conspire (v.)

late 14c., "aspire or plan maliciously, agree together to commit a criminal or reprehensible act," from Old French conspirer (14c.), from Latin conspirare "to agree, unite, plot," literally "to breathe together," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + spirare "to breathe" (see spirit (n.)), perhaps on the notion of "to agree (by spoken oath) to commit a bad act." Or perhaps the notion is "to blow together" musical instruments, i.e., "to sound in unison."

"When a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/whats-new-about-conspiracy-theories

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/07/700998358/throughline-how-conspiracy-theories-helped-to-create-the-u-s

This American Life - Ferguson Conspiracy and Alabama Elections

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/671/anything-can-be-anything

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6282974/pdf/EJSP-48-897.pdf

https://hapgood.us/2019/05/07/the-curation-search-radicalization-spiral/

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-alexa-search-for-the-one-perfect-answer/

The Book of Daniel

Manchurian Candidate

The Jungle

Project

Conspiracy Board

YouTube Video

Conspiracy theories occur when people attempt to apply a pattern to closely related events. It is like creating a connect-the-dots picture without any numbers to indicate where to make the connections. You are presented with a series of dots and asked to create your own picture. The dots are real, but the connections are your own creation. How do you decide to connect the dots?Do you rely on outside sources to connect them for you? Can you trust those sources? Should the dots even be connected?

What is the best way to construct the truth (connections) about our world given a pile of facts (dots) that may or may not be related.

Final

Scenario: While scrolling through your social media (FB, Insta, SnapChat, etc.) you see a story that may or may not be true. How do you determine whether to believe it or not?

Create a Flyer/Poster/Video for middle and high school students that will teach them a series of steps to help determine the validity of a story.

Heading/Title

Subtitle

List of Steps (Each of these should start with a verb.)

Example of how you would do it. For these examples you will either have to make up a story or focus on a real/fake story that you have seen.

Example:

You hear a story that Ferguson protesters are being killed.

Step 1 - Find key words from the news story to create a search

After reading the intitial story, you should pull key terms like Ferguson, police, deaths, murders. These are general terms you should also get specific names such as Darren Seals , Deandre Joshua , and Bassem Masri .

Step 2 - Conduct an Internet search using these terms.

A search of "Darren Seals Ferguson" returned the following information.