Reading the terrible story of conspiracy loon Kate Shemirani should remind us all just how dangerous these people have become. Shemirani’s daughter died of cancer as a direct result of anti-medicine views and worryingly, since the Covid-19 pandemic, people like her are no longer on the wild fringes of society. An increasingly worrying number of people have been taken in by frankly unhinged theories.
I remember many years ago being shocked when someone I knew joined the Unification Church, known as the Moonies. I was aware that cult members were recruiting people just down from where we worked, not least because I was approached by them. I was going through a particularly dark depression at the time and looking back I may have been vulnerable to their recruitment methods. Fortunately, my lifelong atheism saved the day, as did a change of meds. My old colleague, who I knew was single, lonely and unhappy, signed up and some time after left the civil service and disappeared. Who knows what happened? Maybe he didn’t, either? I refer to this incident because it was shocking and unheard of. It’s far more common today. And it has impacted directly in my life.
The person I have known the longest, nearly all my life, went down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories long before Covid. They fell for the Chemtrails nonsense hook, line and sinker, believing that governments and some rich folk were secretly putting toxic chemicals in the air and ridiculing me as one of the ‘sheeple’ who found such talk as being absurd. I came across others who believed in every conspiracy theory in the book. Some of them make David Icke look sane. I used to think conspiracy theorists were harmless nutters. I not longer do. They’re harmful nutters.
An old friend of mine recently died from cancer. When he was first diagnosed, a friend of his explained that it had been his own fault because – and I find it very hard to write what comes next – he had taken the Covid vaccine. Having been reasonably close over many years, his friend abandoned him for good. Quite the way to treat someone with stage four cancer, don’t you think?
My experience is that such people have been brainwashed. I do not know how it works, to be honest, but conspiracy theorists disagree on every subject with real experts, such as the smartest scientists on the planet, and believe that a worldwide conspiracy involving every politician, every scientist, every journalist and everyone else with some kind of influence is keeping The Big Story to themselves. It’s crackers. President Bill Clinton couldn’t even conceal the fact that he’d received a blowjob in the Oval Office from White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Yet it was so much easier for governments to give people cancer courtesy of a vaccine and to then cover it up.
I do not know why people are drawn to conspiracy theories. I agree that we should always interrogate those who hold power and always to test science. But in the end, who do we believe? The finest minds in the world who, by the way, would have nothing to gain from coming up with some conspiracy tosh or some halfwit who has seen a video on YouTube that confirms that 9/11 was an inside job, that those killed in US school shootings were just actors and that vaccines, which have saved millions of lives, were actually devised to kill you.
In the end, we should simply believe the truth, whether or not we understand the often technical evidence provided. In fact, we don’t really need to because that’s what experts are for. I have never met a conspiracy loon who is an expert at anything.
