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Everyone should care less about politics than they currently do, so this is not a detail I share proudly, but I spent a good portion of my July 4th weekend working my way through a two-hour conversation between Ezra Klein and Chris Rufo. The pair offered diagnoses of the problems on the left and right, agreed on a variety of fronts, and articulated cogent, competing visions of the institutional and ideological tensions that define our times.
There was also a bit on conspiracy theories that has stuck with me, so if you’ll forgive a midsummer zag, today’s post will focus on the state of the information landscape online. This was Rufo, describing the rise of antisemitism among the online right:
How do conspiracy theories work? Conspiracy theories work for people who want to forfeit agency. For people who do not foresee the possibility of constructive action in their personal lives or in public life. And therefore the conspiracy theory gives them the rationalization and justification for their nihilism.
That explanation is insightful, but of course lately the answer to the question “how do conspiracy theories work?” could just as easily be “they work quite well.” That was one of the predicates for Rufo’s conversation with Klein. They discussed the growing popularity of conspiratorial narrators like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, the troubling direction that Tucker Carlson has taken his career, and Rufo’s stated concerns with fact-indifferent extremism that’s increasing on the right and increasingly institutionalized on the left.
