Conspiracy Theories and Thought-Stopping Cliches

In March I was the keynote speaker at the Central New Jersey MENSA chapter’s annual convention, discussing misinformation and conspiracy theories, the reasons so many are obsessed with them more than ever today, the pernicious social impact of these belief systems and how to try and combat them. But we also discussed an aspect of conspiracism that is just as dangerous to society; the turning of the phrase “conspiracy theory” into a thought-stopping cliché deployed to shut down conversation, debate, and any and all questions aimed at institutions of power. In the months since the MENSA gathering, this problem only seems to be getting worse. Calling someone a “conspiracy theorist” is now the surest way to try and silence anyone who disagrees with you. 

 

As I had written before in my discussions of my work on the conspiracist phenomenon, its reflections in art and popular culture as well as my run-ins with members of this community—and as you can read in my dialogue with many of these people in this blog, especially the recent posts about the special edition magazines on vampires and Dungeons and Dragons—I think these belief systems have metastasized into something destabilizing and malignant in societies where they take root. And these theories have spread in numerous foreign countries as well, not just in the United States. Check out links here, here and here, for articles about conspiracy beliefs in Europe. Far from merely questioning authorities and being suspicious of bureaucracies and officialdom, the modern conspiracy movement has turned into a phantasmagorical alternate universe where no consensus reality exists, where people create their own reality at will. 

 

Conspiracism has created delusional subcultures of people who believe the Earth is flat, that reptilian aliens are running the world, the Moon landing is a hoax, and that the New World Order cabal used nuclear warheads and death rays from space to destroy the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. These are, of course, a very, very few examples of what goes on in conspiracy world. If you are an avid reader of conspiracy sites like "Before It’s News" and "State of the Nation" and any number of their ilk across cyberspace, you can be deluged by a daily tsunami of conspiracy theories about false flag attacks, predictive programming, crisis actors, the “true” origins of Covid, and rococo yarns spun about “Khazarian” plots to enslave the world that sound so illogical that even the most whimsical science fiction fan couldn’t suspend enough disbelief to accept them on the pages of low-rent pulp novels.

 

Conspiracism leads to a dangerous, unstable world of total relativism, a world where there is no consensus reality, a rejection of all proven expertise, and a place that rejects empirical, evidence-based logic. Although conspiracy world claims to be looking for the “truth” that is “out there,” truth actually does not exist in that world. Truth and reality are whatever you decide they are because they make you feel good. If someone attempts to interrogate your truth, to attempt to counter it with empirical facts, you dismiss that person by accusing them of being a part of the conspiracy. In conspiracy world, people will not only make up their own creative fantasies about human sacrifices and vampiric blood-drinking rites being carried out in tunnels under pizza parlors, but they might pick up a gun and storm pizza parlors on a rescue operation. In conspiracy world, people’s lives were put at risk after a fraudulent claim that the measles vaccine caused autism. Starting in 2020, thousands of people with compromised immune systems, in essence, committed suicide by refusing to take the Covid vaccines after choosing to believe their own personal truth about those vaccines carrying microchips made with alien technology in order to alter human DNA.

 

And conspiracy theories are dangerous because they make many more people automatically suspicious of charges of official misconduct, corruption, and coverup. If people read enough claims of Covid 19 having been caused by G5 cell towers as a part of a mind-control operation by the Illuminati, they tend to dismiss the very real forms of governmental overreach during the pandemic, dishonesty about the efficacy of the vaccines and the lockdown efforts to contain the virus, and the heavy-handed attempts to censor and limit questions and public discussion about the possible origins of the outbreak itself. This is how the term “conspiracy theorist” turns into a thought-stopping cliché, a cudgel to beat down any skeptic of official narratives and policy.

 

The most egregious example of the weaponization of the term “conspiracy theory,” its use as a tool of censorship was in the case of Covid origins. The early hypothesis about the origins of Covid favored by the scientific establishment was that it originated in Wuhan in a wet market where animals like pangolins and racoon dogs were sold for food. Almost from the very beginning, however, any alternative hypotheses like the possibility that the virus could have escaped from a local laboratory where gain of function research—research on how to modify viruses to make them more deadly—was underway was derided as dangerous, “baseless” conspiracy theories. How the idea that a disease outbreak starting in the city where a laboratory was working on increasing the lethality of viruses could be regarded as “baseless” defies all sense and logic. The Chinese government not only denied these claims vociferously, but it hampered the world scientific community’s efforts to find the outbreak’s origins. But such would be expected from a genocidal dictatorship. One would not expect it, however, from many in the scientific establishment who immediately declared that any and all discussion of the lab leak theory should be suppressed immediately. Science, after all, is a method for seeing knowledge, seeking empirical, quantifiable facts. This process involves constantly questioning research findings themselves, double-checking, and constantly replicating previous claims to the truth to make sure that no mistakes had been made. However, in the Covid era's anti-conspiracy hysteria, not only was the idea that a lethal virus could escape from a research facility that was tasked with creating lethal viruses a “baseless conspiracy theory,” but that it was a racist conspiracy theory for good measure. Moreover, it is outrageous how American technology giants like Facebook banned all information suggesting the lab leak theory for nearly two years. 

 

As this article details, during its early days in power, the Biden administration had exerted so much pressure on Facebook that the tech giant was removing joke memes about the possibility of the Covid vaccines being dangerous. The government’s attempt to exert pressure on a private media company to influence its content is censorship in its purest, most reprehensible form. Critics of this policy today are labeled as, of course, “conspiracy theorists.

 

But who is mostly to blame for this weaponization of the term “conspiracy?” I would still argue that it’s the conspiracy culture itself. It’s still the clown world of QAnon and people who had never gotten the note that the eighties are over and there are no global Satanic cults running daycare centers—or pizza parlors—and performing blood-drinking rituals in tunnels deep under the earth. There is, however, the despicable evil of global sex-trafficking organized crime rings, organizations that engage in the trafficking of children as well as adults. They do exist and they constitute a $150 billion a year industry. The problem, however, is that warnings of the existence of these crime syndicates have now been tainted by conspiracism. It becomes harder for some to talk about global crime rings when the discussion raises the echoes of State of the Nation, QAnon, and the madness of their conspiracy theories.

 

Likewise, many had been perfectly comfortable with the censorship of any discussion and debate about the origins of Covid, the effectiveness of draconian lockdown measures, and the effectiveness of vaccines and boosters. As we now know, however, Covid most likely came from a Wuhan lab, the most restrictive of lockdown measures during the pandemic proved to be no more effective in stopping the spread of the virus than the most lax of the Covid policies, and many people who had been vaccinated and boosted still got sick from Covid and still spread the virus. But the madness of conspiracy world helped kill off any tolerance for debate, discussion, and the questioning of official narratives about the pandemic.

 

And that is the true danger of conspiracism.

Long Live the Undead!

If you love vampires as much as I do, take a look at the above special edition magazine about the undead on magazine racks everywhere! I am quoted extensively in this issue discussing the history of beliefs in vampires, and how these creatures have been such a fascinating open text for storytellers for perhaps as long as people have been telling scary stories. 

 

The magazine traces the history of vampires from ancient religions and folklore to literature and modern popular culture like films, TV shows, fashions, role-playing games, and even people who live the vampire lifestyle 24/7. From monstrous vampires to sexy vampires, immerse yourself in the world of the undead in this magazine and see why vampires are the most attractive of all supernatural being.

 

In the article “Undead Evolution,” check out my quotes on how even the narrative structure of such out-there conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon have incorporated the themes and plot structure of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Diabolical elites with enormous wealth at their disposal hunting humans—especially children—for Satanic blood-drinking rites in a far-reaching plot to poison and undermine society sound familiar? Sure, it’s Count Dracula’s evil plan to buy up London real estate and prey on unsuspecting humans. And it’s also at the core of the QAnon mythos with its fantasies of blood-drinking elites in the Deep State and the New World Order running the world and sacrificing abducted children in catacombs under pizza parlors. For over a hundred years, however, no one has ever believed that “Dracula” was anything other than fiction. It’s a strange world we live in, though, when the high foolishness of QAnon has sucked in so many believers. It’s almost like modern conspiracism has become a mind-plague that spreads through the population like a vampire disease.  

The 1974 Conspiracy Classic, "The Parallax View"

Check out this recent episode of Cineverse where we discuss the seminal 1970s conspiracy thriller, director Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty. 

This is a film I discuss extensively in my book, CONSPIRACY FILMS: A TOUR OF DARK PLACES IN THE AMERICAN CONSCIOUS and it’s one of the films regularly screened in my class on the history of conspiracy theories and conspiracy films. As I argue in my book, The Parallax View is one of a small handful it films from the late 1960s and early 70s that established the conspiracy theory film as a distinct genre with its uniques set of archetypes that set it apart from other thrillers, mysteries, and action films. 

 

The narrative follows Joseph Frady, an intrepid reporter (Beatty), as he embarks on an investigation into a series of enigmatic deaths associated with the clandestine Parallax Corporation. Frady's pursuit unveils a perilous network of political intrigue and secrecy.

The Parallax View delves into government corruption, assassination, and the manipulation of public perception. The film benefits from the stylish guidance of Pakula, who adeptly weaves a web of tension and paranoia throughout the story. The cinematography, editing, and skillful use of visual symbolism further contribute to its lasting impact. 

 

As all successful films hold a mirror to their times, reflect the most unsettling freefolating anxieties of the culture that created them, The Parallax View shows us how the JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King assassinations, followed by the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals, birthed an era of suspicion and conspiracy theories. Speculations about conspiracies that have been proven nonexistent beyond a shadow of a doubt (JFK, RFK, MLK) and very real instances of corruption and conspiracy (Pentagon Papers, Watergate) birthed an era of justified and healthy suspicion and skepticism in officialdom, institutions of power, and the elites. But, as we see today, the reach of conspiracism is ongoing and often toxic and destructive to a society. Check out The Parallax View and ponder how we can spot that line between healthy suspicion and the poisonous fantasy worlds of Pizzagate and QAnon.

Some guy named Oliver is upset with declassified JFK documents…

Oh, yeah! Oliver Stone! Now I remember. He used to be big in the early 90s. Unfortunately—or, rather, fortunately—he hasn’t been relevant since. Nonetheless, as he was readying the November 22 premiere of his new Showtime documentary, “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass,” about, you guessed it, explosive new “facts” that prove a vast Deep State conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy, he had been giving various interviews, basically handed the microphone  by the media to revisit conspiracy theories that have been long proven to be a pack of sensationalistic, absurd fabrications. The Hollywood Reporter gave him the opportunity to write this op-ed piece about his dissatisfaction with a newly released batch of recently declassified government documents about Kennedy’s murder. For Stone, not surprisingly, the documents are still incomplete and it still gives him reason to disbelieve the official version of events.

 

In his documentary, Stone now points the finger to Allen Dulles, one of the founders of the CIA, as the chief mastermind behind the assassination. Stone apparently has decided that Lyndon Johnson, his head conspirator in his 1991 film, “JFK,” was not really the grandmaster behind the conspiracy after all. And Stone must have decided that his insanely long list of conspirators, including FBI agents, J. Edgar Hoover, the Dallas police brass, members of every intelligence agency and high-ranking commanders in each of the armed forces, “the homosexual underworld,” New Orleans businessmen, and Texas oil tycoons was not quite long enough.

 

Why Stone is given the platform to make his new documentary now and treated to a great deal of favorable media coverage is puzzling. In the wake of Covid, anti-vaccination movements, and the age of QAnon, the media’s long-running romance with conspiracy theorists has thankfully cooled off. Oliver Stone, however, has turned up again and somehow he’s being given the benefit of the doubt by outlets like the Hollywood Reporter. Maybe they think this favorable treatment is okay since Stone’s films supposedly performed an important function of inspiring much needed skepticism in people when it comes to official government sources and organizations of power and influence.

 

Except Stone’s work has done nothing of the sort. “JFK,” his magnum opus, his impassioned call for truth and justice and taking back democracy from shadowy cabals that subvert the will of the people, is a piece of fraud. The film is a manipulative con job that created enough controversy to garner the film smash-hit box-office numbers at the time of its release and made Stone a lot of money. Luckily, not only have historians dismantled the film at the time of its release, but the in the years since, numerous publishers have bucked the conspiratorial trend and put forth several books challenging the JFK conspiracy mythology. Amidst the multimillion-dollar conspiracy industry the media had created over the decades, feeding the appetites of book readers, TV-viewers, and moviegoers wanting to believe in real life capers and shocking mysteries, more rational minds have prevailed and have thankfully debunked all the conspiratorial foolishness clouding John F. Kennedy’s memory. Among several books and documentaries on the subject, the best one is Vincent Bugliosi’s “Reclaiming History,” not only answering every conspiratorial argument but exposing Stone’s film in a chapter so long and so thorough as to let it stand alone as a book by itself.

 

While the exaggerations and manipulative slight of hand in Stone’s torturously long 3-hour movie can hardly be covered here—again, I highly recommend Bugliosi’s book just for its analysis of the film—I think it’s important to make the point that “JFK” is deliberate deception and not, as film critics and his fans always claimed, simple artistic license in order to create a coherent narrative. “JFK” is a carefully constructed set of distortions and misrepresentation of facts and people. The most egregious of these distortions is the presentation of where people sat in Kennedy’s limousine as it drove through Dealey Plaza. The lynchpin of the entire Kennedy conspiracy is the argument that the bullets that struck Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally could not have come from the direction of the Dallas School Book Depository and been fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. “JFK” attempts to demonstrate this in one of its courtroom scenes where Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison character displays a drawing of the car, its seats, and the positions of the car’s occupants, proving beyond a doubt that bullets that struck Kennedy and Connally would have had to magically shift in mid air to cause the damage they did. The scene is a dramatization of conspiracy theorists’ “magic bullet argument” that also claims to prove that the wounding and killing shots could not have come from Oswald’s position on the sixth floor of the book depository. The problem of the scene, however, as is the case with the entire conspiracy theory it’s based on, is that the position of the seats and their occupants in the film is not accurate. Stone knowingly changed the position of the limousine’s occupants to make the “magic bullet” arguments of the conspiracy theorists look plausible. This is not creative license for the sake of dramatic impact. It’s a piece of deliberate deception. The entire  movie is flim flam, an elaborate lie intended to deceive people.

 

Furthermore, what ultimately makes “JFK” inexcusable and the “it’s only a movie” argument unacceptable is the fact that Stone had always staunchly claimed that his film was NOT “only a movie.” Upon its release, Stone claimed in interview after interview that the film is perfectly accurate in every one of its claims and the depiction of the assassination. He had, in fact, urged moviegoers to use his film as a tool for activism and reject the Warren Commission’s conclusions about Oswald acting alone. 

 

One can not ethically use deception as a tool to get people to take action. As I always discuss with my students in the media ethics course I teach, when you lie to someone, you are robbing them of their autonomy. You are no longer free when you make your decisions about how to act based on someone else’s deliberate deception. When someone is lying to you, they are leading you around by a leash. They have turned you into their slave, their puppet.

 

“But even if Oliver Stone distorted the facts in a movie, could there not be a greater good in inspiring people to question the government, be skeptical of the official version of events, and think for themselves?” Stone’s defenders usually ask. 

 

The answer is “no.” The conspiracy mythology propagated by “JFK” has not led to a world of skeptical critical thinkers. It has led to a world of QAnon, Flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, and belief systems that deny any kind of consensus reality, science and logic. As Tim Weiner writes in his excellent Rolling Stone article about Oliver Stone and his conspiracist derangement: 

 

“I can tell you for a fact that our democracy is suffocating under an avalanche of disinformation. Trump won the 2020 election! Covid vaccines are seeded with microchips! Democrats are blood-sucking pedophile communists! 9/11 was an inside job! Our body politic is being poisoned by lies. They stalk the land like brain-eating zombies. And we can’t seem to kill them.

 

“We have a moral obligation to call bullshit when we see it. Especially when public figures promote lies for profit. Stone’s JFK films are fantasies. Conspiracy theories are not facts. They’re a kind of collective psychosis. And they’re driving our country down the road to hell.”

Great piece on the mind-boggling weirdness that’s QAnon

I am quoted extensively in this excellent bit of investigative college journalism about the utterly bizarre roots of the great American derangement of QAnon. 

The Saint Peter’s University newspaper ran this article examining a part of the modern conspiracy culture whose beliefs appear to be stranger and stranger the more one looks at it in light of all the media coverage it received in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

 

From its unknown origins in the bowels of the 4chan message board in what might or might not have been a prank, this movement resembles both a role playing game from hell and a cult at the same time. It’s a sort of do it yourself, crowdsourced conspiracy where thousands of people have coalesced around a movement with no known leader—aside from whomever it is that has been posting unintelligible gibberish about “storms” and “great awakenings” on the Internet—and also a kind of a cult with no charismatic leader.

 

No matter how one looks at the ongoing saga of QAnon, I think any clear headed person will only see madness.

There is a reality crisis…and this is NOT the way to fight it.

So it seems that every moment you turn on the news you run across stories of conspiratorial beliefs and behaviors so shockingly deranged that you might think you ran across a parody of our conspiracy culture rather than an account of an actual event. At first you might get the urge to laugh at it all, but then the laughter feels a bit uncomfortable.

Take for example the case of Steven Brandenburg. He was the pharmacist who destroyed hundreds of vials of the coronavirus vaccine…and now we know why. As detailed by this recent story in the NY Post, Brandenburg is a hard-core conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is flat and the sky does not exist. What you think is the sky is actually a dome erected by the—wait for it—the government!!! The dome is supposed to shield humanity from the eye of God. But Brandenburg ultimately destroyed those vaccines because, as the article points out, he thought they might be a part of Bill Gates’ microchip plot, they might kill people or either make them infertile or make birth control useless. So apparently Gates’ evil vaccines either cause births…or they don’t. I guess you can take your pick of what you want to believe.

And no, it’s not worth wasting time trying to logically deconstruct Brandeburg’s apparently feverish imaginings. This man clearly appears to be mentally ill.

But then you see the story of last weekend’s incident at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles where anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists attempted to block people from getting their COVID vaccines. Where some 40,000 or so Californians have already died from the virus, behavior like this is absolutely maddening. So, if you want to be irresponsible, self-deluded, and self-destructive, you can go ahead and put your life at risk. Just say no to Bill Gates’ microchips that will turn you into an alien clone. But you don’t have the right the put the lives of others at risk with an outrageous stunt like that protest. Behavior like that, as far as I’m concerned, is tantamount to attempted murder.

But the madness of the current conspiracy culture, unfortunately, begets madness of epic proportions of those who think we can use the power of government to solve any social ill.

In Tuesday’s New York Times, this op-ed attempted to offer a solution to QAnon and its own conspiracy mythology in what appears to be a parody of big-government, liberal overreach. The author, Kevin Roose, is endorsing calls from various academics and law makers for Joe Biden to create a “reality czar” and a “truth commission” where the government will now go into to business of even more electronic surveillance to route out conspiracy theorists who might be potentially violent, like the ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Sure, Roose, does allow that reality czars and truth commissions might sound somewhat “dystopian.” Oh, you think? It sounds maybe like “ministry of information” or “ministry of propaganda” in any standard authoritarian regime. Kim Jung Un in North Korea, Manuel Marrero Cruz in Cuba, and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela all have forms of their propaganda ministries that act as the final arbiter of what is allowed to be the spoken truth in their countries. North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela are also dictatorial hellholes people risk like and limb to escape every day. 

As Matt Welch in this Reason article points out, not only does the Roose article sound like a parody of the meddling, over-regulating left, but it is bound to have very severe unintended consequences. Do you really want whichever party is in power to have the authority to interfere with online speech in order to define the truth? Would the liberals endorsing this idea, the same liberals who had just spent four years raging against Donald Trump and his hostility to the news media want to keep a “truth commission” if Biden gets replaced by a Republican in four years. I suspect not.

 

Moreover, the foolishness of these endorsements of the government getting into the anti-conspiracy business is the fact that the fearful, unsophisticated, and disenfranchised who get lured into conspiracy world are people who are constantly looking for any miniscule, subtle sign of more government surveillance, more regulation, more clandestine control. Governmental anti-conspiracy commissions and regulations will boost the paranoia, will merely confirm what conspiracists already want to believe. It might be something similar to the FBI’s and the ATF’s reactions to David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult in 1993. Koresh, a con artist with a messianic streak, was preaching an imminent apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario to his followers. The sign, he said, would be when the armies of an evil government came and attacked their movement. So the ATF and the FBI saw it wise to surround Koresh’s compound with tanks and helicopters. Quite predictably, death and destruction ensued.

So these Orwellian “reality czars” and “truth commissions” are the worst possible things that could be done to counter the conspiracy movement. The only thing, and the most poten strategy for stopping these movements of epic paranoia is also the most challenging thing. It does not involve deplatforming anyone by social media companies or intrusive government investigation. It involves education. It involves teachers from grade school through high school and college stressing the importance of logic, reason, and critical thinking as the guiding principles of any sane, stable and civilized society.

 

As I outline in this white paper for the graduate program in Communication and Public Relations at Saint Peter’s University, the antidote to dangerous conspiracism is especially media education, media literacy, and the fields of public relations where we teach young people to always be advocates for reason and truth. 

Not surprising in a world with no consensus reality

So I've been away from the blog for a while, as the holidays and numerous writing projects have been taking up my time, but found myself shaking my head in dismay at a month's worth of insanity every time I glanced at trending stories in news apps or turned on the TV. Even though I study the social phenomenon of conspiracy theories, the events of the past month leave me stunned. Although I guess they shouldn't. The logical end result of the conspiratorial mentality, as we have seen so plainly on January 6, is anarchy violence, and destruction. 

This shameful end of the road to the QAnon conspiracy and its adherents should, again, not be a surprise. In 2019 an unpublished FBI memo warned that QAnon and similar conspiratorial subcultures should be viewed as a potential terrorist threat as we would approach to 2020 elections and its aftermath.  And now the memo was proven right.

But even before January 6, the depth of the depravity to which conspiracy fantasies could be goaded into has been obvious. What could be more repugnant than the harassment of the families of Sandy Hook victims by conspiracy theorists? Or anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists taunting and mocking the parents of children who had needlessly died of the measles because they haven't been given life-saving vaccines? Does it surprise anyone that people who could sink as low as the harassment of the Sandy Hook families would be capable of rioting in the Capitol building?

And the worst part of this conspiratorial madness is the fact that the disaffected, a disillusioned collection of unfortunate souls out there, people somehow so disconnected from a consensus reality as to actually entertain the irrational tenets of QAnon, have been goaded on in their beliefs. They have been pushed and egged on, their gullibility, anger, fear, and disillusionment with the world exploited by opportunistic con artists. Their fears have been fed by people like Alex Jones and his imitators all across the Internet - from the State of the Nation to the Millennium Report, Before It's News and Zero Hedge - egging on the unstable toward the inevitable violence.

And the most frustrating and shameful of this exploitation of a disaffected subculture of America was Donald Trump's own tacit endorsement of the QAnon movement from its very inception in 2017. Turning a blind eye to the sort of extremism growing on the fringes of the conservative right by the President of the United States is outrageous. His claims that he knew nothing of QAnon's off-the-wall Satanic child-trafficking conspiracy theory is completely unbelievable. 

People as angry and volatile as the ones who stormed the Capitol are still out there and all over the country. Dealing with this madness, the ultimate madness of a world where there is no consensus reality, is perhaps the biggest existential challenge this culture has to deal with in a long time...perhaps a threat it has never faced before in its history.

QAnon will probably be around for a while...Unfortunately

Check out this recent article I'm quoted in about the future of the QAnon movement. What is the future of this fringe, bizarre, far-right conspiracy movement come the next presidential election? I discuss what might happen to the movement in either the event of Donald Trump's victory or defeat. In either case, I, and several other commentators, don't see QAnon going anywhere any time soon. Perhaps the movement might transform into something new at some point, but it is sure to have more life and more fight left in it.

That's quite unfortunate because they make a case for the fear that our culture might be teetering on the precipice of a new dark age of ignorance. When you take these people together with the 9/11 Truth movement, the anti-vaxxers, the "crisis actor" theorists and the rest of a conspiracy culture, a rational person might start to panic and think humanity has taken leave of its senses.

From a political angle, I think that about 99% percent of those who are center-right, from conservatives to libertarians, look at the QAnon movement as an embarrassment. Trump's tacit endorsement of QAnon is especially galling to these people. Many have lamented the long passing of an age when the right was the home of William F. Buckley's high-toned intellectualism, and they're dreading the coming of a new age when conservatism's voice is being hijacked by loud, irrational, fantasy-prone rabble. 

Why We Need Our Conference...

As I had written yesterday - in the post just beneath this one - I will be taking part in a panel for a special conference at Saint Peter's University on October 13, discussing the unhinged madness conspiracy beliefs have managed to seduce so many Americans into and the depths of complete derangement this is throwing our culture into.

To see just how important it is to hold this discussion, take a look at this article in the New York Times about the Trump COVID hoax conspiracies that sprang up over the past week. And this time the conspiracy theories are not coming from the QAnon, right-wing crowd. This time the left is spinning its own creative fantasies about Donald Trump faking his illness for a variety of nefarious ends.

As the piece so correctly points out, the loss of a sense of consensus reality is not confined to any position on the political spectrum. It is a malady infecting the very culture. Plus, as the piece so ominously, and I believe correctly, points out, this malady is sure to stay with us for a long time. Even long past the November elections.

From 9/11 to Covid 19: Conspiracy Theories, Fake News, and the Assault on Truth

Two decades of a conspiracy culture spiraling out of control.

On October 13, my school, Saint Peter's University, will be hosting the virtual conference "FROM 9/11 TO COVID 19: CONSPIRACY THEORIES, FAKE NEWS, AND THE ASSAULT ON TRUTH." I will present on a panel that also includes Noah Rauch, Senior Vice President for Education and Public Programs at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, and John Montone, reporter for New York's 1010 WINS news radio.

Among the topics we will discuss will be an effort to chart how conspiratorial thinking has mutated from people seeking to reexamine the details of major events to a world where our culture is ready to reject all consensus reality.

As I have written before, these are urgent questions to address because the modern conspiracism is becoming a threat to Americans' health and safety. Conspiracism is a movement we have seen ignoring science in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a movement that has become the haven for the dangerous and unstable fabrications of the QAnon movement, and the bullies and thugs of the crisis-actor movement that harasses the survivors of mass shootings. The anti-vaccination movement has deceived people into endangering the lives of their families and communities through the use of the rhetoric of the conspiracy theory. 

Simply, if there is no consensus reality, then only chaos, anarchy, and a corrosive moral relativism will reign.

With this conference, we are hoping to set an example, to encourage education to be a bulwark against the chaos and anarchy threatening to engulf this culture every day.

It's a collusion between Big Yarn and Big Corkboard!

This satirical article is one of the funniest things I'd read in quite a while. Just check out a little bit of it as it uses the typical conspiratorial logic as a punching bag:

"A federal task force has determined that the recent rise in online conspiracy theories has in fact been a well-coordinated plot by several powerful corporations designed to increase sales of corkboards and  string.

"'You have no idea how high up this goes,' replied a member of the DC taskforce, speaking on deep background. The taskforce determined that powerful office supply consortiums had deliberately fabricated many popular online conspiracies, including Pizzagate, QAnon, and Marisa Tomei's 1992 Best Supporting Actress win, all in an effort to sell more corkboards and red string."

But do read the entire piece because it's very funny. And, more importantly, it points out the logical fallacy at the core of so many conspiracy theories, argument that for someone to have profited from an event automatically means that they must have orchestrated the event.

The real world, unlike the one in movies, TV shows, and spy novels, is full of coincidences.

No, it is not amusing

So something has been nagging at me over the past several days. I just somehow knew that I had made a mistake in my post below about the State of the Nation article about me. And then it hit me. I had used the word “amusing” in describing their links to other conspiracy web pages about the Sandy Hook shooting. And there is absolutely nothing amusing about any of these theories about “false flag” attacks and crisis actors and people pretending to be grieving over nonexistent children in the aftermath of some kind of hoax at Sandy Hook.

Vile, perhaps. These false flag conspiracy theories are vile beyond all comprehension. They are disgusting. They are filthy. They are examples of the absolute depths of depravity some people are capable of sinking to. 

And what is even more revolting than the conspiracy believers are the people who make a living feeding the delusions of these sick, demented individuals. Just as I had written here before, I am absolutely convinced that perhaps the people who are getting the biggest laugh out of the absurdity, the sheer stupidity of these theories are the people behind all the scores of conspiracy web pages, blogs, and various types of social media. I am certain that Alex Jones does not believe a word of the garbage he spews on his show every day. Likewise, I am certain that all the other Jones wannabes out there, the people running the State of the Nation site or the Call for an Uprising YouTube channel, or all of the other charlatans peddling in paranoia, are probably laughing every day at the rubes they are swindling with their Pizzagate and Qanaon and anti-vaxxer bilge.

But then the rubes turn into the people who harass the parents of children who had died because they haven’t gotten a flu vaccine. Check out this article about parents having to suffer the loss of a child and then becoming the victims of the anti-vaxxer sociopaths. The believers in these conspiracies become the human trash that harassed the Sandy Hook parents like Jeremy Richman who took his own life earlier this week. Read the article about Richman’s death right here. He had been one of the people suing Alex Jones for accusing the Sandy Hook parents of being crisis actors.

So no, none of this is amusing.

How come no one has killed Alex Jones yet?

I ask this after a recent discussion I had with a friend of mine who insisted that conspiracy theories like the ones about the JFK assassination and 9/11 are somewhat plausible - he "doesn't exactly" believe them, but could imagine that powers within the government would be willing to attempt such plots - and they could be successful because dissenters within the conspiracy could just be killed off. He - as JFK conspiracists often do - pointed to a series of "suspicious" deaths of people connected to the Kennedy assassination.

First of all, let's just clear the air about these deaths. There is nothing suspicious about them and these people who might have "known too much" died years apart and years after the Kennedy murder. For a superb examination and discussion of this, please take the time to read (and it will take you a little while since it's over 1000 pages) the late Vincent Bugliosi's book Reclaiming History about the assassination.

But conspiracy believers are generally big on assassinations. They believe no tangible evidence exists to prove their massive, complicated accusations because whistleblowers have either been killed off or they have been intimidated into silence through death threats.

So how come some conspiracists don't stop for a second and consider why these assassins from the New World Order haven't yet eliminated people like Alex Jones and the rest of his ilk? Why haven't they offed Jones years ago and made it look like an accident (but plant secret clues to the evil deeds the way criminal masterminds do in murder mysteries or in comic books the way the Riddler always does?).

The reason, of course, is because 9/11 conspiracies, "crisis actors," or Qanon conspiracies are exactly like comic books. They're fantasies!

An Anti-conspiracy Conspiracy? Unlikely.

So I finally got through perusing parts of - probably just a small part of - all the information cropping up in the media about the Qanon conspiracy theory. After several days of this enterprise, I just got tired of the whole thing and more than a bit irritated by the amount of stupid that exists in the world. However, I was also fascinated by the larger social phenomenon of it all, the confirmation of a number of venerable media theories that have been arguing for decades that people are quite active and facile when it comes to protecting their own belief systems, in interpreting and twisting information in the world all around them in such a way as to confirm their own preconceived notions and biases...

...You see as an eggheaded academic who tries to corrupt and brainwash America's youth by teaching them how to debunk conspiracy theories about the New World Order, to embrace the status quo and to appreciate the subversive, Satanic fun of the "Lucifer" TV series, I need to frame everything in terms of high-flown theories...

But anyway, the Qanon conspiracy theory! For those who have not kept up with this, it basically started with a series of postings on the 4chan and 8chan social media sites by someone (or maybe some parties) calling himself "Q" and claiming to be a high-level government operative with inside information that can best be described as depressingly bonkers. And I mean so bonkers that if the producers of The X-Files would ever craft an episode around it, they would make it one of their comical self-parody episodes. But the main points of the theory claim that Donald Trump had been "installed" in the presidency by a secret cabal of military brass to work together with Robert Mueller to expose and smash a world-wide Satanic pedophile ring run by Hilary Clinton, the Democratic party, and numerous A-list Hollywood celebrities. So, yup, Mueller's Russia investigation is just a ruse, a smoke-screen for the real work of taking down the global Satanic child-sex trafficking ring.

And because high-ranking government whistle-blowers would try and blow their whistles by going to disreputable online forums instead of respected media outlets...

Oh, yeah, the so-called "respectable mainstream media" are all infiltrated by sex-trafficking Satanists too. Sorry, forgot about that!

So anyway, there's no point in beating a dead horse here and repeating what so much of the news stories about Qanon have already talked about, namely how absurd all of this is and how there is no evidence to prove any of this silliness. Yes, it's all completely unbelievable and it's all stupid. And no, there is no credible evidence to prove any of these claims. Furthermore, it stretches the imagination beyond all breaking points to suggest that such a far-reaching conspiracy that would include thousands of people from the mass media, law enforcement, and politics could ever pull off a plot like this...

So let's just repeat after me, kids: 9/11 was not an inside job, JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, we landed on the Moon, mass shootings in Colorado, Sandy Hook, and Florida were not false flag operations and there are no such things as "crisis actors." Thousands of people can NOT work together on such ridiculously convoluted plots without slipping up, spilling the beans, or turning on one another. Yes, if you disagree with me, you fail the class!

What is more interesting here, however, is how the Qanon phenomenon gives evidence to how fragmented our society has become to the point of the disappearance of a consensus reality for such a large sectors of the American population. People - again, as decades worth of research on how individuals process information and how personal beliefs and desires intersect with external sources of information coming from mass media sources has demonstrated - will selectively expose themselves to information that confirms their inherent biases. We believe what we want to believe and we will aggressively ignore or reinterpret information that contradicts our beliefs. Cognitive Dissonance is the phenomenon that explains how unpleasant and how downright painful it is to be proven wrong, to hear points of view that disagree with us, and have our beliefs challenged. It so unpleasant that people will go to extraordinary lengths to escape such feelings. The easiest way to escape dissonance today is by way of the conspiracy theory. Scientific studies have disproven the vaccine-autism link you've come to believe? Well, the scientists that authored those studies are in on the conspiracy!

The Qanon phenomenon can best be viewed, I believe, through this framework of a toxic cultural fragmentation and dissonance. Some have come to despise those whose political positions they disagree with to such a pathological extreme that they are willing to embrace the head-spinning absurdity of the Qanon claims.

This article, as a matter of fact, posits that maybe the Qanon conspiracy theory was actually a creation of some leftist pranksters to make ultra-conservatives look bad. At some point, perhaps the pranksters will show themselves in public and yell "Psych! Fooled you!"  Now such an anti-conspiracy conspiracy is quite unlikely, I think. However, if someone tried to pull such a grand-scale joke, it would, no doubt, work quite easily.

Now let me predict that the political opposite of such a prank would work as well. There are demented crackpots on the left as well, and not just on the right. The repellent, violent morons of the "Antifa" movement would be just as ready to swallow a conspiracy that would blame some grand, world-scale act of evil on a vast coalition of the military/industrial complex, corporations, George W. Bush, all in league with Big Oil, FOX news, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh.

Today, unfortunately, stupid has no exclusive party affiliation. And conspiracy theories are its favorite refuge.

August 20: My appearance on "One on One with Steve Adubato"

The date is set! On August 20 my interview on the "One on One with Steve Adubato" show will air. Check out the program schedule right here.

We will be discussing my new novel, CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED, along with the corrosive and downright sleazy impact of conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones on American society. Very timely, I think, especially with all the bizarre new headlines about the QAnon conspiracy theory and Jones getting the book off of social media sites like Facebook, Apple, and Spotify.