Coworker. I told him to fuck off with his conspiracy bullshit. But back when I patronized him, one thing he said was that he didn’t consider belief a binary as in that you either believe something or don’t. He viewed all beliefs as a continuum. You can believe one thing 10% and another thing 90%, but he wouldn’t let me pin him down as to whether he “believed” any particular thing or not.
All while trying to convince me “tall white aliens” run the U.S. government and Sandy Hook was faked by a bunch of actors and the U.S. military had invisibility technology and planes that aren’t dumping weather-controlling chemicals don’t leave trails in the sky. Pretty standard QAnon-level bullshit. But if I asked him if he believed any of those things, he wouldn’t answer. Honestly, it makes sense as a dishonest rhetorical tactic.
Dude also literally drinks borax in his juice cleanse drink.
Like everyone here in have stories but instead of adding to the pile may I offer a simple solution. I tell people who fall this stuff to make a list and post it on their fridge. If just one of them turns out to be true they can call me up and rub it in my face. There are two reasons I suggest this. First, the people in the media who push this stuff keep a steady flow of BS incoming. They put out a new one to distract from the last one. Second, back in 2011 I realized it’s like a cult and I did a little looking into what it takes to get people to snap out of it. The expert I found said there is nothing you can do, folks have to reach their own conclusions. Should any of your friends come around just let it go, don’t make a big deal about it.
I tried something somewhat like this once.
He’d constantly be like “something big is coming very soon, just wait.” And I kept pressing him for “due dates”. Like by what date are you 99% sure “it” (like, official announcements that ETs have been living among us disguised as humans since the 60s or whatever) will have happened? Because if he gives a date, I can finally nail him down and say “hey, so, you were wrong, see? The incorrectness of your prediction is some amount of disconfirming evidence right?”
So when he finally did tell me a “due date” for one of his conspiracy theories, I kept that in the forefront of my brain. He said that Trump would arrest “thousands” of high-profile Democrat pedophiles engaged in child sex trafficking within a year after his first term in office started.
Well, it happened! Not really. All the right-wing news outlets vastly misrepresented an FBI sex trafficking bust that had nothing to do with Trump or “high-profile Democrats” as the one and the same massive bust of sex-trafficking high-profile Democrats that Q and Fox News and my conspiracist former friend had predicted. And it fell within the timeframe he predicted.
Of course, it was horse shit. This was no confirmation of his wacky theories. But to him, I was just being willfully blind to the obvious vindication of his prediction.
The lesson I took from that was that the fantasy they live in is far to resilient against actual reality to be phased even a little bit by any actual real-world events. And promising someone bragging rights “if such-and-such of your predictions come to pass” isn’t going to pan out for you as well as you might hope. It would require them to have a connection to reality for that to work, and they don’t.
Altered Carbon, s01e08, writer Brian Nelson