For the first time in a long time, I clicked on an Instagram story of a friend. It was a video of a Kid Carson podcast who, from what I’ve been able to glean, is trying to be the Canadian Joe Rogan. Carson used to be a radio guy here in the Great White North until he went on a pro “freedumb convoy” conspiracy rant on-air and was (quite justifiably, in my opinion) fired.
Anyway, in this video of his podcast, Kid goes on about how all 190-something nations part of the World Health Organization (WHO) are going to vote to give the organization “limitless power” over how countries deal with pandemics. Don’t forget, dear listener, that the WHO is funded by none other than… Bill Gates! Jesus Christ on a cracker, I watched about 3 minutes of this 6-minute video and my head almost exploded.
As for my friend who posted it, at least some members of their family have been sucked down the FOX News rabbit hole, so I shouldn’t be surprised that they’ve gone and jumped in to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to reach out to this person and try to talk sense into them, but I know it won’t work. They will have some fallacious argument or unprovable rationalization at the ready; parroting some talking point from a big-mouthed, right-wing batshit nutjob.
I was disappointed and sad. My friend is such a kind and loving person, as is their entire family, but they’re spewing this conspiracy bullshit like sprinkles on a sundae – and it’s dangerous.
Distraught and upset, I reached out to my dear friend and world-renowned skeptic, Gordon Bonnet (check out his blog, Skeptophilia. It’s what’s for breakfast). I said to him, “I have this nagging feeling that we’re witnessing the fall of civilization.”
Gordon, unfortunately, has experience with people who’ve gone off the deep end and I was hoping he’d have some insight on how to navigate these waters. At the very least I knew he’d empathize with my situation. His suggestion was to leave them be. Hard as it is to admit, sometimes the only play is to walk away. This is fine on a small scale, but the slow goose step towards a fascist hellscape continues seemingly unabated. What the hell can we do about that? We have to do something, right? Left unchecked, those incapable of reason and critical thought will steamroll right into the vault and rob the rest of us blind.
Stephen King once said, “The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short.” The problem is they can do a hell of a lot of damage in a very quick amount of time. Just look at what happened with just four years of the tangerine shitgibbon in the White House. In the snap of a finger, the United States is on the cusp of rolling back reproductive rights that have been in place for two generations.
So what is there to do?
I have no idea, to be honest. This macro-scale stuff is beyond complicated (practically, not conceptually) but on the micro-scale taking Gordon’s suggestion and letting go is a good start – and that’s what this post is. Letting go. There’s an old saying, “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it is yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.”
I hope these friends come back, I truly do, but they’re going to have to do it on their own.
~ Andrew
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I didn’t want to ‘like’ this post, but WP doesn’t have the option to click “yeah, you’re right; we’re screwed”.
I’m leaning more and more toward just writing off everyone who espouses certain views because, as you say, they are so far down the drain that there’s no hope of fishing them out. You just have to flush and hope they come out OK on the other side.
I have to remember that many people in history must have thought “That’s it! We’re done for!” and yet somehow history made it all the way to the present . . . but this really does feel hopeless. The level of ignorance is most scary of all. I don’t fault crazy theories if they’re at least
self-consistent and – even if implausible – at least somewhat based on fact.
But, how do you argue against fantasy? And it’s fine saying “just let them be” but that only works if they are batshit crazy and with little to no influence. Some of these people wield a lot of power. Some singly, and many in aggregate.
I want to blame the Fox News, the MSNBCs, the Googles and Facebooks, but ultimately, it’s regular idiots who are at fault for swallowing all that stuff hook, line, and sinker.
. . and there are so, so many of them . . .
Depressing.