Conspiracy Theories and Me

Growing up and into college I was a big fan of conspiracy theories. And to a certain extent I still enjoy looking into them today, but there isn't that ability to buy into them anymore. The biggest factor in that is how the conspiracies have changed. They aren't vast overarching schemes to control people that are ludicrous on their surface, and underneath contain every famous person being a lizard person in disguise they are all attempts to smear political parties and politicians with everyday people as willing participants. Every mass shooting becomes a false flag attack to take our guns, even though no politician or group makes that push after the mass shootings. Every message sent has subversive text that normal people just don't get. The part that makes this complicated is that some conspiracy theories have been proven correct. So now everything gets a certain air of legitimacy because hey, sometimes these things are right.

When I was growing up and got to embrace the beginning of the internet the big conspiracy was the Illuminati and the lizard people. Not everybody who believed the Illuminati went in for the lizard people, but it's was more an extension that some corners took very seriously. I was willing to go in for the belief in the Illuminati, but the lizard people was a step too far, but I loved reading about them because it got so weird. The idea of a secret cabal controlling everything was such an interesting idea and it seemed to make sense. Now I know the powers that control the world aren't secret it's just all the really rich people influencing the politicians with their money and keeping the status quo the way it is. There is no secret about the control that people are using. There are obvious inconsistencies in the beliefs these people held and the ability to disseminate those beliefs. The Illuminati are all powerful, but can't shut down your angelfire or geocity site with frames and an animated graphic when you open the page.

To me it was just a fun way to spend time and have information you can talk to people about, or just horde the information like gold. They were fun stories to read and investigate and try to make additional connections on your own. The theories about the lizard people really upped the ante and are science fiction stories. It's all framed like a documentary, but the ridiculousness just makes it a fun story to read and engage with. Beside the fact that there is no way to prove any of this stuff the problem comes from the fact that these conspiracy theories also work as anti-semitic and codes for saying “The Jews” run everything. A lot of the Illuminati conspiracy is based on the existence of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” It's a faked document written to provide a basis to discriminate against Jewish people and was used by many noted anti-semites like Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler to back up their biases.

For my tastes the best conspiracy is the Knights Templar and them protecting the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Obviously this one got a big push into notoriety with the publishing of Dan Brown's “The Da Vinci Code.” it contains such a sprawling history and contains several secret societies and a huge secret that overturns how much of history is viewed. The views and details in “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” is a good read and really illuminates everything that goes into this conspiracy and the many events that happened to keep this information quiet. The conspiracy holds that a crackdown on the Knights Templar gave us the superstition about Friday the 13^th and is the cause of the Spanish Inquisition. It's also what led to the false popes in France who knew the truth and were protecting the bloodline of Jesus Christ. The sheer grandiosity of this conspiracy just makes it so interesting. And that's without going into how so many famous people throughout history are linked to it and hid messages about the truth in all of their work. For me reading this conspiracy is a really cool alternate history fiction made all the better by barely being different from our real world and taking so many small parts of art and history to expand their belief about what happened.

But those are really out there conspiracy theories. The ones that make all these other theories seem more plausible are the ones that were proven to be correct and have allowed other theories sponsored by the same people get a little more traction as being real things. The first one that will come to mind didn't really have a conspiracy following for it, but is a comparison many of these theories will use to show the US government does indeed hide things, and that is the Tuskegee syphilis experiment that claimed to be curing the men infected, but really just monitored them and let them spread the disease to their wives and have kids born with the disease.

The conspiracy and other government run tests that show what the government is capable of is MK Ultra. It featured hopes of using drugs like LSD to weaken peoples mind states and make them susceptible mind control, theoretically with the goal of creating a “Manchurian Candidate.” Many of the records were destroyed so it is tough to find out all the details of the experiments that occurred and their goals. Not as damning but the Air Force's Project Blue Book which investigated all reports of Unidentified Flying Objects proved that the government took the idea of UFO's seriously, especially since there were several instances with credible reports and no explanation for them.

The big change in how I felt about conspiracy theories came after the 9/11 attacks. For a good bit of time I was a truther. Like most opinions of mine that changed while in college it wasn't from the facts changing, but realizing the people I agreed with had a lot of other dumb views that made me look at the facts and reassess them. The best way to debunk conspiracy theories is to remember that any conspiracy has to have some kind of goal behind it. Most of them are to make money of some kind. The best argument for 9/11 is that it gave the US a reason to invade Afghanistan. Not only did it give a good excuse, but we also had the backing of most of the rest of the world in doing so and their support in the war. The Iraq war shows that the government was perfectly willing to exaggerate a claim made by an untrustworthy source and use that as justification for going to war with a country.

The realization that the government didn't need the prelude to start a war. They would come up with one themselves. The best argument against it being a conspiracy is just how big of a cover up it would have to be. Too many people would have had to keep the biggest story quiet and somehow be fine with the idea of the US government killing thousands of citizens to start the war on terror. The person that made me realize I was on the wrong side was Charlie Sheen. When it was announced he'd be the narrator of an official Loose Change movie I knew I was wrong. I mean, the facts meant I was wrong, but having somebody so unstable on the same side as you really draws things into a more stark comparison.

The conspiracy theories that have come into being after this have largely been claims of mass shootings being false flag operations and the families of the victims being crisis actors. The most prominent of those being the Sandy Hook shootings. Thanks to Alex Jones many people think this even never really occurred and was used as a call to take peoples guns, despite that push never coming and the NRA and Republicans getting out there and saying we shouldn't talk about gun control so close to the event while sending thoughts and prayers to the victims. A lot of other smaller shootings have had the same accusation leveled at them by Jones, but this is the one that gets the most traction. Twenty kids were killed and because of these accusations their families are hounded by believers in the conspiracy and sent death threats.

This is the point where I stopped enjoying even my own ridiculous conspiracy theories. The kind of rhetoric is the same as used for the other conspiracies I've talked about. The signs are there if you look for them, and you can't trust the mass media. Believers in the Illuminati have occasionally boated to Bohemian Grove to investigate and been escorted off peacefully, UFO believers have tried to investigate Area 51, but been rebuffed by the Armed Forces who guard the location. I'm sure there are investigators who are so persistent that they annoy anybody involved with those conspiracies, but the idea of calling grieving parents and telling them they didn't have any kids killed in those attacks and telling them to kill themselves is too much. Seeing real life consequences for conspiracy theories just changes things.

It only escalated from their with the propagation of pizzagate. People had to believe there was proof of wrongdoing in the Hillary Clinton emails that were leaked that they believed the people running a political campaign couldn't possibly be talking about food, and specifically pizza that often. So they applied the logic they used on 4-Chan that cheese pizza meant underage porn and that the pizza place mentioned must be keeping kids there. So a man went into the pizza place with an assault rifle and told them to release all the kids from the basement, of a building without any basement. Luckily nobody was hurt in the incident and the man was taken into custody, but the sincerity with which people have started to believe in conspiracy theories is startling. When they are such a grand web of conspirators it helps to keep the immediacy of the problem away. The Illuminati is controlled by people you can't get to and you can't really do anything about. It was all about the idea of being small in the world and being oppressed by the people with power and reach. Now it's much smaller targets that can be found and hounded and that makes the conspiracies dangerous.

The older conspiracy theories helped to explain why only certain people succeed in the world and why certain information can't get out from the government. Now the conspiracies are about undermining events that would force you to reexamine your political beliefs. Donald Trump might not be your ideal Republican candidate, but Hillary Clinton visits a child sex dungeon so you can't vote for her. Somebody just shot a bunch of kids maybe we should regulate guns, don't worry it was a fake attack orchestrated by Democrats to take guns so ignore it. The call to tribalism is strong and this just gives an easy way to ignore the shortcomings of their own political party and point to the other side as being worse. While it's not completely overriding my enjoyment of looking at Illuminati and Area 51 conspiracy theories the new ones do remind me that there is an element of fact checking that is important in reality and that while these beliefs are a fun fantasy for me they are all too real for some other people.

Thanks Jim Caldwell

Over the last four years the Detroit Lions haven't done as well as I've wanted and hoped they would, but realistically they did as well as they should have for the most part. With Aaron Rodgers leading the Packers they weren't going to be the best team in the division and three winning records with two trips to the playoffs is pretty good. Especially considering the fact that they haven't been very good since Barry Sanders retired, and even then they were only good because of him. Not to mention the team is just ten years removed from going 0-16 in a season. Caldwell has finished turning the losing culture of the team around. Jim Schwartz did a lot of work on that as well, but even with the improvements he brought the culture of not being good was still there and the team needed a fresh start and that's what Caldwell gave them.

I'm not going to lie. There were many times in many games where I would curse a blue streak about Caldwell's easy going coaching manner and plays left unchallenged and timid play calling leaving points on the field. The reality is that the team is consistently a challenger in the division and has a shot of getting into the playoffs. I don't think he was ever going to be the coach that really took them to the next level, but he did what his job was and that was rebuild and rebrand the team as one that can win and is no longer a joke. He was helped by the presence of some great players in Matthew Stafford, Calvin Johnson, and Ndamukong Suh. But even after losing two of those players he managed to keep them performing at a high level.

Every fan feels this way, but the past couple of seasons have had some bad officiating that really changed the way the games went for the Lions. I won't list all the calls that screwed the Lions, but there have been several big ones that hurt them big time. Might as well start with the one from this season as it would have put them in the playoffs if it didn't occur. The catch against the Falcons that everybody thought was a touchdown, but on review was called back saying his knee was down then ran off ten seconds to end the game. Considering how long it takes for refs to decide the process of a catch has been completed it seems a real bummer that a guy can be down when his knee hits, but still have to hold onto the ball when he hits the ground, but a guy who drops the ball when it hits the ground doesn't make the catch when even if his knees hit the ground. Caldwell's only losing season in 2015 saw two major calls that completely changed games that would have given them a winning record. The first being in the Seahawks game when Calvin Johnson fumbled the ball on the one yard line and KJ Wright batted the ball out of the back of the end zone which was ruled a touchback for the Seahawks when it should have been a penalty and given the Lions on the one yard line. The other call would be the phantom face masking penalty that gave the Packers another play which resulted in a hail mary touchdown by Rodgers. Replays clearly show that there is no contact, but the call was made and the Packers capitalized.

The biggest of the bad calls that went against the Lions in the Caldwell era happens during the Lions vs. Cowboys playoff game. The officials call pass interference and announce the call then get together and reverse the decision, despite replays clearly showing the pass interference. Fine, that happens all the time. Although Dez Bryant also runs onto the field to yell at the refs which should also be a penalty. So the officials just ignore all of this and the Cowboys get a free stop. Granted the Lions didn't help themselves by shanking the punt on the next play, but that's beside the point as it should never have had to happen.

Now this whining about bad calls seems like it's getting away from my point of thanking Caldwell for turning the team around, but if it wasn't for the work he did turning the team around we wouldn't be the kind of team that can point to such big deal calls working against us. I've seen controversial calls against the Lions before, but most of them I just forget because the team was bad and it didn't change the outcomes of the season. Caldwell made the Lions a team that can make it to the playoffs and be a winning team. Now they're a team were it's a disappointment when they don't make the playoffs instead of a team where fans are happy when we can go .500 and beat each of the division rivals at least once a season. So thank you Jim Caldwell for making the Lions a team that can disappoint me when they don't win.