Richard is a young man from Chicago. He got into conspiracy theories in college, at a troubled point in his life.
When I look back in hindsight at everything that happened that made me get in so deep, I think this might just be a symptom of being a young person. Like that stuff you see on college campuses, all that stuff going on, searching to be a part of something. I was also going through a pretty angry time in my life. In high school my father passed away, my mother struggled a lot after that, it was kind of a tough time. My grades suffered, I still made it into college, but things just really weren’t going very well.
I spend a lot of time online, going down rabbit holes at two in the morning. I just started stumbling upon certain videos, certain documentaries. It was like a real-life thriller suspense kind of thing, you know, getting that dopamine drip. It’s almost like you are watching a movie unfold with all these twists and turns and mysteries. But it’s real life, and I’m sitting there on a laptop going down this rabbit hole and I’m clicking on more videos, getting more drawn in.
The 9/11 attacks happened when Richard was just ten years old. This was a very traumatic event for him and the memories of seeing it happen on TV are still with him. He was naturally drawn by fascination into the 9/11 Truth conspiracy rabbit hole. It was not long before he encountered the works of Alex Jones, a whole new series of rabbit holes opened up, and he started to feel like part of an important community.
You start feeling like “we’re the awake ones.” It draws you in with the facade of “you’re being lied to, you’re being brainwashed,” and the Alex Joneses of the world want to give you the real business. Now you’re in there, you’re part of the “awake” group, you’re special now. What’s funny is they do have some nuggets of truth about weird things that happened in the past. They throw a wide net, it’s like information overload, ranting for thirty minutes, too many things to follow, and then hitting those small nuggets of truth that kind of drag you along. It traps you without thinking, as there’s no way you’d think that you are part of that bubble of dishonesty that you criticize other people for, so you don’t really see it happening.
Richard got deep down in the rabbit hole, and yet like most people he settled more or less on one position on the conspiracy spectrum. He believed many 9/11 theories, Chemtrails, and some kind of “New World Order” conspiracy, and of course the JFK assassination was a given. But he drew the line at the more extreme things. He’d always liked space and astronomy as a kid, and perhaps that helped him steer clear of the Moon Landing Hoax and Flat Earth theories.
People often get out of the rabbit hole by questioning more extreme beliefs, and that’s partly what happened to Richard. But the thing that started him questioning was rather unusually low down on the spectrum: vaccines. Alex Jones is a big promoter of the anti-vaccine theory, so Richard naturally believed that vaccines were just some Big Government/Pharma plot. Then his sister went to medical school.
She got a couple of years in, and one day we were home at dinner, and she brought it up. I didn’t want to get into a whole thing, but I did say something and then she just really eviscerated some of the notions I had about vaccines. That kind of set off the first alarm. I thought, wow, this is a person who has dedicated her entire life for the last couple of years into looking into this stuff, and what she knows just shatters what I thought I knew. And she wasn’t even a professional yet, she was just a med student.
His sister’s information about vaccines got him thinking, but the topic that really started him on his journey out was just on the other side of his line of demarcation. He was previously willing to consider false flag shooting theories as plausible, but then, with the new thoughtfulness prompted by his sister, he looked more closely at the evidence.
The Sandy Hook thing, the shooting in Connecticut of first graders, that was something that was very startling. That was the first time I saw 100 percent that Alex Jones and that community were being very dishonest. Like they said the FBI never recorded the deaths for Sandy Hook. But then I found, no, it was in this separate file, “FBI Miscellaneous,” and it was clearly recorded, and clearly there. So Alex Jones and those people were clearly being dishonest.
Richard frequented some online communities that would discuss supposed False Flags. But when he brought up this “death files” mistake he was shunned. People either ignored him or they insulted him, criticizing him for being a “sheep” repeating government propaganda. Nobody really addressed what he was saying, they just rejected it out of hand.
Experiences like this started to click into place in Richard’s mind, starting what he described as a “domino effect,” where one thing led to another. He became aware of a “gang-like” mentality in the 9/11 Truther community and saw further examples of people simply rejecting evidence without considering it.
There was just something rubbing me the wrong way about the way these people were going about this stuff. The reason I got into this whole conspiracy thing was because I wanted to be this open-minded guy. So how could I be? I had to at least consider other sides here. So, I started to see where they had been dishonest, like in the 9/11 steel beams argument.1 I’ll never forget this video this blacksmith did,2 he kind of explained how beams can weaken at something like only 800 degrees and did a demonstration on it.
Something of an anti-rabbit hole opened for Richard and he started to look at more 9/11 debunking videos about the internal structure of the World Trade Center towers, and videos showing just what an inferno it was inside Building 7, and it all started to make sense. The dominos started to fall, and after a while he stepped away from looking at anything on either side, not really wanting to fully admit he’d been duped. It wasn’t long before the last penny dropped.
I was in my car, and on the radio the subject of 9/11 Truth was brought up, so immediately I’m glued to the radio. These Truthers kept calling in to the show and the “facts” they were spewing were just the same things I’d heard before, and by this time I knew that most of them were just complete nonsense. It wasn’t long after that that I thought: this is all over.
There wasn’t a single “aha” moment for Richard; it was, as he says, “a little bit here, a little bit there.” There are some key moments like his sister explaining vaccines, the Sandy Hook Truthers ignoring actual evidence, the dishonesty of the repeated 9/11 arguments, and then finally, after spending enough time with “the other side,” he accidentally revisited the claims of the 9/11 Truthers with a clearer, better informed mind and saw those claims for what they really were.
Richard recognized a political bias in people like Alex Jones. As he saw it, Jones was very quick to call any school shooting or other shootings by Americans a “false flag,” but when there was an act of jihadi terrorism Jones simply accepted it as a genuine event and attacked Islam.
The thing that really pulled at my heart string was the Sandy Hook parents being told that they were liars, actors. There was one parent, my heart just broke for him. He wanted to prove that his daughter’s death was legitimate, so he thought he’d just show the death certificate and put a stop to it. So, he posted the death certificate and they were like, “Oh, it’s the wrong color ink.” They were just finding these little things that they could turn into inconsistencies.
Richard does not have much time for conspiracy theories now that he’s gotten out, but he has spent a little time debunking something he never actually believed in, the Flat Earth theory.
I’m one of those foolish people who have tried to go on the Flat Earth Society message boards. Just the complete absurdity of it has drawn me in just out of intrigue, I think. I thought I could just go in there and ask them certain things about the Coriolis effect or eclipses. I’ve found the Flat Earth people take scientific theories and change them and make them their own. With the eclipse recently, they even tried to spin that as proof of the Flat Earth theory.
I asked Richard about online resources that might have helped along the way.
It’s tough because when you are in that mindset you have all this great information online, but you can just choose to shroud yourself in whatever vantage point you want to, and only hear that point. Going online and researching stuff did help the dominos fall, but I think there has to be a will to partake in that research.
I didn’t really go with the “everyone’s a paid shill” thing or anything like that. But I did think the people on debunking sites were either brainwashed, or just wrong in misrepresenting facts. Their minds were fixed in a certain way.
I remember when encountering debunkers hearing information then feeling in my gut like this might be the beginnings of being challenged, and I would run to my “safe space,” like googling information from Truthers that would help me feel better. I didn’t entertain that side of the argument, and I chose to shroud myself in information that lined up with my views.
Sometimes I was reading something, or seeing something, and out of frustration I was getting angry at what I’m reading and what I’m seeing. Then I’d run to a YouTube video, or I’d just aimlessly type in whatever theory is being brought forth and add “debunked” and find something to keep on the tracks of the Truther movement.
I try now to always look for the most rational explanation. The one thing that I’ve really gathered from my experience is that all these conspiracies require a big leap of faith, but usually what I find is the simplest explanation is usually true, and you can find A + B = C without a leap of faith.
Richard was helped out of the rabbit hole by his friends (his sister in particular), but it took years to happen. If your friend seems stuck down the rabbit hole, then don’t give up. Maybe it will take years, maybe you won’t see any progress for a long time. But people find their way out with help, so keep helping.