How to talk to conspiracy theorists and still be kind

In roughly five years, I went from reading Skeptic magazine to believing the CIA killed JFK and traffics drugs into the U.S. to support its black operations, MKULTRA is an ongoing program and had a hand in creating the Manson Family and the Jonestown cult, (rogue elements in) the U.S. government at the very least had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and pedophile sex trafficking networks are commonplace and widely known among the ultra-wealthy and powerful elite strata of world society.

This happened because of a consistent, observable and undeniable pattern of elite impunity and abuse of power, most blatantly exhibited by Epstein's death in prison (via murder or facilitated suicide), which led me to take a closer look at the holes in many official narratives we're told to accept in place of explanations which imply that the ultra wealthy & powerful exist beyond all law and morality and use whatever means necessary to maintain their grip on power.

When it comes to these matters people are guessing at the truth with the limited picture of the facts available to them, and conspirators are actively poisoning the well by associating good theories with bad ones, so of course the conspiracy theory world is full of disinfo, misinfo, and just plain mistaken takes. But until the bluepilled crowd represented by this article accepts that at the very least some conspiracy theories are true (hell, just look at the history of things which were dismissed in those terms until incontrovertible documentary evidence emerged), they'll be fighting a losing battle.

> It’s a defense mechanism: we’re primed to be suspicious and afraid of things that can’t be explained.

That's funny. I see the public's need to dismiss conspiracies with mundane explanations as a defense mechanism -- especially the really obvious and undeniable ones like JFK's assassination or Epstein's death. The idea that conspiracy theories represent some source of psychological comfort is just 180 degrees opposite the truth. It's not easy to admit to oneself that your vote is in meaningless in an important sense, that the media you've consumed your whole life is mostly controlled propaganda, and that the avenues to fix these things are risky and uncertain at best.

I much prefer MIT’s earlier article "How to dismiss that ridiculous plate tectonic theory while smoking a pipe in your office". I think it was published in the 1940s or 1950s. Popular at the time, as I recall.