Conspiracy theories in politics: fun shared hobby to "blame the liberals and elites"

[Tero]

I'm not interested in the theories as far as debunking etc. I was mainly interested in how the use of them is tightly joined to the right at this time. Jewish space lasers?

Marjorie Taylor Greene - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It did not have the right impact without the "Jewish" part. The purpose is to at first grab attention and spread like wildfire. But there are parts that the person inventing the conspiracy wants to hang on to. She gets her people to share their ideas and make fun of elites. "Owning the libs."

Trump himself seems to grab onto a new one every time he can. If you can attach a country or ethnic group to it, even better. Trump has no use for facts. He needs these things like he needs rallies. Material for his stand up routine. He does not need to explain it well, like Hannibal Lecter. It is just there for a joke. He needs the crowds and social media for the stuff. He is going to be so depressed when he is nothing in a few years and TV has gone past him and his weird hobbies.

To sum up: My take is that there are only two goals: 1 distract and throw doubt on something, get poltical support of the regular folks in doubting the elites 2 togetherness, sharing.

With Trump there is a big factor that is maybe in all the wacko end of MAGA polticians: secret message to the faithful followers suggesting something rather disgusting about a group (Jews, foreigners, libs) without actually using the word.

 

[Donal]

In a lot of cases, it combines 2 rather ugly parts of our nature:

1) I don't understand it, therefor it is wrong

2) those people are different than me, therefor they are scary

It also gives people seeking power an easy way to rile up support. Especially if they can deflect from their own culpability in the problem.

It's not that we pushed to make the dollar as the world's reserve currency to prop us up as the leaders for globalization. The Jew bankers are why you can't get a good manufacturing job like your dad and grandfather (Grammarly had fun with that sentence).

Also, I don't think that an individual conservative is more susceptible to conspiracy thinking than an individual liberal. It's because conspiracy thinking works better for large groups of modern conservatives. Getting liberals together on anything is like herding cats. If you try to blame "them", at least some of the liberals are going to protest because "I like them" or "I'm one of them". Conservatives are generally united in their opposition to "others" and the unfamiliar. Once you get them in a group and give them someone to vilify, they all fall in line.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Boil complex reality down to simple mythology. That appeals to people who aren't good at, or fond of, critical thinking.

 

[Tero]

Looking for one:

Michele Fiore - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Description of treatments possible under Right-to-Try bill​

Fiore was a primary sponsor of the 2015 Nevada Right-to-Try bill,<a legislation that allows doctors to perform medical procedures that are being used in ongoing FDA-approved clinical trials but have not achieved FDA approval for terminally ill patients who are not responding to traditional medical treatment.edition of her radio show, discussing Right-to-Try, Fiore described the cancer treatment by Cancer is a Fungus author Tullio Simoncini as an example of treatments that the terminally ill could access under Right-to-Try: "If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a PICC line into your body and we're flushing, let's say, salt water, sodium carbonate, through that line, and flushing out the fungus. ... These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective."
She said, "I made comments about cancer that I didn't put in the proper context." She had had a friend with cancer who had made "radical improvement using a doctor out of Italy's treatment covered in his book and his book was called Cancer Is A Fungus ... it was a tumor therapy of some sort.
Using sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) as a cancer treatment is espoused by Tullio Simoncini and is known as the Simoncini cancer treatment. This method has not been proven, and no evidence suggests that it or treatment with salt water works, but if either were to be accepted under the bill's requirements it could be legally considered a non-FDA-approved treatment that a terminally ill patient in Nevada could request.

There is something there, new to my list. A real attempt to prove "the government was wrong." What makes it a political tool is that she used it as a campaign device, promoting "freedom."
Strangely the FDA is still included.

The bill that Fiore introduced eight days before her 2015 show requires that the drug, product or device "have successfully completed Phase 1 of a clinical trial" and that it be "tested in a clinical trial that has been approved by the [FDA]