Humans of CPS (1/24): Ian B.

“This is a story about how I started researching conspiracy theoretic theories. In 2016, I went back to school after not being in school for five years to pursue my Ph.D. in communication studies. The school that I was going to was primarily interested in studying presidential rhetoric which predominantly focused on old dead white people. I did not find that particularly interesting which meant that I was having a lot of trouble maintaining interest. People were studying Reagan’s  “City upon the Hill” speech, Obama’s Democratic Nomination speech, Bernie Sanders’s Civil Rights speech in the 1970s. I decided to do things a little differently and study how Tila Tequila has been tweeting about the flat earth society. Part of it was supposed to troll other people in the class. I was also convinced that no teacher would ever say no to any of these ideas because everybody else was writing about things that I thought were super dumb, and to my surprise my teacher found my topic to be very interesting. Later on, I had my class vote on what I should do next. My favorite topic submission was a speech about how there’s a secret Nazi base on the dark side of the moon!”