This is part 7 of my series answering Bob Murphy's "Tough Questions for Libertarians".
Here is an overview of the series: #458128
Question
For libertarians who spend time making fun of conspiracy theorists, why do you do that?
Context
The point of this question really has nothing to do with the specifics of any particular "conspiracy theory". It has more to do with recognizing that the label "conspiracy theory" only gets applied to narratives that are not sanctioned by the regime. People who believe the official account of 9/11 are not called conspiracy theorists, for instance, when that explanation is clearly a conspiracy. On the other hand, if you question the efficacy of a vaccine, you are likely to be called a conspiracy theorist, despite having posited no conspiracy and really not even having a theory.
So, Bob is basically asking "Why are you mocking people for questioning the regime's narratives?" The alternative, I suppose, is to just ignore them and not worry about it, if you think they're views are wrong.
Here's the full clip of Bob posing this question: https://fountain.fm/clip/m6rFnXbyfxtqtcoWF5m5
Answer
This is the first of the questions that doesn't apply to me. There are plenty of conspiracy theories that I think are dumb, sometimes those are even the regime approved ones. However, I don't spend any energy disparaging fringe weirdos for having weird fringe ideas.
That said, I can steelman these folks a little bit. There's nothing incompatible with libertarianism about generally believing the mainstream narrative of events. As long as you think it's wrong to govern through coercion, you're a libertarian. So, you could think the proliferation of these false conspiracy theories is dangerous and, since you don't believe in coercion, that ridicule and ostracism are the appropriate social tools for governing this type of thing.
Even if you don't agree with every approved view, you may not think the government is full of bad faith psychopathic liars. Rather, you could think there are just certain economic theories they're mistaken about and that's why so much policy is misguided. In other words, their set of facts is correct, but their theoretical framework is mistaken. In that scenario, there's no particular reason you wouldn't want to make fun of the preposterous set of facts adhered to by conspiracy theorists.
Rant
I think there is something more interesting going on here and I'll offer it as my explanation for why certain libertarians go out of their way to ridicule anyone who disagrees with the approved narratives. It has nothing to do with libertarianism, btw.
People are very lacking in humility. Once they accept a narrative, they generally aren't interested in seeing it challenged. We like to think we're super smart, so if we accepted an explanation it was probably the right one. Therefore, whoever has a different explanation is not as smart as us and is clearly wrong. Why listen to someone who's not as smart as you, when you can just drown out their wrong ideas with endless repetition of your correct one?
Everyone here has adopted at least one pretty unusual position, so you've surely faced "counterarguments" that are just the mainstream generally accepted position. People who have never thought an issue through will condescendingly deliver the approved position as though you must have just never heard it before (and aren't they just so smart for knowing it). It doesn't seem to cross people's minds that in order to arrive at an unusual opinion, you presumably had some reason for rejecting the usual opinion: the problem is just that you've never heard the super smart opinion they accepted uncritically (probably in grade school).
@kepford had a nice post recently #478976 about how people lie about so many things. I think this is a cousin of that behavior. Although it's not explicitly in bad faith, the lack of humility involved in asserting, as unassailable fact, things you have only a marginal understanding of is another major way that regime propaganda pervades society.
I'm also reminded of @elvismercury recently claiming that most people claiming to be open-minded are just larping at being open-minded (apologies for not tracking down wherever that was posted). I totally agree. I think one way to test yourself is to think how you respond to ideas contrary to your own. Is your first instinct to fight back or is it to ask follow up questions? Are those questions sincere or are they just a less confrontational form of fighting back?