By: Dylan Paulson, Staff Writer

Everyone at some point in their lives has heard some form of wacky, silly, or goofy conspiracy theory. “Was the CIA involved in the JFK assassination?” or “Are pigeons secretly drones used by the government to spy on us?” or “Are the pyramids secretly nuclear reactors?” We’ve all heard them, and it seems like every 15 minutes, another one pops up and spreads all over social media. For a while, every time I’d see someone post about the moon landing being fake or the Earth being flat, I’d just laugh it off and move on to the next motivational reel or goofy meme that would come up in my feed. But recently, it seems like conspiracy theories are laughed at less and heard out more, and this is something that I take issue with. 

Don’t get me wrong, you should never automatically make up your mind about something just because someone told it to you. You should always ask questions and try to understand things for yourself. However, there’s a very stark contrast between curiosity and conspiracy. Until recently, I didn’t realize the impact that some of these conspiracies have. Let me take you back to July 13, 2024, just this past summer. A Trump rally was held in Butler, Penn., and the location is close to where I live. Now, you won’t catch me walking around parading “MAGA” hats and flags all over the place. However, I am a history nerd, and, like him or not, former president Donald Trump has had an unbelievable impact on our world in the last decade, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see him in person. I headed out to this rally, and everyone knows what happened next: his assassination attempt. The gunman missed the former president’s brain by a few millimeters, and we were that short distance away from having very different conversations about the upcoming election in November. 

Now, it’s one thing to see the recording of the assassination attempt on social media or read about it on the news. It’s another thing entirely to see it happen in real time. It’s a much more intimidating event when you’re standing in a large crowd and all you hear are gunshots and a few people in hysterics. You don’t realize that the person truly being targeted is the person on the podium. So I want you, the reader, to keep this in mind for just a moment as I ask you to picture my surprise when, not 48 hours after the assassination attempt took place, I scroll through X and see nothing but people online saying that the now-iconic image of Trump with the bloody ear was AI-generated, or that “the whole thing was staged,” or my favorite:  “the rally-goers were all paid actors.” Well, if that is the case, then I would very much like to know where my money is because, as it stands right now, I write this article noticeably paycheck-free. What bothers me isn’t so much that people online declared that what I saw and experienced didn’t happen. People spew nonsense all the time. 

What bothers me is how quickly these conspiracy theories arose and how prominent they became, to the point where now-deleted articles from genuine news sources were questioning the authenticity of what happened. Really? Is this what we’re doing? Are we really that unwilling to check things for ourselves, do our own research, or, for Pete’s sake, just think for more than three seconds about how insane these things sound? 

That’s just a recent example. The well-known conspiracy of Holocaust denial, arguably the single most outrageous claim on the face of the earth, has been on the rise to such a degree that I read through some X user’s 20-post thread on exactly why the Holocaust didn’t happen and just about ripped my hair out. However, I’m not going to blame guys like Elon Musk and other people in power who “let this stuff happen.” In this country, free speech means that people are allowed to say some really ill-informed things. No one has to like it; the whole point of this opinion is how absurd those ideas are, but you still have a right to say it. On the other hand, we also have a right to fact-check, think and do our own research, inevitably reaching the conclusion that these conspiracies are just that: conspiracies.

So, if nothing else, I implore everyone reading this to think before they post. But, perhaps even more importantly, think before they believe something. I promise that someone, somewhere, has experienced and may still be trying to process whatever it is you’re conspiring over.