breaking: wearing tinfoil hats will brainwash you faster

According to an empirical study of the subject, a tinfoil hat does the exact opposite of protecting you from evil brainwashing and propaganda rays.

The tinfoil hat is the official symbol of the paranoid and conspiracy obsessed, a long established shorthand for people so out of touch with reality, they’ll legitimately fear mind control rays being broadcast through phones and satellites. In the conspiracy community, this is actually not a fringe view, and the general assumption is that the powers that be are constantly beaming propaganda in various evil experiments that test brainwashing through various implausible frequencies.

Usually, the idea is that these broadcasts create a pliant population ready to ignore obvious scheming around them, or rise up in defense of the villainous elites should all the “red pilled internet researchers” get too close to compromising their schemes for continued world domination.

Warnings about coordinated campaigns to distort reality for malicious gain are at the heart of the Flat Earth Grand Conspiracy Theory of Everything, a recurring theme on the evil version of Goop ran by Alex Jones until the Sandy Hook lawsuit, and make a guest appearance in many salacious and unlikely tales of sinister elites manipulating world affairs through sex slaves. But if the tinfoil hat is supposed to help shield you from at least some of these brainwashing rays that lull the sheeple around you into a state of false contentment, the obvious question is whether it would actually work.

I mean, if the powers that be have the creativity and resources to build and deploy mind control technology across the world, they’d also be creative enough to trick those most likely to avoid it. And believe it or not, according to a study done by MIT researchers, tinfoil hats actually amplify transmissions broadcast at frequencies 1.2 GHz and 1.4 GHz, as well as those at 2.6 GHz. These bands are allocated to GPS, satellite communications, and critical mobile phone infrastructure, respectively.

If some nefarious government entity is using cell phones and satellites to mess with people’s minds, a tinfoil hat would actually make its job much easier, which is why the researchers even say that it’s not really that big of a stretch to imagine disinformation agents trying to infiltrate conspiracy communities with tales of how tinfoil hats gave them clarity they didn’t think was possible while urging their “fellow truth-seekers” to try the same experiment.

Obviously, they were joking, but the joke illustrates the real problem with conspiracy ideation. Once you start believing that somebody’s out to get you, or mess with you for some malicious reason, everything becomes suspect, even advice to protect you from the people out to get you. Something as simple as a random guess that tinfoil should block radio signals that didn’t take the various frequency bands into account can be spun into a tale of subterfuge and ominous machinations.

And it’s even more ridiculous if we note that actually manipulating someone’s mind requires the careful application of magnets at point blank range, over an extended period of time, in a clinical setting, to the exact part of the brain you need to target to trigger the intended effects…

note: this post was originally published on 05.06.2019 on the old blog, and was lightly edited for style and logical flow. I moved it here because it’s evergreen and the study with its implications is honestly, just way too hilarious not to periodically bring up.