Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters in a campaign visit to Council Bluffs. He was back in Iowa on July 18 to participate in a cable TV interview. (Jared Strong/Iowa Capital Dispatch)

Liberal commentators frequently condemn conspiracy theories that threaten public safety. The US mainstream media exploded in 2016 when an armed man harassed diners in a Washington DC pizzeria, allegedly because he subscribed to the QAnon online conspiracy theory claiming that a Hillary Clinton-connected paedophile ring was operating from the restaurant.

British media reacted similarly in 2020 to a man who destroyed a 5G mast for fear it was spreading COVID-19. Yet criminal as these actions were, their negative impacts were limited.

But what if liberal conspiracy theories can be even more wrong-headed and damaging than their fringe counterparts? Our recent research explores this question in detail.

Conspiracy theories, right and left

Liberal observers often present conspiracism as the preserve of right or left-wingers. Journalist David Aaronovitch and philosopher Quassim Cassam, for example, attribute fallacious conspiracy theorising to the political “extremes”.

This preoccupation with the conspiracist fringes has some validity. Rightist conspiracy theories are numerous, ranging from “great replacement” paranoia about the presumed elimination of white populations in the west, to the supposed machinations of ‘bogeymen’ such as George Soros, whose philanthropy is blamed for funding progressive causes like Black Lives Matter.

Right-wing conspiracism relies on simplistic narratives of good versus evil, as well as sexist, racist and nationalist othering.

Left-wing conspiracists, meanwhile, include those who overestimate the role of western interference in foreign protests. For instance, recent pro-democracy uprisings in Hong Kong and Iran were often dismissed as western-orchestrated actions by pundits on platforms such as RT, the Russian news network. According to academic Grażyna Piechota, RT is guilty of “building a conspiracy message [and] using it as a political instrument”.

Older and more damaging are left-wing conspiracy theories of an antisemitic nature – rightly dubbed “the socialism of fools” – which have blamed international Jewish wealth and power for injustice, corruption and unemployment.

Trying to topple Trump

Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, information including a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele posited collusion between Trump’s aides and Russian operatives, and the involvement of Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci in a Russian hedge fund. There were even claims about Trump cavorting with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.

While US liberal media outlets CNN and MSNBC promoted these rumours, they turned out to be mostly baseless. CNN sacked three journalists over the Scaramucci inaccuracies, while special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found no evidence of Russian interference in US politics.

These liberal conspiracy theories about Trump and Corbyn are as simplistic and fallacious as much leftist and rightist conspiracism because they too often ignore wider economic and political contexts.

The antisemitism slur allowed the liberal media to overlook the Corbyn project’s widespread popularity among voters disaffected with the neoliberal settlement – the downscaling of state responsibility and the increased power of the markets – in which liberals remain invested.

In the Trump imbroglio, the obsession with Russian collusion excused liberals from acknowledging the socio-political factors underpinning Trump’s rise, primarily the disaffection of many Americans in an era of declining wages and living standards.

Deadly dangers of liberal conspiracism

Conspiracism from the centre can also have deadly consequences. For instance, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, described by US intellectual Noam Chomsky as “the worst crime of the 21st century”, was justified by western governments’ false claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy deadly weapons within 45 minutes. This claim was vulnerable to the “problematic evidential practices associated with conspiracy theories”, as philosopher Matthew XR Dentith observes.

Irrational conspiracism has tainted the liberal case for many other western interventions from the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US government wrongly accused the Spanish of sabotaging an American ship in Cuba, to the 2011 NATO attack on Libya, which was justified by the bogus allegation that Colonel Gaddafi was planning to massacre civilians.

The human cost of these wars – at least 20 million lives, according to one estimate – well exceeds the damage done in the name of peripheral conspiracy theories such as QAnon.