What Conspiracy Theories Can You Not Believe You Believed??

Tell us the juicy details!

Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash

Hi all! I’m prepping for multiple podcast releases for next month, so while I do that, I thought I would do a more light-hearted (lol…maybe?) post where we get to talk to each other about the crazy shit we used to believe! Or, even if it doesn’t qualify as full-blown conspiracy, something that you were told to believe —and is, shall we say, most likely not true. I’ll go first with a couple examples, and I can’t wait to hear what you used to believe.

I was listening to the podcast “First Person” recently that was interviewing a man who is promoting an alternative the College Board’s SAT and AP exams, based on “classical education” standards instead. This jogged my memory: A parent told me growing up that PTOs [Parent Teacher Organization] are good, and PTAs [Parent Teacher Association] are bad. Because of course we had an opinion on that. Turns out that PTAs are organized at a national level and do advocacy in D.C. for children and schools, promoting things like school lunches and working against school vouchers. OHHH. For a conservative evangelical who didn’t trust the government…it all makes sense now! But when I was little, I just knew we had An Opinion about this, but didn’t understand the nuances of why.

A more insidious conspiracy theory that I once believed was that 9/11 was an inside job. If you also believed this, you’re probably familiar with the argument about the temperature of heat from engine fuel, and how the planes couldn’t possibly have caused the collapse of the Twin Towers. I was only in 8th grade when 9/11 happened and very susceptible to what grown ups told me, but I still feel a little bad / sad that I earnestly believed this for a good little while.

And one last conspiracy theory: that the “theory of evolution” (emphasis by evangelicals on “theory”) was made up to make people lose their faith and let atheism (and probably communism, because it always came down to communism?) take over the world. Fossils in the fossil records were just plants, carbon dating was a hoax and invalid, all the things. We watched a lot of Kent Hovind and Ken Ham in my younger years!

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All right, give me the deets! Did you believe any of the above conspiracies, and were you ever confused as to why (but kept believing anyway, because kids are impressionable)? What other things did you believe? I probably believed a bunch of them right along with you!

And if you want to share with a friend who would enjoy this conversation…the button’s right here! Or find and tag me on Instagram!