ADAM ARMOUR: Conspiracy theories just aren’t cool anymore

Sure, I kind of expect that dude who claims we were in fourth grade together (I have my doubts; pretty sure I’d remember you if you sat three rows behind me in Mrs. McCarthy’s class, Eugene!) to be posting junk about the president injecting a daily serum that gives him super-strength and telekinetic powers. That only makes sense. But the longer I scrolled, the more I saw people who should have know better – not just acquaintances who if not for social media I would have happily shoved from my memory, but honest-to-goodness family members – sharing posts about how that girl in the AT&T commercials is a Ukrainian operative sent to collect our cell phone records and Bill Gates is installing 5G towers in our neighborhoods to spread coronavirus … which is also fake.

There was a time when a guy could drive home from his girlfriend’s house at 2 a.m. listening to a caller rant at George Noory about the cabal of time-traveling wizards that secretly runs the U.S. Department of Treasury and not worry about waking up at noon to discover his uncle’s Facebook tirade about the same topic.

I’m old enough to remember when conspiracy theories were a young man’s game. When talk about the “Deep State” and cults of cannibalistic child kidnappers would be regulated to the furthest depths of ICQ chat rooms. You’d have to hunt that stuff down, dig to the bottom of some sub-sub-Reddit to learn the truth about Betty White’s psychotropic orgies, and the time to do that kind of research is only available to the disenfranchised youth.

These days, it seems as if everyone subscribes to one conspiracy theory or another. If your grandmother isn’t on social media posting about the mole-people running the FBI, then your local comptroller is using her latest press conference to espouse at length about the network of tunnels being used to shuffle America’s most adorable puppies to secret dog-fighting tournaments.

I feel bad for today’s youth, who have had their God-given conspiracy theories co-opted by their parents, grandparents, teachers, pastors, state legislators, the president of the United States … pretty much anyone in a position of authority. It’s akin to catching wind of what you thought was an underground punk band, only to discover your mom has their entire discography on her Deezer playlist. It’s disheartening.

I don’t know how, but I think America’s youth needs to reclaim their conspiracies. Zoomers should consider taking to TikTok and Twitter and Lasso and create a fresh round of unfounded, borderline nonsensical speculation about the quote-unquote truths of our society. And when their parents, extended family members or elected officials inevitably claim those conspiracies as their own – pen a string of 240-character mini-manifestos about how the government is using “The Bachelor” to brainwash the masses into supporting universal veterinary care – our resilient younger generations can just take their conspiracies one step further.

They should continue this war of escalation until “truth” is pushed beyond all reason and both sides stop believing anything and everything they read on social media. Ideally, those seeking some greater meaning behind society’s ills would then realize their time would be better spent looking inward for answers, because nobody on Facebook knows anything at all.

Except for Eugene from fourth grade. That dude’s got it all figured out.