...nice house! too large for me though, lol...
Five myths about conspiracy theories
...In the first few days of August 2018, mainstream news headlines described an emerging conspiracy theory as “bizarre,” “dangerous,” “terrifying ” and a “deranged conspiracy cult.” The movement, one Post columnist wrote, “is scary because it’s getting bigger, it’s scary because we don’t know how to stop it, and it’s scary because the people behind it won’t be stopped.” Yikes.
The catastrophizing headlines were part of a broader tendency to paint conspiracism as a creeping contagion that “manages to insinuate itself in the most alert and intelligent minds,” as historian Daniel Pipes charitably put it, or as “mumbo jumbo” that has already “conquered the world,” as journalist Francis Wheen bluntly asserted.
Those articles last summer were about QAnon, a loose collection of cryptic nonsense that started online and manifested as a handful of people showing up at President Trump’s rallies with homemade signs and shirts. Though the articles implied a substantial number of believers, none reported any data. Subsequent polling showed that many people — 4 in 10 — hadn’t heard of QAnon or didn’t know enough to have an opinion. Among those who knew about it, it was viewed overwhelmingly unfavorably (by both Democrats and Republicans). An analysis of the QAnon subreddit showed that a tiny but vocal contingent of boosters was making almost all the noise about it on the forum. Most people who engage with ideas like this just sit back and watch, probably treating the theories as a curiosity or entertainment.
Ideas can have consequences. Timothy McVeigh , the Oklahoma City bomber, saw himself as resisting a government conspiracy to grab the citizenry’s guns; a man who believed in Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory about a D.C. pizzeria, fired a gun into the restaurant and terrorized its patrons, which included children. But these men are the exception, not the rule. Hyping up every conspiracy theory into an existential threat without any evidence is, ironically, the same habit of mind that produces conspiracy theories in the first place.”... more