Benjamin Hope

My God, I wish I could be a conspiracy theorist. Imagine how easy life would be. No sourcing. No burden of proof. No homework. No checking whether the thing you’re about to say is actually true. Just wake up, make some shit up, hit POST, and congratulate yourself for “doing your own research.” Someone proves you wrong? Ignore it. Someone produces the paper? Don’t read it. Someone posts the raw data? Fake. Primary source? Compromised. Expert consensus? Bought. Photographs? CGI. Video? Edited. Measurements? Rigged. Your own eyes? Trusted, but only when convenient. Every possible piece of evidence against you arrives with a factory-installed escape hatch. And if somebody corners you so completely that there’s nowhere left to run, you pull the emergency brake: “SHILL.” Done. Argument won. Then tomorrow you post the exact same claim as if yesterday never happened. That’s the real luxury. Claims never have to survive contact with evidence. They just respawn. Flat Earth. Anti-vax. 9/11 “truth.” Chemtrails. Virus denial. Evolution denial. Different costumes, same operating system: Make claim. Provide nothing. Get corrected. Ignore correction. Change subject. Make new claim. Get corrected again. Call opponent a shill. Repeat original claim. And if you’re truly committed, you follow the person who debunked you and camp in their replies for months, dropping dead claims under completely unrelated posts like a door-to-door salesman who won’t leave the porch, still pitching a product that was recalled years ago. Meanwhile, if I get a statistic wrong, quote a paper sloppily, miss contrary evidence, or make an embarrassing typo, it’s screenshotted within the hour. And here’s the humiliating part: I care. I go back and check. I correct it. I sit there irritated with myself over a decimal point. I couldn’t knowingly repeat a claim after finding out it was false. I’d be embarrassed by it. Conspiracy addicts have been liberated from all of that. No embarrassment. No recalibration. No learning. No moment where anyone stops and thinks, “maybe I got this one wrong.” They double down, triple down, invent three new conspiracies to explain why the first one collapsed, and come charging back into the replies like getting dismantled yesterday was a warm-up. Being wrong isn’t a setback for them. It’s just another day. God, that must be restful.