No, the Earth is not flat. You're just a moron!

So this appears to be a thing now…every reference to space and the space program gets an automatic reply by the flat Earth believers, as in this article about pictures of the Earth taken from the International Space Station. The piece quickly triggered a set of mental defectives to trot out their conspiracy theories about doctored photos that only create the illusion of a curved Earth.

Now a story like this is probably run in this paper to illicit the incredulous chuckles from readers. It could lead to several head-shakes and jokes about the silliness a of a few people who still believe in nonsense like a flat Earth. As the article details, the Earth was know to be a sphere over 2000 years ago. Simple calculations have been able to prove it.

So I guess I might be in a slightly surly mood right now, but I’m not getting the urge to chuckle at this. Even one flat Earth believer in the world in 2020 is too many. As a growing body of psychological research in conspiracy beliefs is demonstrating, people who believe in idiocy like this are the alienated, the mentally unfit, clinical paranoids, and the sufferers of various mental and personality disorders. They are the antisocial misfits, the inept outsiders who are so alienated from the rest of society that they need to concoct narratives of vast evil cabals that are responsible for all of society’s ills. The creation of these fantasies by these chronic misfits lets them feel like the heroes of their own private universe. It lets them feel like heroic crusaders saving the world from conspiracies no one else is smart enough to see. These conspiracy beliefs are the ultimate ego trip.

Or, in plain English, people who believe in the Earth being flat - or the anti-vaccination agenda, for that matter, or the faking of the Moon landing, or mass shootings being perpetrated by "crisis actors" - are a collection of frigging morons who should be committed to mental asylums against their will. It would certainly be for the betterment of society. 

The most despicable conspiracy site, hands down.

As an observer of the modern conspiracy culture, I often find myself in the same situation as Robert L. Ripley did when he chronicled the world’s oddities. I spend a whole lot of time looking at the strange, the bizarre, and the unexpected. There are the theories about the Earth being flat, the back-engineered alien spacecraft fantasies from the not so distant fringes of UFOlogy, and the stale, shopworn JFK assassination theories. But then there are the conspiracists who are vile beyond any measure of human depravity.

For one, there are the anti-vaxxers who might as well be treated by the law as murderers. Their scientifically discredited nonsense is leading to a global wave of disease outbreaks and death. People like this are no better than someone who prods and cajoles a depressed, suicidal individual into taking their own lives. 

Then we have the 9/11 conspiracy crowd, a collection of blood-sucking vampires exploiting the deaths of over 3000 Americans in order to sell their self-published books, cheaply produced DVDs, and get hits on their social media platforms. 

Then there are the climate-change-deniers who still insist on claiming that global warming is some kind of a massive hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scientists. In the middle of this freakshow we have the State of the Nation website, which subscribes not merely to all of these theories—and pretty much every conspiracy theory under the sun—but has now taken to mocking children and calling them crisis actors. If you visit the SOTN site, you’ll find them not only joining the attacks on 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg, but upping the ante in personal attacks and ridicule. In fact, SOTN displays its unique ability in taking tastelessness, absolute sociopathic callousness to heretofore unseen levels. You will see SOTN offer a rebuttal to Thunberg’s activism by making fun of her appearance and mocking her with nicknames like Greta the Grinch. 

But then if any other boundaries of boundaries of decency might come up, SOTN, of course, finds it and immediately crosses it. SOTN then mocks Thunberg’s Asperger’s Syndrome and, naturally, claims that her condition is some kind of a willful creation by the “globalists” who had vaccinated her to turn her into their puppet on a quest for worldwide domination.

So State of the Nation likes to refer to the big, invisible bogeyman of the New World Order and the “globalists” as “sociopaths” and “psychopaths” a lot. They throw these phrases around constantly. But what they really should do is look those words up in a dictionary. Whoever the dregs of humanity are who run that site should find the experience akin to staring into a mirror.

One of the best YouTube channels out there!

If you were to subscribe to just one YouTube channel devoted to debunking the depressing glut of conspiracy theories polluting the internet, I would urge you to make the Sci Man Dan channel the one. Check out a sample video right here. Not only does this channel devote almost all of its time to dismantling Flat Earth theories, it does so with a wonderfully droll British wit. Not only do you get to see science at work, but presented in a very funny way.

I had been recommending Sci Man Dan to several students recently and they asked what the point was in putting this much energy into dealing with fringe kooks like the Flat Earth believers. The energy must  be put into dealing with Flat Earth believers, into exposing the absurdity, the sheer ignorance of their claims, because they are out there. People like this exist in the twenty first century and they must not. 

This is exactly the reason I am blogging and teaching about the dangers of conspiracism and the threat posed by the shameless, reprehensible charlatans behind this movement. While we should be living in a time where science, rationality, and reason should be ordering our belief systems, we are instead descending into a new Dark Age of willful, aggressive ignorance. This can not stand. The 9/11 “truthers,” the false-flag crisis actor conspiracy theorists, and the rest of their sleazy ilk exist in our time, and they simply must not.

Sandy Hook "truther" James Fetzer loses libel suit. Good!

All words have consequences and now the conspiracy community is learning it the hard way – finally – in court, according to this story. A Wisconsin judge just found conspiracy theorist James Fetzer guilty of libeling Leonard Pozner, the father of one of the children murdered in the Sandy Hook mass shooting of 2012.

The details of this case are so repugnant that it’s impossible, I think, to have any kind of a measured, civil discussion of who James Fetzer is and what he was sued for. As the NY Times story outlines, Fetzer wrote a book arguing that the Sandy Hook massacre was a “false flag” attack, a hoax perpetrated by some government cabal to use as a pretense for cracking down on gun-ownership rights. By that account, of course, all of the grieving families, friends, and coworkers of the children and staff members who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School were liars and “crisis actors,” coconspirators of the shadowy evil cabal. Thus Fetzer got hit with a well-deserved libel suit and now he has, thankfully, lost the case.

The only evil perpetrated in this case, of course, was the one by Fetzer, his co-author, and his publisher. First, arguing that no shooting took place at Sandy Hook is mind-boggling in its sheer callousness. Not only does what they describe – or any of the arguments made by all the other “truther” bottom-feeders like the State of the Nation web page, Alex Jones, the Millennium Report, or the rest of their slimy ilk – defy all logic and common sense, but it’s virtually unfathomable how insensitive it is to the pain of these families. Faking a mass shooting at a school in the middle of a community like Newtown, Connecticut, is impossible. Period! It is just as impossible as the 9/11 conspiracy theories, the vaccination conspiracy theories, and the flat Earth conspiracy theories an ever-growing subculture of the alienated, mentally unstable, psychotic, and pathologically unstable believe in these days. But the fact that Fetzer would use the death of children to make money off of, that he would continually encourage the harassment of people like Leonard Pozner, is an act of inhuman depravity that could only be born of the mind of a sociopath. 

But a quick review of Fetzer’s background reveals that none of what he did with the Sandy Hook tragedy should be of surprise. He is, after all, one of the stars of the 9/11 conspiracy movement. A quick Google of his name will provide a wealth of information about his background, including his founding of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth organization in 2005. The fascinating thing about Scholars for 9/11 Truth is that by 2006 the group saw a schism, where a sizable faction of its members – and no, most of them are not scholars, and the few that are have mostly scholarly credentials like an expertise in horticulture, art, or literary analysis – decided to break away and start their own group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Their problem with Fetzer, they said, was that he wanted to keep an open mind to and include such lunatic theories like the World Trade Center towers being destroyed by lasers from space or mini nuclear weapons.

Again, sorry for the incivility, but you can see what happened to Fetzer, right? He was deemed too batshit-crazy for even the average 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Since then, Fetzer has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. Aside from the 9/11 derangement, he has endorsed the Moon-landing hoax theory, various harebrained JFK conspiracy theories, and has been friendly to various Holocaust-denier and world-Jewish-conspiracy theories. A true, class act, right?

Also it’s worth remarking about something unfortunate concerning Fetzer. From the 1970s until the 1990s, he actually had a legitimate academic career. He is today a professor emeritus of the philosophy of science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Cranks, fringe kooks, and the utterly unscrupulous, do turn up in academia as well from time to time. Intelligence, unfortunately, does not always rule out a lack of morals and conscience…or sometimes just plain mental illness. The Fetzers of academia, thankfully, however, are kept to a minimum by the nature of that business. And Fetzer’s descent into conspiracy theorist batshit-craziness only started after his retirement as a full-time faculty member. With age, one can suppose, the body is not always the first to go. Or maybe he just needed a little extra retirement income and he realized there was an a big enough audience out there to pay for books and videos about 9/11 and crisis actor conspiracy theories, no matter how ludicrous these theories may be.

But aside from celebrating Leonard Pozner's victory, we must also laud his other activism against this predatory, destructive conspiracy culture that is pushing American society ever closer to a new dark age of irrationality and mindless paranoia. Pozner also founded the HONR Network, dedicated to fighting back against online harassment and challenging the malicious lies of conspiracy theorists. As Pozner argues so correctly, conspiracy theories can’t be ignored because they will not fade away on their own. These theories are kept alive by the Internet and they spread like a vicious cancer until they erase real history. 

Do check out the HONR Network’s web page right here and support its mission.

It’s time that the tide began to turn against the terrorists of the conspiracy theory community and the people who should start living in fear – in fear of the exposure of their unconscionable lies – are the Fetzers of this world and the rest of their kind in the “truther” community.

I'm not sure which one is worse...

On the one hand we had a gang of murdering animals like ISIS on a bombing spree in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, killing over 300 people.

And less than 24-hours-later - literally, almost on the very same day - we see the bloodsuckers exploiting it for attention and money on the internet.

I had written before about how almost immediately after some tragedy - from the Boston marathon bombing to the various mass shootings - we see the grave robbers, the bottom-feeders of the conspiracy culture posting their demented alternate theories about "false flag" attacks and "crisis actors." Except in the case of the Sri Lanka attacks, these "alternate news" sleaze bags like State of the Nation and the Millennium Report posted their theories about false flag attacks within a few hours of the news breaking from Sri Lanka.

Check out this link to State of the Nation about the Sri Lanka false flag theory and note how it links to the Millennium Report. The two sites are virtually identical, with State of the Nation regurgitating almost everything that appears on Millennium Report, from its anti-vaxxer nonsense to its plethora of delusional stories about prophecies and Pizzagate and massive deep-state conspiracy theories.

And yes, I admit that this is not any sort of measured, civil piece of discourse on an important issue of the day. But how much civility is warranted when we have a grimy little cottage industry of paranoia thriving on the internet today? How much civility do we owe people like State of the Nation, and Alex Jones, and Millennium report, Before it's News, and Sheila Zilinsky and their ilk who capitalize on death and suffering, who exploit grief so they can make money off their web pages, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Can you not see each of these lowlives jumping with glee, with absolute pleasure every time we have another story of mass destruction, mass murder? The higher the bodycount, the more opportunity there is to make a quick buck of the gullible, the paranoid, and the alienated.

Looking at the sickening handiwork of killers...or looking at the people who cash in on the murders by spreading even more fear, even more paranoia through their conspiratorial BS. I'm really not sure any more which of the two sides is actually worse.

By the most basic definition of the word, they are both "terrorists."

At least he's partially right...

I’ve been following the latest news stories about Alex Jones’ legal troubles with a sort of nauseous fascination. The latest twist in the defamation lawsuits brought against him by Sandy Hook families is Jones’ attempt to worm his way out of taking responsibility for inciting the harassment of these families by claiming that he was a victim of “psychosis.” You can check out the particulars of the case in this story in the Columbia Journalism Review, or by just Googling Jones’ name. The “psychosis” story should be among the first that pop up during your search. (Because, of course, the Insiders and the New World Order controlling Google are doing their best to tear a truth-teller like Jones down)

But basically Jones is up against a wall in court and he claims that it was a form of temporary insanity that made him claim for years that the Sandy Hook shooting – like numerous other mass shootings he had been bloviating about – was either a “false flag” attack or a hoax using “crisis actors.” This is similar to the time he claimed in court during his divorce proceedings that the things he talks about on his program are a form of “performance art.” 

The reality is probably closer to his so-called performance art. Or, to put it more accurately, a con job. Jones, I am certain, has never suffered any sort of psychosis that drove him to spout all of his illogical, contradictory, unprovable mountains of horse turd on his show. He is a showman who has been telling his delusional, gullible, alienated fans exactly what they want to hear. No psychosis there, only an absolute and utter lack of scruples. 

With this psychosis claim, one can see that he is also a pathetic coward who can’t bear to admit any responsibility for his reprehensible behavior and take the consequences like a man.

But the reason I am nauseated by all of this is because I think of all the people who still listen to him and take all of his words as gospel. No matter that their idol admits to being either a liar or mentally unstable, his fan base will still continue to hang on his every word, believing in all of his claims of NWO and Illuminati and Insider conspiracy theories. 

So Jones is at least partially right when it comes to his fans. Believing in these conspiracy theories is a form of mental illness.

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.

And the mystery persists!!

So this article is a quick overview of the legal hit Alex Jones just took from a group of Sandy Hook parents. Apparently he needs to turn over marketing and financial documents in the parents' group's lawsuit against him. This is information that could reveal the deliberate campaign Jones waged against the survivors and parents of the Sandy Hook shooting, accusing them of being a part of conspiracy to stage the attack as a "false flag" event and being paid "crisis actors."

This is the very least Jones deserves in perhaps the most despicable display we have seen from the modern conspiracy community. Still it's interesting, isn't it, that the New World Order of the Illuminati is merely taking Jones to court, rather than making him disappear "mysteriously" from the face of the earth? Such sinister plots, after all, are what Jones has been accusing the "elites" and the "insiders" of, right?  So why is Alex Jones still alive?? I just can't figure this out!

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!

Unfortunate, but not surprising...

I ran across this fascinating article from National Geographic about Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Not to be too self-serving, but my immediate reaction was that it's a real-world example of the theme I was trying to deal with in my new novel, CONFIRMATION. People will believe what they want to believe, what is the most convenient to maintain their preexisting belief systems so as never to have to admit they might have been wrong or that they need to change their world views. And they will keep believing no matter what they see right in front of their faces. This phenomenon, of course, has been demonstrated over and over again in decades' wroth of research in psychology as well as in media studies and analyses of people's reactions to persuasive messages.

These unfortunate folks on Tangier Island are watching their home slowly being claimed by the ocean. Some day, perhaps within the next 50 years, the island will no longer exist due to the rising ocean levels and the global climate change that's behind it. Nonetheless, they still cling to the belief that climate change is a hoax and believe in Donald Trump's conspiracy theories about climate science being fraudulent and the handiwork of the Chinese. These people will, no doubt, stick to their belief that climate change is not real until the moment the last of them will be evacuating the island. Then they will probably claim that the rising tides were a punishment from God because of the gays.

So when we scratch out heads at how people can so adamantly believe that the Earth is flat, that we never went to the Moon, that Bush family members blew up the Twin Towers, that crisis actors pretended to get shot in Las Vegas and Parkland, or any number of utterly implausible conspiracy theories, let's take a look at the people of Tangier Island.

Belief, no matter how it might fly in the face of tangible, empirical evidence, is a mighty powerful thing. And it can be incredibly destructive when manipulated by the opportunistic and unscrupulous.

My Appearance on "One on One With Steve Adubato."

The August 20th episode of the "On on One With Steve Adubato" show is available online right here. 

We discuss the dark side of the conspiracy culture and why all the Alex Joneses and "crisis actor" conspiracy fanatics have crossed way over he line of all human decency today. As I make the point in my novel, CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED, people like that can hardly be cast as heroes any more.

And the antidote to all this madness where people who want to believe too much and want to live inside their self-constructed fantasy worlds of chem-trails and shadow governments, run by the New World Order, the Illuminati, and time-traveling Nazis commanded by Elvis Presley? Education! As I discuss the fantastic opportunity I get to teach about the conspiracy culture and its destructiveness, education must now become the bulwark against the modern Dark Ages we are slipping into faster and faster.

And you can be sure that absolutely no student will ever walk out of any of my classes believing in crisis actors or how the Freemasons coordinated the attacks of 9/11 from Denver International Airport.

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.