The most despicable conspiracy site, hands down.

As an observer of the modern conspiracy culture, I often find myself in the same situation as Robert L. Ripley did when he chronicled the world’s oddities. I spend a whole lot of time looking at the strange, the bizarre, and the unexpected. There are the theories about the Earth being flat, the back-engineered alien spacecraft fantasies from the not so distant fringes of UFOlogy, and the stale, shopworn JFK assassination theories. But then there are the conspiracists who are vile beyond any measure of human depravity.

For one, there are the anti-vaxxers who might as well be treated by the law as murderers. Their scientifically discredited nonsense is leading to a global wave of disease outbreaks and death. People like this are no better than someone who prods and cajoles a depressed, suicidal individual into taking their own lives. 

Then we have the 9/11 conspiracy crowd, a collection of blood-sucking vampires exploiting the deaths of over 3000 Americans in order to sell their self-published books, cheaply produced DVDs, and get hits on their social media platforms. 

Then there are the climate-change-deniers who still insist on claiming that global warming is some kind of a massive hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scientists. In the middle of this freakshow we have the State of the Nation website, which subscribes not merely to all of these theories—and pretty much every conspiracy theory under the sun—but has now taken to mocking children and calling them crisis actors. If you visit the SOTN site, you’ll find them not only joining the attacks on 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg, but upping the ante in personal attacks and ridicule. In fact, SOTN displays its unique ability in taking tastelessness, absolute sociopathic callousness to heretofore unseen levels. You will see SOTN offer a rebuttal to Thunberg’s activism by making fun of her appearance and mocking her with nicknames like Greta the Grinch. 

But then if any other boundaries of boundaries of decency might come up, SOTN, of course, finds it and immediately crosses it. SOTN then mocks Thunberg’s Asperger’s Syndrome and, naturally, claims that her condition is some kind of a willful creation by the “globalists” who had vaccinated her to turn her into their puppet on a quest for worldwide domination.

So State of the Nation likes to refer to the big, invisible bogeyman of the New World Order and the “globalists” as “sociopaths” and “psychopaths” a lot. They throw these phrases around constantly. But what they really should do is look those words up in a dictionary. Whoever the dregs of humanity are who run that site should find the experience akin to staring into a mirror.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a collusion between Big Yarn and Big Corkboard!

This satirical article is one of the funniest things I'd read in quite a while. Just check out a little bit of it as it uses the typical conspiratorial logic as a punching bag:

"A federal task force has determined that the recent rise in online conspiracy theories has in fact been a well-coordinated plot by several powerful corporations designed to increase sales of corkboards and  string.

"'You have no idea how high up this goes,' replied a member of the DC taskforce, speaking on deep background. The taskforce determined that powerful office supply consortiums had deliberately fabricated many popular online conspiracies, including Pizzagate, QAnon, and Marisa Tomei's 1992 Best Supporting Actress win, all in an effort to sell more corkboards and red string."

But do read the entire piece because it's very funny. And, more importantly, it points out the logical fallacy at the core of so many conspiracy theories, argument that for someone to have profited from an event automatically means that they must have orchestrated the event.

The real world, unlike the one in movies, TV shows, and spy novels, is full of coincidences.

One of the best YouTube channels out there!

If you were to subscribe to just one YouTube channel devoted to debunking the depressing glut of conspiracy theories polluting the internet, I would urge you to make the Sci Man Dan channel the one. Check out a sample video right here. Not only does this channel devote almost all of its time to dismantling Flat Earth theories, it does so with a wonderfully droll British wit. Not only do you get to see science at work, but presented in a very funny way.

I had been recommending Sci Man Dan to several students recently and they asked what the point was in putting this much energy into dealing with fringe kooks like the Flat Earth believers. The energy must  be put into dealing with Flat Earth believers, into exposing the absurdity, the sheer ignorance of their claims, because they are out there. People like this exist in the twenty first century and they must not. 

This is exactly the reason I am blogging and teaching about the dangers of conspiracism and the threat posed by the shameless, reprehensible charlatans behind this movement. While we should be living in a time where science, rationality, and reason should be ordering our belief systems, we are instead descending into a new Dark Age of willful, aggressive ignorance. This can not stand. The 9/11 “truthers,” the false-flag crisis actor conspiracy theorists, and the rest of their sleazy ilk exist in our time, and they simply must not.

Conspiracy vs. Incompetence

After a shocking event or a calamity of some sort dominates the news cycle suddenly, no one’s a happier camper than the average conspiracy theorist. The event becomes a Rorschach test onto which conspiracy theorists can fasten their tentacles and hang on for days, weeks, or months even. The most unscrupulous conspiracy theorists—and these days I can’t really think of any other type in the “alternate news” or “truther community”—are probably the happiest when the event claims a large number of lives, as we had seen in the obscene spectacle of the “false flag” theorizing that followed the latest mass shootings. So the way the Jeffrey Epstein case is being milked for everything it’s worth by conspiracy sites like State of the Nation and their ilk is no surprise. Yet looking closely at the rhetoric and logic behind the coverage of the Epstein case gives a glimpse into the utterly erroneous and naïve thought process of conspiracy believers.

“It’s inconceivable that Epstein could have killed himself since he was such a high-profile prisoner,” says the core argument upon which the hundreds (or maybe thousands) of Epstein conspiracy theories are based. “It’s too far-fetched. He would be watched day and night.”

But he wasn’t because of sheer bureaucratic incompetence.

I bring this up as we are just about two and a half weeks away from the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. That tragedy birthed a new era of conspiracy theorizing that is more deranged and morally bankrupt than any other previous conspiracy craze in history, more so than the various Freemason moral panics, the Kennedy assassination fantasies, or the nonsense about “secret” policy organizations like the Council on Foreign relations or the Trilateral Commission plotting to rule the world. The 9/11 conspiracies are also founded on the same fallacy of perfect governmental organizations that couldn’t possibly have been so off guard as they were in 2001. Rather than recognizing ineptitude, convoluted and inefficient bureaucracies, missed signals, and just plain stupid mistakes—the kinds that have plagued complex organizations since groups of people have ever attempted to collaborate on any large-scale endeavor—the conspiratorial mindset starts inventing massive, labyrinthine plots and the work of evil cabals.

Such is now the case with Epstein’s death. Despite the fact that investigations of the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center—as discussed in this article—have demonstrated a long record of inept management of the institution, that history of gross mismanagement is now the fuel for ever more absurd Epstein conspiracy theories. Epstein was killed by Trump, some argue. Epstein was killed by the Clintons, others counter. Epstein was killed by Satanists. Epstein was killed by the Illuminati. There’s probably a blog or Facebook page or web page out there arguing that Epstein was killed either by aliens or NASA because he was either about to blow the whistle on what really crashed in Roswell or give conclusive proof that the Earth is flat.

The amusing part of all of the Epstein theories is the fact that it proves how die-hard conspiracists might be the most optimistic human beings on the face of the Earth. If they are to be believed, this world would be a perfect Nirvana on its own and every problem and calamity is caused on purpose by the hidden hand of some shadowy cabal.

Ah…the wonderful, childlike naivete of simple minds.

The satisfying horror of a good shark film.

A fan of aquatic suspense? So am I! There is an inherent terror in the wide open seas, the unknown depths, and everything that lurks beneath. That’s why well-crafted thrillers about sharks have provided some of the finest examples of terror on the movie screen for decades. So check out this article about shark movies in the New York Observer where I weigh in on the appeal of movies like Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, The Shallow, The Meg, and47 Meters Down.

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."