Real America’s Voice
Not long after the tragic collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, caused by a container ship losing power and colliding with it after midnight on Tuesday, several fringe figures (with massive followings) hit social media to beat the conspiracy drum.
While families waited for word on missing loved ones and the city of Baltimore and its first responders rushed to the scene to do what they could to save lives and ensure the safety of everyone else, a select few decided that this was a good time to claim the clearly accidental collision was an inside job by nefarious bad actors.
As the East Coast woke up to the news, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones tweeted, “Looks deliberate to me. A cyber-attack is probable. WW3 has already started..” He was actually quote-tweeting Andrew Tate, who tweeted (while under house arrest): “This ship was cyber-attacked. Lights go off and it deliberately steers towards the bridge supports. Foreign agents of the USA attack digital infrastructures. Nothing is safe. Black Swan event imminent.”
Andrew Tate is a self-professed misogynist, which is an accurate assessment of the accused sex trafficker and rapist, so he may very well be a reliable source to people like Jones. But it wasn’t just Jones. Former journalist-turned-conspiracy theorist Lara Logan also posted her own wild screed:
Welcome to the world of cyber terrorism. Acc to intel sources: The Baltimore bridge collapse was a 9/11 style attack but they won’t admit it and we cannot see it because it was a CYBER ATTACK. All the SCADA systems that run our critical infrastructure like sewage, electric grid, shipping etc are all wide open systems with no encryption because it is too expensive. They can shut us down anytime they want.
I’m not saying cyber attacks aren’t a thing. In fact, that’s a totally believable scenario, and I know this because I wrote comics for a cybersecurity company and a hacker told me they could destroy the entire West Coast by hacking into electronic road signs. (This hacker was being paid to tell people that this kind of thing was possible and they should probably fix it.)
This stuff is wild to think about. It’s crazy. And to think it could be possible is thrilling. But listen — that’s where we should draw the line. “WOW that’s nuts! That is absolutely batshit, and imagine a global collapse caused by an evil cabal from a secret sect made up of all of our trusted institutions! Anyway, are we ordering food? Whose card are we using?”
Instead, these fringe people are taking it entirely seriously, and they have several platforms on which they are encouraged by even more by people who don’t want to stop and order food, but by people who don’t back off the psychological rabbit holes they’ve dug for themselves and dig even deeper until they believe it’s the absolute truth.
And that sucks all the fun out of this crazy shit.
And even worse, because too many people believe this crazy shit, there is a human cost after the initial tragedies, like in the cases of Seth Rich and Sandy Hook. In the case of Pizzagate, an imagined tragedy led to very real gunfire.
But even more than that, the people who spread conspiracy theories, acting as if they are reporting them as truth, can do it nearly unregulated now that Twitter is X and X is… what it is. And all social media has done is grow their respective followings, getting their unfiltered views in front of millions of people with no fact-checking, no pushback, and often no context and edited or generated with realistic-enough-looking AI. And they do it because all those followers keep giving them their money.
Social media has enabled the existence of this miserable, bullshit corner of the multiverse where nothing is really true or believable except for the most unbelievable falsehoods. This, friends, is the digital hive of scum and villainy.
Conspiracy theories come about when vulnerable people who feel like they’ve lost some sense of control over their lives (spoiler alert: none of us have control over our lives, life is pure chaos). People who believe these things want to feel like they’re in the know, that they know more than everyone else, that they might even be an authority on the subject. And these people need therapy. So do I, but at least I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, especially while the initial tragedy is still unfolding, like, can I please digest one thing at a time here? What is it even like in those brains…
Buying into conspiracy theories means you’d be willing to entertain the idea that Hogwarts is a real school that teaches magic, or that there’s an actual princess living in Disney World’s castle. It’s not the same as wondering, for fun, if Bigfoot is sauntering around the Pacific Northwest. Or if Area 51 is really hiding alien corpses. At some point you have to stop at the ledge and turn around. And the more people who walk off the ledge into the deep end just ruin it for the rest of us.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few more episodes left of The Octopus on Netflix that are waiting for me because it’s not like Elon Musk has already programmed them into my brain.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
