No, I am not a Conspiracy Theorist

A Response to my Critics

Credit: Christopher Dombres, via https://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherdombres/6149055823/in/photostream/

Last week, The Bulwark published Cathy Young’s response to my essay at The Free Press (and here on Restoration) about how our civilization is being subverted. Young’s response makes some important points. She agrees with me that there are serious problems facing our society and I’m very happy about that. But she also criticizes my analysis of the similarities between these problems as a “conspiracy theory.” I think this mischaracterizes the arguments I make.

To show this, I want to talk about what a conspiracy theory is, before setting out again how I think subversion works. I don’t think there is a conspiracy to subvert society, although I do think that some powerful organizations behave in ways that make it awfully tempting sometimes. The truth is more complicated than a conspiracy, but it is useful to think about what has caused the “disparate phenomena” (to use Young’s term) that exemplify the subversion of our society. Conspiratorial thinking would suggest they all had the same cause. I don’t think this. But I do think they have relationships which reflect points of weakness in our society.

But before getting to that, it really is welcome that Young agrees with me on so many of the problems facing us. She agrees with me that we should not encourage civilizational self-loathing, fall for every new kind of “intersectionalist idiocy” or embrace our nation’s sworn enemies. She even agrees that a more “nuanced look” is needed at transgender issues than Trans Rights Activists are often prepared to tolerate. Our disagreements should not overshadow this important common ground: we can’t save what we love about our country without it. But agreeing on what the problems are is not enough. If we want to solve them, we also need to agree on what their causes are. This is why it is unfortunate that Young has mischaracterized my arguments about subversion as a conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories have two main characteristics: they explain everything by reference to a single factor, and they can never be disproven. I think Young and I agree on this, although she puts the point in a slightly different way: “that’s how conspiracy theory works: everything falls into place once you accept it. And it’s unfalsifiable.”

So a conspiracy theory attempts to give a single explanation for disparate phenomena, and everything is evidence for the theory, including things that contradict it. People sometimes use the term to refer to theories about literal conspiracies (e.g. that the moon landings were fake or that 9/11 was an inside job). But it’s more relevant for describing ideological theories about society that force people to stop thinking, because they claim to explain everything and can’t be disproven.

An ideological conspiracy theory currently popular on the Woke Left is Ibram X Kendi’s description of racism as something that is always present and explains every interaction between people. The theory can’t be disproven by pointing out interactions that aren’t racist, because the theory refuses to accept that that is what they are. My dear friend Richard Dawkins once pointed out that one of the good things about atheism as a theory is that it is falsifiable, because if God appeared before us that would immediately disprove it. You can see what’s wrong with Kendi’s theory if you imagine that an atheist who did not share Richard’s scientific approach actually met God. “I am the Lord,” God might say. “No you’re not,” replies the conspiracy theorist, “there is no God.”

Young suggests that my article about subversion is a conspiracy theory in both senses: in the sense of “inhibiting” thought about the phenomena concerned, but also in the sense of pointing to an actual conspiracy.

I don’t think there is an actual conspiracy. I point out that the West’s enemies deliberately try to weaken our society and our institutions. The few people who intentionally act on the instructions of Putin, the CCP or Hamas would indeed be part of conspiracies, even, in some cases, in centralized ones. But there are two much more common ways in which useful idiots help our enemies.

The first is when Americans pursue agendas that our enemies have promoted without realizing that they are enemy agendas. A simple example of this is when the youth of America got hooked on anti-Western propaganda on TikTok. The second is when Americans do things that weaken us or strengthen our enemies for reasons that are independent of any work done by the enemy. Discouraging Americans from having children because of concerns about climate change weakens our nation. Anti-natal policies achieve subversive effects without any enemy intervention to promote them. I think Young and I probably agree on this – and I thank her for pushing me to clarify it further.

We can call all three of these ways in which our society is weakened “subversion.” The final way is certainly very common: Americans frequently weaken their own society because they have become possessed by crazy ideas that happen to be part of their cultural context. The reason I refer to Yuri Bezmenov’s theory of subversion is not to suggest that everything subversive is the result of Russian, Chinese or Islamist efforts to subvert our society. The reason is that when there have been some efforts from outside actors to discourage and demoralize us, this helps to create the cultural conditions for us to discourage, demoralize and weaken ourselves even further.

I am not explaining away intersectional insanities as the long-term plan of Soviet agents. I am suggesting that a culture that suffers subversion once becomes weaker and more susceptible to further subversion. This applies to outside attacks but also to subversion within society: both demoralize and discourage. Demoralized and discouraged people then become more likely to develop independent subversive projects of their own. This is not a conspiracy but a description of a set of social processes, where each kind of subversion makes another kind of subversion more likely. These processes can be independent of one another – “disparate phenomena” – but they can also create the cultural context to make each other more likely.

This is particularly the case when our meme-inculcating institutions, namely the universities and the media, are more-or-less devoted to bringing about a Marxist future. They can use relatively rare bad news (say, a cop killing someone innocent, or an Israeli soldier doing something awful) to bring about the anxiety necessary to “effect real change” (say, defunding the police or delegitimizing the only Jewish state). The stories they pick are not at the direction of Moscow or Beijing or Tehran, but the product of what they already believe – as you would expect of anyone.

Were the professors and journalists in turn trained by the Soviets? In a few cases, well, maybe so! But of course those cases are unusual. Rather, the contemporary American radical left and dead Soviet Union share an aim: the destruction of the free, meritocratic, Western way of life. The Islamism apologists at Columbia University would have never stood a chance had those places not been infected by the Woke mind virus. Were the gender studies professors trying to legitimize Islamism? Of course not. But it is still true that the snowball they started rolling was uphill of those chanting Hamas slogans. They taught their students that men were women, that fat was healthy, that capitalism makes people poor – that up was down. And their students believed them. And now those students will believe anything, especially if it sounds nuts.

I don’t want the idea of subversion to stop people from thinking hard about what is going on in our society. It is a framework that can make it easier to see how our society has been fractured and why one bad thing seems to lead to another. I plan to write more about some examples of this over the coming months. But if this is a bad way of thinking about our current culture and politics, critics should be able to find examples of other societies where enemy subversion has not produced a political and cultural climate friendlier to domestic subversion. They should also be able to point out alternative models of social change that help show how different trends really don’t contribute to a snowballing effect.

Maybe their bigger concern is just about the word “subversion.” It’s pretty catchy.