![]() Rogan has cultivated a persona as an easygoing bro, willing to entertain out-there ideas before swatting them aside. You won’t find them crying over the moon. In Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 diagnosis of “ The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” he described paranoid thinkers as “angry minds” addled by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy.”īut today’s more fashionable conspiratorial figures are not mad at all. He represents a new archetype: the ambivalent conspiracy theorist. Dawson, YouTube’s conspiracy king, channels all of those moods at once, modulating his perspective line by line and shot by shot. star Stephen Curry (who tossed it out as a joke, prompting a NASA invitation to visit its moon rock collection). In recent years, the specter of a fake moon landing has been raised by figures as disparate as the Infowars founder Alex Jones (who treated it as a deathly serious issue), Rogan (who conjured it as a trippy thought experiment) and the N.B.A. You can just type it into Reddit, or blurt it out on a podcast, or drag a crying-laughing emoji onto a picture of the lunar lander and post it on Instagram. When Sibrel finally accepted his belief in the moon hoax, he told The New York Times in 2003, he wept.īut today, it is no longer necessary to commit to the cause to help spread it around. #Moon landing fake movie#So does making an almost-feature-length movie that you sell, for money, as a DVD. Self-publishing a book through great personal expense requires a steadiness of conviction. All three men are personal essayists, too, unspooling their theories as tales of each man’s journey toward skepticism. Dawson, like his predecessors, is a collage artist. The quasi-investigations of Kaysing and Sibrel share similarities to the ones we see today. Bill Kaysing, a former employee of a company that built rockets for NASA, bolstered the movement in 1976 when he self-published “ We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle” - a 200-page pursuit that quoted Lincoln and Shakespeare and featured arcane meditations on rocket propulsion and grainy photocopies of “evidence.” The theory was rekindled in 2001, at the dawn of the crowdsourced web, when a guy named Bart Sibrel produced a 47-minute “documentary” called “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.” It mashed up moon footage with ominous shots from the Soviet Union and Vietnam, was narrated by a severe British woman and was sold on a website called. Moon conspiracy theorizing used to be a serious business. They are mutating our relationship to belief itself: It is less about having convictions than it is about having fun. Along the way, these vloggers are unlocking a new, casual mode of experiencing paranoia. The internet’s biggest stars are using irony and nonchalance to refurbish old conspiracies for new audiences, recycling them into new forms that help them persist in the cultural imagination. In March, the YouTube shock jock Logan Paul dropped a 50-minute pseudo-documentary that stages him pratfalling into Flat Earth paranoia, inhaling anti-NASA propaganda and finally pronouncing it the dumbest thing he has ever heard. I have a love-hate relationship with conspiracies,” Joe Rogan said in April on his podcast, which has hosted discussion on theories around chemtrails, flying saucers and Magic Johnson’s H.I.V. I don’t want to get sued, or put in jail.” Then he narrows his eyes, as if to size up the whole field of space science, and scoffs, “But I mean, the evidence is not looking good.” In the middle of his paranoid rant about the moon, he places his hands sincerely over his chest and says: “Once again, it’s a theory. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |