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?