In her recent article on openDemocracy, Miranda Christou argues that the radical right does three things: spreads (dangerously) false information, recontextualizes acknowledged facts and research, and spreads narratives to lay doubt at the ability of others to offer their own narratives. She is right about this. But this is what everyone does! After all, we’re doing the third thing now by emphasizing reasons not to trust the radical right.
In the US, for instance, the liberal center has come to be caught in the grips of a belief that a vast conspiracy involving the Republican Party working in concert with a number of foreign actors, including a belief among a majority of Democrats (almost certainly moreso among centrists than the left of the party) that Russian hackers literally falsified the results of the 2016 election - something no mainstream news media outlet ever says outright (just heavily hints at).
Beliefs within this frame end up getting protected by suggestions not epistemically far from other self-protecting conspiracy theories - that those with alternate opinions are Russian bots, and so on. There are, of course, more “relaxed” versions of this set of beliefs that are both literally conspiracy theories and very plausibly true. One example is that President Donald Trump may have illegally sought opposition research from foreign intelligence agencies, and so on. But then this same distinction could (indeed, should) be made with respect to everyone else’s belief-complex, resulting in just the mix of alternate knowledge and alternate interpretative matrix that Miranda Christou diagnoses in the radical right.
