numb3r_5ev3n (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2020-04-09 05:33 pm
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2020-04-09 05:33 pm
Entry tags:
Fuck conspiracy theorist grifters. (CW: angry rant, descriptions of racism and fascist fuckery.)
Ten years ago, I had a dream. In this dream, I was in a diner. People were freaking out because a FAMOUS SATANIST (I don't know who it was supposed to have been, just that it was a FAMOUS SATANIST) was coming in to eat. The diner patrons were in an uproar about the FAMOUS SATANIST, who for his part simply sat down and ordered like a normal person.
Then I looked out the window, to see that someone was breaking into cars in the parking lot and stealing stuff out of them. I tried to alert people to the fact that this was going on, but people were too upset by the presence of the FAMOUS SATANIST to notice or care.
This dream has stuck with me ever since, because when I woke up, I knew immediately what it symbolized.
It was about conspiracy theories, and how they work. Conspiracy theories are a grift, perpetuated by grifters. They're misdirection. They're noise to signal. And to many of the purveyors of conspiracy theories - the owners and admins of conspiracy theory websites - they're "entertainment." Because this is the defense they trot out every time someone is killed because of them. The people who perpeturate conspiracy theories are grifters, and their aim is either to bilk people out of money or to incite people to commit violence through acts of stochastic terrorism, or both.
Take Nora Ralph, co-owner and operator of the alt-right conspiracy theory website the Ralph Retort, when one of their associates, Lane Davis, stabbed his own father, believing him to be part of the "leftist pedophile agenda,"
“I watch Alex Jones,” Nora told me. “To me, that’s entertainment. We don’t really think the frogs are gay. I don’t think the protein powder works. I never thought some people watch this stuff and are like, yes, this is hard-hitting journalism. I thought most of us could distinguish between entertainment and facts. I never really thought people were stupid enough to get caught up in this stuff.”
Whenever he's called on his bullshit by authorities capable of actually holding him accountable for his actions, Alex Jones always insists that what he does is "performance art," never mind that he has waged a harassment campaign for years against the families of the victims of mass shootings. Fox News operates under the aegis of being an "entertainment network," with their last objective journalist, Shep Smith, having departed months ago.
When I was a kid, it seemed like people believed in conspiracy theories because it was fun to believe there might be extraterrestrial life. The "True Believers" I knew were hippies and new-age types, people who were typified by the "I Want To Believe" poster in Fox Mulder's office on X Files, readers of books like "Chariots Of the Gods" (and maybe even followers of the Ashtar Command.) You wouldn't think any of these folks might be manipulated into acts of violence over their beliefs.
The right-wing conspiracy theorists, the John Birchers and Rush Limbaugh listeners, weren't in my orbit until later - and even then, it seemed like there was a fair amount of "I want to believe," amongst a lot of them as well. And even if they did listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, they also listened to Art Bell.
In my life, I've seen people deny reality for many reasons. With the "I-Want-To-Believers," it seems like they feel that belief in objectively-observed reality alone would make their experience of the world colder, sadder, and not as fun or whimsical or magical. I certainly fall into the hippie/new age "I Want To Believe" camp in regards to some of my own beliefs.
But then there are the folks who vehemently deny objectively-observed reality because it conflicts with their biases and their prejudices. What we've seen over the past 25 years is the triumph of the latter over the former. And with the rampant Covid 19 pandemic, it seems to be hitting critical mass.
I've heard and seen the same people seemingly hold several conflicting viewpoints about it in their head at once: that it was unleashed upon the world by the Chinese because they "eat weird things," (never mind the fact that e.coli outbreaks in the US because of LETTUCE are now a yearly occurrence) or that it was created by the Chinese government to shut down dissidents in their own country, but it got out of hand. that it was created by Bill Gates, using a combination of vaccines and 5G, that it's a hoax - or that it's real, but it's no worse than any current strain of the flu virus, and can be cured by drinking infusions of garlic or tonic water, or whatever Donald Trump is claiming as a panacea this week, or that it's a cover-up intended to hide sex trafficking of millions of children, or a cover-up to distract from the rescue of millions of children of sex traffickers, and so on. All at once.
Of course, the reason conspiracy theorists try to claim any of these can be concurrently true is so they can claim they were right if any of them do end up holding water. It all comes from grifting, and it's getting people killed. None of them seem to want to accept the idea that a highly contagious strain of corona virus could simply have flared up into a worldwide pandemic - an event which has occurred repeatedly throughout recorded history. And it's not in the interest of the grifters for them to accept this as truth.
At the core of the current conspiracy theories regarding Covid 19, we can discern many prejudices and biases - hatred and suspicion of the Other (in this case, Asians and the Chinese) hatred of anyone who would dare criticize Dear Leader Trump for his mismanagement and bungling reaction to the outbreak, and suspicion and mistrust of medical science and the medical profession ("It's a plot to force us all to take vaccines! They're making it out to be worse than it really is! They're cooking the books and just claiming anyone who dies during this period died of Corona! It's all a hoax!" etc.)
Two biases I have encountered during this period seem contradictory, but again are seemingly held simultaneously in the mind of many conspiracy theorists - that this is somehow a plot to undermine "the white race" (despite the fact that black and brown people are being disproportionately afflicted by the disease) and that white people are by nature clean and resistant to disease and contagion by some innate superiority (instead of privilege and economic inequality.) This kind of thing seems endemic to fascist thought ("our people are strong and wholesome, and our enemy is degenerate and weak and cowardly; yet somehow we are always threatened and vulnerable to attack, and our enemy is always three seconds away from ending us forever.")
This was going to be another angry post dumping on Chris Carter and the X Files, because I can think of many episodes with plotlines similar to current conspiracy theories regarding Covid 19. It feels like Chris Carter started out with a show premise that was full of hope and wonder and whimsy (as many of the "monster of the week" episodes were) and it gradually warped into something dark and paranoid and toxic, and injected paranoid and toxic memes into our cultural mass consciousness.
The aliens in the show were not "space brothers," except for a few notable episodes; "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" and "The Unnatural," stand out as redeeming entries despite the show's overall decline into negative problematic tropes. ("Bad Blood" is another one of my favorites, but it's about Vampires.) No, for the most part, the extraterrestrials depicted were literally virulent organisms, using tropes appropriated from every fascist huckster who has ever tried to dehumanize the "other" and claim that (((they))) were out to infect and degenerate the "real humans." This is what it turned into. This was the "mytharc" that turned so many people off towards the end of the series run - and for good reason. I'm legitimately upset that I ever used to defend this show.
In the meantime, my "current mood" is the X Files theme in major key, which is what I would like to think the "Universe B" X Files series would have become, if it hadn't been ruined; if episodes like "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" and "Bad Blood" had been the series standard instead of one-off episodes, as it should have been.
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Except it never occurred to be, I don’t think until I was peripherally involved in Occupy, that there were right-wing conspiracy theorists. Of course there was Waco but that seemed like a unique phenomenon, not something that could actually become a powerful political force. (And it didn’t occur to Occupy either; they just let everyone in and you got all these kooks causing shit.) So then I got really fascinated and read about some of what they thought and...like. They pulled it right out of the X-Files.
I don’t think Chris Carter ever thought that anyone would take his silly show seriously. And I don’t blame him for Trump or anything. (The same thing happened with Dr. Strangelove, which introduced fluoride conspiracy theories to the general public, except it was supposed to be ridiculous.) I do blame him for trying to capitalize on it well after he should have known better, though.
Anyway, it was full of all the dumbass tropes that make so much sci-fi embarrassing on rewatch. At least it gave us Gillian Anderson, though.
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I don't personally blame him for Trump, either - he was flabbergasted when people refused to believe the same evils of George W. Bush that they believed about the Clintons, for example. But I think the pop cultural mythos he created helped pave the way for Trump.
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I miss what he and Coast to Coast used to represent, I guess? Like he had on all kinds of weird point of views and everybody got the same air time and it was all interesting in a 3am kind of way. I went through a very intense period of First Amendment "Scholarship" in high school in the mid-late 90s and so I was aware of the sorts of things places like Paladin Press published and that was my gateway even before I got into the parts of the internet where stuff like Project Monarch was taken as common knowledge. And it was interesting and fun and weird in a fairly safe way aside from like, Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber. And now this thing I used to enjoy went mainstream and got all gross and wrong somehow. I mean, it was always kind of fucked up but it seems like the fucked up parts are all that's left now.
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By the way, I would add Joe Rogan to your list.
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