Showing posts with label conspiracy theories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conspiracy theories. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Even parasites have the right to free speech


So, recently a couple of friends and some students had asked me about whether or not I was upset—one actually asked if I was “outraged”—about Alex Jones being allowed back in X. I am certainly not outraged, I told them, and not even upset. I had written about this a while back when Jones had first started getting deplatformed from social media. Actually, I am kind of hurt that they didn’t read my old posts about Jones. But in all seriousness, I told them that as someone who tries to be as much of an absolutist about free speech as possible—calling for specific violence, genocide, and murder must be a line any decent person should draw, however—I will defend Jones’ reinstatement on X as strongly as possible. However, I will also use my own freedom of speech to keep pointing out what a morally bankrupt dirtbag he is.

 

As I had also written numerous times before, as I did in one of my recent posts below, Alex Jones is a parasite. He’s a bloodsucker feeding off the grief of others. He has been once since the 1990s when he took advantage of terrorist attacks like the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombing to spin his yarns about the New World Order perpetrating fake terrorist attacks, or “false flag” operations. Of course, the day that must have been the highlight of Alex Jones’ life was September 11, 2001. The murders of 2977 people gave Jones the opportunity to build his conspiracy empire into a multimillion dollar cash cow.

 

Luckily, after he pushed past the bounds of decency one too many times with his lies about the Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax and the families of the slain children being crisis actors, Jones was found liable for defamation and now owes $1.5 billion to these families. Justice was done!

 

But is this any indication that Jones had been changed by the Sandy Hook incident at all? Of course not. He has been spreading his same noxious conspiratorial garbage on his Infowars webpage since then.

 

With that being said, however, I need to hold my nose in disgust and approve of him not being cancelled on social media, but only out of principle. This way more of the world can see the utterly unconscionable garbage he likes spewing and more people will continue speaking out against him. Alex Jones is a cockroach that needs the light shined on him rather than be made a martyr through cancellation. He’s not a truth-teller, not a “dangerous” man who threatens the system, not a maverick and not a rebel. He’s just a cheap hustler.

Monday, November 20, 2023

Holy God! Alex Jones might be right about something…!!

 …And the conspiracy culture is still as horrible as ever. So check out this Newsweek article from a couple of weeks ago. One of my students brought this to my attention, asking me what I thought about it; whether or not Jones had a valid point. I had missed the story when it originally came out, so when I read it I agreed that Jones indeed had a good a point. The article was also a textbook case of shoddy, biased news reporting that should be used as a teaching tool in any journalism class.  And I shocked myself and felt kind of unpleasant having to admit these things. But, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. 

 

The article, as you’ll see, is about Jones’ appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast where Jones said that he feared a terrorist attack on the U.S. in light of the Israel-Hamas war and the growing tensions in the Middle East. And Jones is absolutely right! Living in New Jersey, working just across the river from Manhattan and remembering 9/11, I know that I am living next to the number-one bull’s eye for every terrorist organization in the world. Hamas and every other terrorist proxy of Iran must dream at night or being able to orchestrate another mass-casualty event that will outdo 2001. Or if they wouldn’t try and attack New York, I’m sure they would just as gladly settle for Washington DC, or Los Angeles, or Miami, or any of our other major metropolitan centers. But it’s not just Jones saying this. FBI director Christopher Wray said the same things to Congress in October, warning that the Hamas massacre of October 7 created a terrorist threat to the U.S. “the likes of which we haven’t seen” since the rise of ISIS. None of this should be controversial.

 

Newsweek, unfortunately, thinks that it is, writing that Jones said this “without offering evidence.” Then the article goes on to quote what sounds like a stale Department of Homeland Security boilerplate press release stating they’re working “tirelessly” to make sure this doesn’t happen and that “encounters of known or suspected terrorists attempting to cross the Southern Border, or encounters of those associated with such individuals, are uncommon.” 

 

Uncommon? There were only 19 terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks! What number are we talking about with “uncommon?” With America’s sieve-like Southern Border, there were 2.5 million illegal crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023!! Not fearing a terrorist attack on American soil today is willful blindness and naivete on an epic scale.

 

Jones, of course, said he “feared” that a terrorist threat was imminent, just like any sensible person should. So, it was too bad that he couldn’t offer the kind of precise, actionable intelligence Newsweek seems to want when it dismisses his statement. 

 

Now the way Jones’ argument, or anything he says, is now being framed in this kind of a rhetoric by the mainstream press is his own fault. They rightly hate him and he earned the media’s hatred. Jones earned the hatred of anyone with a shred of empathy and decency. He had been a bottom feeder and paranoia monger, stoking the hatreds and fears of the unstable and alienated prone to believing in the most extreme conspiracy theories. His theories about the Sandy Hook massacre of 2012 were used by psychotics to terrorize the families of the victims. He was sued for libel by those families and ordered to pay them $1.1 billion. He got exactly what he deserves. 

 

The point here is that indiscriminately spouting the most outrageous, the most illogical conspiracy theories serves only to taint your credibility forever. It’s a case of the conspiracy theorist who cried wolf. If you claim that evil cabals are plotting against the world every day and point your fingers at the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Satanists, the Deep State, globalist insiders and shadow governments every single day without any proof of their existence, you won’t be taken seriously even when you identify real sources of evil like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Islamist terrorists.

Sunday, November 19, 2023

A new round of repulsive, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

As any sensible person who has any kind of a passing interest in conspiracy theories could have predicted, the war in Israel spawned an enormous rancid pool of creative fantasies about what is “really going on.” These fantasies raised their ugly heads literally on October 8, in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel, murdering some 1400 hundred people—including small children and toddlers, some of whom they beheaded or burned alive—and taking over 200 people hostage. Before the smoke from the gunfire and explosions had even cleared, the internet was being flooded by the reprehensible sludge of conspiracy theories about how Hamas was not really behind the attacks. The crux of these conspiracies is the “false flag” conspiracy theory, or the “crisis actor” conspiracy theory. It says that Israel was actually behind the attacks, killing its own people, or that no one was killed and the grieving Israelis we see on TV are actually pretending to have lost loved ones. These are more reprehensible examples of how conspiracy theorizing is still the tool of political opportunists and those so devoid of any human decency as to get some pleasure out of inflaming hatred, violence, and divisions among people.

 

One just needs to place the word “conspiracy” after “Israel and Hamas” in Google and the sites propagating them will pop up. All the usual suspects like State of the Nation, Before It’s News, and scores of others had started spinning out these yarns immediately after the October 7 attacks. Afterward, naturally, the pro-Hamas extremists protesting Israel’s retaliation against the attacks are espousing the same conspiracy theories, as are the worthless scum tearing down posters with the pictures of the hostages still held by Hamas.

 

The ongoing frustration for any clear and rational-thinking individual is that so many people can’t see how absurd it is to put your faith in sources of information that claim EVERY single world event is a conspiracy theory. Maybe if there was a site out there that claimed the only major conspiracy was the JFK assassination and not blame every other headline on hidden cabals, one might think seriously about whether or not they might have a point. Or the only conspiracy is the one that involves UFOs. Or maybe the one about the suppressed technology that could make the water-powered, non-polluting car a reality. But every major event is a conspiracy? Sure, only a fool would take professional conspiracy mongers like that seriously.

 

Unfortunately, too many people like that exist. These are the unfortunate souls completely alienated from consensus reality, perhaps those who feel so powerless and without a voice that they find these convoluted tales about hidden forces of evil running the world plausible and the cause of all their misery.

 

Then there are the ones in America’s so-called “elite” universities who’ve now fallen into this same trap of irrational and ugly conspiracism as well. These are the people who should know better, the ones who are supposed to be molded into the future intellectual leaders of society. Unfortunately, at any number of pro-Palestinian rallies at these universities, one can find the just as many people who believe in the crisis actor conspiracy theories or claims that the all the video footage of the October 7 attacks were created by Artificial Intelligence programs. Hearing the marginalized, those who are down on their luck or lacking any prospects in life espousing conspiracy theories is one thing. It’s a terrible situation, of course, but it’s somewhat understandable. But seeing a student from George Washington University telling reporters that she felt it very likely that the Hamas attack videos were created by AI makes me fear the future. The world is suddenly looking more and more like 1930s Germany and now even those who are supposed to be our best and brightest are protesting and shouting anti-Semitic slogans. It’s a modern tragedy.

 


Friday, November 3, 2023

I’m profiled in the AJCU’s “Connections”



I’m honored to be profiled in the recent edition of “Connections,” the online magazine of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. You can check it out right here. 

 

It’s an overview of classes I teach, my research and commentary on mass media issues, popular culture and popular entertainment and why I think certain media products like vampire stories and this summer’s Barbie movie touch the collective nerves in audiences to make these products blockbuster successes. Barbie and vampires I had written about in this blog earlier as well.

 

I also discuss how my research into fandom led me to my interest in the conspiracy theory phenomenon. As I discuss, conspiracy theorists are basically no different from Trekkies writing fan fiction. Just like the fan fiction writer wants to take control of some text he did not originally create and make his own—often subvert it and rewrite it—so do conspiracy theorists want to write their own fan fiction about every day’s headlines. They want to take reality and reinvent, to rewrite those headlines to match the creative fantasies inside the conspiracist’s head. Of all the classes I teach, the one about the conspiracy theories, I firmly believe, is my most important one.

Saturday, August 12, 2023

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.

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

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.  

Tuesday, July 4, 2023

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.

Saturday, April 1, 2023

Facts, fiction, conspiracies, and Dungeons and Dragons

A new film based on the venerable Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game opened this weekend and I am quoted in this special edition magazine exploring all aspects of the game, its history, development, fan community, and fans who had played the games since childhood who are now major A-list stars.

If you see the magazine above on rack in a store, be sure and pick up a copy—or 5—for all of your friends and family members.

 

But most of my quotes appear in story about one of the strangest controversies that engulfed the game starting in the late 1970s. Following the suicide of James Dallas Egbert, a mentally ill college student in 1979 who also happened to be an avid D&D player, unwarranted speculation followed that perhaps the immersive fantasy world of D&D had the power to push young people to self-destruction and violence. But Egbert’s death also coincided with the “Satanic Panic” of that decade, a bizarre moral panic about a vast, international conspiracy of Satanists running daycare centers across America, sexually assaulting and murdering children in occult rituals, and seducing other youngsters to Devil-worship through heavy metal music, violent films, and, of course, a fantasy-oriented game like Dungeons and Dragons.

 

Check out a more detailed read of the history of the Satanic panic right here. I also wrote about the phenomenon in my book, CONSPIRACY FILMS: A TOUR OF DARK PLACES IN THE AMERICAN CONSCIOUS.

 

What is more bizarre than the claims of this layered, convoluted myth is how long the moral panic it created lasted. It took another decade until level-headed, intelligent people finally made peace with the fact there was no vast underground of Satanists, despite the fact that there was barely a scintilla of evidence for any of these allegations from the moment the very panic began. The reason for this, however, is the conspiratorial mindset it was all founded on. Conspiracism is founded on the very logical fallacy that no evidence for the existence of a massive conspiracy theory is evidence in itself. There is no evidence of a massive conspiracy of the Dallas Police Department, the FBI, CIA, oil barons, bankers, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, or weapons manufacturers having killed Joh F. Kennedy, this line of thinking argues, because the evil cabal behind the conspiracy made all the evidence disappear. There isn’t a shred of credible evidence for the Moon-landing-hoax conspiracy theory or the 9/11 conspiracy theories because the hidden forces of evil made that evidence disappear. The result of all of this, however, is that the conspiracists will wind up living in a fantasy land, in a delusion created by their own minds.

 

At least people playing Dungeons and Dragons know that it’s all a game, it’s all make-believe. It was only their critics, the conspiracy theorists, and the moral crusaders who wound up not being able to tell fact from fiction.

Saturday, December 18, 2021

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.”

Friday, December 3, 2021

At the Recent Philcon Conference




It was almost remiss of me to not mention my participation in the recent Philcon conference of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society in Cherry Hill, New Jersey (close enough to Philly). After last year’s all-online conference, it was exciting to be able to talk to a full conference hall of people rather than just stare at a computer screen, and it was great walking through the dealers’ room browsing books.
 

 

And, of course, doing readings and book signings or THE CEDAR VALLEY COVENANT and CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED was outstanding. The interactions with one’s readers, the fan communities that frequent literary conferences, are an experience all authors should take part in. 

 

Those same fans also let me know they will keep me on my toes if I want to writefiction about conspiracy theories…no theory in any book they have read, they told me, is as demented as the “real” ones so many people swear they believe in these days.

 

Well, it’s a good thing my books critique conspiracy theories!


Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Close Encounters of Every Kind



I was recently interviewed about a subject that's quite a favorite of mine because it's so hard to come to conclusions about. It's a topic that requires and open mind, but one that won't be easily filled up with garbage...

UFOs.

This article on the How Stuff Works website (and you can listen to its podcast version as well) details the complex classification system of alleged UFO encounters, everything from strange lights in the sky to encounters with otherworldly beings and all the way to purported human/alien hybrids walking among us. The classification system was originally devised by the legendary astronomer J. Allen Hynek, and it would eventually provide the title for Steven Spielberg's iconic science fiction film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Hynek's system only had three kinds of close encounters. As the article details, at least seven more have been added, including complex subheadings of encounters.

But Hynek's involvement in UFOs I find very intriguing since the eminent astronomer who had originally worked for the Air Force's research projects into the phenomenon was originally a skeptic. He changed his mind while working on the infamous Project Blue Book.

I'm quite open minded about the topic of UFOs myself, but I guess I would consider myself an open-minded skeptic. The recent Pentagon report on UFOs (or UAVs as they like to call it), I thought, made an intriguing case for the consideration of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. There is something flying around in the skies, physical objects of some kind, aircraft that could not have been built by any known technology on Earth today. So where does that leave us about this issue...?

I don't know.

I kind of like the Sherlock Holmes approach to UFOs: once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, has to be the answer. So far the Pentagon report made a pretty good case for the elimination on Earthly technology behind the phenomenon.

So does that leave aliens?

I don't know. 

So my mind is open about the issue, but just as long as we don't get into the territory of absurdly complicated government conspiracies about back-engineered UFOs, demonic UFOnauts, and U.S. presidents having made deals with aliens in abduction/technology-exchange deals.

Thursday, September 2, 2021

The Spike Lee controversy and the end of the conspiracy theorist hero



I was recently interviewed for this article for the French film-magazine, Telerama, about Spike Lee’s new documentary miniseries about New York and the strange, needless controversy surrounding it. As the article details, Lee appears to be a conspiracist who inserted a 30-minute-long segment about the claims of the so-called 9/11 “truth movement” into the final episode of his upcoming HBO documentary, “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021 ½.” 

Lee’s film focuses on New York City and how it has fared over the last two decades, from the 9/11 attacks until the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, since the miniseries foregrounds New York culture over that twenty-year period rather than dealing specifically with 9/11, the insertion of what critics have called a virtual endorsement of one of the most repellent 9/11 conspiracy theorists seems peculiar.

 

The segment which Lee has since removed, reportedly leaving the final installment of the documentary series only 90-minutes-long whereas the other episodes each clock in at two hours, essentially gives the microphone to Richard Gage, the founder of “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.” Among 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Gage’s claims about the attack are particularly offensive and deranged. Aside from the standard, debunked canards of the 9/11 conspiracy mythology – that jet fuel couldn’t have melted steel, that the collapse of the towers was a controlled demolition, and that the collapse of Tower 7 is some kind of a “smoking gun” proving a conspiracy – Gage has argued that the towers were actually hit by drones camouflaged by holograms. He has repeatedly endorsed the claims that the Israeli government was behind the attacks, appearing on numerous podcasts and conspiracy-friendly outlets that also believe the Holocaust was a hoax and that all the world’s miseries are caused by all-powerful, all-controlling Jewish cabals. Recently Gage has also jumped on the COVID-conspiracy bandwagon, arguing that the pandemic was a government-engineered false flag operation, that vaccines will kill people, and it is all but a part of a grand New World Order plan to exterminate large swaths of the human population. Then, for good measure, Gage has also blamed Bill Gates for this massive conspiracy.

 

To be sure, the examination of the cultural impact of these tragedies on New York City is an excellent idea for a documentary. Why Lee would choose to mar that work by giving the floor to an opportunistic charlatan like Gage is somewhat odd. And I say “somewhat” odd because Lee had often made comments to the effect that he, too, believes in the main tenets of 9/11 conspiracism. He had recited those now debunked theories about jet fuel and steel and controlled demolitions. At one point, sounding spectacularly ignorant, Lee had also said that he hoped there would be a full-scale Congressional investigation into the causes of the collapse of the World Trade towers on 9/11.  Except there has been such an investigation. In fact, it had been carried out between 2002 and 204 by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly referred to as the 9/11 Commission. So since Lee appears to be a full-fledged fellow traveler of the Richard Gage and Alex Jones conspiracy crowd, it makes sense that he would want to propagate their theories in his documentary. Now my impression of Spike Lee, from what I have read about him in the entertainment news media, is that he is not a stupid man (an assessment I am reconsidering now in light of this controversy) I am stunned that it wouldn’t occur to him how offensive the majority of Americans find Gage and his ilk. There is a reason none of Lee's colleagues in Hollywood have given 9/11 the Oliver Stone “JFK” treatment; because they understand how the 9/11 truthers are a bunch of bottom-feeding ghouls, a collection of grave-robbers attempting to capitalize on the deaths of thousands of Americans. Giving Richard Gage a platform in a documentary like this is akin to someone making a documentary about the Moon landing and giving the flat Earth theorists and the moon-landing-hoax crowd equal time to argue their beliefs. The fact that Lee does not realize this is stunning.

 

But what happens now that Lee had wised up and removed Gage’s segment? Because Lee was foolish enough to put Gage in the documentary to begin with, he has merely been made a martyr for the conspiracy cause. Richard Gage is a now an idealistic “truth seeker” who is being silenced by The Man for getting too close to the dangerous truth. Just like Alex Jones, Gage might be able to appeal to an even bigger legion of those who are delusional and pathologically alienated from the real world. Gage’s acolytes are those who can’t live in the real world and would rather make up their fantasy version of it, a version in which they are smarter, more astute, more vigilant to the hidden truth than all the “sheeple” around them. 

 

The unpleasant irony in this is that the bookend of Lee’s documentary about New York is the COVID pandemic, a plague that has killed so many more people than it should have and a plague that appears to be intensifying once more because of the madness of conspiratorial thinking. The COVID deniers, the anti-vaxxers, the conspiracy theorists ranting about Bill Gates depopulating the world and putting microchips into vaccines and altering the human DNA are driven by the same fantasies fueling the 9/11 derangement. And, yes, I do loath to call the 9/11 conspiracy theorists “truthers.” They are lying parasites who feed off the blood of three thousand and some innocent Americans. The COVID vaccine conspiracy theorists, in turn, are the kinds of people we had seen stand trial for encouraging the mentally unstable to commit suicide.

 

Although, as the article concludes and as I have been writing for years, this entire Spike Lee controversy appears to be bringing a change to the entertainment industry. The conspiracy theorist hero might soon disappear from popular culture. Films, TV shows, and books – just as I had done in my books like CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED, and THE CEDAR VALLEY COVENANT – might soon show them to be the villains they really are.

Sunday, June 27, 2021

My Guest Spot on the Common Cents Finance Podcast



I was recently interviewed by a couple of excellent Saint Peter's University business students for their Common Cents Finance podcast and we discussed an eclectic mix of topics that included branding, public relations, crisis communication, publicity and brand management, not to mention our discussion of conspiracy theories. And we even lay the smackdown on John Cena for embarrassing himself with that groveling apology to China.

Check out the episode right here.

And do make sure and listen to all of their other episodes as well because the show's knowledgeable discussion of business issues can give a lot of big-name, professional business-broadcasters a run for their money.

Especially in our discussion of off the wall conspiracists like Alex Jones, State of the Nation, and the rest of their ilk, we discuss why the people behind these odious websites and social media need to argue that EVERY SINGLE major world event is really a part of a conspiracy. While these people might be unscrupulous and obviously lacking any sort of a moral compass, they are shrewd practitioners of personal-branding strategies and tactics. If your brand is that of the biggest conspiracy theorists in the world, you have no choice but spin alternate narratives to the consensus reality and information from mainstream sources to keep your fans happy. Why just imagine if State of the Nation did NOT blame some major news story on the Deep State, the Illuminati, or the New World Order! What would their fans do? Most likely star migrating to other purveyors of nonsensical fabrications and fake news.


Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Fascinating!



UFO’s are all over the media lately, and not just on the History Channel and the Travel Channel. 60 Minutes recently did an extensive story on the government’s admission that it had started investigating the phenomenon again in 2007. The 60 Minutes segment can be seen on YouTube here, and several extensive stories about the new UFO revelations can be read here and here. 

And this month, the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Defense are required to share their findings with Congress.

 

The US Air Force had conducted several research efforts into UFOs in the past, starting with Project Sign in 1948, then Project Grudge in 1949, and finally the famous Project Blue Book that ran from 1952 until 1969. Once Blue Book was shut down, the government said that it would no longer spend resources trying to figure out what was behind the phenomenon. The study’s official conclusion was that the vast majority of sightings were misidentifications of everything from temperature inversions, unusual cloud formations, meteorites, swamp gas, and stars, to birds, weather balloons, and conventional aircraft. Since UFOs appeared to pose no threat to national security, there was no reason for the government to be in the business of studying them.

 

That changed, apparently, in 2007 when Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader at the time, had been given information about Navy and Air Force personnel—including fighter pilots and radar operators—routinely seeing unidentified flying objects. These UFOs (or UAPs, “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” as the term UFO had been rebranded) would routinely exhibit flight capabilities beyond those of any existing aircraft in the world. Just as decades’ worth of UFO sightings claimed, the unidentified objects would be capable of speeds exceeding those of any known Earthly aircraft and would perform maneuvers, again, beyond the capabilities of aircraft manufactured by anyone in this world. The UAPs reported by the military personnel must have been powered by technology we can’t even theoretically conceive of. Aside from their abilities to accelerate or decelerate at rates that would most likely compromise the structural integrity of any aircraft—and kill any living being inside it—several of these mystery craft had been seen plunging into the ocean or emerging from it to fly away into the sky. 

 

Harry Reid’s reaction to this information was the request that $22 million be allocated to the Pentagon’s black budget to study these UAPs. As the Senate Majority Leader, he got what he asked for.

 

As the links to the stories attest, the result was the establishment of a study group called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), run by the Defense Intelligence Agency and tasked with cataloging the UFO/UAP sightings. AATIP was funded until 2012 and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force was a follow-up program.

 

We now know all this because a former AATIP director, Luis Elizondo, leaked the information to the media after resigning, allegedly frustrated by the Pentagon brass’ lack of interest in trying to determine what the UAP’s are. In 2017, the New York Times broke his story in this article.

 

So, any day now, we could get the Defense Department's report on all this and, at the very least, it’s expected that the report will acknowledge that the military is aware that some sort of hyper-advanced aircraft are able to enter U.S. airspace at will and evade our most sophisticated defenses. What these aircraft are, the report will no doubt say, nobody knows.

 

If, in fact, the government is “keeping something hidden,” as so many UFO-conspiracy films, TV shows, and books have claimed, that hidden information, I always suspected, is this sort of ignorance. There is something in the skies and we don’t know what it is.

 

Such information would be quite sobering, if not disturbing. It’s actually much more disturbing than all the rococo conspiracy theories about retrieved alien flying saucers and back-engineered UFOs in Area 51. The unknown is the most frightening thing in the world. 

 

It should inspire what past governmental studies of UFOs could not: a broader investigation of the phenomenon by the scientific community. Hopefully scientists might step up and do what Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Book’s skeptic/debunker-turned-believer called for when he said the subject needed “agnostic” investigators. It needed people who neither blindly wanted to believe, nor their mirror-image opposite, the zealous debunkers who had made up their minds that UFOs could not possibly exist before examining the facts.

 

What might eventually derail any such open-minded investigative efforts would be the hard-core conspiracy theorists once more. The conspiracy culture in the UFO community had already driven scientists away once before. As French information scientist and UFOlogists Jacques Vallee wrote in his 1991 book, “Revelations,” by the 1980s scholars like himself had walked away from UFO investigations because the field had been taken over by the saucer-crash proponents and the uncritical believers of ever increasingly outlandish theories about aliens in underground bases experimenting on human abductees, extraterrestrials living among us and walking next to us on the street, or ETs clandestinely running the countries of the world. The sober, cautious, and conservative investigations of lights in the sky and distant sightings, Vallee writes, was just not as sexy as the lurid tales of alien abductions and clandestine military/alien partnerships. But the “sexiness” of the conspiratorial claims had also killed the chance of mainstream science taking the UFO phenomenon seriously.

 

Hopefully that won’t happen again.

Sunday, May 2, 2021

You don't become a successful conspiracy theorist like this...

So, my "anti-fan," Hank Wolfe, on the Before It's News conspiracy site is again claiming that I am up to more dastardly deeds and wickedness. So far he had accused me of being a part of a plot to brainwash my students using 5G technology during my online classes and to replace students who are critical of conspiracy theories with computer-generated "deep fake" doubles. He seems to imply that I either had advanced knowledge of the COVID-19 outbreak or I'm just taking advantage of a COVID hoax - his postings are not quite clear if COVID-19 was manufactured or it's a hoax and no virus actually exists - in order to enslave my students. Since he doesn't seem to be accusing me of being one of the creators of the pandemic (or hoax), I am actually a bit disappointed. I really would have liked to have been accused of something as grand as causing the entire outbreak, or maybe just sitting on the all-powerful Committee of Doom that had manufactured the pandemic.

Now in a post from December 23, which I just noticed on Hank's Before It's News page, he does accuse me of being the mastermind behind the 2020 metal monolith mystery. My novel, CONFIRMATION, Hank argues, is but a bit of "predictive programming," or a part of some greater global plot. I need to reread his post since I can't quite recall his muddled line of "reasoning." Or you can check his posts about me and monoliths here and in right here.

It's true that I joked around about the monolith connection to CONFIRMATION on this blog, but it was, you know...A JOKE!!!

Now it's easy - and oh, so enjoyable - to make fun of a second-rate fantasist like Hank Wolfe. He makes broad declarations of grand conspiracy theories without offering a shred of proof for any of them. In fact, he does not even try his hand at the sort of conspiracist illusion of proof where he provides links to other conspiracy sites making their own unsubstantiated claims. 

That sort of citation, for example, is the stock in trade of State of the Nation, where each of their unhinged claims of COVID hoaxes, alien space weapons, and false flag operations reference a large number of other sources. Those sources, of course, are conspiracy theorists or just previous State of the Nation articles. This sort of circular method of self-referentiality is so amusing that I think I might use it as a teaching tool in my research methods class this fall. Study State of the Nation very carefully, I will explain, to learn how not to present research.

But Hank Wolfe does not bother to try and reference his shocking claims with even the sort of inept approximation of the scholarly citation system. Hank, actually, appears to be somewhat of a lazy conspiracy theorist, posting claims of far-reaching evil plots sometimes weeks, or even months apart.

What Hank does do on occasion is offer links to some news stories he attempts to use as proof that some immense conspiracy can no longer be kept secret. For example, check out this post where his headline screams that the January 6 Capitol riot was so obviously a false flag attack that even The New York Times says as much. Except the Times does no such thing.

And then we have Hank's latest postings about several stories in the Saint Peter's student newspaper, The Tribune. He argues that these two stories - check them out here and here - just about admit that my grand scheme of controlling students' minds are in full swing. The first story, about marijuana legalization in New Jersey is really an admission of an MKULTRA-style mind-control experiment, or so says Hank. The the story about students and faculty starting their COVID vaccinations, Hank writes, is a glimpse into the university's forced vaccination policy. If anyone reads these stories, they will immediately see that Hank is either spectacularly delusional, can't read, or that he thinks his fans are as lazy as he is and would never check his sources.

Hank Wolfe really could benefit from taking my class on conspiracy theories. The Do It Yourself Conspiracy exercise could help him come up with a much more convincing fake conspiracy theory than the kind of lame material he posts on his Before It's News page.

But I guess we can thank Hank for his ineptitude. In a way he helps shine a light on this bizarre cultural phenomenon that has gone so far off the deep end that at its core is but a collection of fabricated stories by sad, desperate losers and opportunists dreaming of becoming next Alex Jones. Hank's nonsense about 5G mind control technology and online learning come through in much fewer articles that say the constant deluge of rancid sewer sludge on the Sate of the Nation or Millennium Report sites. Although Hank sometimes proclaims in very matter of fact tones that the COVID pandemic is a hoax, his focus still seems to be on the more exotic realms of MKULTRA-like brainwashing conspiracies. His work is both scattered and inept. It is not in the league of the shear, cold-blooded, opportunistic evil of a conspiracy site like State of the Nation that repeatedly implores its readers not to get vaccinated, not to wear masks if one is not vaccinated and in the company of strangers, and to avoid all safety precautions that might stop the spread of COVID-19. Hank Wolfe is but a sad, inept clown, a wannabe in a crowded field of aspiring conspiracy influencers. His competition, like State of the Nation, on the other hand, spreads information that's as close as one could get to attempted murder.

Thursday, April 22, 2021

A piece of advice from a manipulative Svengali...



...please read beyond just the first paragraph or two of an article you are commenting on. That is a problem I recently noticed on the oddball "Before it's News" site of a certain Hank Wolfe who occasionally accuses me of using online education and secret 5G technology for mind control. Or something to that effect. Apparently he is attempting to blow the lid off of the sinister "Donovangate" plot I am masterminding to take over all of education or replace students in online classes with computer generated artificial intelligence avatars.

So looking at a recent post from Hank, I saw that he is still obsessed with Donovangate and mind control, looking for signs of it in my school newspaper's articles. In this piece, he comments on the length of an article I had posted about before. The Saint Peter's Pauw Wow - now renamed the Saint Peter's Tribune - had interviewed me about the QAnon phenomenon and Hank Wolfe, connecting those dots as he usually does, uncovered more clues to my occultic plot to bring on the new terrifying age of the New World Order.

And then Hank gives a warning about an SPU Tribune piece about marijuana legalization in New Jersey. Of Hank's work, this is actually one my favorites, as he calls me a "Svengali" who has complete control over the heart's and minds of all of Saint Peter's University. The SPU Tribune article, Hank warns portentously, is an endorsement of campus drug use. This drug use, he declares, is but a new attempt at enslaving the minds of students in the same vein as the Cold War-era MKULTRA drug experiments did.

Now, of course, Hank offers no concrete evidence of legalized pot in New Jersey somehow being a part of any mind control project, and also mischaracterizes the very point of the Tribune article. The article merely acknowledges the legal status of marijuana in New Jersey and reiterates that the smoke-free Saint Peter's campus does not allow pot smoking anywhere. But as any good conspiracy theorist, Hank quickly adds two and two to get five. Except when the true thesis of the Tribune article is so easy to check, I wonder why Hank would even bother to try and distort it as he does. It might be a better idea for Hank to move out of that basement at last, get a job somewhere, and put his efforts toward becoming a more productive member of society than a teller of weird, unprovable tall tales about Donovangate, 5G brainwashing, and Satanic plots.

So the lesson to take away from all this is to spend a mere two to three minutes double checking the sources of any nutter conspiracy sites like Before It's News and you'll wind up laughing at the crudest, clumsiest attempts at deception. Two or three minutes, that's it!

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

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.