Conspiracy theories are hypothesized conspiracy scenarios with specific characteristics, such as opposition to mainstream consensus among qualified experts. They have played a significant role in conflicts from the Indian wars of the 17th century to the labor battles of the Gilded Age, from the American Revolution to the Sandy Hook shooting. These theories have gained prominence in periods of widespread anxiety, uncertainty, or hardship, such as during wars and economic depressions.
Academic research into conspiracy theories has developed over time, with interest emerging in the 1930s. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy promoted conspiracy theories that communists had deeply infiltrated and threatened all branches and agencies of the U.S. government. Recently, events like the election of Donald Trump, the U.S. Capitol riot, and several conspiracy theory-inspired mass shootings have prompted further exploration of conspiracy theories.
Conspiration theories can impact public and personal health, democratic citizenship, and even political issues. For example, the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 was staged by the FBI, while the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords in 2011 was a government mind control. Right-wing extremist groups have played a major role in spreading hatred towards Jews and Muslims, as well as anti-elite, racist, and anti-racist groups.
Despite being a controversial topic in popular culture, research has shown that most Americans believe in conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are found everywhere, including climate change, the secret services murdering Pim Fortuyn and JFK, and the moon landing being a fake show. The approach to patients with conspiracy beliefs should be similar to dealing with psychotic disorders.
📹 How did conspiracy theories become mainstream? | Naomi Klein | Big Questions
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting …
📹 When Did Conspiracy Theories Get So Crazy?
Conspiracy theories used to be silly & goofy but now they’re scary and bad let’s talk about it for 51 minutes (from 13:30-13:58 i had …
A big difference about conspiracy ‘theories’ nowadays is that people can make big money spreading them on social media. This changes the calculus as to whether it’s worth the effort for someone to put in the work. In the past one had to be very committed to whatever idea it was and publish/mail pamphlets/books or do public speaking etc. Now it’s so easy to reach huge audiences it’s obvious there are people doing it who don’t even believe what they are pedaling. “Give the audience what they want”. Looking at you Alex Jones.
I think this began long before social media on the Web. Back in the 80s I was living in Sacramento and watched Rush Limbaugh (who most people thought was an ignorant, offensive, cowardly blowhard) rise from being the local DJ to being the most powerful voice of the American right wing. My father was an apolitical farm boy from western Canada whose career was in an office until he retired early at 55. He and my mom traveled during the summers in their RV and he had little to do following his retirement except spend his time listening to talk radio and perusal TV, which included many hours of Fox News. I watched him go from someone who paid literally no attention to politics to becoming vehemently right wing. He passed away before Trump’s presidency, and I shudder to think how he might have reacted to that. I write this to say that my own personal history includes perusal someone I love become gradually brainwashed by right wing propaganda. It clearly can happen to anyone, particularly those with little education or defenses against it. So few people nowadays are educated in critical thinking. We’ve created a time bomb.
Love this gal. Read Doppelganger and along side that book there is Corruptible by Brian Klaas and Poverty in America by Matthew Desmond. ALL of these books show us what the hell is playing out. It’s a mental illness. Power and Greed is at the core of all of it. I wish the mental health industry would call it out, except they are as greedy as the rest.
The reason why there is a big rise in so-called conspiracies in recent times is not all that complicated. Any idea that challenges a thought or process used to be part of solving problems. Now opposing ideas are CALLED conspiracies. Most people are so scared of being called “conspiracy theorists” that they will follow without critical thinking as long as they are not clumped with the “crazies”.
Naomi Klein’s timing is always so perfect. She’s right on the cusp, the leading edge of the wave, recording what she’s seeing, researching, & asking meaningful questions. I love her insights & how she helps us understand not what we experienced 10 yrs ago but what we’re experiencing right in the current moment. She gives us a frame & language to understand our daily realities amidst the chaos of conspiracy theories, lies & rapid change.
I just read Slave.Control, it’s a short fiction book and what is does really great, is show how not getting the answer leads to so many different theories. That then start building on top of each other. The best thing about it, is that is not about convincing you of anything. Just showing how unacceptable things will start living a life on it’s own, as long as authorities don’t really care to adress it.
Conspiracy theories are very strong because for start, newspapers and politicians likes to manipulate people. So, how we can defend ourselves if even the authorities that wanted to cut conspiracies, doesn’t hesitate to manipulate, or directly to cancel opinions they don’t like. And with this feeling inside us, other actors can amplify conspirances. We are subject from whatever wants to manipulate us. The only solution that I found to myself, is to realize that I’m vulnerable to them. Conspiracies get a lot of traction into people because it reassures you, and it’s quite difficult to fight against ego. The only solution that I have found, is not to have TV, is not open Newspapers, is not to have X, FB, Telegram, you name it.
I think people finally accept that their governments have been lying to them consistently for decades (talking post WW2). Lee Harvey Oswald probably didn’t kill Kennedy. Et cetera. The trouble is now that people hesitate to trust institutions and likely, rightly so. But they bark up the wrong trees like “the Earth is flat”, “the government has aliens” etc. Funnily, it’s now widely accepted that tobacco companies (whose profits depended on it) obscured and lied about the now proven effect on health from smoking. But won’t believe that fossil fuel companies (whose profits depend on it) are doing the same. They think it’s the scientists (whose financial stakes are orders of magnitude smaller) telling the lies. I believe this is the result of deteriorating education standards. I believe that deterioration is no coincidence.
I think another reason conspiracy theories have gained so much traction is due to religion. People already cling to and believe in fantasy. It’s not based on fact, or science, or even what is seen in reality. So it’s not much of a leap to believe in conspiracies. And it’s also exciting – to concoct these elaborate stories and basically turn reality into some great spy film or something.
I am in general agreement with her, but she picks some poor examples. It’s all very well to say that during COVID we could have had kids in schools with good ventilation, but the reality is that it would have taken longer than the pandemic to install the appropriate ventilation everywhere – even assuming the fairy-tale scenario that a vast stockpile of ventilation parts and builders existed in order to do that. Now it’s certainly a good thing to do, but I wonder how many schools and their funders have prioritised fixing their ventilation and other related issues even now.
Social media is doing a lot of harm spreading conspiracy theories. With little regulation or governance, it is helping to stir up discontent, disobedience and riots . It reminds me of the book, “Lord of the Flies”, in which the moral of the book centers on the inherent darkness of human nature and the thin veneer of civilization. With conspiracy theories allowed to spread on social media, we are now living through a real life cautionary demonstration about the potential for brutality and moral degradation in the absence of societal constraints and ethical guidance.
A lot of conspiracy theories exist because people don’t know how to think. To be clear, just because people don’t know how to think doesn’t mean that governments are telling the truth and that ‘big pharma/media/whatever’ isn’t deceiving us. The problem is that we tend to believe what feels right, and we’re not willing to say ‘I don’t know’ (even though, in most situations, we genuinely do not know). For example: if you believe that the US government is hiding evidence of extra-terrestrial life, how are you going to go about finding out whether or not you’re right? There’s only really one way you can do it: you go out and try and find contrary evidence, and if you can’t find it then you can continue to believe that extra-terrestrial life might exist and that the government is hiding evidence of it. Problem is, we don’t do that. Instead, we find a bunch of random people on the internet and just trust them, even though we’ve never met them and don’t have any reason to consider them trustworthy (would we trust a stranger to look after our money, our house or our children?). We’re too quick to claim that we know when we have no reason whatsoever to do so. We claim that Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 election, or we claim that he only won in 2016 because of Russian interference (recent studies show that the tendency to believe conspiracy theories isn’t at all linked to being left/right politically). The salient question to ask ourselves is this: how can we test the information we’re being told (whoever is telling us)?
Roger Stone & Alex Jones openly admitted in a documentary years ago that they propagate conspiracy theories to gain political power which in turn gives them popularity which leads to big bucks for them. It is pure unadulterated heartless exploitation of vulnerable people for their own gain. They only care about themselves and don’t care who they hurt to get what they want.
I left my family’s house for two years, when I cam back they were into the STUPIDEST conspiracies unbelievable, unfixable, they would need a psychologist to help them through their personality defects in order to see that they were wrong; that it’s ok to not know but have a good idea, a best attempt of understanding
Maybe when it became unmistakable how much falsehood and nonsense the ‘authorities’ push on us daily (think 2020 especially). That of course doesn’t make ‘conspiracy’ theories true, though some are, e.g. Paperclip, MK Ultra (some of the docs are declassified now). Its not all so easy to refute and dismiss as flat earth. “Conspiracy theories” are NOT all the same. Given the manipulation our minds are subjected to daily, can you blame those people who have woken up to propaganda techniques and might want to look elsewhere for information? The problem is, the alternative media is now probably as bad as the mainstream, just on a smaller, decentralized scale (though YT is one platform, I mean decentralized in the sense that anyone can have a website). Being able to have an audience online tends to attract a wide array of lone grifters who are obviously not going to get on TV.
What we need is a free market economy with a Universal Basic Income and appropriate regulation to prevent the system from running over people and turning them into “roadkill.” Talking about getting rid of capitalism is like Bernie Sanders promoting “socialism.” He may have something different in mind from corrupt Latin American dictatorships, but the word “socialism” has that sort of connotation for people who’ve fled socialist regimes. You’re immediately going to lose people if you come across as being against capitalism, because for a lot of people it’s perceived as an engine of wealth and progress, and in many respects that’s what it is, depending on exactly how you define it. That said, she makes many valid points about social media and conspiracy theories.
This is true ever since businesses stopped put their service or product first, but profit. Because then the media already shift from what is important, to what sells. And then advertisers made it worse, “if you publish that we won’t advertise in your media.” It’s the whole system where everybody is anxious to earn/have enough rather than wondering what is essential/true/important here.
In a functioning liberal democracy (which is what we are told we have) there would be no conspiracy theories because we wouldn’t be trying to censor them; we would have open debate. The strength of the argument and evidence is what matters. There is no need to censor any speech. The conspiracy theory label was to designed (and weaponized by the CIA in 1967) to stop open debate. That is what its function is, it gets regular people to shut down critical thinking. Arguably, the conspiracy theory label is the most successful example of psychological warfare.
Its much easier to grasp that a shadowy cabal of international elites controled by literal demons are ruining your life than understanding 100 years of complex economic policy & lax regulatory enforcement allows our economy to bottom out every few years. Those with immense wealth are not only enabled, but emboldened to to leverage it to hoard more. Trickle down? More like trickle on. Naomi is right; people’s collective intuition is correct that something is wrong. Monetary incentive to peddle misinformation, poor media literacy, with a heaping helping of American exceptionalism has allowed a turmor to fester in our society.
One issue is that the term “conspiracy theory” now applies to every question that challenges authority or the current mob think view of things. It is now nothing more than a weaponized term used to discredit valid criticism, questions, or caution. Just noting that currency devaluation has, since Roman times, resulted in inflation made me a conspiracy theorist when discussing the Canadian monetary policy of “quantitative easing”.
It’s also a system that, to a diminishing degree, benefit the people at the bottom, though in no way to a fraction of the degree they benefit the people at the top. The benefit of inaction, the psychological’ ‘safety’ of familiarity despite the pitfalls of not changing, are comforting to the marginally comfortable vanishing middle classes, the overtaxed, the lazy, the weak minded, etc. They’re the security blanket of the people too indoctrinated to be afraid of changing the system.
I think of conspiracy theories as much like a political and social gnostic theory. The idea that the confusion you see is not *random*, not accidental, and that there are hidden forces making everything happen according to a plan. A planned event makes sense, a planned event cannot happen randomly, which means that it cannot happen anywhere the elites don’t want it to.
1:49 Just yesterday I was looking through a beautifully photographed brochure mailed to me about the Redwood trees in California. And at the very end of it, my name is listed as a donor, and that made my day! Nobody else will notice it, but add my name to the list of many others and the ripples will add up!❤.
Ms Klein, I was at the BPL last night and experienced your talk/book selling event. Thank you for your time. I agree that loops are dangerous. I would love to hear you and Ms Wolf on the stage at the same time. That would be healthy and interesting. People need to make up their own minds about difficult realities.
You can ask why all the conspiracies, but the real question is which ones have any truth and which ones don’t. The dismissive attitude people have towards conspiracy theories means that they dismiss the ones that might be true too. I guarantee you the W.E.F and the U.N are conspiring to change everyone’s life. They even publish their plans.
When no one is transparent – the government, the media, large corporations – nobody, what you are left with is trying to figure out what the hell is going on yourself. You try to inform yourself as best you can and you come up with a theory of what is going on. Because no one will ever tell you. If the government or the media ever start telling it to you straight, conspiracy theories would be for idiots. But, they are not in the world we currently live in.
Lots of great points. But one thing really jumped out at me: Can we PLEASE be careful with our language and not say “conspiracy” when we mean “conspiracy theory”? It’s not that “conspiracies are spreading”, as Klein says here, it’s that conspiracy THEORIES are spreading. I see this mistake all the time on both MSM news websites and even on Independent ones. Let’s not give fuel to the fire of those who believe in these nutty things.
One of the most hilarious and sick lies about this whole AI promise of not needing to work is that it’ll never materialize – largely because it will cost one’f these billionaires money to do so. If somebody like Bezos can make as much as he does, but his company still employing parttime migrant style workers and workers who have to go to food stamps ??? well – then, I doubt they’ll do anything ‘when they can’. These billionaire psychopaths have proven – if there is profit to be made, they’ll take it. We can keep living in vans and pooping in buckets for all they care.
How did “conspiracies” become mainstream? Because people started to realise, all over the western democratic world, that their media and governments and once trusted institutions have been LYING to them while enriching themselves to the detriment of others. The blatancy of the corruption is now such that it is visible to ALL WHO LOOK.
If you live in the Capitalist West… you live a fiercely prejudiced and propagandised dystopia. The American Empire is so rich and powerful… it’s difficult to see further than your own personal needs whilst within it. To stay within its giant pyramid sales scheme, to keep being able to buy more shiny stuff that you don’t really need. The Empire asks you to be scared or righteously disgusted with other regimes other political systems… and you happily oblige. The American Empire owns Europe outright. Nationstate nationalism still exists, but in name only. Politics has been obliterated… you can only vote vanilla. A true left or rightwing party aren’t even allowed to exist. The ‘food stuffs’ you eat are killing you. It is the number one reason for premature death in the West. The small monopoly of giant food corporations produce addictive ‘edibles’ that only resemble traditional food. Most cannot afford the basics, like housing. It became just another way to play the pyramid sales scheme and make ‘easy’ money. Your standard of medical care… depends on how much you have to spend. If nothing, you’ll wait in queue for years, whilst the wealthy get instant care. Everyone has to endure living through ”Orwellian forever-wars’. So the most important US ( industrial military-complex ) companies keep their profits up. The West is corrupt and increasingly unsafe, a dangerous place to live. Unrest is everywhere. Your society has no intrinsic meaning or purpose. Except the accumulation of things.
“Weaponized psychiatry: The assault on dissidents as conspiracy theorists Question: What kind of people believe in conspiracy theories? The Short answer: People who have investigated and verified them. Everybody in academia knows that research designed to attack conspiracy theorists will bring in grant money, whereas research designed to validate critical inquiry into ultra-sensitive topics (JFK, 9/11, false flags, privately-issued fiat currency, vaccines and autism, etc. etc.) will kill your career. Almost all critical thinkers are open to many of the ideas that the CIA and careerist psychologists demonize as conspiracy theories.” It always cracks me up when dummies (and they always are) use the term “conspiracy theory” in a derogatory manner. Like they assume those with wealth and power would not conspire together to protect their wealth and power? They would just trust to chance? They would let the chips fall as they may? That’s how they got to be wealthy and powerful? Trusting to chance? Thus, are the wealthy and powerful as dumb as the dummies who use the term “conspiracy theory”? I think not. I love it when idiots accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, just so I can make this point. IT ALWAYS SHUTS THEM UP AND REVEALS WHAT IDIOTS THEY ACTUALLY ARE INSTANTANEOUSLY!
The stock market is made hypnotic; and the biological, sociological, and economic environment is made uneven continually as tech companies obtain IPO environments through suggestions. The collective suggestion from tech companies in terms of socialization is providing a hypnotic environment with scientific management as a tool for retributive justice or economic confidence.
It’s interesting to me that people always focus on “conspiracy theories” as if that’s the problem, instead of conspiracy fact, which somehow evades the light of scrutiny just because it’s business as usual and therefore impervious to criticism. Marginalize, ridicule, and even punish those who dare to question the official narrative…is that the agenda here? Be careful what you wish for. How did Naomi Klein become mainstream, is what I want to know? By exploiting her so-called doppelgänger, it seems.
I mean, a lot of conspiracy theories becoming true didn’t exactly help… At this point we are running out of them. If governments could keep their hands to themselves and stop engaging in shady crap with corporations and other organizations then maybe people could again trust them… but we all know that ain’t happening.
FEAR. Despite the title of the book Fear, Jan 6th, etc, I think we’re neither discussing the properly framed problem, nor the big picture solutions yet. #FearIsTheProblem. Fear is the root of arrogance, bullying, misogyny, homophobia, racism, bigotry and greed. Fear allows people to mentally wall-off their own empathy to virtually zero. #MakeBigotryShamefulAgain #BuildBridgesNotWalls #DeportMeToo #BanMeToo Three of the biggest generators of fear are 1) out-of-control capitalism and historically unsustainable and exponentially growing wealth and income inequality levels (if you lose your job you might lose healthcare access, your home, car, partner, child custody rights, etc), 2) fear-mongers like Fox/Faux/Fear News, the GOP, etc. (they’re all out to get you, all the time), and 3) religion (‘evil’ is waiting around every corner, all your life with eternal unimaginable fiery torture as a deterrent). Let’s be honest, no amount or size of Great Walls, or military spending, or nuclear arsenal, or non US soil military bases and ops, or international weapons sales, or personal weapons and magazine sizes, or of school teachers with guns, or of privatized, militarized (and systemically racist) police and mass incarceration, or of mass deportations including the Dreamers, or of bans of entire groups of people, or of intentionally torturous (and often permanently orphaning) separation of immigrant children as a deterrent, or threats to shoot rock-throwing refugees, or torture of POWs, or control over women, or Space Farces, or border moats filled with snakes and alligators, or anything else will ever Make American Republicans Feel Safe enough.
As a student of epistemology for well over three decades, this presentation was remarkably painful to listen to… given that we’re apparently supposed to see her as some sort of “arbiter of truth”, there were so many unexamined premises that she built her “truth” claims on. Maybe she delves deeper into these premises within her book/s, but any first year student of philosophy should be able to immediately recognize that most of this interview was merely a series of claims made about “truth” that were undefined and undefended… as well as no general methodology provided as to how to differentiate between “truth” and “non-truth”.
A lot of people, Klein included, always want to come up with some compelling reason why people are so prone to believing in conspiracies; that the reason they are on twitter so much is the result of a performative capitalist mindset to brand themselves. I think there is a simpler explanation. Mass media social platforms have simply allowed billions of people to connect with each other in ways they’ve never been able to before, and a huge fraction of the population on the planet is simply not intelligent enough to be able to parse bad ideas from good ones. People need to be taught how to reason, or else they will learn it the hard way after losing several relatives to covid.
Because the government redacted a lot of information and were not completely honest, and then declassified the same information thereby confirming the conspiracy theories that evolved from their lack of transparency. Moral of the story: don’t infantalize your citizens, tell them everything, the benefit will outweigh the risks.
No mention the role religion plays in the spread of conspiracies. When people are raised to put faith over facts, they are especially susceptible to conspiracy theories, which is why the Q Anon movement has taken such a deep hold in the American Evangelical movement. Trump and Q are steadily replacing Jesus and St. Peter as leader and messenger and where their values are now considered “Christian”, even though they have nothing to do with those espoused in the bible. Some of today’s conspiracies, many of which revolve around the perceived fall of the American Empire, will be the myths and legends of the future. Much as I can imagine it was during the fall of the Roman empire when the founding myths of Christianity were used to bring power back to Rome.
How many facts have to be uncovered about a conspiracy theory before She realizes it was not a theory but actually happened? Ever here the phrase deceive me once shame on you deceive me twice shame on me? Everyone who questioned the Trump Russia gate story was called a conspiracy theorist. It has been proven beyond a doubt that the dossier was bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and The FBI knew it but buried the facts and pursued an investigation that found the truth that they refused to tell the public and instead implied their were reasons for concern. Everyone who pointed out the Hunter Biden laptop as proof that Joe Biden was a corrupt politician who had accepted millions of dollars from Communist China was labeled a conspiracy theorist. Again the FBI and CIA both put out statements implying it was Russian misinformation. Now we find out that the FBI forensic investigators had proven the authenticity of the laptop and had verified that the emails originated on that laptop at least six months before the public statements implying it was Russian misinformation. How many times do they have to lie to you before you realize you cannot trust them. If you have friends that lie to you as often as the press has in the last 8 years you would no longer call them friends and would have already cut off communication with them I am sure. The FBI and other government agencies also had active misinformation campaigns running on all the social media platforms and were getting full cooperation from all the social media platforms in removing content they did not want the public to have access to.
Have you talked to max Blumenthal? We’ve been lied to, we’ve seen the rich get richer and the illegal war pushers getting richer and rewarded……..I now believe in conspiracy because I’ve lost all trust in government, big pharma, the food and drug industry, big tech, media and AI so what am I supposed to believe when those who push back against the narrative are shut down? Barb
A very narrow, almost trivial example of “elites” or centers of powers using conspiracy culture to further their agenda is the way in which the military tacitly supports claims that the government is “covering up” “evidence” of “alien spaceships” and other signs of extraterrestrial incursions into our world. The conspiracy is useful insofar as it creates narrative that, in many ways, is more compelling, more and more interesting than the truth, which the fact that military (in concert with R&D conducted by Raytheon et al in the private sector) is hiding their development efforts in aerospace and weapons development. If the “useful idiots” are making hay with crazy UFO stories, no one will be all that concerned about high-powered weapons or potentially dangerous and hazerodus experiments that may be going on out in the desert on government lands.
The major problem was a lot of real-life conspiracies came to light in the 1980’s from MK Ultra, paper clip, Iran Contra affair, brainwashing experiments (none of them really worked), CIA helping drug smuggling of Cocaine from Nicaragua and etc. If people have been busted doing terrible things, it’s kind of hard to believe them afterwards. Add in the loonies pushing Alien crap for money.
Naomi Klein shows her ignorance when she says people obviously should wear masks and take pharmaceutical drugs containing genetic material and nanoparticles, never before used in healthy people, because they are labeled as “vaccines”. What do the majority of scientific studies say about the efficacy and risks of wearing masks? What is the risk – benefit of the covid pharmaceutical product versus the risk of covid disease? My guess is Naomi Klein doesn’t know this science, I bet she just knows the corporate television narratives about masks and pharmaceutical drugs. Is she influenced by her husband’s involvement in PharmaCare, which proposes that Canadian citizens help pay for pharmaceutical drugs for their fellow people? This would be a boon for the pharmaceutical industry…
I agree in principle that the public motivation beneath conspiricism is to find a rationale for doing nothing about complex problems. But what is missing in this discussion is how to dismantle conspiracies. The U.S. flavor of Capitalism in particular (thinking of Herbert Marcuse) is adept at ingesting opposition, making it marketable. Conspiracies likewise attribute opposing “facts” to the conspiracy structure, thus defanging their ability to persuade cultists of the possibility that their beliefs may be wrong. Any corrective modification of social media and communications should envision mechanisms for assigning some sort of truth value. Truth, recall, was at the top of the Internet layer cake model.
How did the weapons of mass destruction narrative become mainstream? The power structures do this as well. A lot of these narratives are constructed via the Pentagon and fed through the media. Now, I don’t believe that because I believe men in a smokey room have thought that up to deceive the public so that policies can be enacted much more easily. I just believe it from what I’ve read. Do the policies of a corporation come from the CEO and board of directors? It’s just how it is.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed ( and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary ” H L Mencken Now you’re entitled to believe that this 100 year old message fuels conspiracy theories, but I must confess that I’ve never read anything more logical and in touch with reality.
We don’t talk much about the myriad actual confessed conspiracies beginning wars and toppling regimes, and in true post modern fashion people have stopped engaging with questions about suspicious events altogether. I forget, who is it that’s unable to face the stark horror of reality and hides away in narrative fiction? Sure, Allen Dulles was a bit of a Nazi and a war profiteer who was fired by Kennedy, but Allen Dulles headed up the Warren Commission and found Oswald acted alone. Only a nut would ever question Allen Dulles’ determination regarding Allen Dulles’ involvement in Kennedy’s murder!😆 What’s next, flat earth lizard people! Ha! Maybe the CIA puts out ludicrous conspiracy theories through bot farms like an inverse Iran Disinfo project to discredit inquiry through false equivalence!😄 Like it’s all some twisted psy op!🤣 (Don’t talk about the confirmed ones though–only how silly it is to question suspicious events resembling proven conspiracies.)
“A lot of my work has been about the climate crisis” “… there are very powerful vested interests in our society that don’t want us to focus on the real causes of the warming… that being the fossil fuel companies.” The fact that Ms. Klein pins the entire issue on the fossil fuel companies, and doesn’t even mention animal agriculture and the way we eat being a huge contributor to climate change – and the biggest and most straightforward change we could ourselves make in the short term – proves her point about people not wanting to face an inconvenient truth. It also proves that she herself has been compromised by the mental flaws she warns us against.
The notion of conspiracy theory is closely linked – one could even say, joined at the hip – with another CIA invention, one of the Agency’s founding principles, the idea of plausible deniabilty: they are almost like the two sides of the same coin. If one does’t want to play by the CIA’s rule book, and if one wants to steer away from that hall of mirrors that Naomi talks about, one would do well not to use these inventions of word magic. (If you say alleged consptacy instead of conspiracy theory then you do not insinuate, without evidence, that they might actually be true. As for plausible deniability, you could simply say blatant lies.)
“For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.” Noam Chomsky “We live entangled in webs of endless deceit,(Who’s this “we” that he/it is referring to,the jews) often self-deceit, but with a little honest effort, it is possible to extricate ourselves from them. If we do, we will see a world that is rather different from the one presented to us by a remarkably effective ideological system, a world that is much uglier, often horrifying. We will also learn that our own actions, or passive acquiescence, contribute quite substantially to misery and oppression, and perhaps eventual global destruction. But there is a brighter side. We are fortunate to live in a society that is not only rich and powerful and hence, as any student of history would expect, dangerous and destructive but also relatively free and open, perhaps more so than any other, though this may change if the reactionary jingoists who have misappropriated the term conservative succeed in their current project of diminishing civil liberties, strengthening the power of the state, and protecting it from public scrutiny. For those who are wealthy and privileged, a very large sector of a society as rich as ours, there are ample opportunities to discover the truth about who we are and what we do in the world.
the more Ms Klein…actually, the longer she keeps examining the world, as long as people are listening, the better off we will all be. there is no real difference between 21st century late imperial capitalism and the ancien régime of 1780s France, or the late tsarist autocracy of 1905-16 Russia (or the current Russia for that matter). the names and faces have changed, but the social economy? not. in the least.
We can keep blaming the tech but conspiracy theories are as old as the hills. Conspiracy theories arise in times of economic and political disorder. But we shouldn’t just believe the left and the right are pushing conspiracy theories – the mainstream is falling into paranoid thinking too – Saddam’s WMD, Russia-gate, Havana Syndrome. Chinese weather balloons being shot down, Putin being accused of false flag attacks on Moscow etc etc/ When power and influence begin to ebb, people tend to get paranoid.
Perhaps it’s because so many are being proven correct. It turns out that the addage “The difference between conspiracy theory and truth is time” is also correct. If you look at the awful track record of the mainstream / legacy media, you’d have to be a real idiot to believe them anymore. Just think… those who would claim conspiracies don’t exist, also must not believe in investigative journalism. Conspiracies (2 or more people secretly colluding to do something) happen ALL THE TIME! What do you think politics is?????
Although Naomi is generally a good analyst of social issues and events, her analysis of “conspiracies being mainstream” is wrongheaded and ahisorical. Americans in general have always been susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. Richard Hoffstader (the great American historian) wrote many, many, years ago about the tendency of Americans (people) to be fearful to the point of paranoia. He traces group paranoia through much of the history of the country. Current examples of conspiracies becoming mainstream are the fear-mongering claims made by authoritarian social groups (the far right) that immigrants are stealing jobs from whites or transporting drugs across the border; that Jews own Hollywood and have created a false history of the holocaust to use as leverage for policitcal and financial gain. Naomi’s claim that conspiracies become mainstream because of the fear of becoming capitalist roadkill is wrong and does not withstand scrutiny. If captialism was or is the cause, you would see relatively equal levels of this phenomena across capitalist democracies (and this is not the case). The American public is understood by much of the world to be very fearful and distrusting of its government and are prone to believe and spread conspiracies. One of the biggest causes of conspiracies are authoritarian or facist factions in society that use fear mongering to manipulate the public to gain power or retain power. The history in the US of the use of “wedge” issues by the Republican party and the far-right is a perfect example of this practice.
“Don’t want to face the consequences of the (environmental and health toxins} because it would threaten their entire business model” – therefore, when the environmental movement (70s/80s) began to be concerned somewhat less about carcinogens, herbicides, heavy metals, whaling, and other local pollution issues (not to mention corporate power in general) and slightly more about a potential global greenhouse effect due to CO2 that could “end all life on earth”, it was simply expedient to the greater proportion of “big global business” to go along with this new deflective possibility, which is also potentially the “scarier” – also, very expedient to say the least (doomsdaying is literally in our ancient blood). And that absolutely doesn’t need to be a plan by three people at the top. It is simply a little less “close to home”, and so it “slides” though a little easier. It is the less bitter and “easier to dodge” pill. No single industry on its own is particularly ruffled (CO2 is released with literally every movement or industry on earth, including electricity production, solar panel manufacture and so on), and there are always plenty of methods to throw some lip-service or a compensatory “carbon scheme” here or there to nullify the populace and do-gooding officials. It is not a gigantic jump to go from there, to the situation of a converging global culture of sternly frowning on (or ridiculing) any science that happens to come along and indicates that the “stuff of life”may no longer appear to be the real “exhaust” of industrialisation.
How can someone speak for 13 minutes and not say even 1 thing remotely helpful or interesting? There is a 100% chance that Naomi Klein believes every single conspiracy theory floated by Leftists. Russian election interference, Covid vaccines preventing transmission, Biden is mentally fit, our VP was chosen because she was competent. Which conspiracy theories does Naomi Klein not believe? It seem she buys 100% of Leftist propaganda (conspiracy theories).
Almost! Conspiracy nonsense is born out of a sense that you’re being lied to but you don’t have the tools or even language to understand how. We’ve been very good at brainwashing ourselves into worship of the all power markets. Now that this system is creating massive inequities and clearly isn’t functioning as a force the weeds out the ineffective or incompetent, people start to wonder what’s going on. But they can’t criticize capitalism directly, doesn’t even occur to them. But when the politicians talk about economic recovery and your rent goes up every year and your wages never do, people notice! So they know they’re being lied to. They just don’t know how. So everything else starts to make sense because they have nothing else to use. If you can’t criticize your boss or your landlord because they’re rich and therefore chosen of God or whatever, there has to be other reasons why things aren’t working. But both parties in the US have no incentive to address the material circumstances of anybody. They’re very well paid to make sure those conversations never come up. Two sides of the same neoliberal coin. Direct action is never an option because it would prevent someone from making a buck off of it. And we can’t have that, can we? So nothing gets done, everything gets worse, and without even a moderate adjustment we’re just going to nose-dive straight into anarchy and death.
the answer isnt complicated. when the public has been increasingly misinformed for 50-60 years, when regulation of news media disappeared in the early 80s and allowed them to exist as entertainment, when the government hasnt been honest about anything in more than 25 years, sooner or later many people realize that the truth is, no doubt, a conspiracy. to have the nerve to pretend that mainstream narratives are factual, and questioning them is madness, and to write a book about the public collectively losing its mind, she is plainly more clueless than many foil hat wearing neurotics.
For as long as religion has existed we have had conspiracies, but as always those apocalypse conspiracies ONLY WORKS if people has no better option. Same with modern conspiracies, they are pointless gibbering of the mad man with a sign, until you start harming enough people and leave them with no better choice than populism and conspiracies. Stop funneling the wealth to a few rich people and drain the middle class of wealth and they will only choose conspiracies when they have nothing better to do.
She is a smart, interesting individual that should be listened to but I also think she is simplifying, dumbing down the other side, and hasn’t put much clout into conspiracies or the theories from the initial get-go. It is way too easy for the intelligentsia community to dismiss all conspiracies off hand. I would have liked her to have explained some of the other sides arguments much better than she did. Life and issues she is referring to are much more nuanced and complicate than she would suggest in my humble opinion.
And if I look at climate change denial, which is a conspiracy theory, right? The reason that conspiracy has gotten traction is a combination of the fact that there are very powerful vested interests in our society that don’t want us to focus on the real causes of the warming because it would threaten their entire business model, that being the fossil fuel companies that have underwritten that conspiracy theory. I absolutely lol’d. Anyone else spot the irony in that. Ha ha ha. Eat it up.
I jive so much with the call for an information commons. Having a publicly funded and transparent platform that replaces Twitter, would free everyone from the whims of the owner, and hopefully free everyone from some of the toxic behaviors that we don’t want or need, by applying ethical guidelines. Side, note I was just perusal Brydon & with special guest Michael Palin, and he recounted how Monty Python got started in the USA, it was a little public station in Texas that tried it, and loved it, and spread the word. The rest is history.
Naomi Klein seems to have taken her cues from Naomi Wolfe and is now engaged in a dance of polar opposites. All or nothing, no nuances. Very sad. What she tried to do – differentiate herself from Wolfe – has actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wolfe is now defining Klein. All the issues she mentions have this particular trait – they ALL follow the so-called official narrative people have started challenging. “Oh but NOT ME!!” claims Klein. Oh yes, Naomi, you’re now becoming a tool of the government narratives. No amount of shaming Wolfe (with whom I disagree on some issues) or “them conspiracy theorists” can fix that. That positioning she takes against Wolfe and her ideas (borrowed from others and also researched) is dismissive elitism toward the “poor idiots” who get “dragged into lies” they then spread like virus. Reality is much more nuanced. Not neatly chiseled for consumption or for partisan politics. The saying “wear your mask” has also a doppelganger side to it. Double meaning. Metaphorical. Same with “masks don’t protect you…”
Becsuse the last people to actually “believe they are using the internet” (the stupids, I’m referring to the last people to get smart phones…first the nerds were online, then their siblings found themselves online playing games, then one psrent became the biggest user online, then the other psrent overtook the first one, then you gramma got on Facebook, then the stupids finally got online….and they used their phone for few years, but didn’t understand what everyone was using the internet for….until they found something catered just for them…..lied to control their opinions). Picture this…if the internet started in high school, who would be the last people to use it…by use it, I mean they found something online that interested them….
Thanks. Capitalism likes to foster the fantasy that something will come along (usually magic technology) that will usher in fully automated luxury space communism. We just need to keep letting it run its course. This will never happen. Warp drive, teleportation, replicators – whatever it is, capitalism will simply comodify it like it does to everything else. Capitalists know this. tavi.
There is no such thing as coincidence. The world economic forum is advocating for lower living standards in the West. Advocates of critical race theory in governments, academia, and the media are promoting marxism. Billionaires including Bill Gates, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, and are spending billions of dollars to influence the outcomes of democratic elections. Advocates of illegal immigration are taking resources away from lower and middle class individuals in the west as they influence politicians to ignore laws protecting thr borders. The continued attacks on free speech are alarming. If you are not scared you should be.
The conspiracy theorist used to be your crazy uncle yelling about the illuminati after a few beers at Thanksgiving, but it didn’t go any farther. Now he has his own website and spreads his nonsense all over the internet. I hate being one of those people who blames social media for all of today’s ills because it’s more complicated than that. But at the end of the day, I believe the damage social media has done far outweighs the good. Algorithms encourage echo chambers, and those can be extremely dangerous.
The term ‘conspiracy theory’ is becoming like the words ‘God’ and ‘consciousness’. It is so overused, and used in so many different contexts that its meaning is becoming vague and misleading. Naomi gave two examples of what she implied are legitimate messages, climate and Covid. In these cases, any dissent is labelled ‘conspiracy theory’ as a pejorative and is equivalent to faith terms like ‘climate denier’ and ‘anti-vaxxer’. In these instances, use of the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ has nothing whatsoever to do with its original meaning and is a reflection of modern methods of trying to control narratives. It was laid bare by the events of the pandemic where the official lines were that there was no lab leak, that vaccines would prevent transmission and that lockdowns and mask wearing would make things better. In fact, the first suggestions that Covid did spread due to a lab leak were labelled conspiracy theory. Furthermore, it has emerged that the people working to shut down that conversation were conspiring and knew that it was true. The other official claims, those about vaccines, masks and lockdowns, have not been borne out by statistics at all. I think what Naomi is presenting here is quite a naïve picture of how the world is run. Maybe she should read Whitney Webb’s 2-volume work One Nation Under Blackmail to get an idea of the nature of the network of actual conspiracies that control our governments today. The system isn’t broken. It’s just not running for the purpose we’re being told it is.
Where does pure ignorance come into play with these theories. There has to be a correlation to education/occupation to willingness to accept these theories, right? Although I know plenty of college educated folks who still espouse the “stop the steal” conspiracy, it seems ignorance has to be a foundation for the most ridiculous of these (i.e. QAnon)
Conspiracy theories also come from things like the WEF/UN websites and their numerous documents outlining the left’s plan to control the masses. It also comes from government policies that deny solutions to climate change and focus primarily with destroying capitalist societies. The plutocracies, crony capitalists and marxist authoritarians all play a role in removing more of our freedoms, increasing the cost of living and introducing woke indoctrination into our institutions. You are fooling no one.
What a total BS artist. Instead of disproving a theory on its merits or lack thereof she wants us to dismiss all unapproved ideas as “conspiracy theories”. Sorry, but some of us are distrustful of the media, academia. and corporations and rightly so. I used to be a conspiracy theorist as these theories are proven to be true, I am having trouble finding unproven conspiracies. As an example of this is a study by Statistics Norway that manmade global warming caused by CO2 emissions is false. This makes perfect sense when one stops to think about it because CO2 is after all plant food.
She’s full of ideology, she isn’t a scientist or a philosopher; the times she bashed capitalism I wanted to ask her what should we replace it with? In her opinion probably communism. And COVID being leaked out from a lab it’s even considered by the democrat government of the US, it’s very plausible, it isn’t a ridiculous or a conspiracy, just the attitude of the chinese authorities almost confirm it. Most of the conspiracy theories are ridiculous and too big to even be a conspiracy because the more people are in a conspiracy the chances of failing are greater. But questioning and being sceptic and not believing everything is a good thing, or we would still believe that the Earth is the center of the Universe. The scientific or philosophic authorities of a time also have big egos and biases and like to mock and discard new views, it happened countless times.
“Conspiracy theories” like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to justify the invasion of Vietnam? As now the Fed Gov has admitted that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never even happened. How about Iraq WMD’s? Where did those go? You people who tow the official line are either willful liars, or wildly ignorant.
Hang on ! Its actually likely that covid was developed in a lab. Lots of reputable people and organisations have said this. While its highly likely that it was an accident that it ” escaped ” from a lab by accident its still a huge possibility that it was a lab leak…but its not conclusive. Also Falchi was paying for gain a function research with tax payers dollars thats on record and China carries out gain a function research …thats also on record. So some of what is being said here is totally disingenuous and half true and i cant believe that Ms Klien is unaware of this. It makes me even less inclined to listen to some academics because they arent telling the whole truth. We need to start teaching kids and young to follow the evidence and not listen to people who make the decision to tell only part of the truth. Its heart breaking because i really like Naomi Klien but she isnt telling the whole truth here.
Anyone who disagree with the ministry of truth propagandists must be a crazy conspiracy theorist? lol “She’s comparing people who like doing yoga and eating healthily to Nazi'” It’s the same tactics the Tobacco Industry uses to try to get people the associate anti-smokers with Nazi, because hitler was a anti-smoker so if you are a anti-smoker then you must be a Nazi, this is the association they try to get people to make. Demonization by association they use that tactic alot.
Conspiracy theories are mostly driven by the lack of truth and “facts” by those who have the power to share such information but choose not to. If you’re never told what is actually happening, how else can you navigate your life? People need something to guide them. So if media and governments aren’t willing to put out the whole story then it’s really not fare to blame the people that make up a story that has bits of truth and bits of lies or fantasy. I’m not sure who this lady is but I’m sure she also has built her vision of reality on misinformation and outright lies. We all have and there’s nothing to be ashamed of cause we are part of a very confusing tightly woven level of deception.
Uh…the conspiracy that man is evil, so animal sacrifice, wait, so human Jesus sacrifice to appease a “God” who, has (flood, etc) and will (Lake Of Fire) make the torture of Hitler seem tame—yeah that conspiracy bullsh**’s been going on since humans learned words were useful for manipulation and power grabs.
Naomi Klein is herself a conspiracy theorist. Firstly, she offers some theories about conspiracy theories which can easily be taken to be conspiracy theories themselves. Secondly, she upholds lots of rather typical conspiracy theories about climate change “deniers”, the United States, Israel, the “false consciousness” of the working class and others, etc. Finally, she artfully-selects, like many on the left, ONLY conspiracy theories on the Right, and utterly ignores all the conspiracies theories found on the Left. In other words, she displays the political tribalism that’s typical of conspiracy theorists. What’s more, she even admits that her entire take on conspiracy theories comes from her critique of capitalism. Thus, we have all the cliched takes on conspiracy theories filtered through a rather typical Leftist lens (in her case, “anti-capitalist”), which is itself chock-a-block with conspiracy theories. (Check out this tribal uniformity in the replies section right here. Every single reply offers a leftwing view of conspiracy theories. It’s as if these people believe that it’s literally impossible for a leftwing person to be a conspiracy theorist because everyone on the Left is wiser, more moral, better educated, etc. than the “gammon” and evil people on the Right.)
This is the first person I’ve heard who says the obvious true thing: CONSPIRACY THEORIES GET THE FEELINGS RIGHT. Okay so I’m a psychoanalytically trained clinician and UofC trained humanities blowhard. Take your potshots at me. Of course I believe this. But LOOK. This smart sane totally successful person does too. The FEELINGS. THEY ARE ACCURATE. Just saying.
I have problems with the entire premise. Naomi does hint that “capitalism” has a shady side that can breed something that might look like conspiracies, but then acts as self-appointed keeper of the great ugly secrets by pointing at those who are out there bravely sharing their concerns with the world and accusing them of intentionally spreading lies or having a mental illness. The world is filled with prophets, and we have to figure out which are false, which are being paid to share their message. And we are going to call out those few who have figured out a way to monetize while sharing society’s ugly truths while it is ok for govt and big business to run amok? Isn’t Klein guilty of doing the same thing, putting out content, monetized, against conspiracies? Frankly, I am open to the possibility that she is being paid to be a counter voice. How does one, in as few paragraphs as possible, make an argument for the reality of conspiracies? Certainly, social media has changed the conspiracy game. It used to be that we would find content from individuals who were well researched, brilliant, well read, fairly trusted and have truth-seeking intuition. Now, any lunkhead can share any kooky thought or rumor they heard, it gets distributed to millions at the speed of light. John Taylor Gatto, who read thousands of books, talked about how we are often left following bread crumbs, ie, we have to connect dots from excellent sources of facts, and have to sift through alot of words to get there.
Come on, you can’t address this topic without mentioning Fox. Fox has become the de facto voice of the Republican Party. Because Fox lies non-stop Republicans are totally separated from the real world of facts. Fox made lying a viable business model, and Trump never could have become President without Fox. Fox IS the conspiracy theory network.
Ms Klein, I love your books and essays. But your analysis here cud be better put. Ridiculous conspiracies have gained traction because 250million non readers in the USA now watch them on the internet. B4 1998 one had to READ a book or at least a MAGAZINE in order to think that “the government faked the moon landing” or that Jewish “Iluminati” people put the floating pyramid on the US Dollar Bill. Now all non literate and un-critical people have access to these ideas via the net. The guys I went to high school with in the 1980s no longer believe the science and hx they learned and believed as 10th graders and 30 yr olds. The Internet has erased the scientific and hx canon.
People will fall for BS. And the internet provides more opportunity for BS. Its that simple. I don’t blame algorithms, I blame our genes. For example how can anyone think Trump – who praises Putin, Xi and Kim Jong Un is patriotic? Its totally irrational – but I dont see how social media algorithms have anything to do with it. Oddly Klein’s theory is also a kind of conspiracy theory. She thinks she has an explaination for irrationality. BTW, Im sure her book will sell well.
I think Ms. Klein is missing the mark. Halfway through this article, it becomes clear that she is misrepresenting – perhaps caricaturing – a variety of separate questions, assertions and theories. Klein creates the construct of “Conspiracy Theories”, and within this she places many disparate things, which she is not clear about and perhaps exaggerates. She also dismisses “conspiracy theories”, and as she dismisses them… she actually makes some fair observations. People are freaked out; people don’t wanna deal; people feel exploited, and so on and so forth. Her construct is not precise enough. I could say she sounds like a conspiracy theorist, but that would be churlish.
I’ve always respected your intellect and intelligence, and i appreciate your calm civilised manner. However, I do think “things” in a fundamental way have changed & “we’re not in Kansas” anymore. We have indeed crossed a rubicon. Just know that every philosophy or perspective based book ever written was & is by it’s very nature a “Rabbit Hole” explored. The “New Middle Class mindset” (incl Musk et al) is tired of being lied to. A fully FreeSpeech internet is vital going forward.
I suppose the question though Klein, some have been proven to be correct…the deep state exists, the Iraq war – we were lied to, big pharma made money from Covid, we were controlled. And you were off the mark on RFK, he has championed fairer worker representation and democratic representation for workers. You are beginning to sound a little to comfortable as the left establishment, I wonder is your worry that people will start to make their own minds up. Your politics is not revolutionary – it’s safe.
0:49 and! It’s never the 10 you want! E.g., you watch a documentary, you get 10 more like it. You watch a mystery movie, you gotta look around for more. Thx! YouTube! 6:49 how do you deal with a conspiracy when you’re the target? Something that’s happened to you that you can’t do anything about because you don’t have enough money and|resources for redress? 16 years later and I’m still paranoid. The only difference is, maybe legal redress is coming up in January. If I’m wrong, it’s because I’m paranoid. If I’m right, I’ll cease to be ~ paranoid. 7:23 cool. 25 years ago? That’s 1998 or so. I still lived in Oregon. Tigard, Portland and Eugene. In the mid 1990s I started a habit of black markering big name labels I wasn’t fully into but where all the same practical and comfortable. 10:50 the internet was developed by the US government, originally. Really? Seriously? Hmm. 12:50 thx, Naomi!!! (Sorry Penguin. We’ll need a lot more than your guests to convince me to subscribe, etc.)
The premise is so messed up. Absolute ad hominum attacks of RFK Jr. Her utter falsehoods one after another are shocking. Naomi Wolf actually spearheaded investigating the Pfizer documents. THIS IS HUGE! Everyone can see the intrepid Ms Wolf’s work at DailyClout. Pharma tried to have the documents sealed for 75 years before court forced their release. YAY! Naomi Wolf (Not Klein) gets real work done. The smoking gun is now clear. The vaccines were (and still are) toxic and dangerous. Kuddos Naomi Wolf. She is a national treasure. FYI Folks…Dennis Kucinich is managing RFK Jr campaign for a reason. Bobby is a great candidate and can bring the right and left together at the same table. Make America Free Again!