It’s a conspiracy!

VIEWPOINT

I love a good conspiracy theory.

I can read about the Flat Earth Society or listen to a podcast about how 9/11 was an inside job for hours.

Aliens built the pyramids? You’ve got my attention.

The Clintons have had dozens of people killed (Vince Foster, Jeffrey Epstein, etc.)? How do I subscribe to your newsletter? I heard once a legit claim about how George W. Bush somehow used a super microwave ray emitter to heat the Gulf of Mexico and send Hurricane Katrina to destroy New Orleans. Did you know the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged? Yep. They used actors and everything. I have to admit, it looked real to me. Maybe… too real.

There’s a conspiracy out there for everything from Tupac and Elvis are still alive to all of our world leaders are really just puppets of the Dark Order of the Whatever. If you dig deep enough… if you go far enough down the rabbit hole, you can get the truth.

But here’s the thing… I can read about mole men secretly controlling the government from their underground lair, about how Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced with a body double in the Beatles, or how Apple is using the iPhone’s radiation to control the population by rendering people sterile because they carry their phones in the their pockets… or something.

I can read all that and then get on with my life because I take these things for what they are… outlandish ideas that popped into someone’s head and they vomited them out onto the internet for everyone to enjoy.

Unfortunately, some people, clinging to the idea that there must be some secret organization keeping the “real truth” from us all, will believe anything that supports their feelings, especially in this world we live in where we have to deal with “fake news” and “alternate facts” and social media has given everyone a platform for their own personal agendas. You all have seen this, right? You know it’s all just right-wing, left-nut, fringe-society baloney, right?

Right?

It turns out that, no, we don’t all seem to understand that. I have seen real, actual people… people I know from school or church or work… with actual educations, degrees and common sense, on social media and in the real world, who actually believe that the government is trying to control us with the coronavirus, with 5G cell towers, with vaccines, microchips, etc.

I’m not making any of that up. Look, I know there are bad people and bad things in this world, but that’s just life. There are people who believe Michael Jackson was legitimately killed by some Illuminati secret society. There are people who legitimately believe that the Democratic leadership is heavily involved in child sex trafficking. There are people who believe that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin collaborated on tampering with the 2016 election.

OK, that last one might be true.

Vaccines cause autism? No, they don’t. And no amount of essential oils is going to prevent an unvaccinated child from getting measles. The CIA isn’t staging mass shootings to force the seizure of citizens’ firearms or stricter gun control. And just so I can say I said it, I’m like 99.9 percent sure we really went to the Moon in 1969.

Although there are some pretty compelling arguments out there…