are conservatives crazy?

mental illness and conspiracies.

Emil Kirkegaard has some interesting work that I recommend you check out. I value the fact that he is able to engage with data from a non-conformist position. Rather than being all gloom and doom, he highlights many hopeful trends for the future, and isn’t obsequiously partisan. I could say the same thing about i/o.

But in the disagreement between the two of them, I agree with i/o’s tweet.

1. Calling Kamala Harris a communist is ridiculous, given that she is backed by Dick Cheney, Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, and the Wharton School of Finance.

2. I'm not sure if i/o would agree with me on this point, but I would argue that legal immigration from India and China is a greater threat to democracy than Mexican immigration. This is because elite immigrants have a greater capacity to change norms from the top-down than manual laborers or unemployed welfare recipients.

3. Anyone who thinks Russia is a better country than America is generally delusional, and also generally hypocritical for not leaving the country.

Emil’s response conflates the terms “crazy” with “mentally ill.” This might just be a semantic quibble, but I’ve seen this occur over and over again in other conversations, so I still want to explore the trajectory of conservatism as an increasingly crazy movement. This article isn’t directed against Emil, because he might agree or disagree with parts of it, and I’m not sure what his full position is. Rather, this introduction is just meant to credit him for the inspiration and offer an anecdotal starting point for this survey of history.

structure:

This article is really several articles in one:

1. First, I deal with the semantics of “crazy” vs “mentally ill.” I discuss how it’s possible to be crazy without being mentally ill.

2. Secondly, I go a bit further into the mechanism of ideological transference and the psychology of psychological conversion. I mention my disagreement with Rob Henderson on “luxury beliefs” as a model of social capital.

   1. Specifically, I talk about racial differences in political conversions. Black and Hispanic male teens are much more likely to convert to conservatism from liberalism, while white female teens show the opposite pattern. Among whites, “conservatives” are a highly selected population for low levels of mental illness, but this has to do more with the psychology of ideological conversion than with the beliefs themselves.

3. I then discuss the history of the conspiracy movement, starting in the 20th century.

   1. I observe that over time, the conspiracy movement has become less racist and bigoted against minorities, and more suspicious of elites. Since 2004, the conspiracy movement has become much more associated with the right wing, even though there is a long history of right-wing conspiracy theorists going back to the 1940s.

   2. I also contend that Glenn Beck is crazier than Henry Ford was, on the basis that, in 1920, antisemitism was not considered as “crazy” as it is today.

   3. I discuss the influence of HP Lovecraft, JFK, the "civil war" conspiracy, the role of Hollywood, the fall of the Soviet Union and its impact on Zionism, as well as the roll of Obama and Trump.

4. Finally, I unveil my theory: liberal professors are less mentally ill than the average liberal. Conservative influencers, however, might be more mentally ill than the average conservative, or they just lie for the clout.

5. And lastly, I conclude with a discussion of the “just asking questions” tactics that conservative influencers use to push craziness on their audiences, and contrast it with the unfalsifiable moral claims of the left.

Here we go:

1. craziness and mental illness.

It is possible to believe that “Christianity is crazy” as a religion, and also believe that “Christians have lower levels of mental illness.” This isn’t a contradiction. Mental illness is a specific set of behaviors that can be measured through psychometric testing. For example, let’s say I take 100 people, and 10 of those people are mentally ill: one is a narcissist; the other is borderline; one is depressive; the other is schizophrenic; one is a psychopath; another is a sociopath; one is obsessive-compulsive; another has attention deficit disorder; one is bipolar; another has body dysmorphia.

To define someone as mentally ill, you need to have a set of tests that reliably produce the same results. If 10 different psychologists test one person and get 10 different results, then their diagnostic framework is invalid. If they test one person and all have the same diagnosis, and are able to accurately predict future behavior from this diagnosis, then the category of “mental illness” is empirical and scientific.

“Craziness” on the other hand is quite different. We could say that “using social media is crazy, since it leads to mental illness.” However, Substack is a form of social media that you and I are currently using. Are we crazy? According to some people, we are. But it would be a mistake to say that we are mentally ill just because we use Substack.

Craziness is subjective, whereas mental illness is determined from psychometric tests. That’s not to say that there isn’t an overlap between craziness and mental illness. Mentally ill people are more likely to have crazy beliefs, and people with crazy beliefs are more likely to be mentally ill. This is partially because “craziness” is a measure of deviance from the norm or centrist position, which is determined by intersubjective consensus.

People who are mentally ill have difficulty empathizing and conforming to social rules, including ideological ones. As a result, they “go off the reservation” more often than people are are not mentally ill. However, the reverse is not necessarily true. If a child were adopted and homeschooled by conspiracy theorist parents, and taught that the Earth was flat, then that child would grow up to have crazy beliefs. However, that would not necessarily make the child mentally ill.

Mentally ill are more likely to convert to absurd or crazy religions and ideologies, but people who are raised with absurd or crazy beliefs are not necessarily mentally ill. This is especially true for conservatives.

2. the psychology of conversion.

The average parent in America is more conservative than the population at large. We have a lot of data on this.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/27/parents-republicans-democrats/

What this means is that the majority of young people in America are, at the present moment, being raised by a population which is more conservative and average. Despite this fact, young people are consistently more liberal than average. If political opinions are heritable, how can this be possible? If parents are more conservative than non-parents, shouldn’t that create a selection effect, whereby each generation of young people becomes more successively conservative?

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/07/09/the-politics-of-american-generations-how-age-affects-attitudes-and-voting-behavior/

The only explanation for this is that some percentage of children raised by conservatives are converting to liberalism against the wishes of their parents.

Now, this is a general trend, but not an absolute statement. Anecdotally, there are children raised by liberal parents who become conservative. To find the exact rate of conversion, we can look at the data more closely.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/10/most-us-parents-pass-along-their-religion-and-politics-to-their-children/

If the parents are conservative, the teens age 13-17 converted away from conservatism at a rate of 15%. However, if the parents are liberal, teens age 13-17 converted away from liberalism at a rate of 8%. This means that the liberal rate of conversion is almost twice that of the conservative rate of conversion.

2a. the demographics of conversion

If we break this statistic down even further by specific demographics, the picture might clarify even further.

Source: https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unidosus_latinosonthemove_partisanchurnandchangingvoterintentacrosscohorts.pdf

Source: https://www.dataforprogress.org/insights/2024/7/18/we-polled-black-voters-heres-what-we-found

When we look at Hispanics, there is a clear decline in Democrat party identification/leaning by age, all the way from 69% for the oldest group, down to only 50% for the youngest group. This doesn't necessarily mean that young Hispanics are more conservative, but rather, that they are more independent and less liberal. The Hispanics most likely to support Republicans are those ages 40-49, who have a net leaning of 25% for Republicans. The lowest is for the oldest Hispanics 60+, who lean Republican at 19%. The youngest Hispanics lean Republican 20%.

For black voters, it is also clear that there is a massive different between older votes (65+) and younger voters (under 45). While older black voters support Democratic candidates at a rate of 91-93%, younger black voters drop that support down to 64-71%.

When we look at white voters, we see that for young people, the curve looks like a horseshoe, where whites ages 30-44 are the most likely to vote for Trump, but those ages 65+ or under 30 are the least likely. Part of that was due to the Biden effect, where older whites were sympathetic to Biden due to his demographic profile. However, with Kamala now the candidate, she will likely lose older white voters, meaning that young white voters will be her best demographic among whites.

It is possible that these polls are massively flawed, and will be revealed as inaccurate on election day. Historically, polls are sometimes wrong up to margins of 10%. However, the differences I am highlighting here are between 19% to 23% shifts. Even if the polls are off by 10%, which would be historically massive, even a 9%-13% shift would be appreciable and important for the topic at hand, which is the “conversion rate” of teens from their parent’s ideology.

What this means is that when I say “15% of teens convert to liberalism, and only 8% convert to conservatism,” the numbers for white teens are necessarily even more pronounced. This is because if black and Hispanic teens are leaving the Democrat party by margins between 9% to 23%, the white teens need to “make up” for this difference with an even greater disparity rate between conversions.

The 8%-15% difference between LtC (liberal to conservative) and CtL (conservative to liberal) conversions means that, on net, white teens are shifting 7% away from Republicans and toward Democrats every generation. This is reflected by the data showing that younger whites have shifted 8% away from Republicans in the last 10 years.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/age-generational-cohorts-and-party-identification/

Although the Asian sample size is small, there is some evidence that young Asian voters have swung 5% toward Republicans in the last 10 years.

If we exclude blacks and Hispanics, and only look at white teens, what is the rate of CtL and LtC conversion?

First of all, white teens are only 49% of all American teens. Let’s make the math simpler, and say 50% of teens are white and 50% are non-white. Let’s then underestimate the net LtC (LtC-CtL) for non-white teens as only 5%, even though it may be as high as 23%. If that’s the case, then we have to augment the white net-LtC “widening of the gap” by 5% to account for this imbalance. The result is that the white teen net-LtC isn’t 8-15%, it’s closer to 5.5%-17.5%.

At minimum, the white teen LtC is 15%, and the white teen CtL is 3%; at maximum, the white teen LtC is 23%, and the white teen CtL is 8%. The first number is “hereditarian,” in that it assumes that white teens have the least possible political mobility (18% total change their minds). The second number suggests a “revolutionary mind virus” or paradigm shift, where white teens are massively changing their minds at a rate of 31% total.

This is important, because when we speak about conservative beliefs like “commie Kamala” and “Hungary,” these are especially white-coded. It is true that there are black and Hispanic Trump-supporters who hate the Democrats, but their reasoning usually aligns with the following:

1. Democrats are the real racists;

2. Democrats are bad for the economy;

3. Democrats are bad on abortion;

4. Democrats promote transgenderism;

5. Democrats are weak.

Calling Kamala a “commie” and talking about “based Hungary” refers to an esoteric sub-culture within the MAGA movement which is whiter than your average Republican. Hispanic and black Trump voters are probably watching more TikTok and Hodge Twins than Tucker.¹

The point I am making here is that because no one is converting to conservatism, conservatives end up being a “left behind population.” Essentially, anyone who is conservative ideologically is that way not because they were convinced by arguments or social pressure at school, but because they listen to their parents. When we say, “conservatives have lower levels of mental illness,” we might just be observing that “people who conform to their parent’s ideology have lower levels of mental illness.” This is also probably true for people who follow their parent’s religion.

The converse is also true. People who are mentally ill are more likely to rebel against their parents and align with a new ideology that upsets their parents. This doesn’t meant that liberalism is inherently making people more mentally ill, but the reverse: liberalism is so sexy and attractive that mentally ill people flock to it in an attempt to increase their social capital. People who are mentally ill have a greater need to access social capital than those who are mentally stable. Mentally ill people overcompensate for their disadvantages by “over-signaling” their support of high-status beliefs.

2c. Rob is wrong on “luxury beliefs”

I should write a whole article on what I am about to say, but I think this is the seed of an article I have wanted to write for a long time: Rob Henderson is wrong about luxury beliefs. The fact that certain beliefs carry social capital does not mean they are “luxuries,” because access to social capital is, historically, a matter of life and death, not a “luxury.” This is why people are more afraid of public speaking than of dying: public speaking could lead to consequences for your extended family (shame, guilt by association), while death only kills you as an individual. Following selfish gene theory, it is absolutely crucial that we, as individuals within a tribal species, maintain high social capital at all times. This is even more crucial than accessing food, water, or even sex. Religion manipulates our need for social capital, and can cause people to starve themselves or become celibate. Anyway, it’s possible that Rob already understands these facts and we have a semantic disagreement. Moving on:²

3. the history of conspiracy.

20, 40, or 60 years ago, conservatives did not integrate conspiracy theories as heavily into their worldview. In 1964, white evangelicals voted heavily in favor of Lyndon Johnson, 66%. The Civil Rights Act changed everything. Roe vs. Wade in 1971 didn’t help either. Carter directly appealed to white Evangelicals by espousing their religion, but wasn’t able to win them back, only achieving 42% of their vote.

Because white evangelicals were not able to explicitly state their dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights Act, they instead hyper-focused on moral issues like pornography, abortion, and the Satanic Panic.

The Finder’s Cult story of 1987 is instructional in this regard. It is entirely plausible that a small group of highly intelligent and well-connected individuals were abusing children. The serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy both had careers in politics, and had friends in high places. However, evangelicals took the accusation further: not only was the Finder’s Cult guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but also, the entire FBI was complicit in covering up their crimes because these sorts of crimes were frequent and common among the entire Satanic elite who rule the country.

Allegations of this kind go back to the John Birch Society, but instead of accusing people of being Satanists, they accused people of being secret communists. Over time, the replacement of old guard Rockefeller Republicans like Kevin Philips with new Evangelicals like Billy Graham helped to refocus conspiracies away from the specter of communism toward the specter of Satanism.

Although it was the Evangelical movement that popularized the Satanic panic, it was actually Catholics and feminists who led the charge:

1. The first anti-abortion group is the National Right to Life Committee, which was founded by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1968.

2. The Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media was founded in 1977 by feminists.

3. Lawrence Pazder, a devout Catholic, wrote the first Satanic Panic novel in 1980, and he was brought on sympathetically to the Oprah Winfrey show in 1989.

Abortion, porn, and satanism, alongside other even more fringe topics like “rock music” became the staples of post-Reagan conservatism. This was the platform that pushed Bush to victory in 2000 and 2004, in a rebuke of his father’s failure to win reelection with traditional Rockefeller values.

Ted Sampley’s propaganda

Conservative have consistently trended toward crazier views over time:

• 1831: Prior to the Scofield Bible, John Nelson Darby invents the concept of pre-tribulation rapture with the Plymouth Brethren. He predicts that a Jewish state will be established in Israel and it will be invaded by a tyrannical world government (Gog and Magog).

• 1920: Henry Ford publishes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which allege a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

• 1928: HP Lovecraft publishes The Call of Cthulhu, which is an explicitly racialist invective against foreign religions and non-white people.

• 1947: Truman issues Executive Order 9835, the “loyalty order,” to vet all federal employees for signs of communist sympathies.

• 1958: The John Birch Society is founded, and claims that the presidency and congress have been captured by secret communists.

• 1959-1964: The Twilight Zone portrays various scenarios in which individuals are trapped within a false reality, and discover a horrifying reality about secret forces that are controlling and deceiving them.

• 1964: Thomas Buchanan publishes the first Kennedy conspiracy book, Who Killed Kennedy?

• 1967: Ira Levin’s book Rosemary's Baby imagines a fictional Satanic cult which sacrifices children. It would become the basis for a popular Hollywood film and an entire genre of movies focused on secret Satanic cults.

• 1968: Catholics organize to oppose abortion.

  • Charles Manson first uses the term “Helter Skelter” to prophesize a race war between blacks and whites.

• 1971: Gary Allen publishes None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which sold four million copies. It alleges a conspiracy by a communist elite to enslave humanity.

• 1977: Feminists organize to oppose porn.

  • Star Wars is released, focusing on the narrative of a populist revolt against an evil empire.

• 1978: William Luther Pierce publishes The Turner Diaries, which portrays an inevitable race war, similar to Manson’s “Helter Skelter,” waged against a Zionist-Occupied-Government.

• 1980: Lawrence Pazder writes Michelle Remembers, alleging widespread Satanic sexual abuse.

• 1989: Oprah uncritically invites Pazder on her program, exposing his ideas to millions of people.

• 1991: Televangelist Pat Robertson publishes The New World Order, marrying the earlier theories about communism, Freemasons, and Jesuits together under the umbrella of “the forces of Satan and antichrist.”

  • Bill Cooper publishes Behold a Pale Horse, where he alleges that Eisenhower betrayed America by making a deal with UFOs, and AIDs was invented to genocide non-white people.

• 1993: The X-Files begins an 11 season run until 2002. It features conspiracy theories with references to Operation Paperclip; Mengele-style medical experiments; the creation of a master race through eugenics; and mind control programs.

• 1994: David Icke publishes The Robots' Rebellion, which directly references and supports the claims made in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

• 1995: Ted Kaczynski publishes his manifesto, which portrays the modern world as an all-encompassing hell-scape which must be escaped by rejecting the system and returning to natural traditions of life.

• 1998: Alex Jones helps re-build the Branch Davidian church. He promotes the belief that the government is planning to violently kill and enslave Christians by using FEMA camps.

  • The Truman Show portrays a man whose entire reality is contrived by a team of Hollywood executives.

• 1999: Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut portrays the elite engaging in secret orgies and Satanic black masses.

  • The Matrix portrays humanity as being trapped in a technological simulation where everything is controlled by a robotic global parasitic government which deceives the masses and hides the truth.

• 2001: Alex Jones denies the official narrative on 9/11, helping to establish the Truther Movement.

• 2004: Andy Martin claims that Obama is a secret Muslim following his speech at the DNC. This claim was echoed by conservative forum Free Republic, whose members were referred to as “Freepers.”

• 2006: The Infidel Bloggers Alliance repeats Martin’s claim, followed by Ted Sampley.

• 2010: Glenn Beck became the most popular “news” host in America, alleging that Christian churches had been taken over by an alliance of communists and Nazis working under George Soros. As a Mormon, his belief in the White Horse Prophecy moves him to support Mitt Romney for president.

• 2012: Trump took the stage at the North Carolina Republican Party Convention Banquet, where he alleged that Obama was born in Kenya.

  

3b. who is crazier: Ford or Beck?

Conservatives would object that the Protocols is crazier than Glenn Beck. However, this isn’t necessarily true. The Protocols is an offensive forgery and hoax, but it is also intelligent, educated, and sophisticated. Henry Ford was not a stupid person, and it appealed to him because it seemed to elucidate world events in a rational fashion. This doesn’t mean that Ford was correct, or that his views are acceptable, but that in terms of “craziness” they were much more coherent than anything Glenn Beck believes about George Soros being a Jewish Nazi Communist Eugenicist Socialist Elitist.

When I say that a belief is crazy, I don’t mean that it is “untrue” or “offensive.” I mean that it is tautologically incoherent and defies all logic and reason on its very face.

In 1920, America was not just racially segregated, but also religiously segregated. There were Catholic neighborhoods and Catholic schools, Jewish neighborhoods and Jewish schools. Most Jews did not intermarry with gentiles, as this was a violation of both the Jewish and Christian religion and resulted in excommunication from both communities. Even after 1945, many Jewish families would threaten to disown their children for marrying a gentile, and the reverse was true as well. Because the narrative of identity in America has been reduced to a black-white binary, it is often forgotten that Jews were discriminated against in schools, country clubs, hotels, and businesses.

James B. Stewart’s book Den of Thieves (1992) describes how in the 1970s, American financial corporations were segregated between “Jewish firms” and “WASP firms.” It was only in the 1980s that the distinction between them disappeared, leading to the rise of many important Jewish financiers, like Carl Icahn, Michael Milken, and Ivan Bosky.

All of this is to say that in 1920, most Americans had very little in common with Jews, and very little understanding of the Jewish religion. It would be preferable if Americans like Henry Ford took the time to study Judaism carefully and amicably, rather than jumping to hostile conclusions. The fact that he did not was dangerous and regrettable. However, it wasn’t “crazy.”

In 1920, the prominence of Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia alarmed anti-communists like Ford. Besides Lenin and Stalin, top Bolsheviks included Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, all of whom repudiated the Jewish religion, but had Jewish ethnic heritage. Because of persecution, communists were forced to operate in secret societies, often associated with Freemasons. As a result, the Protocols fit in neatly with conspiracies regarding the Freemasons or the Jesuits, by alleging that all these secret societies were preceded by a 2,000 year old Talmudic conspiracy. This claim was further bolstered by the fact that Rudolf II, who founded modern European Hermeticism and Occultism, was a huge fan of Kabbalah.

Hillsdale college, a conservative institution which worships Churchill, describes his views as follows:

In his article Churchill describes three kinds of Jews. “National Jews” are devoted to their countries and “Zionists” support a national home if not country for Jews in Palestine. According to Churchill, these two categories make up the vast majority of Jews. The third kind—a small minority—are described interchangeably by Churchill as “International,” “Terrorist” and “Bolshevik” Jews. His closing points are that all other Jews should condemn the Bolshevik conspiracy and make clear it is not a Jewish movement.

In the context of 1920, these statements of Churchill should be interpreted as defensive toward the Jewish people. However, in modern times, the terms “International, Terrorist, Bolshevik Jews” sounds undeniably antisemitic. If we understand Churchill as a reasonable British naval officer, and not a “crazy” antisemite, then Henry Ford’s views are still offensive, but they are not as “crazy” as they would appear to us today. Prejudiced, yes. Incoherent or insane, no.

3c. lovecraft and conspiracy.

When Lovecraft wrote the Call of Cthulhu, he was basing his fiction on historical accounts of non-white cultures, such as the human sacrifice cults of Mesoamerica and the Middle East. Lovecraft neglected to acknowledge the Celtic history of human sacrifice when he racialized the practice, but Lovecraft’s fiction can’t be described as “crazy.” However, the images that Lovecraft invoked of Satanism and human sacrifice occurring within small town America clearly influenced Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary's Baby. In fact, although Lovecraft was an antisemite, he praised Levin’s work and encouraged him.

JFK

Since 1964, conspiracy theories have had a tendency to "snowball." For example, JFK was originally a darling of the left, since he was racially progressive, in favor of welfare, and supported the expansion of government. To boot, he was Catholic. All those positions make him radioactive for the traditional Protestants of the John Birch Society. However, over time, these details were ignored and rolled together to fit into a larger puzzle. At various times, JFK was accused of being a “secret communist,” a Jesuit papist, or “puppet of the ADL.” But today, most right-wing conspiracy theorists see him as a “martyr,” killed by the globalists or Zionists.

civil war.

Manson and Pierce both helped to popularize the concept of a race war breaking out in America. As Evangelicals began to “wash away” the racial elements in the conspiracy movement, they replaced race war with the rapture. Alex Jones, attempting to move away from religious prophecy and secularize the message of the Evangelicals, replaced the rapture with “FEMA camps.” But these are all variations on the same theme: ZOG, or the Satanists, or the Globalists, is going to begin a mass persecution of whites, or Christians, or the American people, and the result is going to be genocide, or the rapture, or global depopulation. It’s the same mythic structure, simply altered for the target audience.

hollywood.

A significant proportion of conspiracy thinking can be attributed to Hollywood. Rosemary’s Baby normalized the idea of Satanic human sacrifice cults; The Twilight Zone, Truman Show, and The Matrix normalized the idea of being trapped in a false reality by occult powers. Eyes Wide Shut combined the themes of sexual rituals together with sinister and powerful elites. It should also be mentioned that the myth of UFO abductions fits perfectly into this scheme: some powerful foreign entity controls innocent people and sexually abuses them and treats them like cattle. Lizard people, aliens, Jews, and “globalists” all become interchangeable in the American conspiracy patchwork.

evangelicals and libertarians.

In 1980, the Satanic Panic was more prominent among Catholics than it was among Evangelicals. However, in the aftermath of Vatican II, and the rise of Pope John Paul II in 1978, conspiracy theories were suppressed by the Catholic hierarchy and looked for more fertile ground elsewhere. They found that fertile ground in Evangelicals, who copied and plagiarized from the Catholics and failed to give credit where credit was due. By 1991, Pat Robertson had successfully stolen the thunder of earlier Catholic writers and claimed their theories for himself.

This ushered in an age of "ultra-conspiracy" between 1991 and 2001. These 10 years were critical for the conspiracy movement. The Soviet Union had fallen, and the threat of communism disappeared. For conspiracy theories, this created “mythological pressure.” Mythological pressure refers to the stress created when the fundamental facts of a lie begin to fall apart. For example: “all of the elites are communists, and they want to usher in global communism.” That is a pretty difficult lie to maintain in the face of the fall of the Soviet Union. In order to maintain the lie, conspiracy theorists had to do one of two things:

1. Deny the fall. Claim that the Soviet Union didn’t fall, but only pretended to fall in order to fool people. 4D chess. The real Soviet Union is the United States, whose citizens have been lulled into a false sense of security, but who are sleepwalkers slowly drifting into total fascist-totalitarian-communist dictatorship.

2. Replace communism. A potentially less crazy change would be to swap out “communism” as the boogeyman for something else, like “globalism,” Lizard People, or “world Jewry.”

Conspiracy theorists who hung onto the story of a “communist takeover” went toward the Ron Paul and libertarian movement, which was an ultimate failure. Those who were successful were able to re-brand the boogeyman not as a force of ideology communism, but as an amorphous, ancient, Cthulhu-like or lizard entity, non-human, extraterrestrial, Satanic, hyper-technological, genetically-modified, animal-human hybrid species. In this way, the momentum and inertia of the conspiracy movement was expanded and compounded, rather than dissipated into the overly technical theories of Rothbard and Mises. In other words, it was the fall of the Soviet Union which killed libertarianism, because it stole from libertarianism its arch nemesis. Every successful political movement needs a nemesis upon which to focus its energies. As libertarianism fell away, a new conspiracy movement filled its shoes to carry on the flag.

zionism.

The Iraq War in 2003 fueled a new focus on the Middle East, rather than on Russia. Christian Zionism had long been a part of the conspiracy movement, going back to 1831 with John Nelson Darby. However, now, it was being inverted and turned into its opposite. Rather than Israel playing a positive role in a fight against the Empire of Babylon, and Gog and Magog, Israel was now villainized. Rather than embracing the end of the world, conspiracy theorists saw the Apocalypse / WWIII as something to be avoided, and saw the role of Israel as a negative one.

During the Cold War, Israel was just one ally among many against the Soviet Union. The Soviets were allied at times with Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, which surrounded and attacked Israel. In this context, Israel was seen as an underdog in the fight against communism. However, after the end of the Cold War, the traditional justification for an alliance between America and Israel fell apart. It was no longer justified in terms of anti-communism, but only in terms of Christian Zionism. This shift from a focus on economic policy to religion put Israel front-and-center in the mind of conspiracy theorists.

obama and trump.

The far right has argued that Trump was the first Republican, ever, to mention white people in explicit terms. This is gross historical revisionism. Trump never mentioned white people in a positive sense, but attacked Muslims and Mexicans as an implicit form of white identity politics. Unlike Trump, Bill O’Reilly was willing to put politics in racial terms when he said that Obama’s victory in 2012 was due to the fact that “the white establishment is now the minority.” Even earlier, in 2009, Glenn Beck claimed that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” In comparison, Trump’s racist dog-whistling was actually quite subtle and reserved.

Despite the fact that many white nationalists praised Trump for “making white identity mainstream,” unlike Beck and O’Reilly, Trump refused to ever say the word “white culture” or “white establishment.” As far as Trump was concerned, white people had no particular culture or identity. Instead, Trump referred to Obama as a “secret Muslim” and pushed the conspiracy theory that he was born in Kenya. Trump claimed that Muslims were trying to take over the country, and he pushed the conspiracy theory that Muslims were going to take over Europe while Hispanics took over America.

The reality is that Muslims are rapidly secularizing and assimilating into western culture. “The jihadi plan to take over the west” is failing much more rapidly than the Soviet Union fell apart. Just look at the birth rates:

The Hispanic TFR is not only under 2.1 in America, but also in Mexico (1.8) and Brazil (1.7). There simply aren’t enough Hispanic children to sustain their own populations in their own countries, let alone “taking over” America. To suggest that “demographics is destiny” is to suggest that the Helots would inevitably take over Sparta. It is a form of radical democratic egalitarianism from the right, where manual laborers are equated with financiers in terms of their potential for political and economic power projection.

Racism is generally the idea that one’s own race is superior to others; conspiracy theories, on the other hand, imagine “the people” as victims and underdogs, fighting a superior force. These two ideas are mythological opposites, and yet they often exist in a competitive or symbiotic relationship.

Kanye West and Candace Owens are attracted more to Trump than the Democrats. This is because Trump fits into the populist caricature of a “man of the people,” brash and uncut, whereas the Democrats fit into the elitist caricature of “puppeteers,” slick Hollywood actors who are controlled from behind the scenes by shadowy forces.

4. elites vs proles.

The elite of leftist or liberal intellectual circles are academics and professors with PhDs.

As it turns out, those who graduate with college degrees have lower levels of affective, anxiety, and substance disorders. The effect is more pronounced in each category for level of education than for level of income, when comparing <$19k to $70k. Since IQ is correlated with income, and IQ is inversely correlated with mental illness, these findings make sense.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/

How is this possible, if the average leftist is more mentally ill than the average moderate or conservative? As it turns out, most leftists are of average intelligence, and they do not constitute part of the intelligentsia of the left. There is no contradiction between these two facts: the average leftist is mentally ill, but the average elite leftist (professor, academic, published author) is not mentally ill, and is in fact much less mentally ill than even the average conservative.

On the other hand, while the average conservative is not at all mentally ill (with respect to the left), the elite of the conservative movement may not be any less mentally ill.

Let’s estimate that liberals are 3x as mentally ill as conservatives. If 15% of conservatives are mentally ill, we’ll estimate that 45% of liberals are mentally ill.

However, we also know that college educated people are 57% less likely to have mental illness than those who drop out of high school. This means that liberals with graduate degrees are only 19.35% mentally ill, compared to 15% of conservatives. This is still a greater amount of mental illness, but much less so.

It’s also true that conservatives with graduate degrees should tend to be less mentally ill than the average conservative. However, conservative media and talk radio isn’t dominated by conservatives with graduate degrees. It’s dominated by TikTok, Andrew Tate, the Hodge Twins, Candace Owens, Dan Bongino, Steven Crowder, Brandon Tatum, Diamond and Silk, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I won’t assert without evidence that any of these individuals are mentally ill. My purpose isn’t to diagnose them. But it is entirely possible for a sane person, for a variety of reasons (self interest, fame, money, power, control, importance, winning political battles) to promote talking points that are legitimately crazy. If Marjorie Taylor Greene claims that Democrats control the weather and use it to kill Trump voters, and that FEMA is banning aid from entering Appalachia, is she crazy, or just lying for clout and point-scoring?

It doesn’t really matter what MTG or any other conservative influencer would score on a psychometric test. Maybe they are mentally healthy. But their ideas are not. As it turns out, even conservatives who are more mentally stable than liberals still can be convinced of crazy ideas, and these crazy ideas have consequences.

If we ran psychometric tests on every single member of the January 6th riot, how mentally ill would that person be? Probably slightly more mentally ill than the average conservative, but maybe less mentally ill than the average liberal. Even if that were true, January 6th was a crazy event organized according to a crazy plan to steal an election. John McEntee isn’t a stupid person, but his involvement in January 6th demonstrates a high level of contempt for democracy and a willingness to risk the stability of the government to achieve a Trump victory. Sane people can make crazy plans.

From McEntee’s point of view, his actions on January 6th were rational and calculated, and not the ravings of a madman. Even if that were true, the event that he helped inspire can fairly be called “chaotic,” if not entirely bonkers, kooky, and insane.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of rioters on January 6th, maybe one 1% of them were mentally ill. But that’s still 1,000 mentally ill people attempting to overthrow the government, egged on by hundreds of thousands of passive bystanders. In this way, you can have “low levels of mental illness” and “high levels of craziness” at the same time.

5. just asking questions!

Republicans and conspiracy theorists love this phrase: “I’m just asking questions!” That was the defense of Alex Jones after he was sued for questioning whether or not the parents of Sandy Hook victims were crisis actors. The strategy is fairly consistent:

1. Accuse Hunter Biden of being a pedophile, on the basis that he hired prostitutes and smoked crack;

2. Accuse Democrats of controlling the weather, since a storm hurt Republican areas;

3. Accuse all political elites of sacrificing babies to Beelzebub, since Jeffrey Epstein hired teen prostitutes;

4. Accuse Democrats of stealing the election with dominion voter machines, since there was an unprecedented increase in mail in ballots;

5. Accuse FBI agents and antifa of orchestrating January 6th, since some FBI informants were present;

6. Accuse Democrats of “post-birth abortion” if a damaged fetus survives an abortion after extraction, despite the fact that these fetuses have a low potential of survival;³

7. Accuse immigrants of having a higher crime rate than citizens, since some immigrants do commit crime;

8. Accuse transgender MtF women of going into women’s bathrooms to assault women, despite the fact that not a single one of these “stranger danger” assaults has been recorded.⁴

In each case, there is some modicum of truth or plausibility to each of these claims, but they are also demonstrably without any evidence and are simply assertions. In fact, all the evidence we have suggests these are outright lies.

By contrast, when leftists commit errors, these are generally unfalsifiable moral errors of intent or value rather than empirical errors. For example, “America is an evil country because cops shoot black people.” This isn’t an empirically false statement, but it is simply a moral assertion devoid of any proportion. The implication is that there is a theoretical country which is more moral than America because in this imaginary country, cops do not shoot black people. Leftists assert that such a state of affairs is possible, and they also imagine countries where everyone receives infinite money and resources and judge America as evil for not living up to those standards.

This could be motivated by mental illness. For example, narcissistic people are more likely to engage in moral performances in an effort to feel superior to others. Saying things like “America is evil because cops shoot black people” is a way to feel morally superior to others who disagree with you. By denouncing America as evil, a leftist can feel morally superior to everyone around them.

However, when a right-winger says “Hunter Biden was controlled by Jeffrey Epstein to steal the election with Dominion machines so that the Democrats could use adrenochrome to fuel their weather machines which they harvest from aborted babies to use FEMA to genocide Appalachians so they can let in more immigrants to commit white genocide and get trans people in bathrooms to rape women and…” This is a very morally principled stance. I agree with conservatives that if the Democrats were raping and killing everyone in order to rape and kill everyone even more, this would be very bad and they should be stopped. However, because this is not true, I have to put these beliefs in the “crazy” category, whether those who believe these ideas tend to be “mentally ill” or not.

It would be interesting to start studying the mental illness rates of individual beliefs outside of “liberal” vs “conservative.” For example:

1. Are Democrats using weather machines to kill Trump supporters?

2. Do you think trans-women are women?

The first statement is a matter of objective fact: either Democrats are using weather machines to kill Trump supporters, or they are not. The second is a sort of metaphysical category evaluation which is completely unfalsifiable. The far right lives in an alternative reality, and liberals have an alternative set of values. Having a strange set of moral values might correlate with mental illness, but if living in an alternate reality doesn’t sound “crazy” to you, then you sound “crazy” to me.

Thanks for reading.

You survived! This article took me over 6 hours to write. If you’d like to compensate me for my work, feel free to become a free or paid subscriber. I also appreciate your likes, comments, and re-stacks. As I argue in this article, social capital is more important than life itself, and so your moral support is very much appreciated. Thank you!

1. This is an assumption on my part, and studies on non-white conservative media consumption would be useful here.

2. This article already has too many tangents, so I’m going to have to move on and tease you for now… Comment below if you want to see me write the full article.

3. Even according to anti-abortion activists, this is only possible in less than half of 1% of all abortions.

4. No recorded bathroom assaults between adults and children: “Pat's Place interviewed 536 victims; of them only 2%-- or just 11 cases-- involved strangers. Over the last two years at least 850 children were interviewed, and the number of transgender bathroom assaults was zero. Oliver says there are bathroom sexual assaults, but almost all of them occur between children who are about the same age and who know each other.”

Bathrooms aren’t a risky area, because “most (70%) of the sexual assaults reported to law enforcement occurred in the residence of the victim, the offender, or the residence of another individual… The most common non-resident locations for sexual assaults of juveniles were roadways, fields/woods, schools, and hotels/motels.”