Does anyone actually know a real "5g causes corona" person? I've seen them at marches, that's about it.
They didn't strike me as being normal people taken in by misinformation - instead I figured they had some sort of mental issue like schizophrenia or whatever.
I think that most people massively overstate the amount of genuine crackpottery that exists and instead just resort to calling people they disagree with or are uncomfortable with conspiracy theorists.
As an example, the article lumps in "masks are a control mechanism" with "5g towers cause coronavirus".
The UK government explicitly states that their nudge unit believes in the use of masking as a way to remind people that coronavirus is about. It is being used as a control mechanism, that's incontrovertible fact - it's probably also useful for reducing the spread of coronavirus (but perhaps not for total happiness).
It's not even a conspiracy because it's out in the open.
By contrast the 5g stuff is obviously mental and makes no sense at all.
>Does anyone actually know a real "5g causes corona" person? I've seen them at marches, that's about it.
Social bubbles, man. Go to any place where "new age" people hang out. You'll find them by the dozen. They also - collectively - believe in a veritable smorgasborg of quasi-religious beliefs a la crystal healing. It's important to understand that "belief" doesn't mean the same thing for them as it does for you and I, for their in-group is determined by a staunch refusal to police any notion of objective truth. Maybe they don't all believe 5g causes covid, maybe only 5% of them do, but if someone pipes up with that at a gathering not a single person will challenge them. Instead what will happen is that someone will chime in with their own different, related conspiracy theory / piece of nonsense. Everyone gets to pick and choose which myths resonate best with themselves, and yet collectively they reinforce each other.
There are literally millions of these people. In my opinion they're also one charismatic leader away from being a fascist voting bloc.
I like your analysis, and it sounds reasonable and true to me. But in it, there are the seeds of an approach to better Turkey Day dinners.
Their reluctance to criticize sounds like a recipe for getting along at large seasonal family gatherings, Thanksgiving, etc. So many dinners are wrecked these days because, "Hey, I just gotta correct Uncle Billy's naive political beliefs." Maybe it's better to let Uncle Billy remember that he loves his seldom seen nephew than to engage him in what may morph into an irritating, demeaning argument in front of the whole clan. People are more influenced by those they love or like, than by those who mercilessly point out the weaknesses of their belief in front of others.
And how many people let grandma or grandpa say the absolute nastiest things in the name of "harmony".
I can assure you, the person being attacked doesn't think its very harmonious. And having even one person stand up and say "That's unacceptable" can help the mental state of that victim tremendously.
I will let most things pass until some gets targeted. Then I'm not so quiet anymore.
In addition, silence gives consent. If nobody challenges a belief, then it "becomes apparent" that everybody agrees. That may not be true, but unless a single person steps up, everybody else may stay quiet.
You only need a few vocal, motivated people willing to cow everybody into submission if nobody ever voices opposition.
Yep. Agreed. There comes a point at which silence is no longer an option. Navigating family gatherings has probably always been treacherous. Hard to know when to remain silent, and commiserate later with the obvious target of undeserved criticism, and when it's egregious enough to say, "No more!"
And I'm guessing they don't have much interest in learning statistics? I think statistical thinking is one of the best tools we have for sorting all this out on an individual level.
I wish universities would use statistics as the "weed them out" class instead of calculus. As one example, make the nursing students take statistics instead of calculus; I'm not sure they need either, but statistics will be more useful in their lives and career.
fascist? Many of these types are hard core leftist hippie types, just as if not more liable to vote for deep green or progressive candidates. Please, not every stupidity need be attributed to the right. That's just absurd bias.
From personal experience, I've witnessed "leftist hippie types" become fascist assholes spouting batshit insane anti-semitic bullshit after watching a few youtube videos. If you care for the person, you have to treat them with respect and de-escalate through rational conversation. This takes time and considerable effort. What makes it so mind-numbing is that you know the person you're talking to is otherwise somewhat intelligent (they've lasted this long) and capable of thinking it through. I don't care what you're political views are, this bullshit is indiscriminate. As Rob Corddry once said, "The facts have a well-known liberal bias."
Many on the progressive or even classic left are indeed strongly anti Semitic due to their support for Palestine and the Arabs against Israel. Much of this is based in very valid arguments against Isreali government policies, but it can easily veer into the downright visceral against jews in that region. It's not just a fascist idea.
Fully agreed, which is why I specifically mentioned that there are valid criticisms and people who use those as a springboard for actual anti-semitism.
I only mentioned what I've witnessed. To say "Many on the progressive or even classic left" is hyperbole. Consider using a specific example instead of hearsay. You don't want people thinking you're a disingenuous shill, do you?
That's the thing. The political "spectrum" isn't really real. Extremism comes in lots of fun flavors.
What the new-age hippie leftist types and the far-right evangelicals have in common, apart from a fairly casual relationship with objective truth and a deep distrust of the state, is that they favor a simplistic, absolutist Lord-of-the-rings-esque good-vs-evil style framing of the world. Fascism and vaguely occult symbolism have a long history of symbiosis. This renders New Age types with their laissez-faire attitude to new memes easy prey for propaganda merchants.
Nowhere did parent categorise these people as 'right'. Merely observed that this group is not far away (and IMHO in process of) being coopted, by largely fascist types (at least overhere in Europe).
Sure they have, no doubt, especially the Nazis, but aside from these extremes, most conservative movements (without necessarily being fascist, because it's a fairly specific ideology) tend no more towards weird and completely irrational conspiracy beliefs than do many new age hippie types with strong left-leaning tendencies. Did the whole bunch of you completely miss finding out about the late 60s to early 70s? It was full of cult movements, insane conspiracy beliefs and rigidly unreal dogmas that had a strong leftist or even marxist flavor. Having ideologically tendency shouldn't leave one blind to entire historical tendencies.
So, we agree: so-called "lefty" new age types are prone to whacko conspiracy theories and are dangerously politically unstable, in the same way as the "alt right" that gets so much more attention. That was literally the point I was making.
It's a little worrying that you got so defensive because I used the word "fascism".
In that case apologies, I misunderstood you to be claiming that this sort of emotional instability was uniquely the domain of people who fall into fascism.
That's an interesting viewpoint. Something I've been perplexed by is when I go to /r/conspiracy to see what the "other side" is saying, I see groups of commenters seeming to believe they agree with each other but they're expressing beliefs that are mutually exclusive.
For example that vaccines are subversive for an entirely different purposes. Microchips, financial greed, mass genocide, virus distribution, etc.
I think the word "mental" is doing too much work. It's productive to distinguish between "a minority suffering from a medicalized cognitive dysfunction like schizophrenia who can be safely ignored in the public discourse" and "a substantial and quasi-organized fraction of the population which behaves in a dangerously unreasonable manner".
In other words, are religious fanatics "mental"? Is this a useful categorization, when they're everywhere?
I agree. I've been lazy with my use of language, I'm categorising both insane and unreasonable people together, I suppose because I see them as existing on the same spectrum (i.e. when people act in extremely unreasonable ways, we medicalise it, whereas when they're just a bit unreasonable, we consider it to be normal variance).
The effect seems to be the same though, that you shouldn't use their opinions to inform policy because they're not using causal reasoning. Basically, to listen to them would be populist. It might be a vote winner in the short term but it's a bad thing in the medium to long term.
Or, on a more individual level - I don't hang out with these people because well, it's pointless. We can't get on, we can't learn anything from each other, they're broken humans.
Part of me has difficulties understanding why wearing a mask has had so much backlash. It is a trivial thing to do, and something people in many countries were already doing pre pandemic.
My experience has been that many people who are not in favour of masks think that they are being enforced for reasons other than public safety.
I haven't fully figured it out, but yes, I think people doubt masking was really a public health measure.
My hypothesis about what's going on in people's subconscious, based in part on my own thoughts: your face is a key part of your identity, and pressure or mandate to cover your face is in no small part a demand to cover your identity in the name of conformity. Some people react to this very strongly, if they're inclined to believe "the authorities" want to enforce conformity that way. Add the plain physical discomfort and some flip flopping from the CDC, and you've got a mess.
There might have been some reason for masks early in the pandemic but at this point there is no valid scientific or medical reason for most people to be wearing masks. It's pure politics and virtue signaling with no significant public health benefit.
Flu and covid are spread similarly. The masks slow down the transmission of covid and flu, so you don't die. The indication that flu transmission has virtually stopped is an indicator that the transmission rate of covid could be much higher than it is.
Imagine that you were loudly proclaiming yourself to be an Irish Protestant, in a rather rough Catholic neighborhood in Northern Ireland. Or vice versa.
No, it's not particularly rational. But when there are distrustful, angry, or hostile groups of humans involved, "rational" describes very little of how things usually go.
It's a step along the spectrum of why this textual interaction is not the same as a real world interaction.
Another example would be the plexiglass screens in shops. Theoretically it's just a clear thing that blocks spit. In practice it means there's a psychological barrier which "others" you from each other.
They're also physically uncomfortable.
Describing this as "trivial" is needlessly provocative. You might not care about it, that's not the same as it being irrelevant.
Masks in March of 2020 vs 2022 are kind of different. What is "Trivial" to you isn't to everybody... my covid-vaccinated ESL 5 year old has to cover their face & learn from a covid-vaccinated teacher who's face is covered all day. My child's speech, social & emotional learning isn't trivial to me.
As a German, I find this particular strange among my fellow Germans, because - jokes and prejudice aside - we really like to regulate things and err on the side of caution a lot of the time.
And often enough said laws and regulations are ignored if people perceive them to be overly restrictive, overly cautious, or just pointless. Sometimes people find out the hard way there was a very good reason for those (i.e. get seriously injured or killed), sometimes people get punished for ignoring them (ranging from fines to prison), but a lot of the time there are no real consequences unless something bad happens as a result. Drive a car without wearing a seat belt? Unless you run into a police officer or an accident, there are no negative consequences[0].
I suspect that part of the reason is the backlash people who refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated face from the rest of society. If you ride the bus or train without a mask, those who do may perceive you as putting them at risk and call you out on it. In fact, over here, you are required to wear a mask to use public transportation - if you don't, the bus driver will refuse to go, ask you to leave, and call the police unless you comply one way or the other. Same goes for pretty much any business.
Someone who refuses to wear a mask may think it's just another one of those pointless rules, except that this time, everyone else is totally up in arms about enforcing it to the letter. I am certain there's a lot more to it, but I have a hunch this plays into it.
It is very strange, though. I don't like wearing a mask, either, but even if I was seriously opposed to it, at some point I would just comply so I don't have to deal with people nagging me or bus drivers throwing me off the bus.
[0] Of course, no one ever entered a car and thought, "Today feels like an accident-prone day, I'd better wear my seat belt just this once."
There's also the social signalling effect, right. Imagine that you think that the (made up) Yellow Party are arseholes. They pass a law that makes it a legal requirement to wear the little yellow pin badge. Their reasoning is that advertising their presence is a good thing, because they stand for good in the world, and so by wearing their pin society improves as more people learn and are reminded they exist.
Is it a huge imposition? No, it's trivial. You won't _physically_ notice it.
But if you think the Yellows are wrong, then wearing a little badge is really going to piss you off. At best you might try to make parody of it - maybe you'll write "I hate Yellows" with the little yellow badge and wear that.
Masks are like that. If you don't want to wear one for whatever reason, you're going to resent being forced.
I make an active point of not wearing a mask because I think everyone is going to get coronavirus and that "slowing the spread" is no longer a meaningful concept. It's already spread, it's everywhere, almost everyone I know has had it and if that's too anecdotal you can look at the UK stats.
I'm vaccinated, so I'm not that worried for myself. But the part of town where I live has a large population of elderly people and people with disabilities and illnesses that put them at a higher risk of getting seriously sick or even dying of Covid, so in my situation wearing a mask, keeping my distance, etc. is - IMHO - an act of solidarity as much as anything else.
In Germany, people had to postpone surgery, including for things like cancer, because too many anesthesiologists are busy taking care of Covid patients in ICUs.
Maybe that just means "flattening the curve" has already failed beyond recovery. But if somebody you know has operable cancer and has to postpone surgery until it might no longer be operable, it's not easy to remain nonchalant about it.
Plus, I need to ride the bus, shop for groceries, and so forth, so I'll continue wearing a mask for the foreseeable future.
It reminds me of the day that Twitter, Facebook, and the Apple store all banned Alex Jones on the same day and then denied they were working together to do it. Then they called anyone who had a problem with that a "conspiracy theorist".
I mean, that was literally the definition of a conspiracy. It isn't a theory. It was more of a "conspiracy fact".
> Does anyone actually know a real "5g causes corona" person? I've seen them at marches, that's about it.
The people that I know about will not express such a strong opinion. But they are not sure about what to believe, and people in their circle may share many conspiracies. So, they are not strong believers but may decide to not vaccinate as they "hear things about the vaccine".
> It is being used as a control mechanism
I think that you are missing the degree. One thing is to create a reminder that we are in a pandemic, another it's to think that a government in the shadow is using control mechanisms to brainwash the population so they can take over the country.
Both are "control mechanisms" if you want that interpretation. But, only the second one is referred in the news because it's a conspiracy theory. So, it fits with the 5G desease thinking.
>I think that you are missing the degree. One thing is to create a reminder that we are in a pandemic, another it's to think that a government in the shadow is using control mechanisms to brainwash the population so they can take over the country.
Then its an idiotic, bullying and frankly authoritarian "reminder" that should be thoroughly rejected as a piece of government policy. Forcing people to do something you the controller largely believe useless just to emotionally "remind them" that they should submit to a series of control measures is not something worth applauding.
It's akin to a parent randomly punishing a child in minor ways for no good reason just to remind them who's in charge. That would be considered abusive. From government it's okay?
An important part of the problem, I think, is that there are plenty of examples of large corporations putting people at risk or harming them, either knowingly or out of negligence, and then lying like a rug about it or trying to cover it up.
Think of the tobacco industry denying or downplaying the risks of smoking, knowing full well about the harm it causes. Or the pharma industry pushing opioids on physicians and patients, claiming with a straight face they were not addictive. I'm too lazy right now to go looking, but I'm certain there are plenty more cases like this. Suspecting large corporations or even entire industries of putting profits above the health or lives of lots and lots of people is not really crazy.
Suspecting that Covid vaccines are a vector of implanting microchips in people so they can be mind-controlled via 5g is crazy, IMHO. But the line between these is somewhat blurry. And neither corporations nor governments seem to be doing a very good job of dealing with this other than paint people who are hovering in that blurry area in the crazy corner. One may feel morally righteous in doing so, but it is very counterproductive. If we want people to come back to the "sane side", we need to convince them, not pressure or insult them.
Is it blurry? It seems to me like the difference comes about when you move from something which is reasonably plausible or justifiable but can be shown evidentially to be incorrect, versus something that's just well, random.
"I don't trust vaccines because pharmaceutical companies have a financial incentive for me to take them/my government is forcing me/etc" are reasonable viewpoints to hold. The reasoning is based on correct information and true premises, it's sensible to be skeptical of something that suddenly comes out of nowhere and is being pushed from all angles.
You can even hold that viewpoint and take the vaccine anyway because you figure, sure, they want to push them, but that doesn't mean they're not also actually useful and beneficial for the recipients.
I'm struggling to explain here, but basically, the right side of the equation "X is happening" is correct, but the left side "therefore Y" is problematic.
"I don't trust vaccines because they have 5g microchips in" is wrong on both sides. They don't have 5g microchips in, we can show that. Even if they had an incentive to do so, they can't.
That's the line in my view, whether something is even possible.
A lot of people that go full-on cuckoo bananas conspiracy theorist start out with a realization like "big pharma is pushing opioids on the people, killing thousands, just to line their pockets", and then gradually slide towards things like "Bill Gates wants to microchip people so he can control their brains". It's not like they go from 0 to 100 in a single step.
The best metaphor I can come up with is the event horizon of a black hole. To an outside observer, it's a very sharp line indeed. But to somebody falling into a black hole, Wikipedia tells me, it is impossible to tell when they cross the event horizon. If you only observe specific points, there is a clear line between sane and crazy; but if you move between these points, you probably don't perceive that line as you approach and cross it.
And human beings have a strong tendency, once they accept some kind of belief, to interpret all evidence/observations so as to support that belief, even if it seems to prove the exact opposite to someone who doesn't share that belief.
Yeah, I suppose. I wonder if it's more that they're teetering on the edge and then some traumatic experience just bounces them in.
Based on personal experience I've had times when I've felt like I've veered towards cuckoo land and it's usually been from trauma.
Like, at some point last year I started to lose the plot.
All of the stuff I wanted to do with my life just disappeared - universities gone, work gone, study groups gone, travel very restricted or gone. And the supermarkets started putting up barriers and everyone put stuff on their face, the pubs were closed, people started walking in weird directions around shops and talking about "social distancing" and making stuff illegal and blah blah blah.
And it just fucked with me, it made me feel schizophrenic, because I just don't get this as a response to coronavirus. It felt like, well, you have a 1% chance of dying, maybe 10% if you're in an at-risk group, so just kill yourself now (remove everything that makes life worth living) to avoid the risk. And all I could do is just think about all of the downstream long term permanent effects.
It made me think - is there something underlying this? Like, are the government pushing this because they know something worse is coming down the line (is this a trial run to protect against sars-cov-3 that wipes out 20% of us?). But why are other people just going along with it?
And all the time what seemed like _everyone_ was wandering around acting as if this thing was super bad, and here's me just like, trying to get on with it. I remember walking around empty streets, closed up stores, and just thinking like, what? why? am I in a dream? And it went on for months and months, a year.
Then I'd just be wandering around in a haze, and the cause and effect was disconnected, and meh. It's hard to even word it. I just had some sort of episode.
I've snapped out of it now, but I mean really I've only managed to do that because I'm quite disconnected (I don't work a 9-5, my country has quite lax restrictions, etc).
If I were one of the truckers or whatever and someone was telling me "do this or I'll turn your life upside down" I'd probably be into batshit theories too. If I were in Australia or NZ I don't even think I'd be alive, lol.
I mean, we're still doing some of this shit.
I now know that my countrymen would lock me in a box for months on end to add 1% to their life expectancy. It seems totally horrific when I write that down, but yet people still openly discuss this as if it's some totally normal thing like buying a big mac or whatever. Just odd.
I know what you mean. And I feel for you, as well as countless others who got f___ed over by the virus without even catching it.
Beyond those who died from it, Covid incurred a mental health debt our societies will pay off for years, probably decades, to come. Maybe decades. Suicide attempts among teenagers have doubled over the last 18-or-so months. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I've had to deal with my fair share of mental health issues, but I'm kind of a loner, so the Covid restrictions were not as hard on me as on others. But as a species, we're very social beings, and being disconnected from others is a recipe for a mental health disaster that - say, 10 to 20 years from now - might look even worse than the damage the virus itself did.
FWIW, my godmother holds a yearly Easter-brunch that she has cancelled two years in a row now and will probably cancel again, come Easter. I'm not a religious person, but that brunch has been a fixture in my year for as long as I can remember. I miss it dearly. Likewise, a close friend of my mother's holds a Christmas party every year, again, for as long as I can remember. Cancelled, two years in a row, and who knows if it will be cancelled this year.
It is important, I think, to acknowledge the pain this virus has caused on all of us, even if we got away.
And we - I mean human beings in general - need to make sense of things, at a very fundamental level. If we run out of sensible explanations for what's happening around us, we turn to the irrational.
On a more abstract level, I think living in a modern industrialized capitalist economy incurs a mental health cost we rarely acknowledge. And Covid has turned up the volume to the max. Unfortunately, when we, as a society, acknowledge this mental health cost, our response is to throw pills at it instead of dealing with the underlying pathology.
It feels like if we don't do anything about it, we'll run into a World-War-II-Holocaust-level disaster far sooner than anyone alive right now should be comfortable with. If I look back at history, though, this has happened before, repeatedly, and we failed to learn the lessons offered to us on a silver platter.
I wish I had something more hopeful to say. So let me say this: Nietzsche once said that we have art so we don't die from the truth. The more I think about this, the more I find this to be true. That's what art is for. Life can be a neverending horror show, but through art, we can transform that horror into beauty. Last but not least, it is a means for us to connect to our fellow human beings, even when the lockdown otherwise disconnects us from them.
"The UK government explicitly states that their nudge unit believes in the use of masking as a way to remind people that coronavirus is about." --> I tried searching for this, but I couldn't find where this was stated. Can you share a link?
Are they mentally well adjusted in other ways? Like, if neither of you bring up coronavirus, can you have a proper conversation with them or are they odd?
Yes we can. Theyre not rigorous thinkers, and theres a gap in education level between us, but about various subjects we've had normal conversations.
My take away out of all of this, is that 'social media' is far worse for us than most of us think. It amplifies the worst of the worst disproportionately.
I think it is worth mentioning this article isn't labeling everyone as a conspiracy theorist.
"When we talk about grand conspiracy theories, we mean the claim that there exists a secret plot between a large number of powerful people or organizations, usually an entire industry or many large governments, to consistently deceive us in order to reach an often evil goal."
In specific the article references QAnon and the ideas disiminated by the group.
The flat earth conspiracy theory really made me reevaluate how difficult it is to prove just about anything. As best as I can tell, the easiest way for one person to independently verify the earth is not flat is by watching the hull of a boat disappear before the mast. That's not super conclusive in my opinion because it relies on looking at an object over a couple miles away. This realization evaded most of mankind 600 years ago, so I'd argue it's not overwhelmingly obvious. Similarly, the curvature of the earth isn't observable from a commercial airline flight's standard altitude and window construction.
This is all to say that people refuse to believe things that they cannot personally verify. For the record, I believe the earth is an oblong spheroid.
You can see the same effect on land with a tower and an open plain. Also you can observe the shadow the Earth casts on the moon during a lunar eclipse. It's actually been known since antiquity that the earth is round, though I don't know if most of mankind knew that or if they would have cared.
If you're referring to Columbus with the 600 years ago statement, he actually did some dodgy math to say the Earth was much smaller around than others thought which is why he thought he had a shortcut to India. He would have perished had he not had the good luck to run into a whole other continent that just happened to be in the way. To me the craziest aspect of all of that is that somehow we still refer to Native Americans (somewhat pejoratively) as Indians based on a half millennia old mistake.
> You can see the same effect on land with a tower and an open plain.
On land, you could attribute any observed curvature to geology. On water, there does not seem to be any other way to explain curvature. I see parents point about how personally verifying is both essential to some (many?) of these critics, and quite hard to do rigorously.
It's not quite that easy. One could suppose that light falls due to gravity. So the light from the bottom of a far-away ship falls into the ocean before it reaches you, leaving only the top of the ship visible to you.
I vaguely recall that historically the round shadow of the earth during lunar eclipses was one good piece of evidence.
> If you're referring to Columbus with the 600 years ago statement
Indeed I was but not necessarily him specifically, but the average Javascript engineer at the time.
I was just now reading about Eratosthenes[0], to check my priors because I had been taught some people had speculated it way earlier. The article claims:
> By around 500 B.C., most ancient Greeks believed that Earth was round, not flat
That surprised me. But, here I'm stuck thinking how difficult is me to verify that claim. I'd probably need a few years of Classics and then access artifacts that are one thousand years old. I can totally understand how earnest skepticism unravels into madness.
Carl Sagan talked about Eratosthenes in Cosmos[0] actually which is what I was thinking of. He was also able to make a good estimate of the size of the Earth as well. The video has a good explanation of how it was done.
Bumped into a chemtrails evangelist at the local office supply store.
Rural US, people believe everything out here. The more sparse the population, the stranger it gets. I don't think this is a new phenomenon; cultists were quite the thing in the early 1990s, essentially before modern web browsers. Although dial-up BBS and Usenet had provided a forum for odd bits for a couple of decades, I'm not aware of a universal search engine that could easily lead people into the Revealed Truth.
The 1990s focused the crazy, as gonzo eschatology was not post-Y2K-compliant.
If you can tolerate evangelical tent meetings, that's also a vast ecosystem for remarkable creeds.
I think the wide availability of the internet actually made things worse, not better. Before the internet, there was always magazines that dealt with these subjects, pamphlets that people hand printed, books (back when bookstores were a thing). You definitely had to go out of your way to find that stuff, but it was always there. A lot of older technology like numbers stations[4] must have fed into a general feeling of unease with governments as well, they could be tuned into with relatively simple equipment but their use was opaque and well protected.
The following list is by no means exhaustive but offers a few examples of serious, not serious / parody works.
The outright hoaxes meant to spread misinformation seem to be relatively common, easily spread by word of mouth or cheap pamphlets and endemic.
Recent-ish but pre-internet dissemination of wild theories that occasionally sucked people in: The Stranglers made an album about men in black[0], "The Illuminatus! Trilogy"[1] covers a few different conspiracies that were apparently influenced by letters to Playboy.
The Fortean Times[2] started in the 1970s although it seems not all the writing was meant to be taken seriously. Some people did though.
More seriously and much older, The Miscegenation Hoax[3] was an actual conspiracy to discredit Lincoln.
They didn't strike me as being normal people taken in by misinformation - instead I figured they had some sort of mental issue like schizophrenia or whatever.
I think that most people massively overstate the amount of genuine crackpottery that exists and instead just resort to calling people they disagree with or are uncomfortable with conspiracy theorists.
As an example, the article lumps in "masks are a control mechanism" with "5g towers cause coronavirus".
The UK government explicitly states that their nudge unit believes in the use of masking as a way to remind people that coronavirus is about. It is being used as a control mechanism, that's incontrovertible fact - it's probably also useful for reducing the spread of coronavirus (but perhaps not for total happiness).
It's not even a conspiracy because it's out in the open.
By contrast the 5g stuff is obviously mental and makes no sense at all.