How did we get so casual about conspiracy theories?
I was talking with someone today about nutrition. This person has a PhD in material science. They mentioned eating beef daily and I asked about the cholesterol implications. The answer was about a vague ‘they’ wanted us to think that, but it wasn’t true anymore.
I hear the vague ‘they’ so frequently now it’s just a normal conversation. In truth, as soon as I hear the vague they I dismiss the speaker’s credibility on the subject, but how did we get here? Vague they wanted us to think X is a valid counter argument by the most highly educated people in our society?
This sounds like more of a rant than a question, but I do truly want to know how this happened? Was it pop culture like the X Files that made conspiracy theories main stream? Was it social media? When will the vague they stop being an accepted explanation? Has it always been this way and I didn’t notice?
Thanks, love you!
MKUltra was a secret government program that experimented on people using LSD and torture. The man who became the Unabomber was one of its victims.
COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive. This included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement , Chicano and Mexican-American , and independence movements (including Puerto Rican independence groups).
The Iraq War was predicated on “weapons of mass destruction” which the government knowingly lied about.
The United Fruit Company backed a coup in Honduras.
General Motors conspired to collapse the streetcar industry to gain a monopoly on public transportation.
Cigarette companies suppressed information on the health effects of cigarettes.
Oil companies suppressed information on the environmental effects of fossil fuels.
Purdue Pharma conspired to suppress the risks of Oxycontin and to expand the use of the drug to levels they knew would cause addiction.
My point is, there are true conspiracies all the time. The internet has made it possible for more people to know about it. Unfortunately it has also made it easier for false conspiracy theories to propagate
Also, the fact that those conspiracies were real severely eroded trust in institutions both government and corporate. For example, does anybody really believe the FBI stopped suppressing leftists in 1971? Hell no; they just started calling it something other than COINTELPRO that’s still classified.
Because the government keeps lying about extremely dangerous stuff to make 5 bucks profit.
Case in point shell and otherd lobbying governments for decades to deny global warming.
Microplastics are showing up everywhere because of products which were supposed to be safe.
Israel controls half the Western governments not sure if it’s still “antisemitic” to point that out
Israel doesn’t control western governments, it’s just a very valuable tool of the US, for which they are ready to make a lot of concessions. Western governments in turn are broadly servile to the US. I’m not sure how you expect a small broadly hated state like Israel to control the whole west. Lobby and intelligence can get you far, but not that far.
AIPAC: We control Western governments. These are our guys on the inside. We are spending tonnes of cash to oust anyone who is anti Israel! Look at us owning all these politicians!
Enlightened Liberals: “no this is a strategic partnership”
Listen up. What Israel is currently doing is speedrunning the reputation of the entire Western world into the ground so they can commit a genocide in front of the world in plain sight.
You cannot in any way explain to me how this is a strategically sound plan nor offer any logical explanation except what the Israelis are screaming out loud themselves: Israel controls Western governments. Not the other way around.
AIPAC: We control Western governments.
They are coping, trying to project their own power when they see very clearly that they’re on the brink. I don’t remember AIPAC saying that outright in english, but I wouldn’t exactly put it past those psychos either.
Enlightened Liberals: “no this is a strategic partnership”
I’m neither enlightened nor a liberal, but this is broadly a strategic partnership (in defense of the empire). Liberals still believe that an apartheid ethnostate is a completely acceptable thing, and that they should just kill a little bit less children. When exactly did the US need to convinced to lay waste to the middle-east for their own profit? If Israel sounds like a perfect unsinkable aircraft carrier in the area, it’s because that’s exactly what it is, and the kind of things they have never shied away from.
I don’t deny that they most likely have dirt on some politician, Israeli intelligence is on record trying to pull the grossest shameless stunts, and of course they try their hardest to impact policies abroad, they’re not even trying to hide it. But saying “they control western government” as if the entire western world is a collection of Israeli puppet states is legitimately insane. The US military budget alone eclipses their whole GDP.
What Israel is currently doing is speedrunning the reputation of the entire Western world into the ground
We can do that ourselves tyvm, Israel isn’t responsible for Trump remarkable attempts at destroying the US economy, USD, and the entirety of their softpower. Israel has decided to completely overextend in a way where western governments, despite their ardent zionism, haven’t been able to reign in antizionist sentiment. But do you think that Israelis mind controlled Trump into destroying their lifeline and tariffing their own fucking selves? Everyone knows that Israel is only held afloat by the uninterrupted stream of weaponry from the US, and that’s a
sacrificeprofit the military-industrial complex is willing to make.You cannot in any way explain to me how this is a strategically sound plan
No I cannot, it’s a fascist state eating itself, many such examples. They are desperate, and they’re very clearly running straight into a wall. I’d like you, however, to explain to me how this is a strategically sound plan even IF you assume their total supposed control of western governments when they inevitably crash and burn, as they’ve been working overtime towards. It’s not sound. They’re not sound. It’s a fascist ethnostate.
Israel isn’t responsible for Trump remarkable attempts at destroying the US economy, USD, and the entirety of their softpower.
No, but they helped get him elected.
Not sure they did it on purpose, and it only affected the stupidest of Democrat voters, but any argument that the genocide in Palestine didn’t impact our election is not being honest.
No, but they helped get him elected
Sure, I mean people made the argument with Russia too for his first term. I still think it’s absolutely insane to conclude that Russia controls western governments.
Any argument that the genocide in Palestine didn’t impact our election is not being honest
Of course, and I never made that argument. I can’t give an educated estimate, but folks more knowledgeable than me on US sentiment and voting habits say that this one issue could have massively shifted the election. You could probably even made a case that the democrats would have been a better ally to Israel in the grand scheme of things.
it’s absolutely insane to conclude that Russia controls western governments.
Maybe not governments in general, but Trump and his party specifically, doesn’t seem too insane.
I really don’t see the need to try to see some dark unilateral control, when it’s across the board the exact same thing we’ve identified for literal centuries: The shifting alliances of powers whose interests are aligned.
The sad irony of conspiracy theorists is that it’s not paranoia (alone) that leads them into those rabbit holes, it’s naivety. They think that there are dark forces that hijacked their otherwise fine institutions, but refuse to recognize that those institutions were never meant to serve them in the first place. Trump and his entourage aren’t a cancer on a previously healthy organ, they are a healthy part of a parasite.
