People believe in conspiracy theories because *sometimes* conspiracies happen.
1. The propaganda effort to gin up support for the Gulf War. Remember the Kuwaiti girl who testified before a congressional committee about Iraqi soldiers taking Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and leaving them on the floor to die?
It was a lie. The girl was the daughter of a Kuwaiti diplomat and a public relations firm was involved in this proceeding.
When a bunch of people work together to involve the US in a war, that's a conspiracy.
2. The 2003 invasion of Iraq. a. Dick Cheney regularly visited the CIA to encourage them to come up with intelligence justifying the war. b. The Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon cherry-picked intelligence to make a case for war. c. A CIA case officer who questioned the reliability of informants used by the administration to make a case for war was told his information would make no difference because the administration wanted war no matter what.
When many people work together to start a war based on lies, that's a conspiracy.
3. Think back on the 2020 primary elections. Recall that candidates doing well like Klobuchar and Buttigieg withdrew from the race and endorsed Biden. There were a few others, too. I think Bloomberg might have been one.
Do you really believe that candidates who were doing well would just happen withdraw BEFORE Super Tuesday when they still had a good chance at the nomination? Do you believe all of them just happened endorsed the same guy--Biden, who had run for president twice before and never won a single primary?
It appears that the party apparatus was so eager to stop Sanders at any cost that they engineered a Biden nomination by forcing others to withdraw instead of simply letting the primaries play out and letting the *voters* decide.
And there are Wasserman Schulz emails confirming that the DNC violated neutrality rules and promoted Clinton at the expense of Sanders. Yes, a conspiracy. With unequivocal proof.
4. Recall, also, that during the general election, both Facebook and Twitter banned posts linking to the NY Post story about Hunter Biden. Did these social media platforms just happen to come up with the same strategy accidentally? They censored non-racist, non-inflammatory *political* speech.
In fairness, this may not be conspiracy but something akin to consensus.
5. As for the 2020 election, I have no knowledge about voting machines and mail-in ballots, but I can watch the news about Trump and draw conclusions.
a. Headlines on the CNN website were not summaries of news but anti-Trump editorial comments featuring judgmental words like "unhinged" and "lies."
Did CNN after use these words in headlines about Bush after we all pretty much knew that the Bush administration had lied us into war?
b. CNN also broke with longstanding tradition according to which the last presidential debate was about foreign policy. Why? Because Trump had a clear advantage. He was the first president since Carter not to start a war. In contrast, Biden voted for the Iraq war and rigged committee hearings to get a pro-war vote.
c. Trump supporters were repeatedly maligned as racists. When were Clinton or Biden supporters-or Bush supporters in 2004 ever called war mongers?
Multiple people made these decision. When a lot of people in the media--both networks and social media-- get together to sway the election in a certain direction, well, that might not be a conspiracy in the strict sense of the word but it comes really close.
