Conspiracy prophecies are designed to feel inflated because their function is to spread panic

Evidence

“I don’t want to use inflated language,” she told Steve Bannon about health officials dropping basic vaccination information on people’s doorsteps. And then she went on, predicting, “They take your child away if you haven’t vaccinated him or her, like that’s the next step. Or they take you to a quarantine camp, if you can’t show your vaccination papers. I mean, that may sound a tiny bit … anxious or inflated…” It does sound that way. It always sounds that way. It is supposed to. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 750

Categorization

• DEFINE: Klein defines the operative genre of conspiracy culture—a rhetoric calibrated to be ‘anxious or inflated’ on purpose, as an engine of panic rather than insight.
• XREF: connects to: Extreme cause-effect asymmetry in disasters breeds conspiracy theories — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 880; the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”