Absolutely brilliant by #AdamLewental.

I reviewed Da Vinci Code & Celestine Prophecy when they were blockbusters yrs ago. Fans clearly had a surplus of hysterical forensic energy.

When FB & YouTube conspiracies hit these jonesing brains, it was over. https://www.salon.com/2020/12/18/qanon-conspiracy-dan-brown-da-vinci-code/

I do think it’s beneficial to tell conspiracy fanatics in our lives, left & right, that what they’re doing in scholarship & forensics.

YouTube has fantastic free college lectures (Yale series is excellent) that redirect that energy w/o punishing it.

Conspiracists are frenzied and intellectually disorganized. But full of energy.

Like tantrumming kids who can’t be restrain but need to be sent to sports, a conspiracist can be encouraged to watch OTHER videos in their new areas of interest.

https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152

And btw there are some less posh but non-toxic conspiracy topics that really soak up that energy:

1. Did Shakespeare really write his own plays?
2. Who killed JonBenet Ramsay?
3. What is the lost city of Atlantis?

Goodbye decades.

Let he who has not examined photos of Sarah Palin’s pregnancies or fake Melanias or that weird JonBenet letter cast the first stone

Other stuff from the period hat primed the pump for disordered thinking:
The Secret, obviously, but also The 4-Hour Workweek, which styled cheating as gameplay & paved the way for Cambridge Analytica, hacking college admissions, etc