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9/11 conspiracy theories weren’t originally right coded, but nowadays they seem like they are? More evidence for my ‘woo swims right because creation scientists will happily lend their expertise to it when it jumps into the Christian community’ theory.
Of course on the other hand ancient aliens seems like it’s as left wing as ever.
The left wing seems like it has a perpetual conspiracy theory about Republican plots to institute an actual hard theocracy, the handmaid’s tale is just around the corner, the hallucination that right wing elites are plotting to bring back teen marriage, even some of the farther hysteria about project 2025. Not sure how you’d count this; every piece of publicly available information points to that idea being false, but is political blood libel in a different category? If so why should the same thing not apply to right coded beliefs like pizzagate?
Not every mistaken or unsupported belief is automatically a conspiracy theory. There has to be some sort of criteria to distinguish between them.
I think left wing fears about the coming theocracy are better explained as just generalized anxiety about the opposition, or perhaps false beliefs about the views of individual Republicans, although I agree that they easily could become conspiracy theories with the right narrative.
An unsupported idea about a plot by a powerful group is a conspiracy theory.
You can drop "unsupported", as the COVID experience with respect to lab leaks shows.
Obviously conspiracy theory doesn't have an actual definition- it's a snarl word- but some things labeled as conspiracy theories are corer to the definition than others. I think there was an ACX post about words with expanding definitions somewhere and this seems like a good example- a theory, with no evidence behind it, that there exists a plot by a powerful group to do something evil is pretty core to the conception.
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Why would this not be a conspiracy theory? A powerful group plotting to do something bad is the textbook definition of a conspiracy theory.
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"Ancient aliens" was never really left-wing, and it isn't popular with leftists now. The idea of precursor races who taught man secret knowledge and left their crumbling monumental works behind* comes out of the fin-de-siécle welter of new spirituality, Blavatsky, Steiner, Liebenfels, etc. which was in turn tied up with the Völksich nationalist movements of the day.
*Really it goes back to stuff like the Watchers in Hebrew myth and the Golden Age of the Greeks but that's it's modern permutation.
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