Count me among the people who naïvely thought that particular patently silly conspiracy theory had been relegated to the dustbin of history. Little did I know people have been harbouring it all along. Or perhaps “resurrected it” would be more accurate.
I think what I’ve realized in more recent years is that conspiracy theories aren’t about information- they are a complicated stand-in for a person’s feelings about the world. That’s why you can’t debunk them with facts and why they never go away. Because people are still racist and afraid (despite how far we’ve come), these proxies for those hateful emotions are stood up all over again when the climate is amenable to them.
Similarly, in the queer community we’ve seen the return of “queers are child molesters”. That’s another one that I thought died off in the 1970s, but I think I heard a US politician say a version of it just the other day. Sigh.
For these reasons, I currently believe that we shouldn’t focus on “fixing” these beliefs in the short term. We need to shame them into silence with our majority voices of reason and inclusion (because these bigots are the minority) to keep people from acting on them. Once better norms are re-established, we can start the work of helping people like this get in touch with their feelings and why they are so angry & scared (and thus lashing out with flat earths and antivax and all the rest). We didn’t do that work over the last 40 years when things were fairly calm on this front, and we got TFG. We gotta tamp down this fire again.
