Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, although today we're sharing a sample of this week's episode of our other show, solved.

Best of Left members get solved early, ad-free, and complete with a members-only backstage segment all via podcast.

But we're also putting the show out on the Best

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Best of Left YouTube channel and catching every episode of Solved there. And now here's a few minutes

for free to wet your appetite, but just like Best of the Left,

the real benefits kick in when you hear the whole show, which is greater than the sum of

its parts.

And speaking of anxiety, another thing we do to soothe anxiety is, turns out, believe in conspiracy

theories.

So another book we've been getting

through, but very slowly, because we only read it on road trips and we don't go on very many

road trips, is Naomi Klein's doppelganger. And so Naomi Klein writes, the point, consciously

or not, is to foster denial and avoidance.

The point, she's speaking of conspiracy theories, the point is not to have to do hard and

uncomfortable things in the face of hard and uncomfortable realities, whether COVID or climate

change or the fact that our nations were forged in genocide and have never engaged

in a remotely serious process of making repair, denial is so much easier than looking

inward or backward or forward, so much easier than change, but denial needs narratives,

cover stories, and that is what conspiracy culture is providing, end quote.

So, yeah, this denial, this belief in conspiratorial junk science relieves us from having to confront hard truths about oppression, for instance.

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