Correction: The Repulsive State of the Nation

If you are ever targeted for insults and trolling by anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists, you should be proud of yourself because you are doing something right. You are doing some small bit of good to help dispel unfounded and deadly myths. You are helping shine a light on people who in every sense of the word can be called “terrorists.” They are a pack of jackals, predators who spread fear to parents concerned with the health and well-being of their children.

I recently seemed to have raised the ire of someone—or some group of people—behind a sleazy little fake-news and conspiracy theory web page called State of the Nation. I had written about these people before, but you can find a link to their main page right here. After you read most of their featured stories, you will, I’m sure, walk away feeling more than a bit unclean. Their headlines are now screaming about the measles outbreak across the country being a result of a government conspiracy secretly poisoning people with the virus. But the people responsible for SOTN also believe that the California fires had been started by laser beams from space and Notre Dame cathedral was burned down by those same lasers.

Then a couple of weeks ago one of the fans of SOTN sent me a series of emails with links to incontrovertible “proof” that vaccines are a health hazard and parents must resist vaccinating their children. These links to the “evidence” led to information so absurd, so laughable to anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size that I needed to write a reply to the poor deluded soul who sent the email. Now the writer claimed to be a Saint Peter’s University student, something I am highly skeptical of. But I still tried to urge them to get their facts about the vaccination issue from sources other than web pages that blame the California fires on death rays from space.

I recently noticed that State of the Nation posted my letter. Check it out right here. In their reply, the people running SOTN take me to task for not refuting their long list of links to “high-integrity articles and scientific research papers” proving the deadly harm caused by vaccines. They also inform me that the editor of SOTN—whoever this person is, since he or she does not reveal their name, probably out fear of being assassinated by the Illuminati hit squads of the globalist New World Order—is “Board Certified in Integrative Medicine.” So this individual must know true scientific evidence when he/she sees it, right? Since they’re board certified, you know.

Well, their board certification does at least make them sharp enough to catch spelling errors, so I am impressed by that much of their “open letter” to me. They do point out that I used the word “pray” when I meant “prey” when referring to the unconscionable lowlife of the alternative news community who PREY on the gullible, fearful, and weak-minded. Well, all I can say is that gall-dinged autocorrect got the best of me, actually giving away its Satanic Illuminati programming that had been installed all across cyberspace by the Y2K bug, hinting at how the members of the East Coast Intelligentsia pray three times each day to the Antichrist for the chance to incarcerate the children of American patriots in FEMA camps targeted by death rays from space.

But do not let me digress. The board certified individual behind SOTN accuses me of not refuting their plethora of evidence in all of the links they—or one of their devoted readers—emailed me. But, in fact, I did exactly that. Let me explain…

As I wrote, “facts…are NOT unsubstantiated claims made by other silly conspiracy theorists. You are NOT doing cutting edge research by reading and listening to the rantings of dozens of other websites, YouTube videos, and blogs linked to by State of the Nation.”

The “evidence” offered for most of the ridiculous claims made by SOTN—from the dangers of vaccines to space weapons burning California—are nothing more than links to the web pages of other conspiracy theorists. When one follows one of these links, they wind up at some other conspiracy site where someone is making crazy, unsubstantiated claims about Freemasonic Satanists or crisis actors. Now since the editor of SOTN is a board certified medical professional, one would think that he would know what real scientific, empirical evidence looks like. And, best of all, most of SOTN’s links promising “hard scientific evidence” are actually links back to yet other SOTN posts making unsubstantiated claims about yet more conspiracies.

For example, the first link in the open letter by the board certified editor of SOTN promises evidence of a “PSYOP to Compel Vaccination Compliance: Measles-Infected Residents Banned from Public Places in Rockland County.” But when you click on the link, you wind up at another SOTN link that summarizes a very short article from a web page called ZeroHedge.com about the measles outbreak in New York City. Disappointingly enough, there is no evidence of any “psyop” anywhere in the article. ZeroHedge, by the way, is an alt-right conspiracy web page run by someone with the rather unoriginal pen name of “Tyler Durden.”

Then we have a second link to what promises to be an article about a lawyer who “demolishes pro-vaccine talking points.” Looks intriguing, doesn’t it? Except the fact is that court decisions or arguments by lawyers do not qualify as scientific evidence. And, moreover, when you click on the link, you wind up at…wait for it…another SOTN page! You didn’t see that one coming, did ya? 

Well, in case you keep reading, you do have the article giving the full text of a lawyer making an anti-vaxxer argument, supporting his case by references to a Dr. Mark Geier, a supposed “moderate” in the vaccination issue. A very quick online check of Geier reveals, however, that he’s had his medical license suspended in several states and eventually revoked for administering harmful treatment protocols to children with autism.

This article, which is supposed to demolish the pro-vaccination position, does eventually make reference to a reputable physician and researcher, a Dr. Gergory Poland of the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Poland’s work, unfortunately, has often been misquoted and mischaracterized by anti-vaxxers. He does, if fact, support vaccinations.

And so it goes. The rest of the State of the Nation list of articles amounts to this type of slight-of-hand. They’re loud, click bait titles that link back to other SOTN articles or postings on other conspiracy and anti-vaxxer web pages.  

Now I am not going to continue responding to all those links…right now. The thing is that I have a life and I have a full time job that makes enough demands on my time that I am not able to reply to the massive piles of nonsense like this. When academics and scientists usually give up on replying to all the quackery, the pseudoscience, the conspiracy theories of all the charlatans and cranks out there, it is not because they are unable to dismiss the incontrovertible hard truth of the anti-vaxxer claims, the crisis-actor fantasies, or false-flag delusions. It is simply because they don’t have the time to reply to the sheer volume of fabrications the conspiracy community foists upon the world every single day. 

But I think I will come back to both this list of links and the rest of the toxic sludge that makes up the State of the Nation web page. The board certified editor pleads that the information on his page be disseminated to SPU and other universities and colleges around the country. So yes, the information about the deception, mischaracterizations of science, and fearmongering most definitely will be disseminated. 

And yes, I most definitely wish that children could be legally taken away from parents who refuse to give them life-saving vaccines. Refusing to vaccinate a child is nothing short of child abuse.

But that is all for just now…I do need to make it to a New World Order Illuminati pizza party where I will be given my next round of instructions by my clandestine sponsors of falsehood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

At least he's partially right...

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, it is not amusing

So something has been nagging at me over the past several days. I just somehow knew that I had made a mistake in my post below about the State of the Nation article about me. And then it hit me. I had used the word “amusing” in describing their links to other conspiracy web pages about the Sandy Hook shooting. And there is absolutely nothing amusing about any of these theories about “false flag” attacks and crisis actors and people pretending to be grieving over nonexistent children in the aftermath of some kind of hoax at Sandy Hook.

Vile, perhaps. These false flag conspiracy theories are vile beyond all comprehension. They are disgusting. They are filthy. They are examples of the absolute depths of depravity some people are capable of sinking to. 

And what is even more revolting than the conspiracy believers are the people who make a living feeding the delusions of these sick, demented individuals. Just as I had written here before, I am absolutely convinced that perhaps the people who are getting the biggest laugh out of the absurdity, the sheer stupidity of these theories are the people behind all the scores of conspiracy web pages, blogs, and various types of social media. I am certain that Alex Jones does not believe a word of the garbage he spews on his show every day. Likewise, I am certain that all the other Jones wannabes out there, the people running the State of the Nation site or the Call for an Uprising YouTube channel, or all of the other charlatans peddling in paranoia, are probably laughing every day at the rubes they are swindling with their Pizzagate and Qanaon and anti-vaxxer bilge.

But then the rubes turn into the people who harass the parents of children who had died because they haven’t gotten a flu vaccine. Check out this article about parents having to suffer the loss of a child and then becoming the victims of the anti-vaxxer sociopaths. The believers in these conspiracies become the human trash that harassed the Sandy Hook parents like Jeremy Richman who took his own life earlier this week. Read the article about Richman’s death right here. He had been one of the people suing Alex Jones for accusing the Sandy Hook parents of being crisis actors.

So no, none of this is amusing.

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.

Not sure if I should laugh or cry.

So here's a link to YET ANOTHER major study verifying what the scientific community has known for a long time: there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to suggest that measles vaccines cause autism. Case closed!

Except given the state our modern world is in - and not just America society, but many other countries in the world where we've been seeing measles outbreaks - will this make much of a difference to an ever-growing segment of the population that likes to make up its own facts and create its own belief systems completely unconnected to any empirical evidence? I fear that the answer to that might be..."not likely."

I'm as pessimistic as I am because I recently watched a fascinating, hilarious, frightening, absurd, disheartening documentary on Netflix called "Behind the Curve." It focuses on that other great modern derangement I've been writing about here, the flat Earth movement. The documentary is quite fair to the flat Earthers, actually, as it lets them tell their story in their own words. We see some of the thought-leaders of the flat Earth movement as they explain their beliefs and why they came to believe what they do.

Now the idea that the Earth is flat I will just leave in the same category as the "Pizzagate" conspiracy and the Qanon conspiracy. It is so staggeringly absurd that it's not worth spending the time addressing all of its claims.

What makes the documentary especially fascinating, though, is when we see how this monumental foolishness serves as a magnet, a community, and a surrogate family for people who are and always have been, for whatever reason, completely alienated from consensus reality and any organization or institution of expertise. We see these people congregate in online communities - when they don't get together at actual conventions - and spin their wild yarns of a massive, world-wide conspiracy to hide the truth about the real shape of the Earth. We also see how the people who make up this zany movement already have a propensity for paranoia and for living in their own self-made fantasy worlds. The stars, if you will, of the flat Earth movement profiled in "Behind the Curve," people like Patricia Steere or Mark Sargent, are also staunch believers in vast collection of other conspiracies, everything from 9/11 trutherism to flase-flag-attack theories and all the way to the vaccine conspiracy theories.

But a really sad part of this documentary is when we see people who take their kids to the flat Earth conventions, who teach them to believe in this archaic, utterly unrealistic load of demented nonsense. In my eyes, the behavior of those parents borders on child abuse. It borders on child abuse as much as the behavior of parents who refuse to give their children vaccines. It makes me want to scream that if children can be removed by authorities from families where they are beaten, starved, and tortured, why shouldn't they be taken away from parents who refuse to vaccinate them? Or who indoctrinate them in idiocy like the flat Earth beliefs. That, of course, will never happen. But sometimes it really makes me wish!

So what about our new study debunking the vaccines/autism link yet again? Is there reason to believe it will change minds?

I hope so.

But, then again, when we still have flat Earthers despite all the evidence...