Conspiracy culture mirrors rather than challenges the individualism it claims to oppose.

Evidence

Jack Bratich, a Rutgers University communications scholar with a focus on conspiracies, explained this possible trajectory to me like this: “Liberal investments in individualism result in thinking of power as residing in individuals and groups rather than structures. Without an analysis of capital or class they end up defaulting to the stories the West tells itself about the power of the individual to change the world. But hero narratives easily flip into villain narratives.” This is a crucial point: conspiracy culture does not challenge the hyper-individualism that is at the heart of so many crises reaching their breaking points. Instead, it mirrors it, putting all the blame for society’s ills on singularly powerful individuals: Fauci. Gates. Schwab. Soros. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 760

Categorization

• DEFINE: The Bratich quote crystallizes the mechanism: hero narratives (liberal individualism) flip into villain narratives (conspiracy) without any structural analysis in between.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the analytical core of Klein’s argument about why the wellness/conspiracy right feels structurally identical to liberal individualism - the insight that conspiracy ‘mirrors’ rather than challenges hyper-individualism is the load-bearing claim of the Diagonalism chapter.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘Hero to villain narrative flip’ as a model for how figures like RFK Jr., Jordan Peterson, or Bret Weinstein migrate left-to-right without changing their worldview - the individualist frame is the constant.
• XREF: connects to: Economic distress was redirected into anti-Catholic conspiracy rather than class conflict. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 486