Thursday, May 28, 2020

Conspiracy Theorists

In a letter in this morning's edition of my local paper, a reader writes, in part:

It turns out that the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York have inflicted draconian measures on over 41 million individuals for purely political purposes.  They have conspired to skew and interpret the statistics in a manner that, at best, has put a serious hurt on our economy in terms of unemployment, business failures, and general disruption of the lives of their citizens. 

This leads me to ask the question: What possible political advantage does the writer believe these governors could have gotten from essentially shutting down the economies of their states for ten weeks or more? What did they have to gain from this?

To me, this is frequently where conspiracy theories fall apart. The theorists can never adequately explain what value the conspirators acquire from their plot. And, if this is the case, why did so many others take the same actions, despite differing political and philosophical stances? Why do the scientific experts agree that this was the smart thing to do? Are they all "in on it"? And, again, if so, what do they gain?

Your thoughts?

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