by Guest Blogger John Shirley

It’s hard to see where it will end. Here’s one example. A highly dishonest anti-govt hysterical website called USPatriot just put out yet another claim that “Obamacare” will put “chips” in “All Americans” by the year 2017. Claimed it was reported on NBC. NBC did not report this. It’s a lie.  

There are countless sites like this and what their followers don’t realize is that they’re being exploited for money. If you put up a big headline that says “Obama plans to Turn Americans Into Zombies with Chemtrails”, say, it’ll be shared a zillion times, mostly by people who gaspingly react in a kneejerk way — sometimes by people who think it’s ironically funny. Either response gives the site lots of “hits”, lots of likes, a higher rating on Google. This in turn allows the site hucksters to sell advertising at high rates — or to sell the website itself after it gets enough following. For big money. Perhaps the same thing happens with some of the more crazed “left wing” (pseudo left, really) sites.

The New World Order fantasy, the “government is herding us all into FEMA camps this year for extermination” babble, the “We’re Sovereign Citizens Who Wouldn’t Know the Actual Constitution If It Bit Us In the Ass” crowd — they believe all this stuff because it’s stimulating, it makes them excited, it makes them feel special. But they’re special suckers.

They’re being used so other people can make money.

This faked up verbal-meth for hicks is designed to be jolting to get quick and dirty attention. It doesn’t have to be believable, because site followers don’t actually think about it, they just react. And it’s in a familiar pattern of disinformation, spread by the Timothy McVeigh spawn, the David Koresh sheep, that has been shown to work.

Paranoia works. So they use it again and again and again … and there are countless sites of this kind. Paranoic social lies are viruses, of a kind; paranoic social lies are poison memes. And what is the long term effect? How many confrontations in Nevada over someone’s imaginary “grazing rights”? How many “Oklahoma City bombings”?

How many attempted Presidential assassinations? How many children, raised by these people — to live in fear?

John Shirley was the co-writer of the film “The Crow”; he is the author of the A SONG CALLED YOUTH trilogy, DOYLE AFTER DEATH, HIGH, SILICON EMBRACE, DEMONS, and other novels.  His web page is john-shirley.com