Welcome to Beg to Differ, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor of The Bullwork.

I'm joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal,

Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center and Damon Linker of the week.

We're delighted to welcome our guest this week, Michael J. Totten.

Michael spent more than a decade as a foreign correspondent and foreign policy analyst specializing in the Middle East and his work has appeared

in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and many other places, so we are

delighted to have him join us especially because our first topic today is the

conspiracy mindedness the growing conspiratorial mindset in America. Just an example, if you ask people about the vaccine and whether they plan to take the COVID vaccine.

Let me see I have this 60% say that they would get the vaccine and 21% say they

definitely would not and are pretty certain that more information would not change their minds.

So I'm going to start with you, Damon.

Do you think that people are more conspiracy-minded now than in the past

in America? You know, there's that famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics politics is this new or not new

both can I say that and therefore not be wrong

I mean clearly there is a way in which conspiracy theorizing and speculation is in a way

co-evil with human society, civilization.

It waxes and wains in different times and places.

There is a robust tradition of this in this country,

as Michael Totten could extempor as on is certainly the Middle East has its history of it as well. The difference today I think is that we are all sort of intertwined and connected and information

flows freely all over the place instantly and that I think is enabling the

conspiracies that would always be floating around to become much more

...