This is a follow up story from the other day on how misinformation is proliferating via social media and the internet and finding a home in public discourse.
There is a corner of the gym where some guys who are retired or not working congregate and openly their latest discuss conspiracy theories or rehash old ones. Today it was about chem-trails and how they are releasing chemicals to make men more effeminate and this is why there’s so many gay and trans people now. The reason the public doesn’t know about this story one said is because they have secret concentration camps for putting away people who try to speak up.
Now I know all about the chem-trail conspiracy theories, that one goes back to at least the 1990’s. Alex Jones and others made a living on that one. The other pieces of that about camps and chemicals to make men effeminate was a new one. I guess no one bothered to consider the transition of women to male and lesbians generally. They seem to like RFK Jr. so it gives me some hope that they will vote for him instead of Trump. Based on interviews I’ve heard RFK Jr. give he seems like a good fit for these folks.
I became very interested in how people can be seduced by conspiracy theories back when QAnon and Covid hit and I noticed people who I considered rational were buying into them. Bottom line is that it’s a natural human response to seek out answers to major events or conditions that unfold. It makes us feel safer to find closure. We can be prone to latch on to explanations that give us the impression that these events have a discernible cause and effect associated with something that can be controlled. If a pandemic can be explained by a government plot this means it’s less likely to be a randomly occurring set of circumstances. People who don’t like the idea of trans and gay people probably feel more comfortable with the notion that there is an outside cause for it versus thinking it’s a variation found in nature.
If our world view is reinforced by our selective information sources and our tribal associations, we can conclude that most people would, or should, see things the way we do . This can leave us open to assumptions that that ours is the accurate one.
Today at least 62% of Republican voters still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election. They have constructed an alternative reality where this is true for them. Some conspiracies are innocuous, others have consequences.