There is a reality crisis…and this is NOT the way to fight it.

So it seems that every moment you turn on the news you run across stories of conspiratorial beliefs and behaviors so shockingly deranged that you might think you ran across a parody of our conspiracy culture rather than an account of an actual event. At first you might get the urge to laugh at it all, but then the laughter feels a bit uncomfortable.

Take for example the case of Steven Brandenburg. He was the pharmacist who destroyed hundreds of vials of the coronavirus vaccine…and now we know why. As detailed by this recent story in the NY Post, Brandenburg is a hard-core conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is flat and the sky does not exist. What you think is the sky is actually a dome erected by the—wait for it—the government!!! The dome is supposed to shield humanity from the eye of God. But Brandenburg ultimately destroyed those vaccines because, as the article points out, he thought they might be a part of Bill Gates’ microchip plot, they might kill people or either make them infertile or make birth control useless. So apparently Gates’ evil vaccines either cause births…or they don’t. I guess you can take your pick of what you want to believe.

And no, it’s not worth wasting time trying to logically deconstruct Brandeburg’s apparently feverish imaginings. This man clearly appears to be mentally ill.

But then you see the story of last weekend’s incident at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles where anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists attempted to block people from getting their COVID vaccines. Where some 40,000 or so Californians have already died from the virus, behavior like this is absolutely maddening. So, if you want to be irresponsible, self-deluded, and self-destructive, you can go ahead and put your life at risk. Just say no to Bill Gates’ microchips that will turn you into an alien clone. But you don’t have the right the put the lives of others at risk with an outrageous stunt like that protest. Behavior like that, as far as I’m concerned, is tantamount to attempted murder.

But the madness of the current conspiracy culture, unfortunately, begets madness of epic proportions of those who think we can use the power of government to solve any social ill.

In Tuesday’s New York Times, this op-ed attempted to offer a solution to QAnon and its own conspiracy mythology in what appears to be a parody of big-government, liberal overreach. The author, Kevin Roose, is endorsing calls from various academics and law makers for Joe Biden to create a “reality czar” and a “truth commission” where the government will now go into to business of even more electronic surveillance to route out conspiracy theorists who might be potentially violent, like the ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Sure, Roose, does allow that reality czars and truth commissions might sound somewhat “dystopian.” Oh, you think? It sounds maybe like “ministry of information” or “ministry of propaganda” in any standard authoritarian regime. Kim Jung Un in North Korea, Manuel Marrero Cruz in Cuba, and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela all have forms of their propaganda ministries that act as the final arbiter of what is allowed to be the spoken truth in their countries. North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela are also dictatorial hellholes people risk like and limb to escape every day. 

As Matt Welch in this Reason article points out, not only does the Roose article sound like a parody of the meddling, over-regulating left, but it is bound to have very severe unintended consequences. Do you really want whichever party is in power to have the authority to interfere with online speech in order to define the truth? Would the liberals endorsing this idea, the same liberals who had just spent four years raging against Donald Trump and his hostility to the news media want to keep a “truth commission” if Biden gets replaced by a Republican in four years. I suspect not.

 

Moreover, the foolishness of these endorsements of the government getting into the anti-conspiracy business is the fact that the fearful, unsophisticated, and disenfranchised who get lured into conspiracy world are people who are constantly looking for any miniscule, subtle sign of more government surveillance, more regulation, more clandestine control. Governmental anti-conspiracy commissions and regulations will boost the paranoia, will merely confirm what conspiracists already want to believe. It might be something similar to the FBI’s and the ATF’s reactions to David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult in 1993. Koresh, a con artist with a messianic streak, was preaching an imminent apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario to his followers. The sign, he said, would be when the armies of an evil government came and attacked their movement. So the ATF and the FBI saw it wise to surround Koresh’s compound with tanks and helicopters. Quite predictably, death and destruction ensued.

So these Orwellian “reality czars” and “truth commissions” are the worst possible things that could be done to counter the conspiracy movement. The only thing, and the most poten strategy for stopping these movements of epic paranoia is also the most challenging thing. It does not involve deplatforming anyone by social media companies or intrusive government investigation. It involves education. It involves teachers from grade school through high school and college stressing the importance of logic, reason, and critical thinking as the guiding principles of any sane, stable and civilized society.

 

As I outline in this white paper for the graduate program in Communication and Public Relations at Saint Peter’s University, the antidote to dangerous conspiracism is especially media education, media literacy, and the fields of public relations where we teach young people to always be advocates for reason and truth. 

Not surprising in a world with no consensus reality

So I've been away from the blog for a while, as the holidays and numerous writing projects have been taking up my time, but found myself shaking my head in dismay at a month's worth of insanity every time I glanced at trending stories in news apps or turned on the TV. Even though I study the social phenomenon of conspiracy theories, the events of the past month leave me stunned. Although I guess they shouldn't. The logical end result of the conspiratorial mentality, as we have seen so plainly on January 6, is anarchy violence, and destruction. 

This shameful end of the road to the QAnon conspiracy and its adherents should, again, not be a surprise. In 2019 an unpublished FBI memo warned that QAnon and similar conspiratorial subcultures should be viewed as a potential terrorist threat as we would approach to 2020 elections and its aftermath.  And now the memo was proven right.

But even before January 6, the depth of the depravity to which conspiracy fantasies could be goaded into has been obvious. What could be more repugnant than the harassment of the families of Sandy Hook victims by conspiracy theorists? Or anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists taunting and mocking the parents of children who had needlessly died of the measles because they haven't been given life-saving vaccines? Does it surprise anyone that people who could sink as low as the harassment of the Sandy Hook families would be capable of rioting in the Capitol building?

And the worst part of this conspiratorial madness is the fact that the disaffected, a disillusioned collection of unfortunate souls out there, people somehow so disconnected from a consensus reality as to actually entertain the irrational tenets of QAnon, have been goaded on in their beliefs. They have been pushed and egged on, their gullibility, anger, fear, and disillusionment with the world exploited by opportunistic con artists. Their fears have been fed by people like Alex Jones and his imitators all across the Internet - from the State of the Nation to the Millennium Report, Before It's News and Zero Hedge - egging on the unstable toward the inevitable violence.

And the most frustrating and shameful of this exploitation of a disaffected subculture of America was Donald Trump's own tacit endorsement of the QAnon movement from its very inception in 2017. Turning a blind eye to the sort of extremism growing on the fringes of the conservative right by the President of the United States is outrageous. His claims that he knew nothing of QAnon's off-the-wall Satanic child-trafficking conspiracy theory is completely unbelievable. 

People as angry and volatile as the ones who stormed the Capitol are still out there and all over the country. Dealing with this madness, the ultimate madness of a world where there is no consensus reality, is perhaps the biggest existential challenge this culture has to deal with in a long time...perhaps a threat it has never faced before in its history.

If they won’t wear a mask, throw the bums out!

Well, okay, maybe don’t call them bums. At first, be nice. 

Several weeks ago, I was interviewed for this Fatherly.com article about how conspiracy beliefs are tearing some families apart. What can you do if one of your relatives keeps insisting that COVID does not exist, the Earth is flat, and Bill Gates is trying to microchip you through vaccinations to imprint the mark of the Beast 666 on your DNA? 

 

Actually, as I discuss in the article, the most useful approach to pulling your wacky uncle back out of the rabbit hole is not to dismiss his claims as absurdity or call him crazy or naïve. Confrontation will only cause the true believer to dig his heels in and cling to his beliefs even more tenaciously. All you will achieve by that tactic is to drive the conspiracists back to Alex Jones or State of the Nation or Before It’s News, or any of their ilk. Your conspiracy-believing relatives will take a deep dive back into their paranoid safe spaces on the Internet, questing ever more tenaciously to hear reaffirmations of their fringe belief systems…or just gather more “facts,” more ammunition to fight back next time when you try and tell them that Lee Harvey Oswald really did shoot JFK alone.

 

The best method to dealing with the conspiracy believer, instead, is to ask them to examine their belief systems. Ask them to take a close, critical look at the other theorists who have convinced them that time-traveling aliens were really behind 9/11 and see what testable, verifiable evidence these theorists can provide. Or is the evidence provided by these purveyors of colorful stories of grand global cabals just a long list of web links to other conspiracy theorists who make more claims with no verifiable evidence. Ask wacky Uncle Bob to think about whether or not it is suspicious that an Alex Jones or a State of the Nation claim that everything you read about in the news is a conspiracy? If a conspiracy blogger were to claim, for example, that maybe just the JFK assassination was a conspiracy or the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, a reasonably patient person could hear them out. But absolutely every single world event is part of a conspiracy? At that point, Uncle Bob should realize that he is being taken for a ride by an unconscionable liar and fraud, a flim-flam artist who is monetizing traffic to his blog by spinning one outlandish, absurd claim after the next.

 

In fact, this sort of examination of conspiracy web pages has been an ongoing part of my Conspiracy Films class throughout this semester. Among all of the conspiracy sites, perhaps none was a better teaching tool than State of the Nation. My students were able to use it as a prime example of how to spot the most audacious examples of disinformation and fake news.

But, ultimately, will this attempt at helping those poor alienated souls who are feel so disconnected from any kind of a consensus reality always work? And what can one do about the loved ones who cling to their theories the most tenaciously? 

 

Well, legally there is nothing one can do. Just because a friend chooses to live in their own, self-constructed reality, there is no way we can force him to accept the fact the Earth is round or that over 300,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 if they refuse to do so. They can't be forced into the psychiatric care they so desperately need. If these people annoy you enough, you can always just ignore them. Or how about a rule that we don’t talk politics or conspiracy theories around the dining room table this Christmas?

 

But it these people cross the line into dangerous behavior, such as refusing to wear a mask in a crowded place or congregating with the rest of their COVID-denying friends, to only responsible thing to do is to bar them from your life, your home, or from making contact with your family.

Your life is a book written by Barna Donovan!

Well, all right, kind of. I just had to mention that one of the oddest recent news stories involves a number of mysterious metal monoliths appearing all over the world. Now compare this phenomenon to the plot blurb on the back of my first novel, CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED:

"In Mount Shasta City, California. In New Jersey. In San Diego. Then in Scotland, in Italy, and Cairo. In dozens of locations around the world, 20-ton granite globes suddenly appear. They usually turn up overnight, sometimes in remote locations and other times in the middle of cities in places no one could have put them without detection. For the first time, the world is witnessing a truly unexplainable phenomenon."

Uncanny, isn't it?

But if you want to find out where all of this will lead to...

You can go to your favorite bookseller and purchase your own handsome volume.

More TV Miniseries? Yes, please!

The recent news of Warner Bros. announcing that all of its 2021 slate of films will be released on the HBO Max streaming service at the same time as their theatrical release has raised eyebrows, created controversy, and inspired prognostication about the future of movies and whether movie houses have any kind of a viable future. This Variety article is a good overview of Warner’s audacious move. In turn, director Christopher Nolan’s angry criticism of the simultaneous theater/streaming release plans also made headlines over the last couple of days, as you can read in this Hollywood Reporter article.

Warner’s surprise move reminded me to post this New York Observer article I was interviewed for several weeks ago about the return of the TV miniseries. It discusses the increased investment of top Hollywood dollars, resources, and major A-list talent in television and streaming miniseries and ponders the question about whether the miniseries or the limited-series TV format is a trend here to stay.

 

I don’t just think that the miniseries is here to stay for a while, but I’m actually a lot less optimistic about the future of the movie theater than the Observer article. I do wonder whether the multiplex is an exhibition format that will soon go extinct. Certainly, filmmakers often talk about the shared social experience of seeing a film in a packed movie house and how theater attendance will return once the COVID pandemic passes. Nolan sounds very sure that the movie theater is not going anywhere. While I’m a very big fan of Nolan myself and own all of his films on DVD or Bluray – and can’t wait to add Tenet to that collection – I think his attitude might be Hollywood’s way of whistling past the graveyard. Movie attendance has been declining for several years now even before COVID, and mobile technology and home theater technology has been advancing in such leaps and bounds that one can take one’s favorite entertainment anywhere, enjoy it in solitude or within that “shared social experience,” and do so without paying the ever rising prices of movie tickets. 

 

Now I certainly expect a momentary spike in theater attendance right after the pandemic passes. Many people will probably cut loose and want to go crazy with fun a little bit in ways they couldn’t while the disease raged. Remember how the crowds flocked to the beaches, bars, and restaurants over the summer when it looked like the COVID numbers were improving? We will see that again when the pandemic is over. But I think it will only last for a little while. Especially as it will take time for the economy to recover, how realistic is it to imagine a family paying over a hundred dollars – picture movie tickets for mom, dad, the kids, plus splurging on the ridiculously overpriced food at the dine-in theaters – for a movie night every weekend.

 

Furthermore, if Hollywood and the multiplexes want to offer little more aside from the repetitive noise and disorienting special effects of superhero films, epic scale entertainment that combines complex storytelling and character development might just be perfect for a limited series on television. As I explain in the Observer article, the miniseries ruled the TV ratings throughout the 1970s and 80s, after all. And watching them sure beats paying a hundred dollars for the family just to see a single episode.

My Panels at the Philcon 2020 Science Fiction Convention

This year we had to settle for a virtual venue, but the Philcon science fiction convention is still on! Check out the entire program here. Anyone can sign up to listen to any panel.

And this is my schedule of appearances:

11/21: 7:00 PM - "Pandemic Fiction vs. Pandemic Reality"

11/21: 8:30 PM - "How to Sell the Story You Wrote vs. How to Write a Story That Will Sell"

11/22: 2:30 PM - "Science Fiction Horror"

Believe Me, We Did You a Favor!

So, I’m feeling quite impressed that more than three weeks after our “From 9/11 to COVID-19” conference, conspiracy theorists are still worked up about it. Some guy named Hank Wolfe on the Before It’s News conspiracy site is conducting an “investigation” of “Donovangate” and my masterminding of a nation-wide plot to replace students in online classes with deep-fake avatars. Seriously!

 

You can check out the “ongoing investigation” right here.

 

And, by the way, Hank Wolfe is also fixated on the Satanic significance of the October 13 date of the event. 

 

An article in the Saint Peter’s student newspaper about the event is still bombarded by unhinged comments and rants about how an audience of “truth seekers” were silenced in the Zoom chat room and we refused to answer any of their questions. 

 

The State of the Nation ran a couple of stories on the event, warning their readers about the “anti-truth” event and sharing a hysterical, whiny email from someone who claims to have logged into the event but couldn’t get any questions answered. You can check out the SOTN article here. The first story, by the way, also warns of a dark and dangerous Jesuit conspiracy to deceive America’s youth.

 

Now the student newspaper, as I understand it, contacted SOTN for comments about their dangerous Jesuit conspiracy but got no response other than a list of links to other conspiracy theorists. 

 

But were there questions from outsiders screened out during the conference? Yes, there were. This event was intended for an SPU audience, so imagine our surprise when we notice scores of people logging in who were not affiliated with the school. While we thought we were only sharing the login information with our colleagues and students, apparently someone must have shared that information with who knows how many other friends and they in turn shared it again and so on and so forth. Then it wound up in the conspiracy community.

 

Does the easy escape of the login information make you think of anything interesting, though? Do you notice how hard it really is to keep anything secret? Makes you wonder about those rococo conspiracy theories SOTN loves to spin seemingly 24/7.

 

But to get back to the issue of whether or not we tried to avoid answering the questions of the outsiders, let me just say this: we probably should have. We should have let them ask their Holocaust-denial questions and ask about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like Jews seen celebrating the attacks of 9/11. They would easily have been exposed as the vile hatemongers they are. The best defense against the worst, most hateful people in this world who trade in discord and prejudice is to shine a light on them and have the world see them for what they are. That, by the way, is why I don’t remove any reader comments from this blog, no matter how ridiculous or even hateful they may be. Stupidity should be shown off in all its slow-witted, demented glory. So not listening to and acknowledging these people’s comments during the conference probably did them a great big favor. 

 

It is also for this reason, to shine the light on American culture’s ugly, deranged underbelly the conspiracy culture represents, that I teach my class on conspiracy theories. People like whatever anonymous collection of charlatans is behind State of the Nation is a constant staple in the class. They are a perfect teaching tool when it comes to demonstrating every underhanded, unethical, dishonest, and manipulative form of communication today. For the major final assignment of the semester, the Do It Yourself Conspiracy assignment, I repeatedly send my students to the SOTN page to have them see conspiracist sleaze at its very worst…or is that sleaze at its very best?

Rappers and Political Endorsements

When it comes to celebrities and politics, there is often less than meets the eye. I am quoted in this article about the unlikely phenomenon of rappers appearing to endorse Donald Trump's reelection. After rappers like Lil Wayne, Ice Cube, and Kanye West praised various Trump policies recently, many wondered if their support for Trump was genuine and if it would influence more  Black voters to cross parties to the Republicans.

While it is more and more unwise to look at the Black community as one monolithic group - are there really any racial and ethnic groups whose members always completely agree on every issue? - the article discusses how these particular rappers' recent political activities are really more for show and shock value than any real ideological commitment. 

QAnon will probably be around for a while...Unfortunately

Check out this recent article I'm quoted in about the future of the QAnon movement. What is the future of this fringe, bizarre, far-right conspiracy movement come the next presidential election? I discuss what might happen to the movement in either the event of Donald Trump's victory or defeat. In either case, I, and several other commentators, don't see QAnon going anywhere any time soon. Perhaps the movement might transform into something new at some point, but it is sure to have more life and more fight left in it.

That's quite unfortunate because they make a case for the fear that our culture might be teetering on the precipice of a new dark age of ignorance. When you take these people together with the 9/11 Truth movement, the anti-vaxxers, the "crisis actor" theorists and the rest of a conspiracy culture, a rational person might start to panic and think humanity has taken leave of its senses.

From a political angle, I think that about 99% percent of those who are center-right, from conservatives to libertarians, look at the QAnon movement as an embarrassment. Trump's tacit endorsement of QAnon is especially galling to these people. Many have lamented the long passing of an age when the right was the home of William F. Buckley's high-toned intellectualism, and they're dreading the coming of a new age when conservatism's voice is being hijacked by loud, irrational, fantasy-prone rabble. 

A Successful Conference: "From 9/11 to COVID 19"

 

What a week on this end! In fact, with all the excitement, I didn't get the chance to update this blog about our "From 9/11 to COVID-19" conference. Very successful, especially with the kind of engagement the event had with its audience.

The presentation by Noah Rauch from the 9/11 Memorial Museum was an elegant outline of why the real cause of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers - the crashing of two highjacked airliners into the buildings by Al Qaeda terrorists and the structural damage done to the buildings - just as concluded by National Institute of Standards and Technology and the 9/11 Commission, is the one and only real conclusion any rational individual can reach. Simply, as Rauch presented, no conspiracies, no controlled demolition, no mini nuclear bombs, no space-based death rays built from alien technology the Illuminati is hiding at Area 51. Period.

John Montone from 1010 WINS news radio also offered very moving recollections of being on the scene 2001, covering the attacks and their aftermath. As he also put it so perfectly about our absurd new world of 9/11 "Truthers," Flat Earth, and QAnon conspiracists, you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

"Facts," are what you can examine, test, and replicate under the strict scrutiny of the scientific method. "Facts" are not the suppositions and guesswork conspiracy theorists trade in. Facts are not your personal preferences and wishes you just choose to believe in because they make you feel good or support your preconceived biases.

But we were especially heartened by the feedback from our students and the listeners to the program. The support was fantastic and it's good to see that so many young people are willing and able to live in a world of rationality and reject the paranoid, divisive fantasies of the conspiracy culture.

Check out this link to an article about the event in the Hudson County View.

My New Novel in 2021: FATAL POSE

Well, since I don't like to stop while I'm ahead, in the midst of all the preparations for the "From 9/11 to Covid-19" conference, I'd still like to make a new book announcement. My publisher, World Castle Publishing, will be releasing my third novel, FATAL POSE, in 2021. I'm excited to have gotten the chance to work in a new genre, too: the mystery. So here's a sneak peak at the plot:

Imagine "Pumping Iron meets Columbo." In Venice, California, you'll find the hottest beaches, the hottest gyms, and the hottest bodies. This is where ex-bodybuilder turned private investigator, Gunnar Marino, runs his business. But when a murder and blackmail scheme reaches to the top of the high-powered World BodyBuilding Federation, Marino finds himself in a battle of wits with a clever adversary that could end in mayhem no one might be able to contain.

 

But while you wait for FATAL POSE, I hope you'll give my newest book, THE CEDAR VALLEY COVENANT, a read!

Why We Need Our Conference...

As I had written yesterday - in the post just beneath this one - I will be taking part in a panel for a special conference at Saint Peter's University on October 13, discussing the unhinged madness conspiracy beliefs have managed to seduce so many Americans into and the depths of complete derangement this is throwing our culture into.

To see just how important it is to hold this discussion, take a look at this article in the New York Times about the Trump COVID hoax conspiracies that sprang up over the past week. And this time the conspiracy theories are not coming from the QAnon, right-wing crowd. This time the left is spinning its own creative fantasies about Donald Trump faking his illness for a variety of nefarious ends.

As the piece so correctly points out, the loss of a sense of consensus reality is not confined to any position on the political spectrum. It is a malady infecting the very culture. Plus, as the piece so ominously, and I believe correctly, points out, this malady is sure to stay with us for a long time. Even long past the November elections.

From 9/11 to Covid 19: Conspiracy Theories, Fake News, and the Assault on Truth

Two decades of a conspiracy culture spiraling out of control.

On October 13, my school, Saint Peter's University, will be hosting the virtual conference "FROM 9/11 TO COVID 19: CONSPIRACY THEORIES, FAKE NEWS, AND THE ASSAULT ON TRUTH." I will present on a panel that also includes Noah Rauch, Senior Vice President for Education and Public Programs at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, and John Montone, reporter for New York's 1010 WINS news radio.

Among the topics we will discuss will be an effort to chart how conspiratorial thinking has mutated from people seeking to reexamine the details of major events to a world where our culture is ready to reject all consensus reality.

As I have written before, these are urgent questions to address because the modern conspiracism is becoming a threat to Americans' health and safety. Conspiracism is a movement we have seen ignoring science in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a movement that has become the haven for the dangerous and unstable fabrications of the QAnon movement, and the bullies and thugs of the crisis-actor movement that harasses the survivors of mass shootings. The anti-vaccination movement has deceived people into endangering the lives of their families and communities through the use of the rhetoric of the conspiracy theory. 

Simply, if there is no consensus reality, then only chaos, anarchy, and a corrosive moral relativism will reign.

With this conference, we are hoping to set an example, to encourage education to be a bulwark against the chaos and anarchy threatening to engulf this culture every day.

A Sneak Peak Inside "The Cedar Valley Covenant"

 With "The Cedar Valley Covenant" now available at all your favorite book sellers, take a quick sneak peak at the first two sample chapters! 

CHAPTER 1

            The Handlers had relented. At last they gave in and they would let the Predator have her. He couldn’t function if he couldn’t have her. He couldn’t carry out his mission if he wasn’t allowed to dream about her. She had taken over his fantasies. She had come to possess him, to take over and control his thoughts as much as he needed to take over the thoughts of his targets tonight.

            But the Predator’s Handlers had given in. They, too, after all, were in his head. They understood the condition he was in. They understood his need.

            If the Handlers wanted the Predator to kill the two men sitting across the restaurant, they had to let him take the payment he demanded.

            Jessica.

            Her name rang through the chambers of the Predator’s mind. He was picking up flashes of her, images of her, the closer he got to his targets.

            He needed Jessica.

            It they wanted the Predator to go through with it, they had to let him take Jessica.

            Sure, the Predator realized, they could just as well kill him and find someone else to carry out the hit, but that would take too long. They needed the Predator for his very special qualities. They needed him for his very special modus operandi. They couldn’t let all of his previous work go to waste. It would take too long to set up another assassin to take his place.

            For now, the Predator had the upper hand. The Handlers needed those two men—sitting there and drinking, discussing science and philosophy, teaching methods, the price of South Illinois real estate—dead as quickly as possible. They especially needed Dr. Nelson Danziger dead. His companion, Dr. Brock Randall, was merely a secondary target. The Handlers hadn’t cared about Randall originally. Or, rather, they didn’t care about him enough to want him dead just now. But the Predator had the power to force Randall’s execution. If the Handlers wanted Danziger eliminated, they had to let him go after Randall too.

            Brock Randall had to die because of what the Predator had discovered in his mind. When he read Randall’s thoughts, the Predator found Jessica. From the moment he found her, everything changed.

            Jessica. Brock Randall’s beautiful daughter. Randall and his estranged daughter had started talking to each other again. The Predator knew because he scanned Randall’s mind every day. He could see Randall looking at Jessica’s pictures when he was on the phone with her. The Predator saw her exquisite photo sitting on the desk in Randall’s office. When the Predator shared Brock Randall’s vision, when he intruded into his thoughts, he saw Jessica, he heard Jessica, he saw her photos all over Randall’s house. 

            But Jessica was so far away. The Predator had to get to her. He needed to bring her to Cedar Valley right now. She had become his addiction, his madness. He knew that Randall’s sudden tragic death would bring Jessica to town.

            The Handlers wanted Danziger dead and the Predator was going to kill him before the night was through. But Brock Randall would die at the same time. The Predator would not be denied. Not even the Handlers could stop him now.

CHAPTER 2

            “Brock, to tell you the truth…” Nelson Danziger said and looked Randall square in the eyes. He paused, raised his snifter of scotch and smiled affably. “The impression Cedar Valley State has made on me is really great…”

            Brock Randall swirled the rum around the bottom of his glass. He thought he heard a “but” about to be tagged onto the end of Danziger’s remark. Of course, Randall wasn’t supposed to be the one apprehensive about what Danziger was about to say. Randall, a representative of Cedar Valley State University, was supposed to have been the one with the upper hand here. They were the ones about to offer Danziger a job.

            Except the truth was that Danziger, no doubt, had several other offers waiting for him. He wasn’t a desperate new Ph.D., fresh out of grad school with a few years of adjunct teaching, a pile of student loans and maybe one or two conference presentations under his belt. Nelson Danziger’s CV read like a novella. He already had five books published, two of them with commercial houses in New York. And, despite the subject matter he wrote about, his mainstream success only stood to help the school, to boost enrollment. That success was the reason a small school like CVSU was willing to spend as much money on Danziger as had been allocated for him in the hiring budget.

            “Glad to hear that, Nelson,” Randall replied but paused quietly. He could sense Danziger had more to say.

            “So now I wait and hope for the best. I hope the search committee’s been impressed,” Danziger said.

            “Oh, I’m sure about that.”

            Although Randall had been asked to take Danziger out for his farewell dinner, he wasn’t actually sitting on Danziger’s search committee. Danziger was interviewing for one of the rare full-professor openings in the Psychology Department. Randall was an interpersonal communication specialist. Cedar Valley State being so small, however, almost made the school a big family. Every department took an interest in every single full-time faculty hire. Danziger’s guest lectures, his research presentation and discussions with the Psychology Department’s search committee, had been observed by representatives from every other department. 

            Now that Danziger was about to go home to Tampa while the search committee deliberated, Randall had been asked to take him out for a farewell dinner.

            “You have to admit, though,” Danziger said and paused.

            Here came the “but,” Randall thought. He was annoyed by how much trepidation he felt, but the fact was that this entire interview process had been a seller’s market. And Danziger was the seller. The college needed him desperately.

            Randall just raised his eyebrows and waited for Danziger to complete his thought.

            “They did ask a lot of nervous questions,” Danziger said.

            “Nervous?” Randall asked and sipped some rum.

            “I think they’re asking themselves if they’re hiring a psychologist or a writer from a supermarket tabloid.”

            “That’s not the case at all,” Randall said and chuckled, regretting the words the moment they came out of this mouth. He made himself sound defensive. The key to this entire hiring process was not to make Danziger feel too powerful, too needed.

            “Well, how do you think they feel about my work?” Danziger asked bluntly. “I’m sure my books have impressed the school to a certain degree, and I guess at this point it’s up to the Psych Department’s search committee to make its final decision, but they take input from all the faculty members who’ve observed me.”

            “I think they’re trying to figure out how to deal with…with the implication that you don’t seem to think people who’ve experienced the…”

            “The unexplained?” Danziger asked and drank some scotch. “That they’re not all insane?”

            “Well, you’ve got to admit that your arguments for the objective reality of parallel worlds and the spirit world are fairly radical,” Randall said.

            “Yes, I suppose they are,” Danziger said and stared off into some distant corner of the nearly empty restaurant past Randall’s head. Then his focus came back onto Randall. “I suppose they really are,” he reiterated. “But I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad idea.  Do you?”

            “What do you mean?” Randall chose to evade Danziger’s question.

            “Our line of work. Research, higher education, isn’t it supposed to be a battlefield of ideas? Nothing is supposed to be too radical. We’re supposed to throw all ideas out there and see how they can be defended.”

            Randall shrugged. “Well, you don’t really have a hostile audience here, you know.  My department has a couple of committed post-modernists.”

            “Aha, the post-modernists,” Danziger said and chuckled. “Nothing exists, nothing is real, we can’t trust any rules and any reality. So my candidacy’s not entirely a lost cause.”

            “It’s the people in your own hard-sciences you have to watch out for,” Randall said and finished the rest of his rum.

            “Should I be very worried?” Danziger asked and smiled lightly.

            Randall thought he smiled a little bit too lightly. There was a cockiness emerging from this guy now. 

            “You must have met Tom Lancaster from the Physics Department, right?” Randall asked.

            “Can’t recall his face.”

            “Tall, dark-haired, good looking…”

            “Snappy suits, right…?”

            “Yeah, break those scientist stereotypes. No pocket protectors on that one.”

            Danziger laughed. “Looks like a yuppie stock broker.”

            “Yeah, that’s the one,” Randall said and guessed that Danziger must have been wondering how many students Lancaster was sleeping with. Randall, though, was certain that the answer was none. Lancaster was a real stand up you guy, he had to admit. He always pegged him as highly ethical, if not a bit stiff. He was, of course, a zealot when it came to certain aspects of his work, but he was a straight shooter, nonetheless. Maybe that’s why Randall thought he would have been happy setting him up with Jessica.

            “But anyway,” Randall continued, “he wrote a book a while ago called The Naked Ghost.”

            “Yes, of course,” Danziger said with a knowing smile. “Now I remember.”

            “Well, he’s still trying to save the world. Shining the light of science.”

            “Yes, he’s the one,” Danziger said quietly. “Good for him if he’s trying to save the world, though. Even if sometimes he writes outside of his area of expertise.”

            “He would probably take issue with some of your ideas.”

            “Who knows,” Danziger said and shrugged lightly.

            Randall thought he could sense that cockiness again.

            “Maybe he, too, believes in that battlefield of ideas,” Danziger said.

            “I’m sure he probably does.”

            “Yeah,” Danziger said slowly and drained the last of his scotch. “I remember the reviews of his book. Very zealous guy, indeed. His book was pretty successful.”

            “Not as successful as your books,” Randall said.

            Danziger returned a humble smile. “Well, whatever differences I might have with someone like Tom Lancaster, I hope CVSU will decide it’s a big enough place for a diversity of opinions,” he said diplomatically and leaned back in his chair.

            It was time to wrap up this farewell dinner, Randall realized, glancing at his watch. He still had to drive Danziger to Cedar Valley Municipal Airport, from where he would take a commuter flight to Chicago and catch his connection down to Tampa.

            After settling the bill to be placed on the school’s account, Randall and Danziger left the nearly empty restaurant.

            Only one other patron haunted Bertucci’s Tratoria this late at night, Randall noted as they headed for the front door. A man sitting in the farthest, darkest corner of the restaurant seemed to be staring at a barely-touched plate of pasta in front of him.

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. 

9/28/20 - Learn the Secret of the Covenant!

The release date has been set! On September 28, my new novel, "The Cedar Valley Covenant" will be released by World Castle Publishing. In the meantime, however, take an exclusive look at the book's jacket copy!

A TOWN OF BRILLIANT MINDS…

Jessica Lafayette, best-selling relationship author and soon-to-be radio personality, had a near-perfect life. But she dreamed of reconnecting with her estranged father. Then an accident along a dark stretch of highway shattered everything. Instead of making peace, Jessica comes to attend a funeral in the idyllic Southern Illinois college-town of Cedar Valley.

A PACT WITH A MIND-BENDING EVIL…

After claiming her father’s ashes from the local funeral home, Jessica begins to suspect the unthinkable. The urn she had been given does not contain ashes, and the remains of the dead might be used in the savage rites of an otherworldly power that has taken control of the town.

Pursued by a murderer in thrall to the evil controlling the town, Jessica finds herself involved with an esteemed scientist and shadowed by an enigmatic outsider, all the while struggling to understand the corruption haunting this town. From eminent thinkers to a rising political power broker, Cedar Valley’s best and brightest should have the resources to fight back. Except somehow, some of them have chosen to collude with an Apocalyptic force that will soon alter the course of all life on Earth. 

With no way out, Jessica must fight back and uncover the devastating secret of…The Cedar Valley Covenant.

The exploitation of tragedy.

Every time we think the cesspool of today’s conspiracy culture can’t get any worse, it finds a way to sink even lower, to show a heretofore level of unseen callousness and heartlessness.

For several days now, various media outlets have been reporting on the quick spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories about the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and riots. This is a fairly detailed story about the conspiracy theories from the BBC.

As we are witnessing an American tragedy, the reminder of how fragile our culture is because of race relations, the second tragedy is to see its exploitation by individuals in order to spur even more division, even more distrust and fear among Americans. At a time when the culture needs to come together, to find common ground, to communicate with each other and find a way to live together as one nation and one people, individuals who take this unrest as an opportunity to encourage more suspicion and distrust are little better than murderers themselves.

But as we've seen the handiwork of those who traffic in unsubstantiated conspiracy fantasies before, their behavior should be of no surprise now.

Those who fail to learn from history…well, you know the rest.

So I just ran across this article from a couple of days ago about the eerie parallels between the 1918 Spanish Flu and the current COVID-19 pandemic. More precisely, it’s an article about how the frustrations with the 1918 forced social-distancing and mandatory closing of businesses inspired many to rebel and push back. As understandable as their frustrations were, once they crossed into irrational revolt against even simple cautionary regulations like the mandates to wear face masks, the results were tragic and foreseeable. There was a second wave of the disease outbreak in the fall of 1918 and more lives were needlessly lost.

Are we on a path to repeating what happened in 1918? As we just came out of the Memorial Day weekend, in many places in the country it sure seems like it. We just saw headlining stories about acts of such mindlessness, sheer thoughtless stupidity that it makes one test which is stronger…one’s skull or the nearest brick wall. Hundreds of people packed into pool parties, backyard get-togethers, bars, and beaches while refusing to wear facemasks and ignoring social-distancing practices makes me wonder whether or not at some point in the very recent past we might have suffered from another silent pandemic. And that would have been a pandemic that quietly attacked the brains of huge swaths of the population and drastically reduced IQs. 

But as I had written before, I am completely sympathetic to the call for reopening of the country. It needs to be done before the current economic crisis slides toward a catastrophe to rival the Great Depression. Yet why do we have people asking for the restart of the economy sabotaging their own message with their madness? As infection rates are spiking in several parts of the country, why do we still have to listen to this insanity about how asking people to wear a simple facemask in certain public places is akin to a totalitarian takeover? 

Oh yeah, because despite the fact that we are living in a time when communication technology can give access to information, knowledge, facts, scientific data to virtually everyone at a fraction of a second, we are just incapable and unwilling to learn from history. Learning from absurd conspiracy theories on the internet and hysterical fear-mongering about a totalitarian takeover, sure. Learning from history and scientific authorities...forget about it.

Do you want to exercise your rights? Do it with a facemask!!

And no, making you put on that mask in a crowd while you exercise your rights to free speech and to organize protests is not a part of the creepy commie globalist menace run by International Bankers and Globalists.

Just as we started a well-justified discussion of how long and to what extent a national lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic needs to go on, the one way you could definitely derail your argument for reopening the country is to follow the lead of various gun-toting and flag- and sign-waving yahoos getting a lot of recent attention for their rallies in places like Michigan, Washington, Ohio, and North Carolina among about two dozen or so states.

And planning to reopen the country is, in fact, crucial. It must be done very soon. Daily news updates on the COVID-19 crisis will, without fail, look at the ever-worsening economic situation. At this writing 33.5 Americans are unemployed. Those are people who, through no fault of their own, are unable to pay their rent, their mortgages, or their children’s education. To feed their families, they now need to stand in line at food banks and wait for handouts. Their frustration and fear of a disintegrating economy is understandable. We must keep this pandemic from forcing this country—the world—to relive the 1930s.

This link to a recent New York Times Magazine article about how imperative it is to restart the economy presents various points of view on the issue, including the ethics of weighing the potential death tolls against the devastation wrought upon lives and families by a collapsing economy. From bioethicists to economists and healthcare and civil-rights activists, the piece presents a roundtable discussion of how common sense can somehow let us try and deal with a crisis that will have no easy solution.

If you take a close look at strip malls or any shopping centers where grocery chains and Walmarts and Costcos stand open next to various other closed small businesses, the logic of pushing for reopening is obvious. I myself live next to a Walmart and a ShopRite grocery store, both of which have been open seven days a week throughout the entire pandemic lockdown. I also live next to a very long stretch of strip malls where tile stores, electronics shops, clothing boutiques, and a TJ Max have been closed for weeks. During this lockdown, one could always find more people inside the Walmart or the ShopRite than the tile store or TJ Max at any time before the pandemic. Of course, in both the ShopRite and the Walmart the sizes of crowds had been regulated and plenty of signage is encouraging people to keep at least six feet away from each other. Although neither store, up until now, has mandated that all people wear face masks when they enter, most people do. All of the employees of these establishments also wear masks and gloves at all times. By the same token we could protect the public health and work toward flattening the infection curve and allow more small businesses to open and send more people back to work. That, I believe, is just common sense. 

Common sense, however, seems to be at a frustratingly all-time-low supply in this country. The anti-lockdown protest movement gives evidence to this. One needs to take one look at their absurd signs waved around at the rallies—demanding the right to risk their own lives and those of others by refusing to wear masks—listen to their conspiracy theories about Bill Gates implanting people with microchips at the behest of the global fascist takeover, and any inclination to speed up the reopening of the country will evaporate from most sane people’s minds. The dialogue about the crisis of our times is being derailed, the argument for the need to restart the economy as soon as possible has been poisoned by, hijacked by a conspiracy-addled lunatic fringe. This is a lunatic fringe that insists on living in its own self-aggrandizing fantasy world where they see themselves as collection of action heroes saving freedom and democracy from jack-booted forces of evil. 

To be sure, this anti-lockdown conspiracy crowd is relatively small and their position is not shared by most of the country. The majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, support precautionary measures against the spread of COVID. Yet the reckless gatherings of these “patriots” where a lack of precautions against infection is a sign of idealism and defiance will keep prolonging the disease, will keep adding to the death count. That, in turn, will prolong the return to normalcy and will keep the economy sinking further and further into an abyss.

Belief in the 5G/Coronavirus connection: A study of a world gone mad

This is a recent article I was quoted in about some of the most demented conspiracy theories involving COVID-19. There is an especially strong focus on the claims of a link between 5G technology and the virus, something I'm certain most rational people can't quite wrap their minds around. As I had written in the previous post, the idea of cell-phone radiation having anything to do with a respiratory infection spread by saliva droplets is so ludicrous that it should barely be addressed. Except a growing subculture of the paranoid out there are willing to believe it and there are unscrupulous charlatans all across cyberspace who are more than willing to profit off of telling them what they want to hear.

So check out the article for more of the 5G craziness and other COVID-19 theories. Like the link between testing for the infection and the Mark of the Beast...

And the prize goes...

To the 5G-Coronavirus-link conspiracy theories for the most moronic of all the conspiracy theorizing oozing through the Internet.

The idea that a respiratory illness could be caused by low-frequency cell tower radiation is almost on par with the Flat Earth theories and the QAnon theories. It is so absurd that skeptics really needn’t waste any time even answering them. It is a theory so irrational and illogical that they make the claims that a vast, global Satanic child abuse ring run by Hollywood’s top celebrities out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor sound sane.

And then you have people in England setting 5G towers on fire!

So check out this article where a medical director for NHS England and an associate professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading do have to take the time to explain why the idea that there is any sort of a connection between COVID-19 and 5G radiation is “absolute and utter rubbish.” Basically, if your computer were to be infected by a virus after you had perused too many disreputable web pages—say web pages purveying particularly deviant pornography—would you suddenly get nervous that you, too, might get sick? You woudn’t now, would you? So the idea that an illness spread by droplets of saliva should have anything to do with cell phone radiation is just as deranged.

If one wants to worry about any unscrupulous parties having a hand in exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic, they should pay attention to the article’s points about Russian disinformation campaigns playing a part in the spread of conspiracy theories. As it writes, “some state and state-backed actors seek to exploit the public health crisis to advance geopolitical interests.”

A much more realistic bit of food for thought than then 5G secret weapon of the Illuminati New World Order, isn’t it?