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Paranoia/Conspiracy 2020

By Chris Colcord

Fort Wayne Reader

2018-08-04

Just out of curiosity, how paranoid should you be these days? What’s the recommended amount of irrational fear you should maintain in a surveillance and conspiracy-crazed era? I’ve always been of the belief that everybody should be at least a little bit paranoid at all times, just for safety’s sake—believing there’s somebody out to get you tends to keep the mind sharp, after all. But it’s a tricky thing, for too much paranoia and suddenly you’re spitting on yourself and grabbing strangers on the street and shouting bizarre theories into their alarmed faces.

I’ve never been much of a paranoiac/conspiracist, to be honest — I’ve always believed that I’m simply not significant enough for the government or the Illuminati or the Free Masons to pay that much attention to. Although I guess it would be kind of, I don’t know, flattering, if someone was indeed hacking my phone or surveilling my house, I’m just doubtful that it’s ever happened. I’m not that glamorous.

But I have to admit, it is a little unsettling when you recognize that your data is out there and that companies are playing with it. I filled out an online insurance application form last week, and when the form needed a phone number, I didn’t hesitate. Within 2 hours, I got 6—count ‘em, 6—phone calls from rival insurance companies pushing their services.
It was startling. My phone usually doesn’t ring six times in a day (if not a week,) and here I am getting deluged by calls within minutes of my application being submitted. Now of course I’m no dummy about big data and I’m quite aware of how the world works, and while it may enrage my privacy-mad-zealot friends, this sort of thing usually doesn’t bother me. I’ve always accepted that there’s going to be intrusions like this in the information age, and while it’s annoying, I’ve never felt it was more than that. You can always tell salesmen to buzz off, after all.

But boy, the speed of the responses… that’s what got to me. You read about how sophisticated advertisers are and how much information gets passed back and forth between companies, but until you see it firsthand, it doesn’t really resonate. But I’m probably going to be a little more hesitant about giving out my personal information now, especially in cash purchases when the cashier inexplicably asks for my phone number. I’m just buying a charger, thanks; you don’t need my phone number.

But you know, that’s going to be the extent of my fight for privacy, and the extent of my fight against the military/industrial complex or the Deep State or the Illuminati or the Elders of Zion or whatever other nutball fantasy organization your standard-issue nutball conspiracist believes in. I used to have an almost paternal fondness for the various bozo conspiracists out there, but not anymore. They’re too crazy to be laughed at.

When Edgar Welch drove from his home in North Carolina to Washington, D.C. on December 4th, 2016 and fired an assault rifle in a popular pizzeria to rescue children from sex dungeons, we crossed some kind of line in the U.S. with regards to conspiracy nutballs. Welch was responding to online reports about “Pizzagate,” a supposed child-sex trafficking ring that involved Clinton, Obama, and every other prominent Democrat, and Welch was attempting to free the slaves from the basement of the pizzeria. Problem was, there was no basement. And there was no crime ring, either.

Welch apologized instantly for his “incredibly ill-advised decision,” while admitting to the New York Times that “the intel on this wasn’t 100 %.” A statement that immediately qualified as the Understatement of the Century.

But Pizzagate True Believers have now morphed into “QAnon” True Believers, and the rabbit-hole of insane conspiracy theories continues to ensnare the feeble-minded. This would be easier to ignore if there weren’t so many “QAnon” T-shirts on display at the President’s recent rally, or if the President himself didn’t seem to actively foster such insanity. But there were and he does, and the continued fervency of the online conspiracy nuts has become a frightening thing to behold. (If you want to know—and I don’t blame you if you don’t—QAnon is the moniker of a dark net source/”hero”
who apparently has the inside intel on another child-sex slavery ring founded by Democrats and people opposed to Trump. QAnon has been leaving tantalizing “clues” for his followers about the status of his investigation.)

One would think, that in the midst of the unraveling of possibly the greatest conspiracy against the United States in history, that conspiracists would at least have a passing interest in the actual, real-world investigation against the President, but no. Not only are they die-hard Trumpians, they’re probably disappointed in the whole nature of the investigation. Conspiracists love to have to work to discern all the little clues and shreds of conspiracy from bizarre and esoteric sources, after all, and here Trump is just flat-out saying, I did it. What fun is that?

At some level, I kind of understand the compulsion to follow conspiracies. People love riddles, they love mysteries, and everybody loves the challenge of being the one who figures it all out. It’s the “DaVinci Coding” of America: there are clues out there, you just have to have the vision to see them. Some of the most beloved young-adult books of all time follow plucky teen heroes solving mysteries, and kids love the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Harry Potter and TInTin.

Problem is, today it’s not Nancy Drew solving the Secret of the Old Clock, it’s Alex Jones stalking the parents of Sandy Hook victims. And that’s just something that as a society, we simply can’t abide.