It's rather disheartening to know that we are surrounded by such an incredible amount of idiocy.
A bit of a tangent, but I had a fairly long conversation at a grocery store bike rack with a dyed-in-the-wool Qanon conspiracy theory nut. The conversation started innocuously enough, about biking around town and my e-bike, but he started spouting more and more nonsense. I could have walked away at any point, but I actually was kind of interested to see what was going to come out of his mouth next, because it was mind-boggling to me that he really believed this stuff. Among the gems:
- COVID-19 is nothing more than the common cold, go to this website and the numbers won't add up
- The internet news is all fake. You need to go to this website where the real stories get posted before "the algorithms" take them down and post the fake stuff.
- Donald Trump is an all-powerful businessman who will have you killed if you wrong him
...which led to
- Bill Gates is dead (convicted, tried, and executed at Guantanamo Bay)
- Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton are all dead
- George W Bush and Dick Cheney are currently in the middle of their trial at Guantanamo for orchestrating the 9-11 attacks
- Joe Biden is in a coma
- All of the above people have been replaced by Hollywood lookalikes who train on their various mannerisms to fool the fake news media
- At some point he started on a tangent about "these pedophiles..." but caught himself and then went in another direction (I believe the Clintons were next on his hit list)
This dude was evangelizing, straight up. He claimed that he was a science major in college (50 years ago) so he was trustworthy on these sorts of matters.