Previous articles in the Mindwars series have examined the world of Conspiracy Theory Theorists (CTTs) and traced their supposedly neutral, scientifically grounded activities within a recurring elite script cycle.

This instalment examines a pivotal 2020 paper entitled A ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Conspiracy? A Mixed Methods Investigation of Laypeople’s Rejection (and Acceptance) of a Controversial Label, which poses this central question:

“The label ‘conspiracy theory’, while part of everyday media discourse, is considered by many as problematic. In this research, we posit that there exists diverging social representations associated with this label and that their relative endorsement is a function of preexisting beliefs.”

Superficially, this is social science describing a label. Functionally, as we will see, the paper acts to strengthen and further weaponise that label.

The Official Story (what they say)

On the surface, the paper presents itself as a neutral, scientific inquiry into public perception.

Goal: The researchers state their aim is to “examine how generic conspiracist beliefs are associated with two forms of rejection of the label.” In simpler terms, they want to find out if a person’s pre-existing belief in conspiracies predicts why they might object to the term “conspiracy theory.”

Two Angles Tested:
The study focuses on two primary reasons people might reject the label:

1. The Meta-Con: The belief that the label is a deliberate rhetorical weapon. As the paper defines it, this is the idea that the label “was purposely created by the elites in order to discredit dissent.”
2. Particularism: The stance that the label is conceptually flawed. This is the argument that claims labelled as “conspiracy theories” are “too diverse to draw any generic conclusions” and that the label is therefore an inadequate, one-size-fits-all category.

A crucial note on Particularism: It is vital to recognise that Particularism is not merely a layperson’s attitude; it is a formal, academic position within the field of Conspiracy Theory Theorists (CTTs). Particularist scholars (e.g., philosophers like Dentith) argue that each claim of conspiracy must be investigated individually for its truth and plausibility. They stand in direct opposition to Generalists, who dominate the CTT field in social psychology and argue that “conspiracy theories” can be studied as a single, pathological mindset. The paper’s framing subtly recasts this core methodological schism among experts as a simple “rejection” metric to be measured in the public.

Method: The researchers employ a “mixed methods” approach to appear comprehensive and rigorous. This combines:

• Quantitative Surveys: Using standardised scales—like the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (GCBS)—to measure beliefs and run statistical analyses (like factor analysis) to find correlations.
• Qualitative Text Analysis: Using software to analyse open-ended responses, categorising participants’ own words about the label’s origin and validity. This method is framed as a way to minimise researcher bias and understand the “arguments they mobilise.”

The official story, therefore, is one of dispassionate scientific exploration: using robust tools to map the landscape of a contentious term. It presents the researchers as mere cartographers of a debate, not participants in it.

The Sleight of Hand – What It Actually Does

On paper, this is research about a label. In practice, it’s an operation that amplifies the label’s power by recoding legitimate scepticism as psychological deviance.

Trait Fusion: Pathologising Scepticism
The paper reports a strong correlation (≈ .77) between “generic conspiracist belief” and the belief that the label is a weapon. Then it brands them “empirically barely distinguishable.” That’s the trick: scepticism of the label stops being media-literacy or institutional critique and becomes a symptom. Your doubt isn’t an argument to weigh; it’s a datapoint on a clinical chart.

The Strawman Gate: “Soft” vs “Hard” Meta-Con
The authors split objections into:

• Soft weaponisation: elites often use the label rhetorically.
• Hard invention: elites (e.g., the CIA) created the term.

Looks reasonable, functions as a gate. It papers over the documented middle ground: after the JFK assassination, the CIA ran a campaign instructing assets to discredit critics—weaponising the term even if it didn’t invent it. By spotlighting “hard invention” as the extreme and ignoring the historical weaponisation in between, the paper builds a strawman. Institutions can then “acknowledge” the soft version while pointing to the hard extreme to pathologise anyone citing the record.

Particularism Contained: Boxing the Critics
The study nods at Particularism (judge cases on their merits) but reports that endorsement rises with conspiracist belief. Result: methodologically careful critics—including academic particularists—get boxed into the same attitudinal bucket the field already medicalises. A live epistemological challenge is reclassified as a correlate of “pathology.”

Net Effect: A Wiring Diagram for Intervention
What starts as a survey of attitudes ends as a deployment manual. It supplies a “research-backed” rationale to treat label-scepticism not as a reasoned stance but as a stable, targetable disposition—perfect for comms playbooks and platform UX to design “evidence-based” nudges, warnings, and down-ranks.

The Key Moves (Mechanics You Can See)

The paper executes a precise sequence of manoeuvres that convert scholarly inquiry into a tool for managing public discourse. The authors’ own words reveal the blueprint.

1. Recast a Scholarly Schism as a Lay Attitude.
   The paper explicitly transplants an academic debate into the survey, telling participants: “Some believe that despite their diversity, it is acceptable to talk about ‘conspiracy theories’ in general… Conversely, other researchers believe that… every accusation of conspiracy should be judged on its own merits.” It then requires them to position themselves on a scale from “legitimate” to “illegitimate.” The effect is alchemical: a profound, high-stakes epistemological schism (Generalism vs. Particularism) is flattened into a simple, measurable consumer preference. The methodology itself ensures the debate is framed not as a search for truth, but as a matter of public opinion to be managed.
2. Bundle Dissent with Diagnosis.
   From the outset, the paper’s hypothesis is to “examine how generic conspiracist beliefs are associated with two forms of rejection of the label.” This is the foundational move: it designs a study where political and conceptual dissent is inherently yoked to a psychological diagnosis. The result is a mathematical fusion: a “strong correlation… r = 0.77” leading to a principal components analysis that “revealed a single underlying dimension.” The authors conclude the measures are “empirically barely distinguishable.” The outcome is pre-programmed: By designing a study that correlates politics with pathology, it mathematically “discovers” that scepticism is a symptom. The tool creates the diagnosis it was built to find.
3. Manufacture “Safe” Criticism.
   The paper dutifully catalogues public anger, identifying four main criticisms—historical, conceptual, normative, and political—and even quotes a participant calling the label “extremely derogatory… any ‘conspiracy theory’ will first be categorized as bullshit.” But this isn’t an exposé; it’s market research for the label’s managers. The paper explicitly states the goal is to “adapt social psychologists’ communication about CTs” and that acknowledging criticisms is a “necessary step to increase the persuasiveness… of our arguments.” The public’s raw, legitimate grievances are thus sanitised, studied, and converted into a more effective persuasion tactic. The paper provides the “acknowledge-and-continue” script.
4. Maintain the Origin/Use Blur.
   The authors note that “many participants were not making the distinction between the origin of CTs and the origin of the label,” yet they proceed by codifying this confusion into their central “soft vs. hard” meta-conspiracy framework. This is not a bug; it’s a feature. By defining the “hard” version (invention by the CIA) as the radical extreme, they create a strawman. This allows them to dismiss the nuanced, documented reality of weaponisation by association. The persistent blur is an exploitable resource, enabling institutions to sideline substantive critique by conflating it with the easily dismissed fringe claim.

The Final Product: A Social Management Toolkit
The paper’s own conclusion makes its function clear: it has identified how “generic conspiracist beliefs were substantially related to two distinct types of rejection” and associated them with “distinct vocabulary classes.” This is not a conclusion about truth, but about targeting. It provides a “research-backed” profile of public resistance, giving institutions the calibrated tools to identify, classify, and overcome dissent, all under the authoritative guise of neutral social science.

Particularists, Positioned

The paper handles the Particularist challenge not by dismissing it, but by absorbing it. The stance is given a platform, only to be neatly folded back into the very psychological framework it seeks to critique.

What They Argue: The Case for Case-by-Case Judgment
The study faithfully presents the Particularist core: that beliefs labelled as “conspiracy theories” are “too diverse to draw any generic conclusions” and the label is therefore “illegitimate.” It defines the alternative as a demand for evidence-based, “case-by-case adjudication” where “every accusation of conspiracy should be judged on its own merits, without bias.” This is a powerful, commonsense epistemological stance.

How the Paper Frames Them: The Reasonable Containment
The paper then executes a subtle but definitive containment operation:

• The Correlation Tether: It reports a “robust, yet moderate, correlation” showing that the more participants believed in conspiracies, the more they tended to see the label as illegitimate. However valid the Particularist argument may be, it is statistically tethered to the “conspiracist belief” trait the paper is measuring.
• The “No Hard Camps” Pacifier: The authors emphasise that “relatively few participants fully endorsed” either extreme, and that the views “are not necessarily antagonistic, but rather work at different levels.” This framing defangs Particularism, transforming a fundamental philosophical challenge into a mere difference of emphasis or “level.”
• The Distribution of Arguments: The lexicometric analysis shows that pro-Generalist arguments dominate among low-GCBS participants, framing Generalism as the “mainstream” view. Meanwhile, Particularist arguments—especially the potent, historically-grounded point that “real conspiracies happen”—are noted to appear across the belief spectrum, yet are still processed as data within the attitudinal model.

The Containment Line: Validated, Then Absorbed
The paper’s masterstroke is to acknowledge that Particularist criticisms “occur among low-GCBS respondents”—proving their intellectual legitimacy—while simultaneously ensuring Particularism remains inside the attitudinal frame. By correlating it with conspiracist belief and analysing its vocabulary through the same lens used for the broader “trait fusion,” the paper ensures this methodological critique is re-coded as just another psychological variable.

Net Effect: The Co-opted Critic
The article thus creates the perfect “loyal opposition.” Particularists are validated just enough for the paper to borrow their credibility and most potent arguments (case anatomy, historical reality). But by binding the stance to the same psychological chassis, the paper ensures downstream communicators can reference their caveats while ultimately routing the audience back to the safer, more manageable “trait” story. The critic is quoted, thanked for their service, and then gently escorted back into the box labelled “conspiracist worldview.”

The Standardisation Pipeline: From Academic Paper to Public Rule

This is the process by which a single study is converted into a self-reinforcing system of control. It follows a consistent, four-stage pipeline.

• Stage 1: Canonise (Create the Reference Standard)
  The Nera et al. paper is established as the definitive source. Its key components—a “fusion metric” statistically linking scepticism of the label to the conspiracist trait, a “soft vs. hard” framework for gatekeeping objections, and a classification of participant complaints as “stigma receipts”—are treated as settled facts. It moves the topic from a matter of debate to a matter of reference. The paper becomes a citable artifact that provides pre-made graphs, correlations, and quotable phrases for operators in media and policy to use without question. This is the “cognitive crime” move, where suspicion itself is pathologised by being fused with the belief that you are being pathologised.
• Stage 2: Codify (Translate into Rules)
  The paper’s conclusions and its own communications advice are written into official guidelines. Its explicit instruction to “acknowledge objections” to increase “persuasiveness” becomes ready-made boilerplate. The academic “generalist vs. particularist” debate is flattened into a simple legitimacy scale, allowing newsrooms and fact-checkers to update their templates with prescribed terms like “debunked” and “fringe.” It converts academic findings into enforceable language. The rules ensure consistent messaging across different outlets, processing criticism through a system that always ends by reaffirming the official label.
• Stage 3: Synchronise (Coordinate the Rollout)
  The same message, drawn directly from the paper’s uniform phrasing, is launched simultaneously across all major channels. An explainer in a prestige newspaper, a fact-check from a partner website, and a policy update from a social media platform all use the same “fusion” language, “soft/hard” gate, and “weaponisation” quotes within the same 24-hour window. It creates an artificial consensus. The coordinated volume and uniformity of the message make any opposition appear isolated and illegitimate. The label becomes the default starting point for all discussion.
• Stage 4: Ritualise (Embed into Systems)
  The label and its supporting logic are hard-coded into digital platforms and policy. It becomes an automated warning banner, a down-ranking algorithm, or a “knowledge panel,” with the original paper cited as the “evidence-based” justification for this UX. The paper’s own criticism corpus—the recorded participant complaints—is not used to retire the label, but to justify its more “careful,” and thus more resilient, application. Enforcement becomes automatic and invisible. The system itself enforces the conclusion, making dissent functionally invisible. This is the final step of the “consequences factory,” where soft research hardens into permanent infrastructure.

The Standard Operating Procedure
The paper provides the foundational reference. The codifiers turn it into a uniform language. The operators launch it in a coordinated strike. The user interface and policy code make it a permanent feature of the system.

Why the CIA Debate (The Strawman That Rewrites History & Pathologises the Critic)

The paper itself reveals the mechanism of control by framing the historical debate in a way that pre-emptively discredits it. It begins by accurately observing that “a seemingly common feature to every belief labelled as ‘conspiracy theory’ is that its advocates reject this qualification, which is perceived as stigmatising.” Yet, in the very next breath, it performs the pivotal maneuverer: it states that “such rejection can take the form of a CT,” and immediately offers as its prime example “that the label ‘conspiracy theory’ was coined and disseminated by the CIA to discredit those who questioned the conclusions of the Warren commission.” This is the strawman in its pure form. The paper bundles the documented, historical fact of the CIA’s active weaponisation of the term (a nuanced, “soft” claim) with the more literalist “hard” claim of outright invention, and categorises it all under the newly minted, pathologising label of “meta-conspiracy theory.”

This framing is the engine of the rewrite. By defining the entire critique as a “meta-conspiracy theory”—a belief “that the label ‘conspiracy theory’ is itself an instrument created by the (evil) elites to silence dissent”—the paper seamlessly equates a legitimate media-power critique with a pathological worldview. The “soft/hard” gate then allows institutions to concede the less threatening aspect (the label is sometimes misused) while using the paper’s own framework to dismiss the more substantive, historical argument as a fringe, irrational belief. The documented, operational reality of the term’s weaponisation is thus laundered through the academic literature and emerges sanitised, rebranded as a neutral category that is only problematic when wielded by those exhibiting a “conspiracist mindset.” The paper doesn’t just study the stigma; it provides the scholarly architecture to reinforce it, pathologising the critics by statistically fusing their legitimate scepticism with the very “monological” irrationality it attributes to them.

The Bottom Line On Rejecting A Label

At its operational core, the study refines a control device by systematically linking scepticism of the label to a psychological trait, establishing a discursive gate to manage objections, and framing dissent as a function of pathology. It then provides the strategic communications guidance to ensure its framework is adopted. The academic paper becomes the scaffolding for a more resilient application of the label.

This presents a fundamental choice: are we going to accept a disingenuous rewriting of history, one that launders a documented counter-intelligence tactic into a pathological orientation, all under the guise of neutral science? The efficiency of this system relies on our compliance with its conceptual defaults—the reduction of politics to psychology, the substitution of history with a strawman, and the standardisation of a script for institutional deployment.

The necessary response, therefore, shifts from theoretical debate to active resistance of this architecture. This requires:

• Insisting on Historical Specificity: Rejecting the “soft/hard” shuffle and forcing acknowledgment of the term’s documented weaponisation.
• Decoupling Critique from Pathology: Challenging the “trait-fusion” that pre-emptively frames label-scepticism as irrational.
• Demanding Anatomical Engagement: Forcing specific claims to be engaged on their factual details—actors, mechanisms, evidence—rather than their categorical assignment.

The next step is empirical: mapping the deployment circuits, logging synchronised phrasing, and auditing the codifiers who translate this research into style guides and UI. Without this, we cede the ground. The academic citation provides the justification, the digital interface performs the enforcement, and the disingenuous rewrite becomes the new history.

Published via Journeys by the Styx.
Mindwars: Exposing the engineers of thought and consent.

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Author’s Note
Produced using the Geopolitika analysis system—an integrated framework for structural interrogation, elite systems mapping, and narrative deconstruction.