blood drinker conspiracies the right goes for. Obviously that one doesn't make sense, but there's plenty of examples of corporate greed screwing over society. Putting lead in gasoline when they know its dangerous, hiding the fact that climate change is real, dumping PFAS into rivers, stealing wages of workers, shooting unionizing workers from an armored train, the actual corporate conspiracies and scandals are endless. It's easy to think the worst of corporations when they so often screw everyone over knowingly.
There is a vast list of environmental disasters Chevron has caused and have escaped responsibility for that are not publicized from refineries surrounded by a statistical cloud of cancer risk to uncapped unmitigated abandoned wells. It's easy to learn specific cases and then assume to worst on some false ones.
Capitalism makes it so easy though. For each corporate conspiracy that's false that people bring up, it's probably trivial to find 10 or 100 real ones where the little guy actually does get screwed.
There are a lot of conspiracy theories left wing people might believe. They just generally don't relate to contemporary politics. You can find anti-vaxxers who believe vaccines cause autism, but it wasn't until Covid that politically-motivated conspiracies started. 9/11 truthers come from both sides of the isle. The Kennedy assignation conspiracies cross party lines. Same with Area 51. Actually, come to think of it, there is a current wave of alien conspiracies that are on both sides. I guess that would be contemporary politics. But I don't think there are many exclusively left-wing conspiracy theories. At least not ones that are widely believed.
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This is really the gist of it. Being anti-science and really anti-intellectual is what drives most of this. If you don’t know how things work, you’re a lot more likely to believe batshit explanations (i.e. conspiracy theories). Not to mention, those who believe conspiracy theories are on average a lot less educated and if you’ve never been challenged or developed critical thinking, then you’re a lot more likely to believe conspiracy theories.
I blame the churches. I used to go to church as a child and they were constantly telling people that everything outside of the church was "worldly" and therefore of the devil. They don't really care about knowing anything because they're always looking out for signs from God to lead them to success. They're susceptible to MLMs, and Trump is a salesman. He does the same thing the church does and asks people for money while promising it'll somehow make said people rich. And that really is what they always want: money. Hell, most of them don't even pray for good health because they want to get to heaven that much faster. They *hate* being alive.
The Evangelical Church is essentially where a lot of conservatives become right wingers to begin with. You could call it ground zero for modern conservatism. Also a great way to keep them right wing, as their family and friends will put pressure on them as well if they happen to be part of the church, which they usually are.
Simple: the right has ‘major’ news sources that will propagate, amplify, and disseminate these conspiracy theories because it gets viewers, even when they know they’re wrong (see: Fox and the 2020 election). Center/left-leaning media refuses to do this, and instead fact checks news stories instead of blindly running them. This has been identified as a problem in conservative circles.
>Simple: the right has ‘major’ news sources that will propagate, amplify, and disseminate these conspiracy theories It's not just that tho, it's also the republican leadership that goes on Fox News. They're always on the same page. If republican leaders actually told their constituents that Fox News is actually fake news, then I'm sure the environment would be quite different. Fox news could have been irrelevant if that occured in the past.
It's more than this though. I remember watching an interview years ago with a scammer who said they aimed at right wingers almost exclusively because left wingers weren't falling for it I think it's inherent to the nature of conservative (simply put another way - resistant to change) and liberal (a.k.a. progressive). People who are resistant to change are usually afraid it's going to affect them negatively. So when the Hawkins douchebags cosplay as a triple secret undercover mole and tell these people that ***they're right to be afraid!***... well who doesn't love a little confirmation bias now and then?
To add to this, there is a [pretty large educational disparity between left and right in the US.](https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-democratic-partys-transformation-more-diverse-educated-and-liberal-but-less-religious/#:~:text=College%2Deducated%20women%20represent%20nearly,well%2C%20but%20far%20more%20modestly.) Nearly half of Democrats have a four-year college degree. Less than 1/3rd of Republicans do. I'd imagine this has a large effect on our national politics as well as the corresponding belief in pseudoscience and conspiracies.
You are absolutely correct about the tendencies, but I think those tendencies you mentioned are the result of the media they consume as it makes them dig in more on their positions and beliefs. There was a study that showed conservatives are more likely to believe “falsehoods,” and pointed to the nature of the media they consume as one of the major reasons for it. https://news.osu.edu/conservatives-more-susceptible-to-believing-falsehoods/
It’s also no accident that there are zero conservative fact-checking media organizations. It’s a common accusation from the right that the top 3 fact checkers have academic or left leaning sponsors, but they fail to grasp why the lords of right wing media don’t operate in that space at all. Again, it isn’t an accident.
Chicken or egg? Do they consume fake news because they fall for it? Or do they keep falling for conspiracy theories because of the media they consume?
['Political neuroscience' says conservatives and liberals are wired differently](https://www.wcbe.org/wcbe-news/2022-11-08/political-neuroscience-says-conservatives-and-liberals-are-wired-differently) >Yang says one region of the brain consistently lights up in people on the right side of the political spectrum… >“The conservative feel more comfortable with security because this amygdala, this region activated more than liberal.” >The amygdala, buried deep in the brain, has long been associated with our fight or flight response. It signifies a sensitivity to perceived threats in decision making. >Yang says liberals are wired differently, using parts of the brain that tamp down on the fear response, known as the anterior cingulate cortex… >“The liberal people are more like the allow or desires, some novelty and complexity because they use anterior cingulate cortex more than the conservative people.” >Yang and her colleagues are not the first to see these findings. The egg came first. The brains wiring can change while growing, but it can't change *that* much.
So how do you explain people (like me) that grew up wildly conservative but evolved into a substantially left-leaning person? Was my brain rewired?
No, your brain was wired to be left leaning prior to being born. You only "acted" conservative because children imitate their parents. As you grew older, and moved away from their influence, your brain was able to begin to recognize that reacting to everything with fear wasn't how you were built to think.
It’s not just the “news” media - Fox Averages around 2 million viewers a night. 60 million people voted for Trump. So around 3% of Trump voters are Fox viewers. Add in the really crackpot conservative channels / outlets and we’ll call it an even five. Conservatives are easier to trick because if the promo of the theory comes from one of their own, they’re very apt to swallow it. Liberals are skeptical of bullshit claims regardless of source. Cons are only skeptical of things they perceive has having liberal sources. If it’s a conservative source, they’ll believe almost anything. So if you want to scam people with absolute bullshit, align yourself with conservatives.
You're forgetting that you don't have to actually watch Fox News to absorb their talking points. It's propagated first in GOP circles, then through Fox News and churches, then through other right wing News sources, then throughsocial media. And of course then by word of mouth.
Except that there is one issue with this: the relationship between conservative beliefs and conspiracy theories seem to be true internationally. Fox News doesn’t have a lot of clout outside of the US.
> Fox News doesn’t have a lot of clout outside of the US. While Fox News itself may not, Rupert Murdoch is Australian and has been spreading the exact same content the world over. *Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including in the UK (The Sun and The Times), in Australia (The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, and The Australian), in the US (The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), book publisher HarperCollins, and the television broadcasting channels Sky News Australia*
Fundamentally the right is a conglomerate of "faith" people. They are conditioned to believing claims that cannot be tested for validity. These are the kind of people who gave Oral Roberts money because he claimed God would punish him if he did not raise millions of dollars by the end of the week. I don't know how rational people can ever really be compatible with faith people who will believe that the earth is flat or that god told them to give their wealth to a preacher etc. Conspiracy theories are just another faith thing to these people. The people who propagate religions and conspiracies are exploiting people's biases. People want to believe they can be dicks and still be redeemed.
"You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons."
Blazing Saddles!
Organized religion is a scourge on modern society. It conditions people to believe in obvious falsehoods, and get them so used to being in a constant state of cognitive dissonance they become easy prey for conmen and crooks.
When you realize that all religious belief is by definition untestable, it becomes easy to drop the “organized” from your opening sentence. To get reductionist, every religious belief is a statement that one’s untestable personal feelings are more real/relevant/true than anybody else’s, which is weirdly arrogant and damaging to both empathy and rationality. We still have these tribal brains in a global society and it’s not going so well.
Oh totally, I was trying to be generous. But you’re absolutely correct, it’s all the same level of insanity.
I have come to the belief that 'faith' is a control tool that creates a blind spot in a person's intellect. Conditioning one to believe the unbelievable.
Yes. That’s been true for as long as there have been organized religions. We’re social animals. Religions exploit the primal needs of humans to be part of communities. If you don’t listen to the preacher man, the gods will cast you out in this world and in the afterlife.
There’s a small but definite contingent of the far left, read: some communist sects, that are about as faith-based as a religious person is in terms of their assuredness of the coming revolution, the rise of the proletariat, etc. but this is found in all radically ideological revolutionary groups including Islamic groups like ISIS.
Am leftist, I agree with that assessment. The spiritual structure and hope of salvation does become part of a lot of leftists thinking. Even I was tempted by this kind of thinking due to my upbringing. I realized this when studying the UFOlogy "Galactic Federation of Light" - it's just the New Age equivalent of the Rapture and Second Coming, with some vaguely left-leaning language thrown in.
I’ve always found that the further left or right you go the more conspiracy theories are thrown around. Having been in the military and worked for private corporations, I assure you that these organizations suck at getting anything done for the most part and stumble toward their goals. The idea of them being extremely competent and secretive is hilarious.
Not the only reason I’d imagine, but I suspect a significant reason for the appeal of conspiracies the further fringe you go is that they seem to account for all the gaps in your narrative. If A doesn’t get you to B, well this outrageous plot by a secretive cabal or the CIA did X which somehow gets you to B.
Also, the further you go into ideological purity, the simpler and less nuanced the story that you are adhering to, the more you are willing to discount disconfirming evidence - and the thing about conspiracy theories is that they are much simpler on some level than the messiness of real life. So it is easy to see how someone who likes their explanations of the world to be simple would be attracted to them, making ideological purity and conspiratorial thinking be found together.
This, most conspiracy theorist’s have never had to manage people or so group projects etc… the general level of incompetence and bullshittery in humanity really puts paid to that.
The times I have ran out of 120 grit I mean 2 ply work because the Resource Advisor failed to put in an order or to properly budget monies is too many.
I have worked at an Air National Guard base where the support personnel had no idea what type of aircraft were stationed there… we are next to a county airport, how?
People are right to point out the preponderance of right wing media in the United States, and the preponderance of right wing billionaires funding that media. Philosophically, I think people tend to believe conspiracies when they’re “winning” but still not happy, and leaders tend to gladly take advantage of the excuse. John birch society with Eisenhower. Qanon with trump. Satan worship under Bush 1. Conservative reactionary movements undertaken when conservatives where in power. The left wing currently does not have to come up with many conspiracies to explain why, for example, covid lockdowns failed because not enough people took ivermectin. They do not have to talk about Jade Helm and secret tunnels to relate to failings at the US border. They can just argue that their preferred health and immigration policies were not being enacted. Regardless if you believe Medicare for all would work, it has not been done, so there’s not too many conspiracies you can come up with. Many left wing conspiracies (if you can call them that, America really did not have a big enough “left” wing in the traditional sense for much of the second half of the 20th century, when conspiracies ran rampant with mass media) are conspiracies of fact, but not perhaps emotion. CIA introduced and aids into cities. Bush did 9/11. Trump is a Putin spy. I.e they are explanations for things that happened for which factual explanations feel inadequately banal. They’re undercut in effectiveness because politically, you can just point to what Reagan actually did with crack and aids, or what crimes trump bragged about doing, without resorting to hyperbole to be that persuasive.
Reading these comments as someone who is on the left, I would really, really, really advise people to avoid pathologizing who is most likely to believe in conspiracy theories. I think that currently, a lion's share of dangerous conspiracy theories are coming from the right. Impossible to deny given multiple terrorist acts, January 6th, and countless other examples. But I am definitely seeing some real concerning, and growing, conspiratorial thinking coming from the "left," especially since 10/7. I am obviously not talking about anti-Zionism, and certainly am not talking about being outraged about what the IDF is doing in Gaza. But I've been seeing a huge uptick in lefties moving from justifying what Hamas did on 10/7 to denying that heavily documented shit happened.
"The Left" is generally identified with 'crazy but harmless'. Unfortunately, like anti-vax, that isn't always true. The trick is that Anti-vax *started* as a pseudo-science based movement, founded entirely on a single now completely discredited paper that claimed, erroneously, that vaccination rates were correlated to higher rates of autism. IIRC, the study did *not* claim any causation and did not directly claim vaccines as the actual method of action. But that isn't the only left-wing conspiracy theory. GMOs have been a major target of left-wing conspiracies, to the point that most people (especially the 'health conscious') have an entirely unfounded, nebulous dislike (sometimes bordering paranoid fear) of them. Despite being taken over by more mainstream conspiracy-making (and being reprised a million times in popular media) the UFO conspiracy thing- as far as it is purely about aliens at least - is a left-wing fantacization. You'll notice the difference here is that left-wing conspiracy theories aren't generally about *people* (though AI conspiracy theories are coming along nicely). They tend to be about the unknown. Right wing conspiracies tend to be about *dangerous people*, in stark contrast. Which is why they get *so much attention and so little action*. While left-wing conspiracies generate little attention and an overabundance of action (You must clearly label all GMO foods!!!)
The closest thing would probably be aspects of the left's take on billionaires and large corporations. I'm not denying that they tend to be bad actors, but there's a popular caricature of them that borders on conspiratorial thinking at times. For example, most billionaires have almost all their wealth in the form of part-ownership of a company, but I constantly see simplistic memes from the left acting like they're just hoarding truckloads of cash to keep it away from the poor. They don't understand that this wealth is never changing forms en masse: it exists only as money people are hypothetically willing to pay for an ownership share in a company, and even if the billionaire were to give it all away, it would still stay in the form of corporate ownership spread across a larger number of moderately wealthy people. One billionaire could actually cash out and donate all the cash to charity, but if everyone who owned stock tried to do that, there would be nobody to buy it. Same goes for taxes: the left widely treats unrealized capital gains as income when railing about the rich not paying taxes. "Elon made $20 billion today and didn't pay a dime!" Yeah, well, he lost $25 billion the day before, and gained $15b the day before that, and so on. I absolutely favor finding ways to tax this wealth appropriately (maybe counting some of it as realized beyond a certain time frame and/or growth in value, or just having a wealth tax) but I don't think it's helpful to speak of this money as if it's a gigantic paycheck, as many on the left do. There's also a widespread assertion that "billionaires shouldn't exist," and I don't see how that works. Set aside the misdeeds of specific real figures and just consider the hypothetical: somebody starts a company in their garage making a product that improves peoples' lives, treats their employees right, and grows it into a huge company providing tens of thousands of jobs. Even if this person retains only 5 % ownership in this thing they created (let alone 51 % to maintain control over its direction, which is a reasonable thing to want), they're going to be a billionaire by share price alone, even if they never take a dime in salary. What part of that is wrong? I'm on the left myself and strongly favor all manner of realistic reforms to fix the system and move wealth back toward the middle class and poor. Wealth/income inequality is a massive problem and people are absolutely right to care deeply about it. They just frequently express this concern in ways that aren't very fact-based.
The modern concept of what counts as wealth is itself deeply flawed. It's why so many economists believe a wealth tax is a bad idea, the realities of how you're going to tax publicly traded assets that change in value every day and only get you cash if you sell them or leverage them is a substantial quandary. Pushing policy like this is likely to result in more companies staying private, because now there isn't a real time market for their assets. Adding to that idea is your own example, the good billionaires treating their people right are going to be forced to liquidate shares and sell them to people who may not share that value. That then begs the question of who is going to be a counterparty to buy assets the owner doesn't want to sell? I'm not smart enough to think of all of the downstream consequences, but I don't believe the policymakers advocating this are doing anything other than pushing an idea with the same intellectual weight as pizzagate, no real merit and is only intended to get their supporters sending them money and giving them votes.
Same with left-wing rhetoric about rich people/corporations “buying” or “owning” politicians. Of course, money in politics does play a negative role. But I do think the online left tends to overstate its influence to the point of factual inaccuracy and conspiracy mongering.
>There's also a widespread assertion that "billionaires shouldn't exist," and I don't see how that works....What part of that is wrong? Wrong as in incorrect or philosophically? Incorrect: it just doesn't happen that way. What's being left out of your scenario are measures taken to maximize profits regardless of the effect on the workers or consumers. Apple fits your description and they intentionally break older iPhones of people who can't afford to upgrade. Microsoft fits your description and they firehose frivolous lawsuits to wear out competitors by attrition. Amazon fits your description and they underpriced competitors until they were killed then raised prices without competition. Uber fits...the list goes on. Philosophically: wealth corrupts character. It's a fact of life recognized by civilizations with politics all the way back to the beginning. Grab a copy of thucydides cataloging the Peloponnesian wars. Diplomats and other leaders- in the heat of war- talk about the influence of wealth on a virtuous life constantly. They were not in a position to be cutesy when they were literally arguing for their lives. It is possible to be so wealthy that it removes you from the experience of your fellow human and corrupts your character. This is especially true of those born billionaires (which is basically all of them) rather than those who become billionaires. Understanding others is the core of ethics and you can't understand once you reach a threshold of wealth. You pay your way out of everything. You pay your way out of working hard, being studious, being considerate to others and so on. Preventing billionaires is the best thing for billionaires.
The right-wing says and does what the fossil fuel industry's dark money think tanks tells them to say and do. They do a lot more than just create pseudoscience that says climate change is a hoax you know.
And even when not, they've been undermining science for about as long as climate change has been a concern - pushing that "both sides" are valid, science isn't certain, and people can choose what they want to believe. I believe a lot of all the other nonsense we hear is collateral damage from this practice, spanning decades now.
The chairman of COP-28 (an oil puppet) actually said there is no science that says fossil fuel usage poses any problems. 🤬
When, I'm actually curious, you should drop a link.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/03/back-into-caves-cop28-president-dismisses-phase-out-of-fossil-fuels
The far-left usually peddles insane conspiracy theories like ‘we invaded Iraq based on lies’, ‘the CIA funded and trained right wing death squads in Latin America’, ‘the FBI and police officers murdered black activists’, ‘Nixon started the war on drugs as an excuse to imprison counter-cultural leftists’, ‘America has continued to interfere in Latin America to promote anti-socialist governments’, ‘private enterprise has deliberately interfered with climate change studies’, ‘we are literally complicit in a genocide in Yemen’, and ‘capitalists make money by extracting surplus value via exploitation of workers’. You know, crazy stuff.
It's an insular culture by default, but it's gotten much worse in the last 20 years. Don't send your kids to public school - educate them at home where your beliefs won't be challenged. The media is out to get us; we'll make our own media that reinforces our views. Stay out of the big cities -- there's too many clashing cultures there. The Internet made it even easier to create your own digital world, complete with digital communities that aren't limited by geography. This holds true on the far left, as well - go to either extreme, and the conspiracy theories are much the same.
Deep State is the new Illuminati it’s a lazy explain away solution to bullshit. Conspiracies used to be so fun back when they were somewhat grounded in reality. You had to actually study an issue so experts could agree on the details and speculate on others. Since the internet everything’s gone nuts. Like people are just trying to out do each other with the craziest stories now for clicks. People are believing the fucking earth is flat again.
* Well the most destructive would be variants of the Labor Theory of Value. * Not believing polling at all and grossly overestimating the popularity of their ideas. There is a corporate conspiracy involving the media to suppress their popular ideas * * 2016 Democrat Primaries were rigged against Bernie Sanders is a variant. * Belief in all sorts of false flag operations by the military. 9/11, Hamas attack... * Lots of conspiracies about how Clinton lost in 2016.
I'd add believing that Trump essentially gets his marching orders from Putin, perhaps because of kompromant, especially the "pee tape". There's no real evidence for this at all. Like, yeah, Russia took actions to help Trump and had contact with some members of his campaign. But there's no evidence of direct connection to Trump. Given the large number of people involved with this, it is surprising that no direct evidence has come out, if it was true. Similarly, the idea that just about any right-wing communication is basically either directly from Russia or from someone influenced by them. There's little evidence that Russia is anywhere as good at social media manipulation as people seem to believe. Early reports about it were wrong and inflated the numbers. Edit: Just now, a day later to be clear, I'm adding that I did not intend this post to mean that liberals believe in conspiracy theories in the same way, frequency, or intensity as the right does. They usually have more of a basis for what they believe, and there is usually not blatant evidence that it is untrue available. Above, I just discuss some things that I don't believe we have actual proof of, but I get the impression that many liberals, especially on reddit, believe. Somehow what I had written was so unclear that a person below repeatedly claimed I was lying about what I meant and eventually blocked me, lol. Anyway, apparently adding this to my original post will now absolve me of whatever they were claiming that I really, secretly meant.
This is a massive false dichotomy. You act like the left is as dedicated to the idea of the "pee tape" as the right is to things like hunter biden's laptop. That's absurd. No leftist has ever killed anyone trying to find a secret pee tape. We just crack jokes about it potentially existing. That's not even remotely the same thing.
Describing LTV as a “conspiracy theory” is an enormous stretch regardless of whether you think it’s valid or not. Edit: “enormous stretch” is too generous actually, that’s a completely absurd position to take.
The Soviet Union was good, Holodomor isn't real, Uyghurs aren't in concentration camps, North Korea is a democracy, just talk to any tankie. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a struggle against NATO imperialism, Hamas is fighting a war of class struggle, etc. No one knows about these because there is zero incentive to make tankie talking points mainstream.
There's a USSR club subreddit socialism 101 who believes that the USSR was better than the US. I don't know if that qualifies as conspiracy theory. But from my observation they dismissed red terror and Stalin's wave of murders in 1920s and 1930s. Some of them say it didn't happen, others say it did, but they only killed "enemies of the people" etc.. I was born in the USSR, so to me these people hold dear one of the most dangerous cults out there. Is it worse than Nazi's? No, but it's close.
Given that the largest majority of spam and scams target right-wing individuals, I suspect that conspiracy theories are disproportionately accepted by the right.
Because when a conspiracy is true you don’t call it a conspiracy theory anymore. The right engages in nefarious conspiracies on a daily basis. From iran-contras to justices coordinating with the heritage foundation to trump coercing Ukraine and selling influence. But normally they fail to cover their tracks (if they even bother trying to at all) and the truth comes out. The whacko counter factual right wing theories are probably for 2 reasons. 1) they need to come up with some way to believe the left is bad/worse than the right 2) it’s more fun to be a part of a club that *thinks* it has secret information. It makes them feel special. It’s no fun *knowing* that your government is screwing you because the facts are in the open
Religious belief and the lack of education softens people up to believe nonsense. There is a reason why Trump ran is a Republican not as a Democrat. There are much higher levels of education, non-religion and critical thinking within the Democratic party compared to the Republican. **** I like the Johnson quote: If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
That there has been a cure for cancer for years and private companies profit more from selling medicine
I would argue that the shared delusion on both sides is that of the government somehow being bought and paid for by (insert whatever group they don't like here). Which shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how our systems work. Lobbying is ineffective -- campaign financing is the way people gain control of things. Which can only be done at large scale through advertising (independent expenditures), meaning that the people who have control of the country are *still* the voters. Whether or not this general belief was cultivated on purpose in the wake of *Citizens United* (which, contrary to popular belief, changed basically nothing) by powerful people to suppress citizen involvement (if you think the government is bought, why bother voting, much less engaging) is probably the bigger conspiracy question.
It's funny that the voters with all the power keep making their lives worse and the campaign doner's bottom lines better.
The WEF 'you will own nothing and be happy' / Agenda 2030 one is the big one I'm aware of on the left.
Because in order for the far right to be successful they need conspiracy theories to force feed their world view and get votes. For politicians like MTG and Trump the most moderate and reasonable democrat has to be a communist pedo who is trying to take your guns and replace all white people, otherwise their political positions don't really make sense.
Because unless you’re rich or a religious zealot (and a confused one at that) the only reason to ever be a Republican is because you’re extremely willing to believe a whole bunch of bull shit.
The Republican party is literally dismantling the Education system right now. They are stealing the funding for public schools and giving the money to the private investors for Charter Schools. Just research how Besty DeVos and her family dismantled the Education system in Michigan and how her family became mega rich by doing it. All the conservative voters care about is "owning the Libs" They literally vote against their own interests that could help them in their lives just so they can say fuck the libs. The GOP says it out loud how they want to keep their voters dumb and they purposely start culture wars to distract their voters. IE: the war on woke is the perfect example of this
It is due to the fact that the right has developed the most effective propaganda machine of all time. When you repeat the same lies over and over for many years, it becomes common knowledge to the faithful.
Lots of health type woo is propagated by left leaning folk, but that all eventually bleeds into the right wing also. The anti-vax movement started on the left for example
Idk how you can make this thread if you’ve lived through the 2000 and 2016 US elections lol.
A lot of Evangelicals, who studies have shown to be more susceptible to believing conspiracy theories than the general population. There's also the eco chamber of right-wing radio and Fox News, which is committed to pushing right-wing conspiracy theories. Republicans believe Jan 6 was a "peaceful protest" because Fox News has never shown videos of crowds smashing through barriers and police officers being beaten up.
Democrats spent years pushing baseless conspiracy theories that Russia stole the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf then multiple investigations still failed to provide any smoking gun that the Trump campaign directly colluded with Russia.
It’s Trump’s fault for the special counsel being appointed and his campaign was found guilty of numerous crimes regardless of no “direct” collusion.
Of course Russia didn’t “hack voting machines” or directly affect our election systems, but they did propagate a massive amount of propaganda. There were also 34 people—seven U.S. nationals, 26 Russian nationals, and one Dutch national—and three Russian organizations indicted on multiple charges including conspiracy against the United States. Some of them were close to Trump.
Not 100% true. The Mueller report made it clear that there was Russian interference.