A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-new-bigfoot-documentary-helps-explain-our-conspiracy-minded-era/ar-AA1Yv6pxI wonder if it gets a mention? It does get a mention in the recent Bruce Campbell movie https://www.ernieandemma.com/ - which looks to be even more poignant with his recent cancer diagnosis :-(
Nothing in the linked story explained it. Did someone make a whole documentary and couldn't get the most basic info right? Or did the reporter mangle the article write-up?
- Epstein and way too many important people.
- The big one from the 1970s onward to increase the return on capital by lowering living standards, the "Powell memorandum".[1] That's the founding document of the modern conservative movement.
- Facebook/Meta being behind schemes for age verification.[2]
[1] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/
[2] https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...
The prototypical pedophilia conspiracy theory we didn't believe at all is the Comet Ping Pong one, which was appropriate.
Except the proportion of paedophile priests is about the same as the proportion of paedophiles in the general population. There are more paedophiles in schools and social services than in religious organisations - and there have even been more convictions of teachers and social workers, at least tin the UK. The reason you think of the Catholic Church this way is BECAUSE it got more media attention earlier than elsewhere. A surprising number of people the UK do not know about the biggest big paedophile scandal in the country, the Islington one, that was huge, and at least one politician who was responsible for the failure to investigate went on to have a successful career in politics (the only time it set back her career at all was when Blair wanted to make her minister for children there was a backlash)
I doubt you have any reliable statistics about this, given how many victims keep silent out of fear.
But in any case, the moral failure of the church was not the existence of individual abusers (which indeed can exist anywhere in society), but how on an institutional level known abusers were protected by the curch. Everyone who was part of the cover-up (which went all the way to the top) is complicit.
If they had not trafficked minors as well I wonder whether it would ever have been exposed. It makes me wonder what else is going on.
If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies.
That not a philosophically supportable statement. "There's insufficient evidence to warrant belief in your claim" is more realistic.
No, but we did call people conspiracy theorists for believing the thing Snowden subsequently showed to be real.
Security state loyalists were not nearly as influential in online discourse back then, as they are now. Probably astroturfing, AI and algorithmic amplification plays a part in that.
This MSN "article" seems oddly out of place on HN.
It was interesting to see that one of the main figures featured in the documentary started out pretty generically wanting to get into conspiracy theories and started reading up on one after another until he found a particular one that clicked.
That being said, nowadays it seems that a difference between conspiracy theory and confirmed fact is 12-24 months