Conspiracy on the Left (Patreon)

So it’s [CURRENT YEAR] - We’ve lived through a lot together haven’t we? The cracks are really starting to show, the contradictions are sharpening, and we’re all on the same page: capitalism is on the way out, it’s time to build big, sexy communism! It’s all going just swimmingly. Us commies have firmly cemented our ideas as the hot new thing - the punk rock ideology. Everybody wants a piece, and the good news is that under communism everyone can have a piece.

But being so popular isn’t all just a walk in the park - it does come with its own problems. This essay is about growth and division: what happens when social groups get bigger.

First though, let’s get some context. Throughout the 60s and 70s in the US, intelligence agencies worked hard to undermine, disband and destroy leftist organisations - even just mutual aid networks that were giving food to the hungry and shelter to the homeless. Groups like the Black Panthers were branded “the biggest domestic threat to national security” and all their leaders started winding up dead.

With revolutionary leftist groups on the retreat, the FBI weren’t idle. They weren’t satisfied with just pushing leftists off the table, they had to own the whole, uh, restaurant? Is that a good metaphor? They started writing their own leftist theory to spread through radical circles, encouraging reformist ideas and driving focus away from government surveillance and intelligence, and onto the mainstream media.

They even made up a guy: the FBI fabricated an entire academic publication history dating back through the 50s, and then had their fictitious academic start publishing “subversive” books teaching leftists how the mainstream media manipulates the population. This strategy was a huge boon for the intelligence community for a few reasons: as previously mentioned, it drew attention away from government agencies as the enemy of the left; it explained what the media did in terms of market forces rather than an actively malicious campaign of manipulation; but crucially at the same time it fit in neatly with existing popular conspiracy theories - (((they))) control “the media”. They were banking on there being enough anti-semites in radical circles that this fabricated theory would cause huge schisms while also driving the conversation away from direct action and organising.

However, they knew their academic’s credibility would quickly wane without public appearances, so they took one of their undercover agents who had been infiltrating leftist circles for over a decade already, and attributed this fabricated writing to him, an agent by the name of Noam Chomsky.

No, okay, obviously this is all nonsense. Noam Chomsky is not an undercover FBI agent, I was telling you a little story I made up to illustrate some points about how conspiracy theories work.

During that story, most of you at some point realised what I was doing, but at what point? How much did you believe up until then? Some of what I said was actually true, some parts were based closely on real things that happened. Do you know which parts?

I’m speaking to tens of thousands of people right now - not to brag - and if I hadn’t said all of this was made up, some of you would have taken me seriously. Some of you even, are smaller content creators who would have cited this video as a source and told even more people. Even now that I’ve said it’s fake, there are some people who are at home going “ *puff* I bet it is real though. She says it isn’t but I wouldn’t put it past them!”

I also worked in criticisms of Chomsky that some people have so that people predisposed to dislike him would be more likely to buy in, and here’s a nice big juicy important point: what does “buy in” mean? I didn’t say believe, I said buy in. A huge amount of the traction and momentum that conspiracy theories need to spread comes from people who don’t think they really believe them, just because they don’t believe 100% of what they’ve been told.

It works a lot like paranormal investigation shows. The vast majority of the audience are sitting there going “I can’t believe everyone else is buying this crap! Real ghosts don’t even look like that!” and only a relatively small number of people are going “ *puff* I always suspected it was Abraham Lincoln’s ghost that killed JFK! This show fucking rules!”

Firefighter transition

Welcome back to fire safety lessons! As many of you know, the anti-fire department has been busier than ever lately. There have been a lot of fires to put out, but there’s also been a massive uptick in new volunteers! A problem we’ve been noticing though, is that while lots more volunteers are joining the department, not all of them are as anti-fire as the job really requires. Some of them claim to be anti-fire but then they turn around and try to recruit arsonists to join the department! Some new volunteers don’t even claim to be anti-fire at all. Most worryingly, some people are claiming the fire isn’t even real, which is a really serious problem, because as much as I love the department, I have to admit we often like to think of ourselves as immune to fire, and the truth is: we’re not.

Conspiracy on the Left

Conspiracy theories have been fascinating to me for as long as I can remember. They have this bizarre relationship to reality that makes them tantalising. First learning about the whacky bullshit that people believe and then figuring out how it relates to the real world, which parts are total gibberish and which parts are true or at least based on the truth is an enticing puzzle. It’s like a cryptic crossword where every answer is, sooner or later, “the jews”.

Imagine my delight at finding myself being a transgender leftist youtuber, simultaneously a member of several different groups about which people believe all sorts of nonsense! What a treat!

I know that lots of you are here to hear about some whacky cranks and the funny things they believe in, but we really ought to learn something about how conspiracy belief works before we can talk about any of that.

Richard Hofstadter is a name that comes up a lot in the academic writing about conspiracy theories, and I should know I’ve been reading it all! I wouldn’t normally read this much for a project, but conspiracy belief is actually a relatively new and small field and I… read it for fun… I really like conspiracy theories.

Hofstadter wrote the OG essay in the field of conspiracy research, The Paranoid Style In American Politics, and at the time nobody cared because unlike me and my cool friends who love reading about conspiracy theories, most people didn’t care much about conspiracy theories until american conservatives started noticeably living in an utterly different version of reality from american liberals. America is going to be utterly inescapable in this discussion not only because the biggest conspiracist movements are there and therefore most of the modern thought about conspiracism is there, but because, as Hofstadter pointed out and others have examined in more detail since, the style of politics they practice over there across the pond is very nurturing to conspiracy theories. More on that shortly.

Richard Hofstadter’s original essay is very good but I won’t be quoting from it extensively here because as the author notes, when he says “paranoid style” he means that the political style of conspiracism resembles people clinically diagnosed as paranoid, and while I think the metaphor is apt, the way he writes about how “the paranoid thinks this, the paranoid does these things” is a little tasteless. But as Hofstadter writes, “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content” so let’s talk about the ways in which conspiracy theories are believed.

In a literature review titled Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domain Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Karen M Douglas set out four fundamental things to understand about conspiracism. Take note, intrepid investigator, these are your four rules to help you find up from down when you’re all the way down the rabbithole.

1. Conspiracy Belief is Universal

In other words, there is no demographic that is immune to conspiracy belief, anybody could be a conspiracy theorist. There is no divide in race, gender or politics that would more reliably tell you who believes in conspiracy theories.

This one is interesting already, because although you’ve clicked on this video and watched this far, a lot of people are probably thinking “but Sophie, conspiracy theories are for right wingers!” Not so! Conspiracy theories are for everyone! Yay!

For instance about 60% of Americans today believe that JFK was killed by a conspiracy rather than Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, and that percentage doesn’t dramatically change much for any group, including people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 versus people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. There’s a 2 percent difference, and let me tell you 2 percent does not explain QAnon because when surveyed today 17% of Americans agree with the statement “A group of satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring is trying to control our politics and media”. 37% were unsure.

I’m going to stick with JFK because it’s a very useful example for a bunch of reasons. As demonstrated above, most people statistically agree that it’s true, and they’re probably right, right? But unlike me and my cool friends who have healthy hobbies and go outdoors every day, most people didn’t come to that conclusion by examining bullet trajectories or pouring over declassified CIA documents. No, most people believe JFK was killed by a conspiracy because:

1. Conspiracy belief is emotional

It can be easy to assume that because conspiracy theorists love to pull out facts and minute details to prop up a theory then conspiracy belief must be rooted in analytical thinking, whereas actually conspiracy belief is rooted in intuitive thinking - emotional thinking. We tend to believe something happened because people around us also believe it and because it seems sensible based on what we already know of history. On this ground leftists should actually be a lot more susceptible to conspiracy theories, because when you know the CIA is responsible for events like “The Silent Holocaust” it seems plausible they could be up to any kind of villanous crap. Because of that, we need to be extra careful in these discussions to understand the difference between rhetoric that we politically agree with and verifiable facts.

There has been a lot of writing I think is very useful which we will barely touch on today about how anxiety feeds into conspiracy belief, but it’s more of a psychological approach and today we need to think more sociologically. That said, another reason JFK is so interesting is that we can see a change over time in this case, because when the Warren Commission first released its report on the assassination, 87% of americans believed that Oswald acted alone. If you imagine a teenager at the time that JFK was killed, who then lived through everything that the American government did in the 60 years since - civil rights, the assassination of MLK, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the vietnam war, the whole of the 80s, the rise of the internet, 9/11 - some pretty damn turbulent stuff has happened since JFK was killed, and an alternate reality where JFK got to live out his term and made a safe, happy, harmonious society appeals both to progressive liberals and to modern reactionaries.

Now we should think about a mechanism by which the problem spreads. If you believe things because they fit into the story of the world you’ve been told, and because other people around you think it, then what happens when you already believe in a conspiracy theory and another one, similar in its shape if not content and containing the same bad guys, comes along? And what happens when everyone around you is in the same media environment as you and hears all the same things you do? This is how people wind up believing nothing but conspiracy theories, and it’s also an important feature of conspiracy belief. Conspiracy theories exist in what is called

The Cultic Milieu

I still can’t spell “milieu” right off the top of my head and I have so very little clue how to pronounce it. You’d think as a writer I’d be good at spelling but the moment I look away I could not tell you the letters in that bad boy.

Anyway, the cultic milieu is a cultural and imaginative space where various conspiracy theories propagate, kinda wriggling around, vibing in the milieu just feeding off the same audience of people who are really into conspiracy theories, and it’s why someone who can be described as a conspiracy theorist is unlikely to only believe in one completely isolated conspiracy theory. As Michael Barkun says in Culture of Conspiracy and two men called Joseph say in American Conspiracy Theories, America has a particularly strong and vibrant cultic milieu.

But that idea of someone who’s entire reality is shaped by conspiracy theories is what leads us to the third principle, that:

1. Conspiracy belief is consequential

This is how we can start to distinguish between the entire 60% of Americans who believe Oswald wasn’t acting alone, and the proportion of people we would call “conspiracy theorists”. 60% of Americans “buy in” to a JFK conspiracy theory, but for some smaller number of people, they live in a reality where JFK was definitely killed by the deep state…who also faked the moonlanding, and also started the Vietnam war BECAUSE they are reptilians from the hollow earth. And if you live in that reality, it is your moral obligation to do everything you can to fight the reptilian overlords and defend humanity. For a counter example, if you believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, then it is your moral obligation to do everything you can to change the shape of global power to stop it, which is why many people who don’t want to change the shape of global power choose to live in a reality where anthropogenic climate change is not real, or not significant, or not stoppable. This is where the classic hippy “never put your name on a list” comes from. The point is, conspiracy belief has consequences, whether those consequences are refusing to recycle, publishing a book calling youtubers CIA funded shills, or your wife leaving you because you ask every transgender person you meet whether they are an adrenochrome huffing demon.

But the way we’ve been talking about conspiracy theories so far may not line up with many people’s observable reality that it is the modern right wing, at least in the anglosphere, who buy into, believe, and spread, the majority of conspiracy theories.And that’s why we need the fourth and final principle, that:

1. Conspiracy belief is social

I am about to say one of, if not the, most important phrase in all of the conspiracy theory research I’ve encountered. So put your lil listening ears on, ya cutie patooties. “Conspiracy theories reflect inter-group social conflicts.” In other words, the exact reason that conspiracy theories arise is because two groups are conflicting, but on both sides, not everyone has a complete picture of why or how. There is an intergroup social conflict between American conservatives and liberals. And Qanon is a narrative to explain that conflict to conservatives that puts them in the right. This is why it features so much projection. Claims that the social justice left are burning books while themselves banning and censoring the exact same information literally burned by the nazis; hyperfocus on the liberal pedophilic cabal while supporting Trump, a well known sexual abuser and alleged pedophile who supports and defends other alleged pedophiles (Moore, Epstein). The emotional truth being defended here is, well even if we’re bad, they’re worse.

When George Bush was in government, the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job was significantly more popular on the left than on the right, and far more popular outside of America than within it. Like Qanon, this conspiracy theory was providing a comforting narrative to leftists who saw the terror attacks as a consequence of American foreign policy. “9/11 was an inside job” reflects the perspective that America spent decades bombing the middle east and that the American government is not without blame for 9/11. That’s the thing about emotional truth, it doesn’t always line up cleanly or comfortably with the reality that you're being presented with, and when that cognitive dissonance happens a lot of people choose to lie to themselves.

And those are the tenets of conspiratorial belief.

Buying in

The cultic milieu is called a milieu because a milieu necessarily implies structurelessness and chaos, and that’s one of the first things that researchers into the conspiracies realised. The conspiracy space is incredibly chaotic. Conspiracy theories don’t typically have one standardised narrative. They may not even feature the same characters. And as I said before, way more people “buy in” to some element of conspiracy theories than actually wholeheartedly believe them. And besides people who believe and buy in to conspiracy theories, there are people who see them as a means to an end. Not to say that people who have something to materially gain from spinning conspiracy theories believe nothing, after all, it’s a lot easier to convince others of something that you yourself believe in, but there are people who cynically exploit conspiracy theory audiences for their own ends.

Enter: George Galloway.

George Galloway, talk show host, former British politician and proud fedora owner was a Member of British Parliament - so there’s a fucking red flag - for Labour from 1987 until 2003. From very early in his career he declared himself a socialist, a revolutionary, and an anti-imperialist, and here’s where we’re going to start running into some things that will stay with us throughout this journey. There is a certain type of electoral politics marxist within the imperial core who describes themself as an anti-imperialist, and uh..

In 1994 on a trip to the Middle East, where George Galloway met with Saddam Hussein, Galloway told the Iraqi President "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability [...] I can honestly tell you that there was not a single person to whom I told I was coming to Iraq and hoping to meet with yourself who did not wish me to convey their heartfelt, fraternal greetings and support."

So quick thing here - uh, what the fuck? Look George, just because a group call themselves socialist doesn’t mean you have to try and make friends with a genocidal maniac! Saddam Hussein killed over 200,000 people - still fewer Iraqis than Tony Blair killed but who’s counting? Not The Hague, apparently. Not yet anyway.

Sadly, most people seem to remember George for being kind of cringe on Celebrity Big Brother one time and pretending to be a cat, but Galloway has a long history of walking this weird line between being kinda rad, like calling George Bush “the world’s biggest terrorist” and being extremely cringe, like trying to justify a gay man being executed by the Iranian government.

Two things can be true at once: a regime can be committing horrifying and indefensible abuses and at the same time warmongering politicians and journalists in the imperial core can be using those abuses as a pretext for invasion and more imperialist wars. This doesn’t make the regime good or every bad thing you hear about the regime false. This is a kind of binaristic logic which, when combined with a type of person who is desperate for any kind of attention, is very dangerous. I’ve heard it’s popular to do foreshadowing in your videos now - that’s foreshadowing.

While we might be tempted to think of George Galloway in more glowing terms than Joe Rogan or David Icke,  he has been a guest on Alex Jones’ show several times, including once in 2005 when Galloway had recently been expelled from the Labour Party. Galloway keeps insisting that the attention on him when he’s opposing an illegal war is “The mother of all smokescreens” - eh, it’s a bit clunky but I get what he’s going for. He says it like 6 times though.

Galloway does try to keep his hands clean and just court conspiracy theorist audiences, but now and then he slips up and shows what he really thinks, usually manifesting as antisemitism - which has led to George losing multiple jobs.

Galloway, like lots of modern anti semites, works hard to give himself plausible deniability by always couching his attacks in criticisms of Israel, zionists, international finance but he’ll still say things like “a criminal cabal” runs the country or that there are "No #Israël flags on the Cup!" because Liverpool beat Tottenham at the futbol. Tottenham is a neighbourhood in London where a lot of jewish people live, and antisemitism around the Tottenham football club goes back decades, even though today Tottenham Hotspurs don’t actually have statistically more jewish supporters than any other club. Nonetheless, here’s George

Then he and his defenders can smugly pretend they’re just complaining about big finance in politics and sports and like: no George. Leftists hate global capitalism. Leftists hate the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. Leftists hate the neocolonial wave of occupation in Palestine. You hate jews.

Also a family member of mine died at Hillsborough, so on behalf of the “fallen 96” go fuck yourself George.

Nowadays Galloway has a talkshow produced by Russia Today called MOAT or Mother of all Talkshows christ on a cracker George. RT of course only produces the highest quality content. He’s also the Leader of The Workers Party of Great Britain, a reactionary pseudocommunist party that much like Galloway spends most of its time getting more irrelevant and more bigoted.

The deputy leader of WPB is Joti Brar, who wikipedia describes as “an outspoken critic of [...] ‘transgenderism’” but I would describe as “a rancid little worm” - and yeah if you hadn’t guessed George Galloway’s opinions about trans people… they’re not great.

In case I’m waffling here or mincing my words, here’s a picture of George Galloway with Nigel Farage:

And here he is shaking hands with Steve Bannon:

Galloway is a good example of someone who buys in but doesn’t necessarily believe. He certainly doesn’t share much explicitly conspiracist content, but you only have to look at his biggest audience - surprisingly enough, on Facebook - to see that the people George is speaking to are picking up what he’s laying down. His comments are constantly full of mentions of globalists, The Great Reset - a popular conspiracy theory among anti-vaxxers - and Iver… I can’t say the name of the horse paste on YouTube but people also complain when I say horse paste so let’s say… Mr. Chips’ patented Apple Jelly.

Galloway is a kind of socialist who thinks that appealing to bigots, reactionaries and conspiracy cranks helps him appeal to the real working class, and he’s getting exactly the audience that he’s been asking for.

Speaking of Seabiscuit’s Secret Sauce, someone who’s been increasingly conspiratorial for a long time who recently took an anti-vaccine turn is Jimmy Dore. Shaun already made a great video unpacking Dore lying about Shadowfax Frubes so I’m not going to retread the exact same ground here.

Jimmy Dore made a name for himself online through The Young Turks, but for as long as Dore has been doing politics in the public eye he’s tended towards conspiracism - in much the same way as Galloway, Dore has repeatedly tried to deny the horrific crimes of dictators like Bashar al-Assad (who Galloway also vehemently defends) by saying that the mainstream media is lying about war crimes and human rights abuses. It comes from this place where folks on the left get so much validation and recognition for pointing out where the mainstream media and the government lie about stuff that everything promoted in the mainstream must be implicitly untrustworthy.

Here’s a transcript of Dore’s appearance on The Last American Vagabond podcast, on an episode titled The Shifting Political Landscape of the COVID 19 Deception.

19:40 - “You’re just repeating propaganda because you’re a coward and you go along with herd mentality. And I can’t blame regular people for thinking that Ivermectin is some kind of redneck drug that people are – and horse paste – because everybody tells them that.”

20:48 - “Just amazing that that won’t show up on her wikipedia page, but even when I get something right it will follow me around for the rest of my life. Like, when I was right about this [sic] Syrian gas attacks being false flags uhh and now they still say Jimmy Dore’s a conspiracy theorist because he says that the Syrian gas attacks are false flags – but it’s been proven! It’s been proven true that they were false flags. The OPCW whistleblowers have proven that were true [sic] but that’ll never – they’ll never take that off of wikipedia and that’ll never follow MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, Rolling Stone, Joy Ann Reid, none of the people who pushed that completely 100% false story - and by the way the only thing you had to do to debunk that story was call the hospital, nobody did it! It was reported by everybody, and the retra– by the way Rachel Maddow never took down her tweet about it.”

21:42 - “And so you know censorship is selective because they’ll never censor the establishment. They’re never gonna – again: if you lie at the behest of the establishment, never a price to pay. If you tell the truth that up-ends a lie by the establishment you will be censored.”

I think it’s really interesting to see him shift from using language that recognises dynamics and incentives towards language that talks about the people who disagree with him as his enemies. His language becomes not only more hostile but also more conspiratorial: he’s attributing malice where incompetence and a systemic perspective would explain much more. The specific way that he argues against vaccines is, typically for a conspiracy theorist, by sharing studies that show how alternative treatments could be good maybe, talking about how the mainstream media will never highlight these studies. It’s all selective reading. If it agrees with the narrative, it’s a good and useful fact, and if it disagrees, it’s more mainstream media disinformation.

Dore wants to see himself as some great people’s hero, an underdog defending truth while he’s going to bat for Joe Rogan on twitter.

He also (because of course he supports the Canadian truckers) started calling Justin Trudeau “blackface Hitler” but that’s just objectively hilarious.

From one angle it’s tempting to go easy on Dore. He’s an older guy, he was already more vulnerable, and from what he describes it’s clear that he caught COVID after getting vaccinated, which does happen, but it’s understandable why it would be a really scary experience. I’ve had COVID. It sucks!!

However, what I can’t sympathise with or make any apologies for is spreading dangerous medical advice to vulnerable people who are looking for any excuse not to get vaccinated. The problem with Centaur Shampoo isn’t that it doesn’t work in any case for any course of treatment, the issue is that people who look to popular figures for guidance and advice will take as much of the stuff as possible, way beyond the amount that would be prescribed under any conditions and just poison themselves. I actually know someone who caught COVID and because they still lived with their parents who are MAGA conspiracy theorists, they were forcibly given this fucking dewormer while already sick with coronavirus.

I guess what’s really interesting here is how Jimmy Dore approaches journalism and the search for the truth. He says he’s not a journalist, and he comes from comedy - although I’ve never actually seen him tell a joke, just make that face he makes after what he assumes will be a provocative statement - and I think it’s important to understand that Dore isn’t a journalist even though he’s trying his best to wade deep into issues of credible sources, coverups, manufacturing consent and mainstream media manipulations.

His main argument in that clip for why you should believe him about pony porridge is that Rachel Maddow lies about things, in particular a syrian gas attack that he says was a false flag, and he actually does this all the time. For instance, discussing the mainstream coverage of the gas attacks with Aaron Maté of Grayzone Media, he said “How can you ever trust that news agency ever again? I can’t. And what is the implications of that? What does that say?”

Clearly for Jimmy Dore, once a news outlet has been caught lying they can never be trustworthy again, which certainly has a lot of populist appeal as an idea, and as someone who would like the media to report the perfect truth 100% of the time I find very noble, but in terms of journalistic process, ethics, fact-checking and so on, it doesn’t actually make much sense. What Jimmy Dore is calling a blatant, proven lie is actually a lot messier than he wants to make it seem, and we’re going to have to explore it.

However, I think we’re starting to run into the inevitable problem we were always going to reach here when discussing conspiracy theories on the left. Namely: we all have a tendency to verify stories based on how closely they resemble the history we already know, and some of you, at this point, are thinking “if you know about Operation Gladio none of this is really hard to believe” and some of you are going “ *puff* it was obviously an extension of the area 51 stealth plane program, the deep state military industrial complex attacked Syria to test their transgenderfication gas and they faked the reports to pretend it was chlorine”, but more seriously more of you are thinking “hold up Sophie, false flag attacks are a real thing that does actually happen, and you remember the weapons of mass destruction hype in the 2000s, and you can’t take any side at face value in a war”. The point is, a comprehensive understanding of history, the intelligence community, geopolitics and American Imperialism involves understanding a lot of things that sound like absolute gobbledegook to other people. Before we get any further, we have to confront the question:

What about when conspiracy theories are true?

Following a robbery of FBI offices, documents showed that the government had been involved in illegal surveillance operations, monitoring, infiltrating and even manipulating radical political groups in a counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO. This sounds like a conspiracy theory but is true. I’m breaking no new ground here, this is all on wikipedia. The same documents revealed that the assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton had been a coordinated effort by the FBI and Illinois police.

The history of neoliberalism itself sounds like a conspiracy theory. Milton Friedman and the Chicago school, a bunch of Hyper Capitalist Libertarian fanatics who wound up advising government agencies all over the place, using the CIA to enact coups to implement free market capitalism all over the world.

If you know about this history, a lot of the stuff that Alex Jones and others say about the intelligence community suddenly become apparent references to real things that you know took place. That’s one way that travelling in the milieu of stigmatised knowledge can lead you to conspiracism.

How about something I would call a conspiracy theory, not verified by official sources, which I believe to be true. “The FBI killed Martin Luther King” is a conspiracy theory in that it is not confirmed by any authorised sources and it serves a purpose in discussions of history and in that context it reflects an intergroup social conflict. However, King’s family have been saying that James Earl Ray was framed and that the FBI killed King since literally the day he was killed, and there is plenty of evidence to back that up, though most of it circumstantial. Again, I believe this, I think it’s true, but I’m not telling you that it is true, because as someone with a lot of people listening to me I have a certain responsibility to only work within the realms of what is verifiably true.

When you start to read through the literature around conspiracy theory research, it becomes clear that there’s a division between scholars, and that division comes down to this question: what about when conspiracy theories are true? The issue isn’t how to react to true conspiracy theories or anything so prescriptive - after all these are academics - but rather how we measure “the truth”.

It’s kind of a big question. It’s been perplexing philosophers, morally ambiguous politicians and people coming down from heroic trips for thousands of years now. What like, even is reality, like, man?

In classic rhetorical style I will outline the side I disagree with first, and then tell you why I think it sucks, and the side that I prefer, but I encourage everyone to go and read about it themselves because it’s a complicated subject. The first approach you often encounter is to look at conspiracy theories as a deviation from something called “reality”. How do we know what reality is and what happens in reality? Official sources tell us. What they say on the news is true, and if they make a mistake, sooner or later they’ll let us know and we can update our understanding of reality to accommodate.

In the book Creating Conspiracy Beliefs, the authors cite Keith Harris’ definition of a conspiracy theory, saying that the following criteria make something a conspiracy theory:

1. It posits an explanation for a target event or set of target events that is alternative to the official account of the event(s).
2. Claims that the event(s) was/were brought about by one or more conspirators.
3. Posits that the architects of the event(s) are involved in promoting the official account.
4. Has greater explanatory power than the official account.

The authors go on to say “We define conspiracy belief as ‘the subjective conviction that a small group of powerful actors is secretly working together to produce an unlawful and/or harmful outcome for others in society’”. Yes, imagine if a small group of powerful people were making society worse.

To review, there are official accounts of events, and when people differ from those accounts, claiming that an alternate set of events took place and that the architects or beneficiaries of those events are covering them up, that is a conspiracy theory. When that belief is internalised as an outlook on life, that is conspiracy belief.

Here’s my issue: According to Keith Harris’ criteria, we can very easily point to all sorts of things as conspiracies that are categorically not, and not just because they’re true or exist in “reality”. Various historical genocides meet all of the criteria or at least met them during the period that they were being carried out - the genocide of palestinians by Israeli occupying forces meet the criteria today. Marx’s critique of capitalism is not just beloved by lefto commie radicals but is taken as the basis for even much of modern capitalist economics, yet thanks to registered passenger on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane and Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement Tony Blair, being branded a marxist is a political death sentence in the UK - it would be fair to say that marxism meets all of the criteria. Operation Legacy, a program by the British government to destroy evidence of crimes committed by the British Empire, has been admitted to by the government, but the crimes that were covered up will never be admitted to because the evidence was destroyed. Operation Legacy does not meet the criteria for a conspiracy theory, but the crimes that Operation Legacy covered up do meet the criteria. I think you see my point.

They are treating authority as truth, which is neither logical, safe nor productive.

For instance the Iran-Contra affair is described like this:

“What is known as the Iran-Contra affair was initially an unproven conspiracy theory. Over time however, the evidence showed that the US government had secretly sold weapons to the Khomeini government of Iran with the goal of funding the right-wing Contra Nicaraguan guerillas in violation of the Boland amendment […] Thus unproven conspiracy theories are sometimes subsequently convincingly supported”

And to me that just seems buck wild.

The approach that I prefer, as discussed at length in Culture of Conspiracy by Michael Barkun, is to make a distinction between what we call authorised knowledge and stigmatised knowledge. What is true or untrue is down to the facts, but the mainstream authorities - the government, academia, the news media, et cetera - authorise certain knowledge to be believed as true and stigmatise other knowledge to be disregarded. This terminology I think creates an accurate picture of the state of knowledge in society. Here’s Barkun’s explanation of it:

“Stigmatised knowledge, the broader category in which conspiracy theories nest, is that set of knowledge claims rejected or ignored by certifying institutions - in other words, by authorities of some sort. To advance stigmatised knowledge claims is to challenge authority.”

Which I think is pretty interesting considering the world we find ourselves in now. This of course, didn’t escape Barkun’s attention either. He goes on:

“The movement of stigmatised knowledge into the mainstream, therefore, tells us something about the relative strength of authority, for the stronger authoritative institutions are, the greater their capacity to separate stigmatised knowledge to the fringe. The prevalence of conspiracy theories and other forms of stigmatised knowledge, such as ideas about the year 2012, constitute a barometer that suggests a weakening of authority.

The resilience of such recent features as the ‘birther’ theories that strike at the heart of the presidency and the 9/11 theories that implicate the national government in an attack on American soil are further indicators of this weakening.”

So what really is a conspiracy theory? I’ve left it deliberately vague until now and the only definition I offered I then argued against, and the reason for that is that I’m ambivalent on the exact question we’re discussing. If a conspiracy theory is true, is it no longer a conspiracy theory? I don’t think so, I think conspiracy theories are sometimes true, but I think that the more important distinction is that they are a form of stigmatised knowledge.

People often think that conspiracy theories can be debunked by picking away at particular facts or claims and proving them to be false like pulling out the bottom of a house of cards, but to a conspiracy theorist it’s more like an impressionist painting, showing them what they already feel and know to be true, and debunking does little more than smudging a brushstroke, leaving the overall impression unchanged. Conspiracy theories have a fascinating relationship to the truth because conspiracy theories reflect inter-group social conflicts, and so even when one can be broadly said to “be true” it might mean radically different things to different people.

Take for example the popular modern conspiracy theory and internet meme “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself”. To some this implies a conspiracy involving Hillary Clinton and other liberal politicians, to others it implies Donald Trump and conservatives, but crucially, the truth has very little bearing on the narrative. The veracity of the statement that Epstein was murdered doesn’t change the statement really being made, that members of the American ruling class had provable ties to Jeffrey Epstein that could potentially implicate them in his death, but very few people implicate the ruling class broadly in this conspiracy, rather choosing to implicate their enemies and vindicate their perceived allies. In actuality, the social conflict being described by the theory is between a population who deserve accountable public servants who won’t have ties to child sex traffickers or at the very least a justice system that will strip those people of power if they do, and the ruling class who want to remain unaccountable.

So let’s talk about Jimmy Dore and Syrian gas attacks.

In 2018 in the city of Douma in southern Syria, a gas attack killed between 40 and 50 people and wounded hundreds of others. A week later, after outraged news coverage and expedited political response from western politicians reaching a consensus that the attacks must have been committed by Assad’s government against their own people, the US, UK and France carried out a series of military strikes against government sites in Syria. In the months and years that followed, a fact finding mission and report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found that the gas used was, and I’m saying this not as a scientist or weapons expert, basically chlorine gas.

Syria and Russia responded to the events by claiming that the US and UK had staged the attack, and faked videos and reports in order to justify a military strike, dismissing the OPCW report published by Bellingcat, which the Russian government has claimed is funded by the American government to smear Russia. Bellingcat has documented extensive use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war, a UN investigation into which Russia vetoed earlier in 2018.

The gas attack conspiracy theory, here referred to in the singular but like all conspiracy theories extremely plural in its diversity of narratives, facts, and characters, quickly exploded among self-proclaimed anti-imperialists such as Jimmy Dore, George Galloway and the staff at The Grayzone.

So, when Jimmy Dore says in that clip that “OPCW whistleblowers” have “proven” that the attacks were a false flag, what he means is that WikiLeaks shared reports from within the OPCW casting doubt on whether the gas canisters had been dropped by helicopter - implicating Assad’s government - or placed manually - implicating the Syrian rebels, White Helmets, or whichever intelligence agencies you prefer to believe were involved.

I say it like that because between them, Dore and The Grayzone have tried to cast doubt on whether the attacks took place at all, whether chlorine gas was used, who was responsible and why. All of these pieces are fungible because the truth of what happened doesn’t matter, what matters is that Rachel Maddow is a liar who can’t be trusted. I’m not here to defend the credibility of the mainstream media, in fact if Jimmy Dore wanted to turn his concern about journalistic ethics toward the BBC’s coverage of trans people he would have plenty of substantive bullshit to complain about.

The problem is that just like with COVID, Jimmy Dore’s coverage isn’t motivated by simply uncovering the truth, but a conspiratorial logic instead. When Dore talks about the gas attacks, the two consistent elements of his conjecture are that the US government was using the attacks as a justification to bomb Syria and that the mainstream media - usually Rachel Maddow specifically - are untrustworthy liars unlike Jimmy Dore who you can trust.

When CNN called Jimmy Dore a conspiracy theorist, Dore retorted that “CNN is not there to inform you, they are there to make money”

Again, the people Dore is talking about have a documented history of helping to manufacture consent for American Imperialism and in the case of the gas attacks that’s exactly what they were doing too, but what they’re saying doesn’t have to be untrue for them to be using it towards an imperialist end.

To extend the comparison to COVID, lots of COVID conspiracy theories point to authoritarian policies implemented by governments using the justification of the pandemic as proof that the whole pandemic was manufactured to that end. The observation is true, and it doesn’t require the crisis to have been manufactured in order for it to be true. Governments the world over but especially under the neoliberal project love to use crises, instigated by them or occurring organically, to tighten control on the population. This is where conspiracy theorists employ motivated reasoning - it’s demonstrably true that the government is using the political situation the way that they are pointing out is bad, but that’s not as good a story as if they created the entire thing. The story isn’t proportional to your feelings of betrayal and outrage at the government cynically exploiting disasters. It isn’t proportional to your fear and stress and feelings of helplessness.

So what’s the answer? In short, believe what you want as long as you act proportionately and safely. Organise with people that you are the most sure you can trust, using appropriate opsec practices. If governments are using the pandemic to push authoritarian policies, you don’t have to become an out-and-out antivaxxer to oppose them. If the media is manufacturing consent for war, it will only damage your credibility to try and build the case that everything they discuss is fake when you could simply question whether more bombs will help Syria in any way.

You know what they say: where there’s smoke, sometimes someone is just smoking, or burning their food, or very bad at ironing.

So why do people fall into this trap of pushing conspiracy?

We need to talk about the economics of conspiracism a little bit.

The first thing to understand is that grifters and scams are absolutely essential to a successful conspiracy theory. You have to have full-time, professional evangelists if you want to grow your scam into an mlm, or mlm into a cult, or cult into a full-blown religion or at least neo-reactionary fascist sect of modern christianity. At the risk of repeating myself, this isn’t to say that anyone who makes money peddling conspiracy theories is only in it for the money - in Dore’s case it seems to be much more about the power trip of being taken as the only legitimate source of anti-imperialist news coverage, willing to explore alternative narratives the mainstream media won’t allow.

It’s not always literally about selling something to the audience, but it is about controlling their consumption habits by telling them what they can buy and consume to stay safe

Marjorie Taylor Greene is literally selling Equestrian Edibles to her fans. Alex Jones always tells his audience that his pills - which are literally full of lead - will keep them safe from globalist mind control. It actually maps directly onto the relationship that consumers have to their content. Mainstream media - authorised knowledge - is poisonous and will kill you or make you a slave or put you back to sleep, so buy some of our patented Jimmy Pills, guaranteed 100% truth. Side effects may include: selective reading, aversion to science and pulling “the face”.

This is why outlets like The Grayzone exist.

The Grayzone, founded in 2015 by Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton, set out their original mission as “fighting for a multipolar world” or rather a world not just ruled by America. However, they were identified as conspiracy theorists when they started denying chemical attacks in Syria, trying to “expose” any critics of Russia as western state-funded stooges, and more recently publishing tonnes of anti-vaccine content.

In February 2020, Blumenthal wrote Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs to “weaken Russia,” leaked docs reveal, an article which is a small piece of internet history because it was the first to ever receive the twitter warning “These materials may have been obtained through hacking”. This is actually interesting from our perspective because that is a cut-and-dry example of the process of stigmatising knowledge. Hacked and leaked documents can’t be verified unless the people they were stolen from admit they are legitimate.

The documents Grayzone published certainly implicate Reuters and the BBC as working with the UK government to promote British propaganda around the world, but their relationship to Bellingcat is tenuous at best. Bellingcat did workshops on journalistic standards and verifying information sources with the Zinc Network, a commercial research and marketing business who also bid to be involved with the UK government’s propaganda project. This is how The Grayzone operates a lot - this party has ties to this party who worked with these guys, therefore et cetera. In the article they claim that Bellingcat is funded directly by the UK government.

Once you start seeing what they’re doing as conspiracy theory logic, it’s obvious how it shapes everything that Grayzone does, and it leads to headlines like the one I just read which, I don’t know, is this libel? I don’t know enough about the law here, but I think writing in your headline that Bellingcat “participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs to “weaken Russia,”” and then putting no evidence that that was the case in your actual article is at the very least, low quality journalism.

No media organisation is perfect, but it isn’t surprising to me that Bellingcat would be involved in workshops and training programs about how to verify information sources - they’re an open source investigation outfit. They specialise in OSINT, research where journalists only work with sources that are publicly verifiable by ordinary people, and they’ve been able to do incredible work based on those open sources. It’s about as unsurprising as the BBC having biassed reporting based on the interests of the UK government, or a private company like Zinc bidding to be involved in a lucrative contract. Grayzone’s hacked documents add up a great big “ok, and?” but they want us to believe it’s evidence that open source specialists Bellingcat are part of some kind of sinister conspiracy to “weaken Russia”.

And speaking of Open Source information, for all its defence of the Russian, Chinese and Syrian governments,  Grayzone is deprecated by English wikipedia. Deprecated sources aren’t banned, but wikipedia won’t let people use them as a source if there is any other source available. Grayzone is in great journalistic company as a deprecated source, alongside The Sun, The Daily Mail, JihadWatch, Breitbart, bestgore.com and of course, Russia Today.

And I have to say I find it pretty funny that Max Blumenthal is determined to prove that everyone else is funded by national governments and has connections to the political elite, because Max’ dad Sydney Blumenthal was a presidential aide to Bill Clinton. When Hillary Clinton’s emails were leaked in 2016, a bunch of them from her time as Secretary of State were Sydney Blumenthal emailing her Max’ articles and her responding with things like “Pls congratulate Max for another impressive piece. He’s so good.”, “A very smart piece as usual.”, “Max strikes again!”, “Good stuff. Where is he now?”

Am I saying this to prove a sinister connection between Max Blumenthal and the Clintons? No. I’m saying he’s a spoiled trust fund kid born into the American political elite desperate to prove that everyone else is as connected as he is. Max strikes again!

When Grayzone was launched it was trading on Max’ journalistic credibility, which he used to have because he did lots of good reporting about Israel and yes, about Syria, but then he started getting more entrenched and binaristic in the way he talked about these complicated situations, disregarding any criticisms as mainstream misinformation. In 2016 he started spreading claims of false flag attacks by Syrian rebels manufactured to justify a supposed American invasion.

I think it’s really important to keep remembering that people who lived through the “weapons of mass destruction” craze and witnessed the American media manufacturing consent for war in Iraq aren’t pulling these claims out of nowhere, they’re at least partially primed by real things that did happen in recent memory.

The capitalist media is a hideous leviathan, and the ways that it manufactures consent for inhumanity and violence, both immediate and systemic. Organisations looking to profit from journalism are controlled at least in part by media oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch and stick to a line dictated not by what the public think or believe or are interested in hearing about, but by the interests of people deeply invested in not changing the status quo. However, language that over-emphasises the control that powerful parties have on the news media distracts from the real issue: that an organically evolving system of incentives is open to abuse by the rich and the only people who could create interventions that would keep the media truly free benefit from the way it is biassed, and that is a much bigger problem than news media being controlled by a small sinister cabal, because it can’t be solved by defeating a guy in a room somewhere.

Public personalities like Jimmy Dore or George Galloway and outfits like The Grayzone, however, don’t exist in a vacuum where they are capable of pursuing pure noble journalistic truth - independence in the entertainment and journalism industry means being beholden to both wealthy sponsors and the whims of your audience, and the most surefire way that you can corner an audience in the kind of media market we have is to convince them that every other source of informational nourishment is poison.

Proving that other news outlets are untrustworthy is the name of the game, which is why they love to try to prove that everyone is funded by the state or some wealthy benefactor. That probably makes this a great time to announce that this video is sponsored by Bokksu!

[Bokksu sponsored segment]

I guess the core appeal of Alex Jones or someone with the exact it factor that Jones has is this kind of energy he brings. Everything he says is a kind of self-selecting filter where at every new sentence you're tested, asked "are you really this stupid? do you really believe what this round, red, wet, man is telling you right now?" and if you decide that you are and you do, then it just becomes this sublime noise.

He’s always screaming all the time, begging you to just wake up! Wake up to the complete paradigm of absolute control! Wake up and understand the satanic scum selling baby body parts to the democrat organ harvesting labs! Wake up!

It’s surreal, it’s like being in a dream sequence in a horror movie. His delivery fills you with this energy. If you imagine that the people he’s talking about are all the people you hate it actually becomes somewhat cathartic. It feels good in a very juvenile way to hear that the bad people are irredeemably evil scum who have to be destroyed for the sake of humanity.

It makes me think of - just bear with me for a second here - Batman.

People like to talk about Batman being a fascist, and there are clear-cut examples of fascist dudes writing Batman stories as fascist propaganda to be enjoyed by other fascists, but that’s not what people usually mean by the broader take “Batman is a fascist”, is it? When people say that, they tend to be talking about how Batman’s response to crime in Gotham is to put on a bat costume and punch poor people in the face, when he’s a literal trust fund billionaire who could instead write a cheque for unimaginable wealth for every person he’s putting in the hospital or sending to jail. He could help people in a meaningful way, but instead he approaches social ills with the attitude of a military assault, because he’s a fascist - right?

But that ignores a pretty important aspect of the Batman stories, namely that Batman’s world contains people such as The Jokester, Double Man, Dr Cold and The Puzzler, all of them dangerous, highly capable and sometimes even super-powered serial killers who will only kill more people in nefarious, overly-complicated and silly ways, so Batman has to stop them any time that they aren’t already in prison, and sometimes even when they are. So I guess what people mean when they say Batman is a fascist is that if he existed in the real world and also acted the way that he does in the comics, but without a Joaquin Phoenix to fight, he would be a fascist.

We don’t live in Batman’s world, but if you take everything Alex Jones says at face value, then you might think that we do. Hillary Clinton is poisoning the water supply to turn the frogs gay! Obama kidnapped the mayor and he’s going to turn him muslim unless he gets a million dollars! Space aliens are infiltrating the government and controlling – sorry shit I just realised that’s a thing Alex Jones actually said which is literally a comic book plot. That’s the Skrulls. Shit.

I think that when we talk about conspiracy theory grifters and what they’re trying to do, it’s really helpful to think about what kind of world they’re projecting. What does someone who believes what this person says think the world is like? How does that person act? It’s worth thinking about.

Let’s talk about Russia Today for a second.

I make fun of RT for the worst content that they put out, and I won’t stop doing that here, nor do I think it’s a bad thing to do, but I want to say I think that America shutting down RT America is still wrong. We’ll talk about the war, trust me, the whole conspiracy left just fucking exploded when Russia invaded Ukraine, but I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me here. I think that kind of censorship is wrong.

It’s really important to get your news from a variety of sources, especially from different parts of the world. Al Jazeera, for instance, which was also censored in America during the Iraq war, does great reporting on issues around the world in ways that you wouldn’t get from American, British or European news sources, but it’s worth knowing that Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari royal family, so they might not be as good at reporting on Qatari interests. Every news outlet has its own bias, and you can still get something from them if you know what that bias is.

The reason that RT is worth our concern isn’t that it’s Russian, the reason RT is worth looking at here is RT America journalist Caleb Maupin.

Caleb Maupin is one of the most prominent conspiracy leftists active in the anglosphere today, and out of the people we’re discussing is probably the most advanced in terms of his level of conspiracist nonsense.

Maupin is also very well connected in the world of shitheads who call themselves communists, making a whole youtube series with pseudocommunist transphobe Joti Brar, and appearing at a conference in 2018 with Aleksandr Dugin, one of the founders of Russia’s National Bolshevik Party:

It’s very clear that Maupin, just like Joti Brar and George Galloway, is working hard to make communism cool and exciting to reactionaries and bigots, but something that’s very funny about this which comes across in his writing - and I really am sad how much of his writing I had to read for this project - is that he doesn’t think much of his audience’s intelligence. Everything he writes is incredibly patronising, like:

“Hannah Arendt, a favourite of the Partisan Review milieu, composed a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was widely praised. In the book she put forward the widely celebrated concept of the “banality of evil” arguing that genocide Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann was just an ordinary person, essentially making the case that all populism and mass mobilisations are fascistic in essence, because deep down ordinary working class people are Nazis.”

Which is just a nightmare statement because not only is it misrepresenting what Hannah Arendt said, not just glossing over tonnes of history in simplistic terms, but at the same time as he misrepresents Arendt there he’s showing that he gets what she means, right? The banality of evil is so horrifying to Arendt exactly because ordinary people did carry out not only the holocaust but every little bit of the Nazi regime and every inhuman and vile thing that human beings have ever done to one another. The complete revelation of the face of evil, the ability to gaze into the eyes of the architect of genocide and see a real human person with internal thoughts and dreams is exactly what is so scary about the holocaust. Ordinary people did turn in their neighbours, their colleagues, their fellow human beings to the nazi extermination machine, and Caleb is insensed by this because he believes in the supremacy of something he likes to call “ordinary working class people”.

This is exactly why Caleb Maupin is slippery, he says things like “I’ll never disavow other anti-imperialists”, but “I’ll never disavow other anti-imperialists” is how a fascist using the aesthetics of leftism signals to people who aren’t accepted among the left because they’re bigoted, or insensitive, or support genocidal regimes that they have a safe place with him.

I would say that, though coded, what Maupin says there about Arendt amounts to soft holocaust denial, which shouldn’t be too surprising given the company that he keeps and the fact that Maupin is an anti-semite trying hard but not doing well at disguising it. In 2015, Maupin wrote an antisemitic screed called Satan At The Fountainhead: The Israel Lobby And The Financial Crisis, a title which sounds bad for a book which is somehow worse than you think. Though Maupin tried to hide the contents of the book from readers by making it out of stock - he says that he can’t take the book down - someone uploaded almost the whole thing online. If the couple dozen missing pages are Caleb saying “the rest of this book is a satire of what an extremely antisemitic person would say” then I sincerely apologise.

The book is written in Maupin’s usually dry and condescending style as he lays out the connections between America and Israel both historically and in the modern day, but rather than seeing Israel as a settler-colonialist project receiving support from the American ruling class, most of them not jewish but either fundamentalist christians who view Israel as part of an accelerationist mission to initiate the rapture or supremacists invested in Israel as an outpost of American and European power in the Middle East, he paints a picture of an America that would be good if it weren’t subverted by the nefarious forces of “the Israel Lobby”. As the title implies, he is describing the tail wagging the dog - he links back the 2008 financial crash, private prisons, the lowering of class consciousness, and just about every problem in society to “zionists” and “international bankers”.

“Christianty, Islam, and almost every other religion has condemned the practice of “Usury.” The reason is simple. Lending money for interest is predatory. Those who earn money through lending, become wealthier without performing any labor or service to society. The source of their profit is simply having wealth to begin with. They have made money from having money.”

Ayn Rand, who Maupin refers to by her birth name Alisa Rosenbaum, comes up a lot in the book, because she’s Maupin’s prime example of an evil person. I’m not here to defend Ayn Rand, she was a shitty person, but I don’t know that I have all the same reasons for disliking her as Maupin, who asks at one point in the book whether Rand has any right to say what is a core American value since she is after all, “a Russian-born, jewish atheist”.

He also says that there is no marxism in Israel, which is absurd, it’s a whole fucking country.

The book ends with the inspiring lines:
“People in the United States who are awakening in these increasingly turbulent times must begin to envision a new country for themselves and their children. When they do this, they are not alone. Almost all of humanity is now rising with the same aspirations, and fighting the same, common enemy.”

And if the rest of the book is anything to go on, it’s pretty clear who Caleb thinks our common enemy is.

I’m frontloading talking about Maupin’s antisemitism here because I think it’s the first thing people should know about him, but also because it’s part of what sets him apart. He has specific conspiracy theories he spreads around - don’t worry we’re getting there - but his conspiracism is more advanced. It’s conspiracy belief, not just conspiracy theories. He makes this distinction between anti-imperialists and imperialists, like Galloway, but he also says that “globalists” is the word that right-wingers use for “imperialists”, and in later books he just says globalists himself, so I guess “globalists” means exactly what you think it means.

It is conspiracist logic which drives this completely binaristic worldview. It doesn’t matter if my heroes are part of the ruling class, it doesn’t matter if they’re capitalists, it doesn’t matter if they’re warmongering genocidal maniacs, because my enemies are worse. Everyone is either supporting me in my anti-imperialist crusade against the globalists and against vaccines, or they’re part of the conspiracy as well!

Grayzone is a hub for people who think like this but have learned too much leftist theory to just be MAGA chuds, and people like Caleb Maupin are trying to be politicians for those people to support. Everyone I like is a good marxist-leninist! Please ignore all the marxist-leninist groups who say I’m a reactionary loser! All the people I hate are je- I mean globali- I mean imperialists.

And that’s how you wind up with The Grayzone publishing an article calling Philosophy Tube a paid operative for the royal family and Caleb Maupin writing an entire book about how Breadtube is CIA.

But hold up a second here…

What the hell is breadtube?

Breadtube is - or many people would say was - an online fandom bubble that developed in 2016 between the audiences of Lindsay Ellis, Contrapoints, Hbomberguy and Philosophy Tube. A huge part of the origin of Breadtube can be found in responses to New Atheism content on YouTube and more specifically to the hangovers from mass radicalisation and harassment campaign GamerGate, with the original content creators making lots of content responding to, debunking and countering the most egregious of the far-right personalities on YouTube, and then eventually moving on to talking about broader societal issues as the rise of the online far right blended into the broader rise of the far-right around the world.

In political terms, it’s important to understand the formation of Breadtube in the context of progressive left-liberal politics reacting to the explosion of neo-reactionary movements. If there was one stance that Breadtubers could broadly be said to have in common it’s antifascism, although because the tenuous existence of “Breadtube” came out of a group of content creators - some friends with each other - sharing the same audience, and then the audience created an r/breadtube subreddit, there isn’t any consistent set of beliefs to which breadtubers subscribe. Not all breadtubers even identified as socialists, let alone the same tendency, and pretty quickly the original creators started disavowing breadtube, pointing out that they’d never chosen to be breadtube and had no control over what it supposedly was.

Now of course the training materials are available but people generally have to learn on the job. We’re all volunteers here after all.

There is nobody behind this. The algorithm drew together creators making similar content and their fans celebrated the emergence of a new space for leftist content. It’s really important to understand that most if not all of this has been driven by fans in order to understand what happened next.

As new content creators popped up making leftist content, and the politically engaged audience sought out new creators to label as breadtube, fans started paying attention to Destiny, a popular political debate streamer that breadtube fans were excited about because of various debates against far-right online personalities. In a direct response, Destiny made it clear and continues to make it clear that he finds out-and-out fascists like Lauren Southern far more agreeable than even very moderate leftists. However, the door had been opened and the breadtube audience had firmly connected to the political debate space, and the low low bar had been set: any debater to the left of Destiny could seize the niche of breadtube streamer, which is exactly what happened with streamers like Vaush.

The surge in popularity of this kind of content creator made people like me deeply uncomfortable. By “people like me” I mean women, queers, and other minorities, horrified as these toxic, ignorant and arrogant bros, making their bread & butter on harassment, rudeness and an obnoxious refusal to ever learn anything unless it came at the direct expense of a minoritised creator, dominated the space.

Politically, these debate streamers are liberals, and not just liberals but very uninformed, politically ignorant liberals who don’t understand why simply calling themselves socialists or anarchists doesn’t make their political positions authentically leftist, and certainly doesn’t make them well thought out. This is again, driven by the consumer demographic of Breadtube and by the basic dynamics of social media that platform people who are controversial, well liked by white straight cis men, and not people who are well-read or have any even internally consistent politics.

There isn’t a division between audience and content creator - debate streamers speak on average to a very young audience who understand that being a socialist is a good thing but don’t necessarily understand what it means, and the streamers themselves are the same, creating a feedback loop where all that matters is the content creator never admitting they’re wrong about anything no matter how well or poorly educated they are on any topic.

We’re dealing with an issue of authorities in a realm of stigmatised knowledge.

This has led to a point where there are debate streamers and people in their online social sphere, and on the other side of the breadtube schism there are people who do research, read books and process the information that they absorb into thoughtful, considered content. However both sides of this schism have equal rights to claim the title of Breadtube being creators either from the original cast or having emerged from the fandom, but both sides also have ambivalent relationships to the term and so neither claim it outright.

Let me suggest in lieu of other names that we call the two sides, “cringe angry bros” and “cool tube”.

So, now that I’ve made it clear I’m not doing this video to make any friends:

The Conspiracy Left

We have enough context now to examine some of the statements being made by Maupin and Grayzone - Abi is funded by the queen, Breadtube is CIA - but we still need a bit more history before we can really get into it.

The rise of Breadtube wasn’t entirely copacetic of course, and as with any social group there were people who became infamous among the core community for being a bit of a shithead - real heads remember the guy who called himself an anarchist and publicly defended chattel slavery.

One such figure in the early days of the Breadtube community was Peter Coffin, a former comedy YouTuber and bernie bro who like many people had moved further to the left during and following the 2016 election. Peter was producing video essays mainly focusing on the attention economy and social capital, concepts popular among situationist marxists like Guy Debord. Most people involved in early Breadtube, myself included, interacted extensively with Peter or even called them a friend, because Peter was very excited about and centred themself in trying to organise the project of Breadtube to raise class consciousness via the internet.

However, through a series of public outrages and toxic fallouts with other creators, Peter essentially fell out the bottom of the community, first working with with the most notable creators, then burning bridges and calling them all liberals, then making connections with newer growing creators in the space, then burning bridges and calling them all liberals, then eventually blocking the entire community, while continuing to talk about them all on their own time, to call us all liberals.

Now Peter is a minor player in the conspiracy left, using their platform to promote Iver– sorry, Peter - “bojack”, The Great Reset, and other popular conspiracy left narratives. Peter, much like George Galloway, clearly sees conspiracy theorists as a potential base for leftist politics, which is why they often repeat Great Reset talking points. The Great Reset is a narrative that the World Economic Forum and other “new world order” “globalist” organisations are planning to reshape the economy post pandemic to disenfranchise the majority for the benefit of the few elites. The phrase you’ll hear people like Alex Jones - and Peter Coffin - repeat often, which they attribute apocryphally to one of the “globalists” is “you’ll never own anything and you’ll like it”.

This is weird because conspiracy theories reflect intergroup social conflicts and what the Great Reset is describing is the effects of imperialist neoliberal capitalism, but you have to offer that systemic understanding as an alternative to talking about the globalists. Talking about the globalists is not a viable communist position.

I want to make note of the phenomenon of cancelling here because it’s going to be relevant from here on. It may shock you to hear this, but as a woman with an online presence I have a bit of first hand experience of random angry weirdos getting mad at me for no reason.

Paranoia begets paranoia, and fundamentally the shape that mass cancelling takes is an incredibly paranoid one - stories based on suspicions based on hearsay are repeated about a person and the easiest thing in the world when you see people saying these things about you is to feel like everyone is out to get you, because for as far as you can see there are people who are angry at you, saying things that seemingly come from nowhere.

Obviously not all cancelling is created equal, and more often than not what people are really getting cancelled for is unspoken frustrations, cognitive biases such as bigotry or just being kinda cringe. Actually, let’s say that more clearly - most of what is called cancelling is either someone from a marginalised community or someone that the internet has deemed cringe becoming the main character of twitter for a day because according to at least some people they did something morally bad.

People who are condemned by the community often lose viewers or followers, but people who respond to criticism by saying I’m the real materialist here! You fucking liberal wokelet posers just don’t understand real marxism! Read society of the spectacle, then you’ll understand the way that you’re reinforcing the hegemonic mode by doing this to me! quickly drive themselves out of the community altogether.

And this dynamic was repeating itself over, and over, and over, and over, because in a space with no formalised system for dealing with social fallout people turn into cops and abuse ideas of social propriety to police each other, allowing the loudest and most arrogant people who just ignore anything people are mad about to get away untouched perpetually, and the people who react to upset by acknowledging the upset in any way at all get the worst reactions. On the fringes you have the people who have been pushed out by a constant stream of cancelling and re-cancelling, and people who have self-exiled from the community because they are outraged that their favourite creators won’t apologise for every perceived sin the fans have decided they committed.

So crucially here, the rise of Breadtube created a current of anti-fans and a collection of excluded personalities looking for an audience. The line between these is incredibly blurry because of the modern state of social media where everyone is expected to act somewhat as a brand manager and everyone is told that their access to a website gives them a “platform”.

Let’s go back to Michael Barkun to understand the dynamic at play here:

“The rise of conspiracy theories also appears to closely track larger trends in public attitudes toward government. Surveys by the Pew Research Center demonstrate declining favourable public feelings toward a wide range of political institutions: Congress, numerous federal agencies, and the two major political parties. In general, levels of support have declined, sometimes dramatically, at least since the late 1990s. The surveys also picked up a doubling, from 2000 to 2010, in the proportion of respondents who considered themselves to be angry with the federal government. This group grew from 10% to 20% in the course of a decade. There were also predominantly negative views of financial institutions, large corporations, the national news media, and the entertainment industry.

This is not to say that all [those] who distrust or are angry with government also believe in the conspiracy theories described here. The decline in levels of public support for political institutions is a complex phenomenon with multiple causes that are separate from conspiracism. However, this phenomenon unquestionably provides a background that lends surface support and credibility to conspiracy theories and to political sceptics to seek those theories out.”

This is an important distinction to make. Conspiracy belief cannot be assigned directly to certain topics or communities as cleanly as you might necessarily think, and often conspiracy communities exist within larger ones. For example Barkun also writes:

“While believers in “space brothers” have sometimes been conspiracists, they have more often simply awaited the ETs’ arrival without positing an evil cabal in opposition”

So as we already covered, the cultic milieu sits within a broader realm of stigmatised knowledge, and when you have a community that broadly organises around mistrust of the government or the current worldwide politico-economic system, it’s somewhat natural for conspiracist communities to exist within it. What the rise of Breadtube did was create a space for people who shared fundamentally almost all of the same beliefs but for various reasons defined themselves in opposition to the larger community.

And that’s why when Caleb Maupin had a debate with Destiny and then a debate with Vaush and then a back and forth with Mildred from the channel Thought Slime, Peter Coffin immediately invited him on their podcast.

Peter Coffin at this point has become completely hitched to Caleb Maupin’s star, they are very much in his orbit, and despite everything about Maupin this isn’t unique. Maupin has actual, honest to God students, Maupinists, followers of Maupinism - but that’s a whole other video I can’t get into now.

Much to the chagrin of people who would rather pretend Breadtube was never real and the larger group of people who are sick of hearing about it, myself included, in 2021 Caleb Maupin published Breadtube Serves Imperialism.

The book is highly praised by… Max Blumenthal and George Galloway. Holy shit. Blumenthal’s quote for the back cover wasn’t even proof read, he spelled attention “atttention” and they just put it on the book. Okay, you know what they say about judging books by their covers, maybe we should get into this thing.

The basic thesis of Breadtube Serves Imperialism is that the American ruling class is at war with itself, split between the isolationist white supremacist Trump faction, and the imperialist warmongering liberals. This does reflect some amount of real observable truth, because America is clearly very divided, although both factions are equally warmongering and imperialist. This thesis is very much in line with the talk about internal divisions that you can see on Fox News, or in its most extreme form on Alex Jones’ shows. In the fully science-fiction world of Alex Jones, the “breakaway society” conspiracy theory is that the Earth is like a huge egg, and the liberal globalists are going to destroy the Earth when they leave in their big spaceship. The reality this reflects is that increasingly far-right and religious fundamentalist elements have been gearing up for a second American civil war for decades now, and by framing the liberals as the aggressors driving the division in society, they can propagandise and mobilise their base into preparing for war. It’s not that the division isn’t real, it’s just that the particular framing where liberal hegemony, wokeness, imperialism - used interchangeably with globalism - are the driving forces. In the book, Caleb won’t say in totally explicit terms that he finds Trump’s faction to be the heroic morally superior side, but it’s pretty obvious that’s what he thinks.

So what does this have to do with Breadtube? Well, Caleb educates his readers on the history of counter-gangs, a divide-and-conquer tactic used by regimes trying to suppress uprisings in which a synthetic opposition is formed to suppress the organic rebellion against the ruling class. That’s breadtube - what Caleb calls “the synthetic left”, which I cannot say enough, thank you Caleb, that sounds fucking rad as hell. What a cool name.

Breadtube and their followers, according to Caleb, are a “counter-gang”, and he repeatedly tries to amp up the fear about antifa supersoldiers inspired by breadtube liberals who are going to smash and burn small businesses because all anyone on the “synthetic left” cares about is smashing.

Though at times he makes it clear that counter-gangs don’t know they’re being supported by powerful allies, at other points he writes things like this:

“In many streams it seems apparent that Vaush has ‘handlers’ or ‘advisors’ who are often more familiar with Marxism than he is. Often Vaush will be seen stuttering his way through explaining concepts that he does not clearly understand, clearly quoting someone else, most likely an individual who learned the concept in an academic, not activist, setting.”

Yes Caleb, Vaush is not very smart, he doesn’t know anything about Marxism, not gonna disagree with you there, but Vaush’s “handlers” and “advisors” are called “his twitch chat” and “google”. He’s just trying to cobble together enough convincing sounding bits and pieces that his chat who broadly know even less than him will think he’s a legitimate socialist who is epically owning everyone else with his big muscular brain.

“It became clear to many viewers that the list of quotes had been prepared by someone else, and that Vaush knows very little about Russian or Chinese history. However this has not stopped this smug video game player from occupying the position of being the primary ‘Marxist’ voice on the internet.”

The guy is a streamer. I’m not defending his ignorance, to be clear, I find the guy contemptible, but I’m not taking his ignorance as evidence that there’s a CIA agent just off screen handing him quotes either. This is a social media dynamic. A guy who could really benefit from sitting down away public attention for like a year and reading some books is feeding a mish-mash of nonsense to his audience who also don’t read any books. It’s frustrating but it isn’t a sinister conspiracy.

The book more or less starts by profiling the people Caleb considers to be Breadtube, including Destiny who nobody on Earth would call Breadtube and several small streamers barely anyone has heard of, but not the biggest players in the actual formation of the clique. It’s very strange and it becomes clear pretty quickly to the reader that the people listed are largely just online politics content creators who Caleb has tangled with in some fashion, which is why that part of the book is Caleb’s sincere attempt to dig up as much “dirt” as he can on them. I’m not going to get into the horrible shit that he’s trying to spread, but Maupin even publishes details about one content creator’s family and their criminal convictions. This is so cheap and scummy and so far from what anyone would call journalism, let alone the writings of a socialist.

It was the great American socialist Eugene Debs who said “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” - and yet Maupin is constantly trying to draw focus to criminality, lack of professionalism, discussion of poor mental health and even drug use, because he’s a reactionary talking to reactionaries trying to scare them into thinking antifa is coming to steal their lunch money.

In one passage about Mildred from the channel Thought Slime, he says that her “videos tend to fixate on things like slime, feces, genitalia, and other things deemed to be ugly.”

Because what could be less professional than talking about slime? Maybe writing a book intended to give as much detail as possible about your political enemies to neo-nazis.

Andrew Anglin loves this book. Andrew Anglin, for the blessedly uninformed, is an American neo-nazi and one of the lead moderators of Stormfront, the neo-nazi messaging board.

The reason I gave so much background on the schism in Breadtube is because anyone aware of Breadtube would be aware of the deep divide in the community, the messy political alignments of various members, and the deep disagreements, often on the specific issues of imperialist foreign policy that Maupin is talking about, and Caleb Maupin claims to have worked on this book for a year, which if he wasn’t a hack fraud as well as a conspiracy theorist and a nazbol, would probably have led him to talk more intelligently about this loose affiliation of Youtubers and streamers.

Instead, Caleb uses the idea that youtubers go viral sometimes as an example of shady secrets in the Breadtube elite:

“Some of them have odd skeletons in their closets. Natalie Wynn’s sudden rise to prominence; Vaush’s shady history in relation to topics like child pornography and lack of charisma” Holy shit Caleb, WHAT?! Yes, Vaush does keep talking about child porn, we all wish he would stop it, it’s fucking gross and I don’t know why anybody supports him, but if you were seriously concerned about that I would imagine you wouldn’t list it right next to a “his lack of charisma”? Like, what?!

Anyway, he says at the end of the list of skeletons in closets that “all of these indicate that Breadtube has powerful allies who are using them to serve a purpose other than communist revolution.”

Caleb’s historic examples of similar programs form the bulk of his arguments, for example he claims that while the USSR turned more socially conservative and progressive socialists in the west expressed their discomfort with that, the CIA exploited the division, saying:

“During this time many pro-Marxist college professors and writers in Europe received covert support from the US Central Intelligence Agency. They were carefully being nudged to push a more anti-Soviet brand of Marxism focused on cultural issues rather than class struggle.”

Per the book, Breadtube is “most likely serving one section of the American ruling elite and the intelligence agencies.”

And then on Christmas Eve, The Grayzone published Leaked files expose Syria psyops veteran astroturfing BreadTube star to counter Covid restriction critics.

Buckle in, we’re in for some extremely Grayzone journalism.

The article begins “Leaked documents have revealed a state-sponsored influence operation designed to undermine critics of the British government’s coronavirus policies by astroturfing a prominent founder of the BreadTube clique of “anti-fascist” YouTube influencers.”

It’s about a video that Abi Thorn of PhilosophyTube recently released, which at the time Grayzone staff apparently had decided was part of a plan to mind control vaccine hesitant people and bring them under the thumb of the new world order. The video, which wasn’t actually out at the time, was about how different types of vaccine hesitant people defend their refusal to not get a vaccine, and prominently featured explanations from vaccine hesitant people in their own words, not to debate or debunk them but to examine the reality and talk about why people move away from it - this was all made possible by a study that Thorn and others at a group called Counting Pseudoscience had conducted. For Grayzone however, this vaccine apologia was altogether too much!

Anti-vaccine sentiments are pretty common among the conspiracy left, and this is my speculation, but Grayzone’s pivot to anti-vaccine content seems like the reason that co-founder Ben Norton left the publication. He’s started his own thing Multipolarista, which is sticking with the original aims of a “multipolar world”, but he hasn’t published any of the anti-vax stuff that Max Blumenthal seems so keen on, and he left about the same time that they started opposing vaccines.

Max strikes again!

The article, which is showing supposedly hacked documents discussing the plans for the PhilosophyTube video was written by Max Blumenthal and someone called Kit Klarenberg.

Oh my god why do these guys keep dressing themselves like this? Why do you look like side characters from Better Call Saul?!?

Also Kit, your twitter bio could use some work because I haven’t seen any journalism so far buddy.

The article, which at time of recording is still up, paints a connection between PhilosophyTube and the Royal Family by way of basically not understanding in the slightest what the Royal Institute is because they’re desperate to prove that Breadtube are all controlled by sinister forces. The actual funding for the study, as Abi discusses in the video, came from George Soros’ Open Society foundation, so they really missed a great opportunity to tie in Soros as well. Their links to a “Syria psyops veteran” are about as tenuous and nonsensical as you’d expect:

Someone Abi works with is also on a commission which is headed by someone called Peter Daszak who was involved with a blah blah blah blah, how does anyone read this honestly?

The whole program would be pretty sinister, if the Royal Family actually had anything to do with it, and the people they say are involved were actually involved, and if you agree that vaccines are bad. So, you know, solid reporting there guys.

The article has since been edited, but the original really doubled down on courting reactionaries, listing one of the groups victimised by Breadtube as “female high school athletes who complain about being forced to compete against biological males” but according to Kit, the only reason anyone would call the article transphobic is because it talks about a trans woman.

This is in line with Maupin’s slipperiness (not anti-abortion but happy to work with anti-abortion people, not explicitly anti-trans but works closely with transphobes) and unfortunately I’m used to this shit from Maupin by now but now the used car salesmen seem to be multiplying.

Klarenberg continues to be a weird twitter reply guy even now that the video is out, claiming it to be a “limited hangout” - an intelligence community term for revealing part of the program as damage control.

Debate me! Debate me! I have a 2006 Honda Civic your family would look great in!

I’m giving the “Breadtube is CIA” conspiracy theory so much attention because it’s the first big breakthrough the conspiracy left have concocted, rubbing their brain cells together to produce this new theory, totally their own, and it’s drawn them all together.

Jimmy Dore had Max Blumenthal on his show to discuss the article and Shaun’s video about him, claiming that Shaun had clearly been boosted by the YouTube algorithm, which is to say whoever controls the YouTube algorithm, and in the episode they also watch a video where Maupin is talking to one of his disciples Jackson Hinkle about the Breadtube conspiracy. Maupin is actually quoted in the Grayzone article, saying:

“It does not surprise me at all to find out there is documented evidence that the British Royal Family and an intelligence contractor is bankrolling the work of Abigail Thorn, It lines up with everything I have observed about her and the BreadTube trend overall.”

When he talks about the book, Maupin insists that other people are uncharitably mischaracterising it by saying that he says Breadtube is CIA, but not only is that absolutely what the book does say, but his orbiters like Peter Coffin are pretty explicit about what is really being said here:

Who else is CIA, Peter? Is Doug Walker CIA? Is Jake Paul CIA?

Maupin also went on Peter’s stream to talk about the book, where he hilariously said:

“If Lenin were alive today he would write a book about Breadtube. If Mao were alive today he would write a book about Breadtube.”

Yes Caleb, you’re just like Lenin. You’re just like Mao Zedong. Everyone is very proud of you and you’re definitely a real communist.

Here too, Maupin says that the only people saying that he said Breadtube is CIA are reading his words uncharitably, which at this point is just absurd. This is the conspiracy left’s own conspiracy theory to prove why they’re cool and normal and everyone who opposes them is a fake liar. Everyone’s getting in on it, Maupin may as well just say what he means and be proud of his invention.

But hold up a sweet tender loving minute there bucko, is this really an original conspiracy theory? Let’s investigate.

In the chapter What & Who is Breadtube?, Maupin lists all the content creators he thinks are involved, but then he also talks about someone called Dr. Steve Hassan who Maupin says has “friends on the inside” and is “definitely not a part of the Breadtube universe, but certainly lurks in the background of discussions about ‘deprogramming’”. Okay, this is promising, we have some kind of sinister shadowy figure pulling the strings from behind the scenes.

Steve Hassan is a pop-psychologist and cult researcher whose main contribution to cult research - the BITE model - has been debunked by more serious cult researchers, but he called Trump’s following a cult, so that’ll be why Caleb doesn’t like him. Just like with Grayzone’s “Syria psyops veteran”, Dr. Hassan has next to nothing to do with Breadtube. He actually thinks that trans people are a cult, and tweeted about how hypno porn is real brainwashing to trick people into transing their gender, which would make it pretty hard for him to engage with the majority of Breadtube at all, so I don’t really understand what reason Caleb has for bringing him up here - except maybe that Dr. Hassan was raised jewish and every time Caleb Maupin points a finger there is a jewish person on the other end.

Ah, okay, let’s see what Caleb actually uses as evidence that this kind of manipulation could be taking place. In that stream with Peter Coffin, he says that the CIA funded a group of Marxists called the Frankfurt School… oh my god it was cultural marxism the whole time. You only have to google “CIA frankfurt school” to see it, this is the cultural marxism conspiracy theory from the LaRouche movement, which Maupin is also part of holy shit.

Lyndon LaRouche, American politician, anti-semite and conspiracy theorist, spread the idea that Marxists in the west were being manipulated into hating Stalinist cultural reforms that made the USSR more conservative, because he was a reactionary and didn’t like the Communist Party of the USA being progressive, so they had to all be secret CIA agents. He called Angela Davis a secret CIA agent. I want to say Maupin is living up to being the Lyndon LaRouche of our time but I’m worried he’ll take it as a compliment.

Would it shock you to learn that LaRouchite Cultural Marxism also claims that european leftists are paid by, yep, the Royal Family? Yes, this isn’t just Caleb’s thing, the whole lot of them are getting in on it.

I can’t believe after all this time it’s still Cultural Marxism. I think that was one of the first Breadtube videos I ever watched, Hbomb’s cultural marxism video. Truly the woke orobouros is complete.

They don’t make the cultural marxism conspiracists like they used to. We used to get lectured by a buff Swedish beefcake, now we just have Beaker from The Muppets wearing his dad’s suit.

This is a perfect demonstration of how you cannot use conspiracy theories as part of a leftist project. As Michael Barkun puts it:

“There can be certainly conspiracy theories that are not anti-semitic [...] but contemporary conspiracy theories manifest a dynamics of expansion - the movement from event conspiracies to systemic conspiracies to superconspiracies. As this progression occurs, two characteristics appear.

First, the more a conspiracy theory seeks to explain, the larger its domain of evil; the conspiracy includes more and more malevolent agents. Second, the more exclusive the conspiracy theory, the less susceptible it is to disproof, for sceptics their evidence are increasingly identified with the powers of evil. The result of these processes is that the villains who populate conspiracy theories tend to multiply rapidly. Conspiracists find it difficult to keep out new putative evildoers.

Ufologists [...] began with conspiracy theories that had nothing to do with anti-semitism, yet in some cases ended up testifying to the veracity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

It’s a one way train and it has no fucking brakes, so your best possible option is to jump off before it gathers steam. Hey I landed that one. Good metaphor. Good for me!

The really annoying thing is that the book and the surrounding discussion engages with legitimate criticisms of this clique of content creators. Would I even disagree with the title “Breadtube serves imperialism”? No, not in its entirety. There are a lot of people who are commonly identified with Breadtube who are literally banging the war drum for American invasion all around the world, and they’re calling themselves anarchists. Honestly, it’s embarrassing.

But you know what? I’m gonna try and do better and talk about American imperialism.

Okay bitches let’s do the goddamn homework like the good little students of the immortal revolutionary science that we are. Get out your workbooks I’m gonna school you on imperialism.

In Which Sophie Educates Everyone about Imperialism

Imperialism is no longer the way it was for the empires of yesteryear - I mean, it wasn’t really that way for them either, but the picture many people have of troops and armies occupying imperial territories is a very narrow view of empire. In reality, imperialism has a lot to do with economic domination, arguably even more than it has to do with military domination in the modern context. States like Ancient Rome had client states that depended on Rome economically and had to follow the political mandates of the senate even though they weren’t technically part of the empire, and today a lot of the world finds itself in a similar relationship to richer and more powerful countries, usually America.

This is because capitalism is a system by which the rich get richer, both on an individual and an international scale. The legacy of colonialism means a lot of things but one thing it means is that the world is broadly divided between the descendants of the beneficiaries of colonialism whose countries were able to take the wealth plundered from the rest of the world and turn it into even more wealth, and the people in the countries that were plundered. Enormous monopolies within the imperial core grow to such a scale that they essentially own whole countries in the imperial periphery - the countries whose mineral wealth their production relies on. Oligarchs, rich on investment in speculative markets, playing with debt and fictitious capital while people directly impacted by their decisions starve or go homeless, are able to buy political influence to continuously protect both their profits and their idea of what a moral, fair world looks like - and it’s usually a fucking awful idea because we’re talking about billionaires usually with dynastic intergenerational wealth.

America controls much of the world with it’s enormous buying power, because the freedom in the free market is the freedom for the most powerful - the richest - party to do whatever they want. American money buys goods manufactured in countries dependent on the dollar, because the exported capital from America forces them into dependence by design. American foreign aid even, massive shipments of wheat or cotton, doesn’t help countries but rather completely flattens their domestic wheat and cotton markets, devaluing the crops of local farmers and making them completely dependent on America, and when they refuse the “aid”, America instantly threatens violence. Violence, military intervention, military domination is not irrelevant in a modern discussion of imperialism, it just isn’t most of the imperialism actively happening because most of the time the threat of violence is enough, but the threat of violence has to be credible for imperialism to work.

This is why America models itself as the World Police because they need to show the world constantly how powerful their military is and give themselves a justification for perpetually upscaling their military spending.

Inside the imperial core the engine of capitalist growth works as it ever does, walking on two legs: apocalypse and future. Surpluses of labour have to be absorbed with low paying jobs so working to stop some kind of collapse or catastrophe is the perfect excuse. Surpluses of capital have to be absorbed with projects to throw money into, so why not imagine a bright beautiful future, sponsored by Dow Chemical.

Usually of course these two work continuously in concert, keeping the machine running. In the 60s it was the space race, with the promise of a bright future among the stars on one hand and on the other, the nuclear armageddon implicit in any conversation about whether the US or USSR could put rockets into orbit first. Today’s imperialism is green, with the  American elites like Bill Gates warning us that “the global north has to lead the way in the coming decades” because on a purely economic level, if another country were leading the charge in combating climate change America would have been defeated in the global free market. Imperialist capitalism dictates what these global conversations are about, how we imagine the future and how we conceptualise threats to the future so that we can be grateful to the status quo for keeping us from destruction and cheer on imperial powers as they shape the future for us.

The rest of Breadtube is severely lacking in this specific regard, but that’s not because they’re CIA, it’s because of imperial core privileges and how the ruling class obscure international struggle from the imaginative landscape. It’s because you’re looking at a bunch of content creators who were replying to fascists, american conservatives and anti-feminists online. Yes, they could do a better job talking about geopolitics, no, and I can’t believe I have to say this, none of them are CIA.

Conspiracy theories reflect intergroup social conflicts and it’s just pretty sad to be able to say that the social conflict being reflected here is that Caleb Maupin and the Grayzone feel embarrassed that they aren’t as popular on YouTube as other leftists, that Peter Coffin used to be friends with them before embarrassing themself publicly, and that the audience they all share dislike the audience that Breadtube creators share and the content they make.

Besides, all of this massively overstates the significance of leftist content creators - streamers have found a new level of popularity, but the entirety of the leftist content creator sphere is just a teeny little blip in the grand scale of YouTube and twitch, which for nearly a decade now have had shockingly far right, reactionary and bigoted politics as the absolute default. The internet is still a growing new thing, and the pattern of social development on it is fascinating. The most easy to produce, attention grabbing content will always dominate a space without sufficient moderation or conscious thought by the people running it, and then as audiences get tired of and desensitised to constant shock content, they turn to more well produced high effort stuff, often biassed by who already made money off cheap shock content and therefore has the money to produce more, but eventually more people will fill that niche, hopefully people with a basic understanding of what they’re talking about and ability to establish some expertise and scientific rigour in the space, or, at the very least, the appearance of it. That’s Breadtube. It’s just a dynamic of the space.

That’s also why tonnes of people have noticed and correctly pointed out that Breadtube is overwhelmingly white - it’s a dynamic of YouTube audiences and how the algorithm pigeonholes marginalised creators.

One gets the sense, watching enough Maupin, that his audience are probably a bit older on average than Breadtube’s. It’s in the way he talks, like he wants to emulate being an expert on something. That’s why he dresses like that, right? Like it’s this aesthetic of intellectualism where he’s dressing for the job he wants, but the people that he idolises are all grifting shitbergs who he thinks are geniuses, so he’s accidentally dressing like exactly what he is: a snake-oil salesman. He takes himself incredibly seriously, but he doesn’t want to put the effort into making his work more suited to the medium, which creates this kind of naive feeling to it.

So he simultaneously looks young and old, which is why there’s such a “bring your child to work day” energy to him.

That’s part of the weird magic of the internet. Older people have been online not just for less of their lives but literally for fewer hours of their lives than young people, so young people online can spot a nice solid type of guy a mile-off, but many older people can’t.

I guess I’m speaking about the whole of the conspiracy left right now but there’s this naivety to the kind of world that they each project that says to me that the audience they all share are themselves kind of naive, and that makes the way that these guys act seem somewhere between gross and absolutely horrifyingly predatory from where I’m standing.

And I was going to go from here to a conclusion where I talked about broad lessons on the topic, but then something happened which made the conspiracy left utterly explode into the most unbelievable takes, mental gymnastics and new conspiracism - Russia invaded Ukraine.

The War

On February 24th 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced an invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “special military operation” to “demilitarise” and “denazify” the country, though his speech strongly implied the erasure of Ukrainian sovereignty altogether. Shortly after his speech, Russian forces began a ground invasion of Ukraine along with airstrikes, and at time of writing thousands of civilians have been killed with thousands more wounded. Over 2 million Ukrainian refugees have fled although hundreds of thousands of people are still trapped in cities like Mariupol which Russian forces have surrounded and shelled.

The western response has been broadly sympathetic to the Ukrainian people, with many people organising fundraisers to support the victims of the invasion, though the far right seem split between whether fighting on the side of Ukraine would be defending “the west” from eastern threat or whether Vladimir Putin is the last hope to save the white race from globalist liberalism. On February 24th as the invasion began, the conspiracy left began immediately denying the invasion altogether. As the military project became undeniable, they shifted to claiming that it wasn’t technically an invasion, but rather an operation to protect pro-Russian separatists from persecution by Ukrainian nationalists. Then as Russian citizens began protesting the war, well…

Peter Coffin’s particular strategy of denial is to dip into classic anti-semitic tropes, literally claiming that George Soros is funding any resistance within and without Russia to Putin’s invasion.

This is also completely asinine. Bernie Sanders is an American congressman, he doesn't have to be paid by George Soros to be anti-Russia.

And Peter Coffin went on MOAT to talk with George Galloway about… what Vaush thinks about Ukraine. Come on Peter, this is embarrassing. Do you not feel embarrassed to go on someone’s talk show and when they ask you about the left you start telling them what Vaush thinks? I certainly do. I’d love to stop talking about him, that’s why I talk about these debaters as infrequently as possible.

Maupin of course has been as nonstop on the war as any other political content creator, with such thrilling releases as

Why should American Working People Support Russia

DO NOT DONATE TO UKRAINE

And probably the most unhinged video I have ever seen from Caleb and that’s saying something, Breaking down Putin’s Ukraine Speech. In the video, Caleb condescendingly tells his audience 5 times in a row that Stalin wasn’t Russian, insists that Putin’s obvious anti-communism is actually a huge win for communists, claims that the USSR “invented Ukraine” which he also says “went a bit too far”, oh, and my favourite: for absolutely no reason, Maupin stops himself from saying that Lenin was Russian to speculate about Lenin’s possible jewish ancestry, before continuing to say he was Russian. “Lenin was Russian - well, he was a bit Jewish, but he was still Russian.”

Maupin claims that the Ukrainian people “didn’t even have written language” before the USSR and that Stalin built all their infrastructure and power plants. Look, I know he’s not being literal but it has to be said: Stalin didn’t build fucking anything, Ukrainian workers built all that stuff, and this is typical of Maupin’s Great Man approach to history which is just so hysterically anti-communist. His point, as far as I can follow it, is that Ukrainian people are ungrateful for the USSR inventing their nationality and giving them all their technology including written language, therefore they should just… be Russian instead?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60600487

The conspiracy left’s denial, first of the invasion and then of the violence against civilians, pivoting into justifications for why the invasion and the violence are good, is exactly what the victims of misinformation within Russia are hearing as well.

I know that some number of people will go from what I’ve been saying, the focus on Russia Today, the blindly pro-Putin takes on Ukraine, and say that all the people in the conspiracy left are funded by the Russian government, and I want to nip that in the bud. These guys are cranks, they suck, they spread ridiculous misinformation, but beyond some of them working for RT directly, I don’t think there’s any kind of underhanded secret funding going on. I don’t think these people are secretly paid by the Russian government, and I’ll tell you why:
Alex Jones is defending the invasion as well.

There is a sizable audience who want to mistrust everything that the American government does for some good reasons and some bad ones, and Alex Jones and the conspiracy left all cater toward them. To that end Jones has been sharing a conspiracy theory that is popular in Russia and China that there are bioweapon development labs in Ukraine which are funded by the west which Putin wants to seize, possibly because those labs are where they manufactured COVID 19.

And the conspiracy left are sharing the same conspiracy theory.

Caleb Maupin is sharing it.

Peter Coffin is retweeting Maupin sharing it.

Haz, one of the few Maupinist disciples is sharing it

George Galloway has produced a whole segment talking about it.

On the American right of course, it’s much more popular to talk about the possibility of COVID being manufactured, but among the conspiracy left, the main focus of this story is the possibility of - and this is their term not mine - weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine.

There are biological research labs, but much like the KGB propaganda that the US was using mosquitos for biological warfare in the 1980s, they’re just pointing at a fairly innocuous research facility and claiming it’s the centre of a conspiracy. Alex Jones does this with abortion facilities, claiming that there are babies being kept alive for organ harvesting that good American patriots should go and liberate. This is the manufacturing of consent for an invasion, and it doesn’t matter that they can point to a specific research facility, it’s not a bio-warfare lab. Culture is not a monolith but rather comprises the infinitesimal actions of individuals, many of them overtly positive while contributing to an overall larger harmful pattern. American NGOs helping people start businesses in Afghanistan are directly helping those people and are part of the system of imperialism. US funded labs that are trying to stop the spread of disease in Ukraine are part of imperialism but they are doing something uncomplicatedly good - but that doesn’t make for a good story.

We might be bad but they’re worse. The eternal projection of conspiracy theorists is motivated by a need to prove that the enemy is the greater evil and that’s why they’re directly copying the strategy that the American media used to justify war in Iraq. Yes, we’re fear mongering about weapons of mass destruction to defend a vile and genocidal imperialist war, but our WMDs actually exist.

When there’s a war, these people tell you exactly who they are. They aren’t speaking for the working class in Ukraine. They aren’t speaking for the working class anywhere. They just want to be the only people that their audience can listen to because everyone else is part of the globalist new world order, and they don’t care who it hurts or how much damage they do.

The Danger

Fire safety lesson:
This is an important one. As we all know, water can be very effective at stopping fire. It’s basically the first thing we think of when we see a fire. It works so well because it smothers the fire, depriving it of one of its two ingredients: oxygen. However, water doesn’t always help to combat fire.

If you see a pan or pot of oil that’s caught fire, just about the worst thing you could do would be to pour water on it. When you put water into a pan of burning oil, the water - which is denser than oil - sinks to the bottom, where it heats up and turns to steam, propelling the burning oil in what fire safety experts refer to as “an explosion”. The water doesn’t feed the fire, the water can’t catch fire itself, but it helps the fire travel much, much faster than it would otherwise.

Water can extinguish fire some of the time, but to know when to use water and when to use something else, you need something more powerful than water: truth.

A lot of the time, a large amount of well intentioned response to conspiracy theories is to try and combat them with facts. The thing is, facts and the truth aren’t really the same thing. Lots of disparate facts can be used together to create a false understanding, and that’s exactly what this does:

Twitter has started putting these little blurbs on its trending topics with the hopes of combatting conspiracy theories. This is really stupid, because giving people this information will not and can never simply on its own dispel conspiracy theories. If anything, this is strengthening it. I would go as far as to say this is dangerously inept.

And that one is just funny.

Facts and truth are different things, and the truth requires imparting an actual understanding to people. Stories can be reflections of truth and facts help build stories, but the way an artist uses fiction to try and tell the truth, conspiracy theorists use facts to create fiction.

The Great Reset conspiracy theory won’t be countered by showing people what the World Economic Forum is up to, because the World Economic Forum is a neoliberal capitalist institution of American imperialism and a lot of what it is doing is genuinely sinister as hell. Reading more about it might help people who believe Alex Jones’ version of The Great Reset where we’re all in a Matrix-like simulation, but it won’t help them to understand the way that the world really works. Fundamentally the shape of the story that people believe in remains the same if you aren’t imparting a different understanding to people. Facts that agree with the conspiracy theory are fuel to the fire and facts that disagree are all mainstream media lies, and the problem with the conspiracy left is that they aren’t imparting a different understanding to people. Their understanding of the world is conspiracist, attributing malice and collusion to every party that they oppose, which increasingly is just every party that isn’t them.

I started this project in part because I saw a lot of people who haven’t got much exposure to real communists or Marxists who conflate what these people believe and how they act with Marxism, or call them tankies or red-browns and I don’t think that’s enough.

The reason that this analysis is incomplete without pointing out the conspiracist logics is that the bigotry of fascism is not like the bigotry of your random man in the pub - fascist bigotry is inherently esoteric, utilising a greater explanatory power than official “politically correct” accounts and relying on stigmatised knowledge to spread the bigotry to others - fascist bigotry is inherently conspiracist. The reason that these people are dangerous is that even though they haven’t succeeded at it yet, even the most well-intentioned of them, hoping to use conspiracy theorists to spread marxist ideas, is getting up every single day, and trying to dump water onto the oil fire.

We should avoid platforming these people yes, but there’s more I need to talk about here, because this is about how popular socialist ideas are. Enough people are coming around to socialist economics, understanding that it can really help them and the people they care about - even prominent far-right figures are voicing anticapitalist ideas, and on the other side of the gap are these people, trying to build an alliance with the far-right

These people are organising: they’re meeting up in real life and holding rallies

https://twitter.com/calebmaupin/status/1498292352791760905

https://twitter.com/sophie_frm_mars/status/1502954360363433985

See, Maupin and his orbiters espouse an ideology they call Patriotic American Socialism - there is a whole book someone could write about why this is a fucking nonsense idea. Maybe someone already has. *googles* Okay political theory nerds, there’s a great niche for someone here. Go nuts.

I will say that the someone hold up the flag of the USSR and the flag of the US together doesn’t scream “communist” to me - if anything it just reminds me that Caleb went to that Nazbol conference with the founder of the Nazbol party.

The original nazbols were people from the tsarist army in the Russian Civil War who defected to the Red Army when they saw which side was winning, and convinced themselves they could support communism as the next great era of Russian glory. Nazbols saw Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country” as a victory for their beliefs, and Nazbols are class enemies of people building a real communist society - and that’s not me saying that, that’s something someone in 1922 said. This little known public speaker called Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - or Lenin.

I want to get preachy for a bit:

Progressive Communists of all tendencies need to have solidarity because in different places with different material conditions and different popularity of different tendencies, we all share the same class enemies and we’re all working towards the same thing.

Conspiracy theories reflect intergroup social conflicts and there really is a division - a culture war - within classes stoked by ruling class manipulations. The “woke” and the “anti-woke”. However, tons of young people online are quickly seeing that these divisions cannot be resolved and ignored unless and until the existential threat to the oppressed is defeated. If you say “I’ll stand with people who oppose abortion” or “I support trans people, but I’ll work with people who don’t” you aren’t impartial, you are choosing the side of oppression.

This isn’t the same as helping people who have reactionary views - unions and organisations don’t throw people out for believing shitty things, or deny them help for believing shitty things - but anyone who will storm out of a union meeting because they asked for people’s pronouns is not someone who we can call a comrade, and people who support the genocidal programs against trans people in places like Texas can never be called a comrade unless their understanding of the world fundamentally changes.

These audiences cannot be reached out to through conspiracism because what they are trying to emotionally defend is bigotry and for those purposes the belief in coming change - revolution, civil war, breakaway civilisation, the storm, the day of the rope - can only function as millennialism. The coming storm is the reason to disregard all social progressivism in order to prepare. Progressivism is, after all, just the neoliberal tool of social control.

It does suck to see people who don’t understand socialist theory or world history or even geopolitics today become the voices that people turn to for leftist analysis, but calling them CIA agents doesn’t really help anyone, and I would rather audiences were watching the most moderate, liberal breadtuber than the openly nazi shit that dominated the space before. If people who care about marginalised people and actually understand socialism work together we can make a rich and dynamic space for progressive leftism, and raise the standards of education that people expect from their political content creators, and then hopefully we won’t have anyone who calls themself a socialist openly thirsty for America to invade countries in the global south.

We need more intelligent discussion of leftist politics, and we also need more discussion of the kind of world that we would like to live in, and when we do that we can talk about how achievable it is. And if we talk about how achievable it is, we can talk about how to get there.

We have the capacity to produce everything we need for everyone on the planet right now, more food than the hungry are lacking, more empty homes than people without shelter. We could end climate change, poverty, hunger and disease if we could understand that we are one big family and start to act like it, but we can’t treat that change, that shift, that revolution like a day of judgement where our allies will be vindicated and our enemies punished, because any story that simple is a comforting lie to get us to help more kings make serfs of us into perpetuity. Workers of the world unite doesn’t mean clinging to some communist project of the past, it means building a future together where no person is of more consequence than any other. Communism will never come from angry microphone boys teaching you from their bedrooms arguments to make your racist uncle shit his pants, nor from guys in shirts and ties cosplaying soviet apparatchiks - socialism that isn’t led by indigenous people, people of colour, queer people, disabled people, will never lead the wave of the future because the future will come from the ways that we have to turn to one another for care and protection as the forever wars of the ruling class spin out of control. The future will come from us feeding one another, sheltering one another, taking back the fruits of society for society and no longer letting anyone declare society’s creations their own from which they alone can profit.

We have to organise, we have to have solidarity and we have to work together as progressive communists because the people who want a change in regime who see progressive values as holding them back are starting to organise already.

These people are actively harming our ability to advocate for a better world by associating communism with crank conspiracism, Kremlin apologia and reactionary gibberish. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is an illegal war of aggression which has already killed thousands of civilians and will affect the people there for generations. These people are creating an absurd false dichotomy for leftists, trying to tell you that you have to choose a side between American imperialism and Russian empire building. Real socialists would say “no war but class war”, and real activists are working to help Ukrainian refugees right now, not making speeches in a conference room in Texas about how smart Vladimir Putin is.

We just passed the point of no return for climate chaos - climate scientists around the world got together to announce that we are past the point where consequences of climate change are irreversible, and the thing about climate change is, it isn’t going to kill us all in some catastrophic collapse. It’s going to kill - and it already is killing - the poorest people in the world first. The people who don’t have the legal freedoms or resources to move are going to be the ones trapped in the harshest climates. The countries that don’t have the money to build protective infrastructure are going to see the biggest mass deaths, and imperialism is going to shape that because it is already the shape of global power.

I am frustrated and angry and I know that lots of other people are too, and I want to organise to change the way our world works so that we can not just survive, but thrive as a society, thrive as a species, and even expand to new frontiers of exploration, discovery and human expression. I know that we can do it, and I think lots of other people are realising that too, because the contradictions are sharpening and people can’t just look down and ignore them any more, but to make the best world for everyone, the truth has to matter.

The truth has to matter, because the fucking planet is on fire, and a lot of people deny that either explicitly or make it clear that they don’t really believe it by their actions. Whole countries, whole governments, our entire economic order, is built on denying the obvious death that we all face if the system is allowed to go on as it is. Nuclear war. Climate Change. Even the pandemic would have killed so many fewer people on a communist fucking planet. People die because they don’t have food or shelter every single day and that could literally not be the case. The truth has to matter, because the planet is on fire, and only the truth can be used to fight fire.

Media:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6282974/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0963721417718261

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Culture of Conspiracy

American Conspiracy Theories

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped

Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domain

Manufacturing Consent

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60600487

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deprecated_sources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wRDLf54Scs

https://communemag.com/the-american-roots-of-a-right-wing-conspiracy/

https://www.history.com/news/why-the-public-stopped-believing-the-government-about-jfks-murder

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-one-thing-in-politics-most-americans-believe-in-jfk-conspiracies/

https://observer.com/2016/02/hillarys-email-trail-of-troubling-anti-israel-conversations/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/11/how-right-embraced-russian-disinformation-about-us-bioweapons-labs-ukraine/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41B5YonixBs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03CNLP-gqO8

https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/jimmy-dore-interview-shifting-political-landscape-covid-19-deception/

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/12/24/leaked-files-syria-psyops-astroturfing-breadtube-covid/

https://web.archive.org/web/20220118070956/https://thegrayzone.com/2021/12/24/leaked-files-syria-psyops-astroturfing-breadtube-covid/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_0mhtTN53k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbnHKzpd8RU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR55YBooGnk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0EOR8LyalA&t=663s