You might've seen major news about how The Washington Post published a conspiracy about Trump’s call to the Georgia Secretary of State as fact, deliberately spreading actual fake news. I feel the need to remind people that conspiracies, myths, misinformation, and flat-out falsehoods are not sole products of right wing, QAnon folks, because I have seen many of my own friends actually make such a claim. Here are some left wing ones that come to mind:
- Jussie Smollet hoax
- Covington Catholic kids debacle
- Brett Kavanaugh was a gang rapist
- We’ve been defunding education for years
- The gorilla channel
- "ANTIFA is an idea"
- Russiagate
- Koch brothers are brainwashing a bunch of people into being pro-free market with money
- Pee tapes
- The second amendment is talking about the military not citizens
- Trump was gonna put marginalized citizens into internment camps (several friends posted this)
- The March 4, 2021 riot/insurrection (never happened, no real evidence of one going to happen)
- There was no violence from BLM-ANTIFA riots/it was white supremacists disguised as ANTIFA causing all the trouble
- D.C. lights went out b/c the FBI was kidnapping protestors
- Child labor laws are the reason businesses stopped exploiting children
- Jordan Peterson is a Nazi/white supremacist/alt-right
- The gender wage gap
- Trump said Nazis were “fine people”
- Red states like Florida are handling COVID poorly
- Don’t reopen schools b/c they’re major disease spreaders/unsafe
- Sweden and Denmark are socialist
- Frequent hate crime hoaxes
- Trump is using USPS to steal the election
- Unions are the reason we have weekends and 40-hour work weeks
- The patriarchy; a group of straight white male billionaires are secretly running everything and preventing minorities from progressing
- Overpopulation/overconsumption
- "The world will die if we don't pass X policy by __" (a claim that’s been repeated several times over the past five decades)
- Kyle Rittenhouse (he was with a white supremacist group; crossed state lines to intentionally kill; etc.)
- Wage stagnation
- "Amazon doesn't pay any taxes"
- Trump called troops "liars and suckers"
- Basically anything with dark money, Koch-funded, etc
- Implicit bias
- "Melania has a body double"
- Republican legislators plotted to have AOC murdered
- Detained migrants were forced to drink toilet water
- "Stacey Abrams is the rightful governor of Georgia"
- CPAC designed its stage after a Nazi rune
- Trump lied that he had COVID
Any number of these are believed (or were believed but without legitimate evidence) by left-leaning people. Even those that might be true but are unverified were accepted without question.
So don't even try to act like misinformation or conspiracies are exclusive to "flyover country MAGA cultists." There are liberal and progressive people with PhDs who believe this stuff because they’re also susceptible to untruths.
The difference is the majority of gatekeepers of information are on the left side of the political aisle, so these conspiracies and co. don’t get the same kind of day-and-night coverage and scrutiny. Even if it’s something that’s just speculation, like that Trump was lying about his COVID diagnosis, it would be fact-checked and nuanced to death if it was a belief held by right-wing people. On top of that, those progressives and liberals who try to push back against such conspiracies are often ignored (or some are too afraid to speak up). Plus, even if you don't agree with everything in your tribe, most aren't keen to calling out when their tribe is wrong.