One writer who offered this idea was Josh Hart, a psychology professor at Union College. Hart gave the idea that climate change is a hoax as an example of a conservative theory. For the liberals, Hart said the thought that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in 2016 is a conspiracy theory. As I pointed out in my September 4 post, these two theories are not equivalent.
Let’s compare a few other conspiracy theories. First some conservative examples: The shootings of elementary students at Sandy Hook is a hoax. The Moon Landing is another staged hoax. The American government was somehow complicit in airplane crashes in September 9/11. Prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, were involved in some kind of child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant. The one that liberals are more likely to follow is that Donald Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel.
The conservative conspiracy stories are ludicrous. There is zero evidence to support any of them. On the contrary, major news sources have published evidence things did not happen the way theorists portray them. A sick young man did shoot elementary students at Sandy Hook. Astronauts did land on the moon. A group of Moslem extremists piloted hijacked planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon. The American government had no prior knowledge of the plot. Not only was the story about Democrats being involved in a sex ring false, the restaurant where this supposedly took place didn’t even have a basement. Sarah Palin referred to the mainstream media as the “lamestream” media because it did not publish the conspiracy stories without evidence.
The pee story might or might not be true. It came from a group hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump. The campaign hired Fusion GPS to look into Trump’s ties to Russia. Fusion GPS in turn hired Christopher Steele, a retired British intelligence agent. Evidently Steele heard stories about Trump hiring prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel. The reason he wanted that done is that the bed had once been occupied by Barack and Michelle Obama.
We don’t know if the story is true. If it is true, it is not a nice thing to do, but it pales beside Trump’s many disgraceful acts. There is another difference between the conservative conspiracy theories and liberal theories. That is the strength of the belief. Conservatives are strongly convinced that climate change is a liberal hoax. The Trump administration has eased many of the restrictions put in place by the Obama administration to reduce greenhouse gas. Conservatives are much more likely to consider the coronavirus a hoax and consider rules to wear a mask a violation of their civil rights. They march and demonstrate to protests the tyranny of having to wear a mask.
Liberals are not likely to care about the Trump pee story. If it is true, it does not make that much difference, because much worse things about Donald Trump are already well known.
Finally we come to the conclusion that conspiracy theories are in fact a right-wing phenomenon. Here is what the authors of The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking have to say:
“It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left‐right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States em-brace conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophi-cal, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in Amer-ican Politics to doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults we investigated the relation-ship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspira-torial thinking in general.
“Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general. Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to en-gage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals. The relationship between ideology and con-spiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics.
“Let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid style. The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to under-mine and destroy a way of life.” (Richard Hofstadter, 1964, p. 29)
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