I grew up in a Navy town. I am the son of a Marine combat veteran and drill instructor. My brother was (a fuck-up) in the Marines. My best man was a Naval Aviator for twenty years. A grandfather was a WW2 vet, one great grandfather a WWI vet, and another was in one of the last cohorts of horse-mounted cavalry in the American southwest. I had multiple friends who served, and military culture was everywhere growing up. I got as far as the Enlistment processing center before I told my dad I was joining up, and in the last wise act his MAGA ass ever did, he marched me into the recruiting office to "voluntarily separate for personal reasons." I have no particular bone to pick with the average American servicemember, so believe me when I say...

A bunch of them are dumb as shit.

Even among those who aren't, most who stay in longer than one contract have an authoritarian streak to some degree, and/or they know they're at the peak of their "social capital" and possibly their earning potential too.

Speaking as a veteran, no one accused service members of being smart.

Election deniers are specifically recruiting veterans and service members this year to exploit their social capital and bring legitimacy to the cause, argued Human Rights First, a nonprofit human rights organization. In a report, the nonprofit urged veterans to be wary of calls to “restore election integrity” or “catch the cheaters in real time” and instead leverage their credibility to counter conspiracies about the democratic process.

The pdf of the study is here.

Let's not forget that there were former police and military among the Jan 6th rioters. Anyone can be sucked into the Q-ult.

They should write "unsubstantiated conspiracies".

Conspiracies regularly happen, and pretending they don't or equivocating the heavily documented and testified to cigarette industry working together to publish articles and statements advocating the harmless nature of cigarettes with some baseless claim that Obama is a lizard person is misleading and entirely unhelpful.

That's what happens if the "news" they get is not trustworthy from the start.

The thing that always needs to be considered upon hearing a conspiracy theory: the entity or entities allegedly engaging in a conspiracy that has remained secret for an appreciable period must be hyper-competent enough to keep said secrets, and if that entity fucks up regularly, it becomes increasingly unlikely.

Or to put it another way, a successful conspirator cannot be both some evil mastermind and some incompetent fuck up at the same time if you want your theory to make any sense.

Unless you want to play games about that being staged to make you believe they're incompetent, in which case I wish you a great time in Wonderland.

In a test designed to see whether readers could differentiate between real and false information online, about 90% succeeded.

That is way higher than I expected.