I'm talking "Easy Rider" on the CineVerse podcast

Check out the CineVerse podcast for discussions of classic films on their major anniversaries. I was the special guest on their latest episode for the 50th anniversary of "Easy Rider." So sit back, chill, drop out, tune in, smoke a doobie if that's your thing, and have the ultimate trip as host Erik Martin and I talk about "Easy Rider."

Sandy Hook "truther" James Fetzer loses libel suit. Good!

All words have consequences and now the conspiracy community is learning it the hard way – finally – in court, according to this story. A Wisconsin judge just found conspiracy theorist James Fetzer guilty of libeling Leonard Pozner, the father of one of the children murdered in the Sandy Hook mass shooting of 2012.

The details of this case are so repugnant that it’s impossible, I think, to have any kind of a measured, civil discussion of who James Fetzer is and what he was sued for. As the NY Times story outlines, Fetzer wrote a book arguing that the Sandy Hook massacre was a “false flag” attack, a hoax perpetrated by some government cabal to use as a pretense for cracking down on gun-ownership rights. By that account, of course, all of the grieving families, friends, and coworkers of the children and staff members who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School were liars and “crisis actors,” coconspirators of the shadowy evil cabal. Thus Fetzer got hit with a well-deserved libel suit and now he has, thankfully, lost the case.

The only evil perpetrated in this case, of course, was the one by Fetzer, his co-author, and his publisher. First, arguing that no shooting took place at Sandy Hook is mind-boggling in its sheer callousness. Not only does what they describe – or any of the arguments made by all the other “truther” bottom-feeders like the State of the Nation web page, Alex Jones, the Millennium Report, or the rest of their slimy ilk – defy all logic and common sense, but it’s virtually unfathomable how insensitive it is to the pain of these families. Faking a mass shooting at a school in the middle of a community like Newtown, Connecticut, is impossible. Period! It is just as impossible as the 9/11 conspiracy theories, the vaccination conspiracy theories, and the flat Earth conspiracy theories an ever-growing subculture of the alienated, mentally unstable, psychotic, and pathologically unstable believe in these days. But the fact that Fetzer would use the death of children to make money off of, that he would continually encourage the harassment of people like Leonard Pozner, is an act of inhuman depravity that could only be born of the mind of a sociopath. 

But a quick review of Fetzer’s background reveals that none of what he did with the Sandy Hook tragedy should be of surprise. He is, after all, one of the stars of the 9/11 conspiracy movement. A quick Google of his name will provide a wealth of information about his background, including his founding of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth organization in 2005. The fascinating thing about Scholars for 9/11 Truth is that by 2006 the group saw a schism, where a sizable faction of its members – and no, most of them are not scholars, and the few that are have mostly scholarly credentials like an expertise in horticulture, art, or literary analysis – decided to break away and start their own group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Their problem with Fetzer, they said, was that he wanted to keep an open mind to and include such lunatic theories like the World Trade Center towers being destroyed by lasers from space or mini nuclear weapons.

Again, sorry for the incivility, but you can see what happened to Fetzer, right? He was deemed too batshit-crazy for even the average 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Since then, Fetzer has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. Aside from the 9/11 derangement, he has endorsed the Moon-landing hoax theory, various harebrained JFK conspiracy theories, and has been friendly to various Holocaust-denier and world-Jewish-conspiracy theories. A true, class act, right?

Also it’s worth remarking about something unfortunate concerning Fetzer. From the 1970s until the 1990s, he actually had a legitimate academic career. He is today a professor emeritus of the philosophy of science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Cranks, fringe kooks, and the utterly unscrupulous, do turn up in academia as well from time to time. Intelligence, unfortunately, does not always rule out a lack of morals and conscience…or sometimes just plain mental illness. The Fetzers of academia, thankfully, however, are kept to a minimum by the nature of that business. And Fetzer’s descent into conspiracy theorist batshit-craziness only started after his retirement as a full-time faculty member. With age, one can suppose, the body is not always the first to go. Or maybe he just needed a little extra retirement income and he realized there was an a big enough audience out there to pay for books and videos about 9/11 and crisis actor conspiracy theories, no matter how ludicrous these theories may be.

But aside from celebrating Leonard Pozner's victory, we must also laud his other activism against this predatory, destructive conspiracy culture that is pushing American society ever closer to a new dark age of irrationality and mindless paranoia. Pozner also founded the HONR Network, dedicated to fighting back against online harassment and challenging the malicious lies of conspiracy theorists. As Pozner argues so correctly, conspiracy theories can’t be ignored because they will not fade away on their own. These theories are kept alive by the Internet and they spread like a vicious cancer until they erase real history. 

Do check out the HONR Network’s web page right here and support its mission.

It’s time that the tide began to turn against the terrorists of the conspiracy theory community and the people who should start living in fear – in fear of the exposure of their unconscionable lies – are the Fetzers of this world and the rest of their kind in the “truther” community.

Alex Jones and child porn. Maybe it was the Illuminati Deep State!

Well, we’re just going to leave this article by CNBC right here. It’s a breaking story about the Sandy Hook families who are suing Alex Jones receiving electronic files from him that contain child pornography.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. 

Jones, naturally, is claiming that he is the victim of some vicious conspiratorial plot. Maybe it’s by the Illuminati Satanists trying to silence him just before they roll out the New World Order…

Or is this but another slice of Pizzagate?

So many questions. So much intrigue!

Jessica Biel clarified her position on vaccinations...

...and she still sounds ridiculous.

According to this L.A. Times article, the actress had earlier this week publicly sided with the anti-vaxxer crowd, going to California's Capitol to help lobby against a new law that would tighten vaccination requirements. After a sudden backlash from the public all over social media - thank goodness - she has been quickly backtracking on what her actual position is on vaccinations.

"I am not against vaccinations," Biel tweeted, "I support children getting vaccinations and I also support families having the right to make educated medical decisions for their children..."

It sounds more reasonable, but this argument is the exact sort of absurdity that has now given the U.S. some 1000 cases of the measles. It asks that parents be given the opportunity to research the issue on their own and draw their own conclusions about whether or not to vaccinate their kids. Except parents, unless they happen to be doctors or scientists, are not qualified to research the issue on their own - by spending a few hours on Google and running across the kind of terroristic garbage posted on pages like State of the Nation and similar "truther" sites - and make any kind of an informed decision on their own.

But at least the sudden pushback is heartening to see. More people are finally recognizing the destructive madness of the anti-vaccination movement and the conspiracy theory nonsense it's built on, and they are calling BS.

As the article writes, comedian Jim Kirkman's reply to Biel was perfectly put: "People are dying due to anti-vaxxers and your ignorance will contribute to that death toll."

Where I talk about true crime and serial killers.

A fan of true crime, psychos, serial killers, celebrity crime and good-looking bad girls and bad boys? Check out this link to my recent guest turn on the Lisa Valentine Clark radio show. We had a great talk about the appeal of this sort of dark entertainment. We touch on the natural morbid curiosity people have always had for shocking, unsolved true crime stories. Jack the Ripper, after all, made blockbuster headlines in Victorian London. Plus, do we really get even more excited when the criminals and alleged criminals are really hot-looking…like Jodie Arias, Ted Bundy, and accused Theranos swindler Elizabeth Holmes? My segment begins at 25 minutes.

A state of moral depravity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are doing the right thing in Maine.

According to this piece in CNN, Maine is now the fourth state to do the sensible thing and prohibit people from opting out of immunizations on religious and philosophical grounds. 

Good for Maine!

Of course, I am almost tempted to take some credit for this. I almost want to claim that I called a meeting at the Jersey City headquarters of the American branch of the Illuminati and gave the order to my minions—just as I had done when I ordered the measles outbreak up in New York, according to the State of the Nation website—but it would be really dishonest of me to do so.

In all seriousness, this is a step in the right direction. But it’s also staggering to consider that in 2019 only three other states—California, West Virginia, and Mississippi—have ended religious exemptions to life-saving vaccinations. As I have written before, are we completely committed to returning to the Dark Ages where we are willing to let people suffer and die out of superstitious fear when the power to prevent diseases exist? When it has existed for decades and has saved lived for decades? 

This issue is so frustrating because we see the political power of people so ignorant as to not realize that the religious liberties guaranteed by the Constitution are not without boundaries. Your rights to practice the worship of your invisible magical beings does not outweigh others’ rights to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. People are not allowed to infect others, to spread death and disease out of religious liberties. Saying that people ought to be allowed to opt out of vaccinations on religious grounds is like saying that I had visions where my deity commands me to drink a half a bottle of whiskey every Friday night, then get in a car and drive it as fast as I can, and I must be allowed to do so by law enforcement lest my religious liberties be trampled upon.

The First Amendment rightly protects people’s consciences and allows them to believe as they choose or not to believe as they choose. But it does not give them the right to force their beliefs on others and it certainly does not give them the right to put others’ lives in danger because of religious belief.

So now the rest of the states need to do the right thing, too, and they must protect the lives of their citizens. There must be no exemptions to vaccinations allowed for anything other than medical reasons.