#conspiracy theory media

[benthejrporter]

Ben Emlyn-Jones on the Paranormal Peep Show 22

New HPANWO Voice article: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/05/ben-emlyn-jones-on-paranormal-peep-show.html

[prokopetz]

Sitting here getting "you are not immune to propaganda" memed by a guy who uncritically reblogged that post alleging that every single rock band the poster dislikes is part of a global Mormon conspiracy to ideologically destabilise the American left.

[i-dont-know-how-this-site-works]

I've truly hit rock bottom.

The major complaint with all our delusional takes regarding Tech's survival is that we are taking them out of our asses, but in this case, it is quite literally outta someone's ass.

Look, I don't wanna dunk on my main man, but Tech's got no booty. He is as flat as an airport landing strip in the Netherlands. I don't know what voodoo dark magic Nala Se did to strip Tech of the standard issue clone tushy, because our next possible candidate for Clone CX-2 is Cody, and dude is packin'.

Exhibit 1:

Certified 0° booty.

Exhibit 2:

That's a category 10 booty right here ^.

Now, fortunately for us the creatives put Clone CX-2 in a leotard from the waist down, so we got an unobstructed view of the clone's behind and I gotta say, it's some pretty convincing evidence right here that CX-2 is Tech.

Also, I made this account three years ago and have never changed the profile picture before, but today I did cause delusion is swallowing me whole.

[horseshoemybeloved]

More uncovered screenshots >:3

[truth-has-a-liberal-bias]

From the article:

While speaking at an event put on by the extremist group Moms for Liberty, Trump spread a baseless conspiracy theory that “your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” referring to transition-related surgeries for trans people. In their write-up of the event, a glowing piece about how Trump “charmed” this group of “conservative moms,” the Times didn’t even mention the moment where he blathered on and on about a crazy conspiracy that has and will never happen.

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president. [...]

[thisgingerhasnosoul]

Every time I try to claw back some sense of normalcy, I see another casually (or sometimes explicitly) antisemitic gesture from a random goy who knows fuck-all about anything.

It’s just really hard to find any sense of safety or normalcy knowing that “Jews are oppressors and deserve to die” is a mainstream opinion again.

[fantastic-nonsense]

thinking about Phil Jimenez saying that Nightwing is the soul and linchpin of the DCU again tonight

[love-songs-for-emma]

are u the "insane meta mutual" or "guy who's just along for the ride"?

[backmarkerr]

please....can u speak on the conspiracy

So the conspiracy (more like a theory, really) is that Kimi was pushed out of the team starting in 2008 to make way for Fernando, who was more appealing to the big sponsor coming in. Before you click out thinking "Max, that's stupid, no team would throw a championship for a sponsor." I agree! But keep in mind that they didn't throw the championship, they fully expected to win the WDC with Felipe (and almost did) and did in fact win the WCC in 2008 with Felipe and Kimi despite everything. But there were really suspicious things going on. So with that in mind...

It's 2008. Kimi has just won Malaysia, the second race of the season. Three days after his win, there's this:

.

Ok, kinda weird, but whatever. F1 runs on rumours, right? Suggesting that Kimi might retire when he's doing so well is silly. And in the article they seem to be pretty ambivalent over whether it would be Felipe or Kimi to leave.

Fast forward to Spain two races later. Kimi scores his second win of the season and takes the championship lead. The season is shaping up pretty well for the defence of the title, you’d think this would be a good time for him, but again, the story du jour is Ferrari wanting Alonso in Kimi’s seat for 2009.

[x] I guess now we know at least Massa's seat is secure...?

If you’re like me, that sounds stupid. The reigning champion just won the last GP and his contract runs until the end of 2010, so this media narrative makes no sense. Something pretty catastrophic would have to happen for that to ever come to fruition, right?

So anyway, he gets a first row start in Monaco. Great, that's almost a surefire win/points, right? Wrong, he got a drive-through penalty due to the team not fitting the wheels to the car on time before the race start. Not a great race and he ends up outside of the points. Lewis is now ahead in the WDC by 3 points. Not really a disaster, but...

[x] what on earth...

[x] again the talk of retirement.... I mean, it's weird, right?

Zero points in Canada due to being rear-ended in the pitlane, which the team can’t control. Then he’s back to being neck to neck with his teammate and Lewis by the time the British GP is done in early July, with all three drivers on 48 points. Good news, right? Just gotta stay on track and not fuck it up somehow.

[x] sigh... (this one's a little harder to source as it was printed media, but I've seen this exact interview quoted in different pages)

So anyway, they change his front suspension for the next race in Germany. Kimi has always been very sensitive to changes in the car, so he knew something was wrong. Ferrari (via Michael, who was then head of development) say he's just not adapting well to the upgrades. Maybe, sure, but why aren't you bringing upgrades that are geared towards your world champion?

(an interesting remark from Mark Hughes here if you scroll down to the comments, which adds weight to Kimi not being listened to when it came to car development in 2008)

Bar a podium in Hungary, Kimi scores 0 points in 4 out of the next 5 races. It takes until either Monza or Singapore (hello crashgate!) for Ferrari to put his suspension back as it was.

He proceeds to get 3 podiums in the remaining 3 races but it’s not enough to catch up. By Singapore he was already 27 points behind his teammate (reminder this is the old points system) and very much expected to play the supporting role. In the penultimate race in China he very obviously gave up P2 to his teammate:

"I know what the team expects." [x] / [x]

Yet the narrative in the media and from Ferrari themselves is that his motivation is bad and he's not assertive. It was so pervasive that to this day people still parrot it and say he just didn’t care after 2007, despite Kimi always stating he was fully committed and clearly getting annoyed whenever journalists asked about his motivation even years later.

Montezemolo at the end of 2008 even 'joked' that "Kimi in the recent races was replaced two or three times by a friend, but next year he'll be back." Basically saying that Kimi wasn't really present, you know? An interesting thing to say when this absent driver scored 18 points in the last 3 races (three consecutive P3s), while the one who was amazing and had the team's full backing scored 20 (P7, P2, P1).

A whole 2 points' difference, maybe someone should hire that "friend"...

So why did they do this?

Well, the theory is that Santander (I promise this isn’t like the dumb Sainztander takes) wanted a Spanish-Brazilian lineup due to financial interests (Spanish bank, big market in South America with a looming IPO in Brazil), so Kimi was basically being pressured out of the team from early 2008 onwards. Like I said at the start, the team weren’t really throwing away 2008, as they expected to win the WCC with both drivers (they did) and Massa to be able to win the WDC, which would of course be beneficial for their new sponsor. And he almost did. Almost.

[x] they're not in charge of driver selection but this specific driver line-up would good for them. (this archived copy of the article is from 2010, but the text makes it clear it's from 2009)

Of course at this point we have to wonder if a team like Ferrari would bow down to a sponsor's demands. I can't tell you what the internal considerations were or how much money was on the line, but it's also not like Santander were telling them to get rid of Kimi for a bad driver, you know? Fernando is a great driver, so from Ferrari's perspective they were just trading a great driver for another great driver who also appealed to this huge sponsor, and an Alonso-Massa line-up would be solid. And with the previous talk that Ferrari and Alonso had already inked a deal in 2008... It's just difficult to believe there isn't a grain of truth here.

So the alleged initial plan of having Alonso in 2009 was foiled when Kimi activated the renewal option in his contract. It was then that he was bought out of his last year (apparently paid for by Santander).

[from the book The Unknown Kimi Raikkonen]

As we can see, by the end Kimi was also fed up with what was going on, especially people pointing the finger at him and at his motivation, and his frustration is very clear in interviews like here at 2.35 and here:

Publicly, Ferrari said they wanted someone more in line with how Michael used to be (ironic since Montezemolo allegedly didn’t like how Michael made the team his), who could communicate with the team and give better feedback (ironic when Todt, Dyer, Stella and others said Kimi was very clear and precise.) Kimi himself has always stated that he wasn’t the issue, that his motivation was never lacking and that the real reason he was pushed out was politics and money.

[x]

[x]

If it had only been the mechanical stuff, I’d be willing to chalk it up to just bad luck and incompetence. Shit happens. But with all the rumours around it even before things went bad on the track and Kimi stating that his work and performance weren't the reason he was let go it becomes impossible for me to think there wasn’t an actual push going on to replace him.

Hell, even famed Ferrari fanboy Sebastian Vettel didn't think it was realistic for Kimi to return to Ferrary in 2014 precisely because Kimi isn't one for "bullshit" and "politics". Why would he choose to say that specifically? And according to Finnish media Kimi’s 2014 Ferrari negotiations included Montezemolo personally apologising to him. Now why would he apologise if they hadn’t done something wrong?

Personally I think Kimi's "certain people did certain things" refers to this. He never trashed anyone and always said he had no ill-feelings. And I believe him. But it doesn't mean nothing happened, lest we forget how well he handled Lotus not paying him.

The thing that really bothers me is that Kimi got the reputation for having low motivation and not caring about what he was doing (I heard that take just last month from an F1 youtuber, how Fernando was hired in 2010 because Kimi had mentally checked out 🙄), when obviously someone who wasn’t motivated and didn’t care would have simply called it quits under these circumstances. Instead he got P3 in the standings in 2008 (I know he’s talented, but he must have been trying at least a little), trained hard to lose enough weight to use KERS in 2009 (why would he do that if he didn’t care) and took the team’s only win that year despite the car being shit. Interestingly, pundits acknowledged his good performance complicated things when it came to Ferrari’s rumoured hiring of Alonso. So imagine how much more complicated things would have been had Kimi done better in 2008?

Anyway, this is long, but if you want something longer then I definitely recommend this post here. You might not agree completely with the original authors (there are parts where I wish there was more info), but I think they offer a lot of good research and information regarding the overall situation back in 2008/2009, and it's a good jump-off point for your own research.

But yeah. 2008 could have been everything. Or at least better.

[alwaysbewoke]

[timechange]

MCFLY JULY ‘24 — local legend.

In which the youth of Hill Valley debate a thirty-year-old music industry conspiracy theory about their very own hometown hero.

[benthejrporter]

Jason Holmes Dies

New HPANWO Voice article: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/04/jason-holmes-dies.html 

[monsterblogging]

On the topic of conspiracy theories, I wish more writers were aware of how stuff like ancient astronaut hypothesis, Atlantis, UFO abductions, and the like fit into the scheme of far right conspiracy theories, and cared enough to make sure that their depictions of aliens and lost civilizations aren't repeating far right rhetoric. "People in government are evil lizard people in disguise!" isn't a silly meme, it's a conspiracy theory developed by a guy (David Icke) who claims Judaism and being trans were invented by evil aliens.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 7, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 08, 2024

By rights, tonight’s post should be a picture, but Trump’s behavior today merits a marker because it feels like a dramatic escalation of the themes we’ve seen for years. Please feel free to ignore—as I often say, I am trying to leave notes for a graduate student in 150 years, and you can consider this one for her if you want a break from the recent onslaught of news.

Yesterday, Trump ranted at the press, furious that the American legal system had resulted in two jury decisions that he had defamed and sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll. He was so angry that, with his lawyers standing awkwardly behind him, he told reporters: “I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.”

Today, Trump held a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, a small city in the center of the state, where he addressed about 7,000 people. A number of us who have been watching him closely have been saying for a while that when voters actually saw him in this campaign, they would be shocked at how he has deteriorated, and that seems to be true: his meandering and self-indulgent speeches have had attendees leaving early, some of them bewildered. In today’s speech, Trump slurred a number of words, referring to Elon Musk as “Leon,” for example, and forgetting the name of North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who was on his short list for a vice presidential pick.

But today’s speech struck me as different from his past performances, distinguished for what sounded like desperation. Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.

Trump told the audience that when he took office in 2017, military officers told him the U.S. had given all the military’s ammunition away to allies. Then he went on a rant against our allies, saying that they’re only our allies when they need something and that they would never come to our aid if we needed them. This echoes the talking points put out by Russian operatives and flies in the face of the fact that the one time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked the mutual defense pact in that agreement was after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in support of the U.S. 

He embraced Project 2025’s promise to eliminate the Department of Education and send education back to the states so that right-wing figures like Wisconsin’s Senator Ron Johnson can run it. He reiterated the MAGA claim that mothers are executing their babies after birth—this is completely bonkers—and again echoed Russian talking points when he said these executions are happening—they are not—but “nobody talks about it.” He went on: “We did a great thing when we got Roe v. Wade out of the federal government.” 

He reiterated the complete fantasy that schools are performing gender-affirming surgery on children. “Can you imagine you're a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump’s suggestion that schools are performing surgery on students is bananas. This is simply not a thing that happens. 

And then he went full-blown apocalyptic, attacking immigrants and claiming that crime, which in reality has dropped dramatically since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office after a spike during his own term, has made the U.S. uninhabitable. He said that “If I don’t win Colorado, it will be taken over by migrants and the governor will be sent fleeing.” "Migrants and crime are here in our country at levels never thought possible before…. You're not safe even sitting here, to be honest with you. I'm the only one that's going to get it done. Everybody is saying that." He urged people to protest “because you’re being overrun by criminals.” 

He assured attendees that "If you think you have a nice house, have a migrant enjoy your house, because a migrant will take it over. A migrant will take it over. It will be Venezuela on steroids." He reiterated his plan to get rid of migrants. “And you know,” he said, “getting them out will be a bloody story.” 

He went on to try to rev up supporters in words very similar to those he used on January 6th, 2021, but focused on this election. “Every citizen who’s sick and tired of the parasitic political class in Washington that sucks our country of its blood and treasure, November fifth will be your liberation day. November fifth, this year, will be the most important day in the history of our country because we’re not going to have a country anymore if we don’t win.” 

He promised: “I will prevent World War III, and I am the only one that can do it. I will prevent World War III. And if I don’t win this election,... Israel is doomed…. Israel will be gone…. I’d better win.” 

"I better win or you're gonna have problems like we've never had. We may have no country left. This may be our last election. You want to know the truth? People have said that. This may be our last election…. It’ll all be over, and you gotta remember…. Trump is always right. I hate to be right. I’m always right.” 

Trump's hellscape is only in his mind: crime is sharply down in the U.S. since he left office, migrant crossings have plunged, and the economy is the strongest in the world.

Then, tonight, Trump posted on his social media site a rant asserting that he will win the 2024 election but that he expects Democrats to cheat, and “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.” 

Is it the Justice Department indictments that showed Russia is working to get him reelected? Is it the rising popularity of Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Tim Walz? Is it fury at the new grand jury’s indicting him for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in power? Is it fear of Tuesday’s debate with Harris? Is it a declining ability to grapple with reality?

Whatever has caused it, Trump seems utterly off his pins, embracing wild conspiracy theories and, as his hopes of winning the election appear to be crumbling, threatening vengeance with a dogged fury that he used to be able to hide. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[racefortheironthrone]

The origin of the question was watching news reports where the anchor says something like "a new conspiracy theory alleges" and makes it across (at least for me) as more creditable an issue of debate or necessitating a debunking. Barack Obama is a secret Muslim or has a forged Hawaiian birth certificate is a "conspiracy theory" while if the "conspiracy theory" was Barack Obama is a secret Martian then it probably not get called anything since it'd get ignored even though both seem pretty dumb.

Yeah, this is a problem with the whole "both sides" model of journalism and how it frames "controversies" by framing them as a dispute between two relatively equivalent groups (at least judging by screen time and so forth), rather than exercising some editiorial judgement and flatly saying "this side is lying to you," "these people are full of shit," or simply refusing to give people coverage at all.

[creature-wizard]

Why the fuck conspiracy theorists love to use pop-culture as an explanation for things so much?

"OMG, world is a simulation, just like Matrix!"

"OMG, Back to the Future described Project Monarch!"

"OMG, Mandela Effect is just like Dark City!"

and uncountable others

There's multiple overlapping reasons, most of which stem from assuming that the entertainment industry is controlled by The Conspiracy.

The most straightforward one is the belief that the Conspiracy uses entertainment to brainwash people into accepting heretical beliefs and degrade their morals.

Conspiracy theorists also claim that the Conspiracy puts "predictive programming" into media in order to brainwash their audience into accepting whatever evil scheme they plan to spring next, regardless of how the story frames its subject matter. (Seriously, a narrative can be like "do not build the Torment Nexus!", and these people will claim that the Illuminati is brainwashing people into accepting the existence of the Torment Nexus. Conspiracy theorists are among the worst bad faith readers on the face of the planet.)

Another belief that's developed (and I couldn't tell you its exact origins, but it's highly popular among the types who claim Project Monarch is a real thing) is that the Conspiracy cannot act without announcing their evil plans to the world in some way. Supposedly, this is just one of the requirements of getting your power from Satan. So allegedly, the New World Order people are creating movies that announce their plans to the public by working them into fictional narratives. (And again, it's a form of extreme bad faith reading.)

One other reason is that a lot of media is influenced by conspiracy theories. For example, nearly anything with aliens or Atlantis has been influenced by conspiracy theories to some degree. The Matrix was very much influenced by conspiracy theories. That doesn't mean that this media is all inherently bad, but it does mean that anyone looking at the world through a conspiratorial lens is going to recognize their own beliefs and language, and read it as a kind of validation.

Conspiracy theories also serve as a way to maintain belief in things that scientific evidence doesn't support or even precludes. Like where a more well-adjusted person might accept that dainty little unicorns aren't real animals but write them into a fantasy story because they like the idea of them, a conspiracy theorist type might essentially believe that dainty little unicorns are real animals, and the big elite meanies are hiding it from us.

There's probably more dimensions to this than I've covered here, but yeah, in my experience, this is what a lot of it comes down to.