A Lot of People Are Saying Quotes

“When we decide what community is worthy of epistemic trust, we are implicitly also deciding what it means to know something. Reflecting on Donald Trump’s historical mishmash of a statement that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War (which began sixteen years after Jackson’s death), George Will dissected the president’s words to underscore the essential character of his thought. It is not that Trump suffers the disability of an untrained mind tied to “stratospheric self-confidence,” Will wrote, or that he is intellectually slothful and misinformed or totally ignorant of ordinary matters of history and of the fact that he has no knowledge of that about which he speaks, or that he is indifferent to being bereft of information. It is not that he is cognitively impaired. “The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.” This is dangerous in a president, Will observes, for it “leaves him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.”1 And when that mind demands that its reality be accepted as how things are, we are embattled by an assault on our sense of what it means to know something.”
― Russell Muirhead, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

“The new conspiracism’s characteristic forms—bare assertion, ominous questions, and innuendo—are permissive. They have the appeal of elasticity and irresponsibility. Because of its vagueness, “a lot of people are saying” can embrace an expanding universe of conjured plots and public enemies. And “just asking questions” evades ownership of the claim. The author of any single conspiracist charge is often indeterminate; charges can arise spontaneously as a tease on a radio talk show or an anonymous throwaway on some fringe website.”
― Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

“But in the case of the new conspiracism, what should follow from bare assertion, innuendo, and ominous questions? Voter registration drives? Criminal indictments? Noncompliance? Violent resistance? We don’t know, because there is no call to vote, litigate, resist, or arm. After the summary diagnosis of “Rigged” or “Something is happening here,” there is a yawning hole where organized political action should be.”
― Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

“ExxonMobil and its corporate cousins in the fossil fuel industry have concrete interests to defend: they fear “stranded assets”—oil and gas in the ground that would be unmarketable or less valuable if limits were imposed on fossil fuel production. In service to profitability, they have tried to shape public policy by distorting the public’s understanding of the threat posed by climate change. They are engaged in an intentional misinformation campaign. They understand the scientific consensus but are trying to obscure it. They do not have a compromised relation to reality; they are corrupt.”
― Russell Muirhead, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

“There is no conversation that can build a translation bridge connecting this epistemic divide; conspiracism fractures the common political world.

Where the new conspiracism extinguishes common sense, there can be no argument or negotiation or compromise—all of which require some shared terrain of facts and a shared horizon of what it means to know something.”
― Russell Muirhead, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

“It is all the more difficult in the case of the new conspiracism because so often the “evidence” consists only of bare assertion, “a lot of people are saying.” In addition, there’s the tribal element of the new conspiracism: identification with a group for which conspiracist stories are a regular way of viewing the political world. The tribal element imposes a real cost on changing one’s mind. Call it the reputational obstacle to acknowledging false belief.”
― Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

“Scapegoating conspiracism is an “ideological misrecognition of power relations.”
― Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

“Nothing is more difficult in politics than bringing people together to cooperate for their mutual advantage.”
― Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

“the new conspiracists return to two targets again and again; we focus on them for the same reason conspiracists themselves do—because they are foundations of democracy: first, political parties, partisans, and the norm of legitimate opposition; and second, knowledge-producing institutions like the free press, the university, and expert communities within the government.”
― Russell Muirhead, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy