Maybe this is an unnecessary comment but I think this was uninsightful for SSC. It's impossible to divorce some of the conspiracies from political alignment so

Maybe this is an unnecessary comment but I think this was uninsightful for SSC. It's impossible to divorce some of the conspiracies from political alignment so I'm surprised he's willing to try to make a case for that; and if he wasn't doing that the perfunctory attempt at connecting this to a broader point about false belief and how it is acquired and retained failed. In the article before this one he more or less intimates that it's not necessary to publicly refute false heterodox belief (creationism/ID). W T F? He also ignores, or doesn't include the reasons why it became such a huge topic in the 2000s: bush's presidency.