Harry Stein, a renowned ethics columnist and novelist, shares his journey from the 1970s liberal to the 1990s conservative. In his memoir, “How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace)”, he discusses his experiences as a journalist in an industry dominated by liberals. As a father, Stein found that the Left seemed right, and even worse, the Left was becoming more conservative.
In his book, “How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace)”, Stein discusses his experiences as a journalist in an industry populated by liberals. He shares his experiences as a cheerful, content liberal married to a content liberal living in New York and making an honest living as a journalist.
The memoir is witty, brilliantly argued, and savagely funny, and is available for free download, borrowing, and streaming on Amazon.com. Stein’s life was not initially conservative, but real life and fatherhood gave him a new perspective on politics.
In his book, “How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace)”, Stein discusses the challenges faced by journalists in the 1970s liberal to 1990s conservative era. The memoir is a must-read for anyone interested in the evolution of political thought and the impact of personal experiences on the political landscape.
📹 Harry Stein – “How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy …” C-SPAN interview
Harry Stein spoke about his book “How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace),” …
📹 ⚠️Why Does The Right Always Fall For Conspiracy Theories?⚠️
A Dark Brandon Original This video explores the seeming prevalence of conspiracy theories among right-wing political groups.
“Allexis Telia Ferrell, a 27-year-old from Canton, Ohio, has become a controversial figure following her recent arrest for allegedly killing and consuming a cat. The disturbing case has not only sparked outrage but also fueled an unusual online trend involving Donald Trump memes.” But she was born in Canton, Ohio, and she’s just crazy! Trump is a Debbie Downer where all he talks about is Doom and Gloom… unless he’s whining about himself! He is like Richie Rich on drugs, whining that it is everyone else’s fault but is in trouble for his own schemes and criminal acts. 💙💙💙💙
Don’t forget Steve Bannon and Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich. Sarah Palin. These are the most famous people. Every generation has had them. Back in my day, way back, people thought they were nuts or crazy. They just poo pooped them. Now we embrace them. We love to have our ears tickled and because it is a lie we can add our own nutty spin to it and make it bigger. 😪 sad
As a leftist, I don’t think we have enough information to say for sure that leftists are less susceptible to conspiracy theories, lies and manipulation, because so far we haven’t had to make things up to support our politics. That’s not because we’re better critical thinkers, it’s just because reality is currently aligned with our understanding of the world
I used to listen to Dennis Prager. One thing he said sticks with me, it was something like “The Left thinks people are intrinsically good, while the right thinks people are intrinsically evil.” So if you hear about someone doing something evil, then your immediate reaction will be either “wait, what? Not really?” or “yep, that tracks.”
There’s an emotional appeal to rejecting calls from people to make the government make you help them with your taxes. However, Republican policy is solely concerned with funneling all of your money to the billionaires. Conspiracy theories are a result of the cognitive dissonance between those two things.
We live in a world where random bad things can happen. You could die in a car accident, get cancer, your home could be destroyed by natural disaster or you could get a deadly disease in a pandemic. Some of these can be mitigated by our actions but many simply cannot and this is extremely frightening. I think a lot of people look for some bigger meaning in things, or some nefarious cause when it’s simply random. Some of those people fall pray to conspiratorial thinking when they hear someone tell them that it isn’t random, but bad people are at work.
I hear people using the burden of proof to the statement “There is no logical reason either an atheist or a person faith should be offended by the other’s belief, as both are equally unprovable.” They come across as eager to use what they learned from textbook education to snipe something that bothers them, thus, misunderstanding the person and the use of burden of proof.
Everyone involved in E*stein’s abuses should be prosecuted to take away the distrust caused by things being hidden. Laws need to be applied evenly and equally from rich to poor to restore the public trust that allows people to reject these conspiracies with confidence. Same with trump and other corporate prosecutions
My dad believed a conspiracy back in 2020 that the election result would be reversed and then there would be violent protests everywhere, basically like a war zone. My mom made him agree that if that didn’t happen, he would stop looking at weird conspiracy websites and get new hobbies. But he didn’t stop 😔 He’s not dumb, but he’s extremely paranoid and he refuses to try medication because guess what, he’s paranoid about that too.
the biggest reason that people who follow conspiracy theories are so dogmatic about them, is becuase they enjoy the feeling of ‘being in the know’. they are convinced they are one of the ‘chosen few’ who are special enough to have figured out whatever the conspiracy is, and anyone who tries to convince them otherwise is either A) part of the conspiracy covering it up, and therefore reaffirms their belief it’s real, or B) the ignorant masses of people who aren’t special enough to understand, reinforcing their belief that they, the conspiracy theorist, is special. and i use the term ‘belief’ deliberately. it becomes a matter of faith to these people, not a matter of fact, which is why they bend over backwards to justify the conspiracy despite any counter arguments based on facts
I lost a very close and beloved friend a few short years ago. She fell down the rabbit holes dug by “Q” and arrived at the conclusion that she couldn’t trust doctors or the medical industry. She refused to go anyone but her chiropractor for care, which meant she got no medical care for many years. About 3 or 4 years ago, she discovered a growth in her nose, and she told me that she thought she had cancer there. I repeatedly tried to get her to go to the doctor, but she stridently refused. The growth did turn out to be cancer, which spread to her ears and to her mouth. Eventually, she couldn’t eat or speak any more. Her husband told me that she suffered in the extreme at the end. (She stayed in her home, but finally had hospice services treat her.) Very shortly after her death, her husband took his own life. Two lives lost because of that damned Q and the lies he spreads. I miss my friend so much, and I will never forgive those who caused her death – and her husband’s death. Such people have absolutely NO conscience.
Honestly, I think it’s mostly people who have to be able to have something proven with there own senses or it has to make sense with previously beliefs or values. A lot of conspiracy theorists tend to be the kind of person who is paranoid or angry or inherently skeptical of views they weren’t taught as a child. A lot have also expressed trauma respones. A lot of these groups give lonely, angry, or paranoid people a community where they feel like they belong. Religion is a good example of this. I think it’s a tragedy that these people don’t or can’t get the help they need.
I think it may involve a sort of “reverse Occam’s Razor”, where a lot of these type folks, are not satisfied with their lot in life, but they really don’t want their sucky life to be due to the most probable and most likely cause, being that it’s their own fault, either because they don’t have the necessary amount of intelligence/education to be successful, or that they’re lazy or otherwise lack sufficient ambition or drive to succeed in life, or that they have some other emotional/ psychological (social awkwardness, inferiority complex, etc.) shortcoming that prevents them from getting ahead. It all boils down to the fact that they just don’t want their failure in life to be THEIR fault. So they create some make-believe supernatural force(s) or some other powerful shadow organizations that are conspiring to keep them from succeeding. It’s the collective evil satanic forces conspired against them that’s the problem, not them!
So this is a fine article, but I notice it doesn’t really tackle the question in the title: WHY does the right go for conspiracy theories? I have a hypothesis that it ultimately comes down to a failure of nerve, a lack of guts. This might sound odd, but bear with me for a moment. So, people taking up right wing and left wing ideas both start from a feeling, an intuition, a being smacked in the face with the idea that things aren’t good, that something is badly wrong with the way things are. Now the left wing reaction is to figure if something is seriously wrong, it must be that the problem is with the whole way things are set up and the general sort of people in charge–that the issue is the SYSTEM in some way. And then they look at the situation and think a bit more and look, there are these people structurally in charge, who are making out like gangbusters, and everything seems to be set up to funnel them more money and power, which has to be taken from the rest of us. But the problem is, to admit that basic intuition requires two things: Admitting that a whole lot of propaganda you’ve been imbibing all your life about the wonders of markets and capitalism is WRONG, and accepting that you have to set yourself up in opposition to ALL the people with the most power. So, what if you can’t admit to yourself that there could be anything fundamentally wrong with the core systems you’ve been taught all your life are good? And, what if you don’t really fancy opposing all that power which is, after all, a lot more powerful than you, and which may involve the pillars of your community that you respect and are intimidated by?
I worked with an old man who wasn’t very political at all, moderate in most regards, but he would tell me about all the weird things he believed in. His biggest thing was dowsing. He said he knows a guy who helped him on his farm for decades to find underground water and the guy never failed. I told him that you can dig just about anywhere besides solid rock and eventually hit the water table but he wouldn’t have any of it. I told him to just start digging anywhere next time he taps a well but he refused the idea that water could be found by any other means besides magic.
One reason why the political intelligence of our time is so incredulous and uncomprehending in the presence of the right-wing mind is that it does not reckon fully with the essentially theological concern that underlies right-wing views of the world. Characteristically, the political intelligence, if it is to operate at all as a kind of civic force rather than as a mere set of maneuvers to advance this or that special interest, must have its own way of handling the facts of life and of forming strategies. It accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality and understands human society as a form of equipoise based upon the continuing process of compromise. It shuns ultimate show downs and looks upon the ideal of total partisan victory as unattainable, as merely another variety of threat to the kind of balance with which it is familiar. It is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees. It is essentially relativist and skeptical, but at the same time circumspect and humane. The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with all this: it is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it believes to be trifling degrees of difference: liberals support measures that are for all practical purposes socialistic, and socialism is nothing more than a variant of Communism, which, as everyone knows, is atheism.
I’m just not sure that these people “fall for it” I think it’s something different. I can’t remember where I saw this but years ago I watched something that showed a family where the parents were Wicca, the mother was being interviewed and asked about her belief in faeries and years later I would actually meet a few people that also claimed to believe this. I don’t think any of them have fallen for anything, I think they want this to be real, they don’t want to live in a world where stuff like this isn’t real. I think this is also true for Trumpers and conspiracy theories, they haven’t so much fallen for something as much as they just really want these things to be true.
I enjoy your articles, but I have one knit to pick. It may seem like a small thing, but the correct term is Democratic lawmakers, not Democrat lawmakers. The word Democrat becomes the word Democratic when it is used as a modifier for a noun. It may seem like a small thing, but the right wing uses this as a way to troll Democrats. They are implying the Democrats don’t respect democracy. But it’s also a way to just say FU to Democrats. It is childish as many things are coming from the right, and many people on the right don’t even know the grammar to begin with. But it’s sad to see an increase of Democrats themselves misusing the grammar and thus supporting the troll. I’m guessing you did not do it on purpose. It was probably because you have to watch so much right wing junk that it slipped in.
If you don’t actually know anything of note, any old yarn will easily stand in for knowledge. My eldest and I were talking Greek mythology the other day and it’s easy to see it’s born of storytellers trying to explain things they didn’t understand. GOOD storytellers, for the most part. They don’t paint a very good picture of their gods, but as they thought illness was a curse from the gods for some petty and maybe forgotten slight, among other things of that nature, that certainly tracks. These are the people who’d line up to buy snake oil AFTER old Bill keeled over from his first swig.
Them “It’s Chem Trails! There’s chemicals in there.”…Me “Yeah, anti icing agents. You don’t want your jet fuel freezing at 40,000ft & ALL jet fuel has SOME water in it.” Them “No it’s not!” Me: “So, what is it, then?” Them: “Well I don’t know….but…mind control…Hillary…Obama…Liberals.” Me:…waits….waits…”The same stuff is in your gasoline. So give up your car.” Them: “NNNNNNOOOOOO!!!!!!!”
I feel it may come down to the ability to think critically. But this is honestly based on anecdotal evidence. I started to wonder if the assassinations were somehow a conspiracy by Trump and his cronies. It almost felt comforting to conclude this. But I realized that was insane to think. I mean, I could spend hours rationalizing how it could make sense, though. I just wouldn’t allow that. It took mental effort. I’m not saying all people think like me, and perhaps most people never even have the conspiratorial suspicions in the first place. But I feel like if you do tend to think this way, the lack of critical thinking may be one factor that leads to true belief in the conspiracy.
Conspiracy theory and religion have a lot in common, cognitively. They make outrageous claims lacking any real substantial evidence but allow the believer to form in-groups, feel as though they have access to special knowledge, and provide simple explanations to difficult and oftentimes emotional questions.
Great post man. Only correction I’d make is that akum’s razor doesn’t say “the simplest answer is more likely true” but that “the conclusion which requires the fewest assumptions is most likely to be true” It’s possible that all the q stuff is true but it requires us to make so many major assumptions about so many other things that it’s most likely not true.
conservatism is conservatism because the combintation of three cognitive habits. 1) believing > critical thinking: whether it is a conspiracy theory or religion or fundamentalism vs metaphor, conservative minds place greater value on believing information that confirms to personal likes than apply analysis to that information. This is in part due to the greater activity of the anterior cingulate cortex which is responsible for processing conflicting information. 2) egocentricism > empathy: whether it is the individual or group, there is greater value to the individual or his / her tribe than to the community or other. This is in part due to the greater activity of the medial prefrontal cortex which is responsible for expressing the self. 3) Simplifying information to Black and white options instead of recognizing a spectrum of information, as the spectrum puts excess burden of analysis on the cognitive resources.
This article does not address the relationship between religion and conspiracy theories: according to studies, deeply religious people are much more likely to have delusions and fall prey to conspiracy theories than non-religious people. It has to do with the way people are raised and how they view the world.
And let’s not forget … it takes extraordinary evidence to prove that you have a dragon in your garage,because dragons tend not to be commonplace. On the flip side of that coin, if someone tells you they have a cat living in the garage, that takes less evidence to prove because we already know cats exist.😼
Sometimes when I look at conspiracy theories, sometimes I think some of them could make for interesting dystopian novels. Seriously, writing a book would be much more productive than posting a bunch of lies on the internet that create further division among families and friendships, but they don’t care, they’re chaos agents, they’re bored and have nothing better to do than to fear monger and cast doubt about everything in our everyday lives.
Is it ”falls for them” or ”uses them”? One bit of them is the creative writing side and the other is the political angle and ”here’s how we fix things” or even just the angle it’s framed from. And there’s a lot of faith in it too. Not necessarily religious (although it tends to get drawn in) but just faith in the sense that all the scepticism gets turned in one direction and the alternative narrative is never critically analysed with the same scepticism. Oh, and there’s the exclusivity factor. There’s a sense of ”we’re a team and we think like this and coin our own language”. It’s a club. Or a cult. In psychological terms, it’s in the fringe beliefs section and shares traits with all of those.
It also doesn’t help that a lot of these right wing conspiracy theorists are also highly religious and have been conditioned for their whole life to accept their core belief on very poor evidence, or none at all…they just need faith. Critical thinking isn’t exactly their strong point. In fact, it’s discouraged.
Although “simplest explanation” is the common paraphrasing of the Occam’s Razor principle, this formulation’s not very helpful. “Simplest” is a subjective judgment that’s largely aesthetical. For instance, for a conservative who’s trying to process the TRump @ss@ssination attempt, “inside job” may well be a miles simpler explanation than the one with every one of several dozen government and state employees completely flubbing their professional duties.
Don’t misunderstand me. If there was only one Chester in the world, there would be too many Chesters in the world. But in reality, there aren’t very many Chesters in the world. And the fact that these guys think there are so many Chesters out there speaks volumes about their own proclivities they may be concealing. In much the same way Brucies think every famous person from history was a Brucie.
It is not a Right wing thing, it’s a populist thing. Zanu-PF ran on conspiracies for decades, communist and socialist countries are rife with conspiracies. “Which would you rather believe? That you belong to a community of warriors battling a secret evil, or that you’re a lonely, inconsequential nobody.”
I do not disagree with anything you said here. I would like to point out though – just as a supplement to what you said – that conspiracy theories are not limited to people on the right wing. There are plenty of conspiracies on the left side. The national Institute of mental health has noted that political extremism and either direction is just as likely to be obsessed with conspiracy theories than people who are closer to the center. I am not right wing, but I do think it’s important to point out that the right wing are not the only ones who do this kind of nonsense. For instance, the hit new leftist conspiracy theory this month is that Trump was not shot in the ear, that the whole thing was staged. This is nonsense. Obviously he was shot in the ear. I mean, my God, three people died. People on the left tend to assume the whole “Reagan secret deal with Iran to get the hostages out and win the 1980 election,” even though no evidence of that has ever been presented, and there’s plenty of evidence against it. Not the least of which is that Jimmy Carter was absolutely positively going to lose that election anyway. He was a deeply unpopular president in a time of national and economic crisis. Reagan did not win because of any secret deals, he won because Jimmy Carter was always gonna lose. This next part is more anecdotal, I can’t provide any numbers for it, but I have noticed that people on the left tend to be more likely to believe that 911 was an inside job, and they seem to be more likely to believe that the Apollo program was a hoax.
7:43 – “Maybe some dogs are getting lost, maybe some cats are running away from home.” – OR nothing of this is even happening. You’re giving the conspiracy theorists way too much credit with this explanation. According to credible sources (like the Springfield Police), there’s not even an unusual number of animals missing to begin with. Don’t try to explain phenomena that are made up. It plays straight into their hands. The problem imo is that you fundamentally misunderstand Ockham’s Razor. It does not say that we should always default to common sense intuitive explanations with no second thought or inquiry. If we did that, Physics would still be stuck with Newtonian mechanics. In fact, it says nothing about truth or falsehood of claims at all. It says that in the face of insufficient evidence, it’s prudent to default to explanations with low metaphysical presumptions because they can normally more easily be tested. But this is not a situation of low evidence. We know with good certainty that the whole thing is made up. Applying Ockham’s Razor to a situation like this the way you did here helps the conspiracy nuts, because it already gives their claim way too much credence.
The gact of the matter is different cultures do have different culinary traditions..is that a fact or some burden of proof mumbo jumbo?..you mentioned burden of proof and bias..but no way to debunk the facts..different cultures..because that doesn’t fall under burden of proof or bias..just plain old facts..so based on that fact..where does facts fall under your 2 critical thinking titles?..