Time Travelling Crackpots

So, Charlie Kirk was some kind of time travelling Messiah, sent to our time to ensure that the 'right' timeline came to pass. but he was 'monitored' constantly by 'agents' of dark forces.  No, that's not an outline for another satirical piece for The Sleaze, nor the plot of a forthcoming Christian graphic novel (soon to be a major film), but the is actually the latest whack-a-doodle Kirk-conspiracy theory put out there by right-wing agitator and Trump cheerleader Candace Owens.  Apparently, this particular piece of insanity has been a bridge too far for many of the extreme right loons who follow her - they could, it seems, buy all her schtick about Kirk's widow conspiring against him, so that she could take over his neo-Nazi 'Christian' Hitler Youth style movement, but him being from the future was just too mind-blowing even for them.  Which is saying something, bearing in mind that these are basically the self same nutters who bought into all that QAnon crap and seemed to believe that pizza parlours were fronts for high level peadophiles (and Satanic child sacrifices), or that furniture catalogue listings for office equipment were actually code for child trafficking.  (That's right, you ordered a filing cabinet and instead received a pre-pubescent girl sex slave - which could be quite a shock if all you wanted was somewhere to store your paperwork).  

I suppose that we should be thankful that at least some of these fruitcakes are finally beginning to recognise that the people they have been listening to and allowing to shape their opinions are actually crackpots - those that aren't morally bankrupt, grifters or just plain evil, that is.  Unfortunately, there still seem to be a lot of Americans out there still willing to support a president who, if I'm to be charitable, is certifiably insane, or if I'm not, a senile old fool.  But hey, should we expect anything less from a people who elected a rapist as president (for the second time)?  And no, the rapist comment isn't gratuitous, it illuminates his foreign policy - is it any wonder that a man who doesn't understand the concept of 'No means no' with regard to women, doesn't understand it with regard to the territory of sovereign nations?  ('I just need to grab Greenland by the pussy').  But getting back to the original point, I do find it extremely concerning that so many people seem to be willing to believe this sort of crackpottery and to use these charlatans as their primary source of information rather than more reputable news sources.  In the UK, a lot of it, I'm convinced, is down to poor education, with the Tories spending the better part of fourteen years ensuring that the education sector does anything but teach students critical thinking skills.  In the US, a lot of it, I suspect, is parochialism, with many, many people having no apparent interest in anything going on outside of their state borders, let alone their national borders.  Consequently, they have little idea of the bigger international picture and the fact that, in today's world, isolationism really isn't an option. 

 But many of them, (including well-educated yanks of my acquaintance), never seem to read a newspaper or watch a TV news broadcast, preferring instead to get their information from online sources of dubious provenance.  Their defence is that you just can't trust that mainstream media which has its own agenda and biases, etc.  Which is true, to some extent, but easily countered by gleaning your daily news intake from a variety of news sources with differing perspectives and political affiliations.  I've found that the internet makes this very easy to do - I generally look over news aggregators like the MSN homepage when I open my browser and subsequently get a pretty good and balanced overview of what's going on in the world.  But apparently, those crackpot sites and pure propaganda outlets they seem to favour are easier to read.  Probably because they don't ask you to think about what they are saying, offering no nuance or dissenting opinions and presenting as fact what are actually either speculation or the rantings of some highly dubious crank.  Who wants the boring truth when you can get fantastic lies, like Charlie Kirk being a time traveller?