In June, Rep. Eric Burlison, a Missouri Republican serving on the House Oversight Committee, appeared on BlazeTV’s Prime Time with Alex Stein, where he discussed his belief that giants once existed. Burlison told Stein he was scheduled to be at “NephCon 2025,” a conference focused on fringe topics including the biblical Nephilim —figures in Genesis that some interpret as the giant offspring of angels and human women.
He credited Timothy Alberino’s podcast with sending him “far down the rabbit hole,” eventually reaching claims that the Smithsonian Institution is hiding evidence, the bones of past giants that lived on the Earth. Burlison suggested that, as a member of the Oversight Committee, he could investigate the Smithsonian.
Many people have extremely low literacy levels and have difficulties with media criticism. In the US, this is largely driven by the Right’s attack on education in response to Brown v Board of Ed - if black children get to go to school, they don’t want them to receive a good education. The higher echelons of the Right can afford to send their children to private schools anyway. Many schools in the US also spent the past decade not teaching phonics (using a “whole reading” model that was tested and proven to be ineffective in the 1970’s) and school English curriculums have deprioritized reading entire novels in favor of the passages that show up on standardized tests. Subjects like history and science have also gotten the shrift in favor of more time on math and reading in the decontextualized format they use on these tests.
We live in an era of violent anti intellectualism. It is trivially easy to make shit up, and the internet provides a constant stream of slop. This was bad before AI, AI has accelerated it. And with a distrust in institutions and the idea of an “expert” in general - people will not believe anyone that goes against their pet ideas. It makes them feel smarter, that they know something that the experts don’t. Those latte drinking elitists think they know things, but I know better! There’s the double edged sword of they “know” that you can’t believe everything online, but what that ends up doing is allowing them to pick and choose what they believe. You can provide a Wikipedia article demonstrating that what they are claiming is a 1000 year old Incan carving is a modern art project, but they’ll just claim Wikipedia isn’t a valid source - while uncritically believing “Amazing Facts Channel.”
It’s an attack on the idea of knowledge itself, the world of “alternative facts.” You can pick and choose what to believe - to live in a world of make believe where you are The Chosen One because you know all of these things that the “experts” are too dumb to see.
It kind of reminds me of my ex husband, when I tried to explain how to solve quadratic equations to him. “But what if you could just take the square root of the whole thing and pretend x is that? Isn’t all of math made up anyway?” He had deep insecurities because he had been raised to believe he was a genius, and couldn’t stand being wrong about anything. He’d be furious when I looked up basic facts he was incorrect about because he would constantly belittle my intelligence.
I don’t know if the problem is fixable. Maybe if the internet dies, maybe if we lose Facebook and AI and everything else in some sort of Carrington event and have to go back to books. I don’t know.