5 Conspiracy Theories That Are So Dumb They're Brilliant
It would be nice to live in a world where there's no such thing as random tragedy and where every terrible event could be linked back to a villainous puppet master via a chain of subtle but obvious clues. We don't, though. Luckily, there is a fiercely insane contingent of people who are convinced that everything is a conspiracy, and reading their hilariously daffy theories about the exhausting web of deceit hiding behind recent events can occasionally make our indiscriminately destructive existence more bearable. Here are five of the most ridiculous examples.
"The Ice Bucket Challenge Is a Satanic Baptism Ritual!"
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge obnoxiously dominated everyone's social media feeds for the entire summer, but it's hard to find fault with something that helped gather over $100 million for medical research. Unless you're a crazy person on the Internet, in which case the fault is obvious -- all the people you saw dumping cold water on their heads were actually baptizing themselves into Lucifer's infernal doom army.
If there's one way to honor the Lord of Hell, it's with buckets of ice-cold water.
As evidence of this grand satanic plot, believers point to the fact that a ton of celebrities are taking part in the challenge and, as we all know, celebrities are totes in league with the author of all sin. Case in point -- for her ice bucket video, Lady Gaga dressed in black, and instead of a bucket, she used a silver bowl, an object that has only ever been used for evil. Likewise, Bill Gates built a flimsy bucket-dumping rig clearly evocative of the Temple of Solomon and not just a pile of random bullshit in his backyard.
"Nailed it."
It is important to note that the Temple of Solomon is a biblical structure that has absolutely nothing to do with the devil.
The most shameless affront to God-fearing decency came at the hands of Oprah, who conducted her challenge "in the name of ALS" -- an acronym which, according to this totally sane YouTube lady, actually stands for Antichrist Lucifer Satan (Lucifer is his middle name). Even if you're not a celebrity and you participated in the challenge, you might still be going to hell, because ALS research involves the use of stem cells, which requires aborted fetuses, which are virgin sacrifices made to honor the Father of Lies. Apparently, the devil really wants to cure Lou Gehrig's Disease.
"Obama Is Spreading Ebola ... to Confiscate Your Guns!"
Quick, what would be the worst part in the (extremely unlikely) case that an Ebola outbreak happened in the U.S.? The widespread panic? The irrecoverable economic damage? The devastating number of infected dead? Nope! It would be the fact that President Obama could use it as the perfect excuse to take away your guns ... as he planned all along.
If only we'd paid attention to the signs, like the original Kenyan pronunciation of his name.
According to the top-notch bullshit merchants at Infowars, Obama is "perpetrating the conditions" for a major outbreak by opening the southern borders and allowing infected citizens back into the country. (Did we mention that a lot of this theory hinges on racism? Because it does.) Once the disease spreads out of control, groups such as FEMA, the CDC, and NORTHCOM will swoop in and start disarming the populace, a task those organizations are totally capable of performing. This plan is only slightly less ridiculous than Obama building a giant magnet to collect all of the guns in America.
However, not everyone agrees on his exact motivation. Rush Limbaugh, for example, has been saying the government isn't being as diligent in stopping the virus as they could be because they think we "deserve a little bit of this" as belated punishment for slavery (see "racism," above). Then we have actor Adam Baldwin, whose biggest claims to fame are Firefly and not being related to Alec Baldwin, taking it upon himself to ask the hard questions (right before implying that he believes Obama is the Antichrist):
Boy, Jayne is just drowning in terrible opinions lately.
"Robin Williams Was an Illuminati Sacrifice!"
The death of Robin Williams was a huge loss to the world of comedy and anyone with an ounce of humanity. However, it was great for conspiracy theorists, who immediately uncovered an elaborate plot that unequivocally proved Williams was assassinated by the Illuminati, the shadowy group behind everything in our society. Their evidence? A Family Guy episode, of course.
Wait ... What's with all the "911s" in these conspiracy theory websites? What are they hiding?
You see, minutes before Williams' death was announced, the British TV channel BBC Three aired an old episode of Family Guy wherein Peter Griffin gains the ability to turn everything he touches into a clone of Williams. At one point in the show, Peter tries to shoot himself, but the gun transforms into Williams. The anti-Illuminati resistance points to this scene as some sort of coded message proving that the BBC's head of programming must have been in cahoots with Williams' murderers, a fact that would have never been discovered if some brave soul hadn't been watching cartoons on British television that day.
While the timing of the broadcast is definitely a weird coincidence, it becomes less strange when you remember that Family Guy features at least a half dozen non sequitur celebrity appearances per episode. Any time an even remotely famous person dies, chances are they're on an episode of Family Guy airing somewhere in the world. It isn't limited to celebrity deaths, either: after the Boston Marathon Bombings, ridiculous people flocked to the Internet to report that Family Guy had predicted the attack in an episode where Peter runs over some marathoners in Boston and later befriends a Muslim terrorist, which seems to indicate this has less to do with the Illuminati and more to do with Family Guy being a terrible show.
Then again, one episode shows Tom Cruise, and Tom Cruise will die one day. Coincidence?!
"The Two Crashed Malaysia Airlines Planes Are the Same!"
As we've previously mentioned, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and the shooting-down of Flight MH17 were a siren song for assholes. While some people were trying to console the families of the victims (or the poor Malaysia Airlines stockholders), others were hard at work trying to figure out how these two disasters tied together to prove that World War III was now upon us. Those people were wrong, of course, because as it turns out, the "two" planes were actually one and the same.
Is there nothing MS Paint can't prove?
According to this dazzlingly complicated theory, the USA and the Ukraine needed to increase public support against the rebels in Eastern Ukraine and Russia. To this end, they made MH370 disappear mid-flight over the Indian Ocean, smuggled it halfway across the world, remodeled it into an exact double of MH17, and then destroyed it in the air, framing the rebels for the incident. According to a rebel commander who has absolutely no reason to lie whatsoever, the passengers on board were already dead before the plane went down, because elaborate frame-ups like this are much easier to accomplish with a fuselage loaded with corpses instead of a cabin full of live witnesses.
That's ... a lot of work, you guys. There's a fundamental problem with your scheme when sites claiming that the planes were stolen by wormholes or aliens or some shit actually make more sense. Whatever the explanation ends up being, we can't help feeling like it's going to be extremely mundane compared to all this fantastical speculation.
Just gonna leave this here ...
"Adam Sandler Is a Modern-Day Nostradamus!"
A big reason why many conspiracy theories thrive is because they're difficult to physically disprove -- for example, while most non-maniacs know the moon isn't really a laser projection created by the government, almost no one has actually been up in space to verify its existence firsthand. However, even if disproving a crazy theory was as easy as watching a movie on Netflix or YouTube, people would still fucking fall for them, as The Onion recently proved when they accidentally convinced people that Adam Sandler is some sort of time-seeing wizard.
It all started with a ClickHole article titled "5 Tragedies Weirdly Predicted by Adam Sandler," which cited examples such as the famous scene from Happy Gilmore when Sandler looked directly into the camera and announced Princess Diana's future death. Even if you missed the subtle hints that this was a joke, a quick trip to Netflix would've revealed the fact that at no point in Happy Gilmore does anything resembling this scene come anywhere close to happening.
Despite that, the article went viral as all corners of the Internet marveled at Sandler's magical abilities ...
"Wake up. We're down the clickhole and through the looking glass, Alice."
... and his Jewishness:
"HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO BIZA- wait, he's Jewish? Oh, makes sense."
Stormfront users even cited the article as proof of a global Jewish conspiracy that secretly runs the entire world while inexplicably allowing their Neo-Nazi clubhouse to continue to exist. The Jewish Illuminati may seek to control the planet at the behest of their future-gazing warlock Adam Sandler, but they believe in freedom of speech.
When Adam isn't shilling for JTRIG, he writes about conspiracy theories and drops truth bombs on Twitter.
For some entirely plausible conspiracy theories, check out 4 Reasons Movie Special FX Are Actually Getting Worse and 3 Reasons People Think the NBA Is as Rigged as Wrestling.
