I wish I could understand why so many people seem to believe in the most bizarre conspiracy theories.
My closest friend introduced me to the first major one of our lifetime, the “Who killed JFK?” conspiracy that started in the late ’60s and is pretty much still around. Dozens if not hundreds of books have been written on this subject, blaming everyone except Bobby and Jackie for the assassination.
There was a play about it in the late ’60s, “MacBird,” putting Lyndon Johnson at the center of it all, and Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” covered the subject too.
Woody Allen joked that he was writing a play that would be a nonfiction version of the Warren Report, and some of you will doubtless remember Kevin Costner’s great speech in “Bull Durham” when he explained his beliefs and said he believed Oswald had acted alone.
The next one that captured a lot of conspiracy theorists was that we never went to the moon, and the landings were faked on a sound stage. My biggest problem with that one — other than it being batshit crazy — is if Apollo 11 wasn’t real, why did they fake so many more moon landings?
My personal favorite came along a lot later, when British writer David Icke told us that the people who were really running the world were shape-shifting alien lizards, and that their leader was Queen Elizabeth II.
Hey, rule Brittania.
It’s a shame more people didn’t believe this one, since Icke’s solution to all this was that the lizards only thrive on our negative emotions. If we could only smile on our brother, try to get together and love one another right now, we could beat them.
And of course, Bill and Hillary were drug-dealing murderers who had dozens of people killed, including Vince Foster.
And let’s not forget Barack Obama being born in Kenya.
The 911 attacks were a terrible thing, and a massive group of conspiracy theories were built up around them.
We have a president who wouldn’t exist without conspiracy theories. Donald Trump came to political fame as someone who constantly attacked President Obama as someone who wasn’t born in this country, and his four years in office haven’t changed him at all. It’s important to remember that back in the ’90s, Trump constantly attacked the Central Park Five, who had been convicted of raping a jogger.
When DNA testing later proved they had been wrongly convicted, Trump kept insisting it was wrong and they were still guilty.
Recently, Trump has passed along the conspiracy theory that Obama and Joe Biden had the members of Navy Seal Team 6 killed to hide the fact that they hadn’t really killed Osama bin Laden.
Then there’s QAnon, the right-wing group that insists there is a cabal of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities running a Satan-inspired conspiracy involving a worldwide child sex trafficking ring and a plot to bring down Trump.
Of course the president denies knowing them, although he has retweeted Qanon members nearly 300 times and when asked, he said he knew they were against pedophilia and that was a good thing.
NASA says 5 percent of Americans believe we never went to the moon. That may not sound like much, but it’s more than 16 million people.
Still, some polls have supposedly said 10 percent of Americans identify Joan of Arc as Noah’s wife.
Of course, that’s not a conspiracy.
That’s just stupidity.