I believe you'd have to be cloistered in a room of silence for the last decade or more to have avoided people referring to something as a "conspiracy theory" with a tone of ridicule and dismissiveness.
In fact you would have to be out if it since the Kennedy assassination when they first invented the term conspiracy theorist in order to denigrate anyone looking into the assassination beyond the official narrative. They have been using it ever since then.
Yes, but it was possible for people not to encounter it. Now it is so often lobbed as a grenade at anything someone doesn't want to listen to much like racism, etc. So it is impossible to avoid now.
In the past you only encountered it IF you had an interest in certain topics. Now all you have to do is say something someone doesn't want to hear. They can smile and say "conspiracy" as they virtue signal and suddenly feel good about themselves rather than actually listening to what was making them uncomfortable.
In the past we didn't have the internet, the average person would never even have these debates and if they did it would be with someone they know in person, not strangers anonymously. I like to tell such people that I am not discussing a conspiracy theory, I am discussing conspiracy facts.
I prefer to tell them I am discussing possibilities as often the facts are not available without a time machine.
that's funny you should mention that because I have a theory about Trump's time machine, it sure would explain a lot.
Heh. It can leave you wondering. Right along with that day when you suddenly wonder how intentional and planned the things he says that people think are "stupid" actually are.
It seems to me a lot of those "stupid" things to say occur at exactly the right time. Right about when the media is starting to pay attention to something else.
I do the @newsagg and comparing the left leaning sites to any other source it is VERY obvious how Trump obsessed they are. They often fail to report on much more major things while they keep talking about the same Trump centric things.
Then they start to talk about other things and Trump will say something, or tweet something and suddenly they are back in the Trump zone.
I'm starting to think he may be doing that by design. Actually I've been suspecting that for awhile. Yet I am increasingly leaning towards that being probable.
His every tweet is carefully calculated and he knows that they can't help but to cover every single tweet breathlessly so when he is watching TV and it is not about him he can just tweet something and change what's on TV to being about whatever he wants it to be about. Twitter is like a remote control for him.