Pittsburgh's used conspiracy theory salesman

How Ben Davidson turned impending doom into a YouTube empire

Illustration by J. Longo for The Kernel

This story first appeared in The Kernal on November 29, 2015.

There’s no reason you would know who he is unless you’re one of the 250,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, Suspicious 0bservers, which boasts of providing “the best open sources of information on Earth.” Every morning, all-year-round, Ben Davidson posts dispatches from his explorations into “the frontiers of solar and planetary science.” In Davidson’s world, earthquakes can be predicted by looking at the Earth’s electromagnetic output, the sun directly influences things like suicides and crime rates, and water rains down from outer space.

He also holds forth on common conspiracy theories about Agenda 21 (a United Nations sustainability plan often cited as a cover for a coming New World Order), chemtrails (jet aircraft trails said to secretly contain dangerous chemicals), and global warming. In a typical video, he claims that global warming isn’t happening, and also that the government is secretly spraying chemicals into the air to stop global warming. And that another ice age is around the corner.

For fans of this material, it isn’t the contradictory claims that matter so much as that each of these claims calls the official narrative of anthropogenic climate change into question. Conspiracy theorists eat this stuff up.