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If you will pardon some hysterical left wring political doomerism:
I think I'm having an AI risk moment, and you guys are doing it to me!
I was always kinda skeptical of leftist claims re. right wing fascism in the US.
Yes, claiming the election was stolen is a little ehhhhh, but it is also just more traditional right wing signaling about corrupt institutions and blah blah blah.
Yes, circling the wagons around Trump and friends when they were doing clearly sketchy/criminal shit was a little fucked, but could I honestly say the left or the libs wouldn't do the same thing in exchange for the presidency? Of course not.
Yes, conservative justices are openly political and have only enough respect for precedent to secure the fig leaf with blue tack, but come on now. Roe v Wade, anyone?
The reaction of right wing populists, elected officials, intellectuals, and media regarding our lovable insane maga hammerbro doing a little trolling are making me wig out. People I thought were wrong but serious passing around clear bullshit about gay escorts, pretending the dude wasn't Q radicalized, and laughing it off. It's one thing for the lunatic fringe to do that shit, it's another entirely when the largest single conservative news network and most popular intellectuals are doing it.
Then I come here for a dose of sanity, and I have to dig DEEP into the replies before I find anyone positing the plainly obvious: that if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".
Maybe I'm just having a little moment and will regress to mean in a couple weeks, but this particular incident has shifted me from "no" to "They would if they could" regarding conservatives in this country, at least temporarily.
I was already armed because I think guns are fun and cool and are never gonna be banned regardless of how many schools get shot up so I might as well have fun, now I'm shopping around for my local John Brown chapter.
(also, if you are apolitical or don't mind some leftism from time to time and are looking for a gun club, the John Brown Gun Club and SRA are actually really chill and safe, so far. Much better than the local non-denominational clubs. I haven't been flagged once by a dude shoulder carrying his AR with closed bolt and magazine loaded yet, which is a damn sight better than the public ranges in SC.)
One last thing while I'm thinking about it: Dude once showed up to the range with the sickest Springfield armory 1911 I've ever seen, all nickel and smooth as glass and beautiful as fuck, one of their 2000$ fancy jobs. Predictably everyone gathered around and asked to see it like a bunch of 7 year olds for a foil pokemon card, then dude turns around and fucking holds me up with it practically. Scary as fuck. He let me shoot it afterwards though, so that was something.
This is a fair point, but I find the rest of your post pretty uncharitable. I see the recent right-wing explosion in crazy theories as a pretty understandable, if not reasonable, response to being totally destroyed culturally and shut out of important institutions by the left. With all of the recent censorship on social media sites etc., how can we as leftists expect right-wingers not to get radicalized into conspiracy theories?
I mean, if you look at the recent social media/alphabet agency collusion, the actual deep state was literally cooperating with social media companies to censor the public. That is what we know, of course the low-IQ crazies are going to believe even worse things.
It's a shame that a couple decades ago, this type of deep state critique would be firmly in the far-left camp. Leftists have been using this conspiratorial type of critique against the Western order for the better part of a century or more to radicalize their base, albeit usually with some more qualifiers and generally sane positions. Unfortunately, the right wing flipped the script on us, and weren't able to control the crazy side of the conspiratorial minded base.
If we have to blame someone, I blame leftists for allowing one of the best social movements in human history to be captured by milquetoast wokists and clear grifters. I'm not saying the right wing is innocent, but your post reads like blaming a dying bear for lashing out at its killers.
Am I correct in understanding that you’re referring to the Chomsky type of critique, which includes literal conspiracies that actually were uncovered in due time (and even when not, carefully crafted enough to give a veneer of plausibility and deniability), over the general impression of “conspiracy theory” of things like big pharma conspiracies with vaccines and whatnot?
He is referring to thing called parapolitics (TL;DR: hard left conspiracy community crawling through all the rabbit holes whenever they lead, and doing their research without bullshit).
Some people, like Joel Van Der Reijden of ISGP do follow where the evidence leads, all the way to full HBDIQ awareness.
https://www.isgp-studies.com
https://www.isgp-studies.com/intro
(warning: site can cause severe case of blackpilling)
The 1980's, time of Iran Contra scandal was the heyday, but the community is still here (although smaller and heavily blackpilled).
This was time when doing conspiracy research did not meant listening to Alex Jones, it meant writing down names on big table and painstakingly linking them with spider web of financial, political, personal and familial connections. If you did it thorougly for long time, you found that some major nodes of the web are people whose faces are not on TV screens and magazine covers and whose names are found only in very specialized sources (and then you would lock yourself in your room and hang yourself).
https://web.archive.org/web/20200806155838/https://lombardinetworks.net/networks/the-networks/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi
Obligatory meme:
https://i.imgur.com/snPS83O.jpg
Thank you! I've gotten pretty conspiratorial myself over the years, but can't quite fit in with most conspiracy theorists, these guys seem like someone I can relate to.
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The only thing recent about this is that Trumpism blew the lid off things and left the lunatics in charge of the asylum instead of leaving political leadership to the more 'respectable' members of their coalition*. Conservatives have been losing the culture war for decades - not because leftists are censoring them on twitter (a vastly overrated phenomenon), but because liberals have systematically outcompeted them. That may be giving them a little too much credit; a lot of the drivers of conservative cultural collapse and liberal success are socio-economic forces, not political discourse. Nevertheless, the point remains: for pretty much the first time in living memory, it is liberals and not conservatives setting the default when it comes to social norms. The crisis facing conservatism is one of the extinction, not extermination - the institutions they have historically dominated no longer have the clout they once did and the stories they tell aren't as persuasive as they used to be.
It's understandable that they're freaking out about this. It's just not very sympathetic.
*Let's not forget that Obama's term saw the widespread popularity of things like Birtherism and Jade Helm conspiracy theories.
Left-wing conspiracy theories only seem more sane if you're predisposed to them.
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Geoff Shullenberger and guest had a pretty good podcast on this recently which took a look at how movies once promoted a fashionable kind of conspiracy mindset (Slacker, JFK). Needless to say that is way, way out now.
https://outsidertheory.fireside.fm/universal-basic-mkultra
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