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All three of these articles about "cranks" on the right parse as: People who disagree with right-wingers think right-wingers are wrong. I am not a crank -- I'm right about everything!
I think this is an unfairly low effort dismissal. I don't like all the people above, but they are thoughtful and making more of an effort at fairness than you suggest. Read Ymeskhout's if you haven't and look at things like Trump's post about AI crowds that were included in it. I understand the traditional Motte argument that Trump lies like a used car salesman and Democrats lie like lawyers and there is certainly some truth to that. And I agree that at the moment Democrat lies are more dangerous precisely because they have a veneer of respectability and acceptability by institutions. However, I don't think that changes the fact that Republicans really have become the party of choice for conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality. It is a very particular kind of mindset that is a not insignificant portion of the electorate and it has become increasingly partisan in recent years particularly since Trump and doubly so since COVID.
He's my friend, I have a cameo in the article. His belief is that Republicans are going crazy, he respects my intelligence but thinks I have a reality distortion field that makes me irrational about Trump. Sure, he can think that -- and I think he's wrong! The theory is that we're wrong about everything, we're conspiracy theorists, we're cranks, we're crazy, we believe things without evidence, etc. etc. etc. Most of these guys don't actually know anything about the evidence: I sincerely doubt Hanania could give a steelman of RFK's position about vaccines, or Corona, or a steelman about anything, frankly. Yassine, at least, has been very patient in having these kinds of conversations, but I don't think he would really accept any of these arguments as legitimate: he isn't convinced, and he's not convinced anyone else should be convinced. So they're not just wrong arguments, they're crank arguments, conspiracy arguments, etc.
Democrats are the party of people who act as if there isn't a Replication Crisis. I see the worst nonsense taken credulously just because it was in a study somewhere. Corona came from wet markets? Puberty blockers are reversible? I can go on bluesky right now and find people arguing that Kamala won the election and has all the evidence and will coup Trump any day now. Please, please, I cannot stand to hear more about how I need to carefully consider the people who call me crazy because they didn't carefully consider me. The right does not have a monopoly on nonsense and that is so apparent that it's embarrassing to be told otherwise.
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I just don't know man. What percent of people believe in Russiagate still?
Let's be honest. We're all cranks on some level. What percentage of people are religious? And for the atheist left, it's arguably worst. They seem to have replaced the religion sized hole in their hearts with a grab-bag of semi coherent belief systems.
What percentage of people believe in astrology? How many believe in bad luck?
I think what we're really noticing is that the left credentializes its cranks while the right does not. We have a (now resigned in disgrace) editor of Scientific American saying that the only reason male athletes beat female athletes is societal bias. The scientific establishment has been colonized by the left, who have used it to give a scientific sheen to many of their wacky, incorrect beliefs.
At one point, people who believed in antiseptic medicine were cranks. People who believed in plate tectonics were cranks.
But (going further back now) doctors of the church who calculated the age of the Earth using Biblical text were not cranks. They were credentialed experts.
I think what broke a lot of people (myself included) was the disastrous and anti-scientific response to Covid, which every step of the way was blessed by the so-called experts. It's not really about magical belief systems (which the Left has in plenty). It's about power.
While there are still serious concerns about how wishy-washy Trump is on Russia, that's a separate issue from "Russiagate" which was related to specific coordination possibly through blackmail. It might seem like any criticism of Trump's position on Russia is synonymous with "Russiagate", but when properly disambiguated I'd say not many Dems really believe in the crazier takes (e.g. Trump is a KGB plant).
I also think you're not really understanding what I (or the writers I linked) mean by "crank". A crank isn't just anyone who believes in stuff that isn't supported by science or evidence, it's specifically conspiratorial views like QAnon or "Bill Gates is microchipping us through vaccines" or "global elites want open borders to genocide white people". It's distrust of amorphous undefined "elites", who are perceived to have a secret evil agenda. Someone who believes in religion or astrology is wrong, obviously, but I wouldn't call them a crank.
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How many headlines showed up, pointing to random studies, calling right wingers dumb or conspiracy-prone?
How many left figures show up now and imply that the left rejects grifters and grift in a way that the right does not? Perhaps this point is worth its own high-level post.
Maybe I get this impression just because I avoid leftist spaces like the plague, but it really does seem like the right is more inundated with obvious, low-quality grifters. I attribute this to the fact that Republicans have become more heavily dependent on the less educated, but also because a lack of established media orgs leads to grifters fulfilling the demand from an underserved market.
I think this probably comes back to one of the points Scott made in "Can Things be both Popular and Silenced?". If you're a woke person or a leftist and want to hear woke or left opinions, you have an entire media ecosystem made up of hundreds of thousands of extremely qualified writers, journalists, academics etc. If you have more unorthodox opinions, you are not nearly as well-served, and so the bar is lower for a writer or journalist trying to gain a foothold. A woke person trying to make a living as a blogger or journalist is going up against The New York Times; an anti-woke person trying to make a living is going up against a bunch of other small fries with Substack accounts.
I think this argument is applicable not just to honest people acting in good faith but also to "grifters", broadly defined. If you want to make a living by cynically parroting woke opinions or selling obvious woke-inflected bullshit you don't really believe in, the competition is so stiff that you have to be really good at it to do it at all, so it tends to be a long con (perhaps as much as ten years' training in academia before you set up shop as a "corporate diversity consultant" or whatever). But for anti-woke grifters, the demand for comparable content is just as high but the competition isn't as stiff, so just about any idiot who can string a sentence together can start a podcast and be inundated with Patreon subscriptions within the year. Candace Jones can literally wake up one morning and announce "hi everybody, I'm black and I hate wokeness!" when she was a woke person quite literally the night before. That option is not open to Ibram X. Kendi - he must put in long hard hours in postgraduate degrees and speaking engagements before people are willing to throw money at him for doing nothing.
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Are you talking about quantity or reach? Because the lowest quality grifter with the most reach in America is Ibrahim X. Kendi. Next you have the 1619 project, all BLM related orgs, etc. RW orgs with that much reach are people like Daily Wire and Vivek. You might not like their positions on everything, but those aren't grifters. One is a legitimate media business that has really innovated in the space, and the other is a serious politician and thinker, although odd.
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It's a recent move, and the Left's grift is still there, however, they've started to tone things down in the advent of the ascending accelerationists. Granted, sites like Salon and NewRepublic seem to exist to prove the strawmen visions of the Democrats correct to a degree that feels deranged, even if one were to find the American Russophiles and Sinophiles unpalatable.
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Yeah that will definitely have a selection effect, not just because you aren't seeing as many leftists, but also because people of all political persuasions generally hide their craziest beliefs unless they know they are in good company. So you hang out with rightists and they get comfortable with you and tell you their metaphors that they secretly believe, but are so rarely in a space that is comfortable for leftists that you don't hear their metaphors that they secretly believe.
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Probably true if we confine our examination to X.
But, literally, there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of people who are employed in DEI. They are being paid billions of dollars each year to grift in an official capacity. I think we should probably tackle the taxpayer-funded grifters before worrying about random Twitter bros.
I do agree that it's a great time to be a right-wing grifter, but only because it's a growth industry. The number of people making money off left-wing grifts still exceeeds the inverse by a factor of at least 10.
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Ymeskhout called it a crazy conspiracy theory to think progressive prosecutors were using procedural manipulation to favor BLM rioters.
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