The Chimera of White Chic As It Pertains to the Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch

Two chimeras are to be examined in the Netflix documentary White Heat: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch.

Chimera #1

Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries was possessed by a fantasy that we will call the White Chic Chimera: It is a desire to live in an aesthetic of anorexic and chiseled whiteness, which represents old money from the North East, being part of an exclusive cool club, having the power to aggrandize one’s privilege and sexuality while relegating “The Others” to second-class citizen status and feeling entitled to rely on racist memes and tropes to reinforce the old-guard racial and class hierarchy.

Using an aggressive ad campaign, Jeffries and his minions scaled the White Chic Chimera to make Abercrombie and Fitch the fastest-growing clothing retail store in the world. It dominated the industry for several years before its foul odor became apparent to the masses who appropriately abandoned and shunned the brand.

Chimera #2

This domination made Mike Jeffries drink his own racist Kool-Aid: Full of toxic narcissism and spectacular egotism, he believed that what he was doing--promoting a racist hierarchy to slake his greedy appetites--was smart capitalism, that he was invincible, and that his White Chic aesthetic was something to be proud of. A recalcitrant sinner of racist marketing, Jeffries was doomed to crash.

Jeffries’ pride in his white aesthetic was his second chimera. His pride or hubris in his racial aesthetic made him like the tragic figure Icarus who flew too quickly and too close to the sun making his fall inevitable.

Humiliation, disgrace, and ignominy were the appropriate end for a peddler of racist mythology and exclusion. The chimeras that fed Mike Jeffries’ appetites for money and glory were the very chimeras that consumed him.

Sample Thesis Statements That Address Only White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch

Sample #1

A clothing brand was built not on the clothing itself but what it represented: a chimera consisting of badge of exclusivity, a cult of youth existing in Edenic nature, FOMO coolness that became so invincible as to invite the most reckless and fatuous behavior, and a white aesthetic that shamelessly otherizes and marginalizes other races.

Sample #2

Abercrombie’s chimera of cool was a facade that concealed a toxic brand. The toxicity was manifest in many ways including a badge of exclusivity, a cult of youth existing in Edenic nature, FOMO coolness that became so invincible as to invite the most reckless and foolish behavior, and a white aesthetic that shamelessly otherizes and marginalizes other races.

Sample #3

Shameless narcissist and peddler of racist memes and marketing tropes, Mike Jeffries is a cautionary tale of a man who hijacked his own brain with dreams of white superiority, retail dominance, endless legal schemes, and a bull-headed refusal to embrace the diverse consumer base that he depended on.

Sample Thesis That Compares All 3 Documentaries

38 at the Garden, Homecoming King, and White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch give us a look at how society’s racial stereotypes, either through a passive default setting or aggressive marketing, create a particular type of brain hijack in which the targets of racism are instilled with a chimera that exists both from within and without: the negative stereotype that results from racist memes and tropes, racist political policies, scapegoating, and white notions of status and exclusivity.

Thesis Sample #2

38 at the Garden is a bitter-sweet pill that provides the hope of a disruptive force like Jeremy Lin on one hand and the way hope can become short-lived when society memory-holes talent and individual courage to resort to their racist default setting on the other.

Thesis Sample #3

While we should lament the return of racism illustrated in 38 at the Garden, we find that Jeremy Lin made a permanent mark on thoughtful observers of sports by shaking them out of their internalized racism, making the NBA more open to individual talent over profiling, and creating a historical record of a singular talent whose courage broke the mold and helped people reimagine what they could be.

Thesis Sample #4

38 at the Garden is a powerful antidote to racial stereotyping by using pathos, experience, and personal testimony to show the mental straightjacket of racism and by providing a powerful emotional experience, the documentary is far superior than a polemic that attempts to give intellectual arguments against racism because such arguments are met with the hostility of the Backfire Effect.

Sentence Fragments

Sentence fragments are incomplete thoughts presented as dependent clauses or phrases.

A dependent clause or a phrase is never a complete sentence.

Types of dependent clauses:

Whenever I drive up windy mountains,

Because I have craved pizza for 14 months,

Unless you add coffee to your chocolate cake recipe,

,which is currently enjoying a resurgence.

Phrases

Enamored by the music of Tupac Shakur,

Craving pesto linguine with olive-oil based clam sauce,

Flexing his muscles with a braggadocio never seen in modern times,

Lying under the bridge and eating garlic pepper pretzels with a dollop of cream cheese and a jug of chilled apple cider,

To understand the notion of Universal Basic Income and all of its related factors for social change in this disruptive age,

Running into crowded restaurants with garlic and whiskey fuming out of his sweaty pores while brandishing a golden scepter,

Examples

I won't entertain your requests for more money and gifts. Until you show at least a modicum of responsibility at school and with your friends.

I won't consider buying the new BMW sports coupe. Unless of course my uncle gives me that inheritance he keeps talking about whenever he gets a bit tipsy.

I can't imagine ever going to Chuck E. Cheese. Which makes me feel like I'm emotionally arrested.

I am considering the purchase of a new wardrobe. That is, if I'm picked for that job interview at Nordstrom.

Human morals have vanished. To the point at which it was decided that market values would triumph.

No subject

Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.

No complete verb

The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.

Beginning with a subordinating word

We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.

A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.

Sentence Fragment Exercises

After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.

One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.

Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.

Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.

Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.

Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.

Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.

Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.

Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.

Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.

Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.

Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.

Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.

Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.

Identify the Fragments Below

I drank the chalky Soylent meal-replacement drink. Expecting to feel full and satisfied. Only to find that I was still ravenously hungry afterwards. Trying to sate my hunger pangs. I went to HomeTown Buffet. Where I ate several platters of braised oxtail and barbecued short ribs smothered in a honey vinegar sauce. Which reminded me of a sauce where I used to buy groceries from. When I was a kid.

Feeling bloated after my HomeTown Buffet indulgence. I exited the restaurant. After which I hailed an Uber and asked the driver for a night club recommendation. So I could dance off all my calories. The driver recommended a place, Anxiety Wires. I had never heard of it. Though, it was crowded inside. I felt eager to dance and confident about “my swag.” Although, I was still feeling bloated. Wondering if my intestines were on the verge of exploding.

Sweating under the night club’s outdoor canopy. I smelled the cloying gasses of a nearby vape. A serpentine woman was holding the vape. A gold contraption emitting rose-water vapors into my direction. Contemplating my gluttony. I was suddenly feeling low confidence. Though I pushed myself to introduce myself to the vape-smoking stranger with the serpentine features. Her eyes locked on mine.

I decided to play it cool. Instead of overwhelming her with a loud, brash manner. Which she might interpret as neediness on my part.

Keeping a portable fan in my cargo pocket for emergencies. When I feel like I’m overheating. I took the fan out of my pocket, turned it on, and directed it toward the serpentine stranger. Making it so the vapors were blowing back in her face.

“Doesn’t smell so good, does it?” I said. With a sarcastic grin.

She cackled, then said, “Thank you for blowing the vapors in my face. Now I can both enjoy inhaling them and breathing them in. For double the pleasure. You are quite a find. Come home with me and I’ll introduce you to my mother Gertrude and her pitbull Jackson. I’m sure they’ll welcome you into our home. Considering what a well-fed handsome man you are.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” I said. “I would love to meet your mother Gertrude and your mother’s pitbull Jackson. Only one problem. My breath smells like a rotting dead dragon. Right after eating spicy ribs. Which reminds me? Do you have any breath mints?”

“I don’t believe in carrying breath mints. On account of the rose-water vape. That cleanses my palate. Making my breath rosy fresh.”

“Wow. Your constant good breath counteracts my intractable bad breath. Making us a match in heaven.”

“I agree. Totally. You really need to meet my mother. Because she’ll bless us and make our marriage official. Since we really need her blessing. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Now let me smell your breath. So I can identify the hot sauce.”

“Why must you do that?”

“So I can use the same hot sauce on our wedding cake, silly. To celebrate the first night we met. Capisce?”

“Capisce.”

She approached me. Affording me a view of her long, tired face. Covered in scales. Reptilian. Evocative of something primitive. Something precious and indelible from my childhood lost long ago. I wanted to run from her, but I could not. Some mysterious force drew me to her, and we inched closer and closer toward one another. Succumbing to a power neither of us could fathom.

Comma Splice Review

Identify the Comma Splices Below:

It’s not a question of will there be chaos or will there be destruction, it’s a question of how much?

MySpace was disruptive in its time, however, it’s a dated platform and to simply mention it is to make people laugh with a certain derision surely it’s a platform that has seen its time, another example is the meal replacement Soylent, its creator made a drink that says, “You’re too busy to eat,” so drinking this pancake batter-like concoction gives tech people street. I may laugh at its stupidity, instead I should admire it since the product has made millions for its creator. It’s proven to be somewhat disruptive.

To be sure, though, Facebook redefines the word disruptive, it has rapidly accrued over 3 billion users and will soon have half the planet plugged into its site, that is the apotheosis of a greedy person’s fantasy, imagine controlling half the planet on a platform that mines private information and targets ads toward specific personality profiles.

One of the scary disruptions of Facebook is that billions of people have lost their personal agency, what that means that people have unknowingly been manipulated by Facebook’s puppeteers to the point that many Facebook users suffer from social media addiction, moreover, these same users prefer the fake life they curate on social media to the real life they once had, in fact, their previous real life is just a puff of smoke that has faded into the distance, many people no longer even know what it means to be “real” anymore, having lost their agency, having succumbed to their Facebook addiction, they have become zombies waiting for their next rush of social media-fueled dopamine, what a sad state of affairs.

Essay Comparison Choice #6: The Chimera of Conspiracies:

People lose contact with reality as they go down rabbit holes of conspiracies. We will examine the forces of “the epistemic crisis,” the breakdown of faith in institutions, the death of expertise, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and we will narrow our focus on conspiracies to anti-vaxxing and QAnon.

Sample Outline for Choice #6

For paragraph 1, your introduction, define the idea of a conspiracy as a very tempting chimera to certain types of people.

For paragraph 2, your thesis, develop a claim that explains the causes of a conspiracy chimera. You might want to focus on a specific conspiracy like the one that supports the belief of anti-vaxxers or QAnon. Otherwise, you may find your essay is so broad that you can’t chisel a 1,200-word essay.

Paragraphs 3-7 would explain the above thesis.

Your conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.

Notice there is no Counterargument-Rebuttal Section because this is not so much an argument essay as it is cause-and-effect.

Works Cited page with the sources you used would be your last page.

Since the subject is so broad, we will focus on ant-vaxxers.

For sources, we will look at the following:

Why Are Conspiracy Theories So Appealing to So Many People?
The Appeal of Conspiracy Theories
“Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing” (Dunning-Kruger Effect)
“Why America Loves Fake News”
“Anti-Vaxxers: What Went Wrong?”
“Anti-Vaxxers: How the Media Created a Monster”
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver:
“Vaccines” (June 25, 2017)
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: “Covid Vaccines” (May 2, 2021).
“Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” by Jonathan Haidt

What causes us to believe in conspiracies?

One. According to Jonathan Haidt, the "structural stupidity" of living inside the bubble of social media.

Two. Making conclusions and assumptions based on logical fallacies.

Three. Having a deep moral cowardice that prevents us from being responsible adults and instead embracing conspiracies that indulge our inner child.

Types of Conspiracies

Proxy Conspiracism: The conspiracy belief is a substitute or a proxy for some deep psychological need like control, power, and revenge against others. (From Michael Shermer’s Conspiracy).

Tribal Conspiracism: The conspiracy is linked to a chain of other like-minded conspiracies that as a whole define the religious, political, or tribal beliefs of the individual (From Michael Shermer’s Conspiracy).

Constructive Conspiracism: The conspiracy that is believed “just in case” it’s true because it’s better to be safe. There have been so many true conspiracies, we might just as well be skeptical of everything (From Michael Shermer’s Conspiracy).

Profit Conspiracism: You don’t believe in the conspiracy, but you cynically fabricate one to make money. Alex Jones is a top-level Profit Conspiracist.

Radicalized Conspiracism: You live in a fever swamp of social media, cable news, cherry-picked evidence, and confirmation bias. Worse, many succumb to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which states that there are many people who think they’re smart when in fact they are the opposite and they lack the self-awareness to see how others perceive them.

Outrage Conspiracism: According to social scientist Jonathan Haidt, around 2012, social media algorithms exploited our reptile brains by feeding our appetite for anger and outrage. These emotions are strengthened by extreme misinformation, which makes money for social media companies, destroys our brains, and destroys democracy. “Going viral” is “proof” that the conspiracy is true.

The Epistemic Crisis in Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge

From the ancient Greeks, we had a tradition of mentor and student in which the mentor was the authority on knowledge and both engaged in a humble quest for higher knowledge, battle-testing their ideas by putting them against their opponents’ objections.

Such rigor is in little evidence today. As a result, we live in an epistemic crisis: We can’t even agree what reality is anymore.

Already, for example, the attack on Nancy Pelosi, Paul Pelosi, has been politicized.

A group of people who say the 2020 election was stolen blame Nancy Pelosi so she was targeted and her husband was attacked instead. This is the most logical and clear explanation.

But conspiracy trolls have already weaponized misinformation to call the event a “media conspiracy” to hide the truth: The real event is that Paul Pelosi was having an illicit affair with the attacker and the violence was the result of a relationship gone bad.

Just as getting vaccines and wearing masks is politicized, so is the way society interprets the murder attempt of Paul Pelosi.

***

Are We Losing American Democracy to Conspiracies?

“Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” by Jonathan Haidt

David Pakman Video Interview with Jonathan Haidt

We are trapped in a Groundhog Day of Fragmented Realities

We are trapped in a Groundhog Day, a term for being trapped in a crucible. According to John Haidt, author of the essay “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” the trap is the fragmentation of human experience into “different realities” that don’t mesh with the other. Depending on which information silo you live in, your reality differs from other people’s, and these differences represent your cognitive biases, preferences, and moral development.

Haidt observes that this fragmentation leads to anxiety, alienation, and hostility toward one another. As he writes: “We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”

We are therefore trapped in a state of disharmony, alienation, and hostility among each other. We live in chaos. This is our crucible.

We are not in a Cooperation Mode of History

In more sunny periods of history, Haidt observes, we live in cooperation with one another, but to do so we have to address conflicts from a shared reality. Thanks to social media, the shared reality has been shattered and we don’t live in cooperation. Rather, we live in animosity toward each other, largely in a cultural and political war, but even within the same tribes, a spirit of irrationality causes them to splinter so that Red and Blue tribes have insane subsets that erode and metastasize the entire party.

The glue that holds society together has come undone from social media

Haidt writes that society is held together by three things:

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.

From Friendship to Marketing and Looking for the Viral Effect

Over time, people on Facebook and other platforms moved away from deepening friendships and instead looked to promote themselves and their brands.

As Haidt writes: “Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.”

2012 is when things started to go crazy:

Haidt writes that viral sharing started to motivate social media users to become obsessed with going viral and this is when the craziness began. As he writes:

Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.

What tended to go viral? Anger and outrage and making social media “a nasty place”

Going viral was best achieved through anger and outrage. Social media algorithms want our attention because that is their business model, so their algorithms targeted anger. As a result, anger on social media began to snowball.

By 2013, your posts could either leave you loved or hated, so you started to behave performatively to be loved, even if being loved meant venting hatred toward others.

As Haidt writes:

By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

The Race to the Bottom

Social media posts were now based on dishonesty, oversimplification, and catering to the mob mentality, or in other words, The Race to the Bottom.

As Haidt writes:

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

A whole country drunk and addicted to outrage and its collective judgment debased is the unraveling of a free democracy

Haidt observes that for a sustainable free democracy, we need a voting populace that is reasonably sane, educated, and not living in a Fever Swamp of heated passions. As he writes:

The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

James Madison’s “Nightmare”

James Madison feared that if society was divided by political factions that hated each other’s guts, there would be no cooperation; instead, political tribes would treat politics like a zero-sum game with winners and losers.

Mutual animosity would kill cooperation and in its place democracy could be threatened by civil war, either a cold nonviolent civil war or an outright civil war with violence.

Loss of Trust in Institutions

Social media and its rampant conspiracy theories erode trust in institutions

Conspiracy theories go viral on social media so they are rewarded by the algorithms.

A society beholden to frivolous distractions and two-bit conspiracy theories is not a serious society capable of upholding a free democracy.

Cooperation dies and in its place is “owning” your enemies

We care less about democracy than we do about “owning” our enemies and destroying them. As Haidt writes: “But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side.”

Social media has put different political tribes into different information silos and have “broken the mortar of trust.”

Haidt observes that the exponential growth of social media has fragmented us and resulted in a tribalistic society incapable of democracy. This breaking down of American society into hostile factions occurred between 2011 and 2015. During this time there was “The Great Awokening” on the Left and MAGA on the Right and the two groups have been ratcheting up their mutual hatred since. As he observes:

Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

Social media and its billions of injurious darts have brought injustice and political dysfunction in three ways.

First, trolls get all the attention, not average, responsible citizens with reasonable voices. The more grotesque the more attention. This ruthless aggression scales.

Secondly, political extremism enjoys more voice than moderation even if moderation is 80% of the country. The most white, rich groups on the Right and Left dominate their Extremes.

Thirdly, social media judges and cancels people before they’re given a fair defense. In the words of Haidt: “Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process.”

Information Silos lead to Structural Stupidity

In social media, we are isolated in our information silos that cater to our cognitive biases so never addressing a counterargument, we become more and more stupid and ignorant.

Not even agreeing on what constitutes reality or a health crisis to be specific, we live in what Jonathan Rauch calls an “epistemic crisis.”

A divided country cannot maintain democracy

Haidt reminds us that we are not more stupid; the problem is structural: the “enhanced virality of social media.” In other words, social media is a weapon and this weapon makes for stupid conversation, aggressive political discourse, and a country that is getting more and more divided to the point that it cannot uphold democracy.

Disinformation is the tool of autocrats

Disinformation, a tool of autocrats, is going to get worse, not better. We currently do not have any countermeasures in place to repel weaponized disinformation and bad political actors are seizing upon the opportunity to win their political battles by using the same type of disinformation used by Russia’s Putin and Germany’s Nazis. In the words of Haidt:

In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry. But back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of shit available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality stuff produced by bots).

“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

When you confuse a public and tire them with constant lies and disinformation, you break them into despair, they shrug their shoulders with apathy, and say, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” You’ve defeated them.

Misinformation, extremism, fear of being Twitter-shamed: all these things combined have made us scared, apathetic, conformist, and oblivious to more reasonable voices that might save our democracy.

Haidt proposes 3 reforms to save our democracy

Haidt proposes that we “harden democratic institutions,” reform social media, and “prepare the next generation.”

***

Review of Jonathan Haidt

Since 2009 when social media scaled, we started living in separate information and news bubbles, causing us to mistrust each other. Many of these information bubbles are conspiracy-soaked.
Social fragmentation is antithetical to cooperation and weakens democracies.
We’ve had a breakdown of trust in our major institutions. This has cleared the way for crazy beliefs in conspiracies.
We’ve developed a misguided trust in unreliable sources and ourselves as “experts” who can push the real experts away and embrace conspiracy theories.
The Viral Effect gives false credence to conspiracies so that the popularity of an idea becomes its power, not its truth. This results in the growth of conspiracies.
Misinformation spreads on social media faster than legacy media can slow it down with vetted facts so that conspiracies flood the mass consciousness.
Misinformation creates chaos, but the very same misinformation provides conspiracy theories, which give their believers a false sense of understanding and control.
History teaches us that conspiracies are the tool of the autocrat.
A public confused and fatigued by a flood of misinformation gives up on the notion of truth, credibility, accountability, and critical thinking. They shrug their shoulders in despair and say, “I don’t know what to believe anymore. All I know is the cost of gas.”

***

Sample Thesis Statements

Sample #1

What kind of person gets their brain hijacked by a conspiracy theory? I’m afraid the answer is not a pretty one. Typically, a person who has failed to love and connect with others in a mature, meaningful way and who has deeply-rooted prejudices becomes the perfect personality for the True Conspiracy Believer. Not wanting to confront her personal failings, he scapegoats some Enemy Entity--Anthony Fauci, the WHO, the libs, the Woke, the Jews, the terrorists, the liberal media, the Immigrant Caravan, or some other Enemy Combatant. Secondly, this person is overwhelmed by life’s uncertainty and has a childish desire for a simple narrative to make sense out of the chaos. Third, this person is so deep into the social media rabbit hole that he is disconnected from real people, real news, and reality itself. This is a dangerous cocktail that turns this person into a radicalized conspiracy believer.

Sample #2

Why are people on both the Left and the Right anti-vaxxers? It seems there are plenty of conspiracies out there for people of any political persuasion. For the Right, anti-vaxxing sentiments are rooted in hostility for “big government,” the liberal plot to join China to create a world order, and a weaponizing of Covid to allow the Democrats to destroy the Republicans. On the Left, anti-vaxxing sentiments are rooted in hostility toward Big Pharma, a preference for alternative medicine to mainstream science, and the belief that “personal choice” is superior to being a “sheeple,” and anecdotal evidence of children getting vaxxed and immediately becoming autistic.

Sample #3

Anti-vaxxer beliefs are built on a wobbly foundation of logical fallacies.

Sample #4

Eric Hoffer's perennial classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, published in 1951, is a cogent explanation of conspiracy believers today. The conspiracy believer is marked by a sense of personal failure, a cowardice that prevents honest self-inspection to account for the personal failure, a lust for power and easy opportunities for self-advancement, fear of future change, and faith in an "infallible leader" who possesses some theory to make sense of their world.