I want to believe what you write here, but reality seems to be proving that there are just far more absurdly gullible people out there than I would like to believe.

I mean flat Earth is an actual thing. That proves to me that there are no limits.

What I don't know is whether this is new or an eternal part of the human condition that was just masked in the past. I know there have always been gullible fools, but have there always been this many?

I personally wonder if there might be more today due to too many people being too insulated from the "real world" beyond the easy cushy paths of school -> college -> office job. There are too many people who have never deviated from these paths and thus have never seen the "real world."

I don't think it's stupidity. A lot of these people seem relatively intelligent. They just seem shockingly naive.