Conspiracy Theories.
They're fun until people take them too seriously and people get hurt.
It's entertaining in a lot of ways because its always scandalous and dramatic. It takes Otherism to the extreme by saying "these people" behind the conspiracies are the worst people on earth. Satan worshipers. Sometimes they're suggested to be demons impersonating humans. These conspiracies can be extremely effective in how they manipulate people. Just because you're smart doesn't mean you can't be deceived by a good conspiracy theory. I plan to use this thread to debunk specific theories and cast doubt on the majority of conspiracy theories in general and to do that we need to understand how they operate, why, and what their agenda is.
The basic DNA of a conspiracy theory uses the beliefs of one group of people against another. Religions do this as well so the template is already there. Christians believe things that aren't necessarily true about Muslims and vice versa; kinda like "if you don't call God by the same name I do then you must be talkin' bout the devil!". No... Allah is literally the exact same translation in Arabic which is why Arabic speaking Christians say "Allah". But to an ignorant Christian "this allah fellow" is a whole different person.
The conspiracy theory is also designed (like religious dogma) to reinforce the current position/belief of the conspiracy theorist and their consumers. Usually there is target market but its usually pretty large. 20 years ago we didn't have all these conspiracies about the Left or Right (although I don't know of any right wing conspiracies). It was all about Illuminati, Masons, LDS, Jesuits, mark of the beast, Trilateral Commission, and US government in general. Why did the dollar bill have a pyramid with an all seeing eye? Well if you were a Christian this was simply physical proof that Satan was real and in charge of the government.
In the particular denomination I grew up in one of the most popular conspiracy theories was based on a book called National Sunday Law that said that America was going to adopt a law stating that you had to go to church on Sunday and using that to persecute seventh day adventists and other sabbath keepers because that was what they believed to be the "seal of God". Now for this to happen you'd have to actually eradicate the separation of church and state, change the constitution, and pretty much obliterate Judaism in the US. This conspiracy theory has survived for decades based on the "sunday blue laws". But blue laws DO exist so doesn't that mean this conspiracy theory is right?! NO! The theory takes advantage of the fact that blue laws do exist in order to make false future claims that it cannot validate or verify. It simply wants you to jump to the same conclusion. Blue laws sometimes prohibit certain retail activity (like the sale of alcohol) but are rarely enforced outside of what businesses choose to do internally.
Another part of the DNA of conspiracy theories is that they leverage credibility based on fear and suspicion. Put simply, anyone you don't know COULD be the worst person on Earth, even some kind of Hitler. Feel free to imagine the absolute worst about anyone you don't know, because you don't know them. That's essentially the proposition here. And so it causes people to take "the others" who are not like them or part of their group, and imagine them to be doing something really wrong because INHERENTLY they MUST be wrong because they're not in the same group. Unfortunately, we don't have to go far (or even go) to see this mentality and how it operates. If you're an "other" you MUST BE brainwashed, far-left, pro-abortion, communist, socialist, etc. etc. It is all assumed and even if you have the perfect response or defense to one charge (ex: you didn't even vote for Hillary) they simply hit you with all the other assumptions believing (As their religion dictates) that you are part of the problem because you're not in their group and do not share their group-think.
The slander isn't a bug. It's a feature.
The reason conspiracy theorists have to smear and slander you is the same reason why Christians wont listen to a non-believer which is extremely effective in protecting Christianity. Think about it. If the only people you ever listen to are fellow Christians then you CANNOT be wrong because no one can get in that bubble who isn't reinforcing your belief that you're right. For conspiracy theorists, it is the same. They slander you in order to attack your credibility which enables them to ignore anything you say; thus protecting their religion (which is conspiracy theories).
Distrust.
Distrusting people in power is especially one of the key things that make conspiracy theories work. It's easy to be afraid of how power might be used against you. For a conspiracy theorist, that "might be" turns into "definitely is". And any secretive group has to be conspiring and if they're conspiring then they're up to no good. HOWEVER... these same people, if they think you're on their side, will conspire with you. They will defend their own conspiracies and attack "leakers". Trump is like a conspiracy theory demigod and they don't mind that he doesn't tolerate leakers because they believe he needs to be able to keep secrets. Guess what? All governments need to keep secrets. That doesn't mean that the secrets they're keeping are how they're out to get you. Distrust of the government is the secret sauce that make all conspiracy theories work because that same fear of the government also spreads to other institutions that also have power.
Scandal.
When the idea proposed by the conspiracy theorist is scandalous the mind is entertained by the idea. In a way you kind of want it to be true just because of how interesting it is. I remember when everyone was talking about FEMA camps and now the same knucklehead that conspiracy theorists wanted to send in to destroy the "deep state", has locked up so many kids and their parents that FEMA camps would have been a nice upgrade. Glenn Beck famously advanced a conspiracy about a camp, with pictures, but had no idea that in reality, that satellite map... wasn't even of a place located in the United States.
Shortly thereafter, Glenn Beck was pulled from TV.
Sources.
The #1 problem with conspiracy theories is that people do not pay attention to the source of the material or what motives that source might have. It's all about someone else's conspiracy. Never is any thought given to how there might be a conspiracy to create conspiracy theories. Fortunately, I became more and more resistant to conspiracy theories once I stated to see how they operated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories
From wikipedia:
A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful actors, often political in motivation,[2][3] when other explanations seem more probable.[4] The term has a pejorative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence.[5] Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it, are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth,[5][6] and the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than proof.[7][8]
Research suggests, on a psychological level, conspiracist ideation—belief in conspiracy theories—can be harmful or pathological,[9][10] and is highly correlated with psychological projection, as well as with paranoia, which is predicted by the degree of a person's Machiavellianism.[11] Conspiracy theories once limited to fringe audiences have become commonplace in mass media, emerging as a cultural phenomenon of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
end quote.
Resistant to falsification is what I'm getting at when I talk about sources. In science, we can know things because we TEST everything and test it in a way that, if we are wrong, we can see that we're wrong. If you never entertain the thought that you're wrong then that is very dangerous. People have died because of this.
Jun 22, 2017 - A 29-year-old North Carolina man who fired a military-style assault rifle inside a popular Washington pizzeria in December, wrongly believing he was saving children trapped in a sex-slave ring, was sentenced on Thursday to four years in prison.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sentence.html
Someone might come up with an idea on 4chan and next thing you know conspiracy theorists are taking it as gospel because some anonymous person, claiming to be an insider, has "spilled the beans!" Conspiracy theorists both believe these conspiracies are powerful because apparently everyone at Nasa can keep a huge secret for many years and yet the believe the one guy that claims to be an insider but who only tells their favorite conspiracy theorist because that person wants to tell the secret but only to a non-journalist who isn't going to do anything to verify the story. And it is possible that conspiracy theorists are going to real journalists and those people actually do their jobs and find out the person is lying or believing someone else who's lying. But conspiracy theorists, even though they're paranoid, tend to think that only the "bad guys" are liars and their conspiracy theorist community MUST all be the "good guys" because they're revealing the lies in order to help average people.
In fact, its more like they're lying to people of average intelligence in order to build an audience they can make money on.
Profit.
Conspiracy theories are an INDUSTRY. Just like everything else in America. Conspiracies are controlled by the same market forces. PEOPLE WANT CONSPIRACIES which creates a demand. The demand is seen by opportunists like Alex Jones and he then takes care of the supply. And people who engage in the conspiracy theories never put the same effort into "researching" whether or not their leaders are frauds. Alex Jones now rakes in a whopping $20 MILLION a year! from people like Hemphill who are believers. How does a person who is only in it to expose lies to help people, make that kind of money? And I remember him, because I used to listen to him, back in the day saying that he needed support or else Inforwars was going down and that it was in trouble and he needed people to donate or buy the products he was selling. It was all bullshit (excuse my language). Alex Jones may even be wealthier than Donald Trump if you adjust for Trump's debt to income ratio. That's just my personal speculation. I could be wrong.
It's all about sales...
and actually... "I could be wrong" is a statement you don't often hear from conspiracy theorists. Why? Because they're SELLING these ideas. And you don't sell a product that "might be" the best. It IS the best. You don't sell a product that "may or may not do what it claims" but rather a product that "will do" what it claims and possibly more. Jones is a great salesman. I have to give him that. He's smarter than what he makes himself appear to be in his radio character.
David Icke is another prominent conspiracy theorist. I like his Matrix documentary but did wonder when I saw it, how it was that this man could have such a big audience that people were buying tickets just to hear him talk about conspiracy theories and he ended up talking about lizard people. Totally insane. But again... its that scandal and entertainment value that combine with the paranoia and "I don't know those people" used to get people to believe the worst.
I never bought the lizard people craze, because I was a computer guy in the late 90s when people were talking about it. They said online videos proved that some people weren't who they appeared to be. It was entertaining but I knew the reason why the videos looked like that. And it was simply due to issues in early video compression. Take the same video, uncompressed, and its fine. But compress it for the internet, back in the days of slow dialup and 56K modems... yeah... those codecs would smear the images in a very unflattering way that had nothing to do with WHO is in the video but rather the pixels it didn't know what to do with. But because people on the internet didn't know the people in the videos they were free to believe whatever they wanted no matter how ridiculous.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/David_Icke
David Icke is sitting on around $10 MILLION. Didn't I say this was an industry? People are getting rich off this stuff and they have to keep supplying the demand. Repeating the same old theories isn't going to keep an audience engaged. They understand how much entertainment and showmanship is involved. That's why Alex Jones yells so much. He told a court in his divorce case that it was just an act.
Alex Jones either lies in his allegations or in court in his retractions.
From wikipedia:
Litigation
In February 2017, the lawyers of James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, sent Jones a letter demanding an apology and retraction for his role in pushing the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Under Texas law, Jones was given a month to comply or be subject to a libel suit.[140] In March 2017, Jones apologized to Alefantis for promulgating the conspiracy theory and retracted his allegations.[141]
In April 2017, the Chobani yogurt company filed a lawsuit against Jones for his article that claims that the company's factory in Idaho, which employs refugees, was connected to a 2016 child sexual assault and a rise in tuberculosis cases.[142] As a result of the lawsuit, Jones issued an apology and retraction of his allegations in May 2017.[143]
In March 2018, Brennan Gilmore, who shared a video he captured of a car hitting anti-racism protesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, filed a lawsuit[144] against Jones and six others. According to the lawsuit, Jones said that Gilmore was acting as part of a false flag operation conducted by disgruntled government "deep state" employees in promotion of a coup against President Trump.[145] Gilmore alleges he has been receiving death threats from Jones' audience.[145]
Leonard Pozner, father of a Sandy Hook shooting victim who has been forced to move several times to avoid harassment and death threats accusing him of being a crisis actor, has filed a defamation suit against Jones in Texas.[146]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones
These court cases are part of the reason society has to respond by setting rules and boundaries on what you can say because it can get people killed or harassed; and both are crimes. But people like Alex Jones will always cry foul and say their free speech is being limited because in their minds they are prevented from MARKETING and SELLING their product. A lot of people aren't even vaccinating their children because of Alex Jones.
https://www.statnews.com/2019/03/07/nightmarish-tale-tetanus-unvaccinated-child/
The fear and paranoia people have is often worse than whatever they're afraid of and results can be shocking; which is why people like Alex Jones can be very dangerous when what they say is taken as gospel. If you're not going to trust people you don't know then why trust Alex Jones or David Icke who are rich from people trusting them? Why? Because as long as there is a greater threat... a greater evil as it were... the mind of the conspiracy theorist is so poisoned against outsiders that it doesn't have time to think critically about the insiders. It doesn't have time to weigh the value of the information its being given. All it cares about is whether or not the information CONFIRMS their beliefs (confirmation bias). And so the genius of Alex Jones and David Icke is that they have the ability to teach their followers about thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, without their followers noticing that they're using this very same formula to reap massive profits.
Thesis=Be afraid of powers and people you don't know
antithesis=You consume their information as a result
synthesis=They get rich at your expense.
Therefore, if there isn't enough "deep state", Illuminati, etc. news they can share they will simply MAKE IT UP! This is why Alex Jones said Sandy Hook survivors were "crisis actors"; that they could actually hire kids to make all this stuff up without any leaks when they are being threatened as a result. The lunacy of this idea is that actors do not accept pay to commit real life fraud. They WANT people to know they're actors so they can get other gigs. But a so-called "crisis actor" would never be able to work in the industry again. But no one thinks about this logical problem because the focus of the conspiracy theory is a single minded dogmatic quest to reinforce the very worst beliefs about other people and why people shouldn't trust anyone; even if they were the victims of a mass shooting.
This is not only truly detestable but to partake in this makes them worse than the people they're so afraid of.
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to the general public. An alternate version of history combining to create a sub culture of people that see reality vastly different. And in this same light, the bible would be the biggest conspiracy theory manifesto ever written. Claiming history is different than what we are taught and claiming to know what will happen in the future. I.e. discribing perfectly the times we are in now... I digress. The point here is that this weaponized term conspiracy theory is extremely subjective as anything that challenges or questions the status quo can be written off and largely burried with this label. For example: It was considered a 'conspiracy theory' that world leaders dressed up in robes and attended strange rituals at Bohemian Grove; until it was recorded and exposed. It was considered 'conspiracy theory' that the Gulf of Tonkin incident didnt happen until a freedom of information act declassied the report proving that it didnt happen. It was considered a 'conspiracy theory' that the google home and amazon echo devices could listen to and record conversations and be used to gather information on unsuspecting customers until it has proven in multiple cases that it was in fact listening and recording -- 