I remember back in college just after 9/11, some of the most conspiratorially-minded people I met were hardcore left/liberal. This one guy in my International Conflict and Security class, who was as "crunchy" as one could imagine, was insistent that 9/11 was an inside job. A lot of his evidence was based on "common sense." One example was how slowly we were to scramble fighter jets to take out the planes. He didn't like the idea that perhaps the government wasn't prepared or was otherwise incompetent. He had a narrative in his mind that the government was super capable and competent with contingency plans galore, and that such a conspiracy could actually be kept a secret. Right, left, center, conservative, liberal... we're all just people and are capable of all of the same things, for better and for worse.
I had the same experience. The first *modern* conspiracy theories I came into contact with were the "9/11 Truthers" that came from the left. Then they became "the party of science" while being full to the brim with people who thought that "Big Pharma" secretly had the cure for cancer and that vaccines caused autism. I once told some of them (friends of mine) that there are whole meta studies out there that show that eating organic food does little to no difference for health, and that growing organic food leads to more deforestation because organic yields on farms need more acreage to be equivalent to synthetic farm acre-outputs by weight--even showing them these studies--and oh boy did I ever get pushback from "the party of science" lol.
I showed them the 9/11-Truther debunking stuff, I told them that the larger a conspiracy is the harder it is to contain the truth and that the 9/11 and "Big Pharma" and "chem trails" conspiracies would involve the cooperation of hundreds to thousands of people to contain the secrets, and that having worked for the government personally I knew how inefficient it was at even simple projects to prevent it from maintaining conspiracies the size of the ones they believed in. Did it matter? Not one bit. These people had their narratives in hand and weren't going to be moved by facts, logic, or evidence that countered their claims. Conspiracism is akin to religious zealotry. Even if you show people who take the bible literally that the sun came into existance before the earth did, they're still believe that a supernatural being created the earth before the sun (and all the other stars) because of narratives and zealotry.
"the 'crunchy-to-conspiracy' pipeline"
Awesome.
I remember back in college just after 9/11, some of the most conspiratorially-minded people I met were hardcore left/liberal. This one guy in my International Conflict and Security class, who was as "crunchy" as one could imagine, was insistent that 9/11 was an inside job. A lot of his evidence was based on "common sense." One example was how slowly we were to scramble fighter jets to take out the planes. He didn't like the idea that perhaps the government wasn't prepared or was otherwise incompetent. He had a narrative in his mind that the government was super capable and competent with contingency plans galore, and that such a conspiracy could actually be kept a secret. Right, left, center, conservative, liberal... we're all just people and are capable of all of the same things, for better and for worse.
I had the same experience. The first *modern* conspiracy theories I came into contact with were the "9/11 Truthers" that came from the left. Then they became "the party of science" while being full to the brim with people who thought that "Big Pharma" secretly had the cure for cancer and that vaccines caused autism. I once told some of them (friends of mine) that there are whole meta studies out there that show that eating organic food does little to no difference for health, and that growing organic food leads to more deforestation because organic yields on farms need more acreage to be equivalent to synthetic farm acre-outputs by weight--even showing them these studies--and oh boy did I ever get pushback from "the party of science" lol.
I showed them the 9/11-Truther debunking stuff, I told them that the larger a conspiracy is the harder it is to contain the truth and that the 9/11 and "Big Pharma" and "chem trails" conspiracies would involve the cooperation of hundreds to thousands of people to contain the secrets, and that having worked for the government personally I knew how inefficient it was at even simple projects to prevent it from maintaining conspiracies the size of the ones they believed in. Did it matter? Not one bit. These people had their narratives in hand and weren't going to be moved by facts, logic, or evidence that countered their claims. Conspiracism is akin to religious zealotry. Even if you show people who take the bible literally that the sun came into existance before the earth did, they're still believe that a supernatural being created the earth before the sun (and all the other stars) because of narratives and zealotry.