Everybody has an Uncle Skeeter. Maybe not technically, in the sense that the guy’s actually named Skeeter, but you have one, a family member who is into the conspiracies.
Our Uncle Skeeter was a conspiracy guy back long before anybody had ever heard the word Internet. Used to go on and on about how the moon landing had been faked.
His treatise on the matter was impressive. Mind you, this is before the crazies had social media to crowdsource their insanity.
He insisted, apparently without help from legions of fellow crazies, that the moon landing that we knew had been staged by Hollywood, in some desert setting.
“No way we actually landed a spaceship on the moon,” he insisted at family gatherings.
Not that we made it easy for him to insist. We all knew that Uncle Skeeter was crazy, so we’d let him set up shop in one corner of the house at Thanksgiving and Christmas, Fourth of July, whenever, and we’d position the rest of the get-together so as not to have to interact with his crazy ass.
And since nobody else in the family was into his nonsense, we all just assumed that his mania would die off with him.
Never would any of us have thought that there were millions of other Uncle Skeeters out there, and that one day they’d use this thing called the Internet, and the social media that would be enabled by its interconnectivity, to propagate their crazy theories about the world, build on them, and grow their numbers.
Now the Uncle Skeeters are in ascendance. They harass the parents of the murdered kindergarteners and first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School as being paid actors in a tale crafted by liberals to take away their guns.
The Pulse nightclub shooting was similarly staged. Anytime there’s a mass shooting, basically, it’s part of a progressive plot to disarm the patriots.
At least there’s some relation, however tenuous, to reality in those fantasies.
Of late, we’ve become acquainted with something called Pizzagate, a fabulist tale about a pizza shop in Washington, D.C., that is apparently a front for a child-sex ring run by Hillary Clinton.
The story is so ridiculous that it shouldn’t demand any kind of attention from anyone considered remotely sane, except that a patriot this past weekend decided to investigate the claims for himself, and showed up at the pizza parlor with an assault rifle intent on freeing the sex slaves.
Serious as an effin’ heart attack.
And if you thought the stories about this incident in the mainstream media would scare the Uncle Skeeters of the world straight, yeah, you’re naïve.
The guy was a plant, is the new tale being spun by the Skeeters, his arrest in the case meant to distract attention from what’s really going on.
Another cover.
This is beyond skepticism. These folks are trading in alternative reality, and the more you try to persuade them with facts and appeals to reason, the higher up you move on the enemies list.
If you don’t trade in the conspiracy, essentially, you’re part of the problem.
And folks, there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube on this one.
We can’t marginalize our Uncle Skeeters into a corner of the living room at family gatherings anymore.
The millions of them that are out there have connected, and now that they’ve elected one of their own to the highest office in the land, well, what’s truth and what’s fiction is no longer material.
A republic, if you can keep it, indeed.
Column by Chris Graham
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