breaking news: tinfoil hats are the real conspiracy

According to an empirical study of the subject, if you're trying to avoid the mind control rays of sinister government agencies, a tinfoil hat is the worst choice you could make.

The tinfoil hat is the official symbol of the paranoid and conspiracy obsessed, a shorthand for those so out of touch with reality, they 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 alongside various evil experiments in brainwashing through various implausible frequencies, usually to create a pliant population ready to ignore obvious scheming around them, or rise up in defense of the villainous elites should 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, 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 or if this too is a malevolent trick. 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 was using cell phones and satellites to mess with people's minds, a tinfoil hat would make its job much easier, which is why the researchers even posit that it's not 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.

Of course, the observations were clearly made in jest, but they illustrate 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 of those signals 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…