http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025338600Oh my.
xchrom (105,013 posts) Tue Aug 5, 2014, 07:08 AM
5 of the Most Ridiculous -- and Widely Believed Anti-Government Conspiracy Theories Today
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/5-most-ridiculous-and-widely-believed-anti-government-conspiracy-theories-today
1. The Obama administration has stockpiled 30,000 guillotines. The Obama administration is supposedly up to some really horrible things using the President’s executive powers. One, which began circulating last year is starting to compete with the old FEMA concentration camp conspiracy, which began around 2009.
***SNIP
2. The feds can steal the contents of all safe deposit boxes. Over the past year, dozens of investment and conspiracy websites have claimed that the Department of Homeland Security has informed banks they can raid the contents of safe deposit boxes without warrant and confiscate any valuables they find. Again, like many conspiracy theories, this one has many versions, including one that says the executive order was originally given in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
***SNIP
3. The government and medical industry are hiding a cure for cancer. More than a third of Americans believe that the U.S. government just wants us all to get sick and die, according a recent survey by the University of Chicago. When asked if they believe the Food and Drug Administration purposely conceals information on natural, alternative treatments for cancer, 37% said yes. Fewer respondents said they disagreed with this conspiracy theory.
***SNIP
4. The feds blanketed the South with fake, plastic snow. After uncharacteristically Arctic-like conditions in the South early this year, several websites and YouTube videos pushed a conspiracy theory that the white stuff falling from the sky was not snow, but a plastic impostor that was engineered by the federal government for nefarious reasons that were never explained.
For those curious about #5, which the primitive didn't include, it's this:
​5. Obamacare requires the implantation of RFID chips to track recipients​. The “death panels†conspiracy theory made famous by Sarah Palin and former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey never did happen, but that's not the ominous rumor on the lips of health-reform haters these days.
pipoman (13,103 posts) Tue Aug 5, 2014, 07:16 AM
1. #2 isn't all that far fetched if one considers the extraconstitutional
(I believe unconstitutional) asset forfeiture laws in this country.
^^^must've been caught with drugs in car, and so cops took the car away.
yellerpup (11,158 posts) Tue Aug 5, 2014, 07:50 AM
2. I heard a conspiracy theory in the supermarket parking lot
that was so detailed and convoluted, I don't know how anyone could believe it. A nice old fellow who looks like Santa Claus (a recent Bulgarian immigrant, btw) tells me that the world is being fooled because Obama was programmed and installed with a brain chip when he was a child in Malaysia. Our president is secretly a world-destroying, Muslim robot created by liberals!
I told him I was a liberal. We debated over the veracity of his information, but he explained that his degree in engineering made him superior in intelligence, etc. He told me that it might take another 10 years, but by then everyone would know that they had been ruined by the Black American robot president and that he would be proven right.
WinkyDink (41,224 posts) Tue Aug 5, 2014, 10:57 AM
7. "Remember the 'Maine'!" And JFK, MLK, RFK, Tonkin Gulf, and more recently WMDs. Sometimes the "ridiculous" is posited to make us ignore the real.
