What if I told you that your entire life was a lie and that everything you believed in was a series of plots developed by a sinister elite hell bent on world domination? Well, your reaction should be to say that I was incorrect. You should also recognize that I have no proof for such a claim, apart from appeals to emotion and conspiracy theories. However, because critical thinking has been attacked and maligned by right wing stooges with no arguments other than "cause the bible tells me so", it has become less and less likely for people to reject such tripe. So, I have decided to create a several part series that exposes each conspiracy theorist for the frauds that they are. What better place to start than a man by the name of Alan Watt (no, not the philosopher who has been dead for decades and that you can find on youtube mixed with trap music). Watt believed, among many other odd things, that the government was an elite cabal of evil power players hell bent on world domination. If that sounds like the famed Q Anon conspiracy movement to you, that is because it is essentially the same thing. Q anon is not new. It links directly to the old school new world order conspiracy theories that have been around since the days of Adolph Hitler, all of which are taken from the anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of The Elders of Zion. Watt believed wholeheartedly, or at least pretended to believe wholeheartedly, that chemical trails, sports, movies, television, music, and pretty much anything that was not reading or sitting around having paranoid delusions was created to brainwash the masses. Yes, Watt, like so many other conspiracy theorists, believed in the power of mind control. The interesting thing to note is that there is very little evidence that mind control actually works. I challenge you to find a peer reviewed source that actually states that brainwashing is even possible. You won't find one. Instead what you will find are a series of experiments that have been done with mind control, all of which have very different outcomes (that means it does not work by the way; in order for something to be proven to work scientifically, it must be repeatable). For example, some studies show that torture can make people tell the truth, while other studies show that torture does no such thing and may even actually make people rebel against their captors. Television is also thought to be mind control by people like Watt, supposedly hypnotizing people into watching it for long periods of time; this claim has also never been proven and hypnosis only seems to work when you tell people to do things they are comfortable with. Try telling a woman to take off her clothes in public after she has been "hypnotized" and see how far you get; you probably will not be able to see anything at all after that woman punches you in the face. Propaganda also has its limits. While people generally believe propaganda during great times of distress, such as pandemics or losing a job, they generally tend to not believe them when things are going well for them. So, you see, it is the despair that creates the belief in conspiracy theories, not the propagandist. The despair must exist before the propaganda works. Even marketing, the most effective form of propaganda, does not work every time. A marketing campaign is tailored to a unique audience and generally if you get a two percent return or higher, you are doing well as a marketer. Coca-cola, for example, has about one point five percent engagement rate on social media, and that is one of the most successful companies to ever exist. But brainwashing has to exist for the right, otherwise they cannot make you believe that the things you think are evil. I expose common right wing woo in this episode that is all about cutting through the bullshit.