Gramsci wrote: Tue Jan 06, 2026 12:16 pm On a side note from the current shitshow.

Any other Gen Xers here noticed the shift in the culture around conspiracy theories since we were 18-25ish? Back in mid to late 90s in my circle all the conspiracy minded ideas seemed to come from the left or apolitical hippie types (the most likely to become red pilled fascists later)… I remember lots of Alternative Tentacles/Dead Kennedys stuff, Chomsky, McLibel and illuminati pamphlets etc.

Looking back I can see how this culture morphed into far right lunacy. I’m interested if this was other folks’ experience of this time and how things moved since social media fucked the world.

I think thats just because of the crowd you kept. Outside of schizophrenic people dabbling, I don’t think there is as much crossover between far left and right as liberals like to say, though the times it happens are notable.

The right wing conspiracy nuts included american militia movement had Waco and the Oklahoma City Bombing. There are the ever present right wing occultists, satanists, neo-neo-folk, rw black metal, protocols of the elders of zion, the latter of which I’m 90% somebody brought home from a refinery in the 90s, though I can’t be certain as I was a child. The heirs to the 70s Years of Lead events like the Belgiam mass shootings. There were pre-millennium cults for sure, right wing preppers, and I remember a lot of TV programming about the end of the world because I was really traumatized by it. Oh, David Icke. Neo-nazis. UFOs and the military associations. Alex Jones when he was understood to just be part of Austin color. There was a ton of right wing shit everywhere, and that’s before we even get to September 11.

In the left, ‘conspiracy’ is now mostly referred to as parapolitics. They study similar areas but are much less camp of the saints-y. Some of it gets crazy, but it has to be studied to understand the 20th century, particularly centered around the JFK assassination, which was an event of political significance on a level approaching the dropping of the atomic bomb. De ja vu

Gramsci wrote: Tue Jan 06, 2026 4:25 am

But the weirdest part here is the raw stupidity of the Venezuelan action. No plan, not real case against Maduro. I can imagine a scenario where if it’s a trial by jury or actual neutral judges he’s released as not guilty. Imagine this happening…

Again, this is just South Park.

I'm entirely open to possibility I'm missing something (or a lot of things), but his is my conclusion too. Trump now says he/US runs things in Venezuela but that's just clearly not the case, the entire regime sans Maduro is still there. Any plan for the US companies to benefit from Venezuela's resources is going to take long years and can fail in oh so many of ways so I guess Trump's thinking is that since Maduro = bad, removing him = good, very good so things will just fall into places as he wants because of his general power, awesomeness and will? Or is he actually planning years long military occupation of Venezuela and installing a puppet government there which I have troubles imaging, however I do know Trump said he is not 'afraid of boots on the ground' action or however he phrased it. Plus, he is ignoring the opposition leader because of Nobel Price jealously which is just absurd, even if very on brand, but that is going to make the task of 'running' things in Venezuela even more difficult. I'm almost feel like an idiot nad half for being surprised at the apparent lack of plan of US president in the year 2026, but here I am.

And besides that he is now openly threatening leaders of Columbia and Cuba, saying he will take over Greenland, I'm kind of surprised I haven't heard about 'Canada, the soon to be the 51st state of US'. It does look like he is power tripping, which I think makes actions against Greenland even more likely which is going to be a disaster for NATO, but it's writing for that has been on the wall for some time now. Fuck all of it.


And since eastern block rock/punk music was mentioned here is a banger of an Polish post-punk (I guess?) album from 1986 - Siekiera 'Nowa Aleksandria'
(proper albums ends on track 10)

Gramsci wrote: On a side note from the current shitshow.

Any other Gen Xers here noticed the shift in the culture around conspiracy theories since we were 18-25ish? Back in mid to late 90s in my circle all the conspiracy minded ideas seemed to come from the left or apolitical hippie types (the most likely to become red pilled fascists later)… I remember lots of Alternative Tentacles/Dead Kennedys stuff, Chomsky, McLibel and illuminati pamphlets etc.

Looking back I can see how this culture morphed into far right lunacy. I’m interested if this was other folks’ experience of this time and how things moved since social media fucked the world.

From where I was sitting, conspiracy theories in the '80s and '90s were usually the domain of leftist hippies and the occasional far-right, paranoid survivalist type. W/a side order of political punks who didn't trust any system, maaaaaan.

This might just be a coincidence or it might be trivial as fuck, but the big phenomena that began mainstreaming conspiracies seemed like 1. The rise of designed-to-enrage political talk radio (which later moved online) and 2. The success of The X-Files (of all things!). Of course, once the internet became more pervasive and, especially, since social media ramped up, the whole concept got pretty normalized.

The right (not even necessarily just the far right) full-on embraced conspiratorial thinking during the Obama years, perhaps ignited by the spark of 9/11 and the failure of two wars that came out of it. Conservatives turned to conspiracy b/c they felt marginalized by the national mood, the Tea Party was doing its by-any-means-necessary thing, and their guys lost to a milquetoast technocrat who was really just an uppity commie from Kenya, don't ya know.

We're in a strange place now. Conspiracy theories still seem to be mostly a right-wing phenomenon, but I'm also noticing them more on the left again. Horseshoe theory and all that. The first inkling of this was when certain Marxists began repeating bizarre Russian-media propaganda during the invasion of Crimea. Some of that got pretty nuts (like swearing Russia wasn't behind downing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, despite ample evidence to the contrary; people blamed Ukraine instead, and one theory even went so far as to suggest the CIA did it and the plane was a plant full of cadavers). But shit, even the mainstream center-left was falling for conspiracies—if just a little bit—a few years later, in the form of the Steele dossier.

Some of it is just the times and the way most people get info now. I think the main catalyst is tech. Institutions are breaking down, trust in the media is low, the increasingly small number of companies who own that media insist on pumping out increasingly shoddy info, the stuff online is still a thousand times worse, and people live in their own echo chambers (ie newsfeed culture) and seek out or latch onto stories (often, factoids) that simply confirm their biases—what they already want to believe—no matter how outlandish those stories are. Smartphone culture has made people increasingly irrational, impatient, and looking for simplistic ways to explain the world, I suppose.

Gramsci wrote: Tue Jan 06, 2026 12:16 pmAny other Gen Xers here noticed the shift in the culture around conspiracy theories since we were 18-25ish?

I have, but in a different way. I first came into contact with conspiracy theories in the late 00s, or I guess I knew about 9/11 theories before but it was then that I discovered the "classics" like Illuminati etc., just around the time that a real subculture was forming around this stuff online. I didn't take it to belong to any specific political camp, rather it was mostly turning away from normal politics and the mundane, except when injecting meaning into some event like the Sandy Hook shooting, or the swine flu. Insofar as there was a political view it was a kind of libertarian populism - there are these vast systems of control out of our reach, but individuals can "wake up" and become aware of all this, and us ordinary people can resist the elites and their plans; although that last part proved difficult since everyone was so paranoid and self-isolating. "Waking up" was how many people described their initiation into the conspiracy mindset, which often seemed to be accompanied by religious experiences, as it was for David Icke. Lots of overlap therefore with people interested in mysticism and the occult, as well as quite a number of Christians finding their own creative interpretations of the Bible.

The Leftists I knew were way too rooted in Enlightenment rationalism to even be able to approach that kind of mindspace, and I think kind of ideologically guarded against the whole thing, since to them it was automatically ridiculous and unworthy of respect. While I do not think it has to automatically go in that direction, there is an inherent reactionary tendency to this kind of thinking, in that you start from the idea that you are mostly passive and powerless in the face of forces beyond your control, which are deployed against you by other conscious actors, meaning that political or social changes tend to be interpreted as sinister - if there appears to be a greater acceptance of gay people, it is because the elites intend for this to happen for some evil reason, and so on. Also, because of the logical structure of the conspiracy mindset, if you sit with it long enough you will end up at The Jews sooner or later. Consider also that a good 50% of all existing conspiracy theories can be traced back to either the John Birch Society, or French Catholic anti-revolutionary propaganda. I did encounter the things mentioned, but I didn't find them to be dominant.

A clearly noticeable shift for me happened right around the first Trump campaign. By that time I was out of the "scene", but if I wasn't I would have left the moment Alex Jones came out in support of Trump. I remember thinking like, "oh, so this is what it all came to in the end". He was just looking for his guy. All this resist the evil powers of the world and no politician can ever be trusted, all thrown to the wind. And that kind of selective skepticism became apparent in more than a few conspiracy buffs. Possibly the scene until then worked under the perception of an invincible US hegemony - once too many contending forces become obvious it gets harder to maintain the idea that "the elites" are in charge of all this. Now it's instead the elites, and the worldly power that will help us fight the elites. Putin will save us from the globalists, and so on. I had a fallout with one youtuber I was following, who had reached this very conclusion.

In recent years conspiracy theories have become popular in certain parts of the online Left, under the name "parapolitics". Originally this refers to an academic field that researches the links between governments, intelligence agencies and criminal networks, but by now it has also become a synonym for classic conspiracy theory.

Well, I suppose it would be perfectly okay for the agents of some foreign power to nab and incarcerate Teump and his cronies now, no? This was not a wise box to open.

ErickC wrote: Well, I suppose it would be perfectly okay for the agents of some foreign power to nab and incarcerate Teump and his cronies now, no? This was not a wise box to open.

depends on one's side of the aisle




(yes, I know it would be in fact bad. But.)

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Well it looks like Senator Gallegos is trying to legislate some insurance against a midnight Greenland grab. Not sure if that can go anywhere.

Meanwhile all of Maduro's people are just keeping up their work and the Trump administration's messaging has been all over the place. Trump seems like he's already bored of that topic. It's all so surreal.

RE: conspiracy theories.

It seems like sometimes there's a blanket 'they're all BS' sentiment, which doesn't make sense given that over time, some theories turn out to be true. This is often as a result of declassified documents or leaks. Of course, intelligence agencies and governments foster this sentiment because they love being able to throw the phrase at anything that threatens their power or could expose what they're really doing behind closed doors.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the mind likes answers. Theories tend to proliferate when there is a lack of information, but even more so when an 'official version' of events refuses to answer certain questions, or has the appearance of being deceptive or diversionary.

Have all the questions surrounding 9/11 been answered satisfactorily? No. Will this foster speculation and theory? Of course it will.

I'm sure everyone here has heard of Operation Paperclip, and Mockingbird....etc.

ErickC wrote: Tue Jan 06, 2026 5:06 pm Well, I suppose it would be perfectly okay for the agents of some foreign power to nab and incarcerate Teump and his cronies now, no? This was not a wise box to open.

No No, we around the world have enough confidence in your judicial system to do the work for any of us instead.