Four wacko conspiracy theories that liberals believe

By Tim Dunkin

Conspiracy theories can be a lot of fun. I mean, who doesn't like to joke around about stuff like chemtrails, Area 51, secret shooters on the grassy knoll, the British royal family being replaced by alien cyborgs bent on world domination? Actually, I don't joke around about that last one because it's, like, totally true.

But anywise, the things that make conspiracy theories so pervasive are that they play to the preconceived notions of the one spreading them, while simultaneously requiring no evidence to support them. In fact, the lack of evidence for a conspiracy theory is often considered to be support for it – obviously there's no evidence because "they" have covered it up. This makes conspiracy theories uniquely immune to being refuted. Any argument you might make against a conspiracy theory is invalid because the evidence exists but is being suppressed, or else you're just brainwashed by those who want to cover it all up. It requires a special kind of mindset, drawing upon a special set of "facts," to be able to discern and understand the truth of the conspiracy.

In the world of politics, the kooky fringe Left believes in a lot of conspiracy theories that work to fundamentally shape their worldview. Knowing that they view the world through a special set of lenses that no one else can wear and that they ignore all of the bogus "facts" and "logic" that everyone else use, we can see why liberals think that...

#4. Republicans engineered Detroit's failure so that they could make blacks look bad

What words come to mind when you think of the city of Detroit? Urban decay? Poverty? Despair? Post-apocalyptic wasteland? All of these and more, if you're like most Americans. The city has lost 60% of its population, its tax base has collapsed, abandoned properties take up an area larger than Manhattan Island, and the city is bankrupt due to unfundable pension liabilities promised to its bloated, unionized municipal bureaucracy. Detroit has become America's go-to example for civic decrepitude, an object lesson in what can happen when cities make systematically poor choices in how they operate and use their resources.

Detroit wasn't always this way. For the first six decades of the 20th century, Detroit was a different kind of example: that of doing everything right. Detroit was a center of industry and technology, with one of the highest standards of living and per capita incomes in the country. At its peak in the 1950s, the city had 1.8 million residents (roughly two and a half times its current population). Detroit was synonymous with the auto industry, and was a symbol of American industrial power. All you had to do was say "Detroit" and people knew you were referring to the might of industry and commerce.


It is not coincidental that during those first 60 years, Republicans held the mayoral office for 48 of them. Keep in mind that this was back when Republicans actually were Republicans, and therefore pursued policies that actually sought to encourage growth and prosperity. This was back when Calvin Coolidge was saying things like,

"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life."

If only we could find some of Coolidge's DNA, clone him, and run him for President. This was back when Republicans wanted to limit government, get it out of your lives, and encourage entrepreneurship and free enterprise. And it worked for Detroit.

But then a funny thing happened in 1962 – Detroit's last Republican mayor left office, and the Democrats have held that position every since. That's right – the Democrats have had a lock on the mayorship in Detroit for 51 years. In that same time, there has only been one Republican who served for a single term on the city council, otherwise the Democrats have had a lock on that, too. With Democrat control established, all of the pathologies we have come to expect from liberals started creeping in: over-unionization, punitive taxation, massive social spending, ever-increasing micro-regulation, as well as billions of dollars worth of pension liabilities that they were never realistically going to be able to afford in the first place.

Rather than learn from this illustration, however, the Left chooses to miss the whole point and try to find anything other than themselves to pin the blame on. And one extremely imaginative fellow over at Salon figured it out – Republicans are really the ones who deep-sixed Detroit, and they did it so they could exult over the city's demise as a way of legitimizing their barely-contained racism against blacks that is seething just under the surface like a pot of boiling pig lard. Republican racism, not Democrat ineptitude and stupidity, is really to blame, don't you see? And not just any racism, but that insidious, code word kind of racism that isn't immediately apparent to the average observer, but which has to be parsed out for us by the liberal news media. And when conservatives today lament the decline of Detroit as a symbol of the decline of American power, they're really just using code words to hide their racism and delight that Motown is no more. Never mind that large numbers of black Americans lived and prospered in Detroit back in the glory days of Republican leadership. Republicans destroyed Detroit so they could make fun of blacks and their city, just because.

So yes, Salon and others on the Left really are trying to make the case that the people whose fiscal policies built Detroit and made it great in the first place are the same ones who then destroyed it, even though they would have been in absolutely no political position to be able to do so. And this was all done so that Kwame Kilpatrick would look like a buffoon.


If that logic seems harder to follow than Ted Kennedy driving with a campaign worker and a bottle of whiskey, then you know how I feel. Of course, these are the same people who think George W. Bush dynamited the levies during Hurricane Katrina so that it would kill off a lot of black folks as well, so we're obviously not dealing with the most mentally stable personalities here.

#3. Slate thinks the AP reported on a woman's death just to reinforce patriarchal gender roles

We all know that one of the most common traits of the modern liberal is that they are looking for something to be offended about. Anything. No matter how ridiculous. No matter how much of a stretch it may be. If there's the possibility of turning it into something that can fit the left-wing cultural narrative, they will do it.

So take, for instance, the story that AP ran about a 35-year old New York woman who leaned against the balcony of her 17th floor apartment, it broke, and she fell to her death. When I read this story, I thought it was pretty straightforward. Tragic, but straightforward. A woman leans on a balcony, it gives way, she falls. Pretty simple, right?


Not for Slate, one of the Left's most reliably kooky webzines. Here is their writer L.V. Anderson's take on AP's reporting of this story:

Let's break this down. According to the AP, the crucial facts you need to know about Rosoff right off the bat are that:

1. She was 35 and single.

2. She was a smoker.

3. She invited a man back to her apartment late at night on a first date.

4. The man warned her not to lean against the balcony, but she did it anyway.

The implication being that this smoking slut totally had it coming. A reader is left with the distinct impression that if Rosoff hadn't invited her date inside, hadn't gone outside to smoke a cigarette, and hadn't defied the advice of the wise and logical man she was with, she would still be alive. According to the AP story's subtext, the problem wasn't that Rosoff's balcony railing was shoddy and unsafe – it was that Rosoff defied gender norms by being unmarried at 35, by being sexually liberal, and by insisting on making her own decisions instead of deferring to men's logic.

She then goes on to say, "You may accuse me of overreacting..." Yes, I sort of would. But then again, that's because I'm just some dumb hick from flyover country who isn't adept at reading in oppressive gender norms into boilerplate news stories. Seriously, folks, if you didn't read it before, go back and click the link on the AP story and read it now. I think it ought to be pretty apparent how nuts you have to be to go from that story to the interpretation that Anderson takes.

Keep in mind – Anderson was responding to a news story put out by the Associated Press, a fellow left-wing propaganda outlet. This wasn't some story by the Christian Reconstructionist Theocracy Times or anything. But in many circles of liberals, this sort of thing is par for the course. They're never happy when they're not complaining about something, and when there's nothing to gripe about, they'll invent something, even if they have to throw their fellow liberals under the bus to do it. Because when you're a self-righteous hammer, everything looks like a racist, homophobic, or patriarchist nail. Hence, Slate ends up publishing a garbage article based on some sort of insane troll logic that no normal person would ever have drawn from AP's actual reporting of the story.


Rosoff's problem wasn't that she defied "gender norms," but that she defied gravity, as well as the city's explicit order for residents in her building to not lean on the railings because they might be unsafe.

#2. Benghazi, the IRS, and other scandals were invented just to attack Obama

Anyone who has dealt with them knows this fact about liberals – for them, everything is political. Every action, for the liberal, is weighed as to whether it maximizes votes, helps to damage their opponents, works to minimize damage to their own side, and so forth. For them, doing something merely on strict principle is a foreign concept. Taking a political position only, or even primarily, because it is the right thing to do with regard to eternal and unchanging principles is laughable to the average liberal who believes everything is relative and worth only what can be milked out of it politically.

This readily explains the meme that liberals have finally settled upon to try to wish away the many, many scandals that have plagued the Obama administration like a swarm of hornets.


See, these scandals aren't really scandals – they're being trumped up by racist Republicans and conservatives who are just trying to detract from all the awesome, genius-level work that Obama has been doing on the economy and in our foreign policy. The IRS politically targeting ideological opponents of Obama? No biggie, they probably deserved it anywise. Running guns to Mexican drug gangs so they can be used to kill hundreds of people, including our border patrol agents? Meaningless distraction. Lamenting the easily-averted deaths of four US embassy personnel and soldiers in last year's Benghazi consulate attack? To quote Madame Secretary, "what does it really matter?"

Included in a few liberal screeds is the insinuation that those on the Right who are attacking Obama just don't understand the "black experience in America." If only we did, we'd understand that incompetence and fecklessness are fundamental outcomes of Obama's deprived, racially-charged upbringing of going to the tony Punahou prep school, followed by stints at Occidental College and Harvard. Frankly, I probably have a greater understanding of the "black experience in America" than Obama does, since one time I was buying a pair of pants at a Men's Warehouse and was told by the clothier that I had "black man's disease."

But what it all boils down to is that this left-wing conspiracy theory comes from the fact that liberals just cannot understand that people would be angry about Benghazi, the IRS scandal, Operation Fast and Furious, the NSA spying on us, or any of the other scandals on their own merits. Violations of constitutional and moral principles? I understand not these things of which you speak. To the Left, since they all impact Barack Obama and his cabinet negatively, they're non-issues. If it weren't for the Republicans and Fox News trying to make hay out of things that would otherwise be as unimportant as what color of socks Obama wears, nobody would ever need to hear about them.

#1. Amanda Marcotte thinks that pro-life men oppose abortion because they just want women to be barefoot and pregnant

One of the things that characterizes conspiracy theories are their convoluted attempts to get around readily-apparent evidences that contradict them, so as to make non-readily-apparent points that only appear "obvious" to the person pushing the theory. Combine this liberal tendency toward conspiracy theorizing with a powerful dose of ignorance and deceitfulness, and you have Amanda Marcotte, one of the most popular columnists in the left-wing fringe of the blogosphere. Marcotte is a perfect illustration of how the abortion industry has subjugated the Democrat Party, and the Left in general, like Genghis Khan raping and pillaging his way through a defeated city.


One of the general themes of Marcotte's writings on the subject over the years has been that the pro-life movement isn't really about saving babies, but is actually all about "controlling women's sexuality," which is how "exercising responsibility for your own actions" is being relabeled these days. Apparently Marcotte – along with millions of other liberals – thinks that all of these pro-life men out there opposing abortion are doing so solely because they want to keep women in the kitchen where they belong, baking up some pies while they endlessly gestate our ever-growing brood of future right-wing voters.

Now, when somebody says they oppose abortion because they don't want little unborn babies to be killed horrifically, the average person would probably take them at face value. But left-wingers like Amanda Marcotte are not your average persons (below average in many ways, perhaps, but not average). This is where the conspiracy theorizing comes in: rather than accept a seemingly non-contentious proposition (that pro-lifers actually, you know, care about innocent babies and stuff), Marcotte spins up some sort of weird nonsense about pro-life men wanting to enslave women to the perpetual patriarchy or something.

What makes her argument especially hilarious is that women actually oppose abortion more than men do, and women have featured just as prominently, if not more so, in the pro-life movement over the last four decades. Take the new ban on abortions after 20 weeks that recently went into effect in Texas. Guess what? Four different polls show that women actually supported this ban more than men did. Women are more likely to say that abortion is morally wrong than men are. This continues the trend in polling over the last twenty years that shows women actually being slightly more pro-life overall than men are.

Indeed, the irony only deepens, when you think about why it is that men are more likely to support abortion. You know how one of the arguments against abortion is that it encourages people to throw away any sense of taking responsibility for their own actions? Well, ladies, as it turns out, this argument applies to men as much as it does to any woman. Meet the bro-choice movement: men who are really, really keen on abortion being legal without any restrictions whatsoever because, frankly, they think it will allow them to have more consequences-free sex without having to worry about inconveniences like "child support" or "fatherhood." Essentially, what Amanda Marcotte and those like her in the feminist movement are asking for is that sleazy scumbags be more easily able to pick up drunken young women in bars, take advantage of them, objectify them by treating them like playthings, and then get out of their future responsibilities by paying out some money while the girl gets stuck with a lifetime of physical and emotional damage that harms her ability to have the children that she may want in the future, as well as leaving her wracked with guilt and self-hatred. That's a really great feminist movement you folks have there.



© Tim Dunkin