dead oppossum on Nostr: it tends to be intellectuals with social status who are actually highly susceptible ...

it tends to be intellectuals with social status who are actually highly susceptible to these kinds of things, if you've spent time studying cults like me, cult recruits or people who become immeshed in conspiracy theories aren't mindless sheep who just believe what they're told but people who are looking for something deeper, who are suspicious of surface appearances and assume there is some higher wisdom underneath, radical politiical ideoogies ( i use that in a neutral descriptive sense ) do appeal to a similar kind of 'seeker' with promises of revealed wisdom, that is what 'radical' means, to dig below the surface, to get at the root... marxism and anarchism as well fascism/nazism, in the latter case the parallels with esotericism are quite explicit.

With mass memetic disinfo campaigns and large spectacular events, this process has accellerated, where one basically speed runs all these stages and gets to the deeper revealed truth, like a recent *event* of this magnitude, all of the major conspiracy theories were worked out in a span of a few hours on twitter, no doubt assisted by AI, itself trained on a century of conspiratorial texts.