It’s worse when it turns out some of the wild conspiracy theories were true all along.
If you lie to people and say Directed Energy Weapons don’t exist, and anyone who thinks they do is a Nazi spouting nonsense about “Jewish Space Lasers”, then people who find out not only do DEWs actually exist (In fact they even have a wikipedia page about them, that’s how blatantly real they are) trust you less, but they’re more likely to buy into really fucked up shit like Holocaust Denial and Flat Earth as they suddenly believe the media was “probably lying about that too!”