Qwazy, Just Qwazy

You probably have come across a bizillion articles and videos on BuzzFeed, Cracked, Business Insider, Popular Mechanics and elsewhere mocking the idea of conspiracy.  In fact, the terms “crazy,” “wacky.” and “insane are almost used as standard epithets.  Most of these countdown/clickbait presentations include a mixture of items that are presented as equally implausible, widely believed among (crazy, wacky, or insane) “conspiracy theorists” and somehow dangerous to the public.

Citing the above sources, for example we find that there exists widespread belief that:

1.  The Beatles never existed.
2.  Former-US President Barack Obama can control the weather.
3.  Saddam Hussein had a Stargate.
4.  Numerous kids/teen television shows are controlled by the Illuminati.
5.  Hitler is still alive.
6.  The Hadron Collider can wake up ancient Egyptian gods.
7.  The Moon doesn’t exist.
8.  Jay-Z is a time-travelling vampire.
9.  Today is actually four days.
10.  The Earth is hollow
11.  Dinosaurs helped build the pyramids.
12.  Siri can predict the Apocalypse.
13.  Denver Airport is the home of all evil.
14.  We’re living in the Matrix.
15.  US Senator Hillary Clinton died and was replaced by a double.
16.  Michael Jackson was assassinated by the government of Iran.
17.  Michael Jackson is still alive.
18.  Stephen King murdered John Lennon,
19.  Red headed people are descended from space aliens.
20.  Britney Spears’ personal outbursts were timed to deflect gaffes by George W. Bush.
21.  We’re currently living in the Nineteenth Century.
22.  Centuries Six through Nine never happened.  Historical figures from that time are fictional.
23.  Willie Wonka was a serial child killer.
24.  All of your memories were created last Thursday
25.  The ice bucket challenge was a plot to recruit Satanists.
26.  US Senator Ted Cruz was the Zodiac killer.
27. “Everyday Chemistry.” is a 1970s album recorded by the Beatles in a parallel universe.
28.  A superior human species, homo capensis, secretly rules the world.
29.  Buying Oreos, Advil and Cheez-Its financially supports ISIS.
30.  Obama traveled to Mars while President.
31.  Queen Elizabeth II of England is a cannibal.
32.  Finland doesn’t exist.
33.  Jesuits created Nazism, Communism and Islam.
34.  The majority of celebrities are transgendered
35.  NASA engineers are perfecting holograms of angels in order to hasten the Apocalypse.
36.  US President Donald Trump is from outer space.
37.  US First Lady Melania Trump hired a look-alike to take her place during official events.
38.  J.K. Rowling doesn’t exist.
39.  There is a second star in our solar system, but NASA’s hiding it.
40.  Ted Cruz is late-Kardashian family patriarch Robert.

Looking at this list of putative conspiracy theories has to make you smile a little, right?  I mean, I’ve had red-headed girlfriends and I can totally buy that they’re from another planet.  And don’t tell me you haven’t considered the possibility that Trump came from some other world.  Is it any wonder Melania hires an imposter?  Would you like to get close to that?  And anyone who’s ever been stuck in a long layover in the Mile-High city has probably equated Denver Airport to some form of demonic evil at some point.

It’s difficult to take such claims seriously, because the evidence supporting them might be either non-existent, specious, misinterpreted, inconsequential, or actually points to a different conclusion altogether.  For example, one would be hard-pressed to find anything that would indicate that Jesuits founded Islam when you consider that the religion predates the order by nine centuries.  I knew people from Finland (one for over ten years), and their life stories and experiences definitely trump the "evidence" offered to show the place doesn’t exist.  The story of Stephen King murdering John Lennon comes from little more than the author’s slight resemblance to Mark Chapman, the man currently serving a life term for the slaying.  And while I’m not inclined to see Willie Wonka as a child-murderer so much as a child-torturer, I still have to ask what this has to do with anything, since Willie is a fictional character.*  Moreover, if you're talking about the evils of a single individual -- real or fictional -- then by definition that's not a conspiracy.  What's the logic of discussing it as one?

Some of these might contain a grain of accuracy.  Given the sheer volume of modern-day celebrities populating scores of television channels, radios, movies, and now YouTube and social media, a certain percentage of them are probably transgendered.  That’s a far cry from saying that most are, especially without an empirical basis for that claim.  The fact that occult/religious symbology has sometimes found its way into the background of kids TV and other pop culture artifacts, doesn’t point to an Illuminati conspiracy.  First of all, there’s doubt that the Illuminati still exist.  Even if they did, their “mission” (or “agenda,” if you prefer) has never been what most crying ILLUMINATI CONSPIRACY think it is, but in fact quite the opposite.**    More importantly, there doesn’t seem to be an agenda on the part of media producers.  These symbols either appear within a context of poking fun at mysticism, or with no context whatsoever.  Anyone knowledgeable about semiotics can tell you that symbols are often divorced from their cultural context by society at large, ultimately becoming meaningless style.***

Several of these narratives (the Illuminati takeover of the world, Hitler’s survival of World War II, and the creepiness of Denver International Airport) actually have adherents who take the claim seriously, and look into it as much as their Googling skills allow.  While this creates a kinda combination feedback loop and echo chamber, the point here is that there are people who actually believe these stories.  But what about the others?

Taking a look at the first item on this list, the supposition that the Beatles never existed, one has to wonder who believes this.  While widely reported in mainstream venues and the blogosphere as a “real” and (really) crazy conspiracy theory, the only proponent they can find for this is a lone netizen, who’s not even on the net anymore.   Although this is an example offered up to show the nuttiness of so-called “conspiracy theorists,” there's nothing to show, much less prove, that anyone believes this save for one person.  And for all we know, he/she might just enjoy pulling everyone's chain.

You might see other stories perpetuated around the Internet and YouTube as a joke, but taken seriously by some.  For example, everyone propagating the story that Sen. Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer knows the story is pure fiction, a running joke.  For one thing, Cruz was born on 22 December 1970, a little over two years after the murders of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, the first attributed to Zodiac. Even though a February 2016 Florida poll done by Public Policy Polling revealed 10-38% of Sunshine State voters believed the story true (we’re talking about Florida, after all), it’s not certain if that belief held for any appreciable length of time.  Still, such august dailies as the Washington Post saw fit to seriously debunk the story, even though they were quite aware that it was nothing more than a gag.  One could safely speculate that a 2019 poll on the subject would yield much lower numbers, even in Jacksonville.

I’ll go out on a limb here and speculate that most of the items on the above list actually came from someone’s website, social media, or YouTube account, and that journalistic outlets didn’t simply come up with some of these on their own.  At the same time, if we cannot find widespread and persistent belief in these stories, then we can see a very (alas) typical distortion of the state of parapolitical research.  In other words, what seems to happen in lists like these is that someone outside of conspiracy culture takes a look at the fringe, and sees it as the core.  They look for evidence of lunacy in speculation, and they find it.  While I don’t believe the press has been consciously deceptive, I would nevertheless see the depiction as incomplete, inadequate, and in some cases downright erroneous. 

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*I suppose one could legitimately speculate a correlation between Roald Dahl’s children’s books and his work within UK intelligence.  At best one might find an allegorical significance. 

**Many of the concepts/ideals conspiracists claim to cherish – freedom, personal liberty/autonomy, brotherhood, social equality (the notion that all men–and women–are created equal)– were Illuminati concepts, hence the symbolism present in official US artifacts.

***An excellent read explaining this phenomenon in depth: Ewen, Stuart.  1988.  All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture.  New York: Basic.