To try and answer the rhetorical question (which I didn't ask: the title of this post was chosen by my good man Clayton) of whether the term 'conspiracy theory' is meant to 'stifle dissent', I have to say, of course not. My own thesis about the term and its usages has for many years been that these two words strung together are little more than.... post-hypnotic suggestion.
One industry article I found on the topic of post-hypnotic suggestion explains:
"By implanting specific instructions during a hypnotic trance state, these suggestions continue to exert influence over an individual’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors even after they emerge from this altered state of consciousness."
In other words, the usage of the term in real-time in a news item or other form of media presentation is not meant to persuade anyone of anything that they had not already been pre-indoctrinated to accept on face value. In the case of an AP article about the sad dusty residue of a once-prominent right-wing organization now confined to a single nondescript location ('small-town Wisconsin'), the post-hypnotic suggestion has little to do with any presumptive relevance or even newsworthiness of the.... John Birch Society, whatever that ever actually was, or whoever actually once gave a rat's ass.
What is being set in motion in a pre-indoctrinated readership's collective mindset is not just one but as many as three post-hypnotic suggestions (or, what I term alternatively as 'ideological cues' so no one will accuse me of being a 'supporter' of hypnotherapy....)
Two of these are included in the very headline:
'Small-town Wisconsin', which both indicates and espouses a view that such a place is not even worthy of serious consideration,
and 'the American conspiracy theory', which rather insultingly suggests that there is only one, and that all you need to know about it is that Associated Press is already onto it, so you don't have to be.
These alone are two very broad presumptions, not particularly supported by any further inclusion of any actual, you know, factual evidence that either one of them is true. (Neither one is, but never mind.)
The third post-hypnotic ideological cue is a very subtle departure from the term 'conspiracy theory' itself (because you've already reliably accepted two other false premises...) in the quote I included in my own text: 'the Birch conspiracy.' Suggesting very broadly, once again absent any factual corroboration, that anybody who believes what AP has labeled 'conspiracy theory' is.... a conspirator themselves!
Look at what small-town Wisconsin is up to, still conspiring against The Official Version, after all these years. How sad, suggests our hypnotist-news-outlet, how pathetic, and yet... how dangerous: we mustn't let them get away with it by.... electing Donald Trump?
The only meaningful message in the entire article is little more than VOTE DEMOCRAT.
But since nakedly partisan campaign pitches are boring and tiresome and damn near everyone who intends to vote this November has already made up their minds anyway, the point of this exercise in post-hypnotic suggestion is to remind and comfort a securely predisposed readership that they are... on the right (left?) side of history. Or something.
But since this is really more in the realm of entertainment than of scrupulously factual journalism (remember that? I barely do...), and since there is no activity more governed by predisposed preferences than one's choices of entertainment products, the editors, publishers and (most crucially) advertisers behind AP's selections of items to display on their front page on a Sunday morning during an election year need never to have concerned themselves over trying to convince anyone of the veracity of the article's rather gratuitous claims, because the social-media stats they rely on in deciding what to publish and how to spin it had already informed them that this is the type of thing their hypnotized test subjects want to hear anyway.
Stifling dissent (whatever that even means) has little to do with it.
Giving a target audience what they have already shown they want is the whole point. They just need to be reminded, constantly, of what are the latest correct things to want. Once those urges have been installed, mostly by means of piss-poor public education and shit-stupid popular culture, they only require updating now and then.
Once again, Leonard Schapiro: '...the true purpose of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to establish a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the least trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance....'
If anyone Out There never endeavors to learn anything further about the very scientific and thoroughly value-neutral process of producing and distributing propaganda, irrespective of its ideological contents, making the fullest sense of that quote will go a long way.
(Prior to the ellipsis, the beginning of the sentence was 'no one understood better than Stalin', in a book written over half a century ago entitled 'The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.' Comrade Stalin misunderstood a great many things, but one thing he was a standard-setter at, was how to make people too scared to be heard saying anything other than what they'd been told were the correct things to be heard saying. If one looks at the garbled incoherent nonsense the Soviet state under his rule was known to disseminate on a daily basis, hardly any of it squaring neatly into Marxist theory other than in the simplistic usage of silly slogans, one might conclude that a man first trained to be a priest understood how superstition works, and that beyond creating a new religion and appointing himself as its Godhead, ideology itself was mere content-filler of no real meaning at all.)
To try and answer the rhetorical question (which I didn't ask: the title of this post was chosen by my good man Clayton) of whether the term 'conspiracy theory' is meant to 'stifle dissent', I have to say, of course not. My own thesis about the term and its usages has for many years been that these two words strung together are little more than.... post-hypnotic suggestion.
One industry article I found on the topic of post-hypnotic suggestion explains:
"By implanting specific instructions during a hypnotic trance state, these suggestions continue to exert influence over an individual’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors even after they emerge from this altered state of consciousness."
[ source: https://howtousehypnosis.com/posthypnotic-suggestions/ ]
In other words, the usage of the term in real-time in a news item or other form of media presentation is not meant to persuade anyone of anything that they had not already been pre-indoctrinated to accept on face value. In the case of an AP article about the sad dusty residue of a once-prominent right-wing organization now confined to a single nondescript location ('small-town Wisconsin'), the post-hypnotic suggestion has little to do with any presumptive relevance or even newsworthiness of the.... John Birch Society, whatever that ever actually was, or whoever actually once gave a rat's ass.
What is being set in motion in a pre-indoctrinated readership's collective mindset is not just one but as many as three post-hypnotic suggestions (or, what I term alternatively as 'ideological cues' so no one will accuse me of being a 'supporter' of hypnotherapy....)
Two of these are included in the very headline:
'Small-town Wisconsin', which both indicates and espouses a view that such a place is not even worthy of serious consideration,
and 'the American conspiracy theory', which rather insultingly suggests that there is only one, and that all you need to know about it is that Associated Press is already onto it, so you don't have to be.
These alone are two very broad presumptions, not particularly supported by any further inclusion of any actual, you know, factual evidence that either one of them is true. (Neither one is, but never mind.)
The third post-hypnotic ideological cue is a very subtle departure from the term 'conspiracy theory' itself (because you've already reliably accepted two other false premises...) in the quote I included in my own text: 'the Birch conspiracy.' Suggesting very broadly, once again absent any factual corroboration, that anybody who believes what AP has labeled 'conspiracy theory' is.... a conspirator themselves!
Look at what small-town Wisconsin is up to, still conspiring against The Official Version, after all these years. How sad, suggests our hypnotist-news-outlet, how pathetic, and yet... how dangerous: we mustn't let them get away with it by.... electing Donald Trump?
The only meaningful message in the entire article is little more than VOTE DEMOCRAT.
But since nakedly partisan campaign pitches are boring and tiresome and damn near everyone who intends to vote this November has already made up their minds anyway, the point of this exercise in post-hypnotic suggestion is to remind and comfort a securely predisposed readership that they are... on the right (left?) side of history. Or something.
But since this is really more in the realm of entertainment than of scrupulously factual journalism (remember that? I barely do...), and since there is no activity more governed by predisposed preferences than one's choices of entertainment products, the editors, publishers and (most crucially) advertisers behind AP's selections of items to display on their front page on a Sunday morning during an election year need never to have concerned themselves over trying to convince anyone of the veracity of the article's rather gratuitous claims, because the social-media stats they rely on in deciding what to publish and how to spin it had already informed them that this is the type of thing their hypnotized test subjects want to hear anyway.
Stifling dissent (whatever that even means) has little to do with it.
Giving a target audience what they have already shown they want is the whole point. They just need to be reminded, constantly, of what are the latest correct things to want. Once those urges have been installed, mostly by means of piss-poor public education and shit-stupid popular culture, they only require updating now and then.
Once again, Leonard Schapiro: '...the true purpose of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to establish a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the least trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance....'
If anyone Out There never endeavors to learn anything further about the very scientific and thoroughly value-neutral process of producing and distributing propaganda, irrespective of its ideological contents, making the fullest sense of that quote will go a long way.
(Prior to the ellipsis, the beginning of the sentence was 'no one understood better than Stalin', in a book written over half a century ago entitled 'The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.' Comrade Stalin misunderstood a great many things, but one thing he was a standard-setter at, was how to make people too scared to be heard saying anything other than what they'd been told were the correct things to be heard saying. If one looks at the garbled incoherent nonsense the Soviet state under his rule was known to disseminate on a daily basis, hardly any of it squaring neatly into Marxist theory other than in the simplistic usage of silly slogans, one might conclude that a man first trained to be a priest understood how superstition works, and that beyond creating a new religion and appointing himself as its Godhead, ideology itself was mere content-filler of no real meaning at all.)