VIEWPOINT

From page A4

life. Whether it’s the Deep State, the Illuminati, the Lizard People running the world from their lair in the center of the Earth (unless the Earth is flat), these folks will tell you nothing is what it seems and we’ve got to start paying attention to the “real” truth.

I used to get a kick out of these kinds of weird takes on reality — whether it was about 9/11 being an inside job or GEICO using caveman spokesmen to trick us into believing in evolution, the Democrats running a child trafficking and exploitation ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizza place or whatever your drunk uncle or crazy cousin or hairdresser’s sister’s boyfriend’s roommate who used to work at NASA has come up with from their “research” down the online rabbit hole — but it has become clear that real people have really bought into serious things like the 2020 election being rigged and school shootings being staged to spark gun control reform. And they are perfectly OK with spreading misinformation that has already been debunked all over their social media because it’s what they want to be true.

What is my obligation here? On the one hand, people have the right to believe whatever they

See JUMP, page A9 VIEWPOINT

From page A5

I mean, if you can have a crazy “religion” like Scientology out there that millions of people take seriously, why not crazy “political ideologies” or “different truths” too?

But on the other hand, there are people who are going to read these posts and not only believe them, but also spread them, like some kind of misindformed virus, which is exactly how you end up with otherwise sensible people who 100 percent believe that Obama is a Muslim terrorist who was born in Kenya, or that the JFK Jr. faked his death and is coming back to not only save us from (something?), his arrival will put Trump back in the White House… that’s a real thing that was in the real news last year. Not even Qanon could make that up.

Obviousy, the coronavirus was just an excuse to inject us all with microchips so that the shadow government can… well, I honestly don’t know how to finish that sentence.

But I’ll bet there are people out there who do. There’s a lot of talk these days about free speech and Twitter and whatnot. I’m definitely all about free speech, but just like it doesn’t mean you can run into a crowded movie theater and yell “Fire!” you shouldn’t be able to just go online and yell blatant hate- or liefilled junk and just move on with your life.

I liked my conspiracy theories better when they were about Elvis and Bigfoot.