The Onion buys conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’
www.theguardian.com
Satirical news outlet purchases media platform run by Alex Jones at a court-ordered auction

Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’ By Bryce P. Tetraeder, Global Tetrahedron CEO ☞ https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/

And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice.

🤣

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      11 days ago

      Thanks! The trick is to understand the emotions they aim for and the baseline rhetorical tricks.

      Conspiracies stem from knowing you’re getting fucked, but that most people are good. It’s an attempt to find explanations when the world feels wrong. Someone did it. You just have to sell the truth in the tone that they’re used to hearing. Especially with vaccines where the truth does sound like a free lunch, until you realize that it’s governments and insurers paying for vaccines and it saves them and the economy money by you not getting sick or needing stronger medicines. These are the two groups that desperately want you to exercise, eat right, and quit smoking

      • Emerald@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        11 days ago

        And then there’s ones that don’t have much of a modern-day effect but are still stupid. My English teacher truly believes that the Titanic was sunk on purpose for insurance purposes.

        She also believes that a Secret Service agent might have shot JFK

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
          10·
          11 days ago

          Those too are an attempt to create order out of a scary and chaotic world. The JFK assassination theories are often used as the textbook example of that fact.

          While it is true that JFK’s family was heavily involved in the mob and that he wasn’t the favorite of the out of control CIA, the evidence we have after many eyes on it for decades asserts one thing: a man by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald was an exceptional marksman in his time in the marines, and had a tendency towards political radicalization that wasn’t particularly directed, and so in an attempt to curry favor with the Cuban government (he was a communist but had been disillusioned by the USSR), but without their permission (they would have asked him not to), he hid in a book repository along the route of the presidential motorcade, laid in wait, and when the time came fired two shots directly into the skull of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He like every successful presidential assassin acted alone and based on political grievances.

          And the fact is, that that’s terrifying to a lot of people. One person changed so much with one act. Conspiracy theories here are an attempt to find an alternative explanation for something so jarring. One marine sniper shouldn’t be able to, but the cia or the mob or Cuba or the ussr… A group, conspiring should be able to, and they’re shadowy and hiding the truth…

          The fact is that the difference between the Kennedy assassination and the attempted assassinations of trump are of marksmanship and chance, not of conspiracy. Nobody says the Reagan assassin wasn’t working alone because he failed