Hard to understand what attracts people to conspiratorial explanations in politics. Maybe anti-intellectualism, paranoia, lack of actual experience in movement building; maybe derangement.
Judging from social media, there’s a large current of people who look at political events as orchestrated & manipulated by nefarious forces–especially if those events include massive numbers of working people entering the political arena on their own behalf or for social justice. Apparently those who see things that way don’t know the long history of social movements & revolutions all over the world. But mostly, they have no respect for working people. To them, the prime movers are elite operatives like the CIA & Mossad, or special forces.
People are allowed crackpot notions in a democratic country–though obscurantism & crazy-pants crap best serve autocracy. They’re allowed those theories & free to peddle them but they have to expect to come under the harshest criticism by those who detest elitist & boogie-man theories of history.
When you claim, as Global Research & other libertarians do, that the 2011 Arab uprisings against dictatorship, involving millions of people in several countries, were staged events, you have to expect to be ridiculed, excoriated, denounced as intellectual buffoons. Or do you have an explanation for how nefarious operatives recruited & payed millions of people to protest, get arrested, beaten, tortured, murdered, disappeared?
When you claim thousands of young people protesting Trump’s election–because they are directly affected & scared by his campaign threats–are paid or manipulated by Clinton forces to reverse the election, you make asses of yourself & cannot be taken seriously as political thinkers.
We’re living in a period of crisis, the barbaric phase of capitalism, & we need to work together against war & social hatreds of every kind. We need to build solidarity with those who are under siege. It’s very hard to do that when people who don’t have all their marbles are trying to divide us with stories about the boogie-man.