Why some people fall down the rabbit hole

McGurnicle

Member
A lot of conspiracism is motivated by political and religious ideology. Libertarians want unfettered capitalism so it's to their advantage to vilify government. Religious fundamentalists oppose secularism so it's politically expedient for them to demonize secular culture as a deliberate construction of Satanic elites. Most of the major conspiracy theorists are from one or both of these camps. The paranoid style is effective in whipping up hysterical support for crank political theories and religious extremism. This is a standard criticism of conspiracy culture and I think it's a valid one, but there is another type of conspiracy theorist, one who doesn't hold radical or extreme views but winds up down the rabbit hole all the same. It's this type I want to focus on because I was on the path to becoming this type of conspiracist.

I've always pretty much been a religious agnostic and a political moderate, I've never really held strong opinions in those areas and I try to be reasonable and fair minded by at least attempting to understand issues from all the relevant perspectives. I've found that on most issues every side has at least one or two valid point so it's always a good idea keep an open mind and take the time to carefully consider different viewpoints. It was in the course of researching one of these contentious issues that I confirmed a sort of shocking explanation of the structure and function of one of our major institutions. The explanation itself wasn't controversial, it's accepted by everyone who has bothered to look into it, it's just most people aren't aware of how the sausage is made and when you find out it's pretty hard to believe at first. That led me to scrutinize many other major institutions, and in most cases what I found was very disconcerting. I became disoriented, what was once for me a decent society by, for, and of the people now appeared to be an undemocratic plutocracy, a system "for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools" where everything is corrupt and nothing can be trusted.

Now there are many prominent people on both the left and the right who have been saying essentially this for a long time and none of them could be considered "conspiracy theorists", in itself that perspective is largely legitimate. My close call with the rabbit hole came after those revelations and began with the question: If this is true, then what can't be? If people are clueless enough to allow rampant corporatism, private control of the money supply, mass consolidation of corporate controlled media, money in politics, mass surveillance, etc, with none of it ever being mentioned in school or in the media, then maybe Illuminati type grand conspiracies aren't so far fetched after all?

I did begin to look into many of the different claims for who's behind it all and what the ultimate agenda might be and I found a lot of interesting obscure facts and footnotes that do lend support to those ideas. I won't lie, for a while I was half convinced that there was something to it although I never really settled on any one theory. I think what really saved me from full blown delusion is the skeptics and debunkers who maintain an active presence on conspiracy forums and keep blogs that show up in search results on conspiracy related queries. Maybe I encountered the skeptics just in time before the paranoia really took hold and I was still able to recognize good sense when presented with it.


I always try to tell conspiracy leaning people that debunkers are your best friends, that if you're really interested in synthesizing the most reasonable, coherent perspective then you really do need to let honest skeptics tear into your ideas and be willing to let go of rationally untenable commitments. And for conspiracists of my type that usually works, because there the conspiriacism is just due to simple confusion or disorientation, these types really just need to get their bearings and learn to practice some critical thinking. This type of conspiracy theorist is low hanging fruit for the skeptic, they can be reasoned out of the nonsense because they reasoned their way into it. The other type is much more difficult to get through to because their conspiricism is ideologically motivated.


Anyway, I hope that might provide a little more insight into the conspiracy phenomenon, and maybe help skeptics tailor their approach when engaging with the different types.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for sharing, that's very interesting!

I did begin to look into many of the different claims for who's behind it all and what the ultimate agenda might be and I found a lot of interesting obscure facts and footnotes that do lend support to those ideas. I won't lie, for a while I was half convinced that there was something to it although I never really settled on any one theory. I think what really saved me from full blown delusion is the skeptics and debunkers who maintain an active presence on conspiracy forums and keep blogs that show up in search results on conspiracy related queries. Maybe I encountered the skeptics just in time before the paranoia really took hold and I was still able to recognize good sense when presented with it.

Could you give a bit more detail here (if possible, no worries if not)? I'm guessing it's something like "Rothschilds control all banks", but was it something even more extreme? What forums were you frequenting?
 
Thanks for sharing, that's very interesting!



Could you give a bit more detail here (if possible, no worries if not)? I'm guessing it's something like "Rothschilds control all banks", but was it something even more extreme? What forums were you frequenting?

Yeah it was the Jews, The Jesuits, the 13 Bloodlines of the Illuminati. I never really took the lizard people or the aliens seriously, and even the other groups didn't really make much sense to me either. I just had sort of a vague notion that there might be a hidden power somewhere controlling a grand unified conspiracy. I figured if powerful people could get away with all the stuff that's well confirmed then there very well could be a global cabal running the whole show. The skeptics made pretty easy work of the Jews, Jesuits, and Bloodlines, there's just too many inconsistencies and contradictions once you get into actual history, and William Domhoff's work helped me understand why grand conspiracies aren't viable to begin with and in any case there's no evidence for it in the sociology of power. There are elite theories of power, but they're very different from conspiracism. The websites I mainly frequented were Conspiracy Central(ConCen)and The Info Underground, there were a couple other ones dedicated to the Jesuit theory, and InfoWars for the 13 bloodlines stuff.
 
I haven't read the whole [The psychology of the CT believers] thread so maybe this has already been mentioned but from my interactions with conspiracy theorists the big takeaway is that conspiracism is a folk reaction to the ludicrous structural travesties of our civilization. The sense of alarm and outrage is understandable, the trouble with conspiracism isn't that it's wrongheaded, it's just that it's wrong in most cases.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I haven't read the whole thread so maybe this has already been mentioned but from my interactions with conspiracy theorists the big takeaway is that conspiracism is a folk reaction to the ludicrous structural travesties of our civilization.
Could you give an example of the type of "ludicrous structural travesties of our civilization" you are referring to?
 
An obvious one is public banking. There are no coherent arguments against it, we just don't have it. Why is that? I understand the reason why as a confluence of banal forces, but to arrive at that understanding requires a lot of intensive investigation, thought, and analysis which most people don't have the time or know-how to develop.
 
An obvious one is public banking. There are no coherent arguments against it, we just don't have it. Why is that? I understand the reason why as a confluence of banal forces, but to arrive at that understanding requires a lot of intensive investigation, thought, and analysis which most people don't have the time or know-how to develop.

Why does the lack of public banking lead to conspiracism?
 
A lot of conspiracism is motivated by political and religious ideology. Libertarians want unfettered capitalism so it's to their advantage to vilify government. Religious fundamentalists oppose secularism so it's politically expedient for them to demonize secular culture as a deliberate construction of Satanic elites.

Would you also consider people in this category that deny the 2nd World War holocaust?
Or some Turks that i personally spoke with that deny the Armenian genocide ever happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide_denial

They also seem to be heavy influenced by religion or politics.
 
Last edited:
Extreme wealth inequality, among other things.

I don't know anything about public banking, but I do agree that wealth inequality is a major fire under the cauldron at this time.

It's traditional to compare the US to the Roman Empire. Decadence, bread and circuses, and all that. But I think a more apt and thoughtful comparison can be made to the late Roman Republic.

Male citizens did their time in the army in the wars of conquest. These wars contributed to a huge number of slaves being introduced into the domestic Roman economy. Rich patrician families used slave labor on farms. They used the profits to buy more farms and more slaves. There was no stopping that cycle. Citizen soldiers found when they came back from long years of war that their land had been taken away through one means or another, and there was no way to replace it and no demand for them in what job market there was.

Wealth inequality (and the issue of granting citizenship to Italian allies) were huge sources of discontent. As wealth gathered around a group of super rich patricians, those patricians rather than the state, became the source of political power. Pompey, Crassus, Caesar and others, had their own armies. There was civil war after civil war.

So who are the slaves now but the machines? Who are the super-rich patricians? The billionaires, that are becoming the centers of political power. Our next president might be Mark Cuban. Billionaires that have made the billions through commerce become political power brokers. Politicians that seize power become super wealthy kleptocrats - Putin for instance.

In the US there's seething anger. Although so far the anger hasn't been aimed at wealth inequality I think it's the major source of energy. People have just gotten side tracked into biologically based psychological things like in-group out-group dynamics.

In Japan, where people focus their discontent inward on themselves, there's a growing ennui.

This article: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/japan-mystery-low-birth-rate/534291/

...starts out pondering why Japanese people aren't having sex, but it soon turns to things like this...

...there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.

“The gender stuff is pretty consistent with trends around the world—men are having a harder time,” said Anne Allison, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University who edited the recent collection of scholarly essays Japan: The Precarious Future. “The birth rate is down, even the coupling rate is down. And people will say the number-one reason is economic insecurity.”

This may seem surprising in Japan, a country where the economy is currently humming along, and the unemployment rate is below 3 percent. But the shrinking economic opportunities stem from a larger trend that is global in nature: the rise of unsteady employment. Since the postwar years, Japan had a tradition of “regular employment,” as labor experts commonly call it, in which men started their careers at jobs that gave them good benefits, dependable raises, and the understanding that if they worked hard, they could keep their jobs until retirement. Now, according to Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University’s Japan campus and the author of several books about Japan, around 40 percent of the Japanese workforce is “irregular,” meaning they don’t work for companies where they have stable jobs for their whole careers, and instead piece together temporary and part-time jobs with low salaries and no benefits. (Such temporary workers are counted as employed in government statistics.) Only about 20 percent of irregular workers are able to switch over to regular jobs at some point in their careers. According to Kingston, between 1995 and 2008, Japan’s number of regular workers decreased by 3.8 million while the number of irregular workers increased by 7.6 million.

Irregular workers in Japan are sometimes referred to as “freeters,” which is a combination of the word freelance and the German word arbeiter, which means “worker.” According to Kingston, the rise of irregular workers in Japan began in the 1990s, when the government revised labor laws to enable the wider use of temporary and contract workers hired by intermediary firms. Then, as globalization put more pressure on companies to cut costs, they increasingly relied on a temporary workforce, a trend that intensified during the Great Recession. “This is a major new development in Japan’s employment paradigm, as new graduates find it increasingly difficult to get a foothold on the career ladder as regular employees,” Kingston and Machiko Osawa, a professor at Japan Women's University, write in “Risk and Consequences: The Changing Japanese Employment Paradigm,” an essay in Japan: The Precarious Future.

The surge in irregular jobs doesn’t just create problems for the people working those jobs. It’s also led companies to feel that they can treat their regular workers poorly, because those workers feel so lucky to have a job, Konno told me. Knowing that people in their 20s and 30s are desperate to get regular jobs, companies hire lots of young people and force them to work long hours for little to no overtime pay...
Content from External Source
Sounds familiar doesn't it? There are just too few jobs to go around. It's an employer's market. It's like a million people playing musical chairs with only 800,000 chairs to go around. And the chairs just keep getting fewer and crappier.

As robotic labor becomes more competent, and that's going to be an explosively fast trend, what's going to happen?

In the meantime politicians are aiding and abetting the trend away from steady jobs with benefits, to part time or "independent contractor" jobs. Uber is a hideous example.

I don't think there's one power directing this trend. It's an "unseen hand" of biologically motivated behaviors. The idea of an all powerful, tight knit brotherhood of evil, I think, itself is something based in evolutionary psychology. In a troop of primates of 100 adults, or bands of humans, there are definitely tight knit coalitions. Among primates coalition building is the primary means to the goal of social domination. I don't think that's an accident. It's a behavior that's been selected for. And the drive to be wary of a rival coalitions is just as strong. We call it "paranoia" now.

We still do have millions of separate coalitions. Just look at any business office or high school. And there are a number of powerful coalitions. But in this world of 7 billion people a single ruling group like that is just impossible. But... this kind of thing is deep in our psyche, so it's easy to imagine that single shadowy coalition. And in that fevered dream we imagine things like this...



Not just a powerful coalition, but the mystically tight knit, shadowy group. In the real world, coalitions are made up of self-interested individuals. There aren't any mystical ceremonies keeping the brotherhood in rigid discipline. There are just individuals that go along for various mundane, or admittedly crazy (but still surprisingly banal), reasons.
 
Last edited:
Although so far the anger hasn't been aimed at wealth inequality I think it's the major source of energy.
I have to disagree with you here, Occupy Wall Street was directly aimed at wealth inequality. Conspiracism is a reaction to wealth inequality, it can also be attributed to disparities of power and access.
Similiar to Rome, the political and economic systems of our society are exclusionary, undemocratic, and elitist and that leads to unjust outcomes, and so people look for some nefarious group or entity to attribute that to. A good analogy would be how people observe appearent design in nature and conclude that there is an intelligent designer. It's the obvious inference and it's understandable why people would come to that conclusion, but after a lot of painstaking investigation it turns out that's not the case. The reason people believe in conspiracies is that there is a lot of evidence pointing in that direction, but like intelligent design that worldview just doesn't hold up when you really scrutinize it.
 
Conspiracism is a reaction to wealth inequality, it can also be attributed to disparities of power and access.
The reason people believe in conspiracies is that there is a lot of evidence pointing in that direction

There's a large number of factors, it's a mistake to generalize. Douglas, et al, surveyed the literature and found three broad classes of motives/factors:
  • Epistemic - the desire for a stable, accurate and internally consistent understanding of the world
  • Existential - the desire to feel safe and secure.
  • Social - the desire to fit into a group and boost self-esteem.
These three factors were broken down into various examples on which research has been done. Wealth was not mentioned much, but it does not seem unreasonable that lack of wealth would be a contributing factor. The most similar things were:


Studies have shown
that people are likely to turn to conspiracy theories when they are anxious (Grzesiak-Feldman, 2013)
and feel powerless (Abalakina-Paap, Stephan, Craig & Gregory, 1999). Other research indicates that
conspiracy belief is strongly related to lack of socio-political control, or a lack of psychological
empowerment (Bruder et al., 2013). Experiments have shown that compared to baseline conditions,
conspiracy belief is heightened when people feel unable to control outcomes, and reduced when their
sense of control is affirmed (van Prooijen & Acker, 2015).
Content from External Source
and

Experimental results suggest that experiences of
ostracism cause people to believe in superstitions and conspiracy theories, apparently as part of an effort
to make sense of their experience (Graeupner & Coman, 2017). Members of groups confronting
objectively low
(vs. high) status because of their ethnicity (Crocker, Luhtanen, Broadnax & Blaine,
1999) or income (Uscinski & Parent, 2014) are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. People on
the losing (vs. winning) side of political processes, such as supporters of opposition (vs. incumbent)
parties, also appear more likely to believe conspiracy theories (Uscinski & Parent, 2014). Conspiracy
belief has also been linked to prejudice against powerful groups (Imhoff & Bruder, 2014) and those
perceived as enemies (Kofta & Sedek, 2005).
Content from External Source
The Usciniski reference is a book: http://amzn.to/2vScbV7

20170819-075111-6wj4b.jpg

20170819-075229-vtaho.jpg

However when looking specifically at income inequality:


To test the proposition that economic downturns drive the resonance of conspiracy theories, we measure economic misery. It is easy to say that the economy affects people’s beliefs, but what parts of the economy exactly? Is it employment rates, economic growth, or something else? Rarely do commentators specify. To make the best of it, we track the economy with three yearly measures: the unemployment rate, changes in GDP, and the GINI coefficient of income inequality. 22 If economics drives the overall resonance of conspiracy theorizing, it ought to show up in one of these indicators. It does not.

Uscinski, Joseph E.; Parent, Joseph M.. American Conspiracy Theories (Page 116). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Content from External Source
 

Attachments

  • Douglas Sutton Cichocka 2017 The psychology of conspiracy theories..pdf
    137 KB · Views: 1,291
  • 20170819-075208-sgytw.jpg
    20170819-075208-sgytw.jpg
    80.6 KB · Views: 515
I was in the same boat about four years ago, but what got me were chemtrails. I think I was able to take the step to giving the idea credibility because I had also discovered a lot of actual truths involving the interplay between corporations and the government, the seedy past of the US government, etc. I was noticing grid-like patterns near the airport where I worked and could not explain it away as hard as I tried, "Why else would they fly in a grid?".

Back then a google search would result in pages of pro-chemtrail conspiracy blogs and one or two articles from the mainstream media making fun of or simply disparaging people who believed in them, nothing helpful. People didn't want to talk about it and generally had no information that could actually debunk it. It took me a lot of digging to find metabunk and the incredible interactive wind simulator that shows how the grid pattern is simply due to wind. Being presented with information that made sense, and a community that was devoted to patient repetition of facts and thoughtful analysis, broke me out of that spiral of thinking (seriously you are heroes). A huge weight was lifted off my mind.


https://www.metabunk.org/contrail-pattern-simulator.t3157/
(a forum search for "chemtrails grid wind" does not find this, I found it with "contrails grid wind")
 
I'm interested in knowing if there are any statistics on the professions of people who believe in government or corporate conspiracies. I've only met two firmly committed conspiracy theorists IRL (in real life) - one is a self-employed landscaper and the other is a non-working mom. I've worked in large corporations and with government agencies and from my experience it just seems impossible from an organizational standpoint that a conspiracy like 9-11 or chemtrails could ever be pulled off. So I wonder if having significant experience with the operations of large corporations and the government makes it less likely that a person would fall for a conspiracy theory compared to a people that don't have that experience?
 
if there are any statistics on the professions of people
I've never seen any statistics on professions. There are some polls that break down things like age and education. Going off memory, the young are much more likely to believe in conspiracies. And a leaning toward less formally educated people. But there are college professors, scientists, retired military people who 'speak' on the conspiracy circuits. If you look at that "to the stars academy", which is UFOs not conspiracies per se... but still... they have government employees etc.

I would imagine though that your theory is probably correct. Government and large organizations are so incompetent when viewed from the inside, it is kinda hard to believe that anyone with any experience with them would think large scale conspiracies possible. I'm also not sure how many of these 'professionals' literally believe in the theories... it seems to me a rather large percentage of government people (that speak out at least) are basically disgruntled employees or old people. Not that I'm knocking old people, but old people fall for internet scams more often then younger people.
 
I'm interested in knowing if there are any statistics on the professions of people who believe in government or corporate conspiracies. I've only met two firmly committed conspiracy theorists IRL (in real life) - one is a self-employed landscaper and the other is a non-working mom. I've worked in large corporations and with government agencies and from my experience it just seems impossible from an organizational standpoint that a conspiracy like 9-11 or chemtrails could ever be pulled off. So I wonder if having significant experience with the operations of large corporations and the government makes it less likely that a person would fall for a conspiracy theory compared to a people that don't have that experience?


that interesting - and from the same "University of Anecdotal research", the only two I know are both self employed (professional chess player and the other a web designer / DJ) and both family members
 
To jump on the U of A train:

The conspiracists I’ve known are: young male manufacturing supervisor (chem trails and rocket launches), middle age male with a small construction business (chem trails), and an older male with an unknown profession (Evis and 911). They’re also all in the lower half of the income curve, and two of them did not go to college or university (Don’t know about the third). The other side is a 21-year old woman who had never heard of chem trails and commented “what the fudge are they smoking?”, when I told her about it.

I saw a couple of weird articles on liberals vs. conservatives, ethnicities, and even gun-carrying characteristics of CT’s, but the articles were short on actual evidence. The other references in this thread are better.

I like the theory that the more you know about business and government, the more likely you are to wonder how they even function on a day to day basis. Most of them can’t manage their own finances or achieve their departmental objectives, much less invent and manage a complex conspiracy.
 
The ones I know best are as follows... One musician, quite a talented keyboardist / guitarist. Another is a former BBC journalist, who was 'encouraged to leave' the corporation because of his increasingly suspect and possibly libalous copy he was producing as he started to get into the whole 9-11 quagmire, he is now a freelance journalist and dabbles in blogging, local community and internet radio. The third is a motor mechanic.
 
In the Washington Post today:

'Nothing on this page is real'

This is an insightful article which describes two sides of the current political (or rather ideological) polarization in the U.S..
It includes the story of a retired lady which is probably exemplary in pointing out the attraction of online extremism (of any kind).

Also, it makes you think about the ambiguity of online satire.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” the post read. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem.”

Chapian looked at the photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course Trump had invited Clinton and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the Democrats — or “Demonrats,” as Chapian sometimes called them — had acted badly and disrespected America. It was the exact same narrative she saw playing out on her screen hundreds of times each day, and this time she decided to click ‘like’ and leave a comment.
Content from External Source
Blair had invented thousands of stories in the past two years, always trafficking in the same stereotypes to fool the same people, but he never tired of watching a post take off: Eight shares in the first minute, 160 within 15 minutes, more than 1,000 by the end of the hour.

“Aaaaand, we’re viral,” he wrote, in a message to his liberal supporters on his private Facebook page. “It’s getting to the point where I can no longer control the absolute absurdity of the things I post. No matter how ridiculous, how obviously fake, or how many times you tell the same taters . . . they will still click that ‘like’ and hit that share button.”
Content from External Source
 
This is an insightful article which describes two sides of the current political (or rather ideological) polarization in the U.S..

It describes two facets. I think "satire" sites like this are a net negative. Many people are not going to realize how gullible they are and then start to change their ways, they are just "learning" that liberals invent fake news and that liberals are nasty people who insult them, and try to trick them and get them fired, and so should not be trusted. It's just spreading noise and increasing polarization.

Blair didn’t have time to personally confront each of the several hundred thousand conservatives who followed his Facebook page, so he’d built a community of more than 100 liberals to police the page with him. Together they patrolled the comments, venting their own political anger, shaming conservatives who had been fooled, taunting them, baiting them into making racist comments that could then be reported to Facebook. Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online.
...
“Well, they never did have any class,” commented Shirley Chapian, from Pahrump, Nev., and Blair watched his liberal followers respond.

“That’s kind of an ironic comment coming from pure trailer trash, don’t you think?”

“You’re a gullible moron who just fell for a fake story on a Liberal satire page.”

“You my dear . . . are as smart as a potato.”

“What a waste of flesh and time.”

“Welcome to the internet. Critical thinking required.”

Chapian saw the comments after her post and wondered as she often did when she was attacked: Who were these people? And what were they talking about? Of course Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton had flipped off the president. It was true to what she knew of their character. That was what mattered.

Instead of responding directly to strangers on America’s Last Line of Defense, Chapian wrote on her own Facebook page. “Nasty liberals,” she said, and then she went back to her news feed, each day blending into the next.
Content from External Source
Those insults from the "liberals" who were "policing" the page remind me of the fun people poke at Flat Earther's or chemtrailers, or even 9/11 Truthers.

I just haven't seen tricking and/or mocking people to be very positive.
 
Also, it makes you think about the ambiguity of online satire.
that isn't satire. that is trolling. He knew perfectly well people would think it was true and share it. That was his whole point in posting it, so people would share and he would make money.

although I like the "demonrats", I haven't ever seen that used before. I'm gonna share it on FB ;)
 
A year ago, right after the 2017 election- I tracked a particularly malicious set of “satire” articles coming from Blair. The articles targeted a newly elected mayor of Hoboken NJ, incorrectly identifying him as Muslim. Several outrageous stories were based off things he allegedly said and linked him to ISIS.

I guess the satire “point” was to demonstrate that many people are so consumed with hate and fear that the distinction between two very different religions is totally lost on them. Well- that point was made. Many of the comments I read wished death on the new mayor.

Sikh people have already been murdered by ignorant people who were trying to kill Muslims- so I can’t imagine how anyone in their right mind can think that stoking the hate in such a population is in anyway justified by the self righteous LOLS.

ProPublica article detailing a history of both intentional and misguided hate crimes against Sikhs:
https://www.propublica.org/article/sikhs-in-america-hate-crime-victims-and-bias

Blair’s articles were immediately plagarized by Clickbaiters who republished them without even a satire warning. Snopes had already debunked the story by FB’s freshly rolled out fact checking flagging system was not activated on these- in fact- FB was hosting the plagiarized stories through their monetized “instant article” feature. If you look closely at my screenshots of search results
(there are a few more screenshots in the comments of my Facebook page post about this- My post is like a little time capsule of the scope of the problem as it appeared a year ago- most of these fly by night clickbait websites are gone now- my only regret is that I did not archive examples of the hateful comments the articles inspired)
https://www.facebook.com/250317668742539/posts/372045159903122/
You can see some of the thumbnail images contain a little lightning bolt icon- those are “instant articles.” That means that FB was serving their own micro-targeted ads to the FB users who click those articles- and sharing the ad revenue with the click-baiters...on verbatim stolen headlines of stories that their own independate fact checkers have already debunked!

A Buzzfeed article detailing the way Blair’s stories are republished by Eastern European clickbaiters- also mentions sharing habits on FB (people share without reading the story)
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/fake-news-turf-war

Layer upon layer of problematic incentive. 7B14BFBD-D0E5-499E-BCE5-430E22F9A20F.jpeg
 
Sikh people have already been murdered by ignorant people who were trying to kill Muslims- so I can’t imagine how anyone in their right mind can think that stoking the hate in such a population is in anyway justified by the self righteous LOLS.
Trolls aren't in their 'right' minds. they are juvenile mentalities.
 
For me it was a mixture of a few things.

I got imprisoned wrongly.

When i say i got imprisoned wrongly, i mean i got sentenced to prison for a crime that i knew i should not be in prison for and i was later admonished, and released with a formal apology whena different judge other than the one that sentenced me decreed that there was crucial bits of evidence that should have been looked at by the other Judge that was never looked at.. Such as a mobile phone that the courts had in their possession but did not think to look through, but had they did so they would have seen messages on the phone that proved my side of the story.. Also when i was first arrested i was arrested under mistaken identity, as the Police initially believed me to be someone else and the reasons given by the Police for me being in the area were not the same as the reasons i was actually in the area, although it was just unfortunate that i was at that moment in violation of a minor law breach and thus i was charged with a crime the Police had not initially arrested me for.. It also came to light that the person whom the Police had mistaken me for had been arrested by Police but let go.. It must be noted that the person in Police custody was in breach of very serious crimes, assaults with deadly weapons, burglary, car theft, drugs etc.. I was initially arrested on those charges, while the other guy got let free on my charges, although i was later charged with my own charges and the initial accusations dropped as the Police done a sudden u-turn, although it was not until i got freed that i ever found out the whole truth that happened that night.. The day i got sentenced it was never mentioned to the courts that this had happened, although some members of the PF were aware, getting it put forth in my defence proved more difficult than it should have been, and i somehow managed to find myself being taken by prison van to prison that evening..It was after 5 weeks everything changed around when i got taken back to court to be met by a new judge who decreed the mobile phone evidence should have been looked at and one can only apologise about the atrocious error that Occurred when the Police arrested me for someone elses crimes and let that person go free when they mistook him for me and so charged him with my petty violation.
The judge admonished me.

However when i came out i found life very difficult for a while, as i was still being accused of things by other departments such as social work departments.

Accusations that i was spiking myself with heroin, and had stole over £3000 from a bank account continued to come up on social work computers and i waged a war against the system as a court of law had debunked those claims, but social work departments seemed unaware that the heroin needles had actually been found to be somebody elses "blood thinning needles" and this had been supported by doctors at the local hospital, and the £3000 had actually found its way out of a bank account into my buisness account while i was in prison, and it turned out that it had been my buisness partner that done this, and proving this was exhaustive, and i finally got the eveindence i required when i spoke to my buisness partner with my mobile phone on record and he admitted it over recorded phone-call.

After-all that i was very annoyed with the world and i was left with an extremely primitive emotion called "revenge".

I was also a bit of a drinker and liked a smoke of hash back in those days, and revenge + alcohol + Hash is a lethal mixture.

I wanted to show the Judge, the Jury, the Police and everyone what fools they were, how easy conned they were, and how you do not just believe the first thing you come across.

I was then given a weapon when i came across conspiracy nonsense. Revenge + Alcohol + Hash + Conspiracy and i had my cocktail to get back at the world.

So i went deep down every conspiracy out there and floated it around with a laugh on my face.
I now felt like the clever conman getting my revenge on the fools.
Make people believe i know more than them about the world and just as iv convinced them then pull it away and laugh.
Conspiracy is a good way of making one feel in control and powerful, as you can say just about anything about anyone and make absolutely anything up. It is a fantasy paradise with no limits.

I cannot really speak for anyone else though, only for myself, but for me i never really truelly believed the conspiracy theories, so maybe i was never down that particular Rabbit hole, i dont know, i was just trying to shock people and literally con them and make them feel like fools.

However once i quit with the hash, and the anger began to leave me as the memory of the prison episode evaporated, and everyone in the world seemed to be nice people again and totally on my side, another primitive human emotion returned, called a conscience, and i became content again and i slowly drifted away from wanting to make others feel stupid or feel they required teaching a lesson about life, and so i easily and naturally drifted away from the conspiracy community and began to see them as either the fools or the conmen.

There was one thing however i may have genuinely believed.
And that was that everyone i met during that period was suddenly possessed by a demon upon encountering me.

This was maybe the one thing that i did actually genuinely believe and David Icke may have garnered supporter for a while when his reptillian theory backed up something i already believed due to my experience when everyone in the system seemed to get absolutely everything blundered when it came to dealing with me.

I maybe actually wanted to suggest to those people that they were infact fools possessed by Demons.

I need to state however, i have never been referred to by anyone as Schizophrenic, and while believing this, in no other way was i displaying schizophrenic symptoms, and i was not nervous or anxious.

I a longtime ago however stopped believeing this.
Well, it is not that i stopped believeing it as such, i simply cannot prove it either way.
It is more that i do not give the matter any consideration anymore.
It is not worth considering.

So in my experience "Revenge" is probable a very strong motivation for falling down the rabbit hole.

Although that may only be true in my case, i cant speak for anyone else really



But i think the real annoying thing was, even my girlfriend believed the systems version.
My family believed them.
My friends believed them.
On a daily basis i was humiliated by do gooders that just could not believe the system would get things wrong like this, basically calling me a lair, and this left me very very angry and thinking of them as absolutely gullible and nieve.
I eventually bit by bit changed everyones minds, even getting a tearful social worker to come round to my house and apologise to me infront of my Mother.

But all this, when i began listening to David Icke, talk about Demons, and talk about how shabby certain peoples research is (and my mind goes back to the time i was accused of stealing £3000 and had the social work department just taken the least amount of time to look at the date the money was stolen they would have seen that the daate corresponded with me being in prison, or, the blood thinning needles. A quick look at the medical records of the person that had lived in my house and was now lying in a 30 day coma in intensive care after an artery burst causing volcanic bleeding would have shown the needles were her blood thinning needles. Or had the Police officer been brave enough to tell the truth instead of worrying about his own demotion. Or had the PF came forward and told the truth instead of worrying about the journalists in the courtroom getting wind that a criminal on charges of deadly weapons, assault burglary and car theft aswell as drugs is now on the run with warrants for his arrest after the Police had him in custody but let him go with charges that were not even his) and i was just left saying "yes yes yes" to everything David Icke said about people and the world and how they will just believe everything an authority tells them, and i kind of made it my mission to prove to everyone that infact they were the liars and fools and that no, you cannot just believe everything the system says. because the system is operated by human beings that make mistakes and a primitive emotion when making a mistake is to cover it up to save their skin, and that they were all possessed by demons and now i am one angry demon out to teach them.

Finally however, the courts became aware of the other guy when the Police finally caught him and he was made to appear infront of the courts, and he himself told the courts how he came to be on the run, allegedly escaping Police custody.
And after that, i was called back up to court to be admonished.

Now i do not know what ever happened to the Police officer that arrested me.
But i do know that everytime i threw out a copy of project bluebeam i saw his bald head.

The Judge that sentenced me did actually lose his job as a judge one year later when he used the brothel of a pimp he had sentenced and one of the girls recognised the judge, took a photo and sent the photo to her boss who did not hesitate in sending it on to the courts.
So everytime i spread a conspiracy theory, whether the theory is true or not, i would be picturing everyone that believed that judge over me.

That sums up how i ended up down there for a while. I had to make people aware of little glitches in the system that they dont know about where sometimes social work departments operate a hang without trial system, and the investigations conducted by officials are not always as thorough as most would believe, and some of the deals that go on when trying to escape the dungeons is just criminal, a poker game, really, like the time i bunked a court date, and when i got picked up by the Police the PF refused to give me bail unless i changed my plee to guilty, so i ended up pleading guilty to a crime i was innocent of just so i would not get remanded and i ended up getting found not guilty in the end anyway.
And to think the reason i was bunking the court date in the first place is because i at that point believe a certain mr Bald Head is stitching me up for some unbeknown reason, although i later find out he just covering up his own mistake for obvious reasons.

However those are little things you only become aware of when down there and very difficult to tell people about dungeon poker when they have never been in the dungeons.
Know nothing about the deals that go on in courts.
Very hard to get them to understand.
So far better to just try convince them Jesus smoked Qaneh Bosm

I think also, i detested those in the system so much that i was willing to go all the way down the Rabbot hole.
The worst thing about my experience was that due to what started with one Police officers mistake and arrogance that turned out to be ignorence, i was lead down a path were i was not able to run my buisness. I was too busy being made to protest my inocense. It was effecting my relationship with my wife-to-be, and we were beginning to fight over whether my version of events was true or not.
The stress caused someone else in my household to become an alcoholic and end up on blood thinning injections before nearly dying.
It was really just one cowardly Police officer that started the chain of events, not the illuminati, but in my mind, someone had to pay. And it was so frustrating that i could not ever make this Police officer realise the effects his cowardly action in worrying only about his own wage packet had when a woman lay in a coma for 30 days. He will still be unaware of this.

On the otherhand, my experiences since then have been all great.

Iv been infront of council panels and awarded licenses.

They are mostly good people and i support the system.

But the events of 2006 sent me down the rabbit hole for a while.


The end
 
Last edited:
Back
Top