Conservatives definitely don’t have a monopoly on believing weird or dumb things (the ability to hold insane beliefs is one of the things that all humans share) but if you want to see some of the more startingly unhinged things that grown adults actually believe to be true, I would 100% recommend digging into MAGA Twitter.
Trump’s own love for the horrible blue website inspired millions of racist aunts and uncles to create Twitter accounts called things like ‘@PatriotGunLover1776‘ and ‘@FakeNewsHaterJim‘, where they spend their entire day either sharing obviously doctored photos of Hillary Clinton putting a baby in a woodchipper or typing in all caps at celebrities about how it should be illegal to kneel.
In these weird communities, misinformation and conspiracy theories grow thick and strong like one of those massive colonies of mushrooms that grow under forests. People share hearsay as if it was fact, initial information that later turns out to be wrong is spread and absorbed without any corrections, armchair lawyers and political analysts spout absolute nonsense only to have it believed because they have a 4-digit follower count. Shit gets weird in there.
One of the weirdest things to spawn from MAGA-space is definitely Pizzagate. You might recall Pizzagate from the time that guy fired an AR-15 in a pizza place in Washington, DC because he had become convinced they were running a pedophile ring out of their basement. The twist, of course, being that the place in question did not even have a basement.
In a reasonable world, a setback like this would generally suck the air out of a movement, but we do not live in a reasonable world – we live in this one. No, the Pizzagaters are still going strong, as Chrissy Teigen found out after they took aim at her and her family. Teigen came to the attention of conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin because her daughter dressed up as Alice from Alice in Wonderland and a hot dog, and because Teigen used a pizza emoji. Yep, pretty concrete proof that she’s in an international satanic pedophile cult.
Pictured: Normal brain. Totally normal brain.
As one might imagine, Teigen was pretty weirded out, taking to Twitter to express her confusion about what the fuck was going on:
Alright. I debated saying something about this but I’m pretty disturbed over here. The fact that there are people with these…thoughts…is really scary.
…Apparently dressing my daughter as Alice in Wonderland and a hot dog and having a pizza emoji on Snapchat has to do with pizzagate and being uhhhh darksided. Holy shit That thread is wild. Enjoy.
Yeah yeah it’s “just Twitter” but I’m pretty sure this *sick* person is saying we are darksided pizzagate pedophiles who traffic our daughter. Ummmmm this is really scary shit.
Somehow, the absolutely bonkers contention that using an emoji of a wildly popular food is a sign that you are a pedophile isn’t even the strangest thing about all this – Crokin seems to be of the mind that a lot of celebrities are unwitting participants in this thanks to mind control they suffered at the hands of the MKUltra program.
There are many celebrities under MK-ULTRA & they literally have NO idea bc they are mind controlled. We need to PRAY for them. ❤️
— LIZ CROKIN (@LizCrokin) December 30, 2017
You might know the name of MKUltra from Stranger Things, which showed the project as being an attempt to give young kids psychic powers, but, honestly, the reality is not all that much less strange. Primarily it involved the CIA giving LSD to people and shoving them into isolation tanks in the hopes of figuring out the secrets of mind control until it was shut down for good in 1973. Despite its closure over 40 years ago, these people are convinced it is in some fashion being used on celebs to make them sex offenders.
How does this all tie into Trump / MAGA shit, I hear you ask? Well, unlike everyone in the halls of power, who they believe to be part of the conspiracy, all these Pizzagate people are somehow of the mind that Trump has valiantly taken up their cause and is fighting to break up global pedophilia rings. This belief seems to spring almost 100% from one single infographic.
https://twitter.com/LoveUSADawn/status/947304754102853632
As with most of the things they believe, this is a complete crock of shit. As this Stack Exchange post notes, the figures for Obama are pulled from only a single agency and the figure for Trump is just cobbled together from often completely unrelated numbers from news articles. In an article she wrote for Townhall, Crokin tried to do exactly the same number magic, and was subsequently torn to shreds by Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason:
The idea that there have been “an unprecedented number” of sex traffickers arrested since Trump took office has similarly little basis in reality, and there’s zero truth to the claim of law-enforcement busting up child sex-trafficking rings. Meanwhile, many of the arrests Crokin includes in her tally—arrests that include mostly women selling sex and men trying to engage in consensual adult prostitution—are part of annual sting operations, were the result of investigations n the works long before Trump took office, and/or had absolutely nothing to do with federal law-enforcement directives or activities.
But hey, let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Obviously, both Teigen and husband John Legend were pissed. Teigen very understandably asked why someone whose whole ~thing~ is accusing people of being pedophiles based on absolutely nothing was verified, and Twitter quite quickly seemed to agree, taking away Crokin’s blue tick.
Twitter just unverified my account thanks to @chrissyteigen
That’s OK cuz I care more about saving kids than I do about a blue checkmark!
— LIZ CROKIN (@LizCrokin) December 31, 2017
Legend made the polite suggestion that maybe it was time to lawyer the fuck up:
You need to take my family’s name out of your mouth before you get sued. https://t.co/bPTwiBAs97
— John Legend (@johnlegend) December 31, 2017
At time of writing, Teigen has set her account to private so she doesn’t have to deal with a million MAGA assholes telling her she drinks the blood of children which, well, seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do.
We live in the dumbest time.
