List conspiracy theories here.

this one looks especially ominous - and super convenient! (I think I actually live in one of these):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/16/15-minute-city-planning-theory-conspiracists

Yeah, the Edinburgh weapons are all over this on Nextdoor.

It's baffling. My MP - one of the Actual Worst Ones - is full of this guff.

It seems fitting that a leaflet drop warning against Oxford’s traffic filters plan was organised by Not Our Future – a new pressure group led by none other than Fred and Richard Fairbrass of 1990s band turned anti-vaxxers Right Said Fred.

think the "logic" is that this is an extension of congestion charging / ULEZ / LTN to limit where people can drive their cars, and the next step will be everyone living in cages. People really care about where they can drive their cars I guess.

In Cambridge we have a proposal to introduce congestion charging, sounds fair enough, traffic is terrible here, but the neighbourhood WhatsApp is buzzing with fury, organising protests, etc. our local city councilor is in the group but is keeping very quiet about it, he's a green and is probably in favour of it, so probably smart to not mention it there.

A woman in my work was going on about this a few weeks ago - even though she can't drive and walks to work! Basically there are a couple of people at work who are full-on conspiracy nuts - they talk about this shit between themselves but tend to clam up around anyone else. The guy admits he's a conspiracy theorist, so at least he's honest!

Perhaps this is more of a UK phenomenon, I haven't heard anyone here talking about it as some ominous force

'here' being Bay Area California

UK right now feels like absolutely any old shit can gain traction

Just wait, you're were lagging behind us on transphobia but you're catching up and this one might be the next British invasion.

we just have everything home delivered now so there's no need for any civic life at all

Dave Emory is still going. For some reason, I thought his show was about debunking conspiracy theories. Au contraire. I'm gonna add his podcast to my going-to-sleep rotation.

Grimace's shake is killing people

(not really, but the shake being purple actually means it's made of Grimace)

I cracked up the other day watching teens doing a tiktok challenge where they show them getting a shake and then cut to them passed out/dead.

I feel like RFJ Jr.’s candidacy is another in a series of conservative-backed attempts to foster division in the Democratic party. It’s the oldest trick in the book, divide and conquer, and I think where conservative groups/money fail to generate ways to make Republican ideas more palatable to more groups and voting blocs, they will really lean into trying to break up the Democratic or even anti-Trump voting bloc (inasmuch as there actually is one). The evidence is there that D-leaning voters don’t always line up behind their party’s eventual nominee (e.g. Bernie/Hillary), so it only makes sense that they would look for ways to pry open gaps among Democratic voters. I tend to see things through that lens, including the rampant sexism regarding Democratic women politicians that starts in conservative circles and bleeds out into the general electorate (see Hillary once again) to the point where it’s hard to imagine any D woman being considered “electable” as President. And even though there may be legitimate concerns about Biden as the incumbent nominee, I think there is an element of ageism being fostered, in an attempt to split off younger/progressive voters (as opposed to the more typical attempts to split off moderate/independent voters from a D nominee). Deep-pocket conservative groups and think tanks see that they don’t have (and may not have for the foreseeable future) a unifying Republican candidate who can win on their own merits/appeal, and their only recourse is and will be to create/foster/widen any cracks they see in the Democratic voting bloc, such as it is. Democratic voters are not as easily led/cowed into subservience/worship as Republican voters are, and they see this as a weakness that can be exploited. Ultimately, there is a real need to prevent Republicans from getting their hands on any more levers of power, because we have seen that they are increasingly willing to bend or break any rule and use any levers they can to further cement their minority rule for generations to come. At this point, Democrats need to keep the presidency and the Senate going forward, otherwise they will lose any hope of undoing the damage done to/by the Supreme Court. It is indisputably a fact at this point that here will never be another SC Justice nominated by a D president to succeed to the bench unless the Senate is also held by the Democratic party. This is the reality now, the gloves are off, and as the Republican party grows more and more extreme, hostile, and unpalatable to younger voters, they will turn more and more to fostering division among Democrats. To return to RFK Jr., I see his candidacy as an attempt to sour any anti-vax or libertarian-leaning Democratic voters against Biden and bring them into the Republican fold, or at least turn them against voting for Biden when their preferred nominee ultimately fails. There is really no other reason for him to run as a Democrat- he is clearly not one. But his name, tough-guy image, and outspokenness may be enough to do some damage in this way. That’s my conspiracy theory.

I mean yeah, similar to how Tulsi Gabbard became a conservative darling as soon as it was clear she was a Democrat that hated gay people and voted against impeachment, conservatives are good as masquerading at independents and talking about how ridiculous it is that hardened leftists are "shutting RFK out". not to mention there are some colossal dumbfuck dem voters that buy into his shit too.

don't think this one will succeed as much because even though he's getting double digits in primary polling right now, he's doing worse than DeSantis is in the Republican primary, and I doubt this becomes a Jimmy Carter situation, but....it's annoying how many people fall for this shit over and over and how the media platforms these assholes.

Ugh, RFJ -> RFK, obv.

RFK
Not RFJ
what else do I have to say

We won’t elect this asshole
Even if he’s shirtless and he’s doing pushups

Kennedy’s numbers are sinking recently, a new poll from New Hampshire has him at under 10 percent (if you can’t be a spoiler there why bother).

Biden can only be damaged by someone primarying him from the left and Bernie’s run in 2020 didn’t really hurt him at all. No registered Democrat who votes in primaries is interested in the anti vax homo- transphobe who is running on nothing else than being a moron and bigot. Dude isn’t even pretending to be an economic populist or anything.

What’s hilarious/horrifying is that the conspiracy theorists are probably starting to see RFK Jr. as vindication of their bizarre JFK Jr.-as-conservative-savior theory. Like, “oh we read the tea-leaves wrong, it was the OTHER Kennedy scion we were waiting for!”

xp this level-headedness is uncalled for in the conspiracy theory thread!

some fun fanfic was posted the other day on reddit, from a supposed molecular biologist who has worked on alien genomes. like the autopsy but for the 21st century. an entertaining read.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/14rp7w9/from_the_late_2000s_to_the_mid2010s_i_worked_as_a/

MTV VJ Kennedy could probably get to 20% in some polls 18 months out purely on name recognition.

that reddit thread is wild.. people are really buying into his shit

I have a compilation of men's postwar magazines (Argosy, Saga, etc.) and the editors said that would completely fabricate important WWII battles.. but readers would only call them out on minor technicalities, i.e. "There's no way the Germans had the R-63 Wildcat in 1942, it was even completed until early 1944!" etc., without noting that the battle itself was totally fictional

I get the same drift from this reddit thread, like "what about gut bacteria?" Jeez louise you suckers

This American Life on Art Bell:

Someone sent Art this tape, which was supposedly recorded by scientists who were mining in Siberia. They drilled down nine miles until they smashed through into earth's hollow core. They measured the temperature at 2,000 degrees. And then they dropped down a super-sensitive microphone to listen to the tectonic movements. But they accidentally recorded the moanings of souls in hell.

So Art plays this tape on the air, and people call in to discuss the breakthrough because there are questions of methodology to be discussed. They're not saying, well, maybe hell doesn't exist, or even if hell exists, it's probably not in the center of the earth, or it would be easy for anyone to fake this. They're discussing the logistics of drilling a nine-mile hole and then dangling a microphone into it.

Oh, by the way, there’s Qanon movie in the top ten right now

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/07/07/sound-of-freedom-qanon-theories-jim-caviezel/

Fuck that movie and everyone who paid to see it

Posted about it in a diff thread

Is Art Bell still on the air? Or did he eventually get trapped in another dimension or something? I used to love listening to him whenever I happened to be out driving late at night. I remember one time someone had brought him a time machine, and he spent the whole part of the show that I heard going back and forth about whether he should try it. I never heard what happened.

Oh I see he died a few years ago. Or DID he.

He died in 2018. I remember he disappeared from the air and said his son had been kidnapped and infected with AIDS. I thought it was a weird stunt but it turned out to be true.

Someone sent Art this tape, which was supposedly recorded by scientists who were mining in Siberia. They drilled down nine miles until they smashed through into earth's hollow core. They measured the temperature at 2,000 degrees. And then they dropped down a super-sensitive microphone to listen to the tectonic movements. But they accidentally recorded the moanings of souls in hell.
So Art plays this tape on the air, and people call in to discuss the breakthrough because there are questions of methodology to be discussed. They're not saying, well, maybe hell doesn't exist, or even if hell exists, it's probably not in the center of the earth, or it would be easy for anyone to fake this. They're discussing the logistics of drilling a nine-mile hole and then dangling a microphone into it.

the tape of the souls in Hell circulated among credulous evangelicals for a while. The recording of the souls screaming in torment turned out to be pitch-shifted from the 1972 Mario Bava film Baron Blood

The Cydonia Face on Mars is another Art Bell classic.

Do super sensitive microphones like high temperatures? Record without distortion at them and remain intact etc

&isn't the earth hollow anyway? I mean otherwise how would the Nazis live down there? I saw a documentary on SyFy

All about the mic placement, I’m sure Steve Albini would know.

If I was to record the moanings of souls in hell I'd use a Behringer mic.

use a disposable mic cos the souls in torment aren't exactly trustworthy innit?

Thanks to a trove of old ’90s Art Bell episodes on Archive.org, I listened to a bunch of them while rewatching The X-Files last year. It was fun but tainted by the suspicion that if I googled a lot of these folks, they are probably now right-wing cranks. I mean, they were cranks back then, but the show/topics often had an apolitical air that made even government conspiracies a bit more fantastical in the vein of "Bigfoot is real" rather than "Dems are secretly sex trafficking children”. Fantasy, really.

Ditto The X-Files, too. The show didn’t have right-wing intent—all that post-Watergate paranoia leaned left, if anything, especially when it tied stuff like Operation Paperclip into its mythology—but it was hard for the modern political environment not to shade my viewing. I mean, the big baddie of the show is basically the deep state, and there’s whole plot about a vaccine that is a cover for collecting DNA from abductees.

That’s basically Glenn Greenwald’s whole schtick—Mulder used to seem like an anti-establishment leftie, now he’d be read as a right winger.

I'm not usually a fan of disinformation pranks but I'll make an exception here

I work at AMC and just got fired for refusing to add this liquid to a customer’s soda. We were instructed specifically to serve this to Sound of Freedom audiences. I am a microbiology student and took it to the lab to examine and found what looks like nanobots inside. pic.twitter.com/UHpULlfof2

— andrew (@mrnastynodrama) July 12, 2023

I'm not usually a fan of disinformation pranks but I'll make an exception here

I work at AMC and just got fired for refusing to add this liquid to a customer’s soda. We were instructed specifically to serve this to Sound of Freedom audiences. I am a microbiology student and took it to the lab to examine and found what looks like nanobots inside. pic.twitter.com/UHpULlfof2

— andrew (@mrnastynodrama) July 12, 2023

Ditto The X-Files, too. The show didn’t have right-wing intent—all that post-Watergate paranoia leaned left,

I was thinking about this recently and I wonder if the main difference is scale. The deep state conspiracy was small in number and hidden, whereas now the conservative conspiratorialism is massive and all-encompassing, everyone is in on it. In some ways conspiratorialism on the right isn't really even conspiratorialism, its things out in the open, democracy, bureacracy, regulations, laws, administration. Groups of people having a meeting is inherently suspect, it should be one guy telling the others what to do

That x-files type conspiracy stuff seems the anomaly though, not what we see today

all digital media is turning teal

Mr Beast is the antichrist.

Antichrist has fewer subscribers

i'm spreading my own conspiracy theory. it goes like this. joe biden had hunter arrested - instead of the phony plea deal that was just a red herring or a macguffin or something - and he will have him convicted and then anyone who has ever done drugs will not be able to buy a gun in the future. it will be called: The Hunter Law.

i'm still working on some of the details...

the fact that a (sinister but unpspecified) "THEY" can "CONTROL THE WEATHER" goes back at least to kurt vonnegut's brother bernard discovering silver iodide is effective in cloud-seeding -- plus there's a famous funny-cringey passage in trotsky's LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION where he declares that mankind will one day (after the revolution, via machines) ) master all of nature including the waves and the clouds ect ect

anyway there was a little old lady -- querulous yet also vociferous -- explaining loudly to the whole tolerant post office, as plymouth prepares for STORM AGNES to make landing, that the russians can stop and start tempests at will, which is why the tanks and rockets in the mayday parade are never seen to get wet