re: Let’s address the elephant in the room: the conspiracy folks

I don’t understand how anyone who lived through the pandemic still doubts the government’s abilities to influence MASSIVE social and economic changes against the will of their constituents via propaganda.

It’s one thing to criticize individual conspiracies by picking apart the portions that just don’t hold up to intense scrutiny or are based on misunderstandings. However, I do not understand people who, in 2022, assume that people who subscribe to “conspiracy theories” are somehow insane, dumb, or otherwise “less than”. We have just experienced one of the most incredible government over-reactions in history, resulting in such unthinkable outcomes as jailing pastors for holding church services, preventing children from leaving their homes, banning funeral attendance, and locking nursing home patients in their rooms so they could not see their relatives all while Covid positive patients were forcibly admitted to those same nursing homes. We also have political protestors being held without bail, charge, and access to attorneys; having exculpatory evidence suppressed; having their bank accounts frozen; etc. This is some seriously authoritarian dystopian stuff, and it’s happening now in the open.

We saw these things happen, and they are insane. Before you dismiss a conspiracy off-hand, ask yourself if it’s really MORE insane than what we are witnessing? While a lot of conspiracies are false, a lot of them are later proven true. We have lived through one of the greatest conspiracies in human history, so very few conspiracies really can compare in sheer unbelievability.