I just had a thought like “What if some UFO aduction experiences people claim to have are actually people being kidnapped by the CIA” 
The kind of stories I’m thinking about often go like: “I was driving on an empty road in the middle of nowhere. I saw a bright light,” and then either “I remember nothing but had lost time” or “I remember being experimented on by aliens and then put back in my car.”
My tinfoil hat side is thinking like, these stories started happening around the time the US admitted to experimenting with abuse, torture and psychoactive drugs in Project MK-Ultra. Alien abduction stories were the most prevalent during this time. (CW: Just a heads up. If you want to read the rest of this post or anything else about MK-Ultra, be warned that it’s pretty horrible, and involves some of the most disgusting torture I have ever read about. Death to America.)
Of the surviving documents released to the public about MK-Ultra, the CIA admits to: “kidnapping people it deemed “expendable” to undertake various types of torture and human experimentation on them. The prisoners were interrogated while being administered psychoactive drugs, electroshocked and subjected to extremes of temperature, sensory isolation and the like to develop a better understanding of how to destroy and to control human minds.”
Part of me wonders how many of these alien abduction stories are just people being kidnapped, drugged with powerful hallucinogens, experimented on and then released with the suggestion conditioned into their mind that it was aliens.
The most famous alien abduction story is that of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial couple that were both civil rights leaders, definitely people that the CIA would want to fuck with, especially during rising tensions with the Soviet Union, the US government was suspicious of minorities and anyone interested in their rights.
what is a harmful conspiracy? I hear the terms dangerous and harmful often when it comes to conspiracy theories. and I’m pretty sure they don’t mean ‘the jews are poisoning our wells’ so in don’t understand what they mean or what the exact harm of those conspiracy theories is.
that vaccines are a lie and medicine makes you sicker.
I’m tired and read this as “medication makes you a cracker”
new conspiracy just dropped.
Those conspiracy theories come from the abysmal track record of the U.S. medical system. From over-prescribing opiates for kickbacks to the Tuskegee Experiments, the U.S. medical industry has been responsible for countless horrors over the years. People remember when their relatives, family members, or close friends died of opiate overdoses, and that mistrust extends itself to the rest of the industry. The only reason why I chose to get the vaccine was because the companies were hoarding them from the third world, which was a sure sign that it was effective enough to warrant even more racism in medical care, meaning that these evil companies apparently had something to offer.
Add on to this countless crackpot theories allowed to propagate throughout the country, like “vaccines cause autism” and “china steals organs”, and you get a recipe for a population that has zero trust in companies like Pfizer and J&J.
Good post, I may not trust Pfizer as a corporation but paxlocid really helped me get over COVID faster than family members who’d didn’t take it so I know their shit works
Fuck that’s a strong argument
There is actually some evidence of Uygers in China being used as organ donors as a part of the larger ongoing ethnic cleansing they’ve been engaging in.
Do you have any links to this evidence? I’d like to see it.
I hadn’t looked deeply into it at the time, but I just remember reliable news sources reporting that it was happening. Here’s the Wikipedia article on the topic, maybe read through the references and Google a little. Definitely passes the sniff test for “actually happening” for me
The organ harvesting conspiracy theory is not true. Falun Gong is a Chinese cult that is racist and anti-science. JJ McCullough, a center-right youtuber I disagree with quite often, has made a good video about the Falun Gong and their claims of organ harvesting. The critical point is right here. Also, Wikipedia is not a good source in general for political knowledge, as politics are very contentious and it’s hard to find the truth there. It’s a good place to start, but you should look in the references part of the article for primary sources and check those instead. You can then evaluate the reliability of those sources. If the source is InfoWars, then it’s probably not a great source. The same goes for a site like Radio Free Asia, which is a U.S. propaganda site directly funded by the U.S. government.
Bruh that’s literally an Internet reply hastily written at midnight when I should’ve gone to bed 2 hours earlier abour a subject I only know of from reading the news 3 years ago, not a research paper. I did a quick Google (and saw plenty of reliable news sources and a meeting announcement by the United States House on the subject), incorrectly merged two likely separate genocides in my tired brain and tapped out a hasty reply as a friendly “uh check your sources on that one” i also selected Wikipedia as the article to link after glancing at its sources and specifically instructed to “read through the references and Google a little.”
Human Rights Watch, Reuters, CNN and The Washington Post all reported very clear evidence of this involuntary organ harvesting from political prisoners. They clearly state their evidence (none rely on vague “sources”) and none of the articles contain retraction notices nor significant corrections. As a dude who fixes computers for work and may never leave the North American continent that more is good enough for me to trust as I adapt my world view to new information.
And most importantly if you do the same level of research I just did for the other conspiracy the first-level poster mentioned (the well-debunked claim of “vaccines causing autism”) you will come away far sooner with the correct conclusion that not only are vaccines overwhelmingly safe and effective, but there is no correlation, no method and no evidence for vaccines causing autism. My original point that I wanted to make was that the poster grouped a heavily debunked conspiracy theory with a plausible claim that has good evidence supporting it as if both are equally clearly false.
Politicians being literal Satan worshipping baby eaters got a dude to show up to a pizzeria with a gun. Qanon people have lost their homes because some lady convinced them that their bills were going to be nullified so they stopped paying them.
ok get it. but then again I’d argue that the conspiracy that for example Hilary Clinton is literally a Marxist, is way more harmful 😆
A loooooooooot of conspiracy theories do in fact boil down to "the Jewish are poisoning our wells’ and it is what a great deal of conspiracy weirdos believe. Regardless what you’ve asked is totally beside what OP was asking about and you know it. If you dont, you should have guessed based on replies.
imo its not totally beside. i do believe (to a certain degree) in more than one conspiracy theory that dont boil down to that kind of thing; but to answer OPs question better, i thought it would help me, to first understand the terms harmful, harmless and relatively harmless in this context.
The general vibe of the replied should fill you in.
I always understood it as harmful conspiracies being the Alex Jones homophobic/racist right-wing stuff that is obviously not true and has a fascist agenda.
Also the way I see it is, a conspiracy about the gays being bad is dangerous because gays being evil doesn’t really line up with a realistic scenario and so it winds up just putting an already marginalized group with very little power at risk.
However the CIA harming people is something that does have strong evidence to support it, and so even if my particular theory is incorrect, the CIA doing shady shit isn’t incorrect. It’s the difference between, say, wild accusations of witchcraft against a person who hasn’t hurt a fly, and saying that the Mafia probably murders people.
Unfortunately 99% of widespread conspiracy theories sooner or later arrive at antisemitism, even the seemingly harmless ones