I, too, am very annoyed by the Russia conspiracy theory. I see it as another Red Scare, albeit a much milder one than the ones we saw in the 1950s and 1919-1920.
That said, I don't fault Freddie for not writing about it in this post. People can't put everything in.
So because a given phenomenon is socially constructed, there's no point in trying to delineate the rules that govern its functioning? I don't see how that follows.
This is a more specific objection, which is fine as far as it goes. But I must take umbrage at your negative characterization of people in the 40s, which wounds me for reasons that are squarely the fault of my parents. Also, my sense is that those of us who dislike current humor do so not because we find it impenetrable, but because we are jaded from overexposure to past humor.
I do think that after Umberto Eco's novel, Foucault's Pendulum, it is no longer possible to satirize conspiracy theories. Instead, conspiracy theories are satires on contemporary culture.
Happy birthday, and remember: you were always going to eventually die, and you always will be, until you finally do.
For me, the remixed and absurdist memes are the only ones I find amusing. Political memes try too hard and are usually unbearable, although I have a small collection of MAGA memes that managed to be genuinely albeit unintentionally hilarious.
I really enjoyed the variations on "are ya winning, son?" There was some real creativity in those, for example: https://i.imgur.com/crH482e.jpg
I'm fairly confident in saying that it doesn't really exist *, despite knowing little about it, because I know many conservatives irl, and have never met an actual human that believes it.
I know there *are* humans that subscribe to QAnon, having heard about them first-hand, but the percentage of actual adherents is very small. I'd be willing to bet real money that we could fit all of its true-believers into a large nightclub.
* "doesn't really exist" is a bit of sleight-of-hand, for which I apologize. It obviously exists in some sense, but I don't think it exists in the way it's usually portrayed in the media
I think at this point in time, spring 2020, the number of actual humans that believe in QAnon is almost non existent. But 1.5 years ago it was absolutely a real phenomenon. I would say most of the believers now are just as deep into weird shit but would now pretend they always though QAnon was dumb. The people I know who believed it before are now into different new world order theories.
This seems like it's part of the genuine issue that people can't mentally process scale in the internet age. Absurdly fringe things seem much bigger because there's literally hundreds of millions of people so there's some non zero number of people who believe any dumb shit, but that means nothing.
A year ago I saw some poll asking people what animals they could beat in a fight and everyone should have to memorize that chart. Because it's helpful to understand that about a tenth of all people are either deranged, stupid, or shit posting.
I think part of this is the idea that QAnon is something that normal conservatives or only conservatives believe. QAnon type conspiracies aren’t really about conservatism, and the group of people that buy into them have almost nothing to do with people who are hard core into Mitch McConnell’s political ideology. The three people I know of who legitimately believe in this stuff aren’t that kind of conservative at all, although they are at Trump voters (if they vote at all). They are a hippie-crunchy yoga instructor (mom in her late 30s), a musician (man I. His late 40s) who is really into weed culture and used to be a progressive crank type, and another hippyish type woman in her 20s who isn’t really political at all but left a drug/party lifestyle and got really into being Mormon and probably has some mental illness issues. It’s not about the conservative professionals most of us know. But it is real. Like I had a direct message conversation with one of them (I know this person in real life but I mostly keep up with them through social media and she GENUINELY BELIEVED Trump was going to come back and be president after Biden was sworn in.(Although now those people seem to have moved on from Q and more into the new world order controlling us through vaccines and covid lockdowns).
I didn't say it doesn't exist, only that I know nothing about it. It's obvious there are people who are obsessed over it, but I don't know why they care tho.
I would not say I know people on both sides, but I know one person who made a stunningly rapid and sincere (and lasting) transition between spring 2020 and fall 2020 from liberal BLM posting yoga teacher to deep QAnon believing, anti vax, rabidly anti-CRT, and now suddenly religious Christian. It was weird to watch in real time. It was definitely the wellness culture pipeline for her which during the pandemic flipped from left coded to right coded quickly enough to give you whiplash.
I'd never heard any other conservatives I know mention any of the Qanon or Pizzagate shit, but you can be damn sure that all my liberal friends came running to me (as their token conservative friend) asking me to spill the beans about this "Qanon" they'd heard so much about on NPR.
Maybe not at the Republican Club in Manhattan but there are plenty of normal looking people out there that’ll gladly start going on about this shit once you give them the opportunity. Jesus I remember an Uber driver in Miami that wouldn’t STFU about it.
There are ways to augment one's store of personal experience in order to compensate for its natural limits. For example, one can read about things like Qanon or Pizzagate, and many other subjects as well.
Conservative conspiracy theories definitely exist, though the media definitely over-reports them and steps *very* gingerly around the bigger left/liberal conspiracy theories (the CDC invented AIDS, the FBI assassinated MLK & Malcolm X, various types of anti-semitism) because they're more widespread in African American communities.
Your friendly neighborhood health food store that doesn’t believe in vaccines or covid but is obsessed with GMOS, factory farming, refugees rights, sisterhood is global, etc. This is my neighborhood health food store, fwiw.
If all conspiracy theories are false, then how do you explain its presence in the law books as a criminal offense, and the fact that people get convicted of the offense and go to prison for it?
“ shitposters who have marinated in internet irony so long they have no sense of what true belief would feel like.”
I’ve noticed in the depositions of Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Green that there have been instances where they seem to acknowledge (or do they come to realize) that it’s all just shitposting that they don’t actually believe. As if in some sense they think it’s real at the same time acknowledging it’s a performance.
Another criticism of the parody might be that it doesn't rise above typical reddit in-joke weirdness (I also didn't spot that this was supposed to be an intentional parody).
I chuckled at a bumper sticker, looked at the tshirts for sale online, and it never even crossed my mind it was anything other than normal internet “lol so random” humor. The type of online-ness is so mismatched from the style of QAnon online-ness, the joke totally whiffs.
Same here. This has often happened to me — here I am enjoying something as pure absurdism, and then someone is like, “No, see, it’s about X.” Which almost always sucks the fun out of it. As absurdism it’s open and destabilizing; as parody it’s closed and just intended to confirm the things you think you already know.
I think conspiracy theory culture, including of the right wing variety, can be parodied quite successfully. Good examples would be Dale Gribble on King of the Hill (particularly earlier years) and even in a way the X-Files. Of course these examples make fun of the phenomenon in a gentler, more loving way towards its subjects, as opposed to in a manner clearly designed to flatter the creators. Mike Judge does and seemingly always has known us better than we know ourselves yet never hates us for it.
The real question is can progressive leaning internet snark culture do this effectively. My response to that would be 'not of it involves being funny' since those people don't even know how to be funny to begin with.
I love seasons 2 to 6ish of 'King of the Hill' so much. It has, at its best, a generosity of spirit than a lot of more recent sneering comedy lacks [not always, of course, some writers punish Peggy too readily imho]. I really do hope the revival is actually happening.
Oh god, I don’t. I hadn’t heard of a revival and I don’t want it. I can’t see how it would be possible without losing that very generosity of spirit you praise.
Mike Judge has a real affection for the Dales Gribble of the world, an affection which in contemporary discourse would be considered a deeply suspect sign of latent white supremacy.
Is ideocracy the exception that proves the rule that Mike Judge mostly has affection for the rubes, or is it actually another example of his affection for the rubes? I genuinely don’t know...
I believe it is affection even in Idiocracy. They end up doing the right thing in the end and the evil in the film is generally portrayed as a result of ignorance rather than malice.
This reminds me how the Church of the Subgenius thing became a parody of conspiracy theories (Scientology! The Bavarian Illuminati!) and took sort of the opposite tack, where they sprinkled in just enough self-awareness of real things with the obvious over-the-top pre-internet shitposting.
Subgenius was a bit different in that it was sort of a coded form of solidarity and a defense against the pervasive normie religious culture of the time. That belief system was far more similar to the way woke culture is pushed on people today. “Pull the wool over your own eyes” was a way to take control of your belief system before it was done for you.
This seems like yet another example of rapidly diminishing returns when one burrows too deeply into an Internet phenomenon. If, like me, all you know about "birds aren't real" is the slogan, and maybe you've seen a few diagrams of gears inside a pigeon, it comes across as a funny and breezy way to gently poke fun at irrational thinking. When the media picks up on it and puts the guy on 60 Minutes to, apparently, pontificate insufferably about conspiracy theories (I couldn't bring myself to watch it), it becomes gross and counterproductive in all the ways you spell out here. Too bad supposedly serious media outlets feel the need, for whatever reason (limited resources? low ratings?), to spend time on something like this instead of a deeper dive into something actually relevant to people's lives. (Yes, I know, they do that too--but it's a wonder they find any time at all for something like BAR.) And, at the end of the day, it sounds like they didn't do the BAR guy himself any favors by asking him to explain the joke instead of letting it speak for itself.
Is it a fact that there are no "bird" drones? I've seen video's of "insect" drones. The technology is amazing, and that summation was the purpose of said videos.
Reminds me of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster back in the old days of Internet Atheism: funny as a t-shirt, deeply stupid as a political movement, embarrassing to everybody ten years later.
I think this was the mistaken reading of Chris Morris's 'The Day Shall Come', a film I will go to bat for as far superior in insight and wisdom than the far more beloved 'Four Lions'. Because ultimately the conspiracy theorist and theories in that film aren't the point of the satire, but that the true operations of the American political establishment are far more grotesque than the conspiracy theories. Audiences found it much easier to laugh at the terrorists in 'Four Lions' than at the FBI.
I still liked Four Lions more, but one thing both movies get right is that extremist movements feel like fun, interesting clubs for their members. The Four Lions guys are a lot of fun to hang out with when they aren't stuffing nails and fertilizer into PVC.
Good points all around in this post. Makes me wonder about past political parodies that were successful. Can't think of any except for some SNL skits that relied more on exaggerated physicality. I remember the Gore debate "sigh" and the Ross Perot rants as making me laugh a lot twenty plus operas ago.
The biggest problem with Q-Anon in my opinion is there are enough kernels of truth in it to get people hooked. There really was a cabal of elites (the Jeff Epstein crew) engaged in a pedophilia/underage sex ring that the media more or less has swept under the rug. Mix that with the whole toxicity of online and political discourse and you end up with crowds of people on the grassy knoll waiting for JFK Jr to come back from the dead with Donald Trump at his side to usher in a cleansing of the US Government.
Is there a conspiracy theory that QAnon is actually a false flag operation to discredit those who are against the Epstein underage sex ring? If not, my follow up question is does anyone know if there's money in hatching a conspiracy theory?
Then there's the infrequent headlines—which I've never followed—that the "live forever crowd are—taking blood transfusions from children to gain some youth-restoring hormones or some such. Then there's the "muscle-builder athletes" who buy and consume human milk (a.k.a breast milk) to gain some growth hormone.
So now we have Epstein & Weinstein, who are all about abusing minors, with the bonus that they have contact with just about all of our elites. Tie in the "want to live forever" crowd who do absurd and immoral shit. It doesn't take much to weave these together with the usual leftist crowd who have taken sex education—which is a good thing for 13 YO children. but over the line when taking it to pre-K children. We're not just your plain vanilla this is the anatomy & physiology, but here's how to get yourself off ... BTW do you like choking and bondage too ... which of course leads to "let me be your guide" ... and we have plenty of "youth attracted" teacher videos and plenty of arrests to seal the deal.
Tell me how I can convince my neighbor that our elites aren't drinking children's blood?
Well that’s why it’s literally a conspiracy theory and a pretty effective one. It’s gives a nice, tidy, sinister, central motive to some disparate, weird and occasionally outright evil/criminal behavior that is happening in the world at large.
This is also why anti-vaccine conspiracies are so effective. Because a not insignificant portion of what anti vaxers claim is true (and a lot of it is also complete bullshit). IMO it still tips in favor of vaccines, including the COVID vaccines, but the vaccines are not the no-downsides miracle that was the official narrative.
The covid vaccines (which I have received and endorse!) were the cause of me deciding that the best way to combat misinformation is to rebuild trust in our institutions.
Weirdly, the people who talk most about misinformation don't seem to like my solution.
Right, it's never the elite's fault, it always has to be the rubes who are to blame. To suggest that institutions, media or social movements engage in self-critical reflection is to invite charges of the dreaded both-siderism.
No, it's a great term for a really evil construct ... especially evil in that these days misinformation is used by the billionaire owned media conglomerates against the people.
Fortunately monopolies have a short life-span, as they always over-use and squander their resources ... which in this case happen to be trust.
''conspiracy theories'' partly express a feeling of powerlessnes in the face of a wider and subtle social conspiracy which is perceived as dis-empowering. And truely the powerful do conspire to gain and keep power. I guess i am a "conspiracy theorist".
Yeah that kind of thing is ridiculous. Every society going back to when we were apes has had a ruling class.
I'm sure Tucker Carlson believes tons of things I also believe. I bet even Stalin thought the first pee in the morning just hits different, and he was right!
I hate that conspiracy theories are all lumped together because there's some that are obviously true, some that are plausible, some that are implausible, and some that are insane. People who smugly dismiss every conspiracy theory seem as foolish as those who believe every one.
I'm torn on this. I largely agree with you but for one thing I'm trying to reconcile: that there are conspiracy theories which are obviously true. Which conspiracy theories are "obviously true"? It seems to me that being "obviously true" would disqualify it from being a conspiracy theory at all, and would simply be a conspiracy.
Part of the poisoning of the phrase "conspiracy theory" was adding an element of "but it's not true" or at least "it's quite unlikely that it's true." Is it your objection that obviously true things are being called conspiracy theories, or is your criticism more that the "there are other much more likely explanations" element should not have been added to the definition?
I guess I view this as two distinct things. On the one hand are former conspiracy theories that are now known to be true. MK-ULTRA, COINTELPRO, and the crack cocaine epidemic were all things that actually happened but started as conspiracy theories.
The other is stuff that is obviously true but is connected to the batshit insane stuff so it's treated as a conspiracy theory. The archetypal example is the JFK assassination involving a cover up. That's just public record. But because it's connected to "the Mafia working with Jackie and LBJ murdered Kennedy as revenge for Marilyn" type kookiness it's a conspiracy theory.
The modern version is the Deep State. This is a completely uncontroversial concept. Sure, there's versions of it (like with anything) that are crazy. But based on the history of every large country that's ever existed it would be more shocking if we didn't have one. Yet things like the Washington Post decry this as an insane conspiracy theory.
I'd agree that the idea of the deep state is not controversial and not a conspiracy theory; but as you say, that doesn't mean the conspiracies that invoke it are particularly persuasive to anyone who doesn't already believe whatever is being sold.
Saying that Covid started in the lab in Wuhan was considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream media for quite a while. Now it is widely accepted. Covid has been a bit of a field day for conspiracy theorists because health authorities and media worked so hard to dismiss/downplay anything that would discourage people from taking the vaccines.
Well, libs were against lableak when it was Their Stuff. But now it’s Our Stuff. Similarly Bezos owning the Washington Post – Bezos is Our Stuff, Elon Musk is Their Stuff.
conspiracy theory in history. fact today. the gulf of tonkin never happened: conspiracy theory in its day. israel attacked the u.s. liberty, ditto. iraq never had weapons of mass destruction. for that matter, the video of the new zealand mosque shooter is a hoax. that one is obvious to the casual observer but that it has never been investigated by the msm is proof of their complicity in this enormous and ongoing series of lies (russiagate, crossfire hurricane, hunter's laptop, ivermectin doesn't help with covid, the russian invasion of ukraine was unprovoked, etc., etc., etc.).
There was a great article by someone who discussed - in a refreshingly sympathetic way - how his mother in laws belief in more outlandish claims of election fraud in 2020 comes from this general feeling that the election was somehow bent.
I'm not a Trump voter and I don't think the 2020 election was "stolen" but I'm broadly sympathetic to people who believe that because:
A) When your team loses a close one it's a natural instinct. I do it in every sporting event I've ever watched and, I know there was no politics pre-2016, but people can Google the terms Kerry, Ohio, and Diebold. I was pretty involved in 2004, this was not some fringe, lunatic position.
B) I imagine the entire thing felt rather unfair if you were a Trump supporter. From about a week before the SC Primary about every powerful institution in America united to make Joe Biden President. The media coverage (outside avowedly conservative media) was like watching those NBA TV games where they just show one team's broadcast and the color guy is saying "we" about one of the teams. I can imagine that's very disconcerting if you're not used to it.
So, your guy loses a close one (that, btw, people pretended like it wouldn't be close) and you're pissed off and you have this sense that things were fundamentally unfair but are told there's nothing wrong with any of that. Am I surprised people would look for some answer, even if it's wrong? Not at all.
best thing that ever happened to trump and his supporters is losing 2020. biden is doing far, far more to destroy the democratic party and discredit its beliefs than trump could ever do had he been reelected. that's just objectively true. and biden's not been in office even two years. and his backup is kamala harris.
I was going to take issue with complaint number 1. I laughed at "I'm not going to go on news shows, but shows about clocks and time…" Unfortunately, so did he. Ali G may not have been overburdened with talent, but at least he could keep a straight face.
If Birds Aren't Real Guy did literally any research on the matter, he'd know that expert consensus is clear: you can't reason people out of an unreasonable position, and any extreme belief community worth its salt already has built-in defense mechanisms against outside disapproval. "Outsiders will shun and mock you because they fear your new power!" is, like, Cults/Conspiracies/MLMs/Crypto 101.
If you want to get people out, you have to solve the root causes: economic distress, fragmented communities, and institutional collapse. Flat earthers don't give a shit about Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but when you give them meaningful jobs that pay well, communities they can love and be loved by, and institutions that are effective at the local level, folks suddenly have a lot less interest in owning the spherehead libs. If Birds Aren't Real Guy wants to really make a difference, he should join a union or become a youth pastor.
You're stating this as a fact ("when you give them meaningful jobs that pay well, communities they can love and be loved by, and institutions that are effective at the local level, folks suddenly have a lot less interest in owning the spherehead libs"), but I think it is just your assumption. I'm skeptical of this assumption, but it's the right thing to do in any case, of course.
Did any research? He's a kid who made a joke that took off online.
This is by far the most "get off my lawn" post I've read from Freddie. Why is this much energy being devoted to picking apart the kid's satirical chops? There's a target here, yes, which is a media sphere fawning over this fairly tepid but amusing joke, but that's barely noted
The Birds Aren’t Real movements strikes me as a completely typical parody movement. It seems exactly along the lines of the popular Flying Spaghetti Monster parody from the height of the new atheist era. I guess the main difference is that serious news programs (I think they devoted a whole NYT Daily episode to it) feel the need to cover it like it’s an Important Thing. That tells me the difference is the news media, not the parody movement.
1. Donald Trump tried to steal USPS mailboxes before the election.
2. Cops are performing genocide on black men.
3. Murder of black trans women is frequent and pervasive.
4. Virtually every zoomer and millennial online believe qanon levels of pedophilia exist among Hollywood and east coast elites.
5. Most “Bernie-types” ( for lack of a better term) believe ( unknowingly) everything conspiracy theory about the Clinton’s that Richard Mellon Scaife funded.
6. Gender and biological origins of sex are dreamed up by the patriarchy to suppress people.
I could go on, but I have my day to begin. Birds aren’t real as a parody is just dumb vs a one line stale Reddit joke that outlasted it’s time.
I think that's an overestimate, and also a vague one.
Child sex abuse is a worse problem that I had ever imagined. But the psychological scars of systematic sexual abuse are difficult to conceal, and most young people appear to me to be reasonably well-adjusted, compared to someone who is a victim of child sexual abuse (particularly ritual abuse and group abuse.) "Most families" and "most churches"are not sexually abusing the young children they raise or supervise.
Right. Given the breathtaking list of absurdity coming from the woke left and being adopted as reality within our major institutions, this "Birds Aren't Real" meme might as well join the party.
Crucially missing the news cycles during the 2016 campaign where liberal media made gave tons of light to totally unsubstantiated ideas like the Trump n-word tape that wasn't found and was suspected to not even exist (it wouldn't even matter if it did, people who hate him 100% believe he's said it and his supporters probably wouldn't care if he did) and the whole golden shower dossier or something. I don't remember if the latter was faked or even existed either. But that's another thing where those who hate him would believe even without evidence that he would do that and his supporters would take him at his word if he said it wasn't true.
It's in the nature of topics like these that the people alleging a particular claim of conspiracy might in actuality constitute a conspiracy of their own.
It can get stranger, more meta than that, actually; QAnon's extravagant claims and breathless predictions are factually supported (when such support was offered) only by references to open-source (if often obscure) historical events- information that, while shocking, requires no security clearance to obtain; it doesn't even require more than one person to find it. QAnon could easily be a "one-person disinfo conspiracy" that took off and went viral. The energy and talent required is about on par with that required for writing a B-grade science fiction plot outline.
Mixing conspiratorial allegations with little-known historical data points containing shock value is an old trick that I first became aware of back in the 1990s, when checking out the history of "the LaRouche people." LaRouche publications often made reference to various little-known historical events (or mysteries) of a scandalous nature, or infused with scandalous overtones. The fact base was often authentic (up to a point); then the LaRouchies supplied the narrative framework. Since so few readers were aware of most of the scandalous episodes that were documented (in part because the LaRouchies drew heavily on scandals drawn from the foreign language press), they were led to believe that they were reading something akin to top secret material, unearthed by the valiant efforts of the LaRouche organization. (Their main publication was- and is- titled "Executive Intelligence Review.") It point of fact, it took me some months to realize that they weren't disclosing a single piece of factual data that hadn't already been reported by "legacy media", or documented in history books. (However, those facts were often connected to insinuations or allegations that did not share such provenance. As with Q.)
The LaRouchean conspiratorial worldview- which has more than once pivoted its political sympathies- is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than QAnon. QAnon is more like one alienated youth's version of the gambit, condensed to be Twitter-friendly.
Accusations require being supported with facts. Relevant quoted excerpts of link references, for example, with the URL of the complete link attached. (Wiki entries are acceptable, if well-footnoted.) A bibliography, even.
The claim isn't sufficient, get it? Whether you're making a conspiracy allegation or mocking it. Or whether the claim is of some other sort entirely, or related to some other topic.
I happen to know that some of the claims on your list can be supported by evidence (at least up to a point.) So do it.
Am I reading this right or are you actually saying Freddie doesn’t criticize the left? 😂
I, too, am very annoyed by the Russia conspiracy theory. I see it as another Red Scare, albeit a much milder one than the ones we saw in the 1950s and 1919-1920.
That said, I don't fault Freddie for not writing about it in this post. People can't put everything in.
So because a given phenomenon is socially constructed, there's no point in trying to delineate the rules that govern its functioning? I don't see how that follows.
This is a more specific objection, which is fine as far as it goes. But I must take umbrage at your negative characterization of people in the 40s, which wounds me for reasons that are squarely the fault of my parents. Also, my sense is that those of us who dislike current humor do so not because we find it impenetrable, but because we are jaded from overexposure to past humor.
I do think that after Umberto Eco's novel, Foucault's Pendulum, it is no longer possible to satirize conspiracy theories. Instead, conspiracy theories are satires on contemporary culture.
Happy birthday, and remember: you were always going to eventually die, and you always will be, until you finally do.
For me, the remixed and absurdist memes are the only ones I find amusing. Political memes try too hard and are usually unbearable, although I have a small collection of MAGA memes that managed to be genuinely albeit unintentionally hilarious.
I really enjoyed the variations on "are ya winning, son?" There was some real creativity in those, for example: https://i.imgur.com/crH482e.jpg
Big Bird is only a puppet. This goes deeper than you think.
I think the primary liberal conspiracy theory is that there are conservative conspiracy theories.
You think QAnon is bipartisan in nature?
To be honest, other than hearing the term/name, I have no knowledge of or interest in it. So obviously I can't answer your question.
So you know nothing about the conspiracy theory that is the subject of this post but are nevertheless confident in saying it doesn't exist?
I'm fairly confident in saying that it doesn't really exist *, despite knowing little about it, because I know many conservatives irl, and have never met an actual human that believes it.
I know there *are* humans that subscribe to QAnon, having heard about them first-hand, but the percentage of actual adherents is very small. I'd be willing to bet real money that we could fit all of its true-believers into a large nightclub.
* "doesn't really exist" is a bit of sleight-of-hand, for which I apologize. It obviously exists in some sense, but I don't think it exists in the way it's usually portrayed in the media
I think at this point in time, spring 2020, the number of actual humans that believe in QAnon is almost non existent. But 1.5 years ago it was absolutely a real phenomenon. I would say most of the believers now are just as deep into weird shit but would now pretend they always though QAnon was dumb. The people I know who believed it before are now into different new world order theories.
This seems like it's part of the genuine issue that people can't mentally process scale in the internet age. Absurdly fringe things seem much bigger because there's literally hundreds of millions of people so there's some non zero number of people who believe any dumb shit, but that means nothing.
A year ago I saw some poll asking people what animals they could beat in a fight and everyone should have to memorize that chart. Because it's helpful to understand that about a tenth of all people are either deranged, stupid, or shit posting.
> about a tenth of all people are either deranged, stupid, or shit posting.
Some of us are all three.
I think part of this is the idea that QAnon is something that normal conservatives or only conservatives believe. QAnon type conspiracies aren’t really about conservatism, and the group of people that buy into them have almost nothing to do with people who are hard core into Mitch McConnell’s political ideology. The three people I know of who legitimately believe in this stuff aren’t that kind of conservative at all, although they are at Trump voters (if they vote at all). They are a hippie-crunchy yoga instructor (mom in her late 30s), a musician (man I. His late 40s) who is really into weed culture and used to be a progressive crank type, and another hippyish type woman in her 20s who isn’t really political at all but left a drug/party lifestyle and got really into being Mormon and probably has some mental illness issues. It’s not about the conservative professionals most of us know. But it is real. Like I had a direct message conversation with one of them (I know this person in real life but I mostly keep up with them through social media and she GENUINELY BELIEVED Trump was going to come back and be president after Biden was sworn in.(Although now those people seem to have moved on from Q and more into the new world order controlling us through vaccines and covid lockdowns).
I didn't say it doesn't exist, only that I know nothing about it. It's obvious there are people who are obsessed over it, but I don't know why they care tho.
Yes. I know several on both sides.
I would not say I know people on both sides, but I know one person who made a stunningly rapid and sincere (and lasting) transition between spring 2020 and fall 2020 from liberal BLM posting yoga teacher to deep QAnon believing, anti vax, rabidly anti-CRT, and now suddenly religious Christian. It was weird to watch in real time. It was definitely the wellness culture pipeline for her which during the pandemic flipped from left coded to right coded quickly enough to give you whiplash.
I saw this happen to several people.
Yes. I know very liberal people who buy into half of that shit.
I'd never heard any other conservatives I know mention any of the Qanon or Pizzagate shit, but you can be damn sure that all my liberal friends came running to me (as their token conservative friend) asking me to spill the beans about this "Qanon" they'd heard so much about on NPR.
Maybe not at the Republican Club in Manhattan but there are plenty of normal looking people out there that’ll gladly start going on about this shit once you give them the opportunity. Jesus I remember an Uber driver in Miami that wouldn’t STFU about it.
are you sure U. driver a R?
He was a white dude who said he used to be in the military.
Oh I know true QAnon people. More than one. Maybe I’ve just got friends in low places.
There are ways to augment one's store of personal experience in order to compensate for its natural limits. For example, one can read about things like Qanon or Pizzagate, and many other subjects as well.
Wait, so you haven't personally met the hacker named 4chan?
Conservative conspiracy theories definitely exist, though the media definitely over-reports them and steps *very* gingerly around the bigger left/liberal conspiracy theories (the CDC invented AIDS, the FBI assassinated MLK & Malcolm X, various types of anti-semitism) because they're more widespread in African American communities.
I think the primary liberal conspiracy theory is that there are no liberal conspiracy theories.
Your friendly neighborhood health food store that doesn’t believe in vaccines or covid but is obsessed with GMOS, factory farming, refugees rights, sisterhood is global, etc. This is my neighborhood health food store, fwiw.
100% left conspiracy theories:
Alternative and holistic medicine is better than Western medicine
GMOs are evil
Organic food is better for you
Monsanto is destroying the world
McDonalds execs sat around the table and planned to addict you to fattening food and destroy your life
Anti-vaccine
5G wireless can effect your health
Cell phones cause breast cancer
etc.
I didn't mean 100% not shared by the right, I meant that I agreed 100% left conspiracies are a thing. My bad.
Agree on most, but anti-vaccine (even before 2019) also had good purchase in the right.
What you're describing is a false belief. All conspiracy theories are false, but that doesn't mean that every false belief is a conspiracy theory.
If all conspiracy theories are false, then how do you explain its presence in the law books as a criminal offense, and the fact that people get convicted of the offense and go to prison for it?
Sorry, the presence of what in the law books?
He means that there is a crime called conspiracy which is two or more people working together in furtherance of a criminal act.
I suspect there is a definition argument going on.
“ shitposters who have marinated in internet irony so long they have no sense of what true belief would feel like.”
I’ve noticed in the depositions of Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Green that there have been instances where they seem to acknowledge (or do they come to realize) that it’s all just shitposting that they don’t actually believe. As if in some sense they think it’s real at the same time acknowledging it’s a performance.
Don't break kayfabe!
Damn it. I hadn't made the obvious connection here and had been enjoying 'Birds Aren't Real' as a purely absurd statement.
Another criticism of the parody might be that it doesn't rise above typical reddit in-joke weirdness (I also didn't spot that this was supposed to be an intentional parody).
That is in fact how my family has always processed it also. Forget Authorial Intent!
I chuckled at a bumper sticker, looked at the tshirts for sale online, and it never even crossed my mind it was anything other than normal internet “lol so random” humor. The type of online-ness is so mismatched from the style of QAnon online-ness, the joke totally whiffs.
Same here. This has often happened to me — here I am enjoying something as pure absurdism, and then someone is like, “No, see, it’s about X.” Which almost always sucks the fun out of it. As absurdism it’s open and destabilizing; as parody it’s closed and just intended to confirm the things you think you already know.
Yes! Absurdism is so much more fun than cultural replication.
I think conspiracy theory culture, including of the right wing variety, can be parodied quite successfully. Good examples would be Dale Gribble on King of the Hill (particularly earlier years) and even in a way the X-Files. Of course these examples make fun of the phenomenon in a gentler, more loving way towards its subjects, as opposed to in a manner clearly designed to flatter the creators. Mike Judge does and seemingly always has known us better than we know ourselves yet never hates us for it.
The real question is can progressive leaning internet snark culture do this effectively. My response to that would be 'not of it involves being funny' since those people don't even know how to be funny to begin with.
I love seasons 2 to 6ish of 'King of the Hill' so much. It has, at its best, a generosity of spirit than a lot of more recent sneering comedy lacks [not always, of course, some writers punish Peggy too readily imho]. I really do hope the revival is actually happening.
Oh god, I don’t. I hadn’t heard of a revival and I don’t want it. I can’t see how it would be possible without losing that very generosity of spirit you praise.
I think it depends on the writers to be honest. I would like to see an adult Bobby.
Mike Judge has a real affection for the Dales Gribble of the world, an affection which in contemporary discourse would be considered a deeply suspect sign of latent white supremacy.
Certain friends and I will still occasionally quote his 'We'll grow oranges in Alaska' line when discussing climate change.
After the meglomart explosion:
“It was a propane tank explosion”
“That’s what they want you to think”
“Sir, we are they”
Is ideocracy the exception that proves the rule that Mike Judge mostly has affection for the rubes, or is it actually another example of his affection for the rubes? I genuinely don’t know...
I believe it is affection even in Idiocracy. They end up doing the right thing in the end and the evil in the film is generally portrayed as a result of ignorance rather than malice.
Dale Gribble..thanks for that.
This reminds me how the Church of the Subgenius thing became a parody of conspiracy theories (Scientology! The Bavarian Illuminati!) and took sort of the opposite tack, where they sprinkled in just enough self-awareness of real things with the obvious over-the-top pre-internet shitposting.
Subgenius was a bit different in that it was sort of a coded form of solidarity and a defense against the pervasive normie religious culture of the time. That belief system was far more similar to the way woke culture is pushed on people today. “Pull the wool over your own eyes” was a way to take control of your belief system before it was done for you.
This seems like yet another example of rapidly diminishing returns when one burrows too deeply into an Internet phenomenon. If, like me, all you know about "birds aren't real" is the slogan, and maybe you've seen a few diagrams of gears inside a pigeon, it comes across as a funny and breezy way to gently poke fun at irrational thinking. When the media picks up on it and puts the guy on 60 Minutes to, apparently, pontificate insufferably about conspiracy theories (I couldn't bring myself to watch it), it becomes gross and counterproductive in all the ways you spell out here. Too bad supposedly serious media outlets feel the need, for whatever reason (limited resources? low ratings?), to spend time on something like this instead of a deeper dive into something actually relevant to people's lives. (Yes, I know, they do that too--but it's a wonder they find any time at all for something like BAR.) And, at the end of the day, it sounds like they didn't do the BAR guy himself any favors by asking him to explain the joke instead of letting it speak for itself.
Is it a fact that there are no "bird" drones? I've seen video's of "insect" drones. The technology is amazing, and that summation was the purpose of said videos.
I think there are "hummingbird" drones.
Reminds me of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster back in the old days of Internet Atheism: funny as a t-shirt, deeply stupid as a political movement, embarrassing to everybody ten years later.
Bob Dobbs and the church of the SubGenius tho #slack
I think this was the mistaken reading of Chris Morris's 'The Day Shall Come', a film I will go to bat for as far superior in insight and wisdom than the far more beloved 'Four Lions'. Because ultimately the conspiracy theorist and theories in that film aren't the point of the satire, but that the true operations of the American political establishment are far more grotesque than the conspiracy theories. Audiences found it much easier to laugh at the terrorists in 'Four Lions' than at the FBI.
I still liked Four Lions more, but one thing both movies get right is that extremist movements feel like fun, interesting clubs for their members. The Four Lions guys are a lot of fun to hang out with when they aren't stuffing nails and fertilizer into PVC.
Good points all around in this post. Makes me wonder about past political parodies that were successful. Can't think of any except for some SNL skits that relied more on exaggerated physicality. I remember the Gore debate "sigh" and the Ross Perot rants as making me laugh a lot twenty plus operas ago.
The biggest problem with Q-Anon in my opinion is there are enough kernels of truth in it to get people hooked. There really was a cabal of elites (the Jeff Epstein crew) engaged in a pedophilia/underage sex ring that the media more or less has swept under the rug. Mix that with the whole toxicity of online and political discourse and you end up with crowds of people on the grassy knoll waiting for JFK Jr to come back from the dead with Donald Trump at his side to usher in a cleansing of the US Government.
Is there a conspiracy theory that QAnon is actually a false flag operation to discredit those who are against the Epstein underage sex ring? If not, my follow up question is does anyone know if there's money in hatching a conspiracy theory?
South Park did a take on this with 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Then there's the infrequent headlines—which I've never followed—that the "live forever crowd are—taking blood transfusions from children to gain some youth-restoring hormones or some such. Then there's the "muscle-builder athletes" who buy and consume human milk (a.k.a breast milk) to gain some growth hormone.
So now we have Epstein & Weinstein, who are all about abusing minors, with the bonus that they have contact with just about all of our elites. Tie in the "want to live forever" crowd who do absurd and immoral shit. It doesn't take much to weave these together with the usual leftist crowd who have taken sex education—which is a good thing for 13 YO children. but over the line when taking it to pre-K children. We're not just your plain vanilla this is the anatomy & physiology, but here's how to get yourself off ... BTW do you like choking and bondage too ... which of course leads to "let me be your guide" ... and we have plenty of "youth attracted" teacher videos and plenty of arrests to seal the deal.
Tell me how I can convince my neighbor that our elites aren't drinking children's blood?
Well that’s why it’s literally a conspiracy theory and a pretty effective one. It’s gives a nice, tidy, sinister, central motive to some disparate, weird and occasionally outright evil/criminal behavior that is happening in the world at large.
receiving hypodermic syringes of centrifuged children's blood is totally different from drinking it.
This is also why anti-vaccine conspiracies are so effective. Because a not insignificant portion of what anti vaxers claim is true (and a lot of it is also complete bullshit). IMO it still tips in favor of vaccines, including the COVID vaccines, but the vaccines are not the no-downsides miracle that was the official narrative.
The covid vaccines (which I have received and endorse!) were the cause of me deciding that the best way to combat misinformation is to rebuild trust in our institutions.
Weirdly, the people who talk most about misinformation don't seem to like my solution.
Right, it's never the elite's fault, it always has to be the rubes who are to blame. To suggest that institutions, media or social movements engage in self-critical reflection is to invite charges of the dreaded both-siderism.
"Misinformation" is just a stupid, useless term in general.
No, it's a great term for a really evil construct ... especially evil in that these days misinformation is used by the billionaire owned media conglomerates against the people.
Fortunately monopolies have a short life-span, as they always over-use and squander their resources ... which in this case happen to be trust.
''conspiracy theories'' partly express a feeling of powerlessnes in the face of a wider and subtle social conspiracy which is perceived as dis-empowering. And truely the powerful do conspire to gain and keep power. I guess i am a "conspiracy theorist".
Yeah that kind of thing is ridiculous. Every society going back to when we were apes has had a ruling class.
I'm sure Tucker Carlson believes tons of things I also believe. I bet even Stalin thought the first pee in the morning just hits different, and he was right!
The morning pee is really the best pee
I hate that conspiracy theories are all lumped together because there's some that are obviously true, some that are plausible, some that are implausible, and some that are insane. People who smugly dismiss every conspiracy theory seem as foolish as those who believe every one.
I'm torn on this. I largely agree with you but for one thing I'm trying to reconcile: that there are conspiracy theories which are obviously true. Which conspiracy theories are "obviously true"? It seems to me that being "obviously true" would disqualify it from being a conspiracy theory at all, and would simply be a conspiracy.
Part of the poisoning of the phrase "conspiracy theory" was adding an element of "but it's not true" or at least "it's quite unlikely that it's true." Is it your objection that obviously true things are being called conspiracy theories, or is your criticism more that the "there are other much more likely explanations" element should not have been added to the definition?
I guess I view this as two distinct things. On the one hand are former conspiracy theories that are now known to be true. MK-ULTRA, COINTELPRO, and the crack cocaine epidemic were all things that actually happened but started as conspiracy theories.
The other is stuff that is obviously true but is connected to the batshit insane stuff so it's treated as a conspiracy theory. The archetypal example is the JFK assassination involving a cover up. That's just public record. But because it's connected to "the Mafia working with Jackie and LBJ murdered Kennedy as revenge for Marilyn" type kookiness it's a conspiracy theory.
The modern version is the Deep State. This is a completely uncontroversial concept. Sure, there's versions of it (like with anything) that are crazy. But based on the history of every large country that's ever existed it would be more shocking if we didn't have one. Yet things like the Washington Post decry this as an insane conspiracy theory.
The Washington Post Democracy Dies In Darkness!!!!
I'd agree that the idea of the deep state is not controversial and not a conspiracy theory; but as you say, that doesn't mean the conspiracies that invoke it are particularly persuasive to anyone who doesn't already believe whatever is being sold.
Saying that Covid started in the lab in Wuhan was considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream media for quite a while. Now it is widely accepted. Covid has been a bit of a field day for conspiracy theorists because health authorities and media worked so hard to dismiss/downplay anything that would discourage people from taking the vaccines.
Well, libs were against lableak when it was Their Stuff. But now it’s Our Stuff. Similarly Bezos owning the Washington Post – Bezos is Our Stuff, Elon Musk is Their Stuff.
conspiracy theory in history. fact today. the gulf of tonkin never happened: conspiracy theory in its day. israel attacked the u.s. liberty, ditto. iraq never had weapons of mass destruction. for that matter, the video of the new zealand mosque shooter is a hoax. that one is obvious to the casual observer but that it has never been investigated by the msm is proof of their complicity in this enormous and ongoing series of lies (russiagate, crossfire hurricane, hunter's laptop, ivermectin doesn't help with covid, the russian invasion of ukraine was unprovoked, etc., etc., etc.).
There was a great article by someone who discussed - in a refreshingly sympathetic way - how his mother in laws belief in more outlandish claims of election fraud in 2020 comes from this general feeling that the election was somehow bent.
Will the new film "2,000 Mules" be classified as conspiratorial?
I'm not a Trump voter and I don't think the 2020 election was "stolen" but I'm broadly sympathetic to people who believe that because:
A) When your team loses a close one it's a natural instinct. I do it in every sporting event I've ever watched and, I know there was no politics pre-2016, but people can Google the terms Kerry, Ohio, and Diebold. I was pretty involved in 2004, this was not some fringe, lunatic position.
B) I imagine the entire thing felt rather unfair if you were a Trump supporter. From about a week before the SC Primary about every powerful institution in America united to make Joe Biden President. The media coverage (outside avowedly conservative media) was like watching those NBA TV games where they just show one team's broadcast and the color guy is saying "we" about one of the teams. I can imagine that's very disconcerting if you're not used to it.
So, your guy loses a close one (that, btw, people pretended like it wouldn't be close) and you're pissed off and you have this sense that things were fundamentally unfair but are told there's nothing wrong with any of that. Am I surprised people would look for some answer, even if it's wrong? Not at all.
best thing that ever happened to trump and his supporters is losing 2020. biden is doing far, far more to destroy the democratic party and discredit its beliefs than trump could ever do had he been reelected. that's just objectively true. and biden's not been in office even two years. and his backup is kamala harris.
Genuinely curious, what is biden doing to destroy the party? he seems fine to me
I was going to take issue with complaint number 1. I laughed at "I'm not going to go on news shows, but shows about clocks and time…" Unfortunately, so did he. Ali G may not have been overburdened with talent, but at least he could keep a straight face.
If Birds Aren't Real Guy did literally any research on the matter, he'd know that expert consensus is clear: you can't reason people out of an unreasonable position, and any extreme belief community worth its salt already has built-in defense mechanisms against outside disapproval. "Outsiders will shun and mock you because they fear your new power!" is, like, Cults/Conspiracies/MLMs/Crypto 101.
If you want to get people out, you have to solve the root causes: economic distress, fragmented communities, and institutional collapse. Flat earthers don't give a shit about Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but when you give them meaningful jobs that pay well, communities they can love and be loved by, and institutions that are effective at the local level, folks suddenly have a lot less interest in owning the spherehead libs. If Birds Aren't Real Guy wants to really make a difference, he should join a union or become a youth pastor.
You're stating this as a fact ("when you give them meaningful jobs that pay well, communities they can love and be loved by, and institutions that are effective at the local level, folks suddenly have a lot less interest in owning the spherehead libs"), but I think it is just your assumption. I'm skeptical of this assumption, but it's the right thing to do in any case, of course.
Did any research? He's a kid who made a joke that took off online.
This is by far the most "get off my lawn" post I've read from Freddie. Why is this much energy being devoted to picking apart the kid's satirical chops? There's a target here, yes, which is a media sphere fawning over this fairly tepid but amusing joke, but that's barely noted
The Birds Aren’t Real movements strikes me as a completely typical parody movement. It seems exactly along the lines of the popular Flying Spaghetti Monster parody from the height of the new atheist era. I guess the main difference is that serious news programs (I think they devoted a whole NYT Daily episode to it) feel the need to cover it like it’s an Important Thing. That tells me the difference is the news media, not the parody movement.
Left/liberal conspiracies theories I am aware of:
1. Donald Trump tried to steal USPS mailboxes before the election.
2. Cops are performing genocide on black men.
3. Murder of black trans women is frequent and pervasive.
4. Virtually every zoomer and millennial online believe qanon levels of pedophilia exist among Hollywood and east coast elites.
5. Most “Bernie-types” ( for lack of a better term) believe ( unknowingly) everything conspiracy theory about the Clinton’s that Richard Mellon Scaife funded.
6. Gender and biological origins of sex are dreamed up by the patriarchy to suppress people.
I could go on, but I have my day to begin. Birds aren’t real as a parody is just dumb vs a one line stale Reddit joke that outlasted it’s time.
I think that's an overestimate, and also a vague one.
Child sex abuse is a worse problem that I had ever imagined. But the psychological scars of systematic sexual abuse are difficult to conceal, and most young people appear to me to be reasonably well-adjusted, compared to someone who is a victim of child sexual abuse (particularly ritual abuse and group abuse.) "Most families" and "most churches"are not sexually abusing the young children they raise or supervise.
I don't need your permission to think that, or to write it. I think you got nothing, and with posts like that one, you're on track to prove it.
Hey hero, hot tip: anybody who ever wrote anything of value started out with a readership of exactly one.
Your permission has nothing to do with it. You merely provided an opportunity. Substack enabled the permission, based on my paid subscriber status.
We're a bit wide of the original claim at this point. You still haven't bothered to support it.
KT vs. k.t.? There's a conspiracy theory in there somewhere...
Is it possible for bird drones to build nest, lay eggs and poop on your windshield? If so, I might have several here.
Nanopoop?
One can only hope.
Right. Given the breathtaking list of absurdity coming from the woke left and being adopted as reality within our major institutions, this "Birds Aren't Real" meme might as well join the party.
Crucially missing the news cycles during the 2016 campaign where liberal media made gave tons of light to totally unsubstantiated ideas like the Trump n-word tape that wasn't found and was suspected to not even exist (it wouldn't even matter if it did, people who hate him 100% believe he's said it and his supporters probably wouldn't care if he did) and the whole golden shower dossier or something. I don't remember if the latter was faked or even existed either. But that's another thing where those who hate him would believe even without evidence that he would do that and his supporters would take him at his word if he said it wasn't true.
It's in the nature of topics like these that the people alleging a particular claim of conspiracy might in actuality constitute a conspiracy of their own.
It can get stranger, more meta than that, actually; QAnon's extravagant claims and breathless predictions are factually supported (when such support was offered) only by references to open-source (if often obscure) historical events- information that, while shocking, requires no security clearance to obtain; it doesn't even require more than one person to find it. QAnon could easily be a "one-person disinfo conspiracy" that took off and went viral. The energy and talent required is about on par with that required for writing a B-grade science fiction plot outline.
Mixing conspiratorial allegations with little-known historical data points containing shock value is an old trick that I first became aware of back in the 1990s, when checking out the history of "the LaRouche people." LaRouche publications often made reference to various little-known historical events (or mysteries) of a scandalous nature, or infused with scandalous overtones. The fact base was often authentic (up to a point); then the LaRouchies supplied the narrative framework. Since so few readers were aware of most of the scandalous episodes that were documented (in part because the LaRouchies drew heavily on scandals drawn from the foreign language press), they were led to believe that they were reading something akin to top secret material, unearthed by the valiant efforts of the LaRouche organization. (Their main publication was- and is- titled "Executive Intelligence Review.") It point of fact, it took me some months to realize that they weren't disclosing a single piece of factual data that hadn't already been reported by "legacy media", or documented in history books. (However, those facts were often connected to insinuations or allegations that did not share such provenance. As with Q.)
The LaRouchean conspiratorial worldview- which has more than once pivoted its political sympathies- is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than QAnon. QAnon is more like one alienated youth's version of the gambit, condensed to be Twitter-friendly.
No, no, no. I don't care how long the list is.
Accusations require being supported with facts. Relevant quoted excerpts of link references, for example, with the URL of the complete link attached. (Wiki entries are acceptable, if well-footnoted.) A bibliography, even.
The claim isn't sufficient, get it? Whether you're making a conspiracy allegation or mocking it. Or whether the claim is of some other sort entirely, or related to some other topic.
I happen to know that some of the claims on your list can be supported by evidence (at least up to a point.) So do it.