And this is where conspiracy beliefs start to get tangled up with truth. Because history does contain real examples of conspiracy. Pizzagate was a dangerous lie that led an armed man to walk into a family restaurant, convinced he was there to rescue children from pedophilic members of the Democratic Party. But that incident also exists in the same universe as the Tuskegee experiments, redlining, and the Iran-Contra Affair. “I have this conspiracy that Western governments are involved in an international spying ring,” Wood said. “Before about 2014 that would have made you a conspiracy theorist. Now we know it’s true.”
Summoning — and demonizing — the belief in conspiracies can also have political consequences. “During the Bush Administration, the left was going ####### bonkers … about 9/11 and Halliburton and Cheney and Blackwater and all this stuff,” Uscinski said. “As soon as Obama won they didn’t give a #### about any of that stuff anymore. They did not care. It was politically and socially inert.” In turn, conspiracy theories about Obama flourished on the right. Uscinski said he is frustrated by this tendency for partisans to build up massive conspiracy infrastructures when they are out of power, only to develop a sudden amnesia and deep concern about the conspiracy mongering behavior of the other side once power is restored. It’s a cycle, he said that threatened to make social science a tool of partisan slapfights more than a standard of truth. And in a 2017 paper, he argued that conspiracy beliefs could even be useful parts of the democratic process, calling them “tools for dissent used by the weak to balance against power.”