Recently, u/streetancient asked the question, "What is the wildest conspiracy theory that you secretly believe in?" in r/AskReddit. Unsurprisingly, the answers poured in, and a vast majority of them were..........kind of enticing...?
For your viewing pleasure, here are some of the ones that actually made me pause for a sec:
(And obviously, these are just conspiracy theories, and there’s no proof to any of them, so just have fun with this.)
1. "Ireland began deliberately entering bad songs into the Eurovision Song contest in the '90s. After winning it consecutively for a few years, it began getting too expensive to host, so they sabotaged their chances of winning it."
2. "That the weight loss industry sets people up to fail, because if their products worked, they wouldn't have return customers."
3. "Disney only makes remakes to retain copyright on the stories."
4. "The reason why women's clothing still doesn't have real pockets is to sustain the entire purse industry."
5. "That our phones are listening to our conversations and are serving up advertisements based on what we’re talking about even when the microphone supposedly isn’t on."
6. "All beauty products/skin creams are a scam and are designed to make your skin need more of them constantly."
7. "They forced people back into offices despite the increased productivity, the lowered childcare costs, and time lost commuting because the real estate owners of those leases got PISSED."
8. "That countries' elected leaders aren't in charge at all, but there is a super rich elite behind-the-scenes who pull all the strings."
9. "Build-A-Bear came out with a bunch of new toys that were all the same shade of yellow right after their Minion launch severely underperformed. They had stockpiled yellow fabric in anticipation of the Minion toys selling well and getting a big production run and had to find a way to use it all."
Exhibit A:
Exhibits B, C, D, and — dare I say — E:
10. "I really believe the Will Smith slap was staged to get people to focus on the Oscars."
11. "My wife believes that basically any celebrity who gets Lyme disease is using it to disguise a rehab stay. Lyme disease is pretty rare, and even as people who spend loads of time in tick country, we've barely seen it — and my wife is a nurse."
12. "I love the Oxfordian Shakespeare authorship theory. The man we know as Shakespeare never had any formal schooling (yet wrote of the intricacies of high society and law, etc.), never traveled abroad (yet wrote of various countries), and in the only samples of his handwriting we have, he couldn't even spell his own name correctly. The widest believed theory is that Shakespeare's works were written by an Oxfordian Earl named Edward de Vere, who essentially wasn't allowed to write these things. Because of this, he credited them to a desperate actor."
13. "Paul Pierce pooped his pants during the 2008 NBA Finals. He sat on the floor apparently injured until he was taken off the court in a wheelchair only to return minutes later completely fine. Sitting on the floor and leaving in a wheelchair stopped anybody from seeing his doody stains."
14. "PETA is controlled opposition created by the meat industry to make vegans look bad to the public."
15. "Taylor Swift has control over Google results beyond normal search engine optimization. Try Googling anything about her and you will get pages and pages of positive coverage with hardly any criticism of her. I’ve been going down a real rabbit hole recently trying to figure out her deal, but the internet is an impenetrable wall of polished fluff pieces."
16. "The Dead Internet Conspiracy. A large part of the population of the internet and, thus, a large part of interactions on the internet are completely fake. Just faceless chat bots tooling around; generating social media posts, YouTube comments, and opinion articles on news sites. With the rise of AI-generated essays and research papers, it's becoming easier to draw lines between those papers and how random news articles can read in a way in which a human would never write."
17. "Mattress stores are money laundering businesses. There is no way that people are buying mattresses often enough to keep them in business."
18. "My mother believes that the coffee grinder machines at gas stations are fake, as in they make a lot of noise just to make you think what you're getting is fresh coffee. When they're 'grinding' the beans, you never see the beans move. One time, we called a gas station, and the employee said he didn't know how the coffee maker worked since 'a third party refills them and changes the flavors.'"
