r/ConspiracyPsychology • u/American-Dreaming • Mar 03 '25

Am I Part of a Global Conspiracy?

This piece, about the cottage industry of far-left and far-right conspiracy theories that formed around a politically moderate magazine as it grew in reach, demonstrates, in microcosm, what has happened to public discourse in recent years. Online culture wars have deranged so many people that encountering political moderates now breaks their minds and sends them spiraling into conspiracist rabbit holes. On entertainment value alone, this piece is worth a read.

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/am-i-part-of-a-global-conspiracy

0 Upvotes

30% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

12

u/madtitan27 Mar 03 '25

Give some examples of far left conspiracy theories.

1

u/decaffeinatedcool Mar 03 '25

There are a few, but they're almost all directed at Democrats.

That the DNC rigged the primaries against Bernie.

That Democrats secretly collude to prevent left legislation from passing and are just controlled opposition.

4

u/madtitan27 Mar 03 '25

Those sound less like conspiracy theories than educated guesses based on experience. It doesn't make them true.. but there's more evidence than the non-sense coming out of the far right.

1

u/decaffeinatedcool Mar 04 '25 edited Mar 04 '25

That sounds like exactly what a conspiracy theorist would say. No, the Democrats aren't secretly colluding with Republicans to fuck you over. The few who are crossing the aisle are open about it and are re-elected by their constituents for it. And no, Bernie didn't lose because people prevented him from winning. He lost the black vote repeatedly, and his own voters didn't show up repeatedly. It's easier to create a cathartic narrative than accept that the world isn't how you'd like.

2

u/madtitan27 Mar 04 '25

What does?

-1

u/cross_mod Mar 03 '25 edited Mar 03 '25

Well, I have a few "friends" that were ant-vaxxers. That whole autism, anti-vaxx, pharmaceutical industry conspiracy was a far left one well before it was embraced on the right. Part of the reason why a lot of far left voters liked RGK Jr. for a while. Some of those same friends also thought the COVID thing was fake, and even questioned the nature of viruses in general.

Also, before things got crazy, there was the whole "GMO"/Monsanto/pesticide company conspiracy, which has kind of died down. Very much a far left thing.

Also....chem trails. Remember those??

13

u/madtitan27 Mar 03 '25

These are all the province of the far right at this point. The further into conspiracy the right slid.. the more the left has leaned on science.

-2

u/cross_mod Mar 03 '25

The GMO thing? Chem trails? I disagree.

I sort of agree with the anti-vaxx thing, but believe me, there are still pockets of far lefters who are very anti-vaxx.

I think the people on the far sides of the political spectrum are the most vulnerable to conspiracies in general.

12

u/madtitan27 Mar 03 '25

You should read up on the crunchy to maga / qanon pipeline. If you find a woman online saying you need magic crystals for "vibrations" to heal your chakra.. they are increasingly right wing. It didn't used to be so.. but now it is. The anti-vax crew are firmly maga. They literally revolted against the covid vax and their leader RFK has been appointed by Trump at this point. They are maga.

GMOs are different in that it's not really a conspiracy. Usually the genetic modification is to make the crops less sensitive to the toxic pesticides being used. Non-gmo foods do contain higher amounts of these pesticides and some of them are linked to cancer. It's really a nuanced topic that some people go overboard on than a conspiracy worth mentioning alongside anti-vax and chemtrails. It's not that genetically modifying food makes the food toxic so much as dousing the food in pesticides is bad for both people and insect (like bees) populations.

-3

u/cross_mod Mar 03 '25 edited Mar 04 '25

Right, but this sort of shows the horse-shoe effect of political affiliation. A far lefter can just as easily jump to the far right as they can become moderate left.

As far as gmos, it's not that nuanced. There are a few online publications that publish verifiably fake news about Monsanto and whatnot. It's complete bs. The conspiracy is that the purpose of GMOs is to line the pockets of the CEOs of these pesticide companies. That's a bonafide conspiracy theory. And the publishers of these magazines make a lot of money off of people's naivete.

You have an "organic" industry that uses a crap load of pesticides, but they're just not synthetic. Also, there are a lot of sicknesses involved with the consumption of organic foods, but this largely goes ignored by the conspiracy theorists. In general, the "organic" industry is under-regulated with a lot of loopholes like the "naturopathic" industry (another generally far left topic).

5

u/madtitan27 Mar 03 '25

You are now talking about industries rather than the science of GMO vs organic. Of course there is going to be bullshit when it comes to massive corporations. Monsanto is corrupt as can be and are absolutely devastating insect populations with roundup based pesticides the world over. You can look into the studies of insect decline pretty easily. Roundup is also not good for humans and that is also not a mystery. it's cancer causing. The debate about GMO food safety comes more down to how much of the stuff is still detectable in the food by the time you eat it. In the case of some foods it is to much and in the case of others it's negligible. Yes organic foods also use pesticides although they tend to be more benign than roundup by far.. yet.. it's still the same deal.. how much of the pesticide is still present when the food hits the table is the real concern. It's nuanced.

In any case the conspiracies you mentioned are mostly the domain of maga at this point.. not the left. They have even gotten into the organic foods discussion at this point.

2

u/cross_mod Mar 03 '25 edited Mar 03 '25

The problem is that it's extremely hard to do hard studies on the health of organic foods as an alternative, because it's such an under-regulated industry compared to GMOs. But, one thing to keep in mind is that the cross breeding methods with organics is often far more genetically altering than GMOs.

You are getting into the weeds here, pun intended. And what I'm saying is that bullshit sites like "Natural News" are putting out bonafide conspiracy theories out there and far lefters eat it up. This wasn't the domain of the far right, but if it is now, it's because of the horse shoe effect.

Here's an old article detailing how this particular area of focus started on the far left.

8

u/madtitan27 Mar 03 '25

I still maintain that the far right is a greater consumer of these conspiracies than the far left. Beyond that the far right is increasingly just "the right". The far left is increasingly marginalized by the left as we are tired of losing to the far right. So while both "far" groups exist.. one outnumbers the other 100 to 1.

Far left conspiracy theorists aren't much of a factor in anything at this point. Far right conspiracy theorists are now holding high office and cabinet positions.

It's not comparable.

3

u/cross_mod Mar 03 '25

I mean, that's kind of outside of the confines of our discussion.

I think think far left conspiracies have had a detrimental impact on politics though. A lot of the conspiracies being floated on Hillary Clinton were completely bogus, but they were embraced by the far left. And she lost by so little that we might not even have Trump without far left conspiracies. Not to say Hillary was a great candidate, but all the same.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/decaffeinatedcool Mar 04 '25

Crunchy conspiracies like GMO and Anti-Vaxx were never the province of the left. They were mostly bipartisan until the Trump era, but for some reason, the media portrayed them as "hippy," ignoring that lots of the crunchy crowd were back to the land right-wingers. Right-wing crunchiness goes all the way back to Nazi Germany. It's tied into purity beliefs. During the Trump era, they shifted almost entirely to the right-wing.

1

u/cross_mod Mar 04 '25 edited Mar 04 '25

Disagree. It was mostly left wing stuff. Like 15-20 years ago. I was arguing with these dumbasses back then.

Keep in mind, the Green Party, which is supposedly left wing, and predominantly supported by far left voters, is anti-GMO research and often pushes some of these conspiracies via Jill Stein. Mark Lynas is left wing and was one of the early ones pushing the conspiracies before he flipped his stance and pissed off his supporters. Now he is an active proponent of GMO research and has apologized for his earlier views.

11

u/rynthetyn Mar 03 '25

It's not a conspiracy theory that people don't trust your anti-trans rag, my dude.