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There are plenty of valuable things to spend your time on. Conspiracy theories aren’t one of them.

My church at home has some members who love their conspiracy theories, so I’ve heard it all — the earth is flat, Gavin Newsom is the Antichrist, and the British royal family are lizard people in disguise (I would’ve liked to have seen that on “The Crown”). During my impressionable youth, I often found myself lying awake at night, sweating over when the Democrats would stamp the Mark of the Beast on American citizens in the form of a QR code. 

My family and I often poke good-natured fun at this, but even with the humor, it can get tiring when a new conspiracy theory makes the rounds every other week. 

While I believe we are fighting a spiritual war, these kinds of conspiratorial claims are not rooted in fact. They are based on ideas that live primarily in the murky corners of Instagram and Facebook, requiring an unbelievable amount of mental gymnastics to come up with something that even resembles a valid argument. 

More often than not, theories like these aren’t driven by a desire for truth. They’re driven by emotional reactionism disguised as investigation. 

As Catherine Maxwell wrote in her March 25 Collegian piece, “Candace Owens is not real life,” many pundits who push such conspiracy theories pretend to meticulously analyze facts, even basing their ideas in some truth, but ultimately dig up nothing-burgers that rake in millions of views. They are simply another flavor of demagogue: leaders who seek validation through emotional appeal instead of logic.

For example, I was once told that if you switch the letters of NASA around and add a T, it spells Satan, which somehow proves the demonic nature of America’s space agency. I hope I don’t have to explain how ridiculous this is. They’d be better off hyperanalyzing “Santa.”

But it sounds cool, so it must be true. Right?

Though deeply annoying, the phenomenon of believing something just because it sounds credible is not new. It’s simply another form of groupthink.

Take the popular narrative that violent video games cause kids to commit acts of violence in real life. After the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, “60 Minutes II” aired a segment called “Rage,” in which they insinuated that the video game “Doom” might have inspired Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to commit the shooting. Though no evidence supported this, the idea that video games cause real-life violence seeped into the minds of American citizens.

But studies have debunked these claims, including one published in 2019 by Oxford University, which used both parent testimony and game rating systems to achieve the most accurate results. But despite this, a great amount of people still believe that video games cause violence. This is because it feels true despite all the evidence pointing to the contrary. 

Many “conspiracy theories” have, in fact, been proven true. The Epstein files in particular signal a horrific side of humanity that few of us can imagine. This leads many to rightly wonder what else the elites are hiding. 

But while entertaining suspicion is one thing, entertaining stupidity is another. 

The media controls what, when, and how we see certain material, but that does not mean that every outlandish conspiracy theory has merit. Righteous calls for justice get lost in the noise when we start claiming that the moon is a home base for matrix-controlling aliens. 

We cannot allow emotion to cloud analytic judgment. Far-fetched conspiracy theories distract us from carrying out real-world justice. They distract us from resting in the biblical truth that Christ will care for His flock, regardless of how scary the world seems. 

In the words of our Lord: “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” 

And no, the Illuminati did not pay me to write this.

 

Jayden Jelso is a junior studying English.