{"id":2208622,"date":"2024-03-28T18:14:02","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T22:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/conspiracy-theories-and-returning-to-normal\/"},"modified":"2024-03-28T18:20:32","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T22:20:32","slug":"conspiracy-theories-and-returning-to-normal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/conspiracy-theories-and-returning-to-normal\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Conspiracy Theories Amid the Shift to Normalcy"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fconspiracy-theories-and-returning-to-normal%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2208622&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The decline of shared values and the rise of conspiracy theories reflect societal challenges.\u2062 As religion wanes, ideological vacuums \u2063emerge, fostering mistrust in institutions and promoting unfounded beliefs. The quest for explanations leads to the proliferation of conspiracies, fueled by \u2062a\u2063 lack of cohesive values. This phenomenon underscores the \u200cimportance of maintaining common ground for constructive discourse and understanding.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When you cater to crazy people, you end up with a crazier country.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you deserve to lose if you decide to cater to the crazy. That\u2019s true on every side of the political aisle. All the American people want is some semblance of normalcy. That\u2019s all they want. They\u2019re begging for it. Some semblance of just being an adult with a normal set of values would be amazing from anyone.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But, instead, we\u2019ve decided we\u2019re going to elevate crazy on pretty much every side of the political aisle. It\u2019s totally wild and insane. We\u2019re tearing ourselves apart by elevating crazy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think there\u2019s a reason why we are elevating crazy to this e<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">xtent. And I think the real reason why we\u2019re elevating crazy across the aisle is because we don<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u2018t have a centralizing set of values.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It used to be that the older generation would say to the younger generation, \u201cGuys, you\u2019re morons. You don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about. Let me give you some <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/how-classical-education-can-liberate-black-america\/\" title=\"How Classical Education Can Liberate Black America\">time-tested wisdom<\/a>,\u201d as Thomas Sowell has talked about in the realm of economics.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It\u2019s true across all branches of knowledge. There are a few ways to gather data; controlled studies is one way, but even controlled studies are not going to be as good as time-tested wisdom used over the course of centuries.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is why it is very important to transmit culture, rules, and values to your children. This is why religion has traditionally been an extremely useful preserve of actually maintaining cultural and systemic health.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I teach my kids the rules and I say, \u201cGod says you should do X, Y, and Z,\u201d I\u2019m not just saying, \u201cGod says you should do X, Y, and Z because I read the Bible this morning.\u201d I\u2019m saying that God says, \u201cDo X, Y, and Z because I have a transmitted history of cultural utility that is thousands of years long, and these rules have worked over the course of thousands of years, and I\u2019m transmitting them to you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The proof of the godliness of the rules on a utilitarian level is that they work. The rules are useful; thus, it\u2019s good proof that if God said them, He was right. And even on a utilitarian level, even if God didn\u2019t say them, they would <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">still <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">be right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But as religion has declined, as people are afraid, as parents fear inculcating values in their kids, a problem arises.<\/span><\/p>\n<h4><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/episode\/ep-1935-barack-obama-is-back-member-exclusive\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are some critiques that are made of classical liberalism along these lines, and those critiques are somewhat well-founded. There are conservatives who say the problem with classical liberalism \u2014 which suggests freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on \u2014 is that they can quickly lead to moral relativism if there is no centralizing, coherent set of values we all share.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That\u2019s true. Liberalism can lead to moral relativism. The idea to \u201clet a thousand flowers bloom\u201d is fine as long as the flowers are <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">within a certain set of parameters<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. To say all views are equivalent and thus liberalism is important, is wrong. Not all views are the same, and not all views are good. There are certainly very many bad views.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The rationale for liberalism is to restrict tyrants. Liberalism is a response to people who would shut down valuable speech.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the roots of classical liberalism lie in a shared tradition of virtue. That\u2019s true for any set of freedoms. Any set of freedoms has to exist within a set of broader rules.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Think about any game that you play. If you\u2019re playing chess, you have the freedom to make any move that is within the rules on the board. If you just upturn the chessboard, that is no longer liberalism; you have taken the freedoms and extended them into a realm that defeats and destroys the freedoms.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There should be a shared set of rules and parameters in order for <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">any of this to be u<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">pheld. What has happened in our culture is that religion and religious values, Judeo-Christian biblical values, used to be the shared basis for our culture, and then we could share a lot of freedom within those broad parameters. But as people have changed Judeo-Christian values, as fewer people go to a church or synagogue that actually teaches the Bible \u2014 some synagogues and churches are teaching the church of Karl Marx or the Church of John Dewey or the Church of FDR or the Church of Barack Obama or the Church of Joe Biden \u2014 religion has declined. As that happens, you let in the crazies, because once there\u2019s no shared set of parameters, then any conspiracy theory at all gets through the door.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The only reason conspiracy theories end up getting a lot of traction is due to institutional distrust. Such institutional distrust has certainly been earned by, for example, the legacy media or the scientific community, which promote absolute lies on a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/cancel-culture-is-ideological-not-generational\/\" title=\"Cancel Culture Is Ideological, Not Generational\">fairly regular basis<\/a> because they have a set of values and narratives that override the facts, such as the entire scientific community declaring that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. As this occurs, obviously institutional distrust is going to set in.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The converse of that is people who aren\u2019t going to trust anything the government has to say when it is incompetent at <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">so many tasks and also involves itself in your life in a myriad of ways. They have institutional distrust for the government and anything the government says they are not going to believe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The major check on this used to be godly values. It used to be church. It used to be going out and touching grass, being with some real people, and discussing what\u2019s rational and true. But as sources of truth and values decline, what fills the gap is a necessity to explain the world around you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">People have always wanted to explain the world around them, and they have historically had many tools to do so. One of those tools, the most important tool, was biblical religion in the West \u2014 the idea there is a God who stands above the creation of the universe, and there is a logic to His universe, and there is a set of moral rules that provide guidance for navigating through that universe. That is the basic religious principle of all biblical living.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But as that declines, people see a disconnected set of events so they immediately search for some sort of explanation for that disconnection.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is why <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/exclusive-photos-heres-what-joe-bidens-anti-fall-physical-therapy-routine-looks-like\/\" title=\"Joe Biden's Anti-Fall Physical Therapy Routine Revealed in Exclusive Photos\">conspiracy theories thrive<\/a>; when institutional trust declines and when biblical values \u2014 which offer an ultimate explanation for everything \u2014 decline, there\u2019s nothing to fill the gap except for constant conspiratorialism.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That\u2019s why there is this new push to explain everything through conspiracy. Everything is a conspiracy because the world\u2019s a puzzling place and people need an explanation. And the easy explanation is to make one up in your own head about how there is a group of people in a back room somewhere who are manipulating all the systems.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It can\u2019t just be that life is totally chaotic and that there are a lot of people who are morons out there doing stupid things. It can\u2019t be that. It has to be that there is actually something deep and nefarious going on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it\u2019s every single story.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When a bridge collapses in Baltimore, the Left makes the claim it has something to do with dirty fuel and the Right makes the claim it has something to do with DEI.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don\u2019t know because <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don\u2019t know the facts yet<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. The facts are still coming out. But when the facts come out, we\u2019ll know exactly why that happened.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then weird conspiracy theories about Princess Kate surface when she goes missing. Yet it\u2019s fairly obvious when a rather prominent person goes miss<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">ing, it\u2019s probably a health problem. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But instead, there are just tons of conspiracy theories on all sides of the aisle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then when Princess Kate says she is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, a new slate of conspiracy theories arises. <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/technology\/2024\/03\/27\/kate-middleton-video-cancer-ai\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">According<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> to the Washington Post, \u201cUsers on TikTok, X and Facebook shared videos pointing out alleged AI breadcrumbs, such as a ring disappearing and reappearing on Catherine\u2019s hand. Others said her hair moves unnaturally, or that the bed of daffodils in the background is suspiciously still.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The tendency of our society right now to buy into nearly every conspiracy theory and give them all a hearing without just saying, \u201cNope, that sounds stupid,\u201d is a reflection of the complete decentralization of values \u2014 because now, you\u2019ll be willing to hear pretty much anything.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cIs the CIA behind everything that you see and hear? Is it possible that the moon landing never happened?\u201d These kinds of conspiracy theories are arising because of the vacuum of values. That vacuum of values is almost solely due to the decline of religion.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The decline of religious life in America is the single worst thing that\u2019s happened to the United States since about 1950. It continues apace today. Yet all the secular institutions that were supposed to fill that gap have failed because, of course, they were always going to fail; no secular rationale can fill the explanation God plays in our lives.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So you end up with a bunch of fools running around suggesting their own supposedly plausible explanation for what is happening.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is why the ultimate explanation, the most self-serving conspiracy theory of all and the one that has arisen on all sides of the political aisle, is a sense of victimization.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When you feel the world around you is chaotic and confused and discombobulated, when you feel like a victim, and then you look for an explanation as to why your failures are not your own fault, it must be because there\u2019s someone who\u2019s stopping you from succeeding.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the hardest thing to understand in the world when you are failing is that perhaps it is your fault. Maybe you <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">do <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">need to change what you\u2019re doing in your life. This is true for 90% of human problems, at least in a free West. There are certainly places in the world where tyranny abides, but that is not true in the United States of America.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Politicians always have a stake in engaging in a conspiracy theory because the beauty of being engaged in one is that the prophet is the person who promulgates it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The person who promulgates the conspiracy theory is the person you\u2019re supposed to listen to because they will guide you forward, they will help you, and they will alleviate all your problems. If you just give them enough power, they will fight it. They will destroy the Matrix. They will destroy all of what you\u2019re seeing, and they will lead you free. It\u2019ll be like Plato\u2019s cave. They\u2019ll come back from outside the cave, and they will lead you back toward the light.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But they never lead you toward the light because every failure can now be attributed to that same conspiracy. If they fail to lead you, if you buy into their conspiracy theory, and if you give them power and your life still does not get better, they just say it\u2019s because the conspiracy is so damned powerful. There\u2019s no way they can overcome it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is the danger of conspiratorial thinking, and it is filling up every cup that has been left empty by God, religion, and community. It\u2019s filling up all the political cups right now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It\u2019s extremely dangerous.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Left-wing brand is, of course, what Joe Biden is doing by suggesting that the system is rigged against a wide variety of people. But it\u2019s also happening on the Right, where the suggestion is \u2014 without evidence in many cases \u2014 that the system is rigged.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here\u2019s the thing: There are situations in the United States where the system is rigged, but you can tell what they are \u2014 not because someone posited a conspiracy theory without any evidence whatsoever, just spitting out dumb conspiracy theories \u2014 but because people say it and they do it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is not a conspiracy theory, for example, to suggest that Asians are being discriminated against on college campuses. How do you know it? Because you can see it in the statistics, recruitment materials, documentation, and at all of the major colleges. That\u2019s not a conspiracy theory.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">What America needs to get back to normal is the same thing it always needed: church, community, and a fact-based, rational approach to politics. That\u2019s all people need.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Maybe they don\u2019t want it. Maybe it\u2019s too easy in this day and age to jump immediately to some sort of narrative that explains why you\u2019re a victim of the society in which you live in the freest, most prosperous society in the history of humanity.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But that\u2019s not going to lead to a happy life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Catering to extremism results in a more chaotic nation. Regardless of political beliefs, Americans yearn for normalcy above all else. Striving for a semblance of balance is a common desire among the populace, a plea for stability in turbulent times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":2208623,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2024\/03\/GettyImages-2117511347.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[541],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2208622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-daily-wire"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2024\/03\/GettyImages-2117511347.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2208622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2208623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2208622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2208622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2208622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}