Between high school and college, I took a gap year and went to India to experience the world and learn how to cook. During my time there, I took up a new hobby, podcasting. It seems innocent enough at surface level, but I quickly found a podcast that piqued my interest and was centered around conspiracy theories. I lost myself embarrassingly quickly within these theories.
They were posed by commanding voices with the assurance that research had been done, and everything they were saying was true. I found myself questioning the reality of the world around me; not that this is inherently negative, but it is if you go too far down the rabbit hole.
Personally, I am thankful for flat-earthers, if only for the fact that when that conspiracy came to light one of the show’s hosts latched onto it immediately. This theory was too far-fetched for even my brainwashed mind, and I quickly questioned all of the other things I had listened to and came back to reality.
I share the above story to show that I fully understand the allure of conspiracy theories. They make one feel powerful, or “woke”. They are portrayed as things that are true about the world that the majority of people do not know. This means that once you accept them as true, you are part of a special club that knows exactly how the world actually works.
Once the idea is cemented in one’s mind that there is a secret hidden reality that is entirely different from the one most people experience, it is hard to shake. People then fall further and further into this pseudo-reality, accepting anything that gets suggested with the slightest bit of research.
This idea that Democratic leadership routinely sacrifices children to Satan is insane. If people had not already been drawn in by conspiracy theories, many of which were perpetuated by Trump’s cultism, QAnon would not exist.
This is how QAnon became as pervasive of an idea as it is. An idea was presented that fit with several other widely spread conspiracies within the conspiracy theory community: Jews somehow control the world through a banking oligarchy, celebrities are snake people that ritually sacrifice babies, Hillary Clinton is the devil, etc… The idea was that Democrat leaders are pedophiles that rape and then murder children and Donald Trump is (or was) going to arrest them all.
Rational people do not jump from reality as we know it to the insanity that QAnon is, there are stepping stones that draw people in. Please, as someone who was once brainwashed by the allure of conspiracy theories, be wary of these stepping stones, and do not lose yourself to falsehoods.
