Conspiracy theories co-opted and discredited genuine pandemic-era reform advocacy

Evidence

But there was something else getting in the way: the very idea of treating the pandemic as a portal to something new—something better, greener, and fairer—was being systematically pipiked in the Mirror World by people like my doppelganger. It was getting all mixed up and conflated with the conspiracy talk about how “globalist elites” at the World Economic Forum were trying to harness the recovery for their Great Reset. By early 2021, any discussion about how our societies could and should change in response to the reality of overlapping and intersecting crises was immediately shouted down by the diagonalists as being part and parcel of a conspiracy hatched on a Swiss mountaintop by Bill Gates. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 486

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘diagonalism’ convergence Klein introduced earlier — here she shows the mechanism in action: the Mirror World absorbing and ‘pipiking’ earnest reform into Great Reset conspiracy. — connects to: Health misinformation moved from fringe to mainstream political discourse — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 53; Conspiracy exposure has at times served democratic reform — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 33; the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”
• SEED: The mechanism of ‘pipiking’ — a loose informal verb for stealing/copying and corrupting an idea — is itself a concept worth an essay: how conspiratorial spaces metabolize and weaponize sincere proposals.