Unfathomable accusations delight by disorienting their targets

Evidence

Part of the appeal is performative aggression. The new conspiracism delivers dark claims, though the fabrications are erratic, vague, and undeveloped—more angry assertion than revelatory narrative. For angry minds it offers the immediate gratification of lashing out, of throwing verbal stones. It is a particularly gratifying form of vilification precisely because the more unfathomable the accusation, the greater the degree of disorientation, incredulity, and rage it provokes in its targets. Conspiracist accusations leave the rest of us, officials and citizens alike, baffled, our sense of reality threatened, our responses tentative and, it feels, inadequate. Disorientation is one of the dangerous effects of conspiracism, and producing this reaction is one of the new conspiracists’ declared pleasures. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 94

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Repetition substitutes for evidence as validation in new conspiracism — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 15; Acknowledging disorientation is the first step toward overcoming it.