Days of Darkness: How one woman escaped the conspiracy theory trap that has ensnared millions
Days of Darkness: How one woman escaped the conspiracy theory trap that has ensnared millions
Fueled by the internet, conspiracy theories are having a big moment in America. They're driving online chat room conversations, influencing our politics and adding to the polarization threatening to undermine our democracy.
But habits are hard to break. After weeks of ignoring her feed, Ramona logged back on to Facebook. She missed the sense of community she had found in QAnon forums — the people, not the beliefs — and wanted to reconnect.... But the Facebook group was gone, purged by Facebook
Deplatforming works. It's true they'll go somewhere else, but they'll lose lots of people every time.
63Conspiracy theories are older than the republic. But experts say it would be wrong to dismiss believers as simply stupid or deranged.
That's right. You have to dismiss them as stupid and deranged. For real though, the article makes the point that it's more than stupidity, it's a fear of what people can't control that turns them to conspiracies.
But why do they feel so out of control? Why do they not understand how anything works?
24Is it possible that millions of people who lack the critical evaluation skills to determine when they're being scammed are victims of malicious grifters instead of just being people who are to be dismissed? And is it possible that lacking intellectual and cognitive skills is a disability and we should approach disability with empathy?
When you relegate people to the "stupid" and "deranged" categories, you dismiss them as people capable of learning skills (even if they haven't already for skills that are considered "basic") or possessing any other valuable skill that contributes. Dismissing them also shifts the responsibility from the people who are trying to take their money and radicalize them for their own ideological purposes.
The people trying to exploit others are the ones we should be condemning.
19They feel out of control because they ARE being exploited by systems that are designed to obscure the fact. They don't understand how anything works, because those systems have replaced their education with propaganda.
13"why do so many people believe in conspiracies"
"Well, to understand that, you have let me tell you about how The System is designed to replace education with propaganda."
2Big time. Try opening a publicly funded law school, teaching the rulebook to the plebs, see the power structures try to jam it up, see if local corporate media doesn't publish constant articles about how much money it will cost and constant op-eds like "does [name of local area] really need more lawyers?," while their parent corporations and advertisers are represented in all things by lawyers at firms with 1,000 attorneys that each make in an hour what most working people make in a week. I'm telling y'all, it's sabotage.
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Problem is that lots of seemingly regular Americans believe in some conspiracy theories to a greater or lesser extent. Having spent significant time living on both the US and Europe, I'm pretty shocked how many Americans always seem to think that someone is "out to get them." If it's not some random person, it's a criminal, it's the government, it's the school board, it's the gays. Anyone, really. It's tiresome.
Edit (case in point): https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/suspect-fathers-decapitation-went-rails-college-knew-say-rcna136647
10well, the vietnam war was started from a conspiracy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
and the iraq war:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
there was a plan to stage a false flag attack by cuba, and start a war: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
(JFK said no... but his assassin was a lone wolf)
the Tuskegee experiment killed about 100 people, denying them access to syphilis treatment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
see also unethical human experimentation
the NSA was illegally spying on all Americans and the entire world illegally... probably still are...
the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006, made it legally "terrorism" to basically do any kind of animal rights activism...
....
ill give you that "a secret cabal of satanic pedophile cannibal ultra-wealthy people" is a pretty sill idea...
but yeah, im sure there's never been any other conspiracies.
....
here's a programmer, who worked for a voting machine company, testifying about when he was asked to write a program to rig elections: https://youtu.be/5y48iHK3RP4?si=tGIVNV4WXgmaaFgh
(i know trump lost fair and square... but there's a lot of other elections)when covid first started spreading, there was a conspiracy in China to cover it up... i first learned about it from a conspiracy forum because a doctor leaked that info (he later died from covid)
there are a shit load of conspiracies all the time... it's basic human nature, really...
but you can't figure it out from clues in taylor swift's dance routine or whatever the fuck the q-tips are going in about...if anything, Qanon was a real conspiracy, but just to control conspiracy theorists while making them look dumb.
also, the term "conspiracy theorist" was invented by the CIA to, once again, make them look dumb... but it doesn't even make sense, (almost) nobody has a job making up conspiracies... and it's not a theory without evidence, it's a hypothesis at best (and even then it's probably a very very uneducated guess)
🇺🇸🏈💸☕️
tl;dr there's a lot of real conspiracies...
p.s. the ultra-rich conspiracies are actually just about stealing and hiding more money: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers
oh, groups like Scientology actually do gang stalking... although it's usually just schizophrenic people thinking it's happening, sometimes people are out to get you...relevant Dead Kennedy's song: https://youtu.be/kpoRMKXVkmE?si=vsUGbi9VkfghZd6U
8
i'd say it's more about the want of feeling special and/or in control, not exactly about fear
there's an excellent Dan Olson video on this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
6Got a nice long ride tomorrow for the rest of this video. Very enjoyable listening.
2
In my experience it seems more effective to counter conspiracies with laughter and mockery than dismantle it. Which may sound strange since it sounds intuitive to counter a falsehood with truth or reason.... But disproving takes far more effort than the original conspiracy theory, and that's how these things get out of control. But laughing it off, mockery, and general comedy takes less time and still gets the message across to bystanders.
On the flip-side I do agree doing it wrong can send them deeper into the hole because at its core it's about a sense of community, and everyone has issues with ego and self-esteem clouding better judgment. It's just the circumstances these people are in, well, it makes them far more vulnerable to grifters preying on their ignorance, lack of time, lack of education, etc.
4Definitely! There are some things in society that are harmful to the public, antisocial, breaches of the social contract--such as being unvaccinated, not washing your hands after taking a huge dump, or spreading conspiracies--but which are not illegal or redeemable in tort, things for which public shaming is a just and maybe only remedy.
3
The QAnon Anonymous podcast studies conspiratorial thinking. Very solid reporting, very entertaining if you have a sense to rubberneck the disaster of conspiracy theories.
I’m glad she got out. Hope more people can and do.
9I recommend this podcast to a lot of people and always have to say "it's NOT a pro-QAnon podcast" every time.
6Qdropped podcast is *chefs kiss
2
Isolated from friends and family, distrustful of the explanations offered by officials and the media, Ramona and Don began to prepare. The military might try to put Americans like them in concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. They had to be ready to flee.
I understand we're getting specific examples to flesh out the story, but this is a failure of critical thinking skills.
They are former fast food workers in western Tennessee that one now works at an auto assembly plant and the other is in a local college to become a school teacher.
- Why would the government want to put them in a concentration camp?
Lets assume for a moment there is a plausible "why" to continue the thought experiment. It doesn't even pass back-of-the-napkin math.
How could the government go about do this?
If the bar for being rounded was up all college students and all automobile assembly workers, it would likely include hundreds of other jobs of the same level. There are just too many people to put in a camp! Who would build the camp? Wouldn't we see the camps all over the country under construction? No? Would Western Tennessee be the FIRST camp to be built? Who are they going to get to run the camp? The entirety of people employed at FEMA is only 20,000 people That's not even enough people to run camps in just Western Tennessee. Memphis alone has population of 655,569. Where are you gonna put all those folks? Who are their jailers?
This claim of camps should have fallen apart with the smallest of scrutiny.
I give credit to the woman who was deep into this that figured this out for herself eventually. She was also pretty young and just entering the adult world which itself is pretty scary irrespective of a never before seen global pandemic.
8conspiracy theories are perfect for certain types of people to latch on to because the narrative presented is malleable. If the theory is wrong it can be re-shaped into something new to explain the new unknown.
if you scrutinised a conspiracy then yes they would generally fall flat, but if someone were the dispenser of that knowledge who imbued themselves with the self-importance of knowing secret details, they could always shift the goalposts and weave a new version of the story to maintain the reality they want to revel in.
3
Tldr - the answer was domestic violence.
4Literally slapped back to reality.
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