Fingertip access to more information than ever in the history of the world has not proven to be the boon we once thought it was. Instead, the internet is an overwhelming, 24/7 onslaught of billions of voices all trying to be heard. It’s more than any one person can handle.
You can’t really fault people for doing their best to make sense of the cacophony, can you? It’s just that, when big things happen — or lots of big things all at the same time — some folks out there might reach just a bit. Or, you know, a whole heck of a lot.
In the wake of two massive headline-grabbing events, conspiracy theorists think they’ve seen a pattern.
The alarming outbreak of a new, novel coronavirus has gripped the world as every day brings fresh, terrible news of more infections, farther around the globe, and an increasing death toll.
At the same time, we’re all dealing with the shocking tragedy of the death of Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, in a helicopter crash.
So, naturally, the conspiracy theory crowd decided to watch some old cartoons, and they think they’ve found a couple that predicted it all.
First off, well, you probably know where this is going.
Yeah, The Simpsons . In 30 years on the air, some of their predictions have borne out, like President Trump and the Super Bowl champs in ’92 and ’93. Pretty cool, right?
Well, conspiracy theorists out there think *The Simpsons* predicted the new coronavirus outbreak back in 1993.
In the episode “Marge in Chains,” Homer orders a “Juice Loosener” — finally a better way to get juice out of an orange than jamming it into your eye! — from overseas, where a worker coughs into the packaging, sending the “dreaded Osaka flu” to Springfield.
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That same episode also features a helicopter circling, out of control thanks to that flu.
Widespread disease outbreak is definitely good fodder for conspiracy theorists, but this episode was kind of a two-fer for them. However, although some footage of Kobe Bryant’s helicopter circling L.A. before the crash happened has surfaced, as conspiracy connections go, it’s not terribly convincing.
For some actual compelling evidence of a prediction, conspiracy theorists turned up a 2016 episode of Comedy Central cartoon Chamberlain Heights .
In that episode, a cartoon Kobe Bryant does indeed crash his helicopter before dying in an explosion.
It’s on-the-nose enough that Comedy Central has pulled the episode out of its rotation, and the Legends of Chamberlain Heights official Twitter account posted a message about it, encouraging fans to avoid sharing the clip out of respect for Bryant’s family.
So, that prediction was actually pretty chilling.
The question is, why do conspiracy theorists even look for predictions to big events like these?
The idea is that the events were actually planned, and dropping little predictions into popular culture will soften people’s reactions when the events come around. The concept is referred to as ” predictive programming .”
Of course, it’s up to the conspiracy theorists to use their big brains to unravel the mystery and see what’s really going on behind the curtain.
Of course, if these cartoons were laying the groundwork for some kind of vast conspiracy, they sure were a long time in the making.
Along the same lines of thinking, someone could have said The Simpsons ‘s Osaka flu predicted SARS, but no one was saying that back in 2003.
The outbreak of an infectious disease was bound to happen eventually, and it happens to fit now because predictive programming theories have become much more prevalent on social media than they were in the early 2000s.
Of course, the President Trump prediction was much less likely to come true than the outbreak of an infectious disease, but at the time, the implausibility of the scenario was the point.
Dan Greaney, who wrote the episode predicting Trump’s presidency, told The Hollywood Reporter that it was a “warning to America.”
“And that just seemed like the last logical stop before hitting bottom,” he said. “It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane.”
And that’s one of the big problems with predictive programming theories.
As the RationalWiki put it, it’s “the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose nature of the claims: that the less plausible the claims, and the more contrived the link, the more powerful it must be.”
Not to mention that, especially in events involving mass deaths like a virus outbreak or a shooting, don’t you think someone would speak out? Wouldn’t there be a whistleblower among the director, the animators, the voice actors, and so on?
So, if you see one of the many, many conspiracy theory videos out there about the recent tragedies, stay skeptical.
h/t: The Daily Dot
