You don’t need a ticket to become a conspiracy theorist. Admission is free and it’s all in fun.
You can post your wildest ideas on the web and suggest whatever you’d like. How about questioning if the parents of the kids killed in the Newtown, Conn. School shooting are real parents or if they are actors? With a few keystrokes you can accuse them of shedding false tears.
The movie theatre shooting in Colorado? Staged. All actors.
You can also declare that your own president and his government actually killed all those children in Newtown because Obama wants to stir up support for gun control.
There are many Americans with an unquenchable thirst to disbelieve what their government says. When it comes to their president, they’d argue that black is white, so to speak. It’s a big country, chock full of small minds.
Skepticism is not a bad strategy when dealing with any level of authority, but an outright desire to dismiss all information because of the source verges on the psychotic.
Many National Rifle Association members are thirsty for the Kool-Aid dished out by the conspiracy theorists. The recipe is simple: add powder and stir, stir, stir until enough of them convince each other that the fix was in.
And NRA members – many of whom seem to feel they should be well armed against government tyranny – are bound to become even more resistant to change when they start to believe in a conspiracy.
Of course, there are few true Truthers when it comes to 9/11 or Newtown; those people willing to set up websites or sit down on talk shows to share their sick views. There are countless more drones across America who treat hard news like a reality show and need to see the script padded with a few more twists and turns, not because they don’t trust their president (be it Bush or Obama) but because news has become infotainment in North America.
The instant soapbox of the Internet and the advent of right-wing Fox News gives credence to conspiracy theorists and helps cement their wild claims in the minds of those susceptible to believing the flavour of the month.
Unlike the theories about the September 11 attacks that some people want to believe, Americans could see their future altered if Newtown conspiracies are swallowed by enough voters.
Ten years ago, Truthers could choose to believe 9/11 was an inside job but it didn’t have an effect on the government’s policies. George W. went to war anyway.
But on the gun control efforts triggered by Newtown, a sizeable chunk of voters that believe it was a government set-up could muddle the attempt to bring in policies designed to prevent more mass shootings. For if the Newtown massacre was approved by Obama, then what’s the need for new laws to control guns?
It’s hard to say where this willful stupidity leads. Could enough conspiracy-fueled gun nuts start a revolution, destroy the American government and break into the secret files? And when they find no mention of government murders or government demolition of the World Trade Center, only then will the real truth become clear. We are being ruled by an alien conspiracy.
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