Most people have that family member who’s really into conspiracy theories. I used to not take those kind of things seriously, but lately, I feel like they’re really starting to get out of control.
You’d think that with all the information in the world at our fingertips via smart phones that it would be easier than ever to share factual information, but I’m seeing more and more often that people instead have closed themselves off to information that disagrees with their world view. They instead isolate themselves into a protective bubble where the only information they receive reinforces their beliefs.
For those who are prone to falling for conspiracy theories, it’s a dangerous combination.
Plenty of conspiracy theories are harmless like Area 51, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa or that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. Hell, there are a few that turned out to be true like Operation Paperclip, where the U.S. government hired Nazi scientists to help win the space race against the Soviet Union, or Operation Northwoods, where the CIA planned (but never actually executed) false flag terrorist attacks against U.S. citizen and military targets in Miami to blame on the Cuban government and instigate a war against communist Cuba in the 1960s.
My problem is the increasing belief in conspiracy theories that are so far from reality that they become dangerous. When belief in conspiracy theories affects the day-to-day lives of other people or can get people sick, injured or worse, they become a serious problem.
Sure, it was funny to see people thinking the world was going to end April 8th during the total solar eclipse, but some of those people were so certain that the rapture was going to happen that they started giving away their money assuming they wouldn’t need it anymore.
Other conspiracy theories have devastating emotional impacts, like the family members of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in 2012, who received death threats from gun nuts who thought their dead children were actually crisis actors being used to take away their second amendment rights. Popular conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in damages to those families following a defamation lawsuit.
And the deeper someone gets into conspiracy theories, the more likely they are to go all the way off the deep end into what some call “the anti-Semitic point of no return.”
It should be something that we laugh at, but instead, we have sitting U.S. congress members who thought wildfires in Hawaii and California were caused by Jewish space lasers.
The QAnon conspiracy theory became extremely popular in 2016 and it basically stated that Donald Trump was the only thing keeping the deep state of business elites and Hollywood pedophiles from harvesting adrenochrome from babies that had been victims of child trafficking. It sounds ridiculous, but it has thousands of followers, if not more, and the worst of them have been responsible for multiple murders and terror attacks in the United States. Many QAnon believers participated in the attack on the United States Capital on Jan. 6, 2021, falsely believing another conspiracy theory that Joe Biden and Democrats had stolen the 2020 presidential election.
In my opinion, the biggest negative repercussion of believing in conspiracy theories has been seen with vaccines. Back in the late 2000s, most anti-vaccine conspiracies were being spread by actress and model Jenny McCarthy, the most popular being the since-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. Conservatives at the time mocked all the California yoga moms who stopped vaccinating their children and had started measles outbreaks at Disneyland and other areas on the West Coast.
But during the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories went through the roof. People started spreading lies that there were microchips in vaccines, that they were altering people’s DNA, that the “untested and rushed” vaccines were actually more dangerous than getting sick naturally from COVID.
Those beliefs have made significant impacts on American society. Those same conservatives that were laughing about the anti-vax Californians in the late 2000s suddenly became the conspiracy’s biggest believers. The year the vaccine was released, 90% of Democrats were vaccinated against COVID compared to just 58% of Republicans.
And that decision to avoid getting vaccinated is going to have serious negative repercussions politically. Excess COVID deaths were relatively even between Republicans and Democrats from the start of the pandemic in March 2020 until the introduction of the COVID vaccine around May 2021. But after the vaccine was released, Republicans had a 43% higher excess death rate in the United States among people ages 25 and over.
Over 1 million Americans died from COVID during the pandemic. You do the math.
There were five states in the 2020 U.S. presidential election that were decided by less than 1.5% of their votes. If Donald Trump wants to win the upcoming 2024 election, he’s going to need every vote he can get, but there are a lot of people who likely would have voted for him that refused to get vaccinated, caught a bad case of COVID, and are no longer capable of voting due to being 6 feet underground.
Maybe the tide will turn against disinformation. I haven’t noticed it happening. I’ve been fighting the good fight for several years now trying to battle obviously fake posts with facts and logic, but it feels like people are only getting sicker.
If anyone takes anything from this post, I hope at least people think twice about the consequences of the worst conspiracy theories the next time they are deciding whether or not to share a stupid meme on social media.
Or perhaps if we wait long enough, the problem will eventually take care of itself.