Republicans and their conspiracy theories

Ben Dreyfuss tweeted last night about a study showing that Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to believe in conspiracy theories. This struck me as historically unsupported, but who knows? Maybe it's true today.

So I took a look at the study and discovered something odd. The top three conservative conspiracy theories are COVID, climate change, and the birther conspiracy (this was before January 6 and "Stop the Steal"). No problem there.

Meanwhile, two of the top five liberal conspiracy theories are exact opposites: Donald Trump faked COVID during the 2020 campaign (45% believed it) and Trump covered up the seriousness of his COVID infection (75% believed it).

Did half of Democrats really believe that Trump faked COVID? I don't remember that being a big thing at all. I had to Google just to remind myself about it and found barely anything at all. USA Today reported that the rumor was started by some guy named Richard Greene. The New York Times reported that overnight "hundreds of tweets" were posted in sympathy.

Anyone familiar with Twitter knows that hundreds of tweets is indistinguishable from zero. A meme is basically invisible until it gets to 100,000 or a million tweets. So is it really plausible that this caught on with half of all Democrats? Or that three-quarters believed the even more obscure theory that Trump was covering up his COVID?

There's something off here. Even assuming the polling is all correct, conservatives tend to believe in big, long-lasting conspiracy theories. Liberals, even if they believe in similar numbers of things, mostly believe in tiny, short-lived conspiracy theories. For the record, the top four among conservatives are:

• Climate change is a hoax.
• Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
• COVID has been exaggerated and isn't really that dangerous.
• Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

(I added the last one since it would certainly make the list today.) The top four among liberals are:

• Trump covered up the seriousness of his COVID infection.
• Republicans stole the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections.
• Trump made a secret deal with Vladimir Putin/Trump is a Russian asset.
• Trump faked his COVID infection.

These sure don't seem the same to me. None of them ever became widespread except maybe Republicans stealing the 2000 election and, perhaps, a belief that Trump was open to Russian campaign help. And none of these have spawned a whole subculture of politicians and pundits who obsess about them.

For now, anyway, I'm sticking with my belief that everyone believes in conspiracy theories but modern conservatives sure believe in way more serious and consequential ones. Is there anything even remotely similar to Pizzagate or QAnon on the liberal side?¹

¹And that's not even getting into hyper-contemporary stuff like Haitians eating pet cats, currently believed by half of all conservatives.