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Randall Horvath, the owner of the wholesale retailer OCFireworks, told me that his company has seen about 60 percent more orders than usual. \u201cOf those, buyers are spending on average 30 to 40 percent more than previous years,\u201d he said. The most popular items this year have been artillery-shell fireworks. You can watch YouTube videos of them\u2014they sound kind of like bombs.<\/p>\n
Read: A history of fireworks in pop culture<\/p>\n
Horvath suspects that amateur pyrotechnics have become popular because fireworks shows have been canceled, vacations are off, and there\u2019s nothing to do. People have been stuck inside. They want to set things on fire. He also suggested that the companies that make fireworks for professional displays\u2014such as the shows put on by cities or amusement parks\u2014have turned to the consumer market. \u201cThese people have to make money,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Even in the face of benign explanations, the idea of a government conspiracy has proved compelling. To some degree, our current circumstances are likely to blame. In a 1994 paper, the sociologist Ted Goertzel found that belief in a conspiracy theory is strongly correlated with \u201canomia,\u201d or a feeling that social order is collapsing and \u201cthe situation of the average person is getting worse.\u201d He also found a correlation between conspiracy belief and positive responses to the question, \u201cThinking about the next 12 months, how likely do you think it is that you will lose your job or be laid off?\u201d<\/p>\n
The particularities of the internet are a factor too. Twitter is a great place for an idea like this to spread. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, where users have personalized feeds, posts that take off on Twitter can be seen by anybody. \u201cConspiracy theories on Twitter reach people they wouldn\u2019t normally reach on other platforms,\u201d Matt Schimkowitz, an editor at Know Your Meme, told me. Twitter is also a news platform, where people go to ask questions about real-time events. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to separate conspiracy theories with legitimate calls for explanation,\u201d Schimkowitz said.<\/p>\n
Ellen Cushing: I was a teenage conspiracy theorist<\/p>\n
Conspiracy theories typically \u201chave a logic to them,\u201d even if they\u2019re not verifiable, says Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law who specializes in government transparency. The fireworks-as-government-ploy theory certainly qualifies\u2014it draws on the sense that police forces disproportionately target black communities, which is true. It calls on a history<\/a> of the government sabotaging civil-rights movements, which has really happened. The FBI carried out \u201ca grim and extensive campaign to sow distrust among activist groups\u201d in the 1960s, the reporter Anna Merlan wrote in her 2019 book, Republic of Lies<\/em>, though people\u2019s suspicions were dismissed as paranoia when it was happening.<\/p>\n To be proved true, conspiracy theories have to be backed up by empirical evidence. But that evidence is not always available until long after speculation starts, Fenster told me: Evidence of the FBI\u2019s targeting of Martin Luther King Jr. didn\u2019t come out until years after his assassination. The FBI secretly flew spy planes over the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore in 2015, but it took a flight-tracking service run by two Swedish aviation enthusiasts to prove it a year later.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n