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[–]magnora7 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Imo, people who self-identify as "conspiracy theorists" are like black people who self-identify as the n-word. Just bringing yourself down for no reason.

They have deliberately created an albatross for you to wear around your neck. Do not wear it. You can claim it's "empowering" to "take back" the word, but that's just a cope for the trauma, imo. It's better to sidestep it entirely. It's 100% designed to be an emotional trigger term to shut down people's ability to think (a thought-terminating cliche), so don't play in to that.

It's well-documented that the CIA began to popularize the term "conspiracy theorist" through the media with a program starting in 1969, as a smear against anyone who was questioning the official story of the JFK assassination. It has since expanded to cover anyone who questions anything controversial.

This is why /r/conspiracy is the one place on reddit where the truth is allowed, because it's designed to make the truth-tellers look insane by association with the word, which has been thoroughly intentionally sullied in the minds of the public through the media. Just sidestep this whole thing. The phrase has no power if it's never part of the conversation in the first place.