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Notes -
Mitchel McConnell and the Collapse of Common Sense.
Before I start -
-Please don't feel personally attacked if you bought the FUD, you are not alone.
-It could totally turn out that the recent releases are doubling-down in which case whoops, and feel free to judge me later.
Anyway.
After weeks of speculation, Mitch McConnell appears to be alive (per CNN, Fox). This is good news (because death is bad, and also because he is one of the most competent people remaining in American government). It seems like he and his family wanted some privacy and that he was sick (probably held down by some pneumonia it seems?).
This was always the most likely outcome.
Despite that we've seen a crap-ton of conspiracy theories, and I think these are a microcosm of the decline in America and perhaps the modern world. On reddit and most of blue social media this was painted something that the evil Republicans were doing for evil Republican reasons (with a sidebar of his wife/handler immediately fleeing to China). The mainstream media bit into it as a tabloid chaser (...how far we've fallen) and as a cudgel to hit the Republicans with, and of course you can also blame the 24-hour news cycle.
Posters here and more moderate/right-leaning spaces did better but some still went in on conspiracy theories.
Lest we think it is online only I deliberately polled some people I know in real life.
This never really made sense though. The political hit from having been caught lying about this would be high (well for Republicans, anyway). The benefits on stalling are murky. The amount of family and other people you'd have to keep in the dark was high.
It was silly. Perhaps some people didn't mean it seriously, but that's the problem isn't it.
Too much of politics is low information, demanding people have an opinion, and that opinion is valueless and sometimes more of humor thing or as we talk about with woke a religious stance more than a policy position.
People being stupid and silly isn't a new invention but people are asked about or forced to state their opinions more often and can do so publicly and without later shame for saying something ridiculous. On the other hand the people we used to look to for information have fallen off the rails, and on the gripping hand people feel entirely comfortable completely throwing out experts because the experts have lost a step, not realizing random individuals or influencers really aren't doing any better.
And of course we have what we see anytime a Republican aligned figure is ill or dead - the grave dancing.
The whole thing has been tremendously gross but I can't help but think we'll get more of it.
I mean he was completely MIA and even Trump said he had no idea how he was doing. There have been a ton of health concerns and falls etc. Plus that video where he blankly stared into space during a speech. Makes sense to speculate wildly
Honestly I think I prefer this information environment to the ‘trust the experts’ soft censorship of 2019-2023. I’ve been pretty upset with the Israel conspiracy theories on Twitter, but I’m starting to again think that really inane stuff spreading makes people more cautious about what they believe. I even think the QAnon stuff could have gone away earlier if more people had been exposed to how crazy it all was.
The guy is old, health problems are to be expected, but the immediate rush to "he's dead and this is a cover-up" was silly. Why? What reason to cover it up? This, and the "Lindsey Graham was actually killed by a Russian strike in Ukraine" rumour-mongering is just everyone has gone crazy.
To be fair, this is a world where a president's senility was hushed up for at least a year and it's expected for senior politicians to continue their duties while almost insensible from stroke or in their hospital beds. I can see why people jump to a 'weekend at Bernie's' explanation without a huge leap in logic.
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I'm not a Republican but from where I'm sitting it looks like their opponents already uniformly assume the worst about them. I don't think there's much difference between being accused of this and getting caught doing it. The disgust is already priced in.
Decided to take a break from Twitter for a while and for some reason thought I'd do better on reddit. Opened up a thread full of thousands of people raging about and mocking Elon over something he allegedly said. Looked it up and found out he never said it at all. Pointed this out to a few people. Universally downvoted of course, but one of them bothered to respond and tell me that "It doesn't matter. This is exactly the kind of thing he would say."
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MARGARINE ISN’T BUTTER! It says it right there on the label, it’s not butter! It’s not butter! It’s not butter!
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Most of the content I saw was more of the 'McConnell is potentially braindead and being kept alive for political reasons' moreso than straight up not recording his actual death for what it's worth
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What's strange is this is happening on the same day that Lindsey Graham suddenly dies, almost like McConnell wanted to present himself as continuing to be a part of Republican control of the Senate after Graham threw the SC Senate race into disarray with his death.
That said, I don't love that we're having geriatric senators stay on through major health concerns.
I mean it makes sense, Graham dying and it being announced immediately would just raise more questions about the lack of updates. Although it's entirely possible it was just timing.
Graham dying and it being announced should have steered people in the direction of "if McConnell was dead it would have been announced". If he was severely ill, there could be all kinds of reasons (including his family wanting things private while they dealt with the crisis) for not giving on-the-hour updates. If they had issued on-the-hour updates, the conspiracy mongers would have found some reason to find that suspicious: "why are they telling us he's not dead yet? what is really going on? do they mean he's on life support and is a vegetable but they haven't pulled the plug yet? that's it, isn't it?"
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The idea that Mitch was near-death was plausible. In fact, it’s still possible that this happened and he recovered and that’s why they’re posting about it now. Pneumonia, right?
Other conspiracy theories were much more far-fetched, but not anywhere close tot he worst. Didn’t Twitter have a national freak-out when Donald Trump wasn’t seen in public for three days?
I don’t think conspiracy theories are a sign of decline as such. A lot of them turned out to be true, or events justified immense skepticism. Off the top of my head: Hillary rigged the 2016 primary, Russiagate was a hoax, Corona was probably man-made, the government lied about masks, Snowden, Assange, Twitter Files, Kavanaugh rape hoax, Duke Lacrosse Team rape hoax, Rolling Stone UVA Rape hoax, Trump assassination attempts. The largest mass shooting in American history happened at Mandalay Bay and the investigation went nowhere and odd details went totally unexplained and Trump got up on TV and basically said, wow that was crazy don’t worry about it. Etc etc etc.
In a way conspiracies are just a natural product of society. Any time a small coordinated group is acting in secret against a larger group, that’s a conspiracy. But we wouldn’t really call the journalists who sit around lying to you a conspiracy, even though it’s quite natural for people to feel distrust in that reality.
My theory is that the conspiracy theories used to be smart but are getting dumber. There was a lot of alpha in conspiracy theories when a generation of smart young Americans were posting online because they were locked out of power and party jobs. A lot of those posters are being assimilated now into high-profile jobs (the Trump admin is full of posters), but there’s still this meme floating around that conspiracies are true. So now you have Tucker and Candace and BlueAnon and all sorts of nonsense grifting lowbies. Same as it ever was, not different in some respect from the medieval mob.
Yeah, pneumonia was known as "the old man's friend" because that was what finished off old people in the past. I still wouldn't put a minor stroke out of the picture, though.
Please note all the "hoax" in the list you gave. The problem is now that there is no debunking. Oh, turns out that rumour was only a rumour/a hoax? Doesn't matter, plenty of people will continue to pass it around as Gospel truth (there seem to be a hard core of people who totally believe Trump raped 12 year old girls alongside Epstein, for example).
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Yeah he was probably seriously ill in the hospital and I haven't seen any commentary refuting that - the conspiracy theory is that he was dead or brain-dead and it wasn't commented.
Look at this almost all of these are things that people KNEW were fake at the time. They weren't conspiracy theories where something was being hidden, it's that the dominant narrative was ass. The biggest exception is the Mandalay Bay shooting....but nobody has any firm theory with any evidence behind it or anything beyond "that was weird af" and pure speculation.
This probably extends to your next point - conspiracy theories are getting dumber because stuff that would previously be a "conspiracy theory" (like MK Ultra) has enough penetrance that anybody interested in knowing or learning about them does.
Although plenty of conspiracy theories were always super dumb - ex: moon landing faked.
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