re: #175 Killgore Trout

Ted Gunderson
What a nut.

One thing that really alarms me about this: I can’t quantify it, of course, but I have the impression that ideas like Gunderson’s are much more widely accepted than the really well-informed might typically realize. It seems laughable to us, but that is not true for anyone, not by a long shot.
I am around construction workers, oil-field types, and mechanics quite a bit. In these groups, belief in unconstitutional government plans and conspiracies is practically universal. These guys are from stupid, as their willingness to disregard common memes demonstrates, but they have never had the intellectual tools to properly evaluate the blizzard of information and disinformation that comes their way every day in the modern world. The conspiracy theorists are saying what they want to hear and they don’t see the red flag that raises.
In a different segment of society, a couple of welfare workers have told me that many of their colleagues and almost all of their clients share a different (but similarly crazy) set of conspiracy beliefs. Ex-convicts, and the underclass over which they have so much influence, are almost unanimous in believing that the CIA and Jewish bankers control the drug trade and that law enforcement is a sham.