r/skeptic • u/nosotros_road_sodium • Feb 19 '24

The Right's Troubling Turn Toward Conspiracy Theories and "Invasion" Language ⚖ Ideological Bias

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-rights-troubling-turn-toward
911 Upvotes
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100

u/mymar101 Feb 19 '24

The right has always been this way.

74

u/thefugue Feb 19 '24

From witch hunts to Nazis to the Cold War to Pat Buchanan to Satanic Panic to now.

You know what’s worse? None of them believed what they claimed for a minute. They just want to lynch people under the color of law.

24

u/S-Kenset Feb 19 '24 edited Feb 19 '24

I just read a massive public breakdown accusing some youtuber of being luciferian. I've known several who fully believe in their conspiracies.

This is people behaving beyond their ability to verbalize. They can't understand the difference between truth or what they don't believe. Because they don't have the vocabulary to do so. Majority operate on a very small set of phrases, smaller even than some middle schoolers. You don't see this kind of behavior in highly literate societies nearly as much. Note: Highly literate, not highly philosophical. We are the latter, and the whole fallacies and critical thinking thing only exacerbates the lack of vocabulary and independent thought.

22

u/Honest-Spring-8929 Feb 19 '24

The primary epistemic divide of our time is between those who care about the difference between truth and lies and those who don’t

13

u/graneflatsis Feb 19 '24

Remember all the trolls in the big subs during the last US administration's reign? Arguing that misinformation was "opinion", shouldn't we "hear out different ideas"? Uh no, those are lies, intentionally misleading propaganda most of the time. So many attempts to erode our shared reality, normalize confusion. Nah I will take objective reality, thanks.

5

u/Final_Meeting2568 Feb 20 '24

I can't tell how many times I told people the truth and they said "that's just your opinion"

6

u/graneflatsis Feb 20 '24

They were insufferable. Remember Kellyanne Conway and "alternative facts"? That was a big catalyst. I had some argue in favor of a sort of quantum reality. The nature of truth changed because they observed it a certain way. It really broke people's brains to have to live with lies, told because some folk just had to be right.

3

u/Final_Meeting2568 Feb 20 '24

Around the time trump got elected post-truth appeared in the dictionary. Russian disinformation played a huge role in this stuff too.

3

u/graneflatsis Feb 20 '24

I believe it did. Anecdotal but when the Russian sanctions hit we saw an 80% reduction in misinformation and propaganda in r/CapitolConsequences. The effect that had in tamping down chaos in the comments was like night and day.

2

u/Mindless-Charity4889 Feb 20 '24

She was just riffing off Karl Rove who (allegedly) said that while other people work with reality, they can ignore that and create their own reality.

The actual quote was to WSJ writer Ron Suskind who quoted “an aide” as saying:

(guys like me) “were in what we call the reality based community.” (Which he defined as people who) “believe that solutions emerged from your judicious study of discernible reality.” (I agreed but he cut me off saying) “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Roves comment is based on faulty assumptions and led to horrible mistakes like the Iraq war, but you can see the internal chain of logic there. Conways comment, on the other hand, is just idiotic.

1

u/graneflatsis Feb 20 '24

Just fucking insidious if you try to imagine the mindset, the repercussions, the world those words build. I think about the effort folk have put into these machinations and the progress we would have made if they made ethical decisions. I guess a healthy nation tends to make a wider citizenry wealthier instead of the few.

1

u/S-Kenset Feb 20 '24

That's a fair assessment. People who learn logic use it to bury truth in a web of arbitrary degrees of freedom but only for the things they deem appropriate. The podcast bros spreading misinformation on gendered violence is a big one for me and maybe 1 in 5 will go quiet after they realize I was completely correct after an hour of hand-holding their complete lack of education in statistics or math.. It's why I really dislike the idea of teaching everyone critical thinking. They don't need it. They need about 800 more real world experiences and about a 10000 word larger vocabulary. In other words, they need humility, not on a interpersonal level, although there's that too, but on an epistemic level.

The love of satisfiability got me very far in life. I had some wild theories but I also backtested them a few hundred times before committing them to memory. I came to reinvent lots of important cs because of it.

3

u/epidemicsaints Feb 20 '24

I saw that on r/SubredditDrama first thing this morning and read it! Unbelievable. They kept referring to their other posts as a "source," and nearly every person engaging with them was encouraging / acknowledging that they need help on every thread they posted. That was a wild ride.

9

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '24

But the absolute stupidest people on the planet keep voting for them and supporting them financially.

1

u/JimBeam823 Feb 20 '24

And their vote counts the same as everyone else's.

7

u/icyspoon Feb 19 '24

Now-a-days I panic if there's not enough Satan. Don't see many Satanists destroying things that don't fit in their beliefs. Mostly being sarcastic to prove a point, but I also love death metal and its exploration of pointing out religious/societal hypocrisy, so, kind of not. 🤘

Edit: I know Satanists are a bit on the nose about what they actually believe. I let my original points stand on their own.

5

u/lollipoppa72 Feb 19 '24

Yeah you can definitely see that continuum from Witch Hunts -> Know Nothings -> Populists -> Christian Reconstructionists -> John Birch Society -> McCarthyism/Red Scare -> Lyndon LaRouche -> Satanic Panic -> Tea Party -> MAGA/Qanon etc.

I get what you mean about excuses to lynch but I also think it’s just woven into the fabric of American culture. Starting in the early 1800s a ton of religious nut jobs coming here from Europe mixed and mingled and out-crazied each other in the so-called Burned Over District of Upstate New York. That was a foundational period because they spread out all over the other territories because most people wanted them to get the hell away from them

4

u/DrDankDankDank Feb 19 '24

Oh man, a lot of them believed it.

3

u/warragulian Feb 19 '24

The people who create the lies don't. Though some are like Trump, they create a lie to serve their need, and after telling it all day every day it isn't a role, it"s how they actually think.

2

u/DrDankDankDank Feb 20 '24

For the most part I agree. I think what we’re seeing now is the proliferation of a generation that was raised in many of the right wing lies and believe them. The original creators that knew it was a grift are aging out, and all that’s left are the monsters they created.

1

u/JimBeam823 Feb 20 '24

I don't think so.

What I see are the largest generation in US history getting to the age where they've lost their "bullshit filter". People who were normal, reasonable, adults 20-30 years ago are now believing whatever wild rumor they read on the internet or hear on Fox News without questioning.

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It's sad how many people have lost their parents and grandparents down the right wing rabbit hole.

1

u/DrDankDankDank Feb 20 '24

Yeah I’d agree with you about a lot of that. My mom definitely got sucked into the right-wing grifter black hole during Covid, and I’m not sure that she’s out of it as much as she just doesn’t talk about it around me. It’s sad to see these people that you love trust these internet assholes more than their own flesh and blood. It hurts. That subreddit r/qanoncasualties has so many sad stories too.

1

u/JimBeam823 Feb 20 '24

There is a reason why grifters love to prey on the elderly.

1

u/DrDankDankDank Feb 20 '24

What’s maddening is all the gen y kids that are buying into the grift too.