Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum — A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

303 published claims from this book.

• A crusader against phantom voter fraud led the official election probe.
• A leader can render a disputed proposition ‘true enough’ by practical fiat
• A new conspiracism form drops explanation and aims at disorientation.
• A politician can publicly correct conspiracy narratives at personal political cost
• A president’s conspiracism coerces officials into accommodation and distorts governance
• A training-map color scheme designed for terrain triggered a military takeover conspiracy
• A US attorney quietly enacted democratic process against a president’s rhetoric
• Abandoning conspiracist belief carries a reputational cost among the group
• Accusations of hoax resist correction in ways ordinary bias accusations do not
• Acknowledging disorientation is the first step toward overcoming it.
• Add-on conspiracies reveal tribalism, not sense-making, as the motive
• All anti-liberal ideologies reject pluralism and therefore loathe political parties
• All knowledge depends on fiduciary trust in some community, including conspiracist belief
• Alternative facts are a rejection of factual authority, not a rival claim
• American anti-partyism historically aimed to democratize, unlike today’s conspiracist version
• An officeholder’s specious claims carry destructive force once backed by institutional power
• Assessing conspiracist claims requires dual suspension of disbelief and suspicion
• Bare-assertion conspiracism demands no errant facts to explain
• Belief that events result from hidden intentions made conspiracy explanations normal in Enlightenment thought.
• Birtherism delegitimated Obama by framing his presidency as unconstitutional
• Bots manufactured roughly 20 percent of pre-election political conversation
• Brute factual reality resists attempts to impose an alternate one
• Capricious inconsistency can destabilize the party a leader nominally heads.
• Characterizing opponents as criminal enemies is a step toward regime delegitimation
• Choosing an epistemic authority also defines what counts as knowing itself.
• Citizens United let Koch money convert Republicans to climate denial within years
• Claims of routine unconstitutional overreach convert normal contestation into delegitimation.
• Classic conspiracism defends ultimate values while new conspiracism lacks scale
• Classic conspiracism treats visible facts as misleading surface hiding concealed truth
• Classic conspiracy theories are explanations of events by secret small groups
• Classic conspiracy theory imposes proportionality to make world-changing events comprehensible
• Classic conspiracy theory mimics scientific method to question official accounts.
• Climate denial has moved from disputing data to defunding its collection
• Climate denial led Congress to bar military climate planning
• Collective democratic action requires a shared stock of factual and interpretive common sense.
• Common sense has served as democratic resistance since the American revolution
• Common sense is a political resource against the imposition of a ruler’s single reality.
• Common sense is defined against elites’ esoteric knowledge claims
• Common sense is the shared ground that makes democratic exchange possible
• Compliant elite silence, not belief, enables conspiracism to delegitimize democracy
• Compromise requires shared factual terrain conspiracism erases
• Confirmation bias makes conspiracism rise among the political out-group
• Conspicuous adherence to democratic process can re-legitimate government
• Conspiracism aims to own and impose reality on everyone
• Conspiracism and populism are separable forces with independent effects
• Conspiracism and radical conservatism align over a shared hostility to the administrative state
• Conspiracism attacks shared modes of explanation, not just specific targets
• Conspiracism causes a deeper rift than partisan polarization
• Conspiracism confers insider status through knowingness achieved at no real cost
• Conspiracism differs from bullshit in its emphatic demand for affirmation
• Conspiracism distorts everyday personal relationships, not just politics
• Conspiracism exerts independent political force once it takes hold.
• Conspiracism in power simultaneously denigrates institutions and enlists them to validate claims.
• Conspiracism is fueled by entrepreneurs seeking money and influence, not its consumers.
• Conspiracism is not bullshit because it cares about being affirmed as reality.
• Conspiracism now serves political winners, not just permanent losers
• Conspiracism offers greater coherence than reality by excluding chance and ambiguity
• Conspiracism persists as a moral revolt against impersonal causal explanation
• Conspiracism shifts attention from solvable public problems toward endless revelation
• Conspiracism targets knowledge-producing institutions rather than individual facts
• Conspiracism ultimately destroys its own partisan allies as well as its targets
• Conspiracism undermines rather than expresses democratic skepticism about experts
• Conspiracism’s core effect on bystanders is radical disorientation over who owns reality
• Conspiracism’s core political danger is its claim to own reality
• Conspiracism’s core target is democratic disagreement itself, not this or that policy
• Conspiracism’s corrosive work can be mitigated by coordinated truth-speaking across partisans.
• Conspiracism’s purpose is delegitimizing opponents, not correcting error
• Conspiracist assent functions as tribal identity signaling, not factual assertion.
• Conspiracist assent is a debased form of political participation rather than paralysis
• Conspiracist beliefs cannot be corrected by contradictory evidence or argument.
• Conspiracist charges outlive ordinary lies because they are endlessly repeated
• Conspiracist claims must fit the larger story regardless of specifics.
• Conspiracist claims now align symmetrically with partisan identity on both sides
• Conspiracist claims that sever assertion from verifiability also destroy genuine skepticism
• Conspiracist climate denial rejects expertise itself, unlike corporate misinformation
• Conspiracist delegitimation frames electoral defeat as existential national transformation
• Conspiracist delegitimation rejects the normal cycle of alternating party power
• Conspiracist logic makes denial itself confirm the conspiracy
• Conspiracist propagators treat accuracy as irrelevant because crowdsourcing will reveal truth.
• Conspiracist rejection of shared facts destroys policy accountability
• Conspiracist thinking denies an independent world recalcitrant to desire
• Conspiracist validation replaces evidence with communal repetition and affirmation.
• Conspiracists falsely portray themselves as skeptical critical thinkers
• Conspiracy belief is pervasive across every demographic group, not a fringe phenomenon
• Conspiracy beliefs follow source identification, so only rival trusted figures can dislodge them
• Conspiracy believers accept claims that the larger narrative morally requires, whatever the specifics
• Conspiracy claims travel further than their refutations because they compress into sound bites.
• Conspiracy entrepreneurs manufacture charges for money, celebrity, and influence.
• Conspiracy exposure has at times served democratic reform
• Conspiracy theories held by a president can be enacted into reality
• Conspiracy theory has long filtered how Americans view rival political forces.
• Conspiracy theory requires a vision of threatened political values to attach to
• Conspirators outsourced decision-making to chance to avoid agentic responsibility
• Contemporary mistrust of government has multiple structural causes beyond conspiracism.
• Corporate climate deniers are corrupt, not confused about reality
• Corporate climate misinformation differs categorically from conspiracist fabulation
• Corporate misinformation can be refuted; hoax conspiracism cannot
• Correcting conspiracy misinformation can backfire and entrench the false belief.
• Countering conspiracism requires legibility, not merely transparency
• Countering conspiracism requires reaching open minds only
• Countering conspiracism requires wisdom, not just factual honesty
• Countering conspiracy by infiltration threatens civil liberties as Hoover’s did
• Defending democracy requires ordinary witness, not heroic sacrifice
• Defending experts does not entail granting them authority over political decisions
• Delegitimation erodes democracy slowly rather than through crisis or coup
• Delegitimation rejects knowledge institutions and opposition conventions wholesale.
• Delegitimation strips institutions of standing to persuade or govern
• Delegitimation turns mistrusted opponents into public enemies, unlike ordinary mistrust.
• Delegitimizing parties and knowledge institutions blocks democracy’s core functions
• Democracy can survive structurally while losing its animating meaning.
• Democratic legitimacy requires officials to explain and avow fair process, not just follow it
• Disintermediated broadcasting displaced knowledge gatekeepers and enabled conspiracy entrepreneurs
• Disorientation from losing a shared reality is diagnosed before it can be overcome
• Disorienting targets, not explaining truth, is the conspiracists’ intended payoff
• Disproportionate effect-to-cause gaps drive people toward conspiracy explanations
• Disproven conspiracist charges outlive every form of official refutation
• Disputing conspiracism is a civic duty spanning press, experts, groups, and citizens
• Elected officials know better yet dignify debunked conspiracy claims
• Elected partisans are the effective channel for speaking truth to conspiracy.
• Elite reticence about conspiracism erodes public trust in whether representatives mean what they say
• Epistemic assurance rests on doubt, not certainty
• Epistemic closure makes conspiracists unable to be true skeptics
• Epistemic divides prevent any translation between political worlds
• Equivocal officeholders can delegitimize institutions without fully endorsing conspiracy claims
• Eroded shared reality destroys the possibility of genuine disagreement.
• Evidence-based correction fails against adherents of fabulation because knowledge institutions have already been delegitimized.
• Expert knowledge use in politics is a democratic decision
• Experts’ specialized jargon makes them vulnerable to being cast as a cabal.
• Exposed government infiltration would strengthen rather than weaken conspiracism
• Exposure-only responses mirror the conspiracism they oppose
• Exxon deliberately reversed its climate research to fund denial when regulation loomed
• Faced with disorientation, most citizens are likelier to tune out than to resist conspiracism.
• Factual correction of conspiracism usually fails or backfires
• Fake news functions as a rallying cry delegitimizing the press, not as a theory.
• Fear of primaries drives officials’ conspiracist equivocation
• Fear of primary challenges silences officeholders against their own party’s excesses
• Fossil fuel companies knowingly obscure climate science rather than believe their denial
• Founding-era unity rhetoric was a conscious misrepresentation of American diversity
• Framing parties as conspiracies constitutes an attack on democracy itself
• Futility of reform claims divert attention from ubiquitous semiautomatics
• Gutting agencies makes them genuinely illegitimate in the public eye over time
• Healthy partisanship requires the self-discipline to admit being only a part
• Hofstadter’s ‘paranoid style’ was not a clinical diagnosis of individuals.
• Hofstadter’s paranoid style targets whole ways of life, not particular persons
• Imposing a compromised reality ends democratic politics by destroying common sense
• Independent campaign money stripped party leaders of their gatekeeping power
• Leader equivocation manufactures an epistemic divide over what counts as knowledge.
• Legitimate opposition as organized party rivalry is a modern nineteenth-century invention
• Lie-telling presupposes a shared reality that conspiracism rejects
• Losing a friend to conspiracism creates a gap no common argumentative ground can bridge.
• Lost status and powerlessness, read as elite conspiracy, drive scapegoating conspiracism
• Majorities of Americans hold at least some conspiratorial beliefs
• Maps matching partisan colors can ignite conspiracist suspicion
• Media attacks destroyed the right’s immunity to false information
• Mistrust is democratic, delegitimation assaults democracy
• Mistrust of government is a healthy, intended feature of democratic design.
• Modern democracy depends on insulated expert knowledge for its administrative state
• Moral judgments like torture’s inhumanity need no expert validation
• More than half of Americans endorse conspiratorial narratives about current political events
• Most climate-change denial publications trace back to conservative think tanks
• Most of what people believe is taken on trust, not direct observation
• Most people hold at least one conspiratorial belief.
• Near-zero communication cost eliminated the gatekeeping function
• Nearly a hundred independent 1776 declarations built conspiracist narratives toward revolution
• New and classic conspiracism share urgency but differ fundamentally.
• New conspiracism abandons evidence while classic conspiracism theorizes it
• New conspiracism abandons explanatory theory and targets democratic legitimacy
• New conspiracism ascribes organized power to plotters it never musters itself
• New conspiracism attacks democratic institutions outright rather than just rejecting compromise
• New conspiracism defies the out-of-power symmetry expectation
• New conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory in kind
• New conspiracism dissolves shared perceptions of political reality
• New conspiracism drops explanation and evidence in favor of bare assertion
• New conspiracism floats allegations disconnected from observable reality
• New conspiracism inspires lone armed individuals but not organized movements
• New conspiracism is a closed system that abandons explanation entirely
• New conspiracism is antiparty, not “just fix it” pragmatism or reform-minded Progressivism
• New conspiracism is currently US-specific but likely to spread globally.
• New conspiracism is monologic and untethered to shared facts and experience
• New conspiracism lacks ideology and political theory, producing only disorientation
• New conspiracism lowers the assent bar to mere possibility, without evidence
• New conspiracism obscures real power by delegitimating the institutions that render it visible
• New conspiracism offers cheap knowingness as an elite status
• New conspiracism offers no vision of what should replace delegitimized government
• New conspiracism operates without theory because its sole product is delegitimation
• New conspiracism rejects parties with no reform agenda at all
• New conspiracism replaces skeptical inquiry with certainty immune to correction
• New conspiracism seeks destruction, not regime transformation or replacement
• New conspiracism thrives on innuendo that is only ‘true enough,’ never actually verified.
• New conspiracism undermines legitimacy by attacking attitudes, not by proposing alternatives.
• New conspiracism uniquely harms democracy through both delegitimation and disorientation
• New conspiracism weaponizes reality disputes as a demand for public assent
• New conspiracism will likely spread beyond the United States
• New conspiracists are self-styled cognoscenti, not the intuitive people of populism.
• New conspiracists assent forcefully without believing or disbelieving their claims
• New conspiracists claim elite esoteric knowledge, unlike populists’ plain people
• New conspiracists replace organized political action with mass repetition and assent
• Newer studies show debunking usually works despite the proposed backfire effect.
• Obedient public speech can signal compliance without conveying belief
• Official acknowledgment of a fear ratifies it as reasonable unless paired with correction
• Officials defending democratic processes can enact democracy even from self-interested motives
• Officials who weaponize conspiracism risk believing their own fabrications
• Ominous rhetorical questions can insinuate conspiracy while making no falsifiable claim.
• Only elected officials can effectively counteract conspiracy for partisan voters
• Only new conspiracism causes both delegitimation and disorientation simultaneously
• Only political officials, not courts, can answer conspiracism when representatives abdicate
• Open democratic societies make any secret association read as malicious
• Over half of Americans gave no response to the phrase scientific research.
• Paine’s common sense was a democratic resource against established power
• Parties are definitionally partial and oppositional, not unifying institutions
• Parties deliberately create the divisions critics accuse them of worsening
• Parties do not mirror existing conflicts but actively create and organize them
• Parties function as institutional guarantors of political pluralism against populism
• Parties organize political conflict rather than merely reflecting preexisting disagreements
• Partisan bias charges escalated into a coup conspiracy narrative
• Partisan identity skews which conspiracist claims people credit
• Partisan loyalty compelled Republicans to affirm the Benghazi conspiracy claim over the facts
• Partisan polarization now extends to social life and fear of the other party
• Party officials uniquely positioned to rebut conspiracism instead acquiesce for electoral survival
• People resist randomness and prefer intentional explanations for important events.
• People resist randomness and seek deliberate agents behind major events
• Performing assent to authority’s claims is a form of submission, not belief.
• Polarization and motivated bias differ from conspiracism in being corrigible
• Political action requires shared common sense that conspiracism destroys
• Political conspiracism acts independently once entrenched, not as an epiphenomenon
• Political conspiracism now targets core democratic processes themselves
• Political delegitimation needs no alternative ideology, only angry conspiracism
• Political parties create the people and majority they then claim to represent
• Political unity is constructed, not natural, and must overcome inherent faction
• Politics mixes expert trust with shared commonsense moral judgment, not expertise alone.
• Populism assumes a homogeneous people betrayed by an elite cabal.
• Post-2016 democratic deconsolidation is a named, measurable historical process
• Presidential conspiracism functions as willful arbitrary rule
• Presidential office converts personal conspiracism into publicly authoritative claims
• Presidential recognition power makes conspiracism uniquely divisive at the top
• Presidential scapegoating can make hate feel patriotic.
• Presidents historically used aspirational unity rhetoric that exceeded current facts
• Prior polarization and weakened parties preconditioned conspiracism’s delegitimating effects
• Progressive muckraking saw conspiracy in monopolies and party bosses
• Progressive-era muckraking was conspiracism fused with a theory of democracy
• Public assent, not private belief, is what drives conspiracism’s political effects.
• Public, performative media vilification aims to destroy press legitimacy, unlike private griping.
• Publicly admired acts of conscience draw no public backing from colleagues
• Pure factual exposure mirrors conspiracism by treating declarations as sufficient.
• QAnon frames Trump as sole savior fighting a pedophile deep state
• QAnon grew through entrepreneurial content creators who monetized channel-hopping audiences
• Real expert failures and corruption give democratic skepticism legitimate motivation
• Real governmental conspiracies make dismissing all conspiracy theories irrational
• Real knowledge rests on active doubt rather than certainty
• Reelection fears make silence on conspiracy the safer posture for officials.
• Refusing a conspiracist data demand and explaining why defeated the commission.
• Refuting endless conspiracy claims exhausts both truth-speakers and ordinary citizens.
• Removing editorial gatekeepers opened the way for conspiracy entrepreneurs
• Repetition substitutes for evidence as validation in new conspiracism
• Repetition within echo chambers, not evidence, produces conspiracist assent
• Representatives counter conspiratorial beliefs only through trusted identification, not evidence
• Representatives legitimize constituent fears by sympathetically acknowledging them
• Representatives must both voice constituents’ worries and correct their errors
• Republicans in the Trump era regularly issued accusations they knew might be untrue.
• Resisting conspiracism needs honest witnesses, not heroic martyrs
• Rituals of democratic unity fail once parties deem each other illegitimate.
• Routine institutional obligations become destructive when a president attacks democratic norms
• Scapegoating conspiracism assigns hated groups responsibility for national troubles.
• Scapegoating conspiracism offers only the satisfaction of pulling others down.
• Scapegoating fuses immigrant groups, voter fraud, and partisan opposition into one conspiratorial target
• Scholars have studied legitimacy creating but barely studied delegitimation in stable democracies
• Smear campaigns work by pressuring elected officials into caving
• Social validation through sharing now substitutes for evidence as credibility
• Some political falsehoods aim at affirmation of authority, not belief
• Spicer’s falsehood was an act of submission rather than a lie.
• State officials defeated Trump’s voter-fraud commission by refusing data
• Sunstein and Vermeule proposed government infiltration of conspiracist groups
• Systemic expert marginalization yields pandemics, budget-driven recessions, and health system collapse.
• The ‘fake news’ charge asserts press bias rather than literal fabrication of stories
• The American Revolution conditioned citizens to equate resistance to conspiracy with national identity
• The birther conspiracy persisted by denying plainly verifiable facts
• The crisis of democracy grabbed defenders only after measurable warning signs accumulated
• The Declaration of Independence is a classic conspiracy narrative
• The false belief in modernity’s unity is itself a political fact that directs action
• The fossil fuel industry replicated the tobacco denial playbook
• The new conspiracism is uniquely and asymmetrically a right-wing phenomenon.
• The new conspiracism will outlast Trump’s presidency
• The Russia probe revealed conspiracism’s core function of delegitimating institutions
• The term mainstream has been weaponized as an insult denoting disreputable journalism.
• Those who reject pluralism find even open party rivalry anathema
• Totalitarian regimes own reality by manufacturing a malignant normality people must inhabit.
• Transparency efforts can amplify rather than dispel conspiracism
• Transparency functions as a deterrent against political corruption and misconduct.
• Transparency on its own fails to cure corruption because publicity requires interpretation.
• Tribal political beliefs function as identity markers validated by repetition, not evidence
• True-enough logic treats hostile intent and capacity as adequate support
• Trump brought conspiratorial claims into the White House presidency itself
• Trump demanded Guantánamo detention in the Saipov attack
• Trump reached the presidency without party allegiance or elite endorsement
• Trump’s conspiracism is self-generated to affirm a victimized and grandiose self-image
• Trump’s partisan attacks serve antiparty rather than governing aims
• Unfathomable accusations delight by disorienting their targets
• Use of expert knowledge, not its discovery, is properly a democratic decision
• Vague conspiracist forms like innuendo exist to evade accountability for their claims
• Voter suppression becomes delegitimation when fused to fraud conspiracy claims
• Weak assent fuels emphatic political claims rather than restraining them.
• Wholesome skepticism differs fundamentally from conspiracism
• Written declarations, not battles, drove the Revolution’s course