What is a conspiracy theory?
A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy by powerful and sinister groups, often political in motivation when other explanations are more probable.
America’s Rabbit Hole MazeData suggests crimes motivated by conspiracy theories are escalating. Lahaina, Hawaii, is devastated days after Maui’s August wildfires. Conspiracy theorists claim that the fires were set using “energy weapons” developed by the U.S. military. Rick Bowmer/AP
By David Klepper Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Days after Maui’s wildfires killed scores of people and destroyed thousands of homes last August, a shocking claim spread with alarming speed on YouTube and TikTok: The blaze on the Hawaiian island was set deliberately, using futuristic energy weapons developed by the U.S. military.
Claims of “evidence” emerged: video footage on TikTok showing a beam of white light, too straight to be lightning, zapping a residential neighborhood and sending flames into the sky.
The video was shared many millions of times, amplified by neo-Nazis, anti-government radicals, and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and presented as proof that America’s leaders had turned on the country’s citizens.
“What if Maui was just a practice run?” one woman asked on TikTok. “So that the government can use a direct energy weapon on us?”
The TikTok clip had nothing to do with the Maui fires. It was a video of an electrical transformer explosion in Chile earlier in the year.
But that didn’t stop a TikTok user with a habit of posting conspiracy videos from using the clip to sow more fear and doubt. It was just one of several similar videos and images doctored and passed off as proof that the wildfires were no accident.
Who supports neo-Nazis? Who supports QAnon?
Neo-Nazis: This past summer, hundreds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis mobilized in Charlottesville, Virginia to prove a point — that they were always here and were here to stay.
With anti-Semites, fascists, and racists gathering at the “Unite the Right” rally on the University of Virginia’s campus and racial tensions flaring between white supremacists and counter-protesters, many reactions to the racist violence at Charlottesville were of disgust and sadness.
Even in the wake of contentious partisan politics, both Republicans and Democrats condemned the actions of white supremacists and even called for President Donald Trump to take a stand against their egregious behavior.
Two days later, Trump begrudgingly gave his take on Charlottesville. His position would not only be a lack of condemnation of white supremacy, but he “blamed both sides” for the violence, stating, “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent.
“Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” Trump also added: “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”
Trump’s lukewarm response to the events at Charlottesville and, subsequently, his defense of white supremacy was so shocking to many that journalist Jonathan Cait in New York Magazine wrote, “What is new and even shocking is the intermingling of Republican politics with open white supremacy.”
Increasingly a new constituency for the GOP — one that’s fired up like the rest of the MAGA movement, warring with tech giants and ready to battle through Election Day on behalf of a struggling President Trump.
It no longer is a question of whois the primary support for conspiracy theories but why — why has the Republican party turned so sharply to conspiracy theories as its method of communication? Tucker Carlson, QAnon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, FOX News. All make their living peddling nuttiness.
While politicians of all parties have been infamous for lying, two changes have taken place in the Republican party:
The lies are more extreme, bordering on insane.
When facts emerge, the conspiracy theorists double down, aren’t embarrassed, and continue to promulgate the same lies even after losing lawsuits.
Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, says it tries to remove extremist content. Platforms such as X, formerly Twitter, Telegram, and far-right sites like Gab allow it to flourish.
Federal election officials and some lawmakers have suggested regulations governing AI, including rules requiring political campaigns to label AI-generated images used in their ads.
But those proposals wouldn’t affect the ability of extremist groups or foreign governments to use AI to mislead Americans.
Meanwhile, U.S.-based tech platforms have rolled back their efforts to root out misinformation and hate speech, following the lead of Elon Musk, who fired most of the content moderators when he purchased X.
“There’s been a big step backward,” said Evan Hansen, the former editor of Wired.com who was Twitter’s director of curation before leaving when Musk bought the platform.
“It’s gotten to be a very difficult job for the casual observer to figure out: What do I believe here?”
The disinformation spread by extremist groups and even politicians, such as former President Donald Trump, can create the conditions for violence by demonizing the other side, targeting democratic institutions, and convincing their supporters that they’re in an existential struggle against those who don’t share their beliefs.
Trump has spread lies about elections, voting, and his opponents for years. Building on his specious claims of a deep state that controls the federal government, he has echoed QAnon and other conspiracy theories and encouraged his followers to see their government as an enemy.
He even suggested that now-retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump nominated to be the top U.S. military officer during his administration, was a traitor and deserved execution.
Milley said he has had to take security precautions to protect his family.
Groups, where any conspiracy theory emanating from such as Trump, FOX, Carlson, et al. is accepted without question, are called “cults.” MAGA is such a cult where the belief comes not from reality but from the personality of the theory’s issuer.
The list of incidents blamed on extremists motivated by conspiracy theories is growing.
The Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, attacks on vaccine clinics, anti-immigrant fervor in Spain, and anti-Muslim hate in India:
All were carried out by people who believed conspiracy theories about their opponents and decided violence was an appropriate response.
To believers, the facts don’t matter.
“You can create the universe you want,” said Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who studies online harassment and extremism.
“If the truth doesn’t matter, and there is no accountability for these false beliefs, then people will start to act on them.”
(“Bothsidesism”) claims that U.S. elected leaders and media cannot be trusted feature heavily in many conspiracy theories with ties to extremism.
In 2018, a conspiracy theorist from Florida mailed pipe bombs to CNN, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other top Democrats; the man’s social media feed was littered with posts about child sacrifice and chemtrails — the debunked claim that airplane vapor clouds contain chemicals or biological agents being used to control the population.
In another act of violence tied to QAnon, a California man was charged with using a spear gun to kill his two children in 2021.
He told an FBI agent that he had been enlightened by QAnon conspiracy theories and had become convinced that his wife “possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children.”
With its attendant social isolation, the pandemic created ideal conditions for new conspiracy theories as the virus spread fear around the globe.
Vaccine clinics were attacked, and doctors and nurses were threatened. 5G communication towers were burned as a theory spread, claiming they were used to activate microchips hidden in the vaccine.
Fears about vaccines led one Wisconsin pharmacist to destroy a batch of the highly sought-after immunizations, while bogus claims about supposed COVID-19 treatments and cures led to hospitalizations and death.
Trump claimed hydroxychloroquine and bleach as cures for COVID.
He rejected vaccines while boasting that he had helped develop the COVID vaccines and even has been vaccinated. Despite the contradiction, his cult followers continue to believe.
Few recent events, however, display the power of conspiracy theories like the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, vandalized the offices of Congress, and fought with police in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.
More than 900 have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials, according to data compiled by The Associated Press.
Many of those charged said they had bought into Trump’s conspiracy theories about a stolen election.
“We, meaning Trump supporters, were lied to,” Jan. 6 defendant Robert Palmer wrote in a letter to a judge, who later sentenced him to more than five years for attacking police.
“They kept spitting out the false narrative about a stolen election and how it was ‘our duty’ to stand up to tyranny.”
That narrative continues among Trump’s MAGA followers despite 60+ losing lawsuits and other investigations proving otherwise. As with virtually all cults, counter-facts only harden the belief in the conspiracy theory.
“Who was the bigger spreader of COVID misinformation: some guy with four followers on Twitter or the president of the United States? The problem is our politicians,” Uscinski said.
“January 6 happened, and people said: ‘Oh, this is Facebook’s fault.’
No, the president of the United States told his followers to be at this place, at this time, and to fight like hell.”
Tom Fishman, CEO of the nonprofit Starts With Us, said, “We can look at the window and see a foreshadowing of what could happen if we don’t (defeat conspiracy theories): threats to a functioning democracy, threats of violence against elected leaders.”
Conspiracy theories have always been with us. But why are they so prevalent now, and more so with the Republican Party? The reason: Donald Trump, like most cult leaders, is a proven psychopath, but being President of the United States, he has a louder microphone than any cult leader in history.
Trump meets all twenty criteria for psychopathy (See “The Hare Psychopathy Checklist”), and his mental condition allows him to lie — and even be caught lying — without a pang of conscience.
He is focused on what is best for him and seemingly oblivious to the consequences to anyone else. He is the perfect conspiracy theory machine.
As a psychopath, Trump attracts fearful people, those who feel threatened by the dangerous world they live in. Trump repeats their fears of non-whites, foreigners, non-Christians, gays, the poor, criminals, and women, then tells then only he can protect them.
They so desperately want to believe, they ignore the incongruity and cruelty of his claims and solutions. He becomes the drug they cannot survive without. He defends every lie, never admits being wrong, and attacks those who tell the truth by claiming his misdeed actually is theirs.
If he tells them something as absurd as “a famous politician is kidnapping children, torturing them, raping them, storing them in the basement of a fast-food restaurant, then selling them,” the frightened followers will believe.
Cults are mental drugs. They are addictive. Even when members know the preaching isn’t true, their emotions tell them to believe. You cannot convince an addict or a cult member. There is no outside cure for an addict or cult member,
They can be cured only if they want to be.
Trump was right when he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any followers. They are hooked.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary SovereigntyTwitter: @rodgermitchellSearch #monetarysovereigntyFacebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.
John Stossel
John Stossel puzzles me. When you first conclude he knows nothing about economics, he writes something spot-on. Then he follows up with ignorance about the same subject.
In that, he reminds of Paul Krugman, who alternately understands, then doesn’t understand, Monetary Sovereignty.
Stossel can do it in two sentences. Here is an article on Reason.com, the Libertarian version of QAnon. Look at the subhead.
“Federal government’s budget deficit will bankrupt us.”
Suddenly, the U.S. government will go bankrupt? After world wars, numerous recessions and depressions, now, when the economy is growing rapidly, the federal government is going bankrupt??
The blue line is Gross Domestic Product. The red line is federal “debt.” There is no hint that federal “debt” is leading to bankruptcy. Quite the opposite. As “debt” grows, so does the economy.
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The green line is real (allowing for inflation), per capita GDP. There still is no hint that increasing federal “debt” leads to bankruptcy. Again, quite the opposite.
If Stossel wants to bet that next year’s budget deficit will bankrupt the U.S. government, I will put up every dollar I own that says Stossel is wrong. One wonders why someone, anyone, would make such a foolish statement and expect belief.
Being Monetarily Sovereign, the U.S. government cannot run short of U.S. dollars. Increased federal deficit spending is necessary for economic growth. GDP=Federal Spending+Non-federal Spending+Net Exports
Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan:“A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.”
I suspect Stossel knows he’s wrong, so I’m guessing he hasn’t moved to another country or exchanged all his U.S. dollars for another currency in advance of a mythical U.S. bankruptcy.
He’s just promulgating the usual Libertarian BS that has been wrong for at least 84+ years and will continue to be incorrect during his lifetime and beyond.
But wait. He also says, “Trade deficits are trivial.” In that, he is correct.
A trade deficit merely means we give other nations some of the plentiful U.S. dollars we create at the touch of a computer key, and in return, we receive valuable and scarce goods and services.
I run trade deficits with my local Costco and with my cleaning lady. I don’t feel bad about it, though I don’t even have the government’s infinite ability to create dollars.
The more money I have, the more stuff I can buy. The federal government has infinite money.
Maybe Donald Trump is such a powerful communicator and pot-stirrer that other countries, embarrassed by their own trade barriers, will eliminate them. Then, I will thank the president for the wonderful thing he did. Genuine free trade will be a recipe for wonderful economic growth.
But I fear the opposite: a trade war and stagnation—because much of what Trump and his followers say is economically absurd.
“What Trump and his followers say is economically absurd”? Who could have guessed that MAGAs know so little? Could it be possible that QAnon, Fox, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump are not reliable sources?
“(If) you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country!” announced the president.
Lots of things are essential to America—and international trade is the best way to make sure we have them. When a storm blocks roads in the Midwest, we get supplies from Canada, Mexico, and China. Why add roadblocks?
Steel is important, but “the choice isn’t between producing 100 percent of our steel (and having a country) or producing no steel (and presumably losing our country),” writes Veronique De Rugy of the Mercatus Center.
Trump uses the “you don’t have a country” meme for everything. “If you don’t have a steel industry, you don’t have a country.” “If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country.” “If you don’t have a wall, you don’t have a country.” “If you don’t have a military, you don’t have a country.” “If you don’t have a strong military, you don’t have a country.”
These are a few of his nonsense statements about the end of America. Ms de Rugy’s response was correct.
Today, most of the steel we use is made in America. Imports come from friendly places like Canada and Europe. Just 3 percent come from China.
Still, insists the president, “Nearly two-thirds of American raw steel companies have gone out of business!”
There’s been consolidation. But so, what? For 30 years, American steel production has stayed about the same. Profits rose from $714 million in 2016 to $2.8 billion last year. And the industry added nearly 8,000 jobs.
Trump loves to cherry-pick, twist, and outright lie about statistics to make his point. A day later, he’ll say the opposite. His followers will swoon at each new version despite its incompatibility with what Trump said yesterday.
Trump says, “Our factories were left to rot and to rust all over the place. Thriving communities turned into ghost towns. You guys know that, right?”
No. Few American communities became ghost towns. More boomed because of cheap imports.
It’s sad when a steelworker loses work, but for every steelworker, 40 Americans work in industries that use steel. They, and we, benefit from lower prices.
Right again, John. Wrong again, Donald.
Trump touts the handful of companies benefiting from his tariffs: “Century Aluminum in Kentucky—Century is a great company—will be investing over $100 million.”
Great. But now we’ll get a feeding frenzy of businesses competing to catch Trump’s ear. Century Aluminum got his attention. Your company better pay lobbyists. Countries, too.
After speaking to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia, Trump tweeted: “We don’t have to impose steel or aluminum tariffs on our ally, the great nation of Australia!”
So, the purpose of tariffs is . . . what? To punish our enemies? To reward our businesses? Or simply increase prices for the American consumer.
Economies thrive when there are clear rules that everyone understands. Now we’ve got “The Art of the Deal,” one company and country at a time.
I understand that Trump, the developer liked to make special deals, but when presidents do that, it’s crony capitalism—crapitalism. You get the deal if you know the right people. That’s what kept most of Africa and South America poor.
But Trump thinks trade itself makes us poorer: “We lose … on trade. Every year, $800 billion.”
Actually, last year’s trade deficit with China was $375 billion. But even if it were $800 billion, who cares? All a trade deficit shows is that a country sells us more than we sell them. We get the better of that deal. They get excess dollar bills, but we get stuff.
Right on, John. We have the infinite ability to create dollars by pressing computer keys. The U.S. government can send dollars into the economy whenever it wants to.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke:“The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”
But we don’t have the infinite ability to create stuff. So, trading dollars for stuff is a great deal for us.
Sadly, when the U.S. government does it, the Libertarians wrongly complain about federal deficits and debt. I wonder whether Stossel will hear about this from his Libertarian pals.
And now we come to the usual Libertarian BS:
Real problems are imbalances like next year’s $1 trillion federal government budget deficit. That will bankrupt us.
It hasn’t happened. It can’t happen. It won’t happen. It’s just that incredible fearmongering by people who know better and should stop now.
Trade deficits are trivial. You run one with your supermarket. Do you worry because you bought more from them than they buy from you? No. The free market sorts it out.
Trump makes commerce sound mysterious: “The action I’m taking today follows a nine-month investigation by the Department of Commerce, Secretary Ross.”
But Wilber Ross is a hustler who phoned Forbes Magazine to lie about how much money he has. Now he goes on TV and claims, “3 cents worth of tin plate steel in this can. So if it goes up 25 percent, that’s a tiny fraction of one penny. Not a noticeable thing.”
Not to him maybe, but Americans buy 2 billion cans of soup.
Political figures like Ross—and Trump—shouldn’t decide what we’re allowed to buy. If they understood markets, they’d know enough to stay out of the way.
Like so many of the people Trump hires, Ross was, shall we say, a questionable character, with many, many claims against his honesty.
The combination of Libertarianism and its attendant economic ignorance, together with economic dishonesty leads to bad (for America) decisions. Cut federal spending and we’ll have the bankruptcyStossel and the Libertarians predict.
As for John Stossel, he still puzzles me.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary SovereigntyTwitter: @rodgermitchellSearch #monetarysovereigntyFacebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.
There is a strange confluence among Trump’s MAGAs, QAnons, COVID deniers, coup deniers, election deniers, mask deniers, pro-gunners, and anti-vaxxers.
They all receive their information and beliefs from right-wing-owned media and social media. They trust conspiracy theories more than actual data. They learn by rumor. They lack compassion for others. And many die from or for their beliefs.
Anti-vaxxers: The November 19 edition of Science News contained an article about Louis Pasteur, “the father of microbiology.” The article included the following excerpts:
Pasteur not only made milk safe to drink, but also rescued the beer and wine industry.
He established the germ theory of disease, saved the French silkworm population, confronted the scourges of anthrax and rabies, and transformed the curiosity of vaccination against smallpox into a general strategy for treating and preventing human diseases.
He invented microbiology and established the foundations for immunology.
Vaccination, of course, had been invented eight decades earlier, when British physician Edward Jenner protected people from smallpox by first exposing them to cowpox, a similar disease acquired from cows.
Later Pasteur confronted an even more difficult microscopic foe, the virus that causes rabies, a horrifying disease that’s almost always fatal.
He decided to grow the disease-causing agent in living tissue — the spinal cords of rabbits. He used dried-out strips of spinal cord from infected rabbits to vaccinate other animals that then survived rabies injections.
In 1885 when a mother brought to his lab a 9-year-old boy who had been badly bitten by a rabid dog, Pasteur agreed to administer the new vaccine.
After a series of injections, the boy recovered fully.
Soon more requests came for the rabies vaccine, and by early the next year over 300 rabies patients had received the vaccine and survived, with only one death among them.
Popularly hailed as a hero, Pasteur was also vilified by some hostile doctors. Vaccine opponents complained that his vaccine was an untested method that might itself cause death.
Vaccines, though, have substantially reduced the risks from COVID-19, extending the record of successful vaccines that have already tamed not only smallpox and rabies, but alsopolio, measles and a host of other once deadly maladies.
Yet even though vaccines have saved countless millions of lives, some politicians and so-called scientists who deny or ignore overwhelming evidencecontinue to condemn vaccines as more dangerous than the diseases they prevent.
Dick Farrel, conservative talk show host and avid Trump supporter, changed his mind about the vaccine after he fell sick, but too late. He died of COVID after a two-week battle.
True, some vaccines can induce bad reactions, even fatal in a few cases out of millions of vaccinations.
But shunning vaccines today, as advocated in artificially amplified social media outrage, is like refusing to eat because some people choke to death on sandwiches.
The website “Notable Anti-Vaxxers Who Have Died From COVID-19”, lists just a handful of the many thousands who denied the efficacy of vaccination and paid for their denial with their lives.
They had what they claimed to be “good” reasons for not vaxxing, but they denied the clear facts.
They claimed not to trust an “unproven” drug that had millions of success stories but instead trusted unproven conspiracy theorists who had no successes.
By failing to vaccinate, they helped spread the disease among all those with whom they came into contact. This did not concern them.
Relatives of the anti-vaxxers are the anti-maskers. The primary purpose of masks is to help prevent COVID from drifting to others. It’s why surgeons and nurses wear masks in operating rooms — not to protect themselves, but to protect patients.
Anti-maskers do not care about protecting others. They want their “freedom.” This selfishness is personified by such as Gov. Ron DeSantis, who never shows concern for COVID victims, but only for people who must “suffer the hardship” of wearing a mask. To him, protecting others is a hardship that impinges of freedom.
To support the lie, he promulgates the myth that masks don’t work. One wonders whether he would feel comfortable being operated on by a surgical team that goes maskless.
Anti-vaxers and anti-makers are similar to QAnonbelievers, in that both groups blindly accept the words of unreliable sources.
The more outrageous (even hilarious) the claims, the more fervently they are believed.
For example, here is the utter nonsense, invented out of whole cloth, that the brainless not only believe but promulgate:
I believe because I believe.
The core QAnon theory is that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic sexual abusers of children operating a global child sex trafficking ring conspired against former U.S. President Donald Trump during his term in office.
Followers of the conspiracy theorists say that the Trump administration secretly fought the cabal of pedophiles, and would conduct mass arrests and executions of thousands of cabal members on a day known as “the Storm” or “the Event”.
QAnon has also claimed that Trump stimulated the conspiracy of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the sex trafficking ring, and to prevent a coup d’état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros.
QAnon is described as antisemitic or rooted in antisemitic tropes, due to its fixation on Jewish financier George Soros and conspiracy theories about the Rothschild family, and the myth that Jews harvest the blood of children for ritual.
Unlike the anti-vaxxers, the QAnons have not been killed by their beliefs. They merely have lost years of their lives wandering in the diseased labyrinth of misinformation — years they never will recover.
They also had no concern for the people their bigotry would hurt, the millions of people they want to be arrested and executed because of their mythical “cabal” identification.
Entering Congress in an orderly fashion. A normal tourist visit.
In a similar vein, coup deniers will not accept what their eyes tell them.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.: “Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall, showed people in an orderly fashion in between the stanchions and ropes taking pictures.
“If you didn’t know the footage was from January 6, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”
And people actually believed him.
Hundreds of coup participants now have lost their freedom, their jobs, and their friends because of their beliefs. To rot in a jail cell, your reputation gone, and eventually to realize you have been taken by a con artist, must be a terrible fate. Whether it will be a lesson learned still remains a question.
The fact that the manymillionsmore who voted for Biden than voted for Trump would have had their votes invalidated did not bother the rioters, whose only concern was the happiness of one man.
Then there are the MAGAs:
Surveys of hundreds of fervent Trump voters, whom researchers refer to as Make American Great Again (MAGA) supporters, reveal strong beliefs that the election was stolen; that COVID-19 is a bioweapon from China; and that the riot was the work of Antifa.
Why do they believe? Not because of any facts, which repeatedly demonstrate the lie, but rather because:
These people feel like they’re losing their country and their identity. They feel like they’re being displaced by communities of color, by feminists and by immigrants.
They do not care about people of color, women or immigrants. They care only about themselves.
So they send Donald Trump, the billionaire, their money — dollars that could have been put to good purpose; dollars for which they worked much harder than Trump did — and they see those dollars used to defend a criminal against justice.
Finally, we come to the pro-gunners. They consistently vote against any restrictions on gun ownership.
They claim to believe in the incredibly brainless proposition that giving everyone easily obtainable guns, including high-powered, exceptionally lethal guns, makes America safer.
Not only does this deny all data, but common sense, too. The notion that “guns-for-all” makes us safer it is illogical on its face. Statistics show that if you own a gun you are more likely to be shot than if you didn’t own a gun.
Most American gun owners say they own firearms to protect themselves and their loved ones, but a study published this week suggests people who live with handgun owners are shot to death at a higher rate than those who don’t have such weapons at home.
“We found zero evidence of any kind of protective effects” from living in a home with a handgun, said David Studdert, a Stanford University researcher who was the lead author of the Annals of Internal Medicine study.
The study followed nearly 600,000 Californians who did not own handguns but began living in homes with handguns between October 2004 and December 2016, either because they started living with someone who owned one or because someone in their household bought one.
Living with a handgun owner particularly increased the risk of being shot to death in a domestic violence incident, and it did not provide any protection against being killed at home by a stranger, the researchers found.
The pro-gunners don’t care about the lost lives and health due to the continual shootings, so long as guns remain available for hunting and personal use.
SUMMARYBelieving conspiracy theories can be hazardous to your health. Believers are more likely to waste years of their lives, be injured, or die from their beliefs.
People who are more susceptible to myths and tales fall into several categories:
White supremacists. They secretly feel weak or fearful; they hope to find protection as members of the cult
Those who resist taking direction from accepted authority; it makes them feel impotent.
Those who want to be “in the know” regard non-believers as uninformed and gullible.
Those who lack empathy and compassion: As psychopaths, they are inward-directed. Others’ pain and sorrow does not affect them.
Republican Trumpers: They have been trained to support only what Trump tells them, not reality.
We do not have laws against cruel stupidity. In the land of the free, even such as Herschel Walker can walk the streets, mouth ignorance, lie with impunity, and still attract votes from his peers
The “messiness” of democracy is simultaneously its weakness and its strength. The genius and the fool each have one vote. But I sure wish the voting public was at least a little bit smarter.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary SovereigntyTwitter: @rodgermitchellSearch #monetarysovereigntyFacebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.
While politicians of all parties have been infamous for lying, two changes have taken place in the Republican party:
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 