If I were a betting man, I'd wager this woman spends a lot of time scrolling through right-wing posts on Facebook about the "invasion" of Britain. A Brexit type, if you will.

That's just speculation in this specific case, but the amount of fear-mongering right-wing content on social media is absolutely a contributor to this kind of worldview more broadly.

There were people who went out and shot at water towers during the radio airing of War of the World's. Floridians will routinely try to make hurricanes go away by shooting at them. Police get hundreds of calls about Venus every year.

There's no fixing this type of stupid. All we can hope for is to keep it from spreading too far.

The solution is multi-factorial and will take a generation to implement. Expand the social safety net, expand public education to encompass critical thinking skills and researching skills, restrict private media monopolies that hold public consciousness in a deathgrip.

The way to handle it is to find the "The Architects of Fear", getting rid of them, and making sure no new ones take their place.

So that's why the US banned Toyota Hyluxes.

It's not. The real reason is so much stupider. IIRC it happened partially because of eggs.

I remember the early 2000s when basically 90% of all Americans were absolutely certain that jihadists were going to attack their local supermarket any minute now because Power Cable, Nebraska was such a strategic target.

Heck, there was a bomb scare because of an advertisement campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force that involved placing PCBs with LEDs on them that would display characters from the show. Because surely Al Quaeda would put conspicuous LED displays on their bombs.

News media want people to panic so they keep tuning in. Panicked people tend to come up with remarkably stupid scenarios like "Al Quaeda have unlimited resources and can show up anywhere to shoot people at random" or "Hamas want to take Dorcester as a strategic location to strike at Israel from".

I literally had an old lady tell me that black lives matter was going to take over destroy the UK and take over Britain. Like the organisation. There are some people that are so deep in right-wing newspaper and Facebook shit that they will unironically spout something like that.

I lot of people are like this. They don't conceive a world outside their own. When I was in grade school, so many people in my hometown thought that... we were going to be the next Columbine (not like there were any kids actively acting odd, just the feeling that we were somehow important enough to have such a tragedy). They also thought several big companies were going to open up shop (like Best Buy, Red Lobster, etc... it was the 90s). Currently, some people still live there who think they have the highest number of Somalians living there (they don't), the largest amount of Muslims (they don't), and they're like the drug central for the state (they're not). It's a small town filled with people who don't really travel more then a few hours any direction and so they really don't have a concept of what's outside their world. The town of 20,000 must represent ALL 8+ billion people. If something bad is happening somewhere, then it MUST be happening really close to them. I had someone message me about how the Chinese were basically getting ready to invade them (so many texts about that). Oh, and after 9/11, so many people legit though that small town no one knows exists, was definitely going to be targeted next by middle-eastern terrorists...

victim of mass media brain rot

My thoughts as well.

It makes me wonder about my own fears. How many of them were put there by propaganda?

Well, duh. The photo isn't of Doncaster because it's already fallen to Hamas.

There would have been mention of some of the paragliders shot.

tbf,

the fact that a handful of paraglider managed to overcome one of the most advanced and well financed military on the world, through one of the most militarised and surveilled borders in the world, into one of the most militarised countries in the world, is quite impressive.

Maybe, but I think there's something much more insidious going on here than a random person with weird delusions. I think this is a symptom of the panic narrative that's being boosted all over the world by far-right parties and candidates, social media, and incompetent - or at least misguided - news networks.

If you keep hearing about how the big evil is all around you - it's your neighbors that looks different, your colleagues with a weird accent - and that that evil is coming to get you sooner rather than later, then when you see something that looks different than usual, what are you gonna think it is? The big evil you've been hearing so much about, of course.

This time, it's some old lady thinking paragliders are Hamas, but many times it's some other people saying "the gays" are trying to spread communism and infect the children.

Those poor paragliders