Rupert Murdoch’s Vice Magazine Attacks Conspiracy Theorists

Rupert Murdoch owned publication, Vice magazine, has launched a war against conspiracy theorists in its latest issue this April 2016. 

According to Vice, a former conspiracy theorist who claims the world of conspiracies is a big “cult”, represents the entire world of alternative media which they say needs to be shut down.

Stephanie Wittschier told Vice Magazine that “truthers” (or conspiracy theorists) are dangerous nazi’s who want to lure people into joining their dangerous cult.

According to the Vice.com hit-piece:

The 35-year-old German was deep into the conspiracy theory scene for years before she dropped out, turning her attention to educating outsiders about the sinister truth behind Third Reich truthers and “chemmies” a.k.a people who believe the government is dumping toxic agents in plane vapor trails. Now she and her husband, Kai, run a Facebook page and Twitter account called Die lockere Schraube (“The Loose Screw”). And they’ve since incurred the wrath of their former conspiracy colleagues.

Wittschier’s journey into the world of conspiracy theories began when she watched a documentary about the alleged inconsistencies in the 9/11 attacks. “Immediately afterwards she went online and googled ‘conspiracy’ and ‘9/11,'” Kai told Broadly. Wittschier got hooked. “She started to talk about elites, the Illuminati… At a certain point it stopped being fun, as it became impossible to talk to her. She stopped listening and seemed closed off to any reasonable discussion.”

On the internet, Wittschier found people who shared her convictions. “That’s how it was,” she writes via email. “Back then, I had a friend who was into the same ideological conspiracy [stuff] and we got along pretty well. We believed in the same stuff, browsed the same forums, we used to talk about all sorts of things and most of the time we shared the same opinion.” Wittschier felt accepted among these like-minded people, who would ridicule outsiders’ attempts to re-educate them: “Those people [with different opinions] are representatives of the system or get paid; so-called sheep, people who don’t think.”

At the height of her obsession—especially when it came to chemtrails—Wittschier was part of various groups on Facebook, participated in a forum called Allmystery, and was active on YouTube. But in August 2012, her best friend in the conspiracy world started to question and oppose certain theories, and began the slow process of dissociating herself from the world she shared with Wittschier.

Wittschier spent months questioning the conspiracy theories and she began doing her research for the first time: “At a certain point I started thinking: Gosh, my best friend was totally right. I was shocked. That’s the moment you realize that you have invested all that time and money just to make a complete fool of yourself. It was awful. I felt ashamed, like a total prat. I just wanted to crawl into a hole. I thought about my family, my sister and my husband und all the things I told them.”

Vice is no stranger to being the subject of conspiracy theories itself when in 1994 it mysteriously published an article showing a cartoon of Beavis & Butthead dressed as Al Qaeda operatives flying planes into the twin towers. A scene eerily similar to the 9/11 attacks some 7 years later.

The Vice article goes onto claim that Truthers/conspiracy theorists/cult members are putting people in danger by trying to expose the truth about world events:

According to Wittschier, the issue goes beyond chemtrailers who threaten the press and any former believers. “With hindsight, it was like a cult,” she said. “At first it was very exciting to know secrets that others don’t, and to be able to educate others. They were a close community with rules, hierarchies and so on. It wasn’t until I swung around I realized the pressure they were exerting at the same time—people with different views were, in my opinion, aggresively and systematically attacked and were blocked or deleted within minutes. I was put under observation and everything I did online got recorded, collected, and noted. I can see a lot of similarities to cults like Scientology. For me they are one and the same thing.”

Stepahnie Wittschier claims to have firsthand knowledge of how deadly serious some of them are about their often-ridiculed fears. “At a certain point you come upon things that make you think Are you serious? Some conspiracy ideologists say that they want to die because they can’t take it any more—announced suicides. On his wall, one of them even appealed to the Illuminati to finally kill him. That beats everything. That’s not even an opinion anymore. because they’re putting themselves and others in danger. There are just some seriously crazy people in that scene who are not just peacefully expressing their beliefs.”