{"id":187808,"date":"2019-05-04T04:48:46","date_gmt":"2019-05-04T04:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=187808"},"modified":"2019-05-08T04:15:19","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T04:15:19","slug":"why-we-are-addicted-to-conspiracy-theories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=187808","title":{"rendered":"Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Introduction \u2013 May 3, 2019<\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cConspiracy theories\u201d have often proved to be more than speculative. Any journalist who dismisses them as paranoid ramblings is either a complacent corporate hack, or an intellectual whore in the pay of the powers that be.<\/h5>\n
For there is much that the elite want to conceal and most corporate ‘journalists’ are only to happy to play along. Journalists who won\u2019t, like Julian Assange, end up paying the price.<\/h5>\n
That\u2019s where the “conspiracy theorists” come in. Because although many mainstream journalists may be averse to investigating a taboo topic, most conspiracy theorists are not.<\/h5>\n
To counteract this and undermine the conspiracy theorist’s credibility articles like the following have begun to appear.<\/h5>\n
Like the tech giant’s plans to censor online content<\/span><\/a> this is all about controlling public discourse. However, while the tech giants plan involves outright censorship the following doesn\u2019t suggest anything so direct or draconian.<\/h5>\n
Instead it looks at the wilder fringes of conspiracy research. Where the theories and those investigating them are much easier to deride and dismiss. Not once does the writer seriously scrutinise any of their ideas because, as she puts it after meeting some adherents:<\/h5>\n
\u201cI was pretty sure they had lost their hold on reality as a result of being permanently and immovably on the fringes of American life \u2026”<\/h5>\n
In other words those who seriously consider conspiracy theories are weirdos with no grounding in reality. Or so the Guardian would have us believe.<\/h5>\n
So why is the Guardian trying to persuade us to ignore such ideas if they are dreamt up and\/or believed by people who “had lost their hold on reality\u201d?<\/h5>\n
We would suggest that’s because the powers that be are growing concerned about the spread of these ideas. More and more people are rejecting the official narrative about what happened on 9\/11 or 7\/7. Increasing numbers are asking what really happened at Sandy Hook or during the Las Vegas shootings?<\/h5>\n
Stage managed or not, there events were all used to manipulate the public into accepting measures and policies that they might otherwise have rejected. The events of 9\/11 led to the invasion of Iraq and America’s longest running war in Afghanistan. While the 7\/7 atrocities led to an unprecedented security clampdown in the UK and mass surveillance. If the “conspiracy theorists\u201d had been heard in the immediate aftermath of these events things may have turned out very differently.<\/h5>\n
As it was the \u201cconspiracy theorists\u201d were on the sidelines of public discourse so few listened. However, that\u2019s changing as more and more people are now receptive to such ideas<\/span><\/a>.<\/h5>\n
The fact is that such ideas are becoming more widely believed<\/a><\/span>, while corporate media is losing its influence.<\/h5>\n
That\u2019s why the likes of the Guardian and Google are doing all they can to silence or sideline “conspiracy theories”. Readers will note that the following doesn’t provide any links to these supposedly unfounded theories; if it did people might start examining these ideas for themselves. The they might even start thinking for themselves — and that\u2019s something the powers that be cannot allow. Ed.<\/h5>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories<\/h1>\n

Anna Merlan \u2013 The Guardian May 2, 2019<\/h2>\n

In January 2015, I spent the longest, queasiest week of my life on a cruise ship filled with conspiracy theorists. As our boat rattled toward Mexico and back, I heard about every wild plot, secret plan and dark cover-up imaginable. It was mostly fascinating, occasionally exasperating and the cause of a headache that took months to fade. To my pleasant surprise, given that I was a reporter travelling among a group of deeply suspicious people, I was accused of working for the CIA only once.<\/span><\/p>\n

The unshakeable certainty possessed by many of the conspiracy theorists sometimes made me want to tear my hair out, how tightly they clung to the strangest and most far-fetched ideas. I was pretty sure they had lost their hold on reality as a result of being permanently and immovably on the fringes of American life. I felt bad for them and, to be honest, a little superior.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe things that everyone thinks are crazy now, the mainstream will pick up on them,\u201d proclaimed Sean David Morton early in the trip. \u201cTwenty sixteen is going to be one of those pivotal years, not just in human history, but in American history as well.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Morton is a self-proclaimed psychic and UFO expert, and someone who has made a lot of dubious claims about how to beat government agencies such as the IRS in court. (In 2017, he was sentenced to six years in prison for tax fraud<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.) I dismissed his predictions about 2016 the way I dismissed a lot of his prophecies and basic insistence about how the world works. Morton and the other conspiracy theorists on the boat were confident of a whole lot of things I found unbelievable, but which have plenty of adherents in the US and abroad.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of them asserted that mass shootings such as Sandy Hook are staged by the US government with the help of \u201ccrisis actors\u201d as part of a sinister (and evidently delayed) gun-grab. The moon landing was obviously fake (that one didn\u2019t even merit much discussion). The government was covering up not just the link between vaccines and autism but also the cures for cancer and Aids. Everywhere they looked, there was a hidden plot, a secret cabal and, as the gospel of Matthew teaches about salvation, only a narrow gate that leads to the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n

I chronicled my stressful, occasionally hilarious, unexpectedly enlightening experience onboard the Conspira-Sea Cruise as a reporter for the feminist website Jezebel<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, and then I tried to forget about it. I had done a kooky trip on a boat, the kind of stunt journalism project every feature writer loves, and it was over. Conspiracy theorists, after all, were a sideshow.<\/span><\/p>\n

But I began to notice that they were increasingly encroaching on my usual beats, such as politics. In July 2016, I was walking down a clogged, chaotic narrow street in Cleveland, Ohio, where thousands of reporters, pundits, politicians and Donald Trump<\/a><\/strong><\/span> fans had amassed to attend the Republican national convention. I was there as a reporter and was busy taking pictures of particularly sexist anti-Hillary Clinton merchandise. There was a lot of it around, for sale on the street and proudly displayed on people\u2019s bodies: from TRUMP THAT BITCH badges to white T-shirts reading HILLARY SUCKS, BUT NOT LIKE MONICA.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of the attendees were from InfoWars, the mega-empire of suspicion \u2013 a radio show, website and vastly profitable store of lifestyle products \u2013 founded by Austin, Texas-based host Alex Jones. For many years, Jones was a harmless, nutty radio shock-jock: a guy shouting into a microphone, warning that the government was trying to make everyone gay through covert chemical warfare, by releasing homosexuality agents into the water supply. (\u201cThey\u2019re turning the freaking frogs gay!\u201d he famously shouted.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Jones also made less adorably kooky claims: that a number of mass shootings and acts of terrorism, such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, were faked by the government; that the CEO of Chobani, the yogurt company, was busy importing \u201cmigrant rapists\u201d to work at its Idaho plant; that Hillary Clinton<\/a><\/strong><\/span> is an actual demon who smells of sulphur, hails from Hell itself and has \u201cpersonally murdered and chopped up and raped\u201d little children.<\/span><\/p>\n

Continues \u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because many of them have turned out to be true and the corporate media\u2019s attempts to discredit them only gives them greater credibility<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,27,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Miscellaneous","category-The_Media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187808"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187838,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187808\/revisions\/187838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}