Part 2. The relief that conspiracy theories offer — Why Conspiracy Theories? Powerlessness comes with a sinister list of side effects. A powerless person will look for self-worth, uniqueness and attempt to understand a world that is, by its nature, without order. It is a pain that leads a person to hold tightly to an imaginative and wildly unsupported…

Part 1. What leads a person to believe conspiracy theories. — It’s a tale as old as time. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love and marries girl. Boy starts staying up late watching YouTube videos and becomes increasingly convinced that a cabal of nefarious Jewish businessmen controls the world. Hollywood is in on it, and America is ground zero for…

My first flight. Part one of a series about the lessons learned over four months while earning my pilot’s license in 2020. The Irresponsible Child I was nervous as we walked to the plane that day in August, not because I was scared of death or injury, but because deep down, I didn’t…

The story of a country built on very different views, and how that unites us. Like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, increasingly, our country bifurcates into two houses predicated on moral mandates intrisic to who we are: House Conservative and House Liberal. Most of us realize this, but we don’t often…

It can be hard to talk to someone that you believe is a racist. How do you even do that? You don’t. The moment the word racist enters the conversation in reference to another person or something they believe, even if it’s a loose association, the brain releases a stress hormone in…

Statistics can be one of the most divisive and harmful misinformation tools, and I have seen it all over Facebook. I have attempted to make sense of the apparent conflict of reality that statistics represent. I knew nothing about data science when I began to write this, and after researching…

We are becoming increasingly polarized. Not since the Civil War have we been so far apart ideologically in our country.(1) Even during the lead up to the Civil War, we often found more in common then we do today. Not only are we polarizing faster than we ever have as…

How America’s Ministry of Propaganda is decentralized and highly active. When I boarded the bus in rural Arkansas to go to a new school in the Seventh grade, I was extremely nervous. Raised as a military brat, this would be my first time attending school off-base, and I wasn’t sure I would fit in. I didn’t make it far down the school bus aisle before I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder. I turned to see four older boys, probably 9th graders. They forcefully lead me down the aisle, finally stopping at the back of the bus. I can still remember the eyes of the bus driver in the rearview mirror, watching as the leader of this group picked me up by my neck against the rear door and asked me:

Many people that I know are looking around with confusion at why our fellow countrymen are waging a ground offensive in our cities and towns. It may feel like out of nowhere, we are expected to just accept our “white privilege” and acknowledge “systemic racism.” __________________________________ We are wondering why we can’t go back to the normality that we enjoyed a mere three weeks ago, others just don’t see what all the fuss is all about. Instead of investigating, we argue about the Confederate Flag over morning coffee and get into semantical debates about hashtags. …