Showing posts with label false flag. Show all posts
Showing posts with label false flag. Show all posts

Sunday, September 8, 2019

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.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

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.

Sunday, June 2, 2019

A state of moral depravity.

On occasion I wander back to the State of the Nation website to check whether or not I am being accused of plotting an alien invasion or putting the finishing touches on the Illuminati’s plan for creating a Luciferian one-world government. Stories like that amuse me. They’re a source of a good a laugh for the day. But when I looked at their page in the aftermath of the recent mass shooting in Virginia Beach, there was nothing at all to be amused about.

The page was only the site of cynical, moral depravity that has taken root in a sizable percentage of the American population. It is a moral depravity that is being fostered and nurtured by a handful of con artists and swindlers who run webpages like SOTN, the Millennium Report, Before it’s News, and the rest of the Alex Jones wannabes on the Internet. On the very day of a tragedy, these parasites are already at work spinning their—rather predictable and stale at this point—conspiracy theories about another “false flag” attack.

So consider this: on the very day of the Virginia Beach shooting, SOTN had already come to the conclusion that the murders were actually a false flag. Wouldn’t you think that it’s quite remarkable that the people who run this site, where ever they may be holed up in some basement, would be able to put the pieces together and determine exactly what happened even before law enforcement agencies even started their investigation? But investigations, facts, data, evidence, of course, are completely pointless in the bizarro world of SOTN. They already have their set conspiratorial world view they graft onto any major event. They take their master narrative, something that might have been spun from a second-rate self-published conspiracy thriller about a Deep State cabal of Illuminati New World Order supervillains plotting to bring about a global totalitarian order through a series of manufactured emergencies, and graft this narrative onto the events of the day. Then, without any form of evidence—save for links to OTHER CONSPIRACY WEBSITES and their unfounded, unproven allegations—they begin repeating their claims of false flag attacks over and over again, their stories looping back on themselves where links to “evidence” are previous SOTN or Millennium Report postings.

But at the core of these conspiratorial fantasies are the dead, the injured, and the traumatized. The swindlers and the charlatans like SOTN exploit these victims to get page-views, social-media likes, and shares. Individuals who follow these websites must recognize the ugliness, the sheer callous disregard for pain and suffering people running these “alternate news” sites are capable of.

If you want to imagine what the people running the State of the Nation are doing after every loss of life, imagine them laughing with glee and high-fiving each other, happy as they can be that there is a new tragedy to exploit, a new opportunity for page views by the gullible, simple-minded rubes that will swallow every claim of a conspiracy.

And let me repeat something that I have written here before. Every committed State of the Nation fan, please take note. Please jot it down on a paper just in case you might forget and need to refresh your memory. If the sort of New World Order your favorite website claims exists is really out there, orchestrating these mass murders, how come they haven’t yet found and eliminated the entire SOTN editorial staff? Why are the grand plans of the globalist insider Freemasons and Satanists appearing all over the Internet unchecked?

The answer, of course, is simple. There is no New World Order, there are no grand plans, no false flag attacks, no Satanic secret societies, and the people running State of the Nation are not only lying to you but laughing at you as they are doing so.

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.


Well, the folks over at State of the Nation seem to have an incredibly high of opinion of me! They just blamed me for starting a massive "false flag" measles outbreak up in Rockland County, New York. I'm not kidding. Check out this delirious rant about me from a few days ago.

I almost missed the article since they weren't insulting me in the title.

They claim that my blogging about my frustration with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children was immediately followed by the measles outbreak in New York. It was suspiciously too soon after I blogged, SOTN claims. My post apparently was the command for the New World Order conspirators to infect people with measles so that New York authorities could respond by banning those infected from public places.

So SOTN is now making me out to be some kind of a Bondian super villain, sitting in my lair in Jersey City and issuing false flag orders to all of my NWO minions as a part of my diabolical plan...TO RULE ZA VORLD!!! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Seriously! Read the article. It sounds exactly like the rantings of a hopelessly deranged mind.

However, if you're running the SOTN web page and you actually take seriously what you write, shouldn't you be asking yourself one very important question right now? If Donovan is so powerful that he can just order a measles outbreak at will, what's to stop him from sending a black helicopter full of Illuminati assassins after you for attempting to foil his grand plans for global domination?

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

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."

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

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.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

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.

Monday, January 14, 2019

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!

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

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.

Friday, November 3, 2017

The appeal and the dark side of conspiracy theories

A few weeks ago I was quoted in this Urbo.com article on the truth behind conspiracy theories. Like the most deranged of belief systems, there is just a tiny enough reality, a bit of plausibility at the core of conspiracism to explain why half of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory. While I had long held that conspiracy theorists, even the most demented of them, still served some small positive purpose in our world - their most irrational and unproven claims at least functioning as a symbolic inspiration to stay skeptical of authority - today I am wary of anyone who uses the term "conspiracy." In light of the theories claiming that mass shootings are "false flag" attacks and climate change is the creation of a vast global hoax perpetrated by scientists, most of conspiracism today is the home of charlatans and opportunists out to make a quick buck off the gullible.