How to steer away from the most harmful conspiracy theories
The past 72 hours have been a major exercise in this.
Thank you for reading my newsletter! As many of the events of this week have been somewhat weighty, I’ve left most of today’s paywalled Tuesday edition open for everyone. Thanks so much to my paid subscribers who make it possible for me to do this.
Broad-spectrum conspiracy theorist (and Congressperson) Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose only qualification for being in Congress is that she is a broad-spectrum conspiracy theorist (which is good enough for some voters), is now claiming that the weapons Hamas used to attack Israel were likely supplied by Ukraine.
(I should note that in popular parlance, conspiracy theory has become a synonym for falsehood. This is unfortunate, because they don’t mean the same thing, they mean two different things that are both important; and when people use them interchangeably, we begin to lose recognition of these two separate types of misinformation. Although she’s best known as a conspiracy theorist, Greene’s latest statements are simply a falsehood.)
Here’s why it’s important that her latest falsehoods should not be given any oxygen. It’s a fact that Russia invaded Ukraine without provocation, in violation of international law and basic human decency. Most consider their actions unjustifiable, but it’s also true that some in Russia — perhaps many in Russia — disagree. They see territory that they believe should be their own; they see Ukraine’s Azov Regiment as Nazis running the country, and it’s been a good thing for Russia ever since WWII to get rid of Nazis. Pro-Putin people around the world, presumably including Greene, tend to agree with some of those Russia-centric justifications.
It’s also a fact that Putin has a stated hope to rebuild the USSR as his legacy, a nation which followed Stalinism doctrine to force other nations to adopt their totalitarian version of communism. That we see Ukraine and other nations nearby scrambling to join NATO is evidence that they expect Putin to continue pursuing that expansionist doctrine.
All of this is a bad thing, and it’s underway. Ukraine, with widespread international support, is all that stands in its way.
So when Marjorie Taylor Greene accuses Ukraine of supplying this attack on Israel by Hamas — a proposition so ludicrous that no cogent counterarguments can even be made against it — it’s no less than fueling an engine to erode that support for Ukraine, and make Putin’s reconquista all the easier for him.
Why Greene and other undereducated populists around the world see things from Putin’s perspective is a secret known only to themselves, as there is nothing in Putin’s doctrine of benefit to Americans or citizens of other non-Stalinist countries.
The danger is that when one becomes a follower of Greene and embraces her more mundane conspiracy theories — and it feels Kafkaesque to call Election Truthism and Jewish Space Lasers “mundane” — one is far more likely to carry on and embrace her pro-Putin perspective as well. This is the danger of belief in seemingly harmless misinformation: it’s a gateway drug to the much harder drugs. And this is what we do about it: