Conspiracy accusations

ABSTRACT

In an historic moment in Dutch politics, the entire cabinet left the House of Representatives during a debate due to extreme right politician Thierry Baudet's conspiracy-laden speech. After espousing a variety of conspiratorial claims, Baudet accused the Minister of Finance, Sigrid Kaag, of being a secret agent for a global Deep State since her studies at Oxford. The accusation prompted Kaag and the entire cabinet to exit the chamber. While some MPs defended Baudet's right to speak, others supported the chair's decision to silence him for violating the rules. These events showcase the divisive potential of conspiracy accusations in politics, causing polarised reactions. Our analysis delves into the dynamics of conspiracy accusations, their impact on polarisation, and the role of intended audiences (as opposed to general audiences) in both advancing accusations and shaping responses thereto. We argue that Baudet's tactics aimed at capitalising on the polarisation his accusations generated. We argue further that dismissing conspiracy accusations too hastily can deepen public distrust in elected officials, emphasising the need for caution in handling such claims. Ultimately, we highlight the broader pattern of conspiracy accusations being employed to fuel political polarisation, raising questions about their role in democratic deliberation.

KEYWORDS:

• Conspiracy theories
• accusation
• network polarisation
• political debate

1. Dutch case study

Something rather remarkable happened in Dutch politics on September 21st of last year: in the midst of a debate on the national budget, the entire cabinet was seen leaving the House of Representatives. In the history of Dutch political debate on a national level, this had never happened before. The reason for the cabinet’s departure? One of the Members of Parliament (MP) said something ‘out of bounds’, as it were. More specifically, one politician advanced a conspiracy theory about another politician.

Thierry Baudet is an extreme right politician and (at the time of writing) leader of one of the opposition parties, Forum for Democracy. His political views are rife with conspiracies, which he also promotes in formal debates. On September 21st, 2022, Baudet's speech in the House of Representatives proceeded more or less along the lines of the following fragment¹:

Chair, for years I have witnessed how our society is being destroyed and for years I have been fighting against that destruction. I fight against mass immigration, […] against climate hysteria and its catastrophic consequences, such as the current energy crisis, which has in fact only just begun and threatens to become much worse. Against the Euro that destroys our savings and our economy. Against the insane COVID policy that has undermined not only our freedom but also our health. Against woke-ism and its totalitarian attack on both freedom of speech and natural human relationships. […] I couldn't see the connection between these seemingly different problems. And then I came to the realisation that all these different insanities are actually all part of one single plan. […] [The elites think] that people are hackable and can be programmed. They believe in humanity 2.0 and inextricably linked to this, these people hate the existing individual freedom. They hate humanity 1.0, i.e. real people. That's why they want fewer people on the planet. That's why they want to control us with social credit, QR codes, algorithms; so that our feelings and desires can be monitored and manipulated.

Baudet's speech about evil elites who control our lives went on for about 12 min, during which the chair of the house and the cabinet stayed put – as they formally ought to. However, in the final minutes of Baudet's allocated slot, he put forward another conspiracy accusation, this time not about anonymous evil elites, but about a fellow politician. That is, he claimed that the Minister of Finance, Sigrid Kaag (party leader of D66, one of the largest political parties in the cabinet at the time), was recruited to spy for a cabal of secret world leaders (or the Deep State) during her studies at Oxford, a ‘spy college’ according to Baudet. More specifically, he said:

It is a fact that Sigrid Kaag studied at St. Anthony's College in Oxford. And it is also a fact that this is a perfect example of the connection between secret services, Marxism and the recruitment of a global Deep State.

On hearing these conspiracy accusations, Kaag left the House of Representatives, shortly followed by the entire cabinet. In the meantime, the House's chair was trying to stop Baudet from taking his conspiracy accusations any further and turned his microphone off, but not before he said:

Well, the people who are now walking out, those people, the heirs of this criminal ideology that caused the French and Russian revolutions. An ideology that transformed into cultural Marxism in the second half of the 20th century, those people have set the agenda of modern globalism.

The response from the cabinet to Baudet's address was unique; the rules of the House dictate that the debate cannot continue without the presence of the cabinet, and the fact that they had left meant the debate was to be adjourned. However, when the chair announces to adjourn, some of the remaining MPs demur. One of them, Geert Wilders (leader to populist political party PVV), argues (and others concur):

Chair, a point of order. Whatever you think of Mr Baudet's argument, he has the right to fill his speaking time here and I also insist that the cabinet is represented. […] All MPs are equal and so is Mr Baudet.²

After a short break in which the chair and cabinet confer, Prime Minister Mark Rutte (on behalf of the whole cabinet) re-enters the room to express that a line has been crossed:

The fact that members of this House can sometimes be seen to push the limits of decency in debate, befits democratic deliberation. But the moment one of our colleagues is accused of what she has just been accused of, we have crossed a line and I find that unacceptable. I also understand the procedures that if the Cabinet stays away, the debate cannot continue. So that is why I said in consultation with the Cabinet that I will sit here again, but what happens next in the debate will be very decisive.

Subsequently, the chair requested Baudet to retract his accusation towards Sigrid Kaag, the reason being that his utterance was not in line with the procedural regulations of the House – according to which one cannot attack someone’s person during debates. Baudet, clearly confused by this request, refused and doubled down: ‘I have only said what I 100% believe to be true’. The chair, then, deprived him of the right to speak at and partake in the rest of the day's deliberations. She explained: ‘This is about a conspiracy about the Minister of Finance, where she studied, and I will not discuss that anymore’.

Various MPs from non-cabinet parties expressed support for the chair's decision, referring to former meetings where a majority of the MPs asked the chair to be more active in intervening when politicians disobey the formal rules of debate. Several also pointed out that ‘throwing around conspiracy theories has real consequences for real people in society’. Minister of Housing and Spatial Planning (and former Minister of Health during the Covid Pandemic) Hugo de Jonge, for example, accused Thierry Baudet of ‘conspiracy madness’ that had no place in Dutch politics.³ Yet other MPs objected to Baudet's claims based on the fact that the debate that day concerned the national budget and should have focused on that, rather than on Baudet's speech, which they condemned as a ‘puppet-show’.

What this case shows us is that, sometimes, an appeal to a conspiracy can cause others to remove themselves from the conversation entirely, thereby significantly hindering the possibility of reasonable debate.⁴ More specifically, advancing (and then refusing to retract) a conspiracy accusation sometimes has the effect of deadlocking otherwise open-ended or even benign discussions. By leaving the chamber, the cabinet conveyed reproach of the conspiracy accusations (first towards Sigrid Kaag, later towards the whole cabinet). By refusing to take back his words, Baudet conveyed (and indeed, claimed aloud) that he was not merely concerned that his accusations might be true, but that, as far as he is concerned, they are true.

These events took place in a formal, political setting. There had been meetings in the months prior that had focussed on the formalities that govern what politicians can and cannot say in the House. One could wonder, therefore, why Baudet, whilst being aware of the principles governing official debates, would (knowingly) violate these rules anyway. Why make such specific conspiracy accusations if doing so is likely to invoke reproach from the other parties in the conversation? As we will argue, there's reason to think that it was not so much the other MPs that Baudet was addressing in his speech, but rather an audience that would not share this feeling of reproach in response to his speech. That is, his ‘intended’ audience consisted of people watching the telecast of the proceedings at home – his (potential or future) political base.

Through explicating this case in more detail, we show that there may be a broader pattern at work here. Conspiracy accusations, we argue, sometimes lend themselves to political rhetoric that may invoke responses of castigation on one side, which, in turn, invoke responses of approbation on another. In other words, it seems that there are salient examples of politicians (or other powerful people) adducing conspiracy accusations in a way that causes polarisation. Furthermore, we believe that the case at hand shows us that there is something to be said about considerations to keep in mind in determining how one could, and perhaps should, respond to such conspiracy accusations.

In section §2, we analyse Baudet's claims in terms of both the advancement of general conspiracy theories and of specifically targeted conspiracy accusations. We will get clear on the features and norms of accusations, and use these to explain the cabinet's response. In section §3, we show that, by focusing on the features of accusations, we can also make sense of another (polar opposite) response to Baudet's speech – i.e. the response of his ‘intended’ audience. In section §4, we discuss the cabinet’s response to Baudet’s accusation and consider the consequences of that response.

2. Conspiracy accusations

Claiming a conspiracy is going on is accusing some of conspiring. To get an intuitive understanding of accusation, let’s consider the popular board game Clue. Here’s a brief rundown of the game mechanics. Someone is found murdered in a mansion, and the player’s goal is to solve the murder. There are six possible suspects, six possible murder weapons, and nine possible rooms in which the murder took place. There are 324 possible combinations, and players whittle these down by asking certain questions on their respective turns. When a player believes they’ve determined the correct answer, they may make an accusation by saying ‘I (hereby) accuse so and so, with such and such weapon, in such and such room’. If the player is right, they win the game; otherwise, the player is out of the game. Abstracting just a bit, in a game of Clue we have some morally bad occurrence that we want to explain, we have a range of possible explanations, we have a means of ruling out certain explanations, and we have a process by which to indicate which explanation we think is right. This tells us quite a bit about accusation.

On our view, it’s reasonable to treat accusation as a kind of speech act. If that’s right, then there is a characteristic act that one engages in when one makes an accusation (Austin 1962; Searle 1968). So what do we do when we make an accusation? Plausibly, what we do is to suggest that a particular agent is blameworthy for some particular morally bad action. It seems that we also demand some sort of redress or retribution in making an accusation. When I say ‘I (hereby) accuse Colonel Mustard, with the pistol, in the library’ I’m ascribing blameworthiness to a particular person – Col. Mustard – for a particular morally bad act – the murder. We can imagine, also, that if the board game continued after the accusation, Col. Mustard would not simply be free to go. Rather, he would be made to pay for his crime in some way or other. That is, our demand for redress or retribution would be satisfied. This demand for redress or retribution explains why the content of the accusation – that the action is morally bad – matters. We accuse people of things that demand redress, things like infidelity, robbery, murder, and so on. We do not accuse people of doing morally good or even morally neutral things because these sorts of things do not demand redress.

Finally, it seems that one must have at least some (relevant) evidence in order for their accusation to be acceptable (in the context in which the accusation is made). Indeed, it would be odd (and ill advised) to make an accusation in Clue on the first turn without collecting any evidence whatsoever. This is why there’s a harsh penalty for making a premature accusation in Clue. The same holds of the accusations made outside of the board game. This suggests that there’s a norm governing the acceptability of accusations. To a good first approximation: ‘one must: accuse S of φ only if one has sufficient evidence that S is doing/has done φ’. And this may be accompanied by a norm of retraction, too. Again, to a good first approximation: ‘Should an accuser lack sufficient evidence for the accusation, they must withdraw the accusation’ (cf. MacFarlane 2014; Rescorla 2009).

A couple more features of accusation are worth noting. First, accusations, like any speech act, occur at a context of utterance – i.e. the concrete situation in which the utterance occurs together with a set of background presuppositions which are mutually accepted for the purpose of conversation and some tacit or explicit rules governing the acceptability of conversational moves. Plausibly, one such rule is the one that governs the epistemic standards in a context (D. K. Lewis 1996; MacFarlane 2007). It’s reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the standards for what counts as ‘sufficient evidence’ will vary across contexts. In a game of Clue, one has sufficient evidence when one has ruled out enough possibilities to make at least an educated guess about the killer, the weapon, and the location of the murder. In civil court procedures, one has sufficient evidence when the ‘preponderance of evidence’ standard is met, meaning that one's claim should be more plausible than not (also known as the 51% standard (Smith 2021)). All of this is to say that a given accusation may be acceptable in some contexts but unacceptable in others. Of course, as one of us has argued elsewhere (Duetz 2023), this should come as no surprise. Where in one context the conspiracy accusation is seen as a viable hypothesis with evidential support (a proper conspiracy theory, if you will), the accusations are viewed as unwarranted and flimsy hunches in another context that may be better understood as signalling rhetoric than conveying truth claims.

Second, it’s reasonable to suppose that what counts as ‘sufficient evidence’ within a context will depend upon the severity of the act of which one is accused. In the same context, I might need quite a lot of evidence to warrant an accusation of murder but a good deal less evidence to warrant an accusation of stealing my sandwich out of the office fridge. So, there are two dimensions along which ‘sufficient evidence’ is measured, one depending upon the content of the accusation and another depending upon the context int which the accusation is made. With this in mind, let’s reconsider the Baudet case.

Baudet’s speech was largely conspiratorial – he asserts, for example, that global elites are covertly engaged in a process of Marxist cultural engineering in order to make populations easier to manipulate and control. Yet these remarks were not sufficient to bring the proceedings to a halt. The MPs were, it seems, content – or at least tolerating – Baudet spending his allotted time either asserting or insinuating these and other conspiracy theories. The conspiracy accusations we focus on here, however, were directed to someone in the conversation. Instead of accusing someone of something who isn't actually there, or instead of accusing a vague group of undetermined people like ‘the elite’, Baudet was accusing Sigrid Kaag (and later the whole cabinet) of doing the bidding of some shadowy global cabal rather than serving the citizens of the Netherlands. That is, he was asserting that the cabinet was morally blameworthy for abusing their political power, and demand some kind of redress for the ways in which the cabinet has wronged the Dutch population.

Recall, Baudet says:

It is a fact that Sigrid Kaag studied at St. Anthony's College in Oxford. And it is also a fact that this is a perfect example of the connection between secret services, Marxism and the recruitment of a global Deep State.

What Baudet has done here is accuse Kaag of something. For, certainly, there is an ascription of blameworthiness for involvement in a morally bad act. After all, the global Deep State, by Baudet’s lights, aims to make humanity more docile and easily governed, an aim which is at odds with the principles of democracy to which the Netherlands adheres and which Kaag has sworn to uphold. Still, some might object that this is not a direct accusation. Baudet is stating that Kaag studied at Oxford, and that this fact is an example of how politicians are recruited for the Deep State, leaving open the question whether Kaag was actually recruited or not. Perhaps he chose his words wisely and intentionally, being sure not to make a specific accusation, so as to build in plausible deniability. Baudet could just respond that he was stating facts, and thereby possibly insinuating a conspiracy accusation, but without intent.

In response, what's enough for our discussion is that at least the cabinet (and many others) took Baudet as making an accusation. The ways in which people in general responded to Baudet's claims clearly attest to the assumption that he is making an accusation towards Kaag, or towards members of the cabinet in general, saying they are part of a secret and evil cabal. Baudet’s accusation is taken as an assertion that Kaag really is working for an organisation intent on undermining Dutch democracy even though she outwardly appears to be upholding those ideals. In other words, and without fear of being hyperbolic, we can say that Baudet is accusing Kaag of treason. Given the seriousness of the accusation, it’s safe to say that the standard required for sufficient evidence here is quite high. It is unsurprising, then, that Baudet’s colleagues in the House did not think that the standard was met, and so it is similarly unsurprising that his fellow MPs demanded that he retract the accusation. They gave him a chance – as one might do when a youngster makes an accusation too early on in a game of Clue – to reconsider making this particular conversational move. It’s worth asking why Baudet refused to do so.

3. Baudet's intended audience

We said in the previous section that accusations occur in a conversational context. We said, also, that there is a norm governing accusation according to which one must make an accusation only if he or she has sufficient evidence for it. Finally, we said that the standard for sufficient evidence can be higher or lower depending upon features of the context as well as the content of the accusation itself. In the case under discussion, it had been previously established that any accusations as to the character of one’s fellow MPs were out of bounds. This was a hearing about the national budget rather than a hearing about institutional corruption. Intuitively, then, the standard for sufficient evidence at the context, c, in which Baudet levelled the accusation was exceptionally high. After all, there was an explicit rule barring these sorts of accusations, and so a successful accusation against this background would require strong evidence indeed. But, apart from a vague association of Oxford and the global Deep State, Baudet offered no such evidence. This is puzzling. At least, that is, until one realises that Baudet was simultaneously occupying at least two conversational contexts: one with his fellow MPs and another with his constituents watching the proceedings from home. Call this second context c’.

Now, there are a number of ways in which c and c’ differ, but we only need to point out a few differences in order to make sense of Baudet’s accusation. First, c and c’ differ with respect to the set of propositions that conversational participants mutually accept for the purpose of conversation – that is, they differ with respect to the common ground (Stalnaker 1978; 2002). Put very simply, the participants in c’ are very likely to believe and mutually accept a lot of propositions that the participants in c will not. At the very least, this suggests that what propositions count as evidence will differ at c and c’. If, for example, it’s common ground at c’ that ‘Anyone who studied at St. Anthony’s College was recruited by the global Deep State’, then the fact that Kaag studied at St. Anthony’s College will offer evidential support to Baudet’s accusation. If, on the other hand, this proposition is not in the common ground – and it is not at c – then the fact that Kaag studied at St. Anthony’s College will not offer evidential support to Baudet’s accusation. So there’s one crucial difference between c and c’.

Another important difference concerns the variance in standards governing what counts as sufficient evidence at c and c’. To get an idea of what we mean here, consider Lewis (1979) discussion of standards of precision – i.e. the rule governing how close to the truth one’s utterance has to be in order to count as ‘true enough’ for the purposes of conversation. Here’s the example: Suppose we’re having a conversation about geography. Now, if I say ‘Italy is boot-shaped’ and none of my conversational participants object, then we are, presumably, in a context governed by low standards of precision. Italy isn’t really boot-shaped, but it’s close enough to being boot-shaped for our purposes that my utterance is acceptable. Given this, an utterance of ‘France is hexagonal’ ought to be equally acceptable. If the former is true enough for our purposes, then the latter should be too. If, on the other hand, I say ‘Italy is boot-shaped’ and my conversational partners object, then we are in a context with higher standards of precision: it matters for our purposes that Italy isn’t really boot-shaped. So, here, an utterance of ‘France is hexagonal’ will not be acceptable. Back to the Baudet case.

We’ve already established that the standard for sufficient evidence is extremely high at c: we’re in a formal setting with explicit rules prohibiting these sorts of accusations. But what can we say about the standards in play at c’? Intuitively, the standard here has got to be rather a good deal lower. First, there is no explicit rule prohibiting Baudet from making such accusations with respect to c’. That is to say that, to Baudet’s followers watching the proceedings at home, there’s nothing out-of-bounds about making such accusations. If anything, making such accusations will be encouraged – especially given the sorts of background presuppositions at play here; or, perhaps, there’s some tacit norm according to which the job of an elected official is to root out corruption wherever possible. Whatever the reason, it’s reasonable to suppose that the standard for sufficient evidence is lower at c’ than at c.⁵

Given the difference in common ground and the variance in standards for what counts as sufficient evidence, it seems that, with respect to c’, Baudet’s accusation that Kaag is an agent of the global Deep State is perfectly felicitous. There’s no rule prohibiting such accusations, and Baudet has provided sufficient evidence in favour of the accusation (to the people in c’, anyways).⁶ This means that, by Baudet’s followers’ lights, the accusation that Kaag is compromised because she is part of a conspiratorial network is a salient political issue that should be addressed. If the Minister of Finance (or even the whole cabinet) is part of a conspiracy, we ought to know and something ought to be done. For those who share the view that the government is deeply untrustworthy, and probably corrupt, Baudet raising this issue is important. From this view, he deserves credit for being brave in the face of an evil elite that is trying to muffle and mute him. Certainly, it is not his fault that pointing out the corruptness of fellow MPs is ill-received. Instead, it's the distorted system of elitist politics, trying to save itself from legit criticism, that is showing its true colours here. By not even wanting to engage with the idea that one of the MPs could be up to something nefarious, the cabinet indeed seemed to affirm that Baudet struck a nerve, and might be onto something here.

The context that does allow Baudet's accusation is shared with this other (or intended) audience, consisting of his (potential) following, his (potential) political base, but also more generally people who believe that the cabinet at the time was (intentionally) grossly incompetent and did everything in its power to dismiss opposition. The above analysis resonates with some of the most-liked comments to the video of the debate uploaded on YouTube by Baudet's political party:

1. JediMasterLucia (2022): ‘They fled from the truth. Thierry (and co.) keep bombarding them with the truth’. (314 likes)

2. Liquid_Economy (2022): ‘Behold … Those that walk away cannot manage the truth! Go FvD!’ (308 likes)

3. NastyCupid (2022): ‘If Thierry would have said something obviously false, the cabinet would have remained seated and laugh … The fact that they get up and leave shows that he struck a nerve that's close to the truth. Great job Thierry, your speech was so great that I was moved to tears to hear this in the House of Representatives’. (468 likes)

4. viktor8321 (2022): ‘I can only say 1 thing, Thierry, KEEP ON PUSHING!! The moment the cabinet walks away and the chair gets nervous, you know you're onto something and that the truth is coming to light. Also, great amount of respect for Wilders, who with his response shows that he is definitely NOT controlled opposition’. (644 likes)

5. dutchcowboy3665 (2022): ‘The cabinet apparently wishes to determine what is and is not appropriate in their view. This is pure censorship, resign & piss off’. (282 likes)

6. JackONeill497 (2022): ‘Great job. Because of the way [the cabinet] responded, more people will rewatch this. Streisand effect’. (300 likes)

Comments 1 and 2 express similar sentiments, according to which Baudet's claims are appropriate regarding the relevant common ground and the cabinet's departure should be read as their inability or unwillingness to grapple with the truth of those claims. In other words, Baudet spoke the truth and the cabinet did not want to deal with his accusations.

Closely related are the sentiments expressed in comments 3 and 4, which, additionally, take the cabinet's departure as support for the truth of Baudet's claims. Baudet had been espousing many far-right and conspiratorial claims, none of which invoked such a strong response as the conspiracy accusations directed at Kaag and the cabinet. The fact that they reacted so strongly to these accusations, and not others, is, at least for these commentators, revealing. In other words, the cabinet's response is taken as evidence for the truth of Baudet's conspiracy accusations.

Comments 5 and 6 also emphasise the importance of the cabinet's response, albeit slightly differently. Comment 5 claims that the cabinet's response constituted censorship. By leaving the chamber, the cabinet refused to engage with Baudet any longer and this refusal censored Baudet because it led the chair to deprive him of the right to speak at and attend the rest of the debate. Comment 6 makes a similar appeal to censorship, albeit through a more subtle implication. This commentator points out that the response Baudet's claims elicited from the cabinet was efficacious in ensuring Baudet's claims received a lot of attention. The commentator cites the Streisand Effect, which is the phenomenon:

[W]hereby an attempt to remove or censor a piece of information has the paradoxical consequence of publicizing it more widely. (Hagenbach and Koessler 2017, 1)

In other words, the cabinet's departure from the chamber and the chair's censoring Baudet had, according to the commentator, backlash effects: the extreme – or at least rare – response drew more attention to Baudet's conspiracy accusations than if they had stayed put. The commentator seems to praise Baudet for doing a good job by provoking such a strong response of censorship from the cabinet and the chair because it helps his claims receive more attention.

To sum up, there is a stark contrast between understanding Baudet's conspiracy accusations in the context of c and understanding them in the context of c’, which also explains why, in this case, conspiracy accusations make for ample (perhaps even reliable) rhetorical tools that help one speak to one kind of audience while gravely upsetting another.⁷ In the next section we ask, what, if anything, these insights about Baudet's ‘intended’ audience tell us about the cabinet's response.

4. Responses to conspiracy accusations

There’s no question that the cabinet had to do something in response to Baudet’s accusation. There are rules, Baudet chose to break those rules, and so there must be some consequence. That much is clear. The question is whether the cabinet’s response was the right one, knowing what we now know about Baudet's intended audience. Of course, many people will think it’s obvious that the cabinet responded exactly as they should have, and it’s easy to understand why. A (by their lights) far-right crank said something out of bounds, held up important government proceedings, and refused to apologise for doing so when confronted about it. For a number of good reasons, one might suppose that a government simply cannot allow its MPs to behave in such a way.

Moreover, one might think that any response other than what the cabinet in fact did would have run the risk of giving undue credibility to Baudet’s accusation and further derailed the proceedings. Silencing (or at least excluding) Baudet was, thus, the only sensible thing to do.⁸ In fact, one arguing in this way might say, it is the thing to do in all such situations: we cannot be held hostage by the ravings of madmen, nor can we provide the illusion of credibility by taking their ravings seriously. We certainly see the pull of this response, but, on our view, there's also a sense in which it’s too quick. For there are consequences to responding to Baudet (and others of his ilk) in this way that are often overlooked, and these ought to be better understood before adopting or endorsing the cabinet’s response to Baudet as a general rule. We turn to that task now.

The first thing to note is that Baudet is a duly elected official. This, of course, means that a not insignificant number of Dutch citizens voted for him – presumably because they agree with his views. Moreover, the recent European trend towards the right of the political spectrum and continuous increasing electoral volatility means that there's less solidarity of voters to political parties, which are accompanied by the possibility that people who had no political discontent or distrust in the government might have reason to do so in the future (Martin, de Lange, and van der Brug 2022). It is also, we think, safe to suppose that some number of non-voting Dutch citizens agree with some of Baudet's claims or are at least ambivalent towards him (and his party). This isn’t a rare phenomenon, after all. Indeed, many people in the US who did not vote for President Trump nevertheless agree with his policies. This is significant for a couple of reasons. First, Baudet voters (and potential future Baudet/far right voters) are likely to have lower than average levels of trust in the Dutch government.⁹ As a result, they are more likely than the average Dutch citizen to believe (or be poised to believe) that, e.g. Baudet’s accusation that Kaag is corrupt is true. After all, if one is distrustful of the government in general – whether that distrust is warranted or not – then one is bound to be more likely to believe that (at least some) members of the government are up to no good.¹⁰

What does this distrustful block of supporters and potential supporters – the intended audience – see when the cabinet silences an MP who they believe is courageous for opposing the politicians in power? Certainly, they do not see what we see, i.e. a cabinet at its wits end with Baudet, whose hand has been forced into silencing an elected official who crossed a line. Rather, they see a government concerned more with decorum than truth, worried more about politeness than potential corruption. That is, they see a corrupt and untrustworthy government acting in a corrupt and untrustworthy way, a government which is content to exclude them and their chosen representative for full involvement in the democratic process if it helps their cause (Hauswald 2023). For those that resonate with Baudet's opposition, with the political discontent and distrust that his views entail, this is par for the course. The government has behaved exactly as they would expect. That they have behaved in such a predictable way is, by their lights, evidence that Baudet’s accusation was on or very near the mark – recall the YouTube comments posted on the video of these proceedings – and, if any of these voters didn’t believe Kaag was a Deep State spy before, they are likely to at least now think it’s worth looking into (Brooks 2023). Additionally, these voters are now more firmly polarised in Baudet’s direction, or at least in a direction opposite of the mainstream centrist parties at the time. So, the cabinet’s silencing of Baudet may have served to galvanise voters (Begby 2022) in joining the opposition.

Of course, one might suppose that people who’d vote for Baudet and his party are a lost cause, electorally speaking, so there’s really nothing too concerning going on here. But what about the people with increasing government dissatisfaction and decreasing political trust more generally? Plausibly, we think, Baudet's accusations and the cabinet’s response these invoked may well serve to motivate those people to use their votes as expressions of their political discontent, which, in turn, motivates electoral volatility (Rooduijn, van der Brug, and de Lange 2016). After all, when one gets (by their lights) further evidence that their government is corrupt, untrustworthy, and willing to exclude what they deem ‘problematic’ representatives from the deliberative process, one may well throw one’s official support behind the MP or party who looks to be standing up to that corruption. If one is open to the idea that the government is corrupt and untrustworthy, then it’s not hard to imagine that putative claims of corruption and untrustworthiness will influence their voting behaviour going forward.

So, the cabinet’s silencing of Baudet has a potential three-fold effect: it galvanises his voting base, it motivates his non-voting base to vote, and it may well sway those that didn’t vote for him to do so in subsequent elections. Put another way, the cabinet’s actions – especially when considered in the broader context of how Baudet and his party are generally treated (both within government and more broadly), a growing perception that the Dutch government is corrupt and untrustworthy, and so on – is the kind of thing that can swing future elections in a direction that, depending upon one’s views, is not preferable.

A closely related example of this, though it’s not quite one-to-one: in the 2016 US Presidential election, Hillary Clinton (in)famously referred to would-be Trump voters as ‘baskets of deplorables’. She also declined to campaign in certain states in the Midwest US (‘flyover country’, people call it). On the picture we’re describing here, this sort of bald-faced exclusion should have galvanised voters, who were already electorally volatile for reasons having to do with political discontent and distrust, to vote for Trump (or at least not Hillary Clinton). As we all know, this is exactly what happened.¹¹ There will be more cases that share similarities to the one discussed here, some with more, others with less serious consequences that can to an extent be traced back to a practice of exclusion, condemnation, or of contextual silencing. The point is just that the consequences of excluding, or silencing someone have the potential to be serious and far reaching.

The potential negative effects of the cabinet’s actions do not end with these electoral consequences. Political polarisation, or its perception, unfortunately has the side effect of permeating people's beliefs about trust beyond politics (Enders and Armaly 2019; Lee 2022). It bolsters, among other things, a more specific kind of polarisation which isolates people in certain epistemic networks through the complete erosion of inter-group trust (Hetherington and Rudolph 2018). Such cases are, according to Interian et al. (2023):

[C]haracterized by an increasing intragroup agreement (i.e. between individuals with similar beliefs), while, at the same time, there is a deepening intergroup disagreement (i.e. between individuals identified with groups with contrary beliefs). (3123)

Perceived political polarisation seeps into general society and causes network polarisation, meaning that different (partisan) groups no longer engage with the beliefs of other groups, but increasingly focus inward. The more polarised a society's epistemic networks are, the less intelligible views from other groups will become, the less reason there is to trust members from other groups, the more problems we create for a society's social cohesion (also, see Duetz 2022).

In terms of the case at hand, one group takes Baudet as having said something ‘out of bounds’ and irrelevant to the political issues at hand. For them, uttering ‘Kaag is a member of a marxist, evil, global elite that is out to get us’ is not too different from uttering ‘Kaag is a crazy witch’. Exclusion is warranted because neither is appropriate according to the rules of Parliament and neither is relevant to political debate (and their understanding of what is relevant to political debate follows similar contextual rules of discussion). According to Baudet’s (potential) following, however, the claim that members of the government are entangled with an evil Deep State programme that controls our lives, is not irrelevant at all – nor is it, by their lights, far-fetched or crazy. Exposing these members is a serious and, they take it, politically salient matter. Indeed, uttering ‘Kaag is a member of a marxist, evil, global elite that is out to get us’ is nothing like ‘Kaag is a crazy witch’. The former is a legitimate political concern, though the latter is not.¹²

In cases of network polarisation, it is not merely the case that within groups, people's beliefs become more homogeneous. Rather, what's disconcerting is that sets of groups become more and more polarised, and that this kind of polarisation influences the informational networks of members of the respective groups. We might describe this as an ‘underlying network connecting the members of a society or community’ that ‘is composed of highly connected groups with weak intergroup connectivity’ (Interian et al. 2023, 3124) (also, see Conover et al. 2012). Network polarisation feeds into (informational) isolation of members of the groups involved, meaning that not only will the beliefs around which the group was formed become more homogenous, so will the information they are exposed to. In other words, this kind of polarisation influences the group members’ epistemic environments in a way that is pivotal to the beliefs group members come to adopt (Levy 2023).

As we mentioned at the start of this section, it’s clear that the cabinet had to do something in response to Baudet’s accusation. He broke the rules, and rule violations demand a response (at least if the rules are to be taken seriously). Our aim here was to tease out whether this response in particular – excluding Baudet from the proceedings – was advisable. On our view, there is reason to think this is not the case: we think it is safe to say that the potential downstream consequences of silencing and excluding Baudet are more far reaching than the cabinet could have realised at the time. For those who do not want more people to vote for far right and populist candidates, it is important to acknowledge that an exclusionary response to a rule violation by such candidates is suboptimal. The exclusion and silencing of ‘opposing voices’ is what such candidates and their following expect the people in power to do: for them, the exclusion testifies to the fact that those in power are secretly colluding to retain that power regardless of what people think of them. We may really want to respond in a way that excludes such voices, and we may feel like we’re justified in doing so, but it is, we think, too high risk a political strategy for dealing with rule violations like Baudet’s conspiracy accusation.¹³ Granted, it is not immediately clear what sorts of intermediate (and lower risk) responses were available to the cabinet, and a full discussion of such possibilities is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice to say, however, that there is plenty of logical space between allowing the rule violation to go unpunished and excluding the rule breaker from political debate. As with so many things, the thing to do, it seems, is to find an intermediate response that demonstrates that the rules have teeth without running the risk of lionising far right and populist figures.

5. Conclusion

For those who believe that our analysis of the Baudet case is overly sympathetic to deranged politicians using conspiracy accusations to further their own objectives and causing polarisation, we would like to reply that, first, we plainly disagree with Baudet's claims, and believe that there are good reasons to exclude him from political deliberation for making these accusations.¹⁴ Our aim in this paper has been to show that, nonetheless, there seems to be an internationally growing base for not finding such appeals to conspiracy accusations deplorable. In academia, we can analyse cases like these in more or less neutral terms; putting our own disagreement aside, it is important to study the reasons for why people are not shocked by hearing such accusations in official political settings, and to study how these reasons may be connected to actions from what is perceived as the dominant, centrist, power. In other words, we should be willing to expose ourselves to information from other, polarised epistemic networks, even if doing so only affirms our previous perspective and response. The easy solution is to say that people who vote for populist radical right-wing parties in the Netherlands are crazy and do not deserve a place at the table. The more taxing solution is to investigate what kinds of things we (politicians, academics, government officials, and so on) do that amplify the sentiments that make such parties resonate with voters in the first place. To invoke a platitude: one cannot control what others do, only how one responds.

Accusations, probably of any kind, tend to invoke strong responses because they are morally laden. Refusing to engage with an unwarranted accusation in our daily lives is an inconspicuous matter that's often ethically innocuous. For officials in broadcasted political debate, the stakes are considerably higher. Every politician strives to expand their political following; which messages (and responses to others) are effective in achieving those ends depends on numerous aspects of the political system – e.g. other political parties, economic stability, existing social grievances, and so on.¹⁵ Political discourse is strategic, and one strategy is to employ conspiracy accusations as a rhetoric because such accusations are readily seen by the ‘mainstream’ as crazy (because they are conspiratorial) rule violations (because they are accusations), whereas the non-mainstream see them as resonating with their political discontent and a form of brave opposition that finally stands up to those in power. If we're interested in a less polarised political climate and more social cohesion, we need to look beyond the boundaries of our own bubbles and be willing to steelman, not strawman, other perspectives.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Brian L. Keeley, and Jeroen de Ridder, as well as the participants of the 2nd Conference on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theory (2023), for their helpful comments and interesting discussions on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All quotations of the debate are transcribed and translated by us from the recordings of the debate uploaded to the Youtube channel of Baudet's political party (Forum voor Democratie 2022) unless stated otherwise.

2 This quotation is an exception on fn. 1, and was translated and transcribed from recordings of the debate uploaded to the Youtube channel of a national newspaper (De Telegraaf 2022).

3 Baudet accused Kaag and the cabinet of being involved in a conspiracy. In turn, De Jonge is accusing Baudet of suffering from conspiracism (Dentith 2018). Of these two kinds of conspiracy-related accusations, we focus on the former: where someone accuses someone else of being a conspirator (and not a conspiracist).

4 One might think that this claim resembles the idea that labelling some statement a conspiracy theory helps delegitimize the content of that statement (e.g., see (Hauswald 2023; Husting and Orr 2007). Here, however, we focus not on labelling practices, but practices of accusation. Conspiracy accusations may invoke similar responses to labelling practices (e.g., of parties no longer wanting to engage with some conspiratorial content) but are distinct phenomena.

5 Or, indeed, that whatever the standard for evidence is, it is met.

6 One might object that surely the rules governing c must in some way carry over to c' since we can safely assume that people in c' know that there are such rules in c. However, as we also argue in §4, there are good reasons to question this underlying assumption. For example, people in c' might very well not be bothered by the conversational rules and procedures in c because, on their view, (i) the context of c consists of indoctrinated nonsense that only sheeple would believe, and (ii) should be trumped by a discussion of the corruptness of a PM.

7 It may be that there's nothing special about, specifically, the fact that these accusations are about conspiracies. On the one hand, there's reason to believe that conspiracies function in a specific way because if there is a conspiracy, we should expect evidence to be sparse. On the other hand, it might be that such conspiracy accusations are just one kind of anti-elite/establishment rhetoric (see, e.g., Polk et al. 2017). Our argument can proceed either way.

8 Silencing someone, as we use the notion here, is a rather broad term that refers to preventing someone from expressing their views or criticisms by excluding someone from partaking in a discourse. Our analysis allows, for those who disagree with this understanding of silencing, to replace it with exclusion from the discourse at hand.

9 Both Baudet's party (FvD) and the now biggest party in the Netherlands run by Geert Wilders (PVV) are categorised as Populist Radical Right (Harteveld et al. 2022; Jonge 2021). Support for either one of the two parties correlates with government dissatisfaction and political distrust (De Lange 2022). If this categorization is correct, it is clear why populists show low levels of political trust: because they (like Baudet) strongly criticise the political elite (Juen 2024).

10 Alternatively, it might turn out that Baudet's (potential) voters do not necessarily think the literal accusations are true, but rather that he's voicing more general political discontent through means of hyperbolics or metaphors. Studies have shown the importance of hyperbolic speech for other far right politicians as well (see, e.g., (Abbas 2019; Hidalgo-Tenorio and Benítez-Castro 2022; Masroor et al. 2019). For our purposes, however, nothing hangs on this: hyperbolic or not, there's still a (perceived) accusation at play here.

11 One may wonder whether this exclusionary pattern of behaviour was sufficient to swing the recent Dutch elections for another party on the populist radical right (PVV, lead by Geert Wilders), though, of course, it would be too much to draw a tight causal connection here.

12 Notice, however, that we can easily tweak the case in order to make ‘Kaag is a crazy witch’ the politically salient thing. For example, if loads of Dutch citizens were worried about witches – crazy ones in particular – and selected as their MP someone intent on rooting out the crazy witches, then this MP’s accusation that someone is a crazy witch would be politically salient. In this bizarre scenario, silencing the MP for the crazy witch accusation would have the same sort of effect as the ones we're talking about in the actual case. The upshot is that what counts as ‘salient political speech’ is contextually sensitive, and that suggests that whether an instance of silencing has negative downstream effects will be contextually sensitive, too.

13 Here’s an analogy. Suppose someone pushes you on the playground. That’s a clear rule violation: we ought not to push people. You’ve got to respond, but how? A perfectly natural inclination is to want to push the person back. But, depending upon your aim, that might not be the best thing to do. If your aim is to punish the rule violation, you shouldn’t respond by shoving your shover. Why? Because, as we all know, it’s very often the retaliator who gets caught out by the playground monitor rather than the initial violator. Here, you get punished and the initial violator looks like the victim of your aggression. If, on the other hand, your aim is to stand up for yourself, come what may, then shove away. We think the cabinet is in the first scenario here, not the second.

14 For another discussion of people possible using using conspiracy accusations to further their own objectives and causing polarisation, see Brian L. Keeley’s article in this issue. (inpress)

15 Golder (2016) provides a helpful overview of explanations for the growth of far right political parties in Europe. One such explanation is that ‘voters turn to populist parties, including those on the far right, that criticise mainstream parties for colluding rather than competing for power’ (486).