Government overreach is endemic. Pharmaceutical execs and shareholders place profit above people. The for-profit American healthcare system is broken in many places despite people within the system doing amazing work. Data privacy is a nightmare and too few citizens care about, or even understand, how they’re being monetized and tracked. Silicon Valley leaders market utopia as the end result of their products when we need much bigger structural changes. Big businesses are major drivers of climate change.
All of the above are true. Each sentence provides foundational, even existential, talking points for the public to discuss. In a less polarized society, they would be at the tip of every tongue.
Yet what happens from tongue to eardrum is distorted when filtered through the conspiratorial mind. In the ever-frantic rush for attention capture, conspiracist influencers must pump out volume 10 paranoia regarding every topic.
Here’s an example of that phenomenon in practice.
Not that unusual, actually
The anonymous stocks and crypto account, unusual_whales, insinuates US congresspeople bought war stocks leading up to the Hamas terror attack. The handle purports to have good intentions, such as keeping tabs on the government—and, indeed, reporting on “unusual” congressional activity is important.
In this case, however, their post was weaponized, which seems intentional given that the post was published the day after the Hamas terror attack. Even though many of the purchases listed are from 2022, the insinuation is a sort of foresight by certain congresspeople.
From there, the post turned into content fodder for pro-crypto sites like Finbold, which often have a vested interested in spreading FUD about the US government. (The more uncertainty around legislators the better for members of an unregulated industry.)
As mentioned, some of the purchases that unusual_whales features are a year old. Yet Finbold runs with the notion that these specific purchases were “ahead of” the Hamas attack. Their writer opens with:
As tensions escalate between Israel and the Hamas group, it has been revealed US congressional leaders have been making some strategic investment moves into military-related stocks.
The construction of the sentence implies that the escalation in Israel has been preempted by congressional members, begging the obvious question from the conspiratorial mind: “What did they know?” Even the phrasing, “it has been revealed,” feeds the frenzy given that what was “revealed” by unusual_whales is via a public database that everyone has access to.
Enter Russell Brand. His fever-pitch episode on this topic is called “What They’re Not Telling You.” The insinuation, again, is that congresspeople had insider knowledge that an attack was imminent, instead of the more boring and predictable likelihood that war stocks are always good bets. That’s not an endorsement of their purchases—I believe such trading should be illegal—just the reality of living in a country with an inflated defense budget, and living in a world that’s always at war, somewhere.
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