Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Are conspiracy theories more popular than ever? Are Americans more conspiratorial than ever? Are conservatives more conspiratorial than liberals? Joseph Uscinski is a political scientist at the University of Miami and one of the nation's preeminent experts on the psychology of conspiratorial thinking and the history of conspiracy theories in America. He has some counterintuitive and surprising answers to these questions. Today, he and Derek discuss—and debate—the psychology and politics of modern conspiratorial thinking. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Joseph Uscinski Producer: Devon Baroldi Links Uscinski's research page: https://people.miami.edu/profile/60b5fb062f4f266afb6739ec21657c74 "The psychological and political correlates of conspiracy theory beliefs" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25617-0 "Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30679368/ "Right and left, partisanship predicts (asymmetric) vulnerability to misinformation" https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/right-and-left-partisanship-predicts-asymmetric-vulnerability-to-misinformation/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck Senior Political Correspondent and host of Somebody's Got to win. Brought to you by The Ringer and Spotify. The 2024 election has been upended with Joe Biden off the ticket and Donald Trump facing a new challenger, Kamala Harris. If you want to hear what the insiders are really saying about the race, join me Tuesdays and Thursdays as I break it all down with lawmakers, journalists, and political strategists. We'll go deeper than the headlines to the anxieties at the highest levels of power. And of course, we'll chew over all the hot political gossip as we head into this historic election. Be sure to follow. Somebody's got to win at Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today, conspiracy theories in America and what we get wrong about the people who believe them.

I do feel like modern electoral politics is more consumed by conspiracy than I can ever remember. Going back to 2016, it feels like every. election has effectively been a conspiracy election. Donald Trump, if you recall, was an occasional Democrat between the 1990s and mid-2000s, but in 2015, he gained fame and followers on the right, in part thanks to his endorsement of the birther conspiracy theory, which claimed that Barack Obama faked his birth certificate. Weeks after Trump won the 2016 election, an online conspiracy that became known as Pizza Gate, claimed that Democrats were running a child sex ring

from a pizza joint in Washington, D.C. It was actually called Comet, Ping-Pong, and I had my book party there in 2017. Anyway, weeks after Trump's election, Edgar Madison Welch, a 28-year-old man from North Carolina, arrived at Comet and fired three bullets from an AR-15 rifle

that struck the restaurant's walls, a desk, and a door. He later claimed to police that he was, was just trying to, quote, self-investigate a child sex ring story. Pizza Gate became the pillar of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, which emerged in 2017, and incorporated its beliefs into a larger story that claimed to identify nefarious, worldwide conspiracies for Democrats for running a pedophile ring and drinking the blood of children. The Trump campaign's flirtations with Russian agents throughout 2016 inspired years of so-called

Russiagate analysis on the left, some of which was careful reporting, but some of which assumed that a larger story was being held back from the public in a way that has never really been proved despite a considerable amount of investigation. In other words, Trump's strange engagement with Russia has arguably created something that from a certain perspective looks a bit like a conspiracy theory. After the 2020 election, of course, Trump took the extraordinary step of not only rejecting the results, but also demanding that various state officials and Vice President Mike Pence do their part to overturn the legal vote. Trump's conspiracy theory that the election was rigged against him led to the capital riots

of January 6th. And now, in 2024, for the third straight election, the conspiracies haven't stopped. Trump has accused Democrats of preparing to rig their second straight election. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported just this week that, that left-wing misinformation is having its own moment. Several elected officials across the country and even on MSNBC claimed that Trump faked his own assassination, a claim for which there is about as much evidence

as the typical 9-11 truth-er story. To recap, in just the last nine years, we've gone from birtherism to Pizagate, to QAnon to Russiagate, to rigged elections to January 6th to a faked assassination attempt. modern electoral politics is awash in conspiracy. This is all equally fascinating and disturbing to me. I try to be in the business of telling truths. But in the realm of politics,

I know that sometimes the best story wins regardless of its provable content. And conspiracy theories are, if nothing else, often the best story on offer. At the same time, I have to confess, I'm a profoundly non-conspiratorial person, maybe to a fault. I simply don't believe the most extravagant narratives about aliens in Roswell or JFK and Castro, not to mention birtherism and 9-11 truthers. What I believe, deep down, is that the plausibility of any conspiracy theory

is inversely proportional to the number of people allegedly involved. That is, I think most people suck at keeping a secret. And if your theory of the world requires me to believe that dozens, hundreds, thousands of people are successfully hiding a profound and obvious truth, my baseline feeling is that's just assuming too much competence on the part of people. Today's guest is Professor Joseph Uzinsky. He's a political scientist at the University of Miami and one of the nation's preeminent experts on the psychology of conspiracy thinking and the history of conspiracy theories in America.

He also holds some fascinatingly counterintuitive views about the state of conspiracy in America. And as you'll hear in this episode, I don't always immediately agree with his counterintuition, but I do think that a more careful analysis of the conspiratorial style of politics today would help us all better understand the world, and in particular, understand the carnival playing out before us over the next eight weeks.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Professor Uzinsky, welcome at the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So you're a political scientist who has studied conspiracy theories. You've written books about conspiracy theories. This is a question that I like to ask people who study this field closely. What makes a good conspiracy theory?

Like, what are the basic ingredients of a conspiracy that thrives in the crowded marketplace of ideas? It's sort of interesting that you equate good with thriving. A lot of people might define a good conspiracy theory as one that doesn't go anywhere, or maybe one that eventually turns out to be true. But rarely do I hear good assigned to a conspiracy theory that spreads. everywhere and convinces everyone. Let me change the wording of your question to make it more practical for your listeners. Let's say you get laid off for your job and need a new career and you want to become a conspiracy theorist and make money doing it. Well, we see lots of people doing it now,

so why not you? Right. And you want to get that first group of conspiracy theories out there to start building your audience. Which ones are you going to go with? I mean, there are several strategies you could use. You could use theories that attack the biggest villains that most people already don't like and all are familiar with. So you could conspiracy theorize about the big banks and the political parties and the establishment. Or if you want to go after a more niche audience, you could start talking about lizard people or, you know, conspirators from other dimensions or or things like that. It's up to you where you think the market

is going to best suit your strategy. But that's the advice I would give to a young aspiring conspiracy theorist. Interesting. So fish in crowded ponds. Find the kind of villains that your audience might already have skepticism about, suspicion about, and assign blame

to those pre-existing villains. Seems like an interesting strategy. Yeah, there's rarely anything new under the sun, and that's definitely the case with conspiracy theories. Like, as kooky as they seem, like the ones that make headlines, they're just rehash of the same stuff we've seen forever. So rarely do I see anything new. Most of it's like a madlib,

where you take the same conspiracy theory and change one noun or change a verb and voila, it's all new. but it's the same thing repeated over and over and over and over again. You could use that to your advantage if you want to be a professional conspiracy theorist and just say, okay, a whole bunch of people already don't like X, let's just say they're up to some new thing and rinse and repeat. And you can do that. And that's what a lot of conspiracy theories are.

That group is up to this. And then the next day when something bad happens, oh, that group did it. And the next day when something else bad happens, they say, oh, well, the group did that too. And you just keep going. And obviously, Jewish conspiracy theories make a very good example of this, right? But a lot of them are like this, right? People were shocked when COVID started and people were talking about 5G spreading COVID. But there were people who believed conspiracy theories about cell phones prior to that.

And they believed all sorts of conspiracy theories about diseases, prior to COVID, right? So none of it was really new or creative. How do you distinguish conspiracy theories from, let's call them, counter narratives that turn out to be more plausible than initially assumed? So, for example, maybe some listeners are thinking, during the COVID pandemic, I thought from the get-go that this was a virus that escaped from a lab and not a virus that originated from a wet market. And initially, I feel like the prevailing wisdom of mainstream news and maybe even mainstream scientists was that one of these theories was a conspiracy that it came from a lab, and another was the

probable truth that it came from the wet market. Now I think there's a lot of entirely reasonable mainstream scientists who think, actually, we're not really sure. It might be essentially a 50-50 proposition. And the odds that it came from a lab are much higher than we originally assumed or was originally reported. So that's a counter-narrative that became more plausible with time. Is it reasonable to distinguish these kind of counter-narratives from conspiracy theories? Well, people like using the term conspiracy theory to mean any idea they don't like.

Yes, and so maybe in the answer to this question, in distinguishing counter-narratives from conspiracy theories, maybe it'd be great for you to just describe what you consider to be a conspiracy theory? So a conspiracy theory is an explanation of a event or circumstance that appeals to the actions of a small group of usually powerful people who are working in secret for their own benefit against the common good, and they're doing it in a way that undermines our bedrock ground rules against the widespread use of force and fraud. And further, beyond the substantive aspect, of it, there's an epistemological aspect. And for me, that is that distributed bodies of experts have not found in favor of that idea with open data and evidence that can be openly

challenged. I know that's a mouthful, but essentially what I'm saying is, you know, in order to have a conspiracy theory, you have to be alleging a conspiracy happened, right? So some people will call bigfoot a conspiracy theory. When I say, who's Bigfoot conspiring against, right? Conspiracy theory. And it has to have an epistemological aspect to it too, which is the experts in that area don't take it to be true, right? So that's where I put the definition.

But there is no one set definition, just like the word middle class where everybody is, sometimes they have a definition, sometimes they don't. sometimes they mean one thing, sometimes they mean another. And usually when politicians use it, they don't want a definition at all. They want everyone to use the term however they want. And that's how conspiracy theory often gets used in common parlance. It's whatever I don't like, right? So to me, it really depended on what you were claiming about the lab leak.

If you said it accidentally leaked, not a conspiracy. theory. That's just sort of something that happened. If you say it accidentally leaked and that's being covered up, well now it's conspiracy theory because we're hiding vital, important information. If you say it was purposely released,

then yeah, conspiracy theory. Right? But simply saying it was an accident doesn't rise the level of conspiracy theory. But I do take your point. I mean, no the powers that be did not like those ideas, whether they officially counted under my definition or not, right?

I want to get back to one other word you use, which is plausible. Plausible is a subjective thing, right? And it's driven by the same factors that drive whether you believe something or not. Right. So, of course, ideas you believe you think are plausible, right? Or ideas that you're at least somewhat inclined to are plausible. Like, I have a friend who said to me, once, you know, this birth certificate with Obama thing, that's completely implausible.

So stupid. But the idea that Bush blew up the Twin Towers, well, that's plausible. Unsurprisingly, he was a person of the left, right? And what was plausible was just things that he personally believed or had sympathy for because of his own partisan biases. Right. So I would challenge people, you know, tell me something you believe really strongly that you also think is completely implausible and personal.

probably false, right? Maybe a religious idea, in which case, maybe you're not really a believer, but for the most part, belief and plausibility sort of go hand in hand. So when someone says, this one's more plausible than that one, well, thanks for your opinion. Who cares? I am really interested in the psychology of conspiracy theorists and how they think about the world in, I think, a very unique way. And I have a theory about conspiracy theories, and I'd love you to tell me if this tracks. It's going to start in a weird place, but I promise this plane will land on the runway. As I was preparing for this episode, I saw that Tucker Carlson, welcome to his show, a revisionist historian who made several claims about World War II.

Number one, that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II, because Churchill's military response to the Nazis inflamed the war. And number two, that the Holocaust wasn't actually as evil as it seems because once the Nazis realized they had more prisoners than they could feed, it was actually somewhat humane of them to put them in concentration camps and kill them expeditiously. So as I had the misfortune of having to listen to this tripe, it reminded me of this move that I think conspiracy mongers and conspiracy theorists sometimes make, which is to grant extraordinary agency to their enemies, right? Like in the revisionist model of World War II that I just described, Churchill had high, high agency. He had the power

to turn a continental war into a world war, whereas the Nazis had practically no agency. They made a whoopsies and overstretched their military capacities, and so they just had to build Auschwitz. They didn't want to. They just had to. And of course, I think that's a terrible way to think about World War II, but this model of agency, I think, is at the heart of a lot of conspiracy theories. To believe, for example, in the most aggressive version of the JFK conspiracy theory, is to assume an extraordinary amount of competence among the network of power that pulled off Kennedy's murder. Or if you believe, as many anti-Semites do, that there's a Jewish cabal behind every major political or financial decision, you are in a very strange way,

paying homage to Jewish competence by assigning, like, infinite agency to 0.2% of the worldwide population. I mean, you almost want to say to these people, don't sell Christianity is so short. Like, you guys can do stuff too. Is there something to this idea that conspiracy theories are a loser's model of history in that they often assume a network of power with infinite agency that is always on the other side of the table, while the people on their side of the table are mere pawns in the schemes of the competent. Let me separate agency and competence. So yes, you're right, conspiracy theorists, particularly when we're talking about conspiracy theories

about things that happened in the past, right? Something happened. I'm going to explain how it happened. And you assume that the actions of the villains purposely brought about that and went off like a charm with no problems. So just to start with agency, it's baked into the cake because we're saying that a conspirator did this

for a reason, for their own self-interest, they knew what that they were doing, they wanted to bring about a particular outcome because it suited them. So it's almost tautological to say, we're assuming that someone has agency, right? Because that's what a conspiracy theory is. There's a conspirator who does something

purposely to get something out of it. Yes, they have agency. The competence thing always gets me because the world is, I liken it to a lot of movies that I watch, like whether it's James Bond movies or all sorts of other movies where you have these villains doing these massive, pulling off these massive schemes that are highly competent and nothing goes wrong until the very end, right, when James Bond finally stops them. And you think about how the did they pull off building a massive underwater base? How the heck did they pull off these 800 things? You just think, just one tiny little thing goes wrong and the whole thing falls apart, right? And you have to think about this movie hinges entirely on everything going perfectly right for this villain up until the point where it doesn't.

And so, yeah, I think you're right. It does give too much competence, too much credit to the opposing conspirators sometimes. As you're talking, just a brief thought bubble, because I really want to get to your counterintuitive takes on conspiracy theories that I think a lot of people will really love. But brief thought bubble, one reason why people in power don't believe in conspiracy theories might be, or are less likely to believe in conspiracy theories, might be that it's kind of self-serving for elites to not hold themselves responsible for their own actions. But another angle of attack here that you've made me think of, is that people in power know other people in power, and they know just how fallible and messy power really is.

Like, I mean, as a Jewish person, I'm not trying to make light at anti-Semitism, obviously, but I have to imagine maybe there's rabbis who get wind of these global cabal theories, and they think, I wish we were strong and organized and powerful enough to run the world. We can't even get a synagogue board to decide on whether to serve Manashevitz or a drinkable Pino, on Shabbat. Like, real power is so messy and so much messier than the caricature of power that some people assume when they tell these stories. And that's just an interesting inversion that you made me think of.

I really want to keep things moving. So I want to talk about the popular caricature of the American conspiracy theorist because I would think, at least before having read your work, that we're talking about mostly white middle-aged guys. I don't know why that's the caricature in my head, but I just think of white middle-aged guys when I think of American conspiracy theorists. Does that caricature match the reality from your survey data, or are women just as likely to be conspiracy theorists as men?

I mean, it depends what we mean by conspiracy theorists, which is, again, another term without a real definition that anyone sticks to, right? Do we mean anyone who believes any conspiracy theory? Do we mean people with a really strong tendency towards believing conspiracy theories? do we mean people who invent, improve upon, share, spread conspiracy theories in their spare time is their number one hobby? Or do we mean people like Donald Trump or Alex Jones who do conspiracy theorizing for profit and power, right?

You don't have to answer that question. It's just the term can mean any of those things and be a reasonable application of it. Can I answer really briefly? And then maybe you can help me understand the breakdown. just thinking really quickly about the way that you, I think, very smartly disentangled my question. There are people who create conspiracy theories. There are people who disseminate conspiracy theories. There's people who are deep subscribers to conspiracy theories.

And there are people who are casual subscribers to conspiracy theories. So let's say those are four quick categories that I can just make up from having listened to your answer. Creator, disseminator, strong subscriber, weak subscriber. Is there a useful way to break down the... the census demographics of these groups? Are men more likely to create but not subscribe, et cetera? How would we think about these groups and their demographics? That I wouldn't be able to do for you.

So I can talk about the mass public because that's who I study and that's what I tend to poll. I'm sure some of the people that our polls represent create them, you know, for fun or whatever. I doubt we're getting a lot of Alex Jones types in the poll because there are far fewer of them. But I think in general we tend to conflate that guy with the, you know, the cork board on the wall with the yarn stringing everything together with the mass public or, you know, the Alex Jones or Donald Trump with the mass public. And we have to sort of tease those things apart. Those are very different things because if you're doing a radio show, unconstitutional, theories, you're running for president with conspiracy theories, you have a very different set of incentives than does Joe public, right? So let me answer the question by saying, people who tend to have

a stronger conspiratorial worldview versus people who have much less, right? And what are the demographics that tend to correlate with those stronger worldviews? A little bit more men, but not by much at all, gender, sex is not a very big predictor. Race is, but it's not white. It tends to be African Americans rather than Hispanics or whites. Rich does conspiracy theorizing less, as does more educated. And young does a lot more conspiracy theorizing than does old. Right. So rather than having someone like me, a middle-aged white dude who hangs out a computer all day who's supposedly wearing a tinfoil hat, I'm not the quintessential

conspiracy theorist, right? And a good example I always like to give was the show the view, which I don't even know if it's on anymore, but many of the hosts who are women of different races had espoused different conspiracy theories at different times. I think Wobie Goldberg talked about the moon landing being fake. Rosie O'Donnell had Jet fuel can't melt steel on 9-11. Jenny McCarthy had vaccine stuff, and I could go on and on with view hosts. And the thing is, they're not the ones who jump to our mind.

We usually jump to Trump or Alex Jones or something like that, or some guy in Montana with a ham radio. Now, part of the issue with African Americans is, you know, if you are in a social group that has been historically marginalized and mistreated, then it makes perfect sense, right? Because you have been betrayed by institutions in recent years. So it's only naturally going to say, okay, well, it makes sense that it would be done again, right? But the mechanisms for some social groups getting to conspiracy theories are going to be different than for other social groups, right? If you're a rich,

well-educated, white guy, and you're like, everyone's out to get me, that's a very different psychological mechanism because probably no one's out to get you. I think betrayal is such an interesting psychological mechanism to fold into the picture here because I feel like you mentioned African Americans and young African Americans being more likely to as as as conspiracy theories. I also get the sense that higher education people who are maybe historically on the left but possibly shifting right, who are near to a parent of or are a parent of a child who is autistic, seem to be some of the leading proponents of the relationship between vaccines and autism, which has been demunk several times by science. But there again, you have this feeling of betrayal,

right, of scientific betrayal. The pharmaceutical industry has betrayed me and my child, the same way that African Americans can rightly feel betrayed by the history of American politics. I think this is an interesting thing to hold on to, especially as we think about the support for Trump and the subscription to his own conspiracy theories, which I think play into a feeling of betrayal among a lot of right-wing Americans. This is just one example of the many ways in the political science base, I think, that you've developed reputation for debunking what you consider to be popular myths about conspiracy theories in America. And I want to ask you about some of these myths, some of these false narratives, because many of them surprise me, and some of them are so counterintuitive that I don't even quite yet believe that there are false narratives. But this is a useful epistemic exercise to have my priors checked. I want to start with a widely prevalent idea that conspiracy beliefs are increasing. I think if you follow electoral politics, it really, really feels undeniable that conspiracy theories are becoming more prevalent.

And you've said not so fast. Tell me about the research that you've done comparing 37 conspiracy theories over time and what this study tells us about whether or not conspiracy beliefs are increasing. So when I first got into this area of study, I started a Google Alert on the term conspiracy theory. and I would get back three or four news articles a night and none on the weekends with the term conspiracy theory in it. This was around 2010, around 2015, a balloon two between 50 and 100 stories a day. And I don't bother checking anymore, but I think it's still around that. It's a lot of coverage. So my feeling is that journalists in particular started paying a lot more attention to conspiracy theories, misinformation, what's on social media. And at this point, we have a lot of major news outlets that have desks dedicated to those topics.

So they're getting covered a lot. So it's not surprising that people think that the beliefs are going up because there's a lot more coverage of these beliefs. But I think a lot of that is we're reading about it, so then it's creating this illusion that we're seeing it more, even though we might not be seeing it any more than we had in the past, right? Just because it's on our mind. I mean, I will tell you that when my book came out, I got some media attention for it. And I got more media attention once Brexit and Trump happened. But when COVID happened, I took 300 calls from various media in 2020 alone. right. And so that just tells you the amount of coverage this was getting was insane. Now,

I'm not saying that that journalists created a problem out of full cloth. I mean, what journalists were seeing was what some elites were doing, whether it was the people pushing for Brexit or Trump and others. So they had to cover that. And then as a consequence, they also had to cover the topic of misinformation, conspiracy theory, because it became so popular in elite rhetoric. Right. But But saying that it's gotten more popular among elite rhetoric isn't the same as saying that everyone's believing it more by magic, right? Those are two very different claims. So one thing I did is I started polling a lot of conspiracy theories over and over again.

And then another thing I did was that I went back to the Roper database of public opinion polls and found as many conspiracy theories that had been polled on in the U.S. in prior decades as I could get my hands on, and then re-pulled everything to see what had gone up, what had gone down. And what we found was that most had either stayed the same or gone down, and only a handful had gone up. And the ones that had gone up weren't the ones that anyone were talking about. And I think a great example of this is Q&ONON. Because since Q&N started, you've had a lot of journalists saying it's big and getting bigger

and sticking everything over. And everyone's now a Q&N believer. But we were polling this. and it was small and not getting bigger. And estimates vary, but, you know, if you're measuring it, you know, properly and not running a poll just to get good headlines, you're getting 5, 10, maybe 15%. And that might sound like a lot, but of all the conspiracy theories that I poll, and I poll a lot, it's one of the least believed.

Now, I will say that, again, Nothing is new under the sun. And all Q&N did was gamified a whole bunch of conspiracy theories that had already been around for either decades or in some cases millennia. Right. So this idea of satanic baby eaters and blood drinkers, that goes back centuries and millennia. So none of that stuff was new. And a lot of those ideas, even though we weren't paying attention to them, we're probably

just as believed 10, 15 years ago as they are now. I mean, I lived through a massive satanic panic in the 80s. So most of this stuff is not new and it's not creative, as kooky as it might sound. But for years, I've been polling on Q&ON and it's just sort of, it's not that big, and it's not really spreading everywhere. And the headlines just sort of wanted to make a big deal about something that just wasn't that big. A couple of points off that answer, which I find really interesting. Number one, I am really taken with this idea that there's nothing new about conspiracy theories.

In fact, conspiracy theories often thrive precisely because of how unnew they are, how archetypally fitting they are. And it really is like, you know, a youngian archetypes. It's like there's a stable demand in the conspiratorial American public for some satanic story to be available to them. In the 1980s, it's our children are being influenced. by Satanists, and in the 2010s, it's Democrats are Satanists, and they're running a pedophile ring, and they're drinking the blood of children. It might not be a growing share of the population so much as some bizarrely stable share of the population that needs a satanic story in order to animate their explanation of the chaos of the world. I also want to restate a claim here that you

made, because I think it's subtle but so important that the impression that many people have, including, frankly, the impression that I have, which is that conspiracy theories are playing a larger and larger role in our politics, and specifically that more people are subscribing to conspiracy theories, might be a function of availability bias, of stories being written about conspiracy theories skyrocketing, rather than actual believers in those conspiracy theories skyrocketing. How do we know over a really long,

long period of time, not just the last 15 years, but the last few decades, how have you researched whether the share of the public that believes in what we're calling conspiracy theories has gone up or down? Like, have you used some older database, surveys, letters to the editor to study whether people in the 1950s, 60s, 70s also had some stable share of people believing in conspiracies? I mean, it's, it's very, it's very. really hard to get to, and I will just say that the modern study of conspiracy theories only started around 2010, give or take a few years on either end. Obviously, Hofstadter existed in the 50s and 60s, and there were other historians and some philosophers and cultural scholars,

but taking measurements of this only started like 15 years ago. And it's really hard to compare then to now in a way that is directly comparable, right? It's hard to compare like a historical account to today's polling data, right? It's really hard to do that. I mean, the biggest poll I've seen of belief in a conspiracy theory is JFK. And if you follow that back to 1963, Gallup ran a poll only a few weeks after the assassination in 50, 50, 50% believed it was a conspiracy rather than a lone gunman. That increased to 80% by the mid-70s. I haven't seen anything get to 80% on any of my polls, and I poll out a lot of

conspiracy theories. Where is that number now, by the way? Where is JFK conspiracy theory? It generally floats around 50%. So in the last few years, I've had numbers between 45 and 55. but it's just I've gotten nowhere near 80 on anything. And so I think when people ask me, like, aren't things worse now than they've ever been? And my response usually is worse than when we were burning witches, worse than during the red scares, worse than during the Illuminati panics or the Freemason freakouts of the 19th century? I mean, is it worse than those things? And in terms of public beliefs, I would say no.

I think people are getting smarter. We're getting less taken by conspiracy theories than we have in the past. We have more access, thanks to our phones, to the world's library. If we want pretty good information, that's pretty reliable. We have access to the world's library in our pocket in a way we never did before. When I was a kid growing up, if I had a sunburn, my grandmother would rely on village wisdom, and she would rub me in butter. If you Google that now, it says don't, right?

If we have access to really good information in a way we didn't in the past, and in the past we might have relied on rumor, conspiracy theory, all sorts of stuff in a way we don't have to now. Right. And the data sort of suggests that. Yes, people believe these things, still there, hasn't gone away, but in terms of the public, it doesn't seem to be getting worse. Now, you don't want to conflate that with are they more important,

are they playing a bigger role in our politics? And playing a bigger role in our politics doesn't have to mean that more people believe it. All it has to mean, and I think in this case what it means is that you've had one presidential candidate build a coalition of conspiracy-minded people. And that's his bread and butter. And because of that, conspiracy-minded people are very important to politics because that's the group of people that Trump is trying to impress. and that's why he keeps bumping out conspiracy theories because that's his donor base or a small donor base. Those are his people who are going to turn out for him. That's who he's counting on. That's who he plays to, right? So they could be important in that way, but that doesn't mean more

people believe in, right? And even in cases where you find that some conspiracy theories are believed more now than they might have been in the past, it's usually for mechanisms that don't have much to do with conspiracy theories themselves. Like, lots more people believe 2020 was rigged than do previous elections. But first of all, you usually get between 30 and 50% of the losing party after a presidential election thinking it was rigged.

So there's nothing new about that. Wait, but just just pause on that. I love this point that you're making it. I don't want to stop your momentum. After the typical election, 30 to 50% of the opposing party in the ensuing months tends to think that there was something kooky about the voting tabulation or the results?

Yeah. Wow. And that's not shocking. I mean, we can poll it several different ways. I mean, even going into an election, you ask if your candidate doesn't win, do you think the outcome would have been due to fraud? And you get around 40% of each party saying yes, right?

But usually that disappears for the winning party after the election, and that's the losers who are like, no, we were cheated. Right? So this is very common. I mean, in politics as in sports, you know, the losing team says, you know,

all the calls went against us, you know, bad calls all the way around. Winners don't do that, right? So the only reason it's doubled this time, you know, it's between 60 and 80 percent of Republicans think 2020 was rigged is because you had the sitting president, now ex-president.

You had senators, representatives, and almost the entirety of the conservative media complex just doing a full court press and saying it was rigged, it was rigged, it was rigged, it was rigged, it was red. Right. And so all that is is just top down elite cues, which, you know, drives public opinion about a whole, all sorts of things, not just conspiracy theories. So you had a major elite messaging thing going on for years now.

So why should we be shocked at people who pay attention and trust those leaders and sources of media that they agree with them? I mean, that's just sort of, duh, right? I want to reconcile two ideas here that I think might both be true, but they do have a bit of attention between them. On the one hand, it seems like you're saying, conspiracy theories aren't new, relatively high subscription to certain conspiracy theories aren't new. Even the archetypes of conspiracy theories are typically recycled, whether it's the opposing side cheated, there's a satanic panic. At the same time, it does seem like the political significance of conspiracy theories are really different than they were 20, 30 years ago. Because we haven't had a figure like Donald Trump who so brazenly accepted conspiracy theories on his rise to power, with birtherism, courted conspiracy theorists during his time in power, and then left his first

term in office, concocting an incredibly significant, politically significant conspiracy theory, so politically significant that if a handful of individuals made a different decision, whether it's the Secretary of State of Georgia or the vice president, I mean, American democracy might be somewhat endangered. How do you reconcile these two ideas that on the one hand, you don't necessarily believe that conspiratorial thinking is ascendant, but you do accept the premise that conspiratorial beliefs are much more politically significant, at least in today's Republican Party, than they have been in the past? I mean, a thought experiment would be replace Donald Trump with Jeff Bush, and we're in a very different world, right? And all you did was replace

one person. And I think much of what we'd be talking about, we wouldn't be talking about, right? So to me, I chalk a lot of this up to just the zany circumstances that got Trump into power. I mean, when he came in, he didn't have, he wasn't really a Republican, was barely conservative, and didn't have a coalition ready to go and didn't have an experience. And those are things that tend to drive Republican primaries, right? But he turned the whole thing on its head and said, well, hey, Jeff Bush, you were a successful governor of Florida for so many years. That just means you're that many years more corrupt than me. Hey, you're a good party person or you have a good conservative ideology. That just means you're incompetent, unlike me, right? And he got 40% of

the vote doing that. The other 20 or so Republican primary candidates split. sort of the establishment vote. Right. So Trump was able to win with a minority. And he won sort of on a fluke, right? He got millions less votes, but because of the electoral college system, was able to eke it out, but lost handily again, right? I mean, if that had turned out differently, we would be in a very different world. And I find that a lot of these conversations, people are arguing with me about the public's

beliefs versus the behavior of a handful of elites, right? And those two, those two things are not the they're not the same. I mean, I'm very concerned about Donald Trump. I'm concerned about other elites, too, on both sides who engage in not just conspiracy theories, but, you know, a bunch of nonsense talk. And, but that's elites, right? So just because Donald Trump's doing something doesn't mean that something's gone up in popularity amongst the mass public? I'm listening to you, and I think I disagree with that counterfactual in the following way. Replacing Donald Trump with Jeb Bush is not replacing one person in history. It's replacing millions of people in history, because millions of people voted in the Republican primary,

for Donald Trump over Jeb Bush. And then tens of millions of people voted for Donald Trump in 2016. But not over every other candidate who was not Donald Trump and not a raging conspiracy theorist. Donald Trump is more powerful in the Republican Party, arguably than any individual is in either political party. So his power is downstream of the political preferences, not only of the hands of the hands of, of elites, but of tens of millions of voting Republicans. And so in that respect, I see Trump's popularity not as a freakish coin flip in history, but rather, now that he's, you know, the nominee, for Republican president for the third election a row, rather downstream of the preferences of

Republican voters. And that lends much more credence to the idea that he is popular among Republicans because he reflects what they want in a leader. And his rise to power and his ability to hold power are both dependent on the kind of stories he tells about America, which are often conspiratorial, we should be open to the interpretation that Trump is popular precisely because of his embrace of conspiracy theories and the disproportionate power of conspiracies in the Republican Party suggest today that conservatives are just more conspiratorial than Democrats. You disagree. You're shaking your head. Tell me more. This is a nice story that the left likes to tell itself because they like to think that they're the

same rational ones in the rights, a bunch of cooks. And, and, and, And when Trump shows up, they say, aha, we told you all along. We've been telling you since Hofstadter, since the 1960s, that the right has its own paranoid style, and they're a bunch of conspiracy theorists. And this is just evidence of what we said all along. Well, that's really very unscientific to say, you know, it's been true all along, but the evidence today shows it, right? I mean, why didn't we have Trump in 2012?

And we had almost an anti-Trump in Romney, an anti-Trump in George W. Bush and anti-Trump and Reagan and all these other people. So to say these people were always like this, but somehow they weren't able to get what they wanted for decades and decades until 2016 doesn't really seem to make sense. And this is going to get to your next question, which I'm sort of guessing what it's going to be. And that there's not really strong evidence that the left and right, that conservatives and liberals are inherently different when it comes to their life.

levels of conspiracy theorizing. Right. So I know the left loves to believe that the other side's a bunch of cooks, but, you know, we measure this over and over and over and over again. And I know people don't want to believe me, and it puts people on the left into a knot simply because they're like, do I throw the scientific evidence down the toilet and do what I'm accusing the other side of doing? or do I give up one of my precious beliefs about how bad the other side is?

Right? So that's what we wind up dealing with here. And here's the thing. Trump, there are people who really like Trump. Go to a Trump rally. Are those the same people who are going to the Jeb Bush rally or the George W. Bush rally or the Reagan, you know, members of the Reagan Revolution? Those are different people.

Those are very different people with very different things going on. and the things that Trump is talking about are very different than what the Republican Party used to do. Trump is not appealing to the National Review conservatives. He's created a brand new thing, right? And it would, it just sort of, it has given people on the left, commentators on the left, Trump has given commentators on the left a lot of what they thought was there for a long, long time, right? But they can't answer the question, why now? Why did it, why did it only happen in 2016 and more recently? And why does it seem to be different people forming the base of the coalition rather than what used to be there? And the answer is it's different people that he's

appealing to within the Republican 10. And he's chasing after independence and people on the left who are conspiracy-minded, because that is what he's trying to chase, is anti-establishment voters, who really dislike the system and are willing to vote for an outsider regardless of party. Let me tie a bow on this part of the conversation before we move into the next fight, which is to say, there's so much that you say that I agree with. Trump has overseen a realignment in American politics.

He has overseen a period of an extraordinary diploma divide where college-educated Americans have moved in the Democratic Party while Democrats have lost millions of non-college-educated Americans. That realignment has been complex and multifactorial, but it has also been a realignment of cranks and conspiracy theorists. And whereas it used to be disproportionately Democrats, who, for example, believed that vaccines were bad for their kids, now with Trump's embrace of RFK Jr.,

maybe America's most prominent anti-vax dude, you see that those anti-vax conspiracy theorists are shifting toward the Trump coalition. So it's not so much that I believe that conservatives are naturally historically, more conspiratorial, but rather that today, we have a two-party system.

Conservatives vote for the Democrat, for the Republican Party overwhelmingly, and that is a party that is a party that, is imbued with the culture of conspiratorial thinking because of the person who leads it. So you're nodding a bit. I feel good about where we landed here. I want to move to the next bit. No, let me just stop you there. I agree with what you just said. I mean, a lot of what Trump has done is to, you know, if you think of American politics instead of being unidimensional, like we've got left, middle, and right, think of it as two dimensions. You've got left, middle,

and right, but then this vertical dimension of people who really like the system and then people who really want to blow the system up, right? And people who really want to blow the system up have typically not been chased by mainstream presidential candidates. That's, they've been an underserved market on both sides, right? But Trump said, I'm going to chase that group of people, people who really don't like the system, people who are antagonistic towards politics regardless of party. and he's chased that, right, while doing it under the Republican conservative banner, but essentially being more of an anti-establishment candidate than being a traditional partisan candidate. And that's why he's working with RFK and trying to pull, you know, the former

Sanders coalition into his coalition because he's chasing a different, a different sector of the electorate. And it's done exactly what you're saying. I agree that there is a realignment going on where you're getting people who hate the system becoming conservative Republicans and people who want to support the system going into more of the Democratic coalition. And the vaccine example is exactly perfect. When I first started polling on vaccine conspiracy theories prior to the pandemic really starting, it was even between left and right thinking that vaccines were part of a conspiracy. And now it's strongly correlated with being on the right. Why? Because they have a presidential candidate who's been talking about vaccine conspiracy theories for a long, long time. And you've got a

lot of other leaders on the right who have been courting anti-vax people in the population who already existed. So if you're really into anti-vax stuff, you didn't really have a political party to turn to in the past. But now you do. Yeah, I do like the idea that successful politicians, and there is no question that Donald Trump is a successful politician, they redraw axes in American politics. You know, past axes have involved, are you for or against Medicare? Are you for or against Social Security? Are you for or against more restrictive trade agreements? Trump, in many ways, is anti-Raganite along all these axes. He is for Social Security. He is for Medicare. He is protection. on trade, but he's created a really salient access, excuse me, a really salient access of trust and institutional trust and conspiratorial thinking, and low trust, anti-institutional,

pro-conspiratorial people have, I think, shifted overall toward the Trump coalition. And that's where we agree, because a lot of the arguments that I deal with are, well, they've always been like this. There's something peculiar about. conservatives always that makes them paranoid, conspiratorial, this, that, and the other thing. And the answer is no. But the parties can very much change in their makeup, particularly when elites in one party start chasing a different sector of the country. So it just seems to be the case that, yes, it can go in that direction, where Republicans

all become raging conspiracy theorists and Democrats become people who are anti-conspiracy. That can happen. And it may be going in that direction, right? But that's not because of anything inherent to either party or to liberalism or conservatism that has a lot to do with the changing priorities of the elites in each party. I want to finally get to this research that you've done on the ideological distribution of beliefs and conspiracy theories. I'm looking at a graph that you shared in a recent presentation where you asked people about their belief in ideas like government, mind control, Holocaust denial, intentionally spread cancer through phones,

the power of the Rothschilds, fluoride in water, fluorescent light bulbs being bad for us, intentionally spread AIDS, FDR knew about Pearl Harbor, everything that I just said, every single conspiracy theory that I just mentioned, according to your research, has basically equal numbers of believers on the left and right. So take into consideration the fact that we might be in a moment of, I called it, I think I'm stealing from Madaglaclias, a crank realignment. How do we juxtapose these two ideas? How do we hold them in our head at the same time? That in some surveys, liberals and conservatives seem absolutely equal in their subscription

to conspiracy theories. And on the other hand, we might be in the middle of this sort of molten moment where there's a shift toward the Trump coalition of the conspiratorial minded. So every conspiracy theory is different. And those differences drive what groups of people are going to buy. into it. So it should not be a shock that it's Republicans rather than Democrats who think Barack Obama fake his birth certificate, because both sides like to point fingers at the other side, rarely at their own side. And also, each side has its own definition of what conspiracy theory is

and has very malleable ways of deciding what then counts within that definition. So oftentimes, it's things the other side believes are conspiracy theories, and the things that are. side, oh, it's not conspiracy theory. If our side believes it, it's fiery critique, or it's plausible, or it's excusable and only believed by a few cranks on our side, but not most of us. So there's always a get out of jail card free when people start thinking about conspiracy theories, because they'll never say our own side is taken with them. It's always the other side, right? And a lot of that has to do with what counts, because what counts is usually what the other guy believes, because conspiracy theory is a derogatory term for ideas.

So be that as it may, when you poll on lots of conspiracy theories, depending on what it is, you will find that some are more believed by the right, some are more believed by the left, and a lot are believed equally by both sides. And that's going to change over time, depending on political circumstances and what the conspiracy theories mean at any particular moment. It used to be mostly people on the left. He thought Bush did something on 9-11. now it's evened out 20-some odd years after the fact after people are like,

who's Bush, right? So it's, that one's more even. But at any given time, you will find some that appeal to the left, right, or center, or everyone. And you can't really judge by individual conspiracy theories for that reason, right? Because they just believe different things, so they're not really comparable. So what we do is we take my conspiracy thinking measure, and I've been running that for more than a decade, and I've had other researchers running it on their own polls, and then compare who's higher. Conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats.

And what we find is that it varies from survey to survey, but the difference between sides, if it exists at all, is rarely big. And I just came out with a study yesterday where we have 77 surveys spanning a decade and I forget how many countries, dozens of countries. I think more than 150,000 survey respondents. And essentially, the differences between left and right, Republican, and Democrat are just not big. They're barely there. You have to really squint in your eyes to see them. And yes, there are some researchers that want to make a lot of hay out of it, but there's not much there. And when you poll over and over again, you'll just find sometimes the left, sometimes the right, sometimes neither.

It just depends what circumstances are. And frankly, I'm surprised in the U.S. that it's not a lot more on the right than it has been. I think further polling will show that it will shift more to the right in the future, depending on how things go with. Trump. But most of the polling on this sort of stuff has taken place during the Trump era. So, I mean, I only have one data point prior to Trump, and that's 2012, back when we were in normal politics. And there aren't too many other sort of general measures of conspiracyism taken on nationwide polls before that, because they didn't exist. So it's, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it's, The data just doesn't back up this idea that it's all on the right.

In the research for this show, I did find several papers that claimed an association between conservative politics and sharing what the researchers called misinformation. So in 2019, near Grinberg published fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That's the name of the paper. That found that individuals were more likely to engage with fake news. if they were older and conservative leaning. Two years later in 2021, there was a study from researchers at Indiana University that analyzed

the relationship between partisanship and likelyhood to share misinformation. Also found that conservatives more likely to read and share what these researchers designated as misinformation. There's other papers by the surnames are Kearney, Evineg, Bankler, all found the conspiratorial narratives about COVID and voter fraud was disproportionately consumed by conservatives. I'm not going to claim that these papers are canon, but is it more accurate to say that you disagree with the findings of those papers

or that you're making a subtly different claim than the conclusions of those papers? So I had to read all those papers carefully because they all came up in reviewer rebuttals to my paper that we did two years ago now, showing that conservatives are not more conspiratorial. And reviewers did not like our conclusion. And we had to go through, I think, four rounds of review. And it wasn't so much about methods or anything like that. It was just certain reviewers don't like the conclusion,

and they cannot get their head around it. Right. And so I can't speak to each individual paper. I will say I don't disagree with the papers, but I will say that in addressing them, It is the case if you read those papers carefully, they have really big caveats. One, which is they're only looking at Internet users, which is not a random sample of partisans. It's not representative in any way.

And the context has a lot to do with that. So particularly if you look at anything, like there was a good study in 2016, about the run up to 2016. and what people were tweeting about and putting on Facebook. And they said it was a lot more fake news on the right than the left, but that makes sense, given that the people on the right assumed they were going to lose. And most of the news coverage was really against Trump.

And so if they were going to get anything they liked, they had to turn to worse and worse sources to get it. Now, that's very context-dependent. That's not so much about an inherent desire for fake stuff by people on the right. Same thing with the other study. is that a lot of what they're dealing with are really low numbers, like some of the studies are like, you know, on average, users only dealt with a handful of fake news or misinformation stories.

And the differences are like, oh, the right dealt with like 5.4 and the left dealt with, you know, 3.8. Is that really big? I mean, maybe. I don't know. But even then, they're like, these are small numbers of not represent. samples of the parties or of public opinion more generally, and they're getting into behavioral things that have a lot more going on with them than just do people believe this or not.

So I'm coming at the point from the point of public opinion researchers saying, I do polls, this is what polls say, we're asking people what they believe, whereas the Internet studies are getting to things of, are you saying a particular thing online at a particular time in a particular way, who's sharing it or not? And all of that becomes really dependent on context, more so than some other things that we might do. Would you agree with this attempt at a synthesis that when you poll Americans and you ask them about a range of conspiracies stretching back through time, fluoride and water, Pearl Harbor was an inside job, 9-11 was an inside job, GMOs are going to kill you, that on these issues, subscription to conspiracy theories is relatively balanced. but even as we can hold that idea in our head that there are lots of conspiracy theories

that are equally divided between left and right in terms of the number of people that believe in them, we also live in a period of American politics where Donald Trump is among the most conspiratorial people we've ever had running for president, serving as president, leading a party, and that the shadow that he casts over American politics might be shifting the balance of conspiratorial thinking toward the Trump

coalition on issues related to his power and his personality and his policies. Like, is that a fair summary to make here? I mean, Trump is able to do what Trump does because people like Trump, right? Like, with most parties, you can play mix and match to. just like the Democrats did with who the standard bearer is going to be. And it's not going to make that much a difference. Right. But a lot of Trump's base are Trump or bust, right?

And you can't just replace the Trump with a Romney and get the same thing. And that's why I think everyone else in the Republican Party is scared of Trump because they need his blessing. They need him to be there. If he goes, they're not going to have those same inroads to this group of voters that Republicans typically have not been able to reach well with a Bush or a Romney or whatnot. And that's why some people want to do what Trump does, like DeSantis and Vance and these other people. They say, work for him, it can work for me, and they're doing the same or similar thing.

I'm trying to provide a synthesis for myself to understand your position, because I do think there's a tension between the idea that the popularity of conspiracy theories is often split perfectly down the middle or roughly down the middle between Democrats and Republicans, But also, I find it hard to believe that the Democratic Party is exactly as vulnerable to a character like Donald Trump as the Republican Party. At the very least, in the history of American politics, or at least the reason it's for American politics, there is no example of a left-leaning Donald Trump being the standard bearer of the Democratic Party. And it just makes me wonder whether at this moment the Republican coalition that has coalesced underneath Donald Trump, is considerably more conspiratorial than the coalition that has in the last few decades coalesced under the Democratic Party. That's the tension that I'm trying to resolve. But those are very different questions, right? I mean, the comparison between conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat are different than really loves Trump versus Democrat. Those are different comparisons that you're

speaking about because Republican and loves Trump are not the same thing. Right. So when we're we correlate. What is Donald Trump's, what is Donald Trump's approval rating in the Republican Party right now? I don't know. I don't know, but what I'll bet it's over 90%. What I can tell you is this. What I can tell you is this is that when you, when you correlate Trump support. So let's say we ask people how much they like Trump from zero to a hundred, with a hundred being you really like Trump with, let's say, conspiracy thinking. You get a really strong correlation. But when you compare partisanship or ideology, you don't always get that.

And you rarely get one as strong as when it's just Trump, right? So there's something that's getting missed when we're just saying, you know, are you a Republican or a Democrat or a strong Republican or a leaning Republican? There's something that's being missed because there are people who really, really love Trump. And those are the people who really like conspiracy theory. too because that's what he's giving them. And that's different than just saying, I'm a Republican. Right.

Those are different things. I appreciate, you know, and that's a fine counterpoint that Republicans tend to support Trump, but as opposed to what? You know, the other party, right? So, I mean, Trump knows he has a vice like grip on the Republican Party, and he can chase the anti-establishment voter rather than the traditional conservative voter or traditional Republican voter because they're stuck with him anyway. because they're not going to go to the other side.

Right? So he can manage them just by saying how bad Democrats are, whereas he's making a lot of his appeals to, you know, the conspiracy-minded folks. One thing I really want to do going forward is just sort of get us away from thinking, this is a right-leaning conspiracy, this is a left-leaning conspiracy. I mean, you mentioned fluoride. I mean, back in the 50s, that was a lot of, I guess we might say,

people on the right, but very anti-communist folks who were concerned about fluoride because they thought the fluoride was a government plot to make us stupid and then become communist. Right. But now where do you find anti-fluoride stuff? Portland, you know, a whole lot of left-leaning organizations don't like fluoride. But what holds both the 1950s anti-fluoride activists and the more current anti-fluoride activists together. It's not partisanship or political ideology. It's that they just don't like the establishment.

And we have to start thinking. I know it's easy for partisans to say, well, I don't agree with that. So that's something that's believed by the other side. That's a Republican conspiracy theory. But a lot of the things that left-leaning people call Republican or right-leaning or far-right conspiracy theories are just often they're nonpartisan, meaning people from both sides believe them, or it's not really correlated with partisanship at all. It's just something they reject and want to pin on the other side, right? So as long as we keep doing that, it's always going to look like it's more one side than the other.

But unless it's something that's really clearly partisan, like it's partisans on one side pushing the idea, or the object of it is like clearly partisan, like Barack Obama faked his birth certificate, he's illegitimate, accepting those sorts of things. Everything else is largely driven by conspiracy thinking, which has been, for at least the last decade I've been polling on it, mostly uncorrelated or at best very weakly correlated with partisanship and left-right ideology.

So it's a different political force that's driving this. And I think in general, we try to squish everything into left-right and say, this is left, this is right. We have voters on the left, voters on the right. and just keep those two characters in mind, and that explains everything, and it doesn't, right? What sort of exemplifies politics for the last eight years, not just here but elsewhere,

is that what has been brought to the four are populist people with mannequin views and conspiracist views who don't really have strong party ties, right? Don't really have well-formed, left or right, traditional ideologies, but people who want to blow up the system, people who don't trust it and don't like it. And it's those people that tend to gravitate towards a lot of conspiracy theories. Trump has made a very strong play at those people. He's done it very well and he's done it for a long time. So we should not be shocked that a lot of those folks are getting pulled in.

So what we're seeing now is not just Republicans showing their true colors. It's a realignment. It's a change of who's there. Right. And that's what we really need to think about going forward because I think just what is happening so much lately is we're saying, oh, look at all these conspiracy theories. That's just far right. It's far right. It's like some extreme version.

Like he wanted really, really low tax rates and then satanic baby eaters. That's not how this works, right? These are people who were probably not very unlikely to take part in the 2012. presidential election, but they saw Trump playing their tune, and now they're involved, because they weren't getting what they wanted before. Let me try to summarize where we've landed in a fair way that I hope you'll fundamentally agree with. Number one, in the last decade, no ideology has had a monopoly on conspiratorial thinking, especially on issues related to everyday life.

Number two, the balance of conspiratorial thinking is not as right-leaning as most people on the left want it to be. In fact, we had a guest, Michael Bang Peterson, a Danish political scientist who has a theory called need for chaos, where he's found that some people don't want anything substantive out of politics. They just want to blow it all up. And he said, in his conclusion, that the two groups with the largest need for chaos were number one, low-education white people on the right, and number two, young minorities on the left. So there is, not just according to you, but other researchers, more ideological balance in conspiratorial thinking than maybe, you know, center-left people like me want to admit. But number three, we are in the middle of a significant realignment in trust,

institutional faith, and conspiratorial thinking that is shifting politically adjacent conspiracies toward the Republican Party for the moment. And I do think it is hard to see the difference between the parties and hard to understand politics in the last 10 years if we don't see that realignment clearly. I think you do see it clearly, but I just want to make sure that we end there. Joe Zinski, thank you very much.

Thank you, and I agree with everything you just said. O'Re! We did it. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Boraldi, Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week on Fridays. We'll see you next week.