Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

New conspiracism drops explanation and evidence in favor of bare assertion

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, deepthinking, definitional_content, trade, corroborated, xref, category/definitional-content
aliases@muirhead_lot_2019, loc. 14, @muirhead_lot_2019, loc. 61

4 min read

New conspiracism drops explanation and evidence in favor of bare assertion

Evidence

The new conspiracism is something different. There is no punctilious demand for proofs, no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying …” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!”—a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 14

Yet the new conspiracism discards this defining purpose. Not only does the new conspiracism fail to offer explanations, there is often nothing to explain. Consider again the classic conspiracy theory that the US government helped plan and execute the 9/11 attack. However inaccurate, it helps explain the seemingly incredible fact that nineteen individuals unaffiliated with any state could successfully destroy the World Trade Center and attack the Pentagon. … The typical form of the new conspiracism is bare assertion. Consider Trump’s repeated insistence that busloads of fraudulent voters were sent to cast ballots against him in the New Hampshire presidential primary. The primary was “rigged.” Yet there is nothing begging for explanation. Trump lost New Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes, true; but he won the election—a fact that nobody disputes. The outcome in the Electoral College would have been the same whether he won New Hampshire or not. Unless one thinks it defies belief to suppose that Trump could lose an election, there is nothing here that needs to be explained. Nor are there stray facts to account for. There is no corroborating evidence of irregularity—not even one reported case of a fraudulent voter impersonating a registered voter—something that might get noticed in a small state where fewer than 750,000 people voted and many precincts contain fewer than 1,000 voters. The bare assertion “rigged” does not pretend to analyze how these alleged illegal voters were identified, rallied, and delivered to polling places, or how the plot was covered up. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 61

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Defines the book’s central term, ‘conspiracy without the theory’ — the load-bearing distinction of the whole work.
  • DEEPTHINKING: The core distinction — that conspiracy claims can shed their explanatory function entirely and survive as pure social gesture — is genuinely paradigm-reframing for thinking about misinformation.
  • corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 14; Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 61
  • XREF: connects to: New conspiracism abandons evidence while classic conspiracism theorizes it; Bare-assertion conspiracism demands no errant facts to explain — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 63; New conspiracism lowers the assent bar to mere possibility, without evidence — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 122 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks