Good article about someone who escaped the clutches of online conspiracy theories
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Brent Lee struggles to explain why he used to believe that a cabal of evil satanic paedophiles was working to establish a new world order. He pauses, looks sheepish, and says: “I cringe at all this now.”
For 15 years, Lee collected signs that so-called Illuminati overlords were controlling global events. He convinced himself that secret societies were running politics, banks, religious institutions and the entertainment industry, and that most terrorist attacks were actually government-organised ritual sacrifices.
He was also inclined to believe in UFOs, and that
Stanley Kubrick staged and directed the filming of the moon landing. He saw satanic symbols in the
London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and spent most of his time discussing these theories with an online community of fellow believers.
But in 2018 something shifted, and he began to find the new wave of conspiracy theories increasingly implausible. “I was sick of it. I felt, I can’t deal with hearing this any more because it’s no longer what I believe, so I just logged off the internet,” he says.
Now Lee is trying to help other conspiracy theorists to question their worldview. He will address a conference in Poland on disinformation in October, and has launched a podcast unpicking why he held these beliefs so fervently and why he was so deluded.
Amiable and articulate, Lee is disarmingly willing to admit that he got things spectacularly wrong, but it is still challenging to have a conversation with him about his abandoned belief system. Most of the theories seem so preposterous that the process of trying to understand them becomes exhausting.
When I strain to follow the logic, he says: “Don’t try to get me to make it make sense because it doesn’t. This is why I get so embarrassed about what I believed. You just buy into this ideology and think that’s the way the world works.”
His reasons for abandoning the “truther” movement (truthers believe official accounts of big events are designed to conceal the truth from the public) are also hard to slot into a conventional worldview.
Lee veers between feeling ashamed and amused by his own convictions while also pointing out that it would be a mistake to dismiss these ideas with an impatient eye roll, because they are very dangerous.
Versions of the same ideas have gained greater currency in the years since he stepped away from them. In the US, the influence of
QAnon has shifted from the fringes to the mainstream, and social media has been flooded with the group’s misinformation.
A
2020 Ipsos poll found that 17% of Americans believed that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media”……..
What made him vulnerable? Partly, he blames his education. “I wasn’t taught how to assess information or how to do research,” he says. “I don’t think I lacked intelligence but I was very naive about politics and how the world actually works.”
He had a disrupted education: first, at a US high school on the Frankfurt military base where he spent much of his childhood with his English mother and American stepfather, who was serving in the US air force; later, at a college in England, from which he was expelled (for smoking weed) and started playing in a band.
He spent hours on music production on his computer and developed sophisticated internet skills, at a time when most people were barely online.
This gave him early access to sites run by conspiracy theorists such as
David Icke; soon he was spending nine hours at a stretch consuming truther content online.
His friends, family and fellow band members were bored by his obsessions and he gradually withdrew to focus on online friendships with people who were also ready to believe that the Illuminati and Freemasons had infiltrated global governments……
Naomi Klein examines the mushrooming of conspiracism in her new book Doppelganger, noting that people often come under its sway because they are searching for a practical solution to a sense of unfairness. Conspiracists have a “fantasy of justice”, hoping that the evil-doing elites can be arrested and stopped.
“Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the
feelings right,” she writes. “The feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit … the feeling that important truths are being hidden.”
She quotes digital journalism scholar Marcus Gilroy-Ware’s conclusion that: “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.”…….
https://www.theguardian.com/society...-his-dangerous-beliefs?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other