To be fair, in many ways, we are controlled by a group of global elites, but it's not the people conspiracy theorists think it is. We have billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and other CEOs and oligarch-types across the world who absolutely wield their power and wealth to control the means of production and influence politicians to their whims.
If you haven't already seem it, pretty sure the giant ancient trees is people thinking mountains are stumps if fossilized trees bc some sorta resemble certain types of broken off tree stumps, and some mesas sorta resemble cut stumps.
I congratulate you for shedding your conspiracy theory childhood. I cannot imagine being brought up by parents who believe wild, unsubstantiated nonsense. Wait, Yes I can. I was raised Roman Catholic. Looks like you and I are both survivors. 😆
Conspiracy theory: The coffee in Emma's mug is fake. It's always on the verge of spilling, yet I've never seen a drop fall out. Clearly it's just computer-generated.
As someone who was raised with a somewhat antivax mom, I realized watching this video I should probably go get the hpv at some point. My mom was afraid vaccines made my brother autistic so she held me and my other siblings back from getting vaxxed. Turns out we were all autistic anyway. :/
@@r0hde066 Autism is actually more likely if you have an autistic relative. It's genetic (there have been many genes identified as likely contributing) and the chance of it occuring increases with parental age.
@@r0hde066 all my bio siblings have autism too! Four of us in a row, all on the spectrum- from my experience, it's more likely than not for an autistic person to have at least one other family member on the spectrum.
As a child, my mum was scared off from giving me the MMR vaccine by the bogus autism scare claims. The result was that I got measles, mumps and rubella (thankfully not at the same time) and as a bonus am also mildly autistic. That showed her! :) I did get the polio and diptheria inoculations though.
Do you ever think about how autistic people are more likely to go into stem? So they're more likely to have a career in biology. Therefore there's probably a lot of autistic people who are in the vaccine development industry Like bro we got it backwards... vaccines don't cause autism, autism causes vaccines 🤯
When it comes to the harm of believing conspiracies I always go back to what Voltaire said - “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
She brings one up in the beginning. Vaxx conspiracies cause vaccine hesitancy. There's little harm in skipping a flu vaccine aside from potentially suffering a few days with the flu, but HPV is linked to cervical cancer in women
As an American hearing someone from the UK talk about the cost of medical procedures is supremely funny. No shade or hostility. Super happy you’re getting a vaccine!
You mentioned not being able to pay a lot of attention in school because you believed that soon you would just be on the run, and I TOTALLY understand that. I wasn't raised in a conspiracy theory house exactly, but I was raised a JW and always thought that Armageddon would come before I ever got to __________(kindergarten, middle school, high school, fill in the blank for important life markers). We also had to have "go bags" and were being prepped for when the government would want to hunt us down and we'd be on the run. I did the same thing with choosing classes. Always being amazed that I had even gotten that far.
I would definitely say that "impending armageddon" and "government will hunt you down" would classify you as being raised in a "conspiracy theory house." Sounds like your family was just leaning more into the religion-based conspiracy side of things. I'd be curious to know what age you chose to leave all of the JW stuff behind, if you don't mind sharing -- and, was it at all difficult for you? Or was it one of those situations where it was inevitable as soon as you reached the point/age where you were allowed to make that decision for yourself?
@@Strype13 That's true! I think a part of me still has a hard time associating JWs with other things just because there's always been that separation. As far as your questions go, I was nineteen when I "woke up", so to speak. That was a little under a year ago, and I do think that to some extent it was inevitable. As much as I believed it, it was extremely draining and the fear of being wrong can only last so long. I definitely wasn't one of those people who clocked it for what it was even as a kid because I was so afraid, but I did have a lot of doubts and frustrations with the way things worked. Unfortunately, I'm not fully out yet because of family situations, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to start college within these next few years and finally kind of become a person :)
@@Chronicroc I really appreciate you sharing what it was like growing up in that situation. I'm also very sorry you had to live in such fear like that -- that sounds awful. Granted, you sound like you have a great head on your shoulders and I'm glad you were able to "see outside of the box," so-to-speak, and began to think for yourself. I truly think you will find much more happiness outside of that preconceived, limited, and/or controlled mentality that those types of religions tend to utilize and, in turn, pass down for generations. I really wish you the best of both luck and success in your future endeavors, Chronicroc!
I was coming to the comments to say this too, ex JW here and the whole "the world is going to end so why bother with education, friends, anything really" really fucks with your head. haven't "believed" for over 20 years and I can still spot the after effects
I definitely went through this aswell. Except I was raised in a conspiracy household aswell so we were prepared to leave for everything. It really left me having a hard time with the things I've accomplished aswell.
About Greta Thunberg being a time traveller: years ago, I took my kids to see a planetarium show with a time travel theme. The pretense was that we were departing from the year 2150 to visit the past. Our pilot/guide commented on how good life was in the 22nd Century, thanks to all the hard work our ancestors had done to put an end to pollution and war, then took us into the prehistoric past and showed us some fun things. On the return trip, the machine broke down in the IRL then-present. The pilot told us the machine was no longer able to move forward, only backward, and we would just have to settle down in the primitive past. He gave us a little pep talk, telling us that at least we'd be able to take part in the great work which created the world we'd been born in, and wished us well, telling us he thought he'd take the time machine and go diving deeper into the past. Then the lights came up and we exited...into our challenging new home era.
My parents were endtimes Christian fundamentalists that believed we'd be hunted because of our belief in the Christian God. And so that survivalist bit of your experience is something I relate to. Hording dry goods, water purifying tablets, obsessive thought about how they might get us. Terrifying.
It's ironic that Christianity is the largest religion in the world and nearly two thirds of America is Christian, but so many Christians claim to feel like a minority or feel persecuted
I've never had that or really ever been conspiracy minded but when I ended up buying the farm of a friend of mine as they were about to lose it over a rough patch I have ran it in such a way that it would double as a resource if the craziness of the world does a stupid. We sell the excess but there would be enough grain and such on site that the herd and the flock will be fine and the humans would be eating egg on toast with a glass of milk for as long as needed. Well for up to a year as if that ever became a reality we could plant less grain the next season and start growing vegetables etc too. I don't see this happening but there is some small part of me that just likes knowing there is some plan B if the world does a stupid, I don't entirely trust the dumb messes I and every other human seems to get themselves in.
Being prepared is one thing. Living your life in fear of a situation that may never come is insanity. Still know how to survive without modern culture as a precaution though lol. I find it odd that if society collapsed our homeless population would have a few legs up on more than a few people who even own survival gear. But just don't understand survival.
The SCP community seems to be a good group of entertainment and lore focused cryptid stories in a shared multiverse! Keeps me entertained as well as grounded.
@@kiwi_2_official there are quite a few cryptids and other mythological SCPs. I should also mention that the word "anomaly" definitely works for cryptids.
@@zeratir7873 what i said: not all SCPs are cryptids; SCPs are just anomalies what i definitely did not say: cryptids aren't anomalous and SCPs cannot be cryptids what you said i said: cryptids aren't anomalous and SCPs cannot be cryptids
@@kiwi_2_official Yeah, I have a hard naming anything, that can be classed as "cryptid". Most, I would put in "monster" category. 173 is not there, though - it's just an anomalous object.
“Prince (now King) Charles is a vampire” is an interesting one, largely because while it’s false in a literal sense, it’s a pretty apt metaphor for the parasitic nature of the ruling class.
“I don’t believe anything that’s false is harmless” FINALLY SOMEONE SAYS IT!!! I keep thinking this, but people keep saying “what’s the harm in believing that?” It’s more complicated than the surface level effects that you can see in the worst conspiracy theories. Not seeing the real world as accurately as you humanly can is like being a doctor who misdiagnosed their patient.
All false beliefs are harmful! Yeah!! A false belief persists in opposition to reality. If you are able to hold onto a "harmless" false belief, then you are more likely to believe evidently harmful false beliefs. You erode your ability to tell reality apart from fiction by clinging to fictional beliefs. I swear to god, these things are harmful!!
It's also a well established fact that the best predictor for believing in a conspiracy theory is believing in other conspiracy theories. It's hardly ever just a few that people believe in, it's usually none or a crapload. Now, it's probably not any one conspiracy belief itself causes the belief in other conspiracy theories directly, but it is both a marker and an accelerant of something that's basically broken in the head of the believer, and that breakage is what causes being receptive to those others. So yeah, "ah what's the harm" is very much deliberately choosing to ignore a symptom of a condition that can quickly go much worse.
@@abdulmasaiev9024 coincidentally, you’re describing my brother. And yes, I can confirm it’s exactly like that. A certain need to know better, therefor looking for something that makes him feel “in the know” and is kinda believable or even true, then having been opened up starting to believe in others that have less sturdy foundations, then just letting go of reason and making leaps to conclusions, convincing himself he’s reasonable and others just aren’t, then ending up in echo chambers on the internet and worst of all: believing in so many theories that eventually one will be proven right to some extent. There’s no going back when that happens. The truth is that there are conspiracies in the world, but the reason not to to believe in the theories is not because you think none are ever true, but because so few are that you can’t reasonably justify believing in most of them without solid evidence. Belief is a dangerous thing. It suggest not knowing, just assuming, but going with it all the way anyway. The most painful thing is that he’s into the political ones (conveniently only those that support one side). I don’t know if that’s good because he still has a reasonable concept of physics, or bad because it affects his decisionmaking literally all the time and creates floods of hatred. It’s a drain on my mental health when we’re at home together. It’s not like he’s an idiot, to the contrary. He’s emotionally stunted (sorry bro) but has been told he’s smart so often that he feels like he has to live up to expectations. He just does it in the wrong way. Rant over.
When I started watching flat earth debunking videos, my gf was like "who cares what's the worst that could happen." She has since apologized seeing as we now know what could happen.
Personally, I would never ever even in the privacy of my mind have a negative judgment about someone who accepted conspiracy theories at some point in their life and then learn better. You have my admiration and respect for having a mind capable of accepting the facts.
@@robertt9342 I have a family member in his late 20’s who hasn’t not yet “learned better” about many conspiracy theories in the top tier of this chart. I think for him it is subconsciously a coping mechanism for avoiding trauma (dissociating from reality). In the not-so-distant past it was drugs, alcohol, and hanging out with dangerous and manipulative people. It seems like recently he finally uncovered the underlying trauma, and he has a lot of deep internal work ahead of him which 🙏 that shit’s hard and he’s gonna need support and love and probably professional help. But I know who he is past all the swirling BS and he has kind heart. In my family member’s case it would NOT make sense to, say, ostracize him on the basis of his current belief in conspiracy theories, dangerous as they may be. That would make things worse, for him at least. Coming from the same family and some of the same trauma, I have a complicated time expanding how much contact I have with him, but I know others in the family are closer to him and they got his back as he gets back on a good path to healing. Do you know or love anyone who hasn’t yet “learned better?” I imagine the answer to your question is tailored to those people, makes sense for how you can or cannot relate with them, and based on how they got there to begin with.
@@robertt9342 I can answer for myself: It depends on a lot of factors. like: 1. What the conspiracy is. Epstein may not have killed himself. The well documented facts show that many very powerful people had reason to want him dead. That doesnt mean it happened, its reasonable to have some doubts about the official story. On the other hand something like Holocaust denial is far more extreme and absurd to believe. 2. How strongly they believe it Take the Epstein example. I have some doubts about the official story. But I have no proof, and I see no way of getting proof. Thats fine. But if someone says "I and CERTAIN Epstein didnt kill himself and they go on about how they have researched it and etc etc... To me almost certainly the strength and certainty of their belief is absurd. 3. Actions they commit or possibly stoop to because of their belief. This depends on the action. Like not vaccinating a child for instance. There have been cases where children have died because parent dont believe in going to hospitals. 4. How long they have held the belief/ their age. I am going to be far more lenient to young adults raised in homes of parents who believed in conspiracies. Children instinctually trust their parents and authority figures around them, and parents have a huge amount of influence over what someone believes at an early age. I am less forgiving of someone who is forty though. There's other factors, and its not like I calculate anything out or think about this normally.
I feel so validated! I was a child growing up in a family where my mom believed many of these things. I remember getting actual breething problems when my mom used an essential oil diffuser, and also didn't get my HPV vaccine. Things have only gotten worse with her and in this day she believes almost all of these things (not the flat earth theory tho for some miraculous reason). I have literally lost my mother because of this. All she talks about is how she knows the real side of this world. She wanted to gift me a large amount of money if I didn't get the covid vaccine (I did!) and spends her days scrolling all kinds of sites that get her deeper and deeper into that world. I also notice that anger in myself when someone starts to talk about conspiracy theories because I know how harmful those can be. I have literally consulted a health care provider for advice on how I could get my mom into some treatment. I see her literally fade away in front of my eyes. Trust me when I say it would be better if your mom was dead rather than being so sick you can't even chat with her without all of these things influencing everything she says and thinks. She's like a ghost to me honestly.
I had a falling out with my brother over the 911 conspiracy theory. It took him forever to come around but he's over it now. He had to find someone else who HE respected who just happened to say the exact same thing that I said - basically a world wide coverup is impossible because of all the various persons with various motivations involved. Reporters live for scandals they can out. The idea that every reporter and new caster knows "whats really going on" and yet kept silent... its way beyond unlikely, its not even rational. I have found that a LOT of flat earthers (and other conspiracy theorists) have no sense of scale. They can't seem to grasp just how unlikely a world wide conspiracy is.
I worked for Mattress Firm. The reason they have so many locations is they routinely buy out companies and keep the stores for a while, in order to maintain customer relations with the previous businesses, as well as to determine which location does better. They eventually close low performing stores. We actually have a small video based on that conspiracy theory in our training lol.
My biggest criterion for evaluating the likelihood of a conspiracy is: how many people would need to be in on it and able to keep it secret. People leak classified military equipment specifics to win online arguments; how could they keep something so much bigger under wraps for more than a few years?
Not conspiracy theories necessarily, but i grew up with a parent who believed in a lot of new age practices. Crystal healing, tarot, and no vaccines; that sort of thing. What messed me up the most was the spiritual hierarchy my mom taught me. That some people, like my siblings and I, were innately born to suffer more and had more spiritual responsibility. I grew up with this feeling of isolation from my peers, which is something I still struggle with to this day. That’s the impact that these conspiracy theories have. They give people a sense of righteousness-that they know some unspoken secret of the world which makes them somehow better or more deserving. But as children who can’t think for ourselves, it can really mess with the way we see and interact with the world. I definitely feel for you when you say you were raised this way. I’m glad you were able to get out, and talk about it in a humouring way. I still struggle to talk about it most of the time, but I don’t feel as alone as I used to :-)
My mom is also into that stuff. She was somewhat normal before the pandemic. Now, she is just believing everything from the plandemic to vaccines being toxic. She also believes that Biden is worse than Trump and that he has a secret agenda and is actually a republican (???) We are not American for clarification. She also believes that the government is tracking our every move when we pay with a card and refuses to buy from places that don't allow cash payment. She also believes there is a crack or something between our world and the spiritual world, which is the reason for all the misery in the world. She also believes that the Estonia catastrophe was a cover-up from the Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian governments to hide our involvement in the Cold War...
@@loutsont2985 if im right and its theosophical, which i think i am, its white people appropriating alot of eastern practices during the 1800s into "western occultism". if you want to know more about this particular foolishness id look up helena blavatsky.
If it helps you feel better about setting up a Moon Landing conspiracy website. My sister's class did a "persuasive writing" project that involved giving a talk to parents and she chose to do the Moon Landing being fake... Her talk was in between "Why schools shouldn't have uniforms" and "Why XBOX is better than Playstation" so she was a notable outlier and, according to my Mum, her talk was a running joke amongst the parents for years after.
@@JoshSweetvalethere are a lot of conspiracy theories I’ll bet started as a joke down the pub. The main ones are anti-vax, flat Earth, and fake moon landing starting as a joke then devolved from there. I still live in hope that nobody believed in flat earth, it’s a long joke I’m not in on. It almost definitely isn’t, but there’s still hope for me yet.
For me, the way to healthily engage in the same feelings of secrecy and research conspiracy theories engender is by delving into the lore of detailed fictional worlds. As a trite example, order 66 is a phenomenal conspiracy from the perspective of the SW universe, and it’s really fun to dive into the stories of characters like Fives who uncover it. Also, I think role-playing in games like pathfinder and D&D in worlds where conspiracies and cryptids exist or by playing video games like Control really scratch that itch for me. Anyhoo, lovely video, Emma! Very new to the channel but absolutely love your work!
I didn't have a conspiracy childhood, I got it from the other end when classmates were sometimes told they weren't allowed to play with me any more after their parents found out that my family were Jewish. And, just for the record, if my people *had* space lasers, we'd have better things to aim them at than innocent trees...
@@Ælfgifu-1 Thank you 💙 I mean, it taught me a lot about the way the world works, but I'm very glad that it's not a lesson my kids ever had to learn, or one my grandkids will be likely to have to learn on any kind of large scale. Back in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up, parents could get away with that kind of thing with minimal public censure. Today, they'd be seen for the bigots they are by the vast vast majority of people, and that's progress. Mostly, looking back on it, I feel more sorry for the others kids who were way too young to understand what was happening or why it was wrong. I worry about the adults they grew into and hope they were able to escape that kind of mindset before it was too late.
@@Katherine_The_Okay Unfortunately when I was at school in the 90s a lot of the kids took it upon themselves to do the same bigoted shit. Got myself in trouble on more than a few occasions for standing up for some friends of mine that were jewish, sikh, and muslim against people like that. But then I'm a genderfluid autistic and had enough of the bs myself so I wasn't going to stand for it being done to others. Also probably due to me being an atheist I don't have any kind of strong tribalism attached to any religion so I'm very much of the mindset of leave them be unless they are trying to force what I consider to be harmful ideas on others. Which none of my friends were doing they were merely being attacked usually over the fact they looked different because they wore items of clothing that expressed their religion etc. That just made me really mad, probably also a result of being genderfluid I felt like they were being attacked as a result of the same intolerance that was directed at me for the crime of liking to wear a dress sometimes. Let people wear whatever fabric they want on their body for f sake.
Keeping massive stores of dried food, water, and other supplies for "When everything collapses" is something I grew up with as well. The fact that the goods had lifespans measured in decades and _still_ managed to expire before the apocalypse did nothing to deter my parents. I'm also painfully aware of what it's like growing up "knowing" that the world is going to end any day now. You're definitely not alone in that one. Edit: Actual discussion I had with my mother: "I mean for crying out loud, it's like you actually believe the world is flat!" "No of course I don't believe it's flat... But I do believe it's hollow."
What cracks me up about the food storage is that most take water, and few people store 7-10yrs of water or any... My old roommates had 1/4 of their garage filled with buckets of died powered food, but no water stored.
@@nleem3361 I think just generally having a good amount of food and water stored in case of emergency is a great idea, it's when it gets weird or excessive that it becomes a problem. Also, never forget TP, razors, condoms, and menstrual products, they will be a commodity if something does somehow happen.
ugh my dad is this way. he buys up so many canned foods, extra toilet paper, everything. just on the off chance that *something* is going to happen. no wonder i have so much paranoia now lol
Oh my god, THANK YOU I can't tel you how cathartic is to here this!!! My mum was(/is) in a lot of the same conspiracy holes it sounds like your parents were/are and no one really understands the gravity of how terrifying it can be. So thank you for making this video- I really connected to it and it was nice to know someone understands :)!
I definitely grew up having a conspiracy dad, and I feel like as a POC, our historical experiences make us even more susceptible to conspiracy theories. I remember being told about the nwo and its surrounding theories, and not being able to watch sooooo many shows and cartoons because "they were being used to push agendas and input subliminal messages in kids' minds lol. "GMO" was another issue that resulted in my diet being very restricted and loads of other shit like that. You'd think the ppl saying "do your own research", would do a bit themselves and see the absolute bollocks of these things
When you realize that awful things like MKultra/Project Bluebird or the Tuskegee Experiment actually went down in the USA, you understand how people of certain backrounds may become even more susceptible to conspiracy theories
The book "Republic of Lies" gave me a bit of insight into the history of real conspiracies in the US & especially how POC communities were targeted and are subsequently more likely to be distrustful of institutions. I have no idea how you begin to reverse that
"Do your own research" can sometimes be a very difficult thing to ask of a person. For conspiracies that challenge scientific consensus, the research is very difficult to understand if you don't have an advanced scientific background and education. I'm a biological laboratory scientist and explaining why or how something works from a scientific perspective often results in blank stares. I am a proponent of thinking critically and researching for yourself instead of blind acceptance, but good research is a skill. Reading scientific papers is a skill. I think scientific education in high school should include classes on how to do objective research and how to analyze sources. Maybe that would help combat some very dangerous conspiracy theories.
It definitely does influence the way you see conspiracy theories. A lot of people focus on right wing conspiracy theories, or at least the right wing perspective on them, because of how dangerous it can be. But as someone from a generally progressive Caribbean/black family, it still is very much a real fear a lot of people carry. Because of things like forced sterilization in Puerto Rico, the Tuskegee experiments, and other similar things a lot of people have a strong distrust of doctors, scientists, and vaccines. Like my cousin hates Trump, reliably votes democrat, is very supportive of my sister(gay) and I (trans), but is adamently antivax and thinks COVID is a bioweapon. It's a very hard thing to combat because there is real precedent in our history for these things, and from people you're supposed to trust. So when you try to tell them "trust the science" they say "sure but how can you trust the person telling it to us?"
@@austin.luther Never mind the difficulty of understanding scientific papers, there's the bigger problem of getting confirmation of your conspiracy when you Google it because Google will give you results based on your media consumption.
I remember as a young kid (maybe 8 or 9) hearing that they found viking remains on Mars. It rattled around in my head for years. Never quite believing it (how did they get there in longships?) but occasionally remembering and wondering about it. It was many years later I learned about the Viking probes that landed there...
You know this will sound like a conspiracy but NASA ran 3 life detection experiments and 2 of them turned out false and one turned out true NASA says that it was probably a glitch and yeah probably but hey who knows Also NASA gets lets than half a penny for every tax dollar you give and is severely underfunded
@@landonrounsavall1125 Running 3 tests instead of just 1 or 2 is good experimental practice. It may be grounds to re-do all the tests if possible though 2 against 1 makes the positive result look dubious.
The "Stevie Wonder isn't blind" one is hilarious, mostly because he likes to prank people (look up the time he stole shaq's new car) because it both is and isn't true, based on a fundamental misunderstanding in the general public of what "blindness" is. It can be anywhere from very limited vision to no vision at all. In Stevie's case, imagine closing your eyes and looking at a lamp, and then waving your hand in front of your eyes. Now separate your fingers and do it again. You can "see" a difference.
I can give you an example of the power of conspiracy theories. I'm 40 years older than you, and believed in vaccines because my father had a withered leg from polio. BUT... my other brothers listened to such things. Last October 4th, I got a call at 6:00 AM that my youngest brother was dying of COVID. I went to ICU to sit vigil because no one should die alone. My other brothers also. We watched him turn grey and die at 10:57. And yet, because of conspiracy theories, I'm still the only vaccinated one in the family. I can't change their minds, I can only go again to sit vigil when it's their turn.
I'm so sorry for your loss. I can't relate. I'm a healthcare worker who was working in a clinical lab. Handling hundreds of COVID specimens per day. My father is 68 years old and has adopted several conspiracy theories throughout my lifetime. I say this with all the love a daughter can. The man is naive and gullible to a fault. Bless his heart. As long as someone has enough conviction behind what they say, they can convince him of anything. I asked him the other day and we counted 9 different MLMs he failed at during my childhood. My dad left the US and retired in Indonesia roughly 5 years ago. He's fluent in English, Indonesian, and Dutch but didn't teach me or my 3 younger sisters anything but English. He remarried an Indonesian woman who speaks no English. And me and my sisters now have an 18 month old half-sister who we'll likely only see through a video chat. Thankfully, I haven't personally lost anyone close to me to COVID. But I've worked in the lab, watching the patient's samples become more frequent as their condition deteriorated. I've spoken to the providers eagerly calling about the results on their cytokine results on their critically ill COVID positive patient. Especially in the early days of the pandemic, before anyone in my conservative state even acknowledged that this was more than a handful of 'mild' isolated cases. I had countless conversations with my dad about what I was seeing at work, what the lab techs in our molecular dept were telling us about how many positive samples our lab was testing per day. I could not convince him to get vaccinated while Trump was in office. He didn't actually agree to get the vaccine until thankfully the Indonesian government have him a quid pro quo ultimatum. My dad needed some official documents to send the US Social Security office for my infant half-sister. The Indonesian judge refused to sign the papers until my dad could provide proof of his COVID immunization. At the time Indonesia was leading the world in daily COVID deaths and I had all but accepted that I would never see my dad alive, in person. Clearly in the US this would have never been permitted (and technically, it came down to my dad wanting my half-sister to be receiving the social security benefits she's entitled to. So financial incentives won out over his anti-vax beliefs.) Ultimately, I like to think my attempt to convince him of the safety and efficacy of vaccines over the last 2 years made his decision to get the COVID vaccine less traumatic in the end. It's hard to know. Either way, I'm really sorry for your loss. I hope at some point your brothers either get the vaccine or if they remain unvaccinated, that they avoid the same tragic outcome as your youngest brother. 💙
I trust most vaccines(check side effects and risk of infection), but I don't trust the covid ones in any way(safety, effectiveness, good intentions, etc). Shame your brother died, at 67 the risks are probably worth it though. I'm much younger.
What I don't like about conspiracy theories is that they often turn legit concerns into extreme nonsense. Like Gates being the second greatest money donor to the WHO is a problem, and so is lobbyism, billionaire and big corporate influence on politics and media. And worst conspiracy theories make people hopeless and stressed out.
Well the government literally invented the term conspiracy theory to discredit legitimate theories. A lot of those things are even true anyway she talked about George Soros But he Literally what is a Nazi he masquerading as a non-Jew and then used his position in the Nazi party to steal land and property from other Jews Or the great replacement it’s literally happened before in Europe with Julius Caesar and slaving and killing 2/3 of the celts If people don’t believe in the great replacement they should ask an American Indian
That's the thing about a lot of conspiracy theories - there's generally some element at its core that is either definitely true, or is potentially true and worth looking into. But then people don't find a satisfying answer, because discovering the truth about events is often hard and messy and never really clear. People don't like an answer like "we aren't sure, but X Y Z is most likely what is going on", it's very unsatisfying. So they begin filling in the blanks with speculation and it spirals out of control. The "They're turning the frogs gay!" is a perfect example, because there's actually a nugget of truth there. There have been pesticides (banned in many countries now) as well as certain women's hormone therapies that found their way into these wetland water systems and they were dropping testosterone in frogs to the point where the frogs would actually switch genders to female. The problem here is, Jones has worked his way into believing this is a conspiracy to control the population in some way, when in reality it was an unintended consequence of a few products, and steps were taken to mitigate the damage when they were discovered.
I'm extremely late but I wanted to share my conspiracy theory story. My mom was deep into this world, not always dedicated to a specific theory, but always always always floating in the "but what do we reallllly know?" realm. Tap water, chemtrails, anti "western medicine"/pro pseudoscience. Some ideas were perfectly well grounded (yeah processed foods aren't good for you, but it's just cost-cutting) and some were just simply unreal (vaccinations cause side effects worse than the diseases they claim to prevent). My dad was somewhat in the picture and I was a pretty sciency argumentative kid so I never fell into it, but it absolutely affected me. I still have unbearable medical anxiety, and really struggle with that. I also rushed through my vaccinations as soon as I was allowed. But it was that type of thinking that led to conspiracy theories, the anxiety and judgement filled outlook on everything, that did the most harm. I still can't talk to my mom about my father (he was conspiring with the courts to take me, she says) or my brother (he was taken away by his father). It's still hard breaking away from that today. Yesterday I got my hair cut, but was raised mostly without that option. Or, well, it was an option but my mom would cry and beg me not to cut my hair. In fact, when I was 14 and finally got my first haircut, she did cry and beg me. She thought the hair was sacred and precious, so it stemmed from spirituality rather than conspiracy theory, but it was the same anxiety and judgement as a conspiracy theory. But yesterday I did get my hair cut and I felt a little less guilty about it than the time before.
Training a child to have the mind of a paranoid conspiracy theorist is absolutely insane and I'm glad you came out on the other side of it. Skepticism is goof but paranoia is not
Pausing so I don’t forget later to say: while it wasn’t rooted in any conspiracy theories, I absolutely understand what you mean about struggling to care about things when you don’t expect to make it to milestones. My father was always a hair trigger away from violent fits of rage, and while he was “careful” not to hit us when he threw things, I was absolutely convinced for most of my life that it was only a matter of time before he snapped and killed one or all of us. I had what I deemed essentials on me at all times in my school backpack. My friends used to joke about how if they needed anything I’d always have it. They didn’t know it was because I was always waiting for the day I’d have to flee and live on the streets. I was so genuinely shocked that I made it all the way to graduation; I didn’t plan anything at all for my future and now I’m 30 and still don’t know what the hell to do with myself.
There’s nothing wrong with not having a plan about what to do even in your 30s. I would advise talking to someone about your experiences and learn what you need to learn. Life doesn’t have a road map and most of us are just making it up as we go. The best advice I have heard is don’t sweat the small stuff and don’t worry about things you can’t control. Best of luck.
I was the most skeptical child ever. When people would tell me things, I would think, "Yeah.... no." and dismiss it. I went to religious schools and I was the kid raising my hand and pointing out that what they were teaching us was contradictory (You cannot take and eye for an eye AND turn the other cheek. Adam and Eve didn't know right from wrong until AFTER they ate the fruit, so how can they be blamed? The serpent spoke the truth, etc.). Honestly, I thought everyone knew religion was mythology... but for the sake of the children, we all went through the motions. Then I realized they actually believed this stuff. I stopped going through the motions at age 12, saying, "Sorry, I don't buy it".
In my late 20's ben shapiro convinced me god was real, and then I had kind of a mental break down trying to avoid burning in hell by diving into the religious youtube. Started to believe some crappy shirt even as a full grown adult. Imagine what a child is vulnerable to believing Absolutely, if I had not been able to discuss the crazy things I believed, I never would have found my way out.. it is a vital part of recovery. I kind of made up my own one person cult as a kid. Instead of being told to believe crazy conspiracies, I was told god definitely was real, and never went to church. So I became my own church. Talking to god in my head, not needing to solve any real world struggles I had. Autism, anti social behavior, bullying? Doesn't matter. I'll die eventually and then the real life will begin, so this one and it's struggles are none of my concern. I considered myself a warrior for christ, and that as long as I was willing to fight and die for jesus everything would be fine. Honestly you did a lot better than me. You're smart, bold and living life regardless of your upbringing. Meanwhile I spent my 20's being an incel and am still alone and too scared to meet anyone going into my 30's. And with untreated autism, idk how to deal with people anyway. So be proud, you did good with what you had.
Don't let people talk to you like this. Your autism doesn't need treatment. People just need to treat you better. And thank whatever gods there be you haven't been "treated for" autism. The things they do to kids are unforgiveable.
I am very glad that Ihave grown up in a country where atheism is norm, and religion is oddity. I quit having any more respect to this delusion, it is harful and should be forbidden. EDIT: Religion creates a mental setup, that - you don't need proofs or logic, it is "a given thing,dogma, bible sais so, preacher said it" - blind respect to authorities (clergyman does not lie!) - strenghtening that your truth is inshakable and others are sinners /atheists /otherwise despicable
@@noldo3837 as a religious person who was raised to question everything and form your one's own opinions while respecting others, I differenciate between faith and religious practices. I think it's possible to have modern values and believe in god. Reading about how religions make life so hard for some people hurts a lot
I, aged 41 (2001), brought home the whole "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams" to my 67 YO father, who proceeded to rip me up one side and down the other. Why? Because (a) the buildings had been *destabilized* by the jets slamming into them (he said this as if this should be obvious to me, it wasn't) and (b) (something I did not know) my father had ran telephone cable in the WTC back in the 1970s and after the first bombing of the WTC in 1993, he and many other expert cablers and installers were brought back in to rewire to the massive phone switch that was located in one of the many sub-basements of one of the WTC buildings. One of the things he said about the whole "there were explosives wired throughout the WTC" (a sub theory of the "jet fuel" theory) was that by 1993, running cable for the phone systems and the much newer computer networks was a right royal PITA because the builders of the WTC had not anticipated the boom in computing. That said, I will never forget calling him at home on 9/11 after the towers fell and he was om utter awe at how the buildings just *collapsed*. It wasn't until later that I learned he'd worked in the guts of the building and probably never expected this to happen.
I disliked this one from the outset, it doesn't need to melt the beams, just heat them up enough to weaken their structural integrity. You don't need to melt a candle or a crayon to bend it. Steel is no different, just the temperatures are higher.
even further, something doesn't need to melt for it to be severely weakened by heat. this has been so easily demonstrated in many videos. people heating the same grade structural steel used in WTC to even lower temps than jet fuel and being able to bend it with a pinky. the whole thing is stated by people with 0 understanding of material mechanics. and further, when you remove a large portion of support, it adds stress to other portions of the building, namely compression, which metals are not good at dealing with ( reinforced concreate is designed such that concrete is good at dealing with compression, but forid at tension, and steel is good at tension but bad at compression. It's a horridly stupid conspiracy if you know anything about materials. now could it have been conspiritorial through other means like prior knowledge or something, maybe. but otherwise it's just outright stupid.
While I don’t believe that the towers came down with explosives, the Pentagon wasn’t hit by a jet. Check out Socialism for All’s playlist on 9/11, we were lied to, but not in the way that the typical conspiracy theorists claim.
9/11 legitimized so much of our world today that it is difficult to comprehend. The Patriot Act. The Bush Doctrine (we can attack anyone we believe is a terrorist). The Iraq War (war crime by any definition). We are at the point now where none of this matters because we fucked this planet up long before 9/11.
I found this really relatable as an ex-pentecostal. I hadn't really thought of how much of my worldview used to be based on this fear of the apocalypse (or the rapture, maybe). I feel that I didn't truly even have to be taught faith in conspiracy theories and such, because I just wasn't ever taught to question anything and with neurodivergence mixed up in that, I would take things I was told very literally, all the time. It's fascinating looking back and actually trying to create my own readings & interpretations of certain descriptions in the Bible etc.
I was raised an evangelical so I had a lot of very cringe beliefs that I still find myself compelled to apologize for at every turn. I am so glad you're sharing this and have taken the time to acknowledge and forgive your past self!
Being young is always a time when we make mistakes. Admitting you were wrong and adjusting your worldview accordingly is how you make up for past beliefs. If you do that, no apologies are required.
I know it's a year after you made this but had to let you know that this video spoke directly to my experience as a ex conspiracy parent who unfortunately subjected my children to the same things you went through. Were looking at it from the lens of healing now bit it left my kids with ptsd and plenty of fodder for counseling. I'd planned to write a memoirs someday about my experiences. Thanks again for all you do!
some strains of HPV can actually also cause cancer in AMABs, it's just much less common than cervical cancer. Also, I think the HPV vaccines now cover not only cancer-inducing strains, but also some that cause genital/anal warts afaik. all the more reason for everyone to get it asap!
Fascinating video Emma. I remember the satanic stuff from the 70s. Gossips and rumour spreaders were bad enough before the internet, but now they can transmit their vile thoughts to a worldwide audience. I grew up in Belfast in the 1970s /80s and I certainly understand how toxic this sort of thing can be. My father was a staunch fundamentalist Christian and he hated the Roman Catholic Church with a passion. He also hated Jews and I could never understand why. When I moved to England and ended up marrying a Catholic girl from London, he cut me off completely and we never spoke again. He was convinced that I was under the influence of a secret Vatican conspiracy designed to convert Protestants back to Catholicism. I feel sorry for anyone growing up in such circumstances, surrounded by conspiracy theories.
My parents told me that I had to make my own decisions from a young age but I only learned that i didn't even have the capacity to not fail at doing their job as a child until after i was 30. It's such an unfair trick to make kids believe that they freely decide to follow what their parents teach them. Fucked me up badly over the course of my life...
The Kianu Reeves not aging thing reminds me of how JoJo fans like to joke that the series’ author, Hirohiko Araki, is an immortal vampire whose age has made him forgetful. For context, Araki started writing JoJo in the 80s and has continued to this day. Despite being 62, he barely looks any older than he did at 19 when he made his first public appearance at a con. The series notably has a vampire antagonist for a good bit of its run and famously Araki has created significant plot holes on more than one occasion due to forgetting something he wrote in a previous chapter. JoJo is weird enough and chaotic enough that it admittedly is easy to misremember stuff.
It is so comforting to see someone I respect and look up to talk about how this affected their childhood. I had so many of these pushed on me as a kid (global warming hoax, essential oils, big pharma, vaccines are dangerous, etc.) And my parents still believe in all of those and even more with the new stuff (antifa, election conspiracies, "plandemic", the works). And it's so harmful for me now that I no longer believe in those things and I see my parents still so stuck in these conspiracies and thinking that they lost me to the "woke mob". So it's nice to see I'm not alone in this experience.
If you’re not smart enough to figure out that there’s a huge difference between the obvious disinformation put out as a means of distraction, and actual conspiracies for which there is very obvious evidence, then it’s difficult to know how to help you, no matter how sorry I might feel for you. The obvious links between big pharma (origins: Rockefeller et al), Gates, Event 201, Gain of Function Research, the blatantly planned release of the so-called SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the ‘vaxxeeens’, and their links to the WEF ‘Great Reset’ nonsense, are all very very clear to see. Indeed, literally NONE of the evidence is hidden. It’s all in the public domain in plain sight. But Darwin has a plan for those too scared to employ critical thinking.
I feel for you. And it wasn't just nuts. There were a LOT of steel workers convinced that was simply not possible. Mostly because they just didn't want to believe it was possible.
then dont ever look up architects and engineers for 911 truth, cause it contains literally more then 3500 engineers and architects explaining what happened to the towers
Although it is common knowledge that steel burns very well above 1200ºC or so, who would believe a person saying: "Tomorrow two planes will fly into WTC and burn it to the ground." ?
@@loutsont2985 bro bro bro, kerosene has a temp of about 220 celsius when its burning. steel melts at around 1200. do you realize the 6 times difference?
How is that relevant? There was more than just kerosene. There was lots of paper and furniture, etc. Those holes in the building and the winds at that altitude created, in effect, a blast furnace. So be off with your silly 220 degrees. The heat will dissipate throughout the structure until there is no place left for it to go and then the heat builds... and builds... and builds until it softens. @@larryn4219
So, a novel with basically the idea of "Greta thunberg is a time traveler" is Jostein Gaarder's "the world according to Anna" where a girl falls through time in a dream and resolves to not let the climate go as bad as the one that her grand daughter has to live in. Good book, short, fun read To be fair there is no real plot, but it’s still really good.
Because of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, I was open to the suggestion that the MMR vaccine was connected to autism. I didn’t buy into it being a cause, but I believed that it would make pre-existing autism worse, or jump-start autism in children already at high odds for having it. I delayed my oldest’s MMR by a year because of that… and come to find out not only is my oldest autistic, so are all my kids (so far. I’m growing a little girl at the moment and can’t conclusively say one way or another yet) and so am I 🤣
Aha! I've cracked the code...autism causes vaccines! Joking aside I do wonder if some of those who worked on the original vaccinations were neurodivergent in any capacity
@@mrmaniac3 you can count on it. The MRNA vaccine technique (like what got used for covid) was developed in part by neurodivergent persons. It actually makes more sense to just assume ND input whenever a breakthrough is made, since we think differently. Heck, even just figuring out different and more efficient ways to complete household tasks (ie: loading the dishwasher a certain way, setting up visual cues for certain tasks, etc) is something that is helped along by not being neurotypical.
I actually wrote a research paper, and found out that there is a strong link between autism and genetics. My guitar teacher all of his kids are autistic.
@@samgray49 I mean, it makes all the sense. All my kids so far are autistic, and given that I’m also autistic, and my SO is (more than likely given a large number of conversations and observed behaviors, but since I’m not a specialist I can’t say for sure one way or the other) also probably autistic, the chances that it isn’t genetic are pretty low.
@@martiendejong8857 I… think you might be reading some factually incorrect reports… Every single one of my kids are autistic. Including my first, who I actively delayed vaccinating for his first year. They weren’t under any abnormal stressors (they had their feedings before they cried, they were held fairly constantly, and they were changed frequently enough that no one had so much as redness on their bottoms) and even before their first birthday I could tell that they were “different” from other babies, ie they weren’t hitting all their milestones and they had little idiosyncrasies that showed up. And I’m not the only parent who has noticed this type of thing with their autistic kids. The autistic behaviors get obvious enough to get a diagnosis after 18 months, but all autistic kids start out as autistic babies. In addition to all that, the actual structure of the brain of an autistic person is noticeably different from the structure of a neurotypical/allistic brain. I guess the TL;DR of all this is there’s no reason to not get vaccinated if your only concern is autism. Or 5G. Or whatever it is that anti-vaxxers are scared of this year.
I feel you Emma, I grew up in a Pentecostal doomsday cult that tied into several conspiracy theories, usually around the mark of the beast and the One World Government etc. It was rough and I still have panic attacks about "the End".
When I was around 11 to 12 in primary school the teacher who taught us social sciences and Bible studies (no, this was not a private/Christian school) would make us watch episodes of "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura" during class. Then a bit later in life I got reintroduced to conspiracy theories by Shane Dawson which lead me down a rabbit hole that spat me out at Alex Jones and his Sandy Hook conspiracies. Yeah.... thinking back I can't believe I fell for such horrible things.
I had the opposite experience. During my first year of high school we started look at media criticism and my teacher showed us some very manipulating advertisements and we analysed how it was preying on people's emotions. I didn't believe that the advertisements were real and that people could really be fooled by the ads. I thought that the teacher was just lying to the extent of being conspiratorial. I eventually realised that I was naive.
Alex Jones is the worst excuse for a person, using fear mongering to manipulate his audience. Jesse Ventura is disgusting as well. It was obvious to any thinking person he was just fanning the flame of a very dangerous wildfire. I am ashamed to be from the same country as him.
Omgg I wonder is the Shane Dawson to Alex Jones Sandy Hooks pipeline is more common bc for a very brief time that was me too. I didn't do anything about it or do more than watch a few videos but it feels so so so embarrassing now
The true genius of the conspiracy theory crowd was appropriating the word "theory". It enabled them to present their ignorance on equal footing with the expertise of those who actually do work with theories.
The term "conspiracy theory" was actually popularized by the CIA in order to discredit independent investigation into the JFK assassination. The conspiracy theory crowd didn't come up with it.
*Watergate* was a *theory* - Woodward and Bernstein followed leads, secured evidence and printed a story that turned out to be true. All this stuff is not conspiracy *hypothesis* it's pretty much wild conjecture and free form imagination...
Emma, this video is hugely impactful for me. Thanks a bunch for making it. My brother and I suffered a lot at my parents inherent mistrust of every single main-stream understanding of anything. It was layered into a sort of, hyper-spiritual magical thinking angle, but things like qanon, george soros takes, satanic panic stuff... it's made it incredibly challenging to relate to my family. The internet has made it so much worse. And as you say, it's given me a knee-jerk reaction to dislike friends or people who think conspiracies are fun. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
This video is soooo important. Honestly I recognized a few I got sucked into very briefly on the upper levels mainly because of being raised on the internet for a huge majority of my life. Thankfully they never had that tight of a grip on me simply because I’m fortunate not to have any adults irl who pushed them on me but still I think finding the origins of these and the real harm caused by them is so important! Thank you again for making this!
I honestly believe in this day and age that "keep an open mind" is not a universally good thing. There are ideas out there that are like a virus to your brain.
Hi Emma. I just wanted to let you know that the part you talked about being a child living in fear due to conspiracy theories really resonated with me. Growing up in the 80's I feel like I had those same fears, but over something that was, and still is, very real: The threat of nuclear war. It made me sad the thought that you, and possibly many children that were exposed (and are still being exposed) to these conspiracy theories, are familiar with this kind of stress and trauma. It's bad enough when it's over something real, but it seems worse when it's over insane, totally bonkers, absolutely untrue, conspiracy theories.
Oh man, I remember at 23 I said to my mother 'MMR isnt on my record. What's my immunization status?' 'Er, I think you had them separately?' 'You *think* or you *know*. I'm about to go into a very public facing job, and the last thing I need is to come home with some Victorian disease because you think I got immunized as a baby' '... I don't know for certain! It was a long time ago, plus it was all over the news that it would cause autism....' 'You being drawn in by a con artist and the Daily Mail in the late eighties isnt what Im most worried about right now. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to make some calls to my surgery.' Eventually turned out my immunizations were in order, but the fact my mother could not look me in the eye and give me a firm yes or no about whether I had to worry about my lungs falling out my arse (metaphorically) was deeply concerning.
It’s not quite the same thing, but was raised by extreme fundamentalist Christians and I think there’s a lot of similarities between our experiences. These sort of in group enforced delusions that keep you afraid and your fear makes you more dependent on your in group/suspicious of outsiders (who you are preventively warned will try to deceive you). We were big into the signs of the end times and the conviction that the tribulation would start any day now. I was taught post 9/11 that Muslims were our demonic enemies in the war against satan and that Obama was a secret Muslim and the antichrist. I am bipolar and I have experienced psychosis throughout my life. I thought that my psychotic episodes were encounters with angels and demons and those visceral experiences reinforced for me that my beliefs were true. I was very isolated from anyone who wasn’t at least a fundamentalist Protestant and had restricted internet access, so I wasn’t really able to escape the indoctrination until I got away from my parents and hometown. I know there’s a big overlap between evangelicals and conspiracy communities in the US and it’s curious to see the similarities in their strategies to delude people.
I very much agree with this! I still live with Christian fundumentalists but thankfully my internet access isn't limited anymore, and I watch Emma Thorne and a bunch of other Anti MLM, anti conspiracy and anti fundie UA-camrs as part of my deprogramming, because they all use such similar us vs them and cult like tactics to control you, honestly evengelical fundies are what you get if you mix a conspiracy theory with a cult and a little bit of an mlm
This was hard to watch, but so appreciated. I grew up in a house with miraculous Christianity, witchcraft, psychics, and *lots* of conspiracy theories. I believed so many of the same things as you, even doing class reports on some of them (a memory I recently unlocked, because a lot of my childhood is missing). It feels so shameful, I feel so gross thinking about it. Maybe being exposed to all this stuff helped me become such a critical thinker, I teach problem solving and computer science in university now, but I feel the pain of growing out of it and your family.... Not, and the dissonance that builds up when your parents are frustrated that you don't still believe in all of it, and bringing up this crazy stuff like I'm *supposed* to believe and remember it. Thank you for this video. It really helps to see the story written from another's pen.
I think a learning disability might be responsible for some people being predisposed to conspiracy thinking or at least to Flat Earth in particular. There is something called Dyscalculia. Its a sort of mathematical dyslexia, and has only been recognized as a disability for a few years. People who have this disorder have a very poor or NO sense of scale. So they would naturally have difficulty with conceiving just how unlikely a massive conspiracy is. A clear patterns with flat earthers is a total lack of abstract reasoning, which I think might also be relevant to dyscalculia as well.
Same here. I had a friend whose family "was ordained by a prophet of God" to prepare other Christians for the "End Days". They had rented a storage room and filled it with flashlights, military tents, canned goods, rifles, hunting gear etc. They truly believed that before the rapture, the government will make Christianity illegal and if found out, the liberal commies will come to your home and force you at gun point into internment camps like the Nazis did the Jews. She had me believing this too for a long time.
Jeeze. Was your friend around your same age? And people say there's nothing wrong with teaching (brainwashing) young children with nonsensical religious ideologies...
i was a weird kid, i remember being at scout camp and catholic school recess (early 2000s) and the whole lot of us being rather homophobic, but even though at that time i didn't necessarily like the community i could still understand the fundamental right to marriage equality. and it was this as a second step to rejecting the parents indoctrination. when i could see i was more moral than the church's stance.
@@lifeonleo1074 Yawn, tell me about the 'marriages' in Numbers 31:18, or get out. And about Hosea 9, and the miscarriages, and full details of the slavery described in Leviticus 25, Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 21. And then we can discuss why Satan is OWED anything, post exile. Or to have his unreliable views - on Job, or potentially, anyone else - taken seriously. To the point of even READMITTING him to heaven. And also of keeping many spiritual powers, making him - even if actually 'spiritually dead' post Revolt - certainly not spiritually neutered, it seems. Threats will not be respected on this channel, so bear that in mind. Also, are you into Astrology, or not? Your name kind of implies it. Could be immoral - in the eyes of the god/gods (see Genesis 3:22) who made, you.
Most of the "classic" conspiracy theories (Freemasons, Illuminati, Rosicurians, Knights Templar, etc) are generally people The Vatican didn't like. Freemasons didn't have a religous requirement to be a member, so Christians, Jews, atheists were all exchanging ideas, in secret, which is scary to theocratic authority. The Templar just had more money. Just like today, by and large it's just garden variety Christian nationalism (anti-semitism) and/or greed.
Not the same as being raised on conspiracy theorys, but I remember fully believing that the world was going to end in 2012 - the chaos going on in my family life made it seem not so far-fetched. I remember feeling really apathetic and I think this, along with the aforementioned family chaos, is part of why I dissociate so much now. I remember going to a fireworks show and watching the sky in a state of terror thinking "this is what its going to look like when everything explodes and we all die. It's going to be so loud and hurt so much." And now whenever I hear Katy Perry's firework it's all I can remember svdvsvdc Like it's funny _now_ but at the time it was awful (Edits for spelling)
I grew up with a mom who believes in a lot of conspiracy theories, I haven't seen many people go through a similar experience! Thank you for this video :)
Just on the moon landings, I remember Stephen Fry on 'QI' saying that too many people would have to have been in on the ruse for it to have been kept secret; someone high up would have talked. Plus, the Soviet Union would have tried to debunk it, and I don't think they ever have. It doesn't stop my friend, William believing that the whole thing was produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. I'm pleased you didn't spill your beverage - I was worried for a while. Can't always rely on gravity.
Darn it! Two people have beaten me to the Stanley Kubrick insisted on filming it on location joke. Ironically, it was cheaper and easier to go to the Moon. The technology to fake such footage didn't exist in the 1960s.
My childhood best friend’s dad believes in a lot of these from harmless to very dangerous. He was convinced that the Evergreen Ever Given wasn’t actually stuck in the Suez Canal…”Bugged out” when during the first COVID wave…has a large arsenal, etc.. My friend doesn’t believe everything his dad does but he does believe a lot unfortunately. He has crippling anxiety because of it (plus other factors) and even though I love him as a brother, I can’t talk to him about a lot of things because I don’t want to set him off. My biological brother also at least passively believes some dangerous conspiracy theories
My 8th grade English teacher was a conspiracy theorist. Us being kids in a pretty uneventful town all thought he was awesome because he was "teaching" us so much stuff about the world that no other teacher would talk about. When I came home and talked to my mom about what I learned in English class she was furious. In retrospect I definitely side with my mom on this one (pretty sure he listened to InfoWars.) The sad thing is that when he wasn't spewing conspiracies and actually teaching material, he was a delightfully smart man! I truly hope he has come to his senses and is doing okay today.
My 7th grade social studies teacher was teaching us to develop a critical view of media and we analysed advertising. I thought that she was a conspiracy nut when she showed us examples of manipulative ads I thought they were fake as no-one could be so evil or gullible. Unfortunately she was telling the truth.
I wasn’t raised in a single conspiracy theory, then I was introduced to Art Bell in college… looking back as honestly as possible, like with my church upbringing, I simply absorbed unquestioningly what ever Bell’s guests said. By my early 20’s I’d hit a saturation point of that world (which mostly pertained to ufo lore), once I started hearing the RW stuff like replacement theory or Jews are lizards, my intuition was like “maybe all this conspiracy stuff is actually just total garbage…”. That house of cards fell pretty quickly.
Funny enough, the thing that broke me out of the rightwing conspiracy spiral was when they went through a big phase pushing climate change denial, and at the time I'd definitely been dipping toes in those theories they use as a soft entry point to more messed up ideologies. I guess my parents putting me through DNR summer camps my entire childhood learning about nature and conservation was what finally saved me from the rightwing pipeline on youtube as a teenager. While I do hold a lot of suspicion for powerful entities and I do enjoy a good conspiracy theory now and then, I've steered way clear of the hate-inducing scapegoat conspiracy genre for years and my life is the better for it. I really hope anyone falling in deep right now can find their anchor to sanity before they start becoming a person they regret later
In a round about way I'm sort of glad for my young earth creation upbringing, because when I started to learn about how wrong it was, it helped me to learn the manipulation and tricks used by YECs to get people to believe. It has really helped me be more discerning with information
25:03 this reminds me of the childhood fears I had growing up about the rapture. Instead of thinking I was going to be on the run or dead from elites because of a power grab like you did, I thought I was going to be on the run or dead from evil atheist elites for being a Christian as the doomsday of Revelation was happening. It was about 50/50 fears of that happening, or waking up one day with my entire family gone and me being left because I didn't believe hard enough. Luckily, this wasn't on my mind super often, but I did have my moments where I was just so worried about "The End". I'm glad those days are behind me.
26:00 I can say I experienced this feeling. I didn't believe many conspiracy theories but I had paranoid delusions throughout my teens. It's very hard to focus on class work when you're constantly waiting to get called down to the office and disappeared
Thank you for being vulnerable with us and sharing this Emma. I remember having a loud argument with a friend in 12th grade in the library about me denying evolution. And I definitely cringe looking back.
Hi Emma, firstly: wow, very couragous of you to talk about your childhood conspiracies secondly: it would be interesting if you could tell us the story of how you got out of these conspiracy theories Thank you very much for everything you do!
Hello Emma My childhood (and ongoing adult) trauma wasn't due to some conspiracy theory, it was due to being brought up in the '70s / early '80s and within the total obliteration zone around several US and UK airbases. We absolutely knew that one day, the sirens would sound, and we were going to die. The foreseeable future stretched out no more than 4 minutes. Sadly, it's not one you can simply walk away from, and I still wake up screaming.
Emma, I have a conspiracy theory-believing parent and I’m so glad you talked about this. Agree that there’s not a lot of spaces on the internet devoted to this topic
I can’t say I grew up with much deep knowledge of the higher level conspiracies, but I’m sure a handful circles the social groups I was in and my family. Thank you for bravely sharing! I’d love to hear more about any of them, whether your personal experience or educational dives into others.
I grew up as an atheist in a hyper-christian country, so I learnt from a very young age to question beliefs and be generally skeptical. I have had some bizarre beliefs in the past, but none which make the conspiracy theory list. My father believed in the "cold-fusion" conspiracy theory. Managed to mock him out of that.
You're so charming and hilarious. I grew up with a brother who was (and still is, sadly) waaaaay down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. I got sucked in for years too but was very fortunate to get out of it. I just want to give you a hug and a nice warm cup of tea and just talk about our traumas for a while and then talk about what we've done to be whole after. I hope you find your happiness now and always, Emma!
Emma, you just made me realize I never got my hpv vaccine bc when I was younger my family told me the vaccine would kill me or be very bad for me (I don't remember) i can't believe the absurdity. anyways, thank you for this 💜💖
I was told it had more side effects than actual benefits. When a gynecologist then asked me if I had gotten it I said no, they then asked if i was sexually active, which I wasn't (closeted asexual, yay) and they said I don't need it until i get sexually active. So I didn't get it. When i considered getting it after all just to be safe I had already turned 27 and couldn't afford it.
@@Itri_Vega me too. I think it comes from the ingrained puritanical beliefs in our society. The whole, "My daughter isn't going to have sex, why does she need this?" thought process.
I remember being very into alien conspiracies when I was like 12, I think that was basically me being a little knowledge sponge and somehow landing in an odd conspiracy corner of the early internet with no critical thinking skills lol. It was mostly harmless but looking back a lot of the "ancient aliens built the pyramids" stuff was quite racist because of course, none of these theories ever claimed buildings made by Europeans to be alien creations instead
My grandpa actually gave me the same "Don't be an organ donor, they might kill you for your organs!" thing. Thankfully my response to him was pretty much just "... uh huh, okay grandpa." I'm so glad he didn't try teaching me that when I was younger and more likely to believe him. ^^;
I had a conspiracy childhood too. I relate so much. Its so nice to hear someone else talking about it. It's like this big thing that happened in my life that I never talk about because I'm so embarrassed. Talking about it is great and I think it could be so beneficial. I wonder how many of us there are. One thing I want to ask is are you still in touch with him?
I was lucky to escape internalizing any conspiracy theories as a kid/teen. I do remember that when the film Zeitgeist came out in 09(?), that all of my friends were convinced of every claim made in it, though.
That was an interesting film, right up until he said something about the short-selling of airline stocks hitting 11 times its average daily level the day before, and then it was: "WHOA there, clown. You just activate my TRAP card. Show me the graph!" I can draw a graph of daily activity on which hitting 11 times the average is entirely unremarkable.
I had a conspiracy theory dad, too. To this day, I still have a bug-out bag for the "just in case" scenarios that were pushed on my as a kid. Granted, my scenarios are different as an adult, but still based in deep-rooted paranoia.
That's not inherently a bad thing as long as you don't spend too much time thinking about it or spend too much money on it. It's like buying insurance, odds are you'll never need it but if it gives you peace of mind and lets you get on with your life it's worth every penny.
Wait a bug out bag is a good thing to have I just used mine and my kids last month when my oldest son (14) was at camp in Georgia and had to be taken to the hospital for Appendicitis. We live in Florida that was a 9 hour drive (did it in 7) all I had to do was grab the bags and my purse and go. I may be a little more on the prepper side of things because I live in Florida and have had to go with out power and water for up to a month before.
Yeah, I can see this as being an appropriate response to living in an increasingly difficult and unpredictable world. I've been listening to the podcast of Margaret Killjoy, a trans anarchist prepper, and although it hasn't deeply changed my behaviour, it's very interesting to think about. I think it's reasonable to claw back a sense of your self efficacy by taking control of what you can reasonably influence. Certainly the idea of raising your own food, making your own essential pharmaceuticals, understanding how to defend yourself from the police and security services, or organising mutual aid in your community seem like very rational things to do. Also being ready to; escape oppression, live off grid, survive as a refugee, or organise disaster relief, these are potentially good and healthy things to learn. I can see how dwelling on the disastrous could be bad for you mentally, equally, it could be very therapeutic and reassuring as part of a mutually supportive community.
A bug out bag is fine. In some areas whole towns have been wiped out by wildfires. This never really happened when I was young in the same areas. So why not be prepared just don’t live in fear.
my dad is a major major INSANE conspiracy theorist. he believes the earth is flat, the mandela effect, lizard people, things like that. he's so condescending about it all. no one else in my close family believes him, (thank god), but there was a time for awhile when i was a younger teen where i believed a lot of what he said.. thankfully my brain developed & i dont anymore, but it could've been bad if i didnt have people online to look at & tell me how irrational it is to believe things like that!
Imagine you were told all your life that you are stupid. Then one day someone comes along and says "No... you're not stupid. YOU were LIED to. You're actually smarter because you see the TRUTH!" Its intoxicating, especially for people who might be insecure about their intelligence. That's why you rarely see people recover from conspiracy theories, because then they have to admit to them selves that they really aren't all that bright.
Good and brave video. It's easier to put yourself above others and say, "How can you believe such nonsense" without knowing their path in life. With this planned series of yours, people like me who had a conspiracy-free childhood can learn how to get caught up in these downward spirals of disinformation and use that knowledge to help others get out of those spirals. And to lighten and lift the spirits a bit:😉 Lias the rainbow giraffe 🌈🦒"Leaf🍁 been upon her" is delighted that you have found the path to truth. May Lisa bless you to always see the path of truth. "Leaf🍁 been upon you"
The part where you were saying the appeal of conspiracy theories is the feeling that you're in on something unique that others don't know about - I think that kind of thing really appeals to me too, but I don't think I've believed any conspiracy theories. The thing that makes me feel that way is learning about common misconceptions that the public believes. It makes me really happy and excited to learn things like "Frankenstein is actually the name of the scientist, not the monster", or "Greenland is actually way smaller than it looks on some world maps", etc. So idk, maybe that's a healthy outlet for the drive to know things others don't. There's not a massive cover-up of these facts, people just don't know stuff sometimes.
One theory with RMS Titanic was that following her collision with HMS Hawk was that her identity was swapped with one of her sister ships (Think it was Olympic) and it was actually the sister ship that sank in the collision with the iceberg. As far as I am concerned, the ship that hit the Iceberg bore the name RMS Titanic, whether it was the same ship that hit HMS Hawk is irrelevent. I think Dan would actually be quite happy that you believed the moon landing conspiracy and then changed your mind.
One correction. It was RMS Olympic that collided with HMS Hawk. Not RMS Titanic. RMS Titanic ALMOST collided with SS New York shortly after leaving her Southampton dock. Something unfortunately left out of the 1997 film. Besides that little detail your completely correct about the conspiracy theory. A completely stupid theory. It is definitely the wreck of Titanic that's disintegrating on the ocean floor. That was proven in the 1980s when the wreck was found. I believe Titanic had some unique setup of navigational lights. That's how the wreck was properly identified.
A friend told me about this one so another mate and I took the piss by saying yeah, 100% real. He got pictures and books out to show how the 2 ships looked different. Fun times. 🤣🤣🤣
The Olympic is the ship that hit the HMS Hawke, but yeah the damage was like, five figures (which IS a lot in 1912 money, but still) which White Star who owned the ships, was capable of paying. Both ships were worth £4m, but only insured for £2m, so not only would swapping the ships result in hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars worth of structural and cosmetic changes to make Olympic look like Titanic and vice versa, but you’d have to believe WSL would rather risk a complete loss of a still mostly new ship instead of just repairing it which is what they actually ended up doing lol. Olympic ended up being a tough old girl and kept only chugging after her sisters sunk.
having some storable food, water purifiers and bandages stored somewhere in your house is probably a good idea, not because of conspiracies, just in case of a general emergency or natural disasters
I live in New Zealand. What you have just suggested is official government policy. Because it's not IF we are going to get a big property damaging earthquake, it's WHEN IT HAPPENS, you need enough to "get through" I'd also add to your list (from experience) - 1) You need actual stored water, and more than you think 2) If you have a vehicle, have 20 litres of fuel stored. Disasters can be very localised, being able to drive somewhere else is useful.
I live in the Top End of the Northern Territory in Australia. Seasonal monsoonal rain that can last for months, regular cyclones, prone to isolation and inundation by flooding. Stockpiling supplies is not paranoia when the threat is real.
Emma, I speak from experience when I tell you just how difficult, how traumatic and callous the process of recovering from these theories really is. I speak from experience to tell you that even navigating them simply in order to understand them still runs the risk of misunderstanding or misinterpreting a critical component fact about them. It is a minefield, always running in a circular path; the stakes are intrinsically always this high, even as a skeptic, even as someone with no vested biographical interest in it. No one deserves to be gripped with that kind of fear and despair, to betray even your own experiences in favor of preparing for something so impossible to control, or even to conceptualize. I am proud of the human you became. ❤ And doubly proud that you made this video.
I feel like Operation Northwoods should be at the "things that actually happened" tier. It's wild. Also, how your mug didn't spill should be a conspiracy in and of itself.
that mug runs on satanic magic, clearly Emma is doing satanic rituals...also that liquid doesn't look like coffee...it's a little red-ish, so maybe she's sipping on some nice Adrenochrome.
"It was planned/proposed" isn't the same as "this did happen". The "best" lie contains a grain of truth. In this case there actually was this proposal and you can look it up. The lie/conspiracy part is that it was implemented. (And for some strange reason they still published the proposal part but not the actual implementation part.)
some of these conspiracy theories are really worrisome, but nothing in this video had me more worried than seeing your tea mug almost spill every single time it was in shot.
Thank you for speaking that openly about that part off your childhood. For me it was over 15 years ago, when i left home for my first appartment. It's like the cliche thing. you get a little disconnected from your former life, orient yourself in the world, got unrestricted access to your own internet. And there i got in the community some guy, that really put his claws into me. I'm maybe exagerate a bit, bc how i discusted i am, how easy i was falling for that back then. But back to the story. He was friendly. Sended me Videos about 911 and Zeitgeist and i digged it and it was going very antisemetic very fast. I'm very happy, that i've done my A-Level after my apprenticeship and was going to study and got an academic way to look into things. I don't know where i would have landed, if it went otherwise.
My guilty childhood conspiracy was the Eric Von Daniken, Chariots of the God's stuff. My parents and siblings were so patient with me as I talked about it ALL the time. Luckily, like you I grew up, I wonder why everyone doesn't?
I'm guessing fear of the wider world, fear of judgement (it's safe in your own circles), fear of rejection (by those who might wish to join and your peers) I think it's why conspiracy theorists types and deep religionists have to be treated and approached with compassion, not negativity
25:10 I grew up in a similar way. I was raised to believe there was a war coming and I must be ready when "those in the know" will start killing. This is a massive over simplification, but it bred in me a constant paranoia. Even though I know it's not true, I still always make sure I'm at least wearing shoes I can run in. Just in case.
I remember when the Towers fell. I knew enough about metalurgy then, steel gets soft at a lot cooler tempature than it melts. It's why blacksmiths can shape hot iron and steel.
I swear, I look back and go “how could I believe that” or “I’m never going to tell me kids this stuff. That was traumatizing” great job with the reflecting and great video. PS. Where did you get your shirt? I love it!
My mother has unfortunately fallen deeply into the conspiracy theory whirlpool and all the things she talks about are in the top two tiers of the chart. It's hard to say why, because she's missing a lot of the usual markers and vulnerabilities for conspiracy theorizing, but I think it's something to do with feeling lost and aimless at the current stage of her life. Like, she needs something to blame that isn't herself and dumb luck or circumstance for the fact that her life isn't quite what she pictured it would be as a child.
And explanation I don't personally subscribe to - but I heard recently - is that some people are drawn to conspiracy theories because its more comforting to believe that SOMEONE is in control (even if they are evil) rather than accepting the chaos of reality.
This was fascinating! Thanks so much for sharing such a vulnerable part of your upbringing with the world. I can't imagine that that was easy, even being relatively removed from that time in your life. And congrats on your HPV vaxx! 🥰
I would say that one healthy way to engage in that conspiracy urge is just to find a good fantasy series with highly in depth world building and go down the rabbit hole on theorizing were the series is headed. I'd suggest The Storm light Archive by brandon sanderson
Thank you so much for watching and sharing your own stories! I really feel happy that this was the right thing to do :)
I suspect a whoops has occurred. I approve.
To be fair, in many ways, we are controlled by a group of global elites, but it's not the people conspiracy theorists think it is. We have billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and other CEOs and oligarch-types across the world who absolutely wield their power and wealth to control the means of production and influence politicians to their whims.
Be happy Scientology didn't get it's claws on you.
If you haven't already seem it, pretty sure the giant ancient trees is people thinking mountains are stumps if fossilized trees bc some sorta resemble certain types of broken off tree stumps, and some mesas sorta resemble cut stumps.
I congratulate you for shedding your conspiracy theory childhood. I cannot imagine being brought up by parents who believe wild, unsubstantiated nonsense. Wait, Yes I can. I was raised Roman Catholic.
Looks like you and I are both survivors. 😆
Conspiracy theory: The coffee in Emma's mug is fake. It's always on the verge of spilling, yet I've never seen a drop fall out. Clearly it's just computer-generated.
Clearly God holds it back. Why? We don't know. But there simply is no other explanation.
Deep Fake
I feel like it a hard learned skill or a result from editing
It's tea. It's legal to call tea coffee in the U.K.
You can clearly tell by her accent that it is actually milk tea.
As someone who was raised with a somewhat antivax mom, I realized watching this video I should probably go get the hpv at some point. My mom was afraid vaccines made my brother autistic so she held me and my other siblings back from getting vaxxed. Turns out we were all autistic anyway. :/
the fumes from your vaccinated brother's body gave all of you autism ofc 🙄/j
howare the odds on this? Are all the children authistic? that must be very unlikely, or is it?
@@r0hde066 idk man antivaxxers are weird
@@r0hde066 Autism is actually more likely if you have an autistic relative. It's genetic (there have been many genes identified as likely contributing) and the chance of it occuring increases with parental age.
@@r0hde066 all my bio siblings have autism too! Four of us in a row, all on the spectrum- from my experience, it's more likely than not for an autistic person to have at least one other family member on the spectrum.
As a child, my mum was scared off from giving me the MMR vaccine by the bogus autism scare claims. The result was that I got measles, mumps and rubella (thankfully not at the same time) and as a bonus am also mildly autistic. That showed her! :)
I did get the polio and diptheria inoculations though.
The idea that having your child turn out autistic is somehow worse than having them *fucking die* is just the worst kind of evil bullshit imaginable
Do you ever think about how autistic people are more likely to go into stem? So they're more likely to have a career in biology. Therefore there's probably a lot of autistic people who are in the vaccine development industry
Like bro we got it backwards... vaccines don't cause autism, autism causes vaccines 🤯
Did you have a sibling if so. Did she make the same mistake twice?
Funny thing: one of the guys who started that whole thing got his medical liscence revoked
Sorry, but you being slightly autistic is just so funny (in that context), I love it. Sorry.
When it comes to the harm of believing conspiracies I always go back to what Voltaire said - “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
She brings one up in the beginning. Vaxx conspiracies cause vaccine hesitancy. There's little harm in skipping a flu vaccine aside from potentially suffering a few days with the flu, but HPV is linked to cervical cancer in women
Thats the exact reason we shouldn't allow religion to exist
he was a general badass,hehehe...
As an American hearing someone from the UK talk about the cost of medical procedures is supremely funny. No shade or hostility. Super happy you’re getting a vaccine!
yeaaaahhhh I had the same thought. I was like "oh that's not very expensive". sigh
As an American, I can confirm our healthcare system is utter bullshit designed to make rich people richer
@@fluffyphoenix8082 400£ is not expensive? ^^' Oh no...
@@fluffyphoenix8082 i thought it was 4 pounds and thought damn thats stupid... 400 for any medical procedure seems absurd let aone vaccine
It’s pretty much the same cost as here.
You mentioned not being able to pay a lot of attention in school because you believed that soon you would just be on the run, and I TOTALLY understand that. I wasn't raised in a conspiracy theory house exactly, but I was raised a JW and always thought that Armageddon would come before I ever got to __________(kindergarten, middle school, high school, fill in the blank for important life markers). We also had to have "go bags" and were being prepped for when the government would want to hunt us down and we'd be on the run. I did the same thing with choosing classes. Always being amazed that I had even gotten that far.
I would definitely say that "impending armageddon" and "government will hunt you down" would classify you as being raised in a "conspiracy theory house." Sounds like your family was just leaning more into the religion-based conspiracy side of things. I'd be curious to know what age you chose to leave all of the JW stuff behind, if you don't mind sharing -- and, was it at all difficult for you? Or was it one of those situations where it was inevitable as soon as you reached the point/age where you were allowed to make that decision for yourself?
@@Strype13 That's true! I think a part of me still has a hard time associating JWs with other things just because there's always been that separation. As far as your questions go, I was nineteen when I "woke up", so to speak. That was a little under a year ago, and I do think that to some extent it was inevitable. As much as I believed it, it was extremely draining and the fear of being wrong can only last so long. I definitely wasn't one of those people who clocked it for what it was even as a kid because I was so afraid, but I did have a lot of doubts and frustrations with the way things worked.
Unfortunately, I'm not fully out yet because of family situations, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to start college within these next few years and finally kind of become a person :)
@@Chronicroc I really appreciate you sharing what it was like growing up in that situation. I'm also very sorry you had to live in such fear like that -- that sounds awful. Granted, you sound like you have a great head on your shoulders and I'm glad you were able to "see outside of the box," so-to-speak, and began to think for yourself. I truly think you will find much more happiness outside of that preconceived, limited, and/or controlled mentality that those types of religions tend to utilize and, in turn, pass down for generations. I really wish you the best of both luck and success in your future endeavors, Chronicroc!
I was coming to the comments to say this too, ex JW here and the whole "the world is going to end so why bother with education, friends, anything really" really fucks with your head. haven't "believed" for over 20 years and I can still spot the after effects
I definitely went through this aswell. Except I was raised in a conspiracy household aswell so we were prepared to leave for everything. It really left me having a hard time with the things I've accomplished aswell.
As a Yank, I so envy that you haven't heard of Marjorie Taylor Greene's "Jewish Space Lasers" nonsense.
Nonsense?!? Wake up sheeple! Jk
Everything MTG thinks is nonsense. Hopefully they oust her soon.
I know right? Why does the craziest stuff seem to come from here in the states?
I just googled that.
No one is dumb enough to genuinely believe that, then again, Trump was a president, of an actual real country.
Wild.
I can’t believe that one didn’t get a question mark!!
About Greta Thunberg being a time traveller: years ago, I took my kids to see a planetarium show with a time travel theme. The pretense was that we were departing from the year 2150 to visit the past. Our pilot/guide commented on how good life was in the 22nd Century, thanks to all the hard work our ancestors had done to put an end to pollution and war, then took us into the prehistoric past and showed us some fun things.
On the return trip, the machine broke down in the IRL then-present. The pilot told us the machine was no longer able to move forward, only backward, and we would just have to settle down in the primitive past. He gave us a little pep talk, telling us that at least we'd be able to take part in the great work which created the world we'd been born in, and wished us well, telling us he thought he'd take the time machine and go diving deeper into the past. Then the lights came up and we exited...into our challenging new home era.
All you have to do is go far enough into the past and then you come around again! LOL.
@@Robert08010 Heh, depends on whether time is circular or linear, I suppose.
Only one way to find out....
I was going to say "Onward!" But maybe "Backward!" is a more appropriate blessing. @@arcadiaberger9204
@@Robert08010I seriously hope you're joking. 😅
@@arcadiaberger9204 Oh, that's such a cool idea!
My parents were endtimes Christian fundamentalists that believed we'd be hunted because of our belief in the Christian God. And so that survivalist bit of your experience is something I relate to. Hording dry goods, water purifying tablets, obsessive thought about how they might get us.
Terrifying.
Instead, now, (at least here in the states), Christian fundamentalists are the ones hunting people who don't believe like them.
Yeah, I grew up in fear of being left behind during the rapture because I had that sinner's guilt from just being a normal kid.
It's ironic that Christianity is the largest religion in the world and nearly two thirds of America is Christian, but so many Christians claim to feel like a minority or feel persecuted
I've never had that or really ever been conspiracy minded but when I ended up buying the farm of a friend of mine as they were about to lose it over a rough patch I have ran it in such a way that it would double as a resource if the craziness of the world does a stupid. We sell the excess but there would be enough grain and such on site that the herd and the flock will be fine and the humans would be eating egg on toast with a glass of milk for as long as needed. Well for up to a year as if that ever became a reality we could plant less grain the next season and start growing vegetables etc too. I don't see this happening but there is some small part of me that just likes knowing there is some plan B if the world does a stupid, I don't entirely trust the dumb messes I and every other human seems to get themselves in.
Being prepared is one thing. Living your life in fear of a situation that may never come is insanity. Still know how to survive without modern culture as a precaution though lol. I find it odd that if society collapsed our homeless population would have a few legs up on more than a few people who even own survival gear. But just don't understand survival.
The SCP community seems to be a good group of entertainment and lore focused cryptid stories in a shared multiverse! Keeps me entertained as well as grounded.
(not all) scps are cryptids they're just anomalies.
@@kiwi_2_official there are quite a few cryptids and other mythological SCPs. I should also mention that the word "anomaly" definitely works for cryptids.
@@zeratir7873 what i said:
not all SCPs are cryptids; SCPs are just anomalies
what i definitely did not say:
cryptids aren't anomalous and SCPs cannot be cryptids
what you said i said:
cryptids aren't anomalous and SCPs cannot be cryptids
I LOVE the world building in some articles. The S&C Plastics in Sloth's Pit is a really fun canon, themed around Halloween and horror movies/stories.
@@kiwi_2_official Yeah, I have a hard naming anything, that can be classed as "cryptid". Most, I would put in "monster" category. 173 is not there, though - it's just an anomalous object.
“Prince (now King) Charles is a vampire” is an interesting one, largely because while it’s false in a literal sense, it’s a pretty apt metaphor for the parasitic nature of the ruling class.
LOL!!! Except for the daylight thing!!!
Parasitic? UK makes money hand over fist on the royals "brand"
Well royalty isn't human sooo....
Of course it's false, everyone knows they're space lizards...
“I don’t believe anything that’s false is harmless”
FINALLY SOMEONE SAYS IT!!! I keep thinking this, but people keep saying “what’s the harm in believing that?” It’s more complicated than the surface level effects that you can see in the worst conspiracy theories. Not seeing the real world as accurately as you humanly can is like being a doctor who misdiagnosed their patient.
All false beliefs are harmful! Yeah!! A false belief persists in opposition to reality. If you are able to hold onto a "harmless" false belief, then you are more likely to believe evidently harmful false beliefs. You erode your ability to tell reality apart from fiction by clinging to fictional beliefs. I swear to god, these things are harmful!!
Absolutely
It's also a well established fact that the best predictor for believing in a conspiracy theory is believing in other conspiracy theories. It's hardly ever just a few that people believe in, it's usually none or a crapload. Now, it's probably not any one conspiracy belief itself causes the belief in other conspiracy theories directly, but it is both a marker and an accelerant of something that's basically broken in the head of the believer, and that breakage is what causes being receptive to those others. So yeah, "ah what's the harm" is very much deliberately choosing to ignore a symptom of a condition that can quickly go much worse.
@@abdulmasaiev9024 coincidentally, you’re describing my brother. And yes, I can confirm it’s exactly like that. A certain need to know better, therefor looking for something that makes him feel “in the know” and is kinda believable or even true, then having been opened up starting to believe in others that have less sturdy foundations, then just letting go of reason and making leaps to conclusions, convincing himself he’s reasonable and others just aren’t, then ending up in echo chambers on the internet and worst of all: believing in so many theories that eventually one will be proven right to some extent. There’s no going back when that happens.
The truth is that there are conspiracies in the world, but the reason not to to believe in the theories is not because you think none are ever true, but because so few are that you can’t reasonably justify believing in most of them without solid evidence. Belief is a dangerous thing. It suggest not knowing, just assuming, but going with it all the way anyway.
The most painful thing is that he’s into the political ones (conveniently only those that support one side). I don’t know if that’s good because he still has a reasonable concept of physics, or bad because it affects his decisionmaking literally all the time and creates floods of hatred. It’s a drain on my mental health when we’re at home together. It’s not like he’s an idiot, to the contrary. He’s emotionally stunted (sorry bro) but has been told he’s smart so often that he feels like he has to live up to expectations. He just does it in the wrong way.
Rant over.
When I started watching flat earth debunking videos, my gf was like "who cares what's the worst that could happen." She has since apologized seeing as we now know what could happen.
Personally, I would never ever even in the privacy of my mind have a negative judgment about someone who accepted conspiracy theories at some point in their life and then learn better. You have my admiration and respect for having a mind capable of accepting the facts.
Exactly
So is the key part of your statement “and then learn better”? I can agree to that.
How about those that have not yet learned better?
@@robertt9342 I have a family member in his late 20’s who hasn’t not yet “learned better” about many conspiracy theories in the top tier of this chart. I think for him it is subconsciously a coping mechanism for avoiding trauma (dissociating from reality). In the not-so-distant past it was drugs, alcohol, and hanging out with dangerous and manipulative people. It seems like recently he finally uncovered the underlying trauma, and he has a lot of deep internal work ahead of him which 🙏 that shit’s hard and he’s gonna need support and love and probably professional help. But I know who he is past all the swirling BS and he has kind heart. In my family member’s case it would NOT make sense to, say, ostracize him on the basis of his current belief in conspiracy theories, dangerous as they may be. That would make things worse, for him at least. Coming from the same family and some of the same trauma, I have a complicated time expanding how much contact I have with him, but I know others in the family are closer to him and they got his back as he gets back on a good path to healing.
Do you know or love anyone who hasn’t yet “learned better?” I imagine the answer to your question is tailored to those people, makes sense for how you can or cannot relate with them, and based on how they got there to begin with.
@@robertt9342 I can answer for myself:
It depends on a lot of factors.
like:
1. What the conspiracy is.
Epstein may not have killed himself. The well documented facts show that many very powerful people had reason to want him dead. That doesnt mean it happened, its reasonable to have some doubts about the official story.
On the other hand something like Holocaust denial is far more extreme and absurd to believe.
2. How strongly they believe it
Take the Epstein example. I have some doubts about the official story. But I have no proof, and I see no way of getting proof. Thats fine. But if someone says "I and CERTAIN Epstein didnt kill himself and they go on about how they have researched it and etc etc... To me almost certainly the strength and certainty of their belief is absurd.
3. Actions they commit or possibly stoop to because of their belief.
This depends on the action. Like not vaccinating a child for instance. There have been cases where children have died because parent dont believe in going to hospitals.
4. How long they have held the belief/ their age.
I am going to be far more lenient to young adults raised in homes of parents who believed in conspiracies. Children instinctually trust their parents and authority figures around them, and parents have a huge amount of influence over what someone believes at an early age.
I am less forgiving of someone who is forty though.
There's other factors, and its not like I calculate anything out or think about this normally.
I feel so validated! I was a child growing up in a family where my mom believed many of these things. I remember getting actual breething problems when my mom used an essential oil diffuser, and also didn't get my HPV vaccine. Things have only gotten worse with her and in this day she believes almost all of these things (not the flat earth theory tho for some miraculous reason). I have literally lost my mother because of this. All she talks about is how she knows the real side of this world. She wanted to gift me a large amount of money if I didn't get the covid vaccine (I did!) and spends her days scrolling all kinds of sites that get her deeper and deeper into that world.
I also notice that anger in myself when someone starts to talk about conspiracy theories because I know how harmful those can be. I have literally consulted a health care provider for advice on how I could get my mom into some treatment. I see her literally fade away in front of my eyes. Trust me when I say it would be better if your mom was dead rather than being so sick you can't even chat with her without all of these things influencing everything she says and thinks. She's like a ghost to me honestly.
I had a falling out with my brother over the 911 conspiracy theory. It took him forever to come around but he's over it now. He had to find someone else who HE respected who just happened to say the exact same thing that I said - basically a world wide coverup is impossible because of all the various persons with various motivations involved. Reporters live for scandals they can out. The idea that every reporter and new caster knows "whats really going on" and yet kept silent... its way beyond unlikely, its not even rational. I have found that a LOT of flat earthers (and other conspiracy theorists) have no sense of scale. They can't seem to grasp just how unlikely a world wide conspiracy is.
I worked for Mattress Firm. The reason they have so many locations is they routinely buy out companies and keep the stores for a while, in order to maintain customer relations with the previous businesses, as well as to determine which location does better. They eventually close low performing stores. We actually have a small video based on that conspiracy theory in our training lol.
Thanks! Always wondered…
Ok Mr money laundering coverup man
My biggest criterion for evaluating the likelihood of a conspiracy is: how many people would need to be in on it and able to keep it secret. People leak classified military equipment specifics to win online arguments; how could they keep something so much bigger under wraps for more than a few years?
Watching a video called "Why we are really legitimate businessmen" as part of induction is definitely a red flag.
If there was gonna be a conspiracy, I would have expected "My Pillow" to be at the center, not Mattress Firm!
Not conspiracy theories necessarily, but i grew up with a parent who believed in a lot of new age practices. Crystal healing, tarot, and no vaccines; that sort of thing.
What messed me up the most was the spiritual hierarchy my mom taught me. That some people, like my siblings and I, were innately born to suffer more and had more spiritual responsibility. I grew up with this feeling of isolation from my peers, which is something I still struggle with to this day.
That’s the impact that these conspiracy theories have. They give people a sense of righteousness-that they know some unspoken secret of the world which makes them somehow better or more deserving. But as children who can’t think for ourselves, it can really mess with the way we see and interact with the world.
I definitely feel for you when you say you were raised this way. I’m glad you were able to get out, and talk about it in a humouring way. I still struggle to talk about it most of the time, but I don’t feel as alone as I used to :-)
that sounds like theosophy to me
My mom is also into that stuff. She was somewhat normal before the pandemic. Now, she is just believing everything from the plandemic to vaccines being toxic. She also believes that Biden is worse than Trump and that he has a secret agenda and is actually a republican (???)
We are not American for clarification. She also believes that the government is tracking our every move when we pay with a card and refuses to buy from places that don't allow cash payment.
She also believes there is a crack or something between our world and the spiritual world, which is the reason for all the misery in the world.
She also believes that the Estonia catastrophe was a cover-up from the Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian governments to hide our involvement in the Cold War...
Strange: your name seems Italian but your mother'r beliefs seem (oriental-) Indian!
@@loutsont2985 if im right and its theosophical, which i think i am, its white people appropriating alot of eastern practices during the 1800s into "western occultism". if you want to know more about this particular foolishness id look up helena blavatsky.
If it helps you feel better about setting up a Moon Landing conspiracy website. My sister's class did a "persuasive writing" project that involved giving a talk to parents and she chose to do the Moon Landing being fake...
Her talk was in between "Why schools shouldn't have uniforms" and "Why XBOX is better than Playstation" so she was a notable outlier and, according to my Mum, her talk was a running joke amongst the parents for years after.
BTW, The fake moon landings were directed by Stanley Kubrick... Just spoofing y'all.
One doesn't have to actually believe the persuasive talk.
Copypasting 'persuasive' pre-cherrypicked disinformation sounds like an easy passing grade.
@@JoshSweetvalethere are a lot of conspiracy theories I’ll bet started as a joke down the pub. The main ones are anti-vax, flat Earth, and fake moon landing starting as a joke then devolved from there.
I still live in hope that nobody believed in flat earth, it’s a long joke I’m not in on. It almost definitely isn’t, but there’s still hope for me yet.
NASA shill confirmed
For me, the way to healthily engage in the same feelings of secrecy and research conspiracy theories engender is by delving into the lore of detailed fictional worlds. As a trite example, order 66 is a phenomenal conspiracy from the perspective of the SW universe, and it’s really fun to dive into the stories of characters like Fives who uncover it. Also, I think role-playing in games like pathfinder and D&D in worlds where conspiracies and cryptids exist or by playing video games like Control really scratch that itch for me. Anyhoo, lovely video, Emma! Very new to the channel but absolutely love your work!
I didn't have a conspiracy childhood, I got it from the other end when classmates were sometimes told they weren't allowed to play with me any more after their parents found out that my family were Jewish. And, just for the record, if my people *had* space lasers, we'd have better things to aim them at than innocent trees...
I'm so sorry you went through that!
@@Ælfgifu-1 Thank you 💙 I mean, it taught me a lot about the way the world works, but I'm very glad that it's not a lesson my kids ever had to learn, or one my grandkids will be likely to have to learn on any kind of large scale. Back in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up, parents could get away with that kind of thing with minimal public censure. Today, they'd be seen for the bigots they are by the vast vast majority of people, and that's progress. Mostly, looking back on it, I feel more sorry for the others kids who were way too young to understand what was happening or why it was wrong. I worry about the adults they grew into and hope they were able to escape that kind of mindset before it was too late.
Wait what this about Jewish space lasers?!
@@RobinTheBot MTG said something about Jews having space lasers. That b*tch is nuts.
@@Katherine_The_Okay Unfortunately when I was at school in the 90s a lot of the kids took it upon themselves to do the same bigoted shit. Got myself in trouble on more than a few occasions for standing up for some friends of mine that were jewish, sikh, and muslim against people like that. But then I'm a genderfluid autistic and had enough of the bs myself so I wasn't going to stand for it being done to others. Also probably due to me being an atheist I don't have any kind of strong tribalism attached to any religion so I'm very much of the mindset of leave them be unless they are trying to force what I consider to be harmful ideas on others. Which none of my friends were doing they were merely being attacked usually over the fact they looked different because they wore items of clothing that expressed their religion etc. That just made me really mad, probably also a result of being genderfluid I felt like they were being attacked as a result of the same intolerance that was directed at me for the crime of liking to wear a dress sometimes. Let people wear whatever fabric they want on their body for f sake.
Keeping massive stores of dried food, water, and other supplies for "When everything collapses" is something I grew up with as well. The fact that the goods had lifespans measured in decades and _still_ managed to expire before the apocalypse did nothing to deter my parents. I'm also painfully aware of what it's like growing up "knowing" that the world is going to end any day now. You're definitely not alone in that one.
Edit: Actual discussion I had with my mother: "I mean for crying out loud, it's like you actually believe the world is flat!" "No of course I don't believe it's flat... But I do believe it's hollow."
What cracks me up about the food storage is that most take water, and few people store 7-10yrs of water or any... My old roommates had 1/4 of their garage filled with buckets of died powered food, but no water stored.
@@nleem3361 I think just generally having a good amount of food and water stored in case of emergency is a great idea, it's when it gets weird or excessive that it becomes a problem. Also, never forget TP, razors, condoms, and menstrual products, they will be a commodity if something does somehow happen.
ugh my dad is this way. he buys up so many canned foods, extra toilet paper, everything. just on the off chance that *something* is going to happen. no wonder i have so much paranoia now lol
Being prepared isn't really all that crazy. Nothing is guaranteed in this life. Maybe being too obsessed with it isn't good though.
They're not wrong, but they're going to be the ones who cause the end.
Oh my god, THANK YOU I can't tel you how cathartic is to here this!!! My mum was(/is) in a lot of the same conspiracy holes it sounds like your parents were/are and no one really understands the gravity of how terrifying it can be. So thank you for making this video- I really connected to it and it was nice to know someone understands :)!
I definitely grew up having a conspiracy dad, and I feel like as a POC, our historical experiences make us even more susceptible to conspiracy theories. I remember being told about the nwo and its surrounding theories, and not being able to watch sooooo many shows and cartoons because "they were being used to push agendas and input subliminal messages in kids' minds lol. "GMO" was another issue that resulted in my diet being very restricted and loads of other shit like that. You'd think the ppl saying "do your own research", would do a bit themselves and see the absolute bollocks of these things
When you realize that awful things like MKultra/Project Bluebird or the Tuskegee Experiment actually went down in the USA, you understand how people of certain backrounds may become even more susceptible to conspiracy theories
The book "Republic of Lies" gave me a bit of insight into the history of real conspiracies in the US & especially how POC communities were targeted and are subsequently more likely to be distrustful of institutions. I have no idea how you begin to reverse that
"Do your own research" can sometimes be a very difficult thing to ask of a person. For conspiracies that challenge scientific consensus, the research is very difficult to understand if you don't have an advanced scientific background and education.
I'm a biological laboratory scientist and explaining why or how something works from a scientific perspective often results in blank stares. I am a proponent of thinking critically and researching for yourself instead of blind acceptance, but good research is a skill. Reading scientific papers is a skill.
I think scientific education in high school should include classes on how to do objective research and how to analyze sources. Maybe that would help combat some very dangerous conspiracy theories.
It definitely does influence the way you see conspiracy theories. A lot of people focus on right wing conspiracy theories, or at least the right wing perspective on them, because of how dangerous it can be. But as someone from a generally progressive Caribbean/black family, it still is very much a real fear a lot of people carry.
Because of things like forced sterilization in Puerto Rico, the Tuskegee experiments, and other similar things a lot of people have a strong distrust of doctors, scientists, and vaccines. Like my cousin hates Trump, reliably votes democrat, is very supportive of my sister(gay) and I (trans), but is adamently antivax and thinks COVID is a bioweapon.
It's a very hard thing to combat because there is real precedent in our history for these things, and from people you're supposed to trust. So when you try to tell them "trust the science" they say "sure but how can you trust the person telling it to us?"
@@austin.luther Never mind the difficulty of understanding scientific papers, there's the bigger problem of getting confirmation of your conspiracy when you Google it because Google will give you results based on your media consumption.
I remember as a young kid (maybe 8 or 9) hearing that they found viking remains on Mars.
It rattled around in my head for years. Never quite believing it (how did they get there in longships?) but occasionally remembering and wondering about it.
It was many years later I learned about the Viking probes that landed there...
You know this will sound like a conspiracy but NASA ran 3 life detection experiments and 2 of them turned out false and one turned out true NASA says that it was probably a glitch and yeah probably but hey who knows
Also NASA gets lets than half a penny for every tax dollar you give and is severely underfunded
@@landonrounsavall1125 Running 3 tests instead of just 1 or 2 is good experimental practice. It may be grounds to re-do all the tests if possible though 2 against 1 makes the positive result look dubious.
Nah that was Thor
The "Stevie Wonder isn't blind" one is hilarious, mostly because he likes to prank people (look up the time he stole shaq's new car) because it both is and isn't true, based on a fundamental misunderstanding in the general public of what "blindness" is. It can be anywhere from very limited vision to no vision at all. In Stevie's case, imagine closing your eyes and looking at a lamp, and then waving your hand in front of your eyes. Now separate your fingers and do it again. You can "see" a difference.
I can give you an example of the power of conspiracy theories. I'm 40 years older than you, and believed in vaccines because my father had a withered leg from polio. BUT... my other brothers listened to such things. Last October 4th, I got a call at 6:00 AM that my youngest brother was dying of COVID. I went to ICU to sit vigil because no one should die alone. My other brothers also. We watched him turn grey and die at 10:57. And yet, because of conspiracy theories, I'm still the only vaccinated one in the family. I can't change their minds, I can only go again to sit vigil when it's their turn.
I'm so sorry for your loss. I can't relate. I'm a healthcare worker who was working in a clinical lab. Handling hundreds of COVID specimens per day. My father is 68 years old and has adopted several conspiracy theories throughout my lifetime. I say this with all the love a daughter can. The man is naive and gullible to a fault. Bless his heart. As long as someone has enough conviction behind what they say, they can convince him of anything. I asked him the other day and we counted 9 different MLMs he failed at during my childhood.
My dad left the US and retired in Indonesia roughly 5 years ago. He's fluent in English, Indonesian, and Dutch but didn't teach me or my 3 younger sisters anything but English. He remarried an Indonesian woman who speaks no English. And me and my sisters now have an 18 month old half-sister who we'll likely only see through a video chat.
Thankfully, I haven't personally lost anyone close to me to COVID. But I've worked in the lab, watching the patient's samples become more frequent as their condition deteriorated. I've spoken to the providers eagerly calling about the results on their cytokine results on their critically ill COVID positive patient. Especially in the early days of the pandemic, before anyone in my conservative state even acknowledged that this was more than a handful of 'mild' isolated cases. I had countless conversations with my dad about what I was seeing at work, what the lab techs in our molecular dept were telling us about how many positive samples our lab was testing per day.
I could not convince him to get vaccinated while Trump was in office. He didn't actually agree to get the vaccine until thankfully the Indonesian government have him a quid pro quo ultimatum. My dad needed some official documents to send the US Social Security office for my infant half-sister. The Indonesian judge refused to sign the papers until my dad could provide proof of his COVID immunization. At the time Indonesia was leading the world in daily COVID deaths and I had all but accepted that I would never see my dad alive, in person. Clearly in the US this would have never been permitted (and technically, it came down to my dad wanting my half-sister to be receiving the social security benefits she's entitled to. So financial incentives won out over his anti-vax beliefs.) Ultimately, I like to think my attempt to convince him of the safety and efficacy of vaccines over the last 2 years made his decision to get the COVID vaccine less traumatic in the end. It's hard to know.
Either way, I'm really sorry for your loss. I hope at some point your brothers either get the vaccine or if they remain unvaccinated, that they avoid the same tragic outcome as your youngest brother. 💙
I trust most vaccines(check side effects and risk of infection), but I don't trust the covid ones in any way(safety, effectiveness, good intentions, etc).
Shame your brother died, at 67 the risks are probably worth it though.
I'm much younger.
Sorry for your loss.
oh my god i'm so sorry about your brother. :( i hope your family grows form this. and i hope you're doing ok. 🙏🏻i wish i could give you a hug :(
@@invisiblemissx You're thankfull a government blackmailed a person into getting vaccinated against their will and that's a problem.
What I don't like about conspiracy theories is that they often turn legit concerns into extreme nonsense. Like Gates being the second greatest money donor to the WHO is a problem, and so is lobbyism, billionaire and big corporate influence on politics and media. And worst conspiracy theories make people hopeless and stressed out.
Well the government literally invented the term conspiracy theory to discredit legitimate theories.
A lot of those things are even true anyway she talked about George Soros
But he Literally what is a Nazi he masquerading as a non-Jew and then used his position in the Nazi party to steal land and property from other Jews
Or the great replacement it’s literally happened before in Europe with Julius Caesar and slaving and killing 2/3 of the celts
If people don’t believe in the great replacement they should ask an American Indian
that's ironic because those legit concerns wouldn't even be noticed without the conspiracy heads shouting about stuff that only mildly related.
Try doing some basic research into the subjects. It’s not difficult.
That's the thing about a lot of conspiracy theories - there's generally some element at its core that is either definitely true, or is potentially true and worth looking into. But then people don't find a satisfying answer, because discovering the truth about events is often hard and messy and never really clear. People don't like an answer like "we aren't sure, but X Y Z is most likely what is going on", it's very unsatisfying. So they begin filling in the blanks with speculation and it spirals out of control.
The "They're turning the frogs gay!" is a perfect example, because there's actually a nugget of truth there. There have been pesticides (banned in many countries now) as well as certain women's hormone therapies that found their way into these wetland water systems and they were dropping testosterone in frogs to the point where the frogs would actually switch genders to female.
The problem here is, Jones has worked his way into believing this is a conspiracy to control the population in some way, when in reality it was an unintended consequence of a few products, and steps were taken to mitigate the damage when they were discovered.
WORD
I'm extremely late but I wanted to share my conspiracy theory story. My mom was deep into this world, not always dedicated to a specific theory, but always always always floating in the "but what do we reallllly know?" realm. Tap water, chemtrails, anti "western medicine"/pro pseudoscience. Some ideas were perfectly well grounded (yeah processed foods aren't good for you, but it's just cost-cutting) and some were just simply unreal (vaccinations cause side effects worse than the diseases they claim to prevent). My dad was somewhat in the picture and I was a pretty sciency argumentative kid so I never fell into it, but it absolutely affected me. I still have unbearable medical anxiety, and really struggle with that. I also rushed through my vaccinations as soon as I was allowed. But it was that type of thinking that led to conspiracy theories, the anxiety and judgement filled outlook on everything, that did the most harm. I still can't talk to my mom about my father (he was conspiring with the courts to take me, she says) or my brother (he was taken away by his father).
It's still hard breaking away from that today. Yesterday I got my hair cut, but was raised mostly without that option. Or, well, it was an option but my mom would cry and beg me not to cut my hair. In fact, when I was 14 and finally got my first haircut, she did cry and beg me. She thought the hair was sacred and precious, so it stemmed from spirituality rather than conspiracy theory, but it was the same anxiety and judgement as a conspiracy theory. But yesterday I did get my hair cut and I felt a little less guilty about it than the time before.
Training a child to have the mind of a paranoid conspiracy theorist is absolutely insane and I'm glad you came out on the other side of it. Skepticism is goof but paranoia is not
Pausing so I don’t forget later to say: while it wasn’t rooted in any conspiracy theories, I absolutely understand what you mean about struggling to care about things when you don’t expect to make it to milestones.
My father was always a hair trigger away from violent fits of rage, and while he was “careful” not to hit us when he threw things, I was absolutely convinced for most of my life that it was only a matter of time before he snapped and killed one or all of us.
I had what I deemed essentials on me at all times in my school backpack. My friends used to joke about how if they needed anything I’d always have it. They didn’t know it was because I was always waiting for the day I’d have to flee and live on the streets.
I was so genuinely shocked that I made it all the way to graduation; I didn’t plan anything at all for my future and now I’m 30 and still don’t know what the hell to do with myself.
There’s nothing wrong with not having a plan about what to do even in your 30s. I would advise talking to someone about your experiences and learn what you need to learn. Life doesn’t have a road map and most of us are just making it up as we go. The best advice I have heard is don’t sweat the small stuff and don’t worry about things you can’t control. Best of luck.
I was the most skeptical child ever. When people would tell me things, I would think, "Yeah.... no." and dismiss it. I went to religious schools and I was the kid raising my hand and pointing out that what they were teaching us was contradictory (You cannot take and eye for an eye AND turn the other cheek. Adam and Eve didn't know right from wrong until AFTER they ate the fruit, so how can they be blamed? The serpent spoke the truth, etc.).
Honestly, I thought everyone knew religion was mythology... but for the sake of the children, we all went through the motions. Then I realized they actually believed this stuff.
I stopped going through the motions at age 12, saying, "Sorry, I don't buy it".
In my late 20's ben shapiro convinced me god was real, and then I had kind of a mental break down trying to avoid burning in hell by diving into the religious youtube. Started to believe some crappy shirt even as a full grown adult. Imagine what a child is vulnerable to believing
Absolutely, if I had not been able to discuss the crazy things I believed, I never would have found my way out.. it is a vital part of recovery.
I kind of made up my own one person cult as a kid. Instead of being told to believe crazy conspiracies, I was told god definitely was real, and never went to church. So I became my own church. Talking to god in my head, not needing to solve any real world struggles I had. Autism, anti social behavior, bullying? Doesn't matter. I'll die eventually and then the real life will begin, so this one and it's struggles are none of my concern. I considered myself a warrior for christ, and that as long as I was willing to fight and die for jesus everything would be fine.
Honestly you did a lot better than me. You're smart, bold and living life regardless of your upbringing. Meanwhile I spent my 20's being an incel and am still alone and too scared to meet anyone going into my 30's. And with untreated autism, idk how to deal with people anyway. So be proud, you did good with what you had.
Your comment touched my heart. You are an excellent writer. I hope things get better for you ASAP.
Don't let people talk to you like this. Your autism doesn't need treatment. People just need to treat you better.
And thank whatever gods there be you haven't been "treated for" autism. The things they do to kids are unforgiveable.
I am very glad that Ihave grown up in a country where atheism is norm, and religion is oddity. I quit having any more respect to this delusion, it is harful and should be forbidden.
EDIT: Religion creates a mental setup, that
- you don't need proofs or logic, it is "a given thing,dogma, bible sais so, preacher said it"
- blind respect to authorities (clergyman does not lie!)
- strenghtening that your truth is inshakable and others are sinners /atheists /otherwise despicable
It's amazing how Shapiro can convince anyone of anything.
@@noldo3837 as a religious person who was raised to question everything and form your one's own opinions while respecting others, I differenciate between faith and religious practices.
I think it's possible to have modern values and believe in god.
Reading about how religions make life so hard for some people hurts a lot
I, aged 41 (2001), brought home the whole "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams" to my 67 YO father, who proceeded to rip me up one side and down the other. Why? Because (a) the buildings had been *destabilized* by the jets slamming into them (he said this as if this should be obvious to me, it wasn't) and (b) (something I did not know) my father had ran telephone cable in the WTC back in the 1970s and after the first bombing of the WTC in 1993, he and many other expert cablers and installers were brought back in to rewire to the massive phone switch that was located in one of the many sub-basements of one of the WTC buildings. One of the things he said about the whole "there were explosives wired throughout the WTC" (a sub theory of the "jet fuel" theory) was that by 1993, running cable for the phone systems and the much newer computer networks was a right royal PITA because the builders of the WTC had not anticipated the boom in computing. That said, I will never forget calling him at home on 9/11 after the towers fell and he was om utter awe at how the buildings just *collapsed*. It wasn't until later that I learned he'd worked in the guts of the building and probably never expected this to happen.
looking up the melting point of steal and the temperature of jet fuel could have saved you from all of this.
I disliked this one from the outset, it doesn't need to melt the beams, just heat them up enough to weaken their structural integrity. You don't need to melt a candle or a crayon to bend it. Steel is no different, just the temperatures are higher.
even further, something doesn't need to melt for it to be severely weakened by heat. this has been so easily demonstrated in many videos. people heating the same grade structural steel used in WTC to even lower temps than jet fuel and being able to bend it with a pinky. the whole thing is stated by people with 0 understanding of material mechanics. and further, when you remove a large portion of support, it adds stress to other portions of the building, namely compression, which metals are not good at dealing with ( reinforced concreate is designed such that concrete is good at dealing with compression, but forid at tension, and steel is good at tension but bad at compression. It's a horridly stupid conspiracy if you know anything about materials. now could it have been conspiritorial through other means like prior knowledge or something, maybe. but otherwise it's just outright stupid.
While I don’t believe that the towers came down with explosives, the Pentagon wasn’t hit by a jet. Check out Socialism for All’s playlist on 9/11, we were lied to, but not in the way that the typical conspiracy theorists claim.
9/11 legitimized so much of our world today that it is difficult to comprehend.
The Patriot Act.
The Bush Doctrine (we can attack anyone we believe is a terrorist).
The Iraq War (war crime by any definition).
We are at the point now where none of this matters because we fucked this planet up long before 9/11.
I found this really relatable as an ex-pentecostal. I hadn't really thought of how much of my worldview used to be based on this fear of the apocalypse (or the rapture, maybe). I feel that I didn't truly even have to be taught faith in conspiracy theories and such, because I just wasn't ever taught to question anything and with neurodivergence mixed up in that, I would take things I was told very literally, all the time. It's fascinating looking back and actually trying to create my own readings & interpretations of certain descriptions in the Bible etc.
I was raised an evangelical so I had a lot of very cringe beliefs that I still find myself compelled to apologize for at every turn. I am so glad you're sharing this and have taken the time to acknowledge and forgive your past self!
Being young is always a time when we make mistakes. Admitting you were wrong and adjusting your worldview accordingly is how you make up for past beliefs. If you do that, no apologies are required.
Don't be ashamed. You know where this stuff came from and can help other people be made free of it.
when i was a kid, i thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be.
Ah, the films! The filmsssss! 😉😜
@@stevenredpath9332 Same.
I know it's a year after you made this but had to let you know that this video spoke directly to my experience as a ex conspiracy parent who unfortunately subjected my children to the same things you went through. Were looking at it from the lens of healing now bit it left my kids with ptsd and plenty of fodder for counseling. I'd planned to write a memoirs someday about my experiences. Thanks again for all you do!
some strains of HPV can actually also cause cancer in AMABs, it's just much less common than cervical cancer. Also, I think the HPV vaccines now cover not only cancer-inducing strains, but also some that cause genital/anal warts afaik. all the more reason for everyone to get it asap!
Fascinating video Emma. I remember the satanic stuff from the 70s. Gossips and rumour spreaders were bad enough before the internet, but now they can transmit their vile thoughts to a worldwide audience. I grew up in Belfast in the 1970s /80s and I certainly understand how toxic this sort of thing can be. My father was a staunch fundamentalist Christian and he hated the Roman Catholic Church with a passion. He also hated Jews and I could never understand why. When I moved to England and ended up marrying a Catholic girl from London, he cut me off completely and we never spoke again. He was convinced that I was under the influence of a secret Vatican conspiracy designed to convert Protestants back to Catholicism. I feel sorry for anyone growing up in such circumstances, surrounded by conspiracy theories.
My parents told me that I had to make my own decisions from a young age but I only learned that i didn't even have the capacity to not fail at doing their job as a child until after i was 30. It's such an unfair trick to make kids believe that they freely decide to follow what their parents teach them. Fucked me up badly over the course of my life...
The Kianu Reeves not aging thing reminds me of how JoJo fans like to joke that the series’ author, Hirohiko Araki, is an immortal vampire whose age has made him forgetful. For context, Araki started writing JoJo in the 80s and has continued to this day. Despite being 62, he barely looks any older than he did at 19 when he made his first public appearance at a con. The series notably has a vampire antagonist for a good bit of its run and famously Araki has created significant plot holes on more than one occasion due to forgetting something he wrote in a previous chapter. JoJo is weird enough and chaotic enough that it admittedly is easy to misremember stuff.
It is so comforting to see someone I respect and look up to talk about how this affected their childhood. I had so many of these pushed on me as a kid (global warming hoax, essential oils, big pharma, vaccines are dangerous, etc.) And my parents still believe in all of those and even more with the new stuff (antifa, election conspiracies, "plandemic", the works). And it's so harmful for me now that I no longer believe in those things and I see my parents still so stuck in these conspiracies and thinking that they lost me to the "woke mob". So it's nice to see I'm not alone in this experience.
Atheist-UA-camrs; want some?
Some Watch-Suggests?
Antifa was founded as the military branch of the Communists. Read a history book.
It's funny how the "baddies" are the woke mob, yet when a person believes the conspiracy theories they're "awake" Projection maybe?
the woke got nothing to do with conspiracy theories.. 'woke' is a term used to describe people who are constantly virtue signaling
If you’re not smart enough to figure out that there’s a huge difference between the obvious disinformation put out as a means of distraction, and actual conspiracies for which there is very obvious evidence, then it’s difficult to know how to help you, no matter how sorry I might feel for you.
The obvious links between big pharma (origins: Rockefeller et al), Gates, Event 201, Gain of Function Research, the blatantly planned release of the so-called SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the ‘vaxxeeens’, and their links to the WEF ‘Great Reset’ nonsense, are all very very clear to see. Indeed, literally NONE of the evidence is hidden. It’s all in the public domain in plain sight.
But Darwin has a plan for those too scared to employ critical thinking.
As a New Yorker who was living here when the city was attacked in 2001, the steel beams and all the "911 truther" stuff sends me into a RAGE.
I feel for you. And it wasn't just nuts. There were a LOT of steel workers convinced that was simply not possible. Mostly because they just didn't want to believe it was possible.
then dont ever look up architects and engineers for 911 truth, cause it contains literally more then 3500 engineers and architects explaining what happened to the towers
Although it is common knowledge that steel burns very well above 1200ºC or so, who would believe a person saying: "Tomorrow two planes will fly into WTC and burn it to the ground." ?
@@loutsont2985 bro bro bro, kerosene has a temp of about 220 celsius when its burning. steel melts at around 1200. do you realize the 6 times difference?
How is that relevant? There was more than just kerosene. There was lots of paper and furniture, etc. Those holes in the building and the winds at that altitude created, in effect, a blast furnace. So be off with your silly 220 degrees. The heat will dissipate throughout the structure until there is no place left for it to go and then the heat builds... and builds... and builds until it softens. @@larryn4219
So, a novel with basically the idea of "Greta thunberg is a time traveler" is Jostein Gaarder's "the world according to Anna" where a girl falls through time in a dream and resolves to not let the climate go as bad as the one that her grand daughter has to live in. Good book, short, fun read
To be fair there is no real plot, but it’s still really good.
Atheist-UA-camrs; want some?
Some Watch-Suggests?
Because of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, I was open to the suggestion that the MMR vaccine was connected to autism. I didn’t buy into it being a cause, but I believed that it would make pre-existing autism worse, or jump-start autism in children already at high odds for having it. I delayed my oldest’s MMR by a year because of that… and come to find out not only is my oldest autistic, so are all my kids (so far. I’m growing a little girl at the moment and can’t conclusively say one way or another yet) and so am I 🤣
Aha! I've cracked the code...autism causes vaccines!
Joking aside I do wonder if some of those who worked on the original vaccinations were neurodivergent in any capacity
@@mrmaniac3 you can count on it. The MRNA vaccine technique (like what got used for covid) was developed in part by neurodivergent persons. It actually makes more sense to just assume ND input whenever a breakthrough is made, since we think differently.
Heck, even just figuring out different and more efficient ways to complete household tasks (ie: loading the dishwasher a certain way, setting up visual cues for certain tasks, etc) is something that is helped along by not being neurotypical.
I actually wrote a research paper, and found out that there is a strong link between autism and genetics. My guitar teacher all of his kids are autistic.
@@samgray49 I mean, it makes all the sense. All my kids so far are autistic, and given that I’m also autistic, and my SO is (more than likely given a large number of conversations and observed behaviors, but since I’m not a specialist I can’t say for sure one way or the other) also probably autistic, the chances that it isn’t genetic are pretty low.
@@martiendejong8857 I… think you might be reading some factually incorrect reports…
Every single one of my kids are autistic. Including my first, who I actively delayed vaccinating for his first year. They weren’t under any abnormal stressors (they had their feedings before they cried, they were held fairly constantly, and they were changed frequently enough that no one had so much as redness on their bottoms) and even before their first birthday I could tell that they were “different” from other babies, ie they weren’t hitting all their milestones and they had little idiosyncrasies that showed up.
And I’m not the only parent who has noticed this type of thing with their autistic kids. The autistic behaviors get obvious enough to get a diagnosis after 18 months, but all autistic kids start out as autistic babies.
In addition to all that, the actual structure of the brain of an autistic person is noticeably different from the structure of a neurotypical/allistic brain.
I guess the TL;DR of all this is there’s no reason to not get vaccinated if your only concern is autism. Or 5G. Or whatever it is that anti-vaxxers are scared of this year.
I feel you Emma, I grew up in a Pentecostal doomsday cult that tied into several conspiracy theories, usually around the mark of the beast and the One World Government etc. It was rough and I still have panic attacks about "the End".
When I was around 11 to 12 in primary school the teacher who taught us social sciences and Bible studies (no, this was not a private/Christian school) would make us watch episodes of "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura" during class.
Then a bit later in life I got reintroduced to conspiracy theories by Shane Dawson which lead me down a rabbit hole that spat me out at Alex Jones and his Sandy Hook conspiracies. Yeah.... thinking back I can't believe I fell for such horrible things.
that sounds SUPER illegal for your teacher to do that
I had the opposite experience. During my first year of high school we started look at media criticism and my teacher showed us some very manipulating advertisements and we analysed how it was preying on people's emotions.
I didn't believe that the advertisements were real and that people could really be fooled by the ads. I thought that the teacher was just lying to the extent of being conspiratorial.
I eventually realised that I was naive.
Alex Jones is the worst excuse for a person, using fear mongering to manipulate his audience. Jesse Ventura is disgusting as well. It was obvious to any thinking person he was just fanning the flame of a very dangerous wildfire. I am ashamed to be from the same country as him.
Omgg I wonder is the Shane Dawson to Alex Jones Sandy Hooks pipeline is more common bc for a very brief time that was me too. I didn't do anything about it or do more than watch a few videos but it feels so so so embarrassing now
Also took me myself a while to discover that the 'Fable Funnel' (Lubach) starts after 4 clicks in the same direction.
The true genius of the conspiracy theory crowd was appropriating the word "theory".
It enabled them to present their ignorance on equal footing with the expertise of those who actually do work with theories.
The term "conspiracy theory" was actually popularized by the CIA in order to discredit independent investigation into the JFK assassination. The conspiracy theory crowd didn't come up with it.
*Watergate* was a *theory* - Woodward and Bernstein followed leads, secured evidence and printed a story that turned out to be true.
All this stuff is not conspiracy *hypothesis* it's pretty much wild conjecture and free form imagination...
Emma, this video is hugely impactful for me. Thanks a bunch for making it. My brother and I suffered a lot at my parents inherent mistrust of every single main-stream understanding of anything. It was layered into a sort of, hyper-spiritual magical thinking angle, but things like qanon, george soros takes, satanic panic stuff... it's made it incredibly challenging to relate to my family. The internet has made it so much worse. And as you say, it's given me a knee-jerk reaction to dislike friends or people who think conspiracies are fun. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
This video is soooo important. Honestly I recognized a few I got sucked into very briefly on the upper levels mainly because of being raised on the internet for a huge majority of my life. Thankfully they never had that tight of a grip on me simply because I’m fortunate not to have any adults irl who pushed them on me but still I think finding the origins of these and the real harm caused by them is so important! Thank you again for making this!
I honestly believe in this day and age that "keep an open mind" is not a universally good thing. There are ideas out there that are like a virus to your brain.
Hi Emma. I just wanted to let you know that the part you talked about being a child living in fear due to conspiracy theories really resonated with me. Growing up in the 80's I feel like I had those same fears, but over something that was, and still is, very real: The threat of nuclear war. It made me sad the thought that you, and possibly many children that were exposed (and are still being exposed) to these conspiracy theories, are familiar with this kind of stress and trauma. It's bad enough when it's over something real, but it seems worse when it's over insane, totally bonkers, absolutely untrue, conspiracy theories.
Oh man, I remember at 23 I said to my mother 'MMR isnt on my record. What's my immunization status?'
'Er, I think you had them separately?'
'You *think* or you *know*. I'm about to go into a very public facing job, and the last thing I need is to come home with some Victorian disease because you think I got immunized as a baby'
'... I don't know for certain! It was a long time ago, plus it was all over the news that it would cause autism....'
'You being drawn in by a con artist and the Daily Mail in the late eighties isnt what Im most worried about right now. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to make some calls to my surgery.'
Eventually turned out my immunizations were in order, but the fact my mother could not look me in the eye and give me a firm yes or no about whether I had to worry about my lungs falling out my arse (metaphorically) was deeply concerning.
It’s not quite the same thing, but was raised by extreme fundamentalist Christians and I think there’s a lot of similarities between our experiences. These sort of in group enforced delusions that keep you afraid and your fear makes you more dependent on your in group/suspicious of outsiders (who you are preventively warned will try to deceive you). We were big into the signs of the end times and the conviction that the tribulation would start any day now. I was taught post 9/11 that Muslims were our demonic enemies in the war against satan and that Obama was a secret Muslim and the antichrist. I am bipolar and I have experienced psychosis throughout my life. I thought that my psychotic episodes were encounters with angels and demons and those visceral experiences reinforced for me that my beliefs were true. I was very isolated from anyone who wasn’t at least a fundamentalist Protestant and had restricted internet access, so I wasn’t really able to escape the indoctrination until I got away from my parents and hometown. I know there’s a big overlap between evangelicals and conspiracy communities in the US and it’s curious to see the similarities in their strategies to delude people.
I very much agree with this! I still live with Christian fundumentalists but thankfully my internet access isn't limited anymore, and I watch Emma Thorne and a bunch of other Anti MLM, anti conspiracy and anti fundie UA-camrs as part of my deprogramming, because they all use such similar us vs them and cult like tactics to control you, honestly evengelical fundies are what you get if you mix a conspiracy theory with a cult and a little bit of an mlm
same here as an ex-hindu atheist
This was hard to watch, but so appreciated. I grew up in a house with miraculous Christianity, witchcraft, psychics, and *lots* of conspiracy theories. I believed so many of the same things as you, even doing class reports on some of them (a memory I recently unlocked, because a lot of my childhood is missing). It feels so shameful, I feel so gross thinking about it.
Maybe being exposed to all this stuff helped me become such a critical thinker, I teach problem solving and computer science in university now, but I feel the pain of growing out of it and your family.... Not, and the dissonance that builds up when your parents are frustrated that you don't still believe in all of it, and bringing up this crazy stuff like I'm *supposed* to believe and remember it.
Thank you for this video. It really helps to see the story written from another's pen.
I think a learning disability might be responsible for some people being predisposed to conspiracy thinking or at least to Flat Earth in particular. There is something called Dyscalculia. Its a sort of mathematical dyslexia, and has only been recognized as a disability for a few years. People who have this disorder have a very poor or NO sense of scale. So they would naturally have difficulty with conceiving just how unlikely a massive conspiracy is. A clear patterns with flat earthers is a total lack of abstract reasoning, which I think might also be relevant to dyscalculia as well.
When I was about 8 a friend of mine convinced me that judgement day was coming soon and we were all going to die. I was truly so panicked!
Same here. I had a friend whose family "was ordained by a prophet of God" to prepare other Christians for the "End Days". They had rented a storage room and filled it with flashlights, military tents, canned goods, rifles, hunting gear etc.
They truly believed that before the rapture, the government will make Christianity illegal and if found out, the liberal commies will come to your home and force you at gun point into internment camps like the Nazis did the Jews.
She had me believing this too for a long time.
Jeeze. Was your friend around your same age? And people say there's nothing wrong with teaching (brainwashing) young children with nonsensical religious ideologies...
@@Strype13 yes, my friend was a child at the time and the same age as me. This was in the mid 90s.
i was a weird kid, i remember being at scout camp and catholic school recess (early 2000s) and the whole lot of us being rather homophobic, but even though at that time i didn't necessarily like the community i could still understand the fundamental right to marriage equality. and it was this as a second step to rejecting the parents indoctrination. when i could see i was more moral than the church's stance.
I think the average person is a lot more moral than the average church.
Moral in your own eyes, immoral in the eyes of the God that created you, choose.
@@lifeonleo1074 Yawn, tell me about the 'marriages' in Numbers 31:18, or get out.
And about Hosea 9, and the miscarriages, and full details of the slavery described in Leviticus 25, Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 21. And then we can discuss why Satan is OWED anything, post exile. Or to have his unreliable views - on Job, or potentially, anyone else - taken seriously. To the point of even READMITTING him to heaven. And also of keeping many spiritual powers, making him - even if actually 'spiritually dead' post Revolt - certainly not spiritually neutered, it seems.
Threats will not be respected on this channel, so bear that in mind.
Also, are you into Astrology, or not? Your name kind of implies it. Could be immoral - in the eyes of the god/gods (see Genesis 3:22) who made, you.
Most of the "classic" conspiracy theories (Freemasons, Illuminati, Rosicurians, Knights Templar, etc) are generally people The Vatican didn't like. Freemasons didn't have a religous requirement to be a member, so Christians, Jews, atheists were all exchanging ideas, in secret, which is scary to theocratic authority. The Templar just had more money.
Just like today, by and large it's just garden variety Christian nationalism (anti-semitism) and/or greed.
We should make a drinking game where each time Emma almost spills her coffee because she's waving her arms around we all do a shot. :D
I’ll pass. I like my liver too much, lol
@@CraftyVegan omg, nice username
@@alexs.5871 thanks 😊
*alcoholism commences*
I don’t fancy a trip to the ER
Not the same as being raised on conspiracy theorys, but I remember fully believing that the world was going to end in 2012 - the chaos going on in my family life made it seem not so far-fetched. I remember feeling really apathetic and I think this, along with the aforementioned family chaos, is part of why I dissociate so much now. I remember going to a fireworks show and watching the sky in a state of terror thinking "this is what its going to look like when everything explodes and we all die. It's going to be so loud and hurt so much." And now whenever I hear Katy Perry's firework it's all I can remember svdvsvdc
Like it's funny _now_ but at the time it was awful
(Edits for spelling)
I grew up with a mom who believes in a lot of conspiracy theories, I haven't seen many people go through a similar experience! Thank you for this video :)
Just on the moon landings, I remember Stephen Fry on 'QI' saying that too many people would have to have been in on the ruse for it to have been kept secret; someone high up would have talked. Plus, the Soviet Union would have tried to debunk it, and I don't think they ever have. It doesn't stop my friend, William believing that the whole thing was produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. I'm pleased you didn't spill your beverage - I was worried for a while. Can't always rely on gravity.
It was produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, but he was such a stickler for detail they filmed it on location.
Just tell your friend Kubrick was such a perfectionist he insisted they shot on location.
Darn it! Two people have beaten me to the Stanley Kubrick insisted on filming it on location joke.
Ironically, it was cheaper and easier to go to the Moon. The technology to fake such footage didn't exist in the 1960s.
Or...... You just learn science.
@@iwanttocomplain An English man in New York always walks. Jumping about in The Big Apple is considered rude.
The US gov hired Kubrick to fake the moon landing,. But Kubrick being Kubrick, he went to the moon to film for realism.
My childhood best friend’s dad believes in a lot of these from harmless to very dangerous. He was convinced that the Evergreen Ever Given wasn’t actually stuck in the Suez Canal…”Bugged out” when during the first COVID wave…has a large arsenal, etc.. My friend doesn’t believe everything his dad does but he does believe a lot unfortunately. He has crippling anxiety because of it (plus other factors) and even though I love him as a brother, I can’t talk to him about a lot of things because I don’t want to set him off. My biological brother also at least passively believes some dangerous conspiracy theories
My 8th grade English teacher was a conspiracy theorist. Us being kids in a pretty uneventful town all thought he was awesome because he was "teaching" us so much stuff about the world that no other teacher would talk about. When I came home and talked to my mom about what I learned in English class she was furious. In retrospect I definitely side with my mom on this one (pretty sure he listened to InfoWars.) The sad thing is that when he wasn't spewing conspiracies and actually teaching material, he was a delightfully smart man! I truly hope he has come to his senses and is doing okay today.
My 7th grade social studies teacher was teaching us to develop a critical view of media and we analysed advertising. I thought that she was a conspiracy nut when she showed us examples of manipulative ads I thought they were fake as no-one could be so evil or gullible.
Unfortunately she was telling the truth.
I wasn’t raised in a single conspiracy theory, then I was introduced to Art Bell in college…
looking back as honestly as possible, like with my church upbringing, I simply absorbed unquestioningly what ever Bell’s guests said. By my early 20’s I’d hit a saturation point of that world (which mostly pertained to ufo lore), once I started hearing the RW stuff like replacement theory or Jews are lizards, my intuition was like “maybe all this conspiracy stuff is actually just total garbage…”. That house of cards fell pretty quickly.
Funny enough, the thing that broke me out of the rightwing conspiracy spiral was when they went through a big phase pushing climate change denial, and at the time I'd definitely been dipping toes in those theories they use as a soft entry point to more messed up ideologies. I guess my parents putting me through DNR summer camps my entire childhood learning about nature and conservation was what finally saved me from the rightwing pipeline on youtube as a teenager. While I do hold a lot of suspicion for powerful entities and I do enjoy a good conspiracy theory now and then, I've steered way clear of the hate-inducing scapegoat conspiracy genre for years and my life is the better for it. I really hope anyone falling in deep right now can find their anchor to sanity before they start becoming a person they regret later
I had spent many nights falling asleep to Coast to Coast AM... It got really cringy, specially looking back at it now
In a round about way I'm sort of glad for my young earth creation upbringing, because when I started to learn about how wrong it was, it helped me to learn the manipulation and tricks used by YECs to get people to believe. It has really helped me be more discerning with information
25:03 this reminds me of the childhood fears I had growing up about the rapture. Instead of thinking I was going to be on the run or dead from elites because of a power grab like you did, I thought I was going to be on the run or dead from evil atheist elites for being a Christian as the doomsday of Revelation was happening. It was about 50/50 fears of that happening, or waking up one day with my entire family gone and me being left because I didn't believe hard enough.
Luckily, this wasn't on my mind super often, but I did have my moments where I was just so worried about "The End". I'm glad those days are behind me.
26:00 I can say I experienced this feeling. I didn't believe many conspiracy theories but I had paranoid delusions throughout my teens. It's very hard to focus on class work when you're constantly waiting to get called down to the office and disappeared
For anyone concerned, I got a lot better once I was out of my abusive home and got some meds and therapy.
That is Alex Jones to a Tee. And that is why I recommend people to stay FAR away from his stream of bs.
Thank you for being vulnerable with us and sharing this Emma. I remember having a loud argument with a friend in 12th grade in the library about me denying evolution. And I definitely cringe looking back.
Hi Emma,
firstly: wow, very couragous of you to talk about your childhood conspiracies
secondly: it would be interesting if you could tell us the story of how you got out of these conspiracy theories
Thank you very much for everything you do!
Emma, congrats! I also didn't get my HPV till my 40's. It's finally available for just about everyone, and it's important. Hooray!
Hello Emma
My childhood (and ongoing adult) trauma wasn't due to some conspiracy theory, it was due to being brought up in the '70s / early '80s and within the total obliteration zone around several US and UK airbases. We absolutely knew that one day, the sirens would sound, and we were going to die. The foreseeable future stretched out no more than 4 minutes. Sadly, it's not one you can simply walk away from, and I still wake up screaming.
Emma, I have a conspiracy theory-believing parent and I’m so glad you talked about this. Agree that there’s not a lot of spaces on the internet devoted to this topic
I can’t say I grew up with much deep knowledge of the higher level conspiracies, but I’m sure a handful circles the social groups I was in and my family.
Thank you for bravely sharing! I’d love to hear more about any of them, whether your personal experience or educational dives into others.
I grew up as an atheist in a hyper-christian country, so I learnt from a very young age to question beliefs and be generally skeptical. I have had some bizarre beliefs in the past, but none which make the conspiracy theory list. My father believed in the "cold-fusion" conspiracy theory. Managed to mock him out of that.
I grew up watching Kent Hovind’s videos at about age 12. Your channel has been a great catharsis for me. Love your channel Emma
Try also Gutsick Gibbon. She destroys Hovind.
You're so charming and hilarious. I grew up with a brother who was (and still is, sadly) waaaaay down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. I got sucked in for years too but was very fortunate to get out of it. I just want to give you a hug and a nice warm cup of tea and just talk about our traumas for a while and then talk about what we've done to be whole after. I hope you find your happiness now and always, Emma!
Emma, you just made me realize I never got my hpv vaccine bc when I was younger my family told me the vaccine would kill me or be very bad for me (I don't remember)
i can't believe the absurdity. anyways, thank you for this 💜💖
I was told it had more side effects than actual benefits. When a gynecologist then asked me if I had gotten it I said no, they then asked if i was sexually active, which I wasn't (closeted asexual, yay) and they said I don't need it until i get sexually active. So I didn't get it. When i considered getting it after all just to be safe I had already turned 27 and couldn't afford it.
I hope you get the vaccine now!
@@Itri_Vega me too. I think it comes from the ingrained puritanical beliefs in our society. The whole, "My daughter isn't going to have sex, why does she need this?" thought process.
I remember being very into alien conspiracies when I was like 12, I think that was basically me being a little knowledge sponge and somehow landing in an odd conspiracy corner of the early internet with no critical thinking skills lol. It was mostly harmless but looking back a lot of the "ancient aliens built the pyramids" stuff was quite racist because of course, none of these theories ever claimed buildings made by Europeans to be alien creations instead
There’s Stonehenge
My grandpa actually gave me the same "Don't be an organ donor, they might kill you for your organs!" thing. Thankfully my response to him was pretty much just "... uh huh, okay grandpa." I'm so glad he didn't try teaching me that when I was younger and more likely to believe him. ^^;
I had a conspiracy childhood too. I relate so much. Its so nice to hear someone else talking about it. It's like this big thing that happened in my life that I never talk about because I'm so embarrassed. Talking about it is great and I think it could be so beneficial. I wonder how many of us there are.
One thing I want to ask is are you still in touch with him?
I’ll be so curious to see how much more thoughtful you’ll be in 30 yrs. Can’t believe you’re so young! (In the nicest possible way)
alright can we just talk about the fact that she was sooooo close to spilling her coffee at 0:10?
I was lucky to escape internalizing any conspiracy theories as a kid/teen. I do remember that when the film Zeitgeist came out in 09(?), that all of my friends were convinced of every claim made in it, though.
That was an interesting film, right up until he said something about the short-selling of airline stocks hitting 11 times its average daily level the day before, and then it was: "WHOA there, clown. You just activate my TRAP card. Show me the graph!" I can draw a graph of daily activity on which hitting 11 times the average is entirely unremarkable.
I had a conspiracy theory dad, too. To this day, I still have a bug-out bag for the "just in case" scenarios that were pushed on my as a kid. Granted, my scenarios are different as an adult, but still based in deep-rooted paranoia.
That's not inherently a bad thing as long as you don't spend too much time thinking about it or spend too much money on it. It's like buying insurance, odds are you'll never need it but if it gives you peace of mind and lets you get on with your life it's worth every penny.
Wait a bug out bag is a good thing to have I just used mine and my kids last month when my oldest son (14) was at camp in Georgia and had to be taken to the hospital for Appendicitis. We live in Florida that was a 9 hour drive (did it in 7) all I had to do was grab the bags and my purse and go. I may be a little more on the prepper side of things because I live in Florida and have had to go with out power and water for up to a month before.
Yeah, I can see this as being an appropriate response to living in an increasingly difficult and unpredictable world. I've been listening to the podcast of Margaret Killjoy, a trans anarchist prepper, and although it hasn't deeply changed my behaviour, it's very interesting to think about. I think it's reasonable to claw back a sense of your self efficacy by taking control of what you can reasonably influence. Certainly the idea of raising your own food, making your own essential pharmaceuticals, understanding how to defend yourself from the police and security services, or organising mutual aid in your community seem like very rational things to do. Also being ready to; escape oppression, live off grid, survive as a refugee, or organise disaster relief, these are potentially good and healthy things to learn. I can see how dwelling on the disastrous could be bad for you mentally, equally, it could be very therapeutic and reassuring as part of a mutually supportive community.
A bug out bag is fine. In some areas whole towns have been wiped out by wildfires. This never really happened when I was young in the same areas. So why not be prepared just don’t live in fear.
my dad is a major major INSANE conspiracy theorist. he believes the earth is flat, the mandela effect, lizard people, things like that. he's so condescending about it all. no one else in my close family believes him, (thank god), but there was a time for awhile when i was a younger teen where i believed a lot of what he said.. thankfully my brain developed & i dont anymore, but it could've been bad if i didnt have people online to look at & tell me how irrational it is to believe things like that!
Imagine you were told all your life that you are stupid. Then one day someone comes along and says "No... you're not stupid. YOU were LIED to. You're actually smarter because you see the TRUTH!" Its intoxicating, especially for people who might be insecure about their intelligence. That's why you rarely see people recover from conspiracy theories, because then they have to admit to them selves that they really aren't all that bright.
This was relatable. Little Emma wasn't alone.
Good and brave video.
It's easier to put yourself above others and say, "How can you believe such nonsense" without knowing their path in life.
With this planned series of yours, people like me who had a conspiracy-free childhood can learn how to get caught up in these downward spirals of disinformation and use that knowledge to help others get out of those spirals.
And to lighten and lift the spirits a bit:😉
Lias the rainbow giraffe 🌈🦒"Leaf🍁 been upon her" is delighted that you have found the path to truth. May Lisa bless you to always see the path of truth. "Leaf🍁 been upon you"
The part where you were saying the appeal of conspiracy theories is the feeling that you're in on something unique that others don't know about - I think that kind of thing really appeals to me too, but I don't think I've believed any conspiracy theories. The thing that makes me feel that way is learning about common misconceptions that the public believes. It makes me really happy and excited to learn things like "Frankenstein is actually the name of the scientist, not the monster", or "Greenland is actually way smaller than it looks on some world maps", etc. So idk, maybe that's a healthy outlet for the drive to know things others don't. There's not a massive cover-up of these facts, people just don't know stuff sometimes.
One theory with RMS Titanic was that following her collision with HMS Hawk was that her identity was swapped with one of her sister ships (Think it was Olympic) and it was actually the sister ship that sank in the collision with the iceberg. As far as I am concerned, the ship that hit the Iceberg bore the name RMS Titanic, whether it was the same ship that hit HMS Hawk is irrelevent.
I think Dan would actually be quite happy that you believed the moon landing conspiracy and then changed your mind.
One correction. It was RMS Olympic that collided with HMS Hawk. Not RMS Titanic.
RMS Titanic ALMOST collided with SS New York shortly after leaving her Southampton dock. Something unfortunately left out of the 1997 film.
Besides that little detail your completely correct about the conspiracy theory. A completely stupid theory. It is definitely the wreck of Titanic that's disintegrating on the ocean floor. That was proven in the 1980s when the wreck was found. I believe Titanic had some unique setup of navigational lights. That's how the wreck was properly identified.
A friend told me about this one so another mate and I took the piss by saying yeah, 100% real. He got pictures and books out to show how the 2 ships looked different. Fun times. 🤣🤣🤣
The Olympic is the ship that hit the HMS Hawke, but yeah the damage was like, five figures (which IS a lot in 1912 money, but still) which White Star who owned the ships, was capable of paying. Both ships were worth £4m, but only insured for £2m, so not only would swapping the ships result in hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars worth of structural and cosmetic changes to make Olympic look like Titanic and vice versa, but you’d have to believe WSL would rather risk a complete loss of a still mostly new ship instead of just repairing it which is what they actually ended up doing lol. Olympic ended up being a tough old girl and kept only chugging after her sisters sunk.
having some storable food, water purifiers and bandages stored somewhere in your house is probably a good idea, not because of conspiracies, just in case of a general emergency or natural disasters
I have enough to survive two weeks. If society isn’t back up and running by then, I’m out.
I live in New Zealand. What you have just suggested is official government policy. Because it's not IF we are going to get a big property damaging earthquake, it's WHEN IT HAPPENS, you need enough to "get through"
I'd also add to your list (from experience) - 1) You need actual stored water, and more than you think 2) If you have a vehicle, have 20 litres of fuel stored. Disasters can be very localised, being able to drive somewhere else is useful.
I live in the Top End of the Northern Territory in Australia. Seasonal monsoonal rain that can last for months, regular cyclones, prone to isolation and inundation by flooding. Stockpiling supplies is not paranoia when the threat is real.
Emma,
I speak from experience when I tell you just how difficult, how traumatic and callous the process of recovering from these theories really is. I speak from experience to tell you that even navigating them simply in order to understand them still runs the risk of misunderstanding or misinterpreting a critical component fact about them. It is a minefield, always running in a circular path; the stakes are intrinsically always this high, even as a skeptic, even as someone with no vested biographical interest in it. No one deserves to be gripped with that kind of fear and despair, to betray even your own experiences in favor of preparing for something so impossible to control, or even to conceptualize.
I am proud of the human you became. ❤ And doubly proud that you made this video.
I feel like Operation Northwoods should be at the "things that actually happened" tier. It's wild. Also, how your mug didn't spill should be a conspiracy in and of itself.
Nope, it falls under the "proposed by evil human stains but never got off the drawing board" Tier
@@adventureunlimiteduk I suppose if that was a tier, sure.
It didn't actually technically happen, but the CIA has done identical things to it a thousand times in the past.
that mug runs on satanic magic, clearly Emma is doing satanic rituals...also that liquid doesn't look like coffee...it's a little red-ish, so maybe she's sipping on some nice Adrenochrome.
"It was planned/proposed" isn't the same as "this did happen". The "best" lie contains a grain of truth. In this case there actually was this proposal and you can look it up. The lie/conspiracy part is that it was implemented. (And for some strange reason they still published the proposal part but not the actual implementation part.)
some of these conspiracy theories are really worrisome, but nothing in this video had me more worried than seeing your tea mug almost spill every single time it was in shot.
Thank you for speaking that openly about that part off your childhood.
For me it was over 15 years ago, when i left home for my first appartment. It's like the cliche thing. you get a little disconnected from your former life, orient yourself in the world, got unrestricted access to your own internet. And there i got in the community some guy, that really put his claws into me. I'm maybe exagerate a bit, bc how i discusted i am, how easy i was falling for that back then. But back to the story. He was friendly. Sended me Videos about 911 and Zeitgeist and i digged it and it was going very antisemetic very fast. I'm very happy, that i've done my A-Level after my apprenticeship and was going to study and got an academic way to look into things. I don't know where i would have landed, if it went otherwise.
My guilty childhood conspiracy was the Eric Von Daniken, Chariots of the God's stuff. My parents and siblings were so patient with me as I talked about it ALL the time. Luckily, like you I grew up, I wonder why everyone doesn't?
I'm guessing fear of the wider world, fear of judgement (it's safe in your own circles), fear of rejection (by those who might wish to join and your peers)
I think it's why conspiracy theorists types and deep religionists have to be treated and approached with compassion, not negativity
25:10 I grew up in a similar way. I was raised to believe there was a war coming and I must be ready when "those in the know" will start killing. This is a massive over simplification, but it bred in me a constant paranoia. Even though I know it's not true, I still always make sure I'm at least wearing shoes I can run in. Just in case.
I remember when the Towers fell. I knew enough about metalurgy then, steel gets soft at a lot cooler tempature than it melts. It's why blacksmiths can shape hot iron and steel.
I swear, I look back and go “how could I believe that” or “I’m never going to tell me kids this stuff. That was traumatizing” great job with the reflecting and great video. PS. Where did you get your shirt? I love it!
you didn't ever find the shirt, did you? I want to find it so bad lol
My mother has unfortunately fallen deeply into the conspiracy theory whirlpool and all the things she talks about are in the top two tiers of the chart. It's hard to say why, because she's missing a lot of the usual markers and vulnerabilities for conspiracy theorizing, but I think it's something to do with feeling lost and aimless at the current stage of her life. Like, she needs something to blame that isn't herself and dumb luck or circumstance for the fact that her life isn't quite what she pictured it would be as a child.
And explanation I don't personally subscribe to - but I heard recently - is that some people are drawn to conspiracy theories because its more comforting to believe that SOMEONE is in control (even if they are evil) rather than accepting the chaos of reality.
This was fascinating! Thanks so much for sharing such a vulnerable part of your upbringing with the world. I can't imagine that that was easy, even being relatively removed from that time in your life. And congrats on your HPV vaxx! 🥰
I would say that one healthy way to engage in that conspiracy urge is just to find a good fantasy series with highly in depth world building and go down the rabbit hole on theorizing were the series is headed.
I'd suggest The Storm light Archive by brandon sanderson