Alt-Right conspiracy theories are obviously true… except they are not.

Alt-Right conspiracy theorists like to suggest that a nefarious, wealthy, elite are secretly conspiring with each other to run the world in their own interests, rather than in the interests of humanity. 

This is obviously true. 

Even a modest knowledge of history demonstrates that since the birth of ‘civilisation’ 8-10,000 years ago, ruling classes across the globe have ruled in their own interests. Not only that, these ruling elites have almost always inflicted terrible suffering upon those they rule over in order to maintain their rule and protect their own interests. 

This is the history of the human race – Emperors, Kings, Queen’s, Czars, Khans, Moguls, Popes, high priests,  dictators, despots and supreme rulers…  all ruling to serve their own glory and preserve their own wealth and elite privilege.

Indeed, the socialist left has been saying exactly this for at least the last 150 years. We have also pointed out that under capitalism all that has changed is the way these elites justify their elite status. Historically elite status was justified by reference to God and hereditary title and enforced by extreme violence. In the capitalist era elite status is justified exclusively by wealth and enforced by reference to equal opportunity and property rights as expressed by ‘the law’… which ultimately rests on violence.

The fact that the world is run by an informal global network of capitalist, neoliberal, plutocrats ruling in their own interests is blatantly obvious. Just look around you!

Yet the Alt-Right, seem to find that simple truth too hard to bear. For over 50 years the Right have theorised that ‘free markets’ are the key to ‘free societies’. That if wealthy people are ‘free’ to do anything they wish with their money then we will all be free and we will all prosper. Yet in the West it manifestly hasn’t happened that way. On the contrary, global free markets mean that manufacturing jobs have been exported to the third world, living standards have stagnated, pensions are falling, financial insecurity is the norm for almost everyone, even the middle classes, and most work places, even in ‘the professions’, have become managerialist tyrannies.

So for the Alt-Right this lived-reality creates a huge cognitive dissonance. Free markets are meant to free us all and make us all rich and social democracy, let alone socialism, is meant to be inefficient, corrupt and tyrannical. Yet the evidence of lived experience increasingly suggests it may be the other way round! 

It seems that accepting that reality is so difficult for the Alt-Right that they would rather believe that a global conspiracy of satanic, liberal,  billionaire, paedophiles, is ruling the world from the basement of a pizza restaurant in New York. And that these ‘liberal Satanists’ are determined to destroy the capitalist system, despite the fact that their billions have accrued because of the success of neoliberal capitalism in concentrating wealth in their hands.

One conspiracy theory that has been described to me in all seriousness, is that the 30-40 richest billionaires are secretly using Covid to reduce the human population of planet earth rapidly from 7 billion to 1 billion by using vaccination injections to secretly neuter the human race. If such a rapid population reduction actually took place it would of course be catastrophic for global capitalism, destroying markets, transport systems, supply chains and all the rest and quickly rendering ‘Fiat Money’ worthless, which would mean the ‘wealth’ of these paedophile billionaires, which exists only as numbers in computer systems, would entirely disappear and the power and status of the billionaires would disappear with it. There would literally be nothing in it for the billionaires.

Yet many on the Alt-Right regard such bizarre, superstitious, conspiracy theories, that are irrational according to their own logic, as being more believable than the fact that global, neoliberal, capitalism is the cause of most of the problems we face?

It really is extraordinary.