It’s a hard time to be a conspiracy theorist. They hunker like microwave burritos, covered in tinfoil and stuffed with extremely suspicious material, scanning the TV for mind control signals and finding the exact opposite: reality TV. Which doesn’t need any mind at all. How bad must that feel? They alone know how aliens killed JFK, and nobody listens. Every human alive has been part of a pregnancy, but the the cast of 19 and up get still an audience of millions.

The internet is even worse. It used to be that a sufficiently spittle-flecked barrage of fake facts would drive off all but the most determined sane person. Now anyone can disprove their arguments in seconds. And the internet is far better at insane rants too. The conspiracy theorist needs a moon mission and at least three Elvis clones, but the internet can go just as insane about a bad video game review. In honor of these struggling psychopaths, behold the bronze, silver, and gold of conspiracy insanity.

Phantom Time

Heribert Illig makes most conspiracy theorists look lacking in imagination. He skips over pedantry like Area 51 and Atlantis to allege that three entire centuries of history are imaginary, and every single historian, scientist, astronomer and calendar-looker-at since has been covering it up. The “Phantom Time Hypothesis” alleges that the years 614 – 911 AD simply didn’t happen, and is also a Doctor Who episode plot which somehow escaped into the real world.

A huge chunk of the Dark Ages didn’t happen. The Vikings simply didn’t exist. China was nice enough to invent the entire Tang dynasty just so that the Roman Holy Emperor Otto III could pretend to be ruling in the year 1000 AD. I’m not joking to make them sound more ridiculous, but only because I can’t – that really was one of their theories. And because shouting “you’re insane” isn’t a scientific argument, no matter how accurate it may be, researchers had to find proof that 15% of AD actually happened. A fact so obvious it lights up the sky, which is exactly how they confirmed it: records of Halley’s comet appear in historical records at the right times. Many other errors were also found, but when someone has the only conspiracy theory so crazy it’s actually disproved by real lights in the sky you’re allowed to just stop talking about them.

Armed Weathermen

The internet has made it easier to diagnose the early warning signs of conspiracy theory. If someone casually tweets that they think the president would empower weathermen with hollow-point ammunition to massacre citizens, you can get them professional mental help. Or stop being friends with them. At the very least you’d hope they weren’t your elected representative. But if you live in Kentucky you would – as you do with so many things – be hoping in vain.

Senator Rand Paul bought into a conspiracy theory that the National Weather Service was buying 46,000 rounds of hollowpoint ammunition, and that this was preparation for a government takeover-by-shooting-everyone. Because we all know that when the President of the United States decides to go rogue the most lethal weapon available to him will be weathermen. You end up hoping an elected official simply misunderstood “meteorologist” to mean “from space”, because at least then the stupid conspiracy theory would be awesome.

It’s also fun to notice that when many people genuinely thought that the supreme executive power was about to send tens of thousands of flesh-destroying rounds against his opponents, their first response was to write saying “I know what you’re doing and oppose you. Here is my IP address.” So take this as a warning: when your choices are LINK “simple clerical error” or “And now Tom with the weather and the massacre of our country”, it’s probably the former.

Rainbow Woman

The chemtrail conspiracy is famous, and almost understandable. It’s natural to be impressed by flying jets leaving trails of condensed water through the sky. Those are hundreds of tons of metal soaring like that wasn’t impossible! They DO prove that people are up to mind-boggling scientific projects which alter the very fabric of human society! Those projects are “engineering” and “aerodynamics,” the sort of thing that really should make anyone think. Unfortunately many think “smart people are trying to control me” while revealing that smart people wouldn’t need to, and that the word “think” earlier in this sentence was a lie.

They claim that the trails of condensed water (contrails) are released chemicals (chemtrails). Even though chemicals released at that altitude would diffuse to homeopathically-ineffective levels. Besides, if the airline industry was part of a critical citizen control project, flights would be better organized. They couldn’t have California erupting in armed insurrection because of LAX’s shitty scheduling. And this conspiracy is for people who don’t aim that high. It takes real insanity to build a conspiracy theory out of a lawn sprinkler, but this MacGuyver of Madness does exactly that.

For those preserving their IQ high score by not watching it: a woman sees a rainbow in the lawn sprinkler droplets, and reveals a lot more about her life than she’d like by choosing “bitter paranoia” instead of “beauty.” She attempts to explode the English language through sheer irony by looking at a rainbow and saying “This cannot be natural.” You can actually see the point where her level of education tops out, because her “learn to read” books taught her that rainbows happen in the sky. When she finds out that the sun doesn’t really have a smiling face on it she’s going to have a theological breakdown, and that is going to happen because she’s not smart enough to avoid staring to find out.