Teachergate and Gay Frogs

This fall semester I am teaching my class on the history of conspiracy theories and conspiracy entertainment again, and this time we’re busier than ever. As I post supplemental materials on the course Blackboard shell, it becomes harder and harder to keep ahead of the students. They’re often able to top me finding the most outlandish conspiratorial claims in the shortest amount of time. It’s especially gratifying—or is that disturbing?—to see them find older theories that somehow still finds some adherents.

 

For example, when one of my students found Alex Jones’ rants about the New World Order introducing chemicals into the water supply that turn frogs gay, lots of laughs were had in class. Check out this YouTube clip where someone edited Jones’ histrionics into a music video. While the clip was posted three years ago, there are still Jones fans out there worried about those homosexuality-causing chemicals in the drinking water.

 

The frog theory and video, aside from being hilarious, were also quite useful for our discussion of the fluoride-in-the-water conspiracy theory of the 1950s and 60s. That was a theory Stanley Kubrick had already lampooned in his 1964 classic, Dr. Strangelove. Yet fluoridated-water theory still has its staunch believers to this day.

 

The students’ final project will be the Do It Yourself Conspiracy exercise, where they will have to create their own conspiracy theory using the typical conspiracist’s tricks of the trade: cherry-picking facts to support preconceived ideas, quoting people out of context, making spurious connections between unrelated variables. Usually in the past I had seen some remarkable creations of conspiracy fiction that rival the professional charlatans like Jones or the people at the State of the Nation and the Millennium report sites. This year, however, I’m not sure how the students’ work will stack up against the unadulterated madness of the pros.

 

I mean QAnon? Really people? A vast cabal of human-sacrificing Satanists led by Tom Hanks congregating in tunnels deep underground to drink human blood? Take a look at this Time article to see how committed the QAnon followers are to their cause.

 

And then I noticed a series of posts on the Before It’s News site that quite impressed me. No major news event is left unexploited by the truly committed conspiracists. School closings, apparently, are suspect for a writer named Hank Wolfe, with online education being just a part of a vast 5G mind-control plot he calls "Teachergate." In his posts, Wolfe draws a line between school closings, 5G towers, the New World Order, brainwashing, and all the way to Elon Musk’s neuralink microchip and teachers being replaced by perfectly realistic artificial intelligence simulations on the screens of millions of students across the country.

 

Wolfe’s complete thesis can be read across the following four postings:

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/07/online-education-and-5g-mind-control-exposed-2517291.html

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/08/teachergate-school-cancellation-agenda-exposed-2517416.html

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/08/elon-musk-brain-implants-and-nwo-mind-control-2517431.html

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/09/musk-5g-and-the-school-shut-down-scam-2517449.html

 

The one disappointing thing about Wolfe’s posts is the way he didn’t weave Satan, the Antichrist, or blood-drinking, devil-worshipping celebrities into his yarn. Perhaps it’s because A Call for an Uprising is working that side of the street. Or maybe Wolfe just didn’t get around to it yet. Perhaps that will be his next major revelation.

 

But with theories like Wolfe’s out there, my students will be challenged to reach deep inside their creative core and really work extra hard to top harebrained craziness. 

Unconscionable Monsters...

That’s the only phrase I could use in a recent reply I wrote to a comment on my October 29, 2018 post about the Call for and Uprising YouTube channel that has recently shifted from its laughably ridiculous obsession with Satanists in the entertainment industry to its jumping on a series of repugnant, morally bankrupt Coronavirus conspiracy theories. The worse of these theories—to be found all over the online conspiracy community—all amount to attempting to convince people to ignore the scientific and medical establishment’s guidelines on avoiding the COVID-19 virus. People who actively try to convince others to ignore the safety warnings about this disease can hardly be classified as human. Can there be no clearer example of true evil in this world today than someone who willfully attempts to deceive others into endangering their lives and health? Such behavior is on par with attempted murder.

Among some of the most repellent examples of these theories, found all across web pages like State of the Nation, The Millennium Report, Before It’s News, or Alex Jones’ Infowars, include claims that the virus just simply does not exist, that the illnesses are caused by 5G cell towers, that the entire outbreak was engineered by some mysterious “they” to depopulate the Earth, or that the virus is real but it had been created to then compel people to take vaccines that will kill them. 

Alex Jones, the most high-profile and prolific of these professional scumbags, has also just been warned by the New York State attorney general’s office to stop peddling a “natural” remedy he claims will cure COVID-19. Check out an article about it right here. Jones, of course, knows full well that tens of thousands of his readers and listeners hang on his every word every day. And he knows that there is no cure yet for the virus. Attempting to sell his listeners this modern day version of snake oil (a concoction called colloidal silver that has absolutely no scientifically proven medicinal properties) is the act of one of the most brazen, the most audacious sociopaths in the conspiracy world.

There indeed are a couple of horrible diseases spreading the world right now. The Coronavirus is just one of them. The other one is the conspiracy theory.

A Call for an Uprising...to find all those missing pets?

 

I recently spent a little time watching a YouTube video from Call for an Uprising since its fans have been responding so vigorously to my last post about the channel. Afterward I did some Googling for information about a sudden surge in animal disappearances and—no surprise here—couldn’t really find anything.

So why did I look for information about missing animals, you might ask. Well, one of their recent videos included a very surreal and disjointed rant about this past Friday the 13^thcoinciding with the Harvest Moon and how there is supposed to be Satanic activity at an all-time high when that happens. In a rather quick rant—sounding quite rushed, sloppy, and even more unhinged than the usual videos from this channel—the narrator unleashed a sort of stream of consciousness ramble about Satanic cults performing rituals during the Harvest Moon and on Friday 13^thand how on both of these occasions household pets go missing at a greater frequency than most other times. Again, since the 13^thand the Harvest Moon fell on the same date, pets were supposed to have been disappearing left and right.

So far I’ve found no evidence in the news—national or local—for any sort of an increase in pet disappearances this past Friday. The reason for this, Uprising fans will, I’m certain, soon point out, is that the mainstream media is keeping all of this hidden because they are under the control of the Illuminati Satanists. Instead of putting this massive media-machine cover-up to use, I’m not sure why the Satanists wouldn’t just go and buy some cats and dogs—or whatever else it is they need to sacrifice—from some animal shelters. Those animals are not that expensive and I’m sure it would be much less of a hassle to buy a cat or a dog than to try and steal it and then call their compatriots at the hidden Illuminati lair to squelch all police reports of mass animal disappearances. 

Plus, Uprising claims, these animal-sacrificing Satanists are all around us. They are normal-looking everyday people. They could be your next-door neighbor. You might even see them at church on Sunday because they claim to be good Christians. It’s only behind closed doors that their true evil nature is revealed! Pretty scary stuff, right? It could make for a really nifty horror movie late night on the SyFy channel, or a low-budget offering on Netflix. But I’m just wondering about the efficiency of all that animal-stealing. If these vicious blood-thirsty Satanists are the people next door, then wouldn’t they need to hold down day jobs? So when would they find the time to make the plans to steal the animals? Uprising makes it sound like the animal thefts are committed on Friday the 13^th, but I’m wondering why the Satanists couldn’t have stolen the animals earlier, just so everything is all set and ready to go for Friday night. Stealing your neighbor’s dog on Friday, after a long day of work, sounds rough and way too risky. I mean I must admit that on Friday afternoon, after a long day and a long week of work, I’m pretty beat. I’m not sure that I would have the stamina to go out and try and steal a cat or a dog, plus make it to my local coven’s shadowy headquarters for the Black Mass and the sacrifice.

But the rest of the episode is full of these kinds of logical inconsistencies. Just check it out for yourself for a few laughs. My second favorite howler of a claim is that the Satanic panic of the 1980s was actually manufactured by the world-wide Luciferian conspiracy. So that absurd moral panic was created by Satanists—arguing that there was a world-wide Luciferian conspiracy—in order to have the whole thing collapse, get debunked by everyone from local police agencies to the FBI (all part of the Satanic underground, I presume) so that they could keep on worshiping the Dark Lord of Hell in privacy and not be suspected by anyone. Hmm…interesting! So then why not just worship in private in the beginning and why bring the topic of Satan into the mainstream conversation. 

So the arguments in this video were so vague and completely lacking in one single iota, one scintilla, one shred of evidence that could prove any of its crazed, feverish rambling, that I just had to do a little investigating and look at the new Call for an Uprising web page. Maybe there would be some discussion of actual evidence to prove these claims. Maybe there was a hint of how the mysterious figure behind this channel uncovered the secrets of the Satanists and lived to tell the tale. But all I found was the requirement to pay $2.99 a month for a membership before being given access to the site. I declined to do that.

As it should be obvious to any intelligent person here, A Call for an Uprising is not merely the handiwork of an unconscionable con artist, but perhaps one of the most audacious con artists who ever plied his trade on gullible, impressionable victims.

No, you should NOT have the right to do your own research and make a choice!

This is an interesting article from a couple of weeks ago that was just brought to my attention. It’s a piece by Jennifer Reich, a sociologist and author of the book “Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines,” condensing the topic of her book. Both the book and the article give a glimpse of the complex decision-making processes of people who refuse to vaccinate their kids. 

Reich especially focuses on the kind of damage unvaccinated children can do to herd immunity, or the way measles epidemics can spread when a large enough segment of a population is not immunized. Parents refuse to consider the greater, herd immunity factor because, as Reich argues, of a cultural atmosphere of hyper-individualized parenting. Parents who have come to believe that vaccines are harmful to their children will quickly and readily ignore the greater good in an effort to protect their own children from a perceived threat.

This complete and total disregard for the greater social good is as infuriating as the fact that somehow at the start of the twenty-first century so much of the world, even parts of the so-called developed world like the U.S. and Europe, is slipping into a new Dark Age of superstition, ignorance, and beliefs in unsubstantiated pseudoscientific crap being shoveled all over the internet by charlatans and conspiracy theorists. And remember what I wrote in several of my posts here: I’m a libertarian and I am all for individuality. I am passionate about forms of government that allow their citizens as much individuality as possible. But I am also passionate about empirical scientific facts, about reason and rationality. Vaccines work! Period! This is a fact that has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We know that vaccines work just like we know that that Earth is round. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism!! This, too, has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. And vaccines are not a New World Order/Illuminati/Satanist plot to depopulate the world, or whatever deranged fantasies predators and nightcrawlers like Alex Jones, State of the Nation, The Millennium Report, and the rest of the festering moral cesspool that is the “truther” community keeps propagating for attention and profit.

Reich’s article also points out the other frustrating aspect of the hyper-individualistic parents; the parents who want to have the “right to do their own research and make up their minds about vaccines.” Is this sort of behavior not want to make you test which is harder, your head or the nearest concrete wall? Is this not the height of the most toxic sort of hubris, the most insane form of solipsistic behavior? I definitely think so. And, remember, I’m the individualist libertarian! However, facts are facts. Consider the following: if any of these concerned parents suddenly heard a banging and wheezing noise come out of their car’s engine just a moment before said car sputtered to a stop and died on the side of the road, what would they do? Would they pop the hood, roll up their sleeves and go to work trying to fix it right then and there? Would they whip out their smart phones and Google “how to fix dead engine?” Of course, not! They would call a tow truck and have that car taken to an expert to fix the problem. So sorry, folks, but this is why I have no patience and sympathy for the let-the-parents-do-the-research-and-make-up-their-own-minds crowd. The average Middle American soccer mom does not have the ability to research the issue on her own and come to accurate conclusions. Unless that soccer mom has medical training and is a physician, she has no business making decisions about whether or not to vaccinate! This is also why I am once again being uncharacteristically un-libertarian in favoring very tough punitive legal measures against people who refuse to vaccinate their children.

Now I do agree with Reich’s argument—and the arguments of many other dismayed doctors and scientists—that the real villains in the recent measles outbreaks are not necessarily the parents themselves. The parents are merely gullible and ignorant of scientific and medical data. And, of course, they are also fearful. I completely understand the kind of dread fear any parent might have over the thought of their child becoming sick, disabled for life, or dying. I am completely sympathetic to the fact that any decent parent will always fear for their child’s health and welfare. But the real villains are the ones who feed on this fear, who exploit it, who tell parents lies.

The real villains are the anti-vaccination activists, the conspiracy-peddling vampires like Jones, the State of the Nation editorial staff, The Millennium Report web page, the Call for an Uprising YouTube channel and the rest of their sociopathic ilk.

Time to call garbage what it is...

So this article was brought to my attention and I scratch my head and wonder how historians and anthropologists in the future will make sense of the early 21st century, a time that appears to be going insane. Long after the atom has been split and men walked on the moon, we wind up in a world where scientists still need to waste their time explaining to adults that the Earth is round and that vaccines that have been administered to people for generations are not causing autism. Worse yet, as the CNN piece above argues, science seems to be losing the social media war to the anti-vaxxers!

And that is where the article asks an important question. What can science and academia do now? Has the war for the minds of the alienated, the troubled, the naive, the paranoid, those so far on the fringes of modern society as to be seeking a community among those who reject all consensus reality, been completely lost?

The answer, hopefully, is 'no.' But what science needs to start doing is what it has dreaded for the longest time. They need to engage the trolls. The thinking among scholars has so far been that replying to the various "truther," "crisis actor," anti-vaxxer and flat Earth conspiracy theorists was a mistake because it gave such charlatans and con artists attention. But this sort of don't-feed-the-trolls approach has not been working. When we are seeing a sudden surge in measles outbreaks because fearful parents have been deceived into withholding life-saving vaccinations from their children, science and academia must fight back. Science must develop a public relations campaign for an evidence-based, rational world view, for a belief system that must be based on objective, quantifiable truth. And science and academia must start finding the nerve to do something they had so far loathed to do. They need to "lower themselves" to the level of the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. They must call the frauds, the con artists, the hustlers like Alex Jones, Call for an Uprising, and State of the Nation parasites exactly what they are. People running the conspiracy and "alternate news" web sites, podcasts, YouTube channels and blogs are blood-suckers and bottom feeders who spread disease and death for a quick buck in online advertising.

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.

The sad "State of the Nation"

So how does that saying go that if you have enemies it means you’ve stood up for something some time in your life? 

A few days ago the State of the Nation website ran this little insult piece about me, claiming that not only am I the “torchbearer” of the anti-conspiracy movement, but that my “torch went out.” To illustrate that my torch went out, they provided several examples of the typical “proof” that is in the tool box of all conspiracy theorists worth their salt: links to unsubstantiated claims made by other conspiracy theorists and articles and quotes taken out of context. Do check out their links and see for yourself. They are quite amusing, especially the link that supposedly blows the lid off the Sandy Hook false flag conspiracy…posted by someone called “Dr. Eowyn” from the Millennium Report web page. It’s fascinating to see that much of the content on the State of the Nation page is just material reposted from the Millennium Report. Although the Millennium Report doesn’t appear to be reposting stuff from State of the Nation. Or at least they didn’t run the article about me. I’m somewhat disappointed.

Now am I upset about the State of the Nation’s article? Not in the least. As you will see when you visit their page, these are the people who argue that the California fires were started by lasers from space! How upset can you be if people like this criticize you? Plus, if you scroll down to my anti-vaccine post below, someone criticizing me put up their own link to the State of the Nation article. That person also thought that I would remove their comments and give them the comfort of feeling like the martyr for the “truth” they crave for. As I wrote here before, I won’t remove any criticism of me, and I certainly do not need to remove any State of the Nation fan’s conspiracist rants. Illogical, absurd foolishness will be recognized as such by the normal people that make up the majority of the population. The tinfoil garbage of State of the Nation, Millennium Report, Alex Jones, the Before It’s News website, the anti-vaxxer movement, and the rest of their ilk will be laughed at and dismissed by most individuals whose IQs are larger than their belt size.

And the State of the Nation piece also reminds me of the work I also need to do as a writer and educator. The sad fact is that we do have a number of unfortunate lost souls out there who, for whatever reason, are so alienated from mainstream society and all sources of expertise and consensus reality that they choose to believe in fantasies about the Illuminati, the New World Order, Satanic secret societies running the world, and autism-causing vaccines being given to children on purpose. The paranoia of these people is then being fed by unscrupulous charlatans like Alex Jones, the State of the Nation, Before It's News, or A Call for an Uprising-type YouTube channels. It’s only education that has a chance of standing up to this new rising Dark Age of irrationality.

Truth found!

I’m a huge fan of all of Josh Gates’ exploration/mystery/paranormal reality shows like “Destination Truth,” “Expedition Unknown,” and “Legendary Locations.” As I was working on CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED, I would often refer to his shows as a shorthand for describing who my main characters are. “They’re the cast members of a paranormal reality show, kind of like Josh Gates’ “Destination Truth,” I would say. When I was watching a marathon of his old “Destination Truth” show (on the SyFy channel originally from 2007 to 2012) recently and spent some of the commercial breaks channel surfing to a couple of other paranormal shows, I was taken by something wonderfully ironic. I almost laughed out loud.

OK, so let me set the scene: “Destination Truth” was oriented much more toward the exploration of supposed paranormal phenomena, whereas his recent programs are about exploration and the examination of legends, historical figures like Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Billy the Kid, and historical mysteries like lost treasures. In “Destination Truth,” Gates and his team would specifically investigate claims of hauntings, monsters, alien encounters and such around the world. But the most entertaining aspect of each of each episode would be Gates’ droll, tongue-in-cheek presentation of the old myths and his interview with locals who told of their encounters with otherworldly entities with wide-eyed, stunned solemnity. 

Now, mind you, Gates’ winking presentation of these eyewitnesses never came across as condescension or disrespect for the simpleminded yokels who still believe in witchcraft, vampires, and demons in the twenty first century. But it is a lighthearted acknowledgement of how unbelievable this may sound in our rational modern world. “Destination Truth” had a fascinating subtext about old cultural traditions and folk beliefs colliding with a modernizing world. It is interesting to consider the comfort of old belief systems, especially superstitions and mystical belief systems, in a world where science has disproven the existence of the supernatural. 

And then it came to my channel surfing where I would run into the rest of the paranormal reality fare like “Paranormal Lockdown” or “Most Haunted Towns” or other Travel Channel shows like “Ghost Adventures” and “The Dead Files.” The straight-faced, humorless discussions of everything supposedly otherworldly on these shows, the recollections of encounters with ghosts and demons by “average Americans,” looks astoundingly like Gates’ interviewees in the back country of Guam recounting their experiences with blood-sucking hellhounds. Except, again, the people on these other shows are Average American Folks! They are the citizenry of perhaps the most technologically and scientifically developed nation on Earth. 

And, then again, they are the citizens of a country that has an ever-growing number of people who believe the Earth is flat, that Hollywood is run by devil-worshipping Illuminati cultists if you follow lunatic YouTube channels like A Call for an Uprising, or that a vast conspiracy is faking mass shootings. 

We sure are an advanced culture today, aren’t we? And we keep getting smarter and smarter by the day!

Steph Curry got schooled

So earlier this week the Golden State Warriors' Steph Curry set off a little controversy when on a podcast he appeared to be maybe joking but not joking that he thought the moon landing never happened. Now whether he was kidding or not is hard to tell - let's hope really was kidding - but his comments did bring some furious criticism down on him. NASA even invited him to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to show him moon rocks and explain why the Apollo moon missions were all, in fact, real.

So now Steph clarified that he was absolutely kidding about being a moon "truther" and he never believed that the Apollo missions were a hoax. If anything, he said that his comments were a "silent protest" against how gullible people are and how quickly they fall for fake information just because they come from someone famous. Silent protest? Huh? Not sure I understand that one. But I hope he means it that this was but his clever wit at work, a big practical joke on the real moon truthers out there.

Although the best reaction to all this was just posted on my new favorite YouTube channel, "A Call for an Uprising." Check it out right here. In his customarily breathless monologue, the host of this show gave an exasperated, outraged explanation about what was REALLY behind the whole Steph Curry kerfufle. Steph, our anonymous host explained angrily, is actually a part of the Illuminati and the secret bloodlines that control the world - and orchestrated the moon landing hoax for some unspecified reason - and this stunt with the podcast was just a ploy by the Insiders, the Elites, the New World Order, and Them, to discredit belief in the moon conspiracy.

Now I still believe that whoever is behind this looney tunes "A Call for an Uprising" channel is pulling off his own massive con on tens to thousands (if his subscription count is to be believed) of people out of pure, simple, uncomplicated greed. Each posting, in fact, starts out with links to opportunities to donate money to the show. But the frightening thing is that there ARE tens of thousands of people out there who are gullible, simple minded, and alienated enough to believe all the bovine manure in these videos.

Or perhaps the shadowy operative behind "A Call for an Uprising" is merely carrying out a silent protest against the stupidity of the conspiracy culture.

Whaaat?? Getting marked by "The Beast" at the airport??

With another semester winding up, I will soon be taking a little break from corrupting the minds of the young and the innocent and getting away from it all for a little winter break. All that mind-corruption, you know, is quite hard work. As I'll be doing some flying - and I've been flying quite a bit over the past year and planning on more travel over the coming year - for the break, I'm just learning that airports around the country will soon be getting turned into the centers where the Beast, the Antichrist, and Satan will be marking travelers with the "sign" and moving us closer and closer to the enslavement of all of humanity.

You don't believe me, you say? Check it out right here. This YouTube video from the "Call for an Uprising" channel will explain the whole shocking plot, that is if you can sit through all 11 execrable minutes of it. I did, shaking my head a lot and not knowing if I should laugh or cry. One wants to laugh as the idiocy of this information, laugh at the fact that this channel - and many others like it - is a con job where some Alex Jones wannabe hustler in a basement somewhere is ranting about the end of the world and the Illuminati and Satanists, telling thousands of rubes and delusionals what they want to hear, and said rubes are eating it up and believing every word of it. And then you want to cry because there are thousands of rubes and delusionals actually out there who actually believe in this and they can't understand what kind of a swindle "A Call for an Uprising" is.

As you'll see in the video if you check it out, they take the issue of planned face-recognition software at airports - something that does raise some legitimate privacy concerns - and turn it into a farce by predicting that it's the first step in some kind of a New World Order fascist takeover, and insinuating that terrorist attacks like 9/11 were "false flag" conspiracies. And so on and so forth. Again, at the core of this story is a valid issue, although, as much of a Libertarian as I am, I don't believe that heightened airport security is leading us to a fascist state. You see, the thing is that I prefer to be a live Libertarian who might be slowed down a little bit at the airport, rather a dead one, blown out of the sky by some ISIS psycho who wanted to reserve his spot in paradise. Yet the best way to completely tune the issue out is by having these conspiracist idiots start spouting their New World Order fantasies about it.

And, of course, this massive global conspiracy that will soon implant Satanic microchips in Americans is somehow allowing their evil plots to be exposed on YouTube by "A Call for an Uprising." Yeah, sure.

A Call For An Uprising?

Yeah, maybe it should be a call for an uprising by everyone offended by ignorance in the modern world and possibly the most absurd supernatural-conspiracy-theory channel on YouTube.

Recently I have been talking with some friends who asked me to compile some of the most insane, counterintuitive, and laughably illogical conspiracy theories circulating in cyberspace today. Perhaps they could be good tools to use in my Conspiracy Films class, they said. So I thought that would be an interesting exercise…

…and I found an extremely prolific conspiracy channel on YouTube that could make for an entire class on its own. 

So check out a channel called “A Call For An Uprising” right here. This is one of a growing genre of conspiracy-theory purveyors dedicated to arguing that every celebrity and almost every prominent person in the world is a Satanist and a member of the Illuminati. And yes, this sort of thing we can call an entire genre of conspiracism, since a there is a depressingly large number of them all functioning on the same narrow set of premises and arguments attempting to “prove” that a global Satanic conspiracy is running the world and about to usher in the end of days and the Antichrist. Scary stuff! I think I will need to work these YouTube channels and websites into my in-progress book about the Apocalypse in popular culture. 

But here is a quick overview of some the oft-repeated arguments “A Call For An Uprising” cranks out in its daily videos (yes, DAILY!! Someone in a basement somewhere is putting these things together seven days a week, with each episode running anywhere from about 10 minutes to almost a half an hour).

Every single celebrity – from actors to singers, models, and even WWE wrestlers – is a member of the Illuminati and made a deal with the devil himself for their fame and fortune. And yes, "A Call For An Uprising" takes “a deal with the devil” quite literally. The origin of that term, you know, is but a metaphor. It refers to compromising one’s principles for some kind of financial or material - most often superficial and short lasting – gain. According to “A Call For An Uprising,” celebrities literally made a pact with an actual supernatural creature for fame and fortune. I would like to see some kind of proof of this pact of course. Like, hmm…I don’t know…maybe a video? Can I see footage of the dark lord of hell rising from a pit or something? Can I see the signing ceremony? A copy of the contract, perhaps? And how are these contracts negotiated? Does the devil have a cadre of lawyers hammering out the deal, or is it just the devil himself? Is the deal brokered by the celebrities’ agents? Their lawyers? So many questions! So few answers!

These Satanic Illuminati celebrities are perhaps the worst conspirators in the history of evil global conspiracies since none of them can help but keep giving the details of their diabolical plans away. According to “A Call For An Uprising,” the signs are everywhere. Movies, music videos, advertisements, TV shows, cartoons, comic books are all – yup, you guessed it, just rife with clues to how the Antichrist will take over the world. So these evil conspirators, apparently, like to operate the same way the Riddler always did in the Batman comics; they must always drop clues to their next big criminal plot. Why they would do this I’m not sure, but “A Call For An Uprising” has a catch phrase it loves repeating over and over again:

“Predictive Programming.” So whoever manages “A Call For An Uprising” just LOVES the phrase “predictive programming.” I guess it sounds very clandestine and mysterious and cool. It’s basically the Riddler principle, that evildoers for some reason don’t plot their evil deeds in secret but first need to trumpet it to the whole world by putting signs and codes and hidden phrases in their movies and music and TV shows and so forth. It makes as much sense as you plotting to rob the local bank but first going about and casing the place in the most obvious way. Imagine being that bank robber and walking into the bank, staring at the security cameras in the most conspicuous way, and perhaps even as you’re wearing a T-shirt with a huge sign on it saying “Bank robbery being planned right now.” Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

“A Call For An Uprising” also seems to have an obsession with witches. Numerous videos are about witchcraft and how TV shows are promoting witchcraft by real life, practicing, spell-casting, supernaturally powered witches. The most demented of these videos claims that Brett Kavanaugh’s problems with sexual assault allegations stemmed from his falling victim to a witch’s curse. The video even offers "proof" of this curse! And what proof, you might ask? Well, the hearings were often attended by the actress Alyssa Milano, who played a witch in the “Charmed” TV show. Clear cut proof, isn’t it?

The channel also seems to have an obsessive hatred of formal schooling. Now the American educational system, from elementary schools all the way to the halls of higher education might have its fair share of problems, but “A Call For An Uprising” claims the real dangers of schools lie in the way they are indoctrinating students in…you guessed it, Satanic Illuminati ideologies. The real reason schools require kids to study geometry, “A Call For An Uprising” argues, is to expose them to Illuminati and Freemasonic symbolism. Calculating the areas or triangles and hexagons, I suppose, is somehow brainwashing kids into becoming followers of demonic secret societies.

Now reading this, one might be tempted to shrug the whole thing off as the rantings of an obviously very sick, very delusional mind, someone still stuck in the 1980s and its oddball Satanic conspiracy theories. That, I think, is very far from the truth. Whoever is running this ridiculous web page, I am certain, functions the same way that Alex Jones does. The person—or people—behind “A Call For An Uprising” probably know how laughably insane every moment of every single one of their videos is. However, they also know that the United States in the early 21^stcentury is full of enough of the disenfranchised, the unsophisticated, the ignorant and those sadly lacking in any kind of critical thinking abilities, people so alienated from a consensus reality, that they will swallow every word of every single video on this channel as some kind of a gospel truth. Just check out the channel and see how it has—as of this writing—353,000 subscribers. Then read the disjointed, paranoid ramblings of those offering feedback. 

Very sad, indeed.