still no class analysis? still no understanding of how intelligence agencies drives beliefs in conspiracy theories to sow social and politics unrest????

okay then https://twitter.com/abbieasr/status/1312512066071060480

explain to me how thinking a celebrity was replaced by lookalike is a “mostly harmless” belief like accepting that very thing doesn’t make you susceptible to believing all sorts of other nonsense. i’m so cranky y’all made some rando a de facto conspiracy expert

a white person with a degree can become an expert on anything with very little effort.

definitely not a thing that’s lead us to the dog shit planet we currently live on

i did some threads with short thoughts on why this chart was harmful bullshit last weekend but let’s do another one

take the tuskegee experiment which she lists as “a thing we know happened” - completely misses that the reality of that experiment and the popular understanding are two different things

the popular understanding is that the govt infected black men with syphilis. the reality (as far as we have been told) is that they merely withheld treatment and diagnoses from black men who already had syphilis

now that’s two very different (but both abhorrent) things. how would this person classify these two things - she’d probably say that believing the govt deliberately gave syphilis to black men is a harmful belief, she’d have to right?

because someone who thinks the government was doling our syphilis is probably skeptical of vaccines, probably has a distrust of the medical establishment that goes beyond simply know it’s history of abusing black lives.

does that view only become socially harmful once espoused? what if they’re quiet about it but still don’t vaccinate their kids leading to a potential outbreak of measles? does it become harmful then? i bet you the person who made this chart hasn’t thought about it

let’s dig a little deeper: what is actually behind the popular misunderstanding of what the tuskegee experiment was? why hasn’t there been a real campaign to combat misinformation?

maybe because it would raise questions about other biological research the US government has been caught doing but still denies

and maybe because there are actors who still actively benefit from black mistrust of the medical establishment. who are they? just grifters and snake oil salesmen? oh or the russian bots we’ve heard so much about somehow connected to modern manifestations of it

do you see what i’m working at here? that just because you put a fact or idea in a box and say “real, not harmful” does not wave away the actual living history that idea has become a part of.

we can do that with a lot of shit on this chart. COINTELPRO was real, we know it was. we know the operation known as COINTELPRO officially ended. did those counterinsurgency activities by the government end?

is it harmful that some black people deray is modern cointelpro agent? or is it reasonable given the history we know?

the problem with this chart is that it’s misunderstanding of how conspiracies function creates misunderstandings of how the world functions. I hedged before but i am comfortable saying that this chart is actively harmful

we can keep going. if “avil was replaced” is a mostly harmless conspiracy what about the one that gucci mane was replaced by a clone? is that a mostly harmless belief? https://twitter.com/lilpoolish/status/1312794381942960129

do you think it doesn’t absolutely rend the social fabric of reality that some people believe the government can replace anyone it wants with a clone?

you can do this with almost every arbitrary placement on this chart. how is someone questioning the official 9/11 story dangerous to themselves and others? explain it to me, i wanna know

the chart tells us that subliminal messages in children’s tv is fake, yet the thread below we have documented history of the government using sesame street as a counterinsurgency tool on black youth. so what’s the truth? https://twitter.com/paulkleinfancam/status/1288507731519983623

like i keep saying: I promise you the person who keeps going viral for this shitty chart has not spent more than 10 minutes researching and trying to understand any of this stuff like all the people y’all call cranks

i want to be clear here: i do not think this chart helps. i think it is an absolutely harmful piece of propaganda that exists only to make liberal normies feel smug and “educated” instead of reading a book and realizing reality is a lot closer to the conspiracies they ignore