One of my uncle’s is a really friendly and kind guy who always cracks jokes about everything and is the kind of person everyone loves.
A few years ago, he started posting a lot about chemtrails. Over time, his posts were getting replied to more and more by other people from around the world who were now his “friends” despite the fact that this guy has rarely left Wales. Over time his posts were spreading to other conspiracy theories, and eventually checked the whole bingo list off when it comes to the ways in which MSM etc. were manipulating us.
Over time it’s just gotten worse and worse, and a few months ago, I saw him in real life for the first time since all this happened and was wary about how he’d be (he knows my feelings about this). He was very cautious for a little while, but after an hour or so started soapboxing about the problems of the world to anyone and everyone.
It’s like a mental illness in a way. The more you refute his points, the more his counterarguments continue, which are based on things which are unprovable in the negative, but also impossible to prove in the positive. The thing is, his conclusion drawn from this is always that the conspiracy theory is true.
He’s impossible to talk to these days, it’s really sad, and there seems to be no way that it’s going to change either.
Really sorry to hear that, man. I think the pandemic has made this infinitely worse. I just listened to Death By Conspiracy?, a BBC podcast/radio show and while I think there are some questions to be asked about the value of honing in on one specific case it tells a really sad story about a guy from Shrewsbury whose response to covid isolation was to join covid denial groups on facebook, and he wound up dying of covid.
The most interesting episode is one where they interview the guy who was instrumental in ‘turning’ him and go to one of the anti-lockdown protests in London. It’s clear that this guy had found a community in the conspiracy theory world and ultimately it’s contrary to his interests (and possibly even his mental health) to even contemplate that his ideas might be wrong because it would mean rejection by a group who have accepted him with open arms as a ‘leader’ of sorts. Fascinating, scary, very sad.
This is exactly it, I’ll take a listen. My uncle went to those anti-lockdown protests in London too. Probably the first time he’s been to London for years, but felt passionate enough about the situation to go to them multiple times.
We’ve seen this with a friend of ours who’s gone anti-vax. A few years ago she was into hypnotherapy and alternative medicine - fair enough, there’s plenty of people like that in Brighton - but started posting about “medical freedom” during the pandemic. You could see that they too had accumulated lots of friends from all around the world to support their viewpoint - I wonder if there’s an element of evangelism involved, that if you’re true to the cause you’ll do your best to spread it amongst people who hold wavering views or who might be susceptible?
I have a (white) friend whose job is dreadlock maintenance. as you can imagine, living in Brighton, he’s not short of (white) customers. There is an implicit assumption of shared beliefs and when one of his customers found out he’d been vaccinated, he was asked to wear gloves when dreading their hair “so that vaccine proteins don’t leak out of your body and into my hair”
Another theme I’ve seen is that the vaccine can KILL and therefore people should stay away from the vaccine. Now, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say that the vaccine is 100% perfect, or that there will be people out there who experience negative effects from it, and it may be very unfortunate that some people who have very complicated medical histories aren’t the right people to be vaccinated. But my word, to take that view while ignoring the massive good that vaccines do strikes me as being exceptionally short sighted.
It’s not the biggest leap from “vaccines can have a negative impact on some people (albeit an exceptionally small minority)” to “I don’t want vaccines to touch me in any way otherwise I might be impacted by these negative effects”
But why is it that they’re SO focussed on this particular vaccine and very little else across the whole spectrum of life?
I think it’s because you can control whether you have the vaccine or not, which is not really true of the virus (or most other threats, be they threats to life or threats to the ego).
I think this is the root of almost all conspiracy theories (the desire to impose order on a senseless and frightening world).
Its a fair comparison, my experience of people during manic episodes is very similar to what I’ve seen of extreme conspiratorial thinking.
-same obsessive drawing of connections between things that may or may not be connected
-the idea that the universe/the new world order is intentionally leaving clues for you to decipher, especially “hiding in plain sight” kind of stuff
-weird obsession with numerology
-anyone who disagrees with what you’re saying is probably compromised by the people who mean you harm/control things
My parents who are in their 70s know someone (quite a bit younger) who died as a result of an adverse reaction to the AZ shot. Really, really sad and I was sure it would put them off getting their boosters but nope, they took the view that “It’s a one-in-a-million chance* and unfortunately, someone has to be that one.” I’m not sure I’d have been able to be so pragmatic but I was very relieved
*citation needed, obviously
Yeah, there is a lot of “I’m not anti-vaxx I’m just anti THIS vaxx” and it seems to stem from a combination of the perceived ‘rush’ to produce it (which has been thoroughly debunked wrt to the mRNA vaccines at least, they were 10+ years in the making) and people who were convinced that covid was a hoax needing something to pin their “great reset” conspiracy onto so pivoting to “population control”.
It has to be said that - while I of course agree with everything you’ve said - it does not help that Bill Gates and some other philanthropists have undeniably said things about developing countries that are a bit… eugenics-y. So all it takes is for someone with reservations about a vaccine they wrongly believe to have been cobbled together to stumble across some real quote from a billionaire about overpopulation and you’ve got a recipe for … exactly what 's happening.
Covid-19 being made in a lab and government-made diseases are separate entries for some reason.
It’s a pure fact that governmental organisations like the CDC manufacture diseases for the purposes of research and treatments:
And as stated in that article, they often do it very poorly and with dismal safety standards.
Maybe I’m just quibbling the wording, and what the graphic means by “Government -made diseases” is concepts like “The US deliberately created and spread AIDs among African Americans”. Which I’m not advocating, but I don’t think it’s irrational to observe the Tuskegee Experiment and not have legitimate questions about public health approaches to diseases like AIDs.
On the deep state front, I think it’s a question of semantics more than anything. My position is that if there are institutions like bureaucracies, intelligence services, lobbyists etc that exist outside of democratic power structures, but exert influence and manage the functions of the state within those democracies, then that’s what I’d refer to as a “deep state”. I don’t think that’s especially controversial.
I find digging into the like objective facts of things the British government / army got up to in Ireland to be somewhat mind melting to the point where it is bad for my health. The book ‘Who Framed Colin Wallace’ really freaked me out last month. It’s a great read and you can find a PDF of it online now it’s out of print, but its contents are really frightening
Though I suppose what I was reading about was an actual conspiracy, and not a conspiracy theory
for a quick minute.