https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/solar-eclipse-conspiracy-theories-far-right-1234998475/
Alex Jones and other far-right influencers are pushing an array of conspiracy theories about the solar eclipse on April 8.
Funny the last eclipse was no issue. The one where Trump looked directly into the sun with bare naked eyes. Pepperidge Farms Remembers….
Man i was in south Carolina at the time, and there was talk of lizard men and Bigfoot a plenty.
Also people from the forest and creatures from the swamp, all sorts of ooga booga shit.
Clearly he saw something that the Deep State is trying to hide, and now's the chance to see it for ourselves.
Yep.
"Political conservatism is associated with an increased negativity bias, including increased attention and reactivity toward negative and threatening stimuli"
yes it gives their life structure like other addictions do and is even controlled by the same part of the brain
The fear is how they keep the grift going. None of these wack jobs believe 99.99% of the shit they spew, but a base that is afraid is easier to manipulate/con.
In a way yes, NPR talked about a study where conservative brains have a bigger fear center in the brain. There were a lot of cool distinctions made between conservatives and liberals in their brains and behavior patterns.
Is it a coincidence that every nation's least intelligent people tend to be conservatives? And that the less intelligent they are, the more conservative they are?
Fear of the things you don't understand leads to fear of change. That's it. That's the entire thing.
You know I genuinely noticed something quite alarming about politics: Conservatives' stances are eerily close to my first draft uneducated analysis of a situation... when I was still a child.
When I was the age to get "The talk" I inquired as to why people who didn't want to get pregnant didn't just not have sex, and it was calmly explained to me why that was dumb as hell.
We're dealing with people who have the political leaning of a child with no compassionate education.
They're all just reactionary. They see a headline that says "algae farms being used to fight climate change" and think "dumb liberals using algae to do what algae does and thinking it's going to save the planet." That's as far as they go with their analysis.
Or they see headlines about DEI programs and think "that's actually racist against white people by giving minorities an advantage" without considering the underlying problems of inherent minority disadvantage in the numerous interconnected socioeconomic systems.
Conservatives are reactionary, not smart enough to be analytical, and unwilling to learn. Problems are literally too complicated for them to understand.
No it’s a conspiracy. They’re putting lead in the water that’s turning the conservatives stupid and violent
These people legitimately believe that shooting 1000 rounds of shit surplus ammo per week is perfectly normal. These people are very likely contaminating their entire lives with lead residue unless they are taking precautions, which we all know they are not.
Idk about lead exposure from shooting, but I do know that lead exposure makes you prefer guns to other shooting sports.
My new conspiracy is that the popularity of fishing and hunting in right wing areas exposes the youth to lead in fishing weights and projectiles. The double whammy of lead from the environment due to gas in past decades (which mostly affected everyone but poor people even more) combined with lead from fishing and hunting exposure caused whole regions to have lower intelligence.
Then because of how dumb and backwards the area is, pretty much anyone with a head on their shoulders wants out ASAP exacerbating the problem and we end up with whole regions ripe for activating into an idiot army. This fact is taken advantage of by Republicans (not the dumb ones, the grifter ones that were rich and not exposed as much) with the way the U.S. senate works giving power to land instead of people. Republicans then keep those regions dumb and scared to help them keep their grasp on power.
Dude if when you get hunted or fished meat and it has lead in it, take it back and get a refund. Bullet fragmentation is a well known factor and if someone is losing enough fishing weights that its increasing lead exposure they need to stop fishing.
These are probably some of the lowest on the totem factors ya could bring up which is rather impressive since fishing and hunting may have an effect, problem is that said effect is cultural. People have been hunting with lead projectiles since the fucking bronze age if not earlier, you can handle lead perfectly safely, just dont lick it, aerosolize it, smelt it, or fucking drink it and you should be fine.
Fuck if you said mercury poisoning from eating too much fish was a factor you may have been fucken onto something.
Dude if when you get hunted or fished meat and it has lead in it, take it back and get a refund.
I'm talking about regions where it's not uncommon to hunt and eat what you shot, not going to Albertsons.
you can handle lead perfectly safely, just dont lick it, aerosolize it, smelt it, or fucking drink it and you should be fine.
How many people wash their hands immediately after handling fishing gear or projectiles and then go on to itch their eye, pick their nose, etc. There are many vectors for lead in your hand to get into your body. And if you do this often and are young, it could conceivably have an effect.
I read once that the most accurate definition of their mindset boils down to "You don't get to tell me what to do; I get to tell you what to do."
Is it a coincidence that every nation’s least intelligent people tend to be conservatives?
Its more often that media likes to fixate on the biggest freaks. Flip over to some Ben Shapiro ass news coverage and you'll get plenty of "Blue Haired College Student Literally Shits Herself On Camera When Asked To Define The Word Woman".
Should be noted that the Alex Jones gang used to be a 9/11 Truthers and a anti-surveillance libertarians. They had more in common with the Austinite Fruits-and-Nuts liberals than Trump conservatives. But old liberal Austin money dried up and new right-wing tech billionaire money flooded the state, so Jones (and a bunch of others like New Atheist Sam Harris and journalist Glenn Greenwald) made the jump to follow the money.
Conservatives dominate conspiracy theories for the same reason they dominate terrestrial radio and cable news and country music and Twitter. That's literally just where you go to get paid.
Jones included a video of a man speculating that various Texas and Oklahoma counties had declared a state of emergency in order to usher in a billionaire-led new world order.
It's already like this
Losers that never paid attention in science class and had no science after high school trying to tell everyone we’re wrong and they’re right, so they don’t feel as idiotic as they are
Most of the people saying this stuff, like Alex Jones, know that it's bullshit. They are preying upon the uneducated and gullable.
Can't trust the scientists, they went to college and college makes you liberalwokecommunist!!
My conspiracy theory is that it's a hoax made up by the tourism boards of the cities along the path as a way to drum up more business.
Let's face it, nobody actually would want to go to Cleveland without the eclipse.
Hey Cleveland is fine. I went there multiple times. Sure it’s because my doctor was there, and no I wouldn’t go there otherwise, but yeah it’s not bad
Is this really worth covering, rolling stone ?
There are and will always be a bunch of nutters who who think the mailman is CIA but there’s fuck all you and I can do about it.
The on going coverage is becoming grotesque . Just leave ‘em to it.
How dare they report on someone who is wildly popular spreading dangerous conspiracy theories!
Seriously, it's like reporting on a headline from the Weekly World News. So fucking stupid clickbaity nonsense.
Our lack of free or affordable mental health care is really making itself apparent now. These people are bat shit crazy!
Aw, man they got me. I was going to block out the sun to calibrate the gay Jewish space lasers to kill god before the election. I also had planned an update for the moonagram. You guys would have loved it.
I was thinking of taking my kids to see the eclipse at Niagara but…these guys and the combination of a large crowd has me concerned.
It's a bit late to make plans. Roads are going to be massively congested in the hours before and after. The best way to avoid that is to stay somewhere overnight, but those places are all booked now.
If you have an opportunity to experience the total eclipse by taking a short trip, do it! I would avoid the tourist traps, though. They will be full beyond capacity.
A small park in a rural town will get the same eclipse as Niagara Falls or other big cities inside the totality area.
Be aware of general traffic, also, though. Plan to make a day of it, get to where you plan to go early and hang out for a while.
Honestly I saw the last one and I don't get the hype. The shadows made cool shapes and then it got dark and then it stopped being dark. It was neat but not like this lose your mind shit.
A whole lot of semi and newly blind people who believe it was a conspiracy are not going to admit to their ignorance. They will in fact probably say that the blindness was not normal eclipse behaviour and that it was all a Librul conspiracy to blind conservatives.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As early as 763 BCE, ancient Assyrians were charting the process by which the path of the moon temporarily obstructs the sun, and astronomers have continued to do so for thousands of years since.
Unconvinced by thousands of years of scientific inquiry, as well as driven by a general sense of apocalyptic bloodlust, many on the right are trading conspiracy theories about the upcoming eclipse, ranging from the belief that it signals the End Times to the idea that the Biden administration is using it as an opportunity to shut down cellphone service or bring in the National Guard in an effort to make beautiful blond children who play sports transgender.
The post, which has more than 3,000 retweets and 1 million views, illustrates how the trajectory of the most recent solar eclipse viewable in the United States, as well as the trajectory of the upcoming eclipse, form an “Aleph” and “Tav,” which (as anyone who was forced to go to Hebrew school instead of staying home and using cheat codes to make your Sims woo-hoo naked knows) are the first and last letters in the Hebrew language, signaling the beginning and end times.
While this explanation sounds both highly rational and surprisingly efficient by county bureaucracy standards, it is not one that has been accepted by the slew of mini-Alex Joneses on TikTok, Instagram, and X.
Ostensibly, the title of the project, which is intended to measure changes in electric and magnetic fields, is a clever (albeit nerdy) reference to ancient Egyptian mythology.
So coming from the perspective of someone who very much understands science and how eclipses work: On Monday, if you’re standing in the right place at the right time and wearing stupid-looking glasses, you may or may not see the sun go black for a moment, as has periodically happened since the recording of human history.
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The QAA podcast did an ep about this recently.
Whenever I see or hear anything Alex Jones, I just imagine he's a time traveler from the Warhammer: 40k universe.