Okay, I've watched the whole thing, 2:40:02, and I've seen far worse. Wynn makes some good points along the way, but as so often before when I'm watching videos, listening to podcasts or reading texts about conspiracy theories and the people addicted to them, it makes me think of this:
Why democrats fail at the criticism of fascism! (Ruthless Criticism)
Don't get me wrong; I'll give her credit for the effort, for trying, but let me start at the point where it becomes apparent that she, more or less explicitly, gives up her attempt to explain conspiracism. It's towards the end of part 5:
00:00 Part 0: Diagrams
06:15 Part 1: Just Asking Questions
21:25 Part 2: The Rabbit Pill
45:45 Part 3: Conspiracism
50:37 –Intentionalism
1:05:56 –Dualism
1:15:45 –Symbolism
1:29:01 Part 4: The Ritual
1:59:07 Part 5: It's a Big Club and You Ain't In It 2:20:24 Part 6: ?????
What makes her give up is a social-media post from someone who has asked an AI to translate some of Hitler's stuff into English and now thinks that it's brilliant, which makes her say:
It's just so stupid! How can you be this stupid? (...) It boggles my mind how susceptible to propaganda you are. It's not like someone tricked you by giving you a transcript without telling you who wrote it. They told you it was Hitler! And when you agreed with it anyway, did you question your own judgment? (...) I cannot believe how goddamn dumb you are.
I don't find it difficult at all to believe how dumb this fascist is because most people don't know much about fascism in general or Hitler's version of it in particular, and most people in democracies share several fascist ideas with Hitler because their democratic ideas aren't that different from fascism, which is what makes the transition from one to the other occur so frequently and so easily.
What she is having to cope with intellectually is a fascist who suddenly (if the story about the AI translation is true) finds out how much he has in common with a long-gone German fascist. And all she has as an argument against this happening is that he
should know better than this, that it's not
comme il faut for democrats to agree with Hitler.
In fact, her contemporary fascist feels betrayed because nobody ever told him how great Hitlers's ideas were! That's how little he claims to have known in advance! And he is not entirely wrong: When democrats confront fascism, they prefer to ignore the
ideas of fascism. Instead, the confrontation is a psychologization: Hitler and his henchmen were bad people. (Another thing democrats have in common with fascists, cf. Trump's
bad hombres.)
It's a great example of how portraying somebody as a monster without seriously criticizing his ideas does nothing whatsoever to immunize people against those ideas. It's like when Democrats/democrats portray themselves as the better alternative to the fascist Trump by pointing out that
their version of deporting immigrants would make deportations run much smoother, without glitches, and in accordance with the current laws and regulations - which appear to be about to change.
The mere mention of the
name 'Hitler' is supposed to make the fascist exclaim,
'Get thee hence, Satan!' However, he doesn't, and It's not at all difficult to understand why: He's a
fascist! Why would he?!
It's a little like when she declares that
"Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools."
No, it isn't. It's got nothing to do with socialism. And calling anti-Semites fools is as unconvincing as calling conspiracy nuts stupid or dumb (or nuts). It doesn't make it clear
why anti-Semitism is foolish.
Wynn has an example of somebody else, who also doesn't know how to handle fascists. It appears to be from a social-media post:
Losing my husband/best friend
He is the only one who can see the truth and all the rest of us are brainwashed, stupid, being controlled by the media (who are controlled by China).
There is that word
stupid again, but this time it's from a fascist conspiracy nut targeting a democrat (I assume).
It would have been interesting to hear if or how the woman had tried to argue against her husband's conspiracy theories, but the post is about the loss.
Wynn has a hypothesis about what makes celebrities become conspiracy theorists. Her idea is that it is caused by incidents of public humiliation. Her examples are Naomi Klein, Candace Owens and David Icke. I am not sure that it is true. In the case of David Icke, he had obviously gone insane before he was humiliated in public. As Wynn's clip shows, people started laughing at him when he claimed that he was the son of God!
Her idea makes more sense in the case of Klein and Owens, but I am still not sure that it is correct. Judging by the (much fewer) cases I know of Danish celebrities who became conspiracy theorists, I get the impression that it has more to do with narcissistic opportunism: Celebrities tend to hunger for an audience, and if they feel let down by the audience they used to cater to, catering to another is more like a career choice, and in order to attract the attention of that other audience, it often requires being more outrageous than anybody else.
Anyway, Wynn mentions celebrity conspiracy nuts as an introduction to the more ordinary kind:
Of course, for everyday non-celebrity conspiracists, the source of that humiliation might be more subtle: It could be a divorce, losing a job, or just a feeling that your life didn't turn out the way you wanted it to. You miss being young and full of hope, and you're, like, 'Who took that from me?' (...) A lot of men, in particular, feel humiliated by modernity itself. Like in Fight Club, these middle-class men feel emasculated by their white-collar jobs. Cucked! And conspiracy investigation can be a way to reclaim heroic masculinity from the comfort of your desk chair. And it is a traditionally masculine activity, though recently that's changed. A lot of women get into conspiracism via alternative health and wellness, often after frustrating or humiliating experiences with mainstream medicine, which can still be quite misogynistic. A lot of women got into QAnon because of its MeToo-adjacent themes of exposing powerful sex criminals and the sort of heroic femininity of saving children.
I think Wynn is on to something here, and yet she misses it. And I think she misses it because of her own dualism, which is ironic because she already warned against that: See the video's table of contents!
The dualism she operates with is, the idea of sensible, 'normal', sane vs. the delusional thinking of conspiracy theorists. For this reason, she doesn't really delve into where exactly the conspiracy nuts come from before they went down the rabbit hole. It's like when Christians think of themselves as sensible, normal and sane, and describe other believers as
infidels when, in reality, the Christianity, Islam and Judaism are very similar in most respects.
The most important aspect of becoming a conspiracy believer is what they used to believe before they went the conspiracy way. In the case of women, alternative health and wellness is not exactly free of delusions, neither is the ideal of heroic masculinity or femininity. Wynn makes the mistake of focussing on the disappointment, which is probably the trigger that makes people go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but she tends to leave out the contents of the previous delusions, what people believed before they were disappointed, disillusioned - but not enough to let go of the delusions. The new delusions, the conspiracy ideas, are not the opposite of the ones they already had. They are the
radicalization of those delusions, which makes the old delusions look almost sane in comparison.
I'll explain this in more detail when I have the time.
en.wikipedia.org
