Jones explains the choice Americans face with a bizarre, violent, lowkey-racist allegory: imagine you stop at the grocery store "on your way back home from church on a Wednesday night," and as you return to your car, a couple of "thugs … pull knives on you" and ask for "everything you got" and start coming on to your wife. Jones says you can let the thugs tie you up and take you to your house, where they'll get the codes to your safe, violate your wife, and "kill you while you cry." Or, Jones posits, you can "explode" in the grocery-store parking lot, "rip the knife out the guy's hand, and stab it right into his throat." This is analogous to our current situation, he insists, with the globalists standing in for the thugs: "You are under lockdown, you're under martial law. And it's just gonna get worse the more you submit to it."
Conspiracists are drawn to this fantasy of domination and submission because they refuse to accept that people are willingly surrendering their individual autonomy for the common good. Americans are looking out for each other, staying home even when they're not especially at risk, and calling on the government to take care of their basic needs. No one is drawing a knife on us.
This is too much for the conspiracist to bear. Their libertarian worldview is seemingly repudiated by the fact that, when faced with such a serious crisis, Americans are, by and large, not behaving like libertarians. It is easier for conspiracists to believe the pandemic is a globalist plot to brainwash us than to believe that Americans will give up certain freedoms with little if any pressure from any government or cabal — that a little bit of peer pressure and genuine selflessness is all it takes. Behind the fear of a conspiracy, behind the fear that citizens will be easily duped, is a greater fear: that no conspiracy is necessary.
(@disclosetv) <a href="https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1257567413954117632?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 5, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>