Shadowland

Thank you to Joe Berlinger and The Atlantic for being another media outlet, in addition to Vice, that treats the spread of this conspiracy cancer on America seriously. Q-Anon is no longer cute or funny. It and all its offshoots are dangerous to our society and this series brings it to the forefront like none I've seen.

Vice News did an excellent job of talking about QAnon for the sham that it is with their "QAnon: The Search for Q," but that series focused more on the leaders and not the participants. The leaders are few, the participants are legion, and that is what is dangerous.

If you are non-Q, and not easily led into a conspiracy mindset, you will enjoy this series. I'm not saying it won't make you mad, because it likely will. Personally, I could not be more fed up with what alleged ADULTS are doing in the US to tear down democracy, and why? Money. As the program points out shortly into the first episode, conspiracy theories are a billion-dollar industry, and the people that are believing them and acting on them are NOT the people making the money -- in fact, they're the ones that are ruined the most; financially, emotionally, and in their lives and relationships with other people. The people telling them to believe are the ones making the most money.

The show lets this play out on your screens with little commentary, and the participants show you who they are, and tell you what they believe. This is an important show, but a mere drop in the bucket against the conspiracy theory industry. I wish there were MANY more shows that exposed truth to people like this one does. It's what is needed now more than ever. This scourge is not going away as much as we may want it to. It's only getting more serious by the day.

I started watching this hoping to understand how so many people believe this conspiracy of absurd ideas. After 3 episodes, I couldn't take anymore. It's 95% conspiracy characters spewing their rhetoric. So far, there was no mention of Trump! Is he not part of this story? Are there any disclaimers after hearing these vaccine, election deniers fantasy's? This documentary has given voice to the misinformed, to people who had a need, and Trump took advantage of their minds & their bank accounts.

Where the documentary does succeed is in its access to the people who are still down that rabbit hole. They spoke freely and it was fascinating but where is the other side? I would love someone to make a documentary about what can we do to change this?

Remember, we had a conspiracy theory of collusion with Russia that was debunked.

Well, to be honest it wasn't even investigated as Muller couldn't even answer basic questions about the key components of what he was supposed to look into.

We later found out the FBI knew right from the start the dossier was fake.

Here you have the opposite.

They look into "theories" but ignore the fact that the much of it has been proven true. Medicines that were banned work - are over 80% effective. Harms from the vaccines. Masks not helping and more.

Amounts to a political attack, ignoring the real story.

Yet another brazenly fake 'documentary' using actors and staged events (how do you get three different camera angles during the same phone call, by a lady in a pizza kitchen smaller than an RV?), to promote whatever is the latest trending pop-culture version of what everyone is supposed to think.

Advertisers and entertainers have been using audience data since long before the time of 'social media' to craft narratives, based in part on what audiences will respond to, and in part on what ideas might best manipulate their interest going forward.

It isn't any conspiracy, it's just a tried-and-true business model: find out what they want, use it against them to make them want other things too, and build in enough ideological cues to have them believe that by taking this maneuvering of their viewpoints at face value, they are somehow ending up on the correct side of things.

This kind of mind-candy isn't even about politics or ideology really, it's just about what entertainment and marketing have always been about: finding one way or another to part fools from their money. If it didn't work so well, nobody would produce this kind of transparent fiction and call it 'information.'

Why not interview the many doctors, scientists, nurses, politicians and teachers etc. Who also share these beliefs that something just wasn't right about what happened during covid or the experimental vaccines and still to this day isn't okay. This documentary I find can be perceived 2 ways, I don't believe in division, however those who consider themselves liberals or lefties might perceive this as funny and just reaffirm their beliefs and on the other side would support the other side of beliefs and reaffirm it. But again, why not show the world that not only ordinary people believe in so called conspiracies but some would say it is truth, and some of those people are doctors, nurses, scientists, teachers, police officers and the list goes on. Perhaps then this bias perception would change.