On skepticism, questioning authority and conspiracy theories

Last week one of my colleagues at Saint Peter’s University invited me to give a guest lecture in a class aboutmedia literacy, discussing conspiracy theories, how to define them, how they manifest in our culture, how they are both reflected by and shared by popular entertainment, and how they are amplified and spread by social media. I'm pictured about to start the lecture. It was a great opportunity to discuss this with students since I had written a book about the topic and teach a course on it. And it was great hearing that this same professor also uses the critical examination of conspiracy theories as a tool for various exercises in several of his classes, as do I. 

Discussions like this should always start with a precise definition of what we mean by “conspiracy theory,” what the term “conspiracy” means in a strict legal sense, and how it differs from those outlandish, rococo speculations of grand cabals and shadow organizations of blood-drinking cultists and Satanists. As far as the law is concerned, a “conspiracy” is any instance of two or more people colluding to commit a crime. Gangs and organized crime cartels are conspiracies in the legal sense of the word. Films like the “Godfather” trilogy and “Goodfellas,” or TV shows like “The Sopranos” are crime films, not conspiracy theory films. Films like “The DaVinci Code” and its sequels, TV shows like “The X-Files” or the plethora of Roswell crash and UFO cover-up entertainment, however, fall into the “conspiracy” theory category.

 

Conspiracy theories, as a whole, are claims about secret organizations of such immense power and control as to be able to create a false consciousness in an entire global population, organizations of such reach and influence as to be able to start wars at will, manipulate economies, and construct fictions like mass shootings in the mainstream media every day. Conspiracy theories, in short, refer to grand plots to run everything according to some unified grand scheme…and plots that have absolutely zero tangible proof of their existence. For example, we had a little thought exercise pretending to be the New World Order plotting the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and concluded how the major conspiracy theories contradicting the U.S. government’s explanations for the events of that day are as absurd as the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy theories or the chemtrail conspiracy theories.

 

But all this is not to say that an outright denialism of conspiracy theories is all desirable either. As so much of history has proven the old adage, absolute power does corrupt and it corrupts absolutely. The opposite side of a knee-jerk non-belief is when we turn “conspiracy theory” into a thought-stopping cliché, the shutting down of all dissent, debate, and discussion. We saw this with the knee-jerk reactions to the claims that the COVID virus might have escaped from a lab in China. Just a few years ago, if you said something to that effect on social media, you could have been deplatformed and branded a hateful, racist conspiracy theorist. I had written about that issue right here in previous blog posts.

 

So what is the solution to the problem, my colleague and I finally asked. The best that we can do in a free society is to educate in logical, critical thinking, and media literacy. To try and turn out students who will be able to cast a skeptical eye at organizations of authority and power, whether those organizations of power are governments, corporations, or collections of charlatans spreading malicious lies about fake mass shootings, Satanic cults hiding under pizza parlors, COVID being spread by chemtrails and activated by 5G towers run by the cabal that assassinated JFK from the grassy knoll and fluoridated the drinking water.

With our focus on such pedagogy, we can only hope that no Saint Peter's student will every walk away from our school listening to Alex Jones, thinking that Oliver Stone's film "JFK" was an accurate dramatization of the assassination, for fall for any the nonsensical fantasies spread on conspiracist webpages and social media.

Some guy named Oliver is upset with declassified JFK documents…

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Mystery at the museum solved...

I’ve been catching up on episodes of one of my favorite Travel Channel shows, “Mysteries at the Museum,” and I was definitely not disappointed by their JFK assassination special. So we’re finally getting more of these mystery-solving type reality shows take the route of logical, evidence-based conclusions to supposedly “unsolved” mysteries, even though the more sensationalistic approach might probably get more attention and please the conspiracy crowd out there. The “Mysteries at the Museum” episode focused in on the major lynchpin arguments of conspiracy theorists and very elegantly debunked all of them. The conclusion on the end of the program was an unequivocal “no” to conspiracy. Very well done, in my opinion. Endorsing convoluted, unproven conspiracy fantasies might be the easier route to take when it comes to the Kennedy assassination. Standing by the truth, however, is the right thing to do. 

Except they forgot about Elvis...

...Elvis was also a part of the JFK assassination conspiracy!

OK, some childish humor in the middle of the night as I wanted to share this link to a very good piece CBS News did on conspiracy beliefs. The story focuses on the psychology and appeal of extreme paranoia. It is good to see the media's and academia's approach to the issue taking this turn. Whether or not conspiracy theories about JFK, the Freemasons, the New World Order, and the Illuminati are real are no longer questions fit for constructive discussion. They have all been disproven beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt. All right? Deal with it! Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, the Illuminati don't exist, and neither does the new world order. What both the social sciences and psychology need to probe at this point is why do people keep believing in things that are unprovable?

This story has some great information and excellent links to understanding the psychology of the conspiracy theorist.

My big reveal!!

So I need to take the opportunity on the public forum to finally reveal my true identity to the world. I am the Antichrist!

Yes! And that is why I took the role of a college professor when I came to Earth. This is the profession that gives me the greatest opportunity to corrupt the most minds. Young, innocent, impressionable minds!

OK, so I’m kidding. But this is actually part of my introduction to the Do It Yourself Conspiracy exercise in my Conspiracy Films class. Through the reverse scientific process, by cherry-picking facts, making spurious connections, anyone can “prove” that just about any event in the world is but a part of a massive conspiracy. Even the most ridiculous of the supernatural, Antichrist and Satanic conspiracy theories can be proven true through the deceptive presentation of actual facts. The exercise is designed to help students develop critical thinking skills and help them understand how unethical communicators can manipulate the into believing the most patently absurd claims. In the age of fake news spreading through the internet and YouTube channels claiming to prove that the Earth is flat and that all entertainers are Satanic Illuminati conspirators plotting to take over the world (completely nuts, isn’t it? The only Satanic Illuminati conspirators around are teaching on college campuses) through the use of chemtrails and tainted vaccines that cause autism, I do believe that this is one of the most important exercises I give any of my classes.

But here is the proof that Barna William Donovan is the Antichrist himself:

The name! “William Donovan” was the founder of the CIA, the organization behind the biggest conspiracies of the late twentieth century. Assassination – from JFK to RFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon, Tupac Shakur, Princess Diana, and Michael Jackson – coverups from the Moon landing to the Roswell crash. And 9/11 anyone? Who but the CIA could have pulled that off?

Take a look at my books! Doesn’t all that violent imagery make you wonder? Blood? Guns? Testosterone? “A thirst for violence?” Who but the Antichrist would write such things?

Look at my blog posts arguing that there is no connection between media violence and real world violence? Is that not part of the most vile of Satanic deceptions??

Check out all the positive references to Lucifer, Satanists, and Baphomet. The work of the great deceiver himself!

Then let’s check out the fact that I teach at a Jesuit university. The Jesuits have also been accused of some of the biggest conspiracies in history. Check out this link to Jesuit conspiracies.

And let us not forget that Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Illuminati, was trained by…wait for it…the Jesuits!!

And how about the location where I teach? Saint Peter’s University is on John F. Kennedy boulevard in Jersey City.  So a link between the CIA, the Jesuits, and JFK? Coincidence, right? Well, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn if you believe that!

And how about the Satanic numerology of Saint Peter’s University’s location. You, I’m sure, are familiar with the oft-proven Satanic symbolism of the number 13. So guess where Saint Peter’s University is located…?

2641, John F. Kennedy boulevard!

And 2641 adds up to…13!!!!

So can any of this really be a coincidence?

Of course it can. This is a simple parlor trick that can be used to prove anything anyone wants to prove. Some of my students have “proven” that they had relatives who took part in the JFK assassination. 

And hopefully they all walked away from the class wiser to the ways of all the deception spreading through the Internet and social media today like a malignant virus.

How come no one has killed Alex Jones yet?

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

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

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

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

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

An Anti-conspiracy Conspiracy? Unlikely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Conspiracy Theorists

I am quoted in this article about a new study into the psychology of conspiracy beliefs. It's fascinating to read that insecurities kindled in people from the time they are infants will shape their predisposition to believe in fantastic, irrational, and unrealistic claims of massive conspiracy theories later in life. These findings are not surprising, though, as a growing body of research has been affirming that people who tend to be the biggest fans of the most outlandish conspiracy theories are also those who feel the most powerless, alienated, and insecure. "Individuals with anxious attachment are preoccupied with their security, tend to hold a negative view of outgroups, are more sensitive to threats, and tend to exaggerate the seriousness of such threats," the study says.

Raising well-adjusted children who are given adequate feelings of security and control in their lives might be a good start to help keep us from raising another generation of kids who will believe that the Earth if flat, that LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, the Dallas police, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, aliens, oil billionaires, Elvis Presley, Oliver North using a time machine, Frank Sinatra, and John Wayne shooting from the grassy knoll killed JFK.

Moreover, as I argue in the article, the educational system needs to do its part in teaching logic, critical thinking skills, and media literacy skills to help young people deconstruct the messages of paranoia hucksters like Alex Jones and the flat Earthers, to understand all of the underhanded and unethical communication tactics conspiracy theorists use to convince the gullible and unwary of everything from "crisis actor" conspiracy theories to the fantasies of the anti-vaccination crowd.

I incorporate such exercises in the class I teach about conspiracy films and American culture at Saint Peter's University. In their semester projects, students need to manufacture their own conspiracy, creating one using tactics such as the reverse scientific process to cherry-pick facts that support preconceived notions, inaccurately assigning causality between unrelated variables, and launching all manner of character assassinations against one's critics. Once students can see how easy it is to create vast conspiracies where none exist, they should hopefully be able to recognize all the flat Earth theories, Moon landing hoax theories, and 9/11 Truther claims for the simple parlor tricks they are.

Edge of the Unknown

I was recently interviewed on the Edge of the Unknown radio show, hosted by Mark Henry. You can listen to the entire two hour program right here. We discuss everything from UFOs to Area 51, just what exactly the U.S. government's HAARP project does - what it's accused of doing! - the JFK assassination, and whether or not the Moon Landing was a hoax...plus the allure of all the conspiracy theories surrounding all of these things.

So what are the unbelievable conspiracies, the unlikely ones, and which ones might just possibly have something to them?  Check out this episode of the Edge of the Unknown...plus the archives of a long list of great discussions with Mark Henry every week.

Looking at conspiracy cinema

This may be a belated start to a new year of blogging, but I am just able to put a new link in to the amazon.com page for my forthcoming book, CONSPIRACY FILMS.

Due this June 30th from McFarland publishers, the book will be one of the most comprehensive histories of conspiracy theory films ever written. Tracing a decade-by-decade chronicle of some of the most pervasive conspiracy theories in modern American culture, the book will then look at the films they helped inspire.

From JFK to Roswell, alien abductions, men in black, secret societies like the Masons and the Illuminati, I document our culture's most colorful fears and the movies they turn up in.