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All these articles about "cranks" to me are just wordgames. Radical/progressive/woke left believes in their own conspiracy theories, the main one is what I call as universal leftist conspiracy - courtesy of James Lindsay. It is really simple:
There are two groups of people: purple and beige. Purple people have access to some special attribute or property - let's call it purpleness. Purple people use this property to oppress beige group. Purpleness also helps purple group to create and reproduce system of purpleness, which reproduces oppression over to the next generation. Liberation from oppression and true equity will only happen if we dismantle the system of purpleness.
This is the most simple and primitive form of conspiracy theory which you can apply to mainstream ideas that for some reason are not considered as low status conspiracies. Some examples:
There are men and women. Men have access to male privilege which they use to oppress women. This system is called patriarchy and women will never be free unless we dismantle it.
There are heterosexual people and the rest such as queer people. The former group has ability to define what is normal, they have access to heteronormativity which they use to oppress nonheterosexual people. We will not have true liberation until we will not dismantle it.
There are white people and the rest, especially Black people. White people have access to whiteness to oppress other races. There can never be true equality until we will not dismantle white supremacy.
There are capitalists and workers. Capitalists have access to capital and they exclude workers from access to it, reproducing the system of capitalism. There can never be true equality unless oppressed workers have access to means of production which is the first step to dismantle capitalism.
These are all the simplest and crudest forms of conspiracy theory which if applied to anything else would be identified as some uncouth theory only stupid people believe in. Except these conspiracies are high status so they are fine to utter even in a good society. This universal conspiracy can also be applied to many other popular leftist systematic conspiracies, just define new groups and systems of oppression be it handicapped people or fat people or tans people or many more. This type of "analysis" is in my opinion absolute farce, people who believe in these things can identify racism and sexism everywhere - from knitting to hiking. Which is the point - once you are woke to this systemic conspiracy thinking, then you will see sexism, racism and white supremacy even if you see somebody throwing a bugger from his car as he waits on a red light.
A conspiracy theory typically involves some shadowy group doing something in a centrally planned way. Your bullet points are all just badly worded versions of perfectly reasonable observations about uncoordinated human behaviour.
A conspiracy theory such as flat earth or Qanon are in a completely different category.
What is the patriarchy or whiteness except the ultimate in shadowy central planning? With it white men crushed and destroyed the natural inclination of society to employ black women in every leadership role and it wasn't until about a decade ago that we finally realised that and ushered in the current age of milk and honey.
Uncoordinated behaviours wouldn't involve making up entire branches of science to trick people into thinking your ethnicity and sex is superior, and yet that is apparently one of two possible reasons white men do better than their counterparts on iq tests and tests of strength - either a shadowy cabal of evil white men engineered hyper specific tests that look like general knowledge testing or a strict measure of weight lifting while actually biasing these tests on behalf of other whites and guys, or every white just knows in their racist hearts how to pass an iq test the same way every man knows the secret sexist trick to win at arm wrestling.
The only reason q anon or flat earth is different is because it doesn't have the backing of the so called experts. But the experts have been peddling conspiracy theories for decades and the right have been pointing it out the entire time. Don't confuse holding institutional power for actual expertise. Progressives do not deserve endless charity and conservatives do not deserve endless scrutiny.
Depends on how it's cashed out and elaborated on. I believe it to be patently obvious we live in a patriarchy that has been making slow-motion improvements, but that this fact is just a reflection on millions of people's net behaviours over time rather than something anyone has ever nefariously discussed in a group.
Yeah but when people are railing against the patriarchy they aren't taking issue with patrilineal descent, they do assume nefarious motives.
They rely on the same blurred understanding of intent and agency as the q anon types, in that the more thoughtful among them will, when you really get into it with them, call it a prospiracy in the ssc sense of an aligned group having the same motives and therefore moving towards the same goal without the need to coordinate, but then go to back to using language that implies deliberate action when speaking generally.
You present the 'prospiracy' as the machinations of society and I agree, but the crank sees it as the reason their life didn't live up to their expectations. In my experience that is a better delineation between the crank and the conspiracy theorist than the status of their conspiracies.
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Innocent black men are routinely killed by corrupt police in large numbers, and the murders are covered up.
Donald Trump is a Russian Asset, controlled through Kompromat.
The Russians hacked the 2016 election
Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist, and the Republican machine helped him cover it up.
It seems to me that these four fit your definition of "conspiracy theory", do they not?
So the second one sounds like an example of a conspiracy theory – it's not just an exaggeration but implies a shadowy cabal who's really in control. Unless the speaker just means Trump is a 'Russian asset' in the minimal sense that his existence is of value to Russia (rather than in the spycraft sense).
The others seem a bit more like rash overclaims than complete fantasies to me though it really depends on how the speaker elaborates on what they mean when questioned. Russia did interfere with the 2016 election, for example, but it does not appear at all likely it made a significant difference to the outcome.
...What specific beliefs of the purported "Gribbles" are both widespread and remain preposterous when granted this level of charity? I do not think Flat Earth is a belief held by an appreciable percentage of Republican voters. Ditto for Qanon, which as a diffuse meme has the added benefit of being almost entirely undefinable. What specific Qanon claims are widespread among Republican voters, that we might compare to specific beliefs among Democratic voters?
This is a Russell Conjugation: I raise good points from a skeptical perspective, you rashly overclaim, he is a conspiracy crank.
Let's take something pretty spicy: One prominent point in the constellation of Qanon memes is that elites are abusing children and covering it up at scale. Or, alternatively, we could phrase it "Nancy Pelosi is raping and murdering children in a basement under Memories Pizza to harvest their adrenochrome". Now that more specific formulation I just made up; I have no idea if any specific person has ever used it in the wild, and my prior that it is true rounds to zero. But the former formulation is just straightforwardly true, as Diddy's prosecution is now demonstrating. It seems to me that the way you are using Qanon is meant to imply that the specific, explicitly ridiculous formulation is the central example of a Red Triber belief. It seems likely to me that to the extent that Qanon has ever been widespread, the most widespread versions of it have been the least specific and the most plausible, while the least widespread versions of it have been the most specific and least plausible. This should not be surprising, and is not unusually centered in Red Tribe even in the present.
With the inclusion of the word "routinely", this moves straightforwardly into the realm of conspiracy theory. Certainly there is at least one and perhaps as many as a dozen cases a year in a nation of ~350 million, but Blue Tribers routinely overestimate the number by two to four orders of magnitude, speaking as though this is how the vast majority of homicide against Black people is committed. It is not hard to find prominent Blues feeding the fantasy within the last few years. Nor is the conspiracy element extricable from the structure of this belief. The narrative is that cops routinely kill innocent black people and get away with it, despite obvious formal mechanisms to catch and punish such actions. Major changes in policy have been implemented nation-wide on the basis of this belief, both formal (body cams), semi-formal (the Defund the Police movement) and informal (biased rumor-mongering and disinformation, which remains endemic). The effects of this conspiracy theory have been devastating: nation-wide riots and a collapse in the effectiveness of policing, resulting in a serious violent crime wave and tens of thousands of additional deaths, most of them among Black people.
The central example of the claim I'm citing is that Russians hacked the voting machines and changed vote totals to ensure Trump would win. That is very clearly an example of a conspiracy theory. Then we have a motte and bailey where the motte is "Russia engaged in hacking relating the 2016 election" (true, and as you note irrelevent) > "Russia hacked the election, deciding the outcome" (not true and highly deceptive, but with a fig leaf of unfalsifiability) > "Russia hacked the voting machines and changed vote totals" (flatly false.)
Two of the three accusations against him were proven false and withdrawn. The third, original accusation was repeatedly proven false on specific questions of fact, only to be serially altered into unfalsifiability. The reality is that there is no credible evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist or an abuser of any kind, and there is no evidence that the Republicans ignored to secure his confirmation. The beliefs of a large portion of Blues shares no overlap with this reality. And again, conspiracy is implicit here; they're claiming that an obvious truth is being concealed by a definable hierarchy of people for nefarious ends.
So here I for sure agree with you. Phrased like this, it's on a level with QAnon and flat earth.
The others not so much. That Kavanaugh for instance was a sexual abuser is nothing close to a conspiracy view, he was accused by a professor. This doesn't require any kind of nefarious shadowy cabal, it requires Democrats to be more disposed to 'believe women' and some motivated thinking, and the Republicans to see plausible doubt that he did anything at a party decades ago, certainly enough that they can give their ally the benefit of the doubt. There's no specific coordination, no outrageous nefariousness, just a he said/she said that's split along lines of self-interest.
Anyway, I agree that both sides use ambiguous and provocative claims, only for many to retreat to more reasonable specifics when under pressure. My only point is that such motte/bailey strategy should be separated from off-the-reservation beliefs that are different in kind because they include implausible specifics, usually to do with central coordination or schizo leanings that the believer is very special. That a pizza restaurant is a paedophile market. That a government higher up is speaking to you directly on the dark web. That the space landings were faked.
I maintain that's a useful distinction.
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Not a conspiracy theory, just a retarded belief.
Are there (a significant amount of relevant) people who believe this?
This also seems like a strained framing, a lot of blue tribers believe that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist (unlikely but unknowable) and believe that Republicans don't care about it because they hate women/whatever (wrong, Republicans just don't believe he is a rapist).
2 and 3 are one point stretched into two. But it's true that Russiagate stuff is definitely conspiratorial thinking, but it's miles more believable than QAnon (so is the Stop the Steal stuff, for whatever that's worth).
But is the term "conspiracy theory" not already used in a pejorative sense, such that it can be defined as "retarded belief" in the minds of many? To put it in fewer words, these are one and the same, to some.
Maybe, but we're not many, we're few and (usually) subject ourselves to a higher standard. There is such a thing as conspiratorial thinking, which is distinct from just being stupid, and it could be that, as of right now, it's more prevalent on the right.
Now, I'm of the opinion that Richard Hanania and his consequences have been a disaster for the rat-adjacent discourse, but I wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand.
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