I’ve noticed a few people on here use “x years from now” incorrectly to refer to the past. I wonder if it’s an ESL thing and maybe their native language uses that construct to refer to the future.

I’ve read that intelligent people can be more susceptible to rabbit holes because they trust themselves to see through the bullshit. They don’t realise the bullshit is carefully crafted to slip past their filters.

Thanks! I was tired and typed that in haste. Corrected.

He knew what he was doing!!

Yeah, that too.

Honestly, one thing that I’ve found to be surprisingly consistent across a lot of the apparently-bonkers-on-the-surface conspiracy crowd is that someone is selling “alternative wellness” products at the bottom of it.

I remember discovering that Alex Jones was off selling a bunch of “alternative wellness” stuff too and saying “oooohhhh, okay, that makes more sense”.

I think that the business model looks something like this. You take some issue that someone doesn’t like. I don’t know, being told to wear a mask. You say “this is unnecessary”. Okay, fine, that’s something of a values call, weighting risks against benefits. Then you promote related stuff that they agree with. So, okay, say someone goes to church, and they pray for someone to get better, and that’s a normal part of the culture, right? But in the case of Sherri Tenpenny, it looks like she’s off encouraging people to perform prayers that include a lot of the other kinda wonky products she’s promoting. She’s trying to leverage the cultural norm of praying for someone to get better to associating the stuff she’s promoting with getting better.

So you put out stuff that people agree with to draw them in. Do a wide range of things targeting sometimes-totally-different groups. Some people don’t like 5G – that’s not new with 5G, as there have always been people worried about the health effects of cell phones and radios. Some people don’t trust vaccines. Some people don’t like being told what to do and don’t like being made to wear masks. Some people are pissed off with overseas competition for the field they work in, so opposition to global trade goes over well. Some people are concerned about the effects that industrial chemicals might be having on their bodies. Some people have the idea that there are some sort of ties between life or biological processes and magnets (though that tended to be more of a left-wing than a right-wing thing in the US in the past, but I suppose the same mechanisms work on people either way). I mean, run down the list, doesn’t need to have much to do with each other. You’re just trying to pick up people who don’t agree with the mainstream on one point or another, so that you look appealing to them on that point. You’re saying something that the mainstream isn’t that they like.

You keep constantly promoting communication channels you run. In Sherri Tenpenny’s case, she’s promoting a ton of podcasts and newsletters and mailing lists. The near-term aim is to get an audience subscribed to those channels, so that you can have as many shots as possible as putting a sales pitch for your products in front of them. The long-term aim is to ultimately use those channels to shift as many as possible onto regularly buying whatever snake oil you’re peddling.

And that explains why you have some weird agglomerations of different views. I mean, she’s talking about chemicals, 5G, anti-vaccines, magnetism, faith healing…it seems incredibly unlikely for someone to have honestly picked up all of those highly-abnormal views and also have honestly come to the conclusion that they are an expert on them. But, if your goal is to just try to do a broad shotgun marketing blast towards anyone who might be upset with the mainstream in any sense and hook them in, you’re just looking to convert anyone you can get to following and listening to you.

The final goal is to use those communication channels you’ve established with them to get them sending you money for whatever product you’re trying to sell. “Alternative wellness” products are hard for the end user to evaluate the efficacy of, and you can mark them up to whatever, so snake oil makes for a good fit.

It’s not that people like Sherri Tenpenny are idiots and believe what they’re saying. It’s that they’re trying to perform a scam, and the collection of conspiracy or at least outside-the-mainstream ideas are “hooks” to try to draw people into the channel used to sell the scam.

That would honestly be hysterical. And you wouldn’t ever want to go to the beach, as anyone who has ever played with a magnet in the sand knows.