Doesn’t have to be one you think is true or even possible. Could be niche or mainstream. Mine is probably Mike Tyson threw that Jake Paul fight. I heavily believe Tyson did everything he could and is just old. Not to mention he’s fighting a roided up good athlete in his physical prime with a limited engagement strategy. I do like hearing people argue its all staged, understandable cope.
I don’t engage with conspiracy theories much but the two that have actually stuck to my memory are that the WTC attack on 11-9 happened right after the building 7 property was bought and insured for a huge amount, then loaded with the financial records needed for a massive financial crimes investigation, so it was a real attack but allowed to happen as a combo insurance payout and financial crime coverup, and that reddit is a consent manufacturing facility because the city with the most active accounts is an air force base with a small population (something like 25 accounts per person, if I recall) that does cyber warfare.
99% of plastic recycling programs are useless and are staged to make people feel good about themselves.
That’s not a conspiracy LOL, there’s plenty of greenwashing around that costs more in environmental effects than if we’d just partied like it’s 1977.
This isn’t a conspiracy at all. Plastic recycling was originally driven by plastic producers, to shift the blame for pollution away from themselves. Basically, it was a way for the producers to go “it’s not our fault the world is full of plastic. It’s the consumer’s fault for failing to recycle all of it!” They saw the inevitable plastic mountain on the horizon, and took steps to ensure they weren’t going to be blamed for it.
That Avril Lavigne is dead. From her second album onwards it’s been Melissa, a woman initially hired as s lookalike by her record company for things like meet-and-greets. When Avril died, the record company covered it up in order to keep making money.
I love it because:
- it’s so blatantly nonsense
- Lavigne has very distinctive teeth and the idea of finding an exact lookalike itself is incredibly unlikely
- people believe it anyway
- there’s all kind of videos comparing live footage and how different her signing voice is
- some people** really** believe it
- it was started by a guy on his blog with an explicit statement at the start that it wasn’t true and his intent was to demonstrate how easy it was to create a conspiracy theory…
it was started by a guy on his blog with an explicit statement at the start that it wasn’t true and his intent was to demonstrate how easy it was to create a conspiracy theory…
This reminds me of the guy who faked a study that supposedly claimed chocolate could help to lose weight, he put a lot of red flags in it, and it was still not only turned into headlines of numerous magazines, but was actually even published in a scientific journal that claims it does extensive peer review.
Unfortunately, this study is still referred to as of today. People still find claims that chocolate with high cocoa content can work as a weight-loss accelerator.
Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace was originally planned to be a covert Sith Master. He force jumps, he uses mind control, and he “accidentally” sabotages them. But the negative reaction to him was so strong, Lucas reworked the last 2 scripts of the prequels and is why Count Dooku basically comes out of nowhere.
At that point George’s writing and directing was so shitty, Jar Jar would have had an evil smirk or some stupid Sith one-liner that he repeated every 15 min.
Something something something dark side. Something something something complete.
Pretty much everything “New World Order”: One of the oldest and most common labels for conspiracy theories that claim a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world under a totalitarian one-world government.
Edit: Although there are certainly some signs of such conspiracies today, the absurd thing about many of these theories is that they are often used by right-wing extremists to gain support for ideas that are very close to the goals of the conspirators described in such theories.
The best example is probably MAGA with its “cabal” of child molesters. Now that their leader is president, it is telling that MAGA has gone quiet on this conspiracy theory - and no one there is talking anymore about the fact that influential billionaires are becoming richer and more influential under the MAGA regime.
I have always found such things interesting, as they themselves give rise to conspiracy theories.
Kubrick shot the (fake) moon landing, and NASA gave him the lens he used to shoot Barry Lyndon as a reward.
But, ah, you’ll say, I know the joke! He was such a perfectionist that he shot it on location!
Wrong! Kubrick hated traveling. He filmed it in London.
He was a perfectionist, though, so he had NASA land astronauts on the moon to take reference pictures for the backgrounds.
I’ve always loved the Denver Airport conspiracy theory - that it is actually the secret headquarters of the illuminati or other organisations. It was $2bn over budget and has tunnels under it, which have led people to claim there are also secret bunkers under the airport. It also has a few bizarre pieces of art within it.
I think it’s just an airport with ugly aesthetic choices but I love that people think of all the places a global secret society would base itself, they’d pick Denver Airport.
Apparently there are 6 underground levels at the airport - but they’re used to run an airport. And the tunnels were for a failed automated baggage transport system. The art is just art.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that the stock market serves a real economic purpose that isn’t just “cryptocoin bullshit, but before they were invented”
All Silicon Valley believe the Rokko’s Basilisk theory
Which is why we fucked
The Anti-vax movement was started and funded by Big Pharma, because there is more money to be made in treating a disease than there is in preventing it.
You’re half right. Andrew Wakefield, the father of modern anti-vaccine sentiment, wrote a bogus study with horrible methodology against the MMR vaccine due to a desire to sell separate alternative measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines. Brian Deer explains it best in his 2004 documentary “MMR: What They Didn’t Tell You”.
the nsa funds each and every open source projects for example signal
I think it’s possible that Robert Trump, Donald Trump’s younger brother, was an early victim of COVID. He died suddenly and was “very ill” but no specific cause was ever mentioned AFAIK. I think this was covered up because it was politically inconvenient for his brother.
I have nothing to really base it on except the timing and reaction was suspect.
The Post Office is secretly being controlled by the US Government. If you look at the actual laws of the US it allows the President to appoint someone called the Postmaster General who’s in charge of the whole thing.
I think it would be a pretty good prank to bring this up in a “favorite crazy conspiracy theory” conversation where all but one participant agrees that it’s a baseless conspiracy theory and see if the one other person insists that the Postmaster General Theory is real, or goes along with the crowd. But I really don’t think my friends are coordinated enough to pull it off.
Honestly? My real conspiracy theory is that the the fappening wasn’t an Apple iCloud leak, it was a NSA leak.
In 2014 a whole bunch of celebrities nude photos got put up anonymously on 4chn and reddit. The FBI ended up blaming a guy from Cleveland. But during the same time the NSA was operating under a 6 hop rule for sweeping cell phones and operators at Langley were notorious for copying off photos from random cellphones that they could access too.
The 6 hops rule let the NSA guys get a secret warrant to remotely search a phone if someone is a contact of a contact of a contact of a contact of a contact of a contact who’s a suspected terrorist. That is a hell of a lot of people and I’m sure a lot of celebrities.
So I’m sure the guys at the NSA were collecting and then trading various celebrities nude photos, and one of them was stupid enough to start posting them for clout on 4chn. I believe that they were disciplined and that put a stop to it but they had to find someone to take the heat and they got Apple to do that.Alex Jones was a CIA plant to discredit conspiracy theories that were a liiiiittle too close to reality.
Basically, the government saw some conspiracy theories that were edging too close to what was actually happening. But they couldn’t just outright deny those theories. Because the government spontaneously going “no, we didn’t get microwaves from aliens, and those aliens definitely don’t live among us now as billionaire lizard people” would look suspicious as hell. Any outright denial would only lend credibility to those theories. Like the Streisand Effect, denying them would catapult them to fame. So instead, they created a patsy.
Enter Alex Jones. He’s an idiot, very opinionated, and very vocal about it. But most importantly, he has that spark that makes mediocre white dudes feel smart when they listen to him talk. All the government had to do was give him a platform, and occasionally feed him some juicy conspiracies for his next script. Alex doesn’t even realize he’s being helped along. The government used Alex to give conspiracy theorists a recognizable face and a household name. When Alex Jones hit the air, conspiracy theories were suddenly up front and center in the zeitgeist. Largely due to the government’s help, though he didn’t even know he was the controlled opposition.
And they intentionally got him to parrot those too-close-to-reality conspiracy theories, right alongside the super crazy ones. By making Alex Jones a household name, they were able to collectively discredit all conspiracy theorists. And all they had to do was set him up to skyrocket to fame, and then fail very publicly.
Sandy Hook happened, and that was what the CIA had been waiting for. I don’t think they caused the shooting, but they certainly capitalized on it by getting Jones to fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole with it. Once he had time to work through all of the theories they wanted to discredit, they realized he was getting out of control, and they needed to burn him. And so they did, by leaving him completely disgraced. And the best part (from the government’s perspective) is that burning him only helped further discredit those real conspiracy theories.
