The Internet and the Bridge Collapse

In Baltimore yesterday the news was all bridge collapse, all day long, the biggest thing to happen here since the Ravens won the Super Bowl. 

Meanwhile, on the Internet, the entirely predictable conspiracy theory explosion was under way. This incident is a paradigmatic case because it is so obviously an accident; if the crew intended to ram the bridge as a terrorist attack, why would they warn authorities so that they successfully shut the bridge down and got the traffic off? I suppose Alex Jones' cyberattack is remotely possible, but that seems to me like a very crude way to proceed; how could you predict which way the ship would drift after it lost power? Quite likely it would just end up on a mudflat.

World War III isn't so bad, is it?

This guy doesn't seem to know that 1) in our world there are security cameras trained at every key piece of infrastructure 24/7, and 2) the news channels all say the same thing because they just parrot statements from government officials.

One of my sons follows conspiracy accounts for fun, and he says everyone is claming the attack was a "false flag." But surely for there to be a false flag, there has to be a flag? A false flag operation is when you blame one entity but another really did it. In this case, our government hasn't blamed anyone.

Apparently Barack and Michele Obama once made a documentary that included a scene of a huge ship running onto a beach, which somehow proves they were behind this attack.

Meanwhile in MAGA land, it's all the fault of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I mean, the shipping company is based in India and the whole crew is Indian, but they somehow promoted the wrong people for ethnic reasons anyway?

All the people I follow passed this stuff along with the tag, "predictable response." And it was predictable. 

What does that mean?

What, if anything, do the people who post this stuff really believe? Are a lot of them doing it for fun and profit?

But let's assume a lot of people really believe this stuff, or at least believe it is plausible. Why? How did we come to have this reservoir of distrust so vast and deep that even perfectly obvious accidents appear to people as sinister acts by evil cabals? Is this just hangover from Vietnam, the Cold War, and the Invasion of Iraq? If our government tried harder to be more honest, would that help? Or does this distrust spring from a deeper place?

The other day I was talking to my conspiracy-enjoying son about the fake moon landing thing, and he said, "To some of these people, everything the government says is a lie, and since all we know about the moon landing comes from the government, it has to be fake." But the people who say things like that constantly rely on "the government" to tell the truth – about the weather forecast, upcoming road closures, when the first day of school will be. How do they know which statements are just from the government, and which are from "the government"?

How much does any of this matter?