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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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