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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.
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.
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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