You don't become a successful conspiracy theorist like this...

So, my "anti-fan," Hank Wolfe, on the Before It's News conspiracy site is again claiming that I am up to more dastardly deeds and wickedness. So far he had accused me of being a part of a plot to brainwash my students using 5G technology during my online classes and to replace students who are critical of conspiracy theories with computer-generated "deep fake" doubles. He seems to imply that I either had advanced knowledge of the COVID-19 outbreak or I'm just taking advantage of a COVID hoax - his postings are not quite clear if COVID-19 was manufactured or it's a hoax and no virus actually exists - in order to enslave my students. Since he doesn't seem to be accusing me of being one of the creators of the pandemic (or hoax), I am actually a bit disappointed. I really would have liked to have been accused of something as grand as causing the entire outbreak, or maybe just sitting on the all-powerful Committee of Doom that had manufactured the pandemic.

Now in a post from December 23, which I just noticed on Hank's Before It's News page, he does accuse me of being the mastermind behind the 2020 metal monolith mystery. My novel, CONFIRMATION, Hank argues, is but a bit of "predictive programming," or a part of some greater global plot. I need to reread his post since I can't quite recall his muddled line of "reasoning." Or you can check his posts about me and monoliths here and in right here.

It's true that I joked around about the monolith connection to CONFIRMATION on this blog, but it was, you know...A JOKE!!!

Now it's easy - and oh, so enjoyable - to make fun of a second-rate fantasist like Hank Wolfe. He makes broad declarations of grand conspiracy theories without offering a shred of proof for any of them. In fact, he does not even try his hand at the sort of conspiracist illusion of proof where he provides links to other conspiracy sites making their own unsubstantiated claims. 

That sort of citation, for example, is the stock in trade of State of the Nation, where each of their unhinged claims of COVID hoaxes, alien space weapons, and false flag operations reference a large number of other sources. Those sources, of course, are conspiracy theorists or just previous State of the Nation articles. This sort of circular method of self-referentiality is so amusing that I think I might use it as a teaching tool in my research methods class this fall. Study State of the Nation very carefully, I will explain, to learn how not to present research.

But Hank Wolfe does not bother to try and reference his shocking claims with even the sort of inept approximation of the scholarly citation system. Hank, actually, appears to be somewhat of a lazy conspiracy theorist, posting claims of far-reaching evil plots sometimes weeks, or even months apart.

What Hank does do on occasion is offer links to some news stories he attempts to use as proof that some immense conspiracy can no longer be kept secret. For example, check out this post where his headline screams that the January 6 Capitol riot was so obviously a false flag attack that even The New York Times says as much. Except the Times does no such thing.

And then we have Hank's latest postings about several stories in the Saint Peter's student newspaper, The Tribune. He argues that these two stories - check them out here and here - just about admit that my grand scheme of controlling students' minds are in full swing. The first story, about marijuana legalization in New Jersey is really an admission of an MKULTRA-style mind-control experiment, or so says Hank. The the story about students and faculty starting their COVID vaccinations, Hank writes, is a glimpse into the university's forced vaccination policy. If anyone reads these stories, they will immediately see that Hank is either spectacularly delusional, can't read, or that he thinks his fans are as lazy as he is and would never check his sources.

Hank Wolfe really could benefit from taking my class on conspiracy theories. The Do It Yourself Conspiracy exercise could help him come up with a much more convincing fake conspiracy theory than the kind of lame material he posts on his Before It's News page.

But I guess we can thank Hank for his ineptitude. In a way he helps shine a light on this bizarre cultural phenomenon that has gone so far off the deep end that at its core is but a collection of fabricated stories by sad, desperate losers and opportunists dreaming of becoming next Alex Jones. Hank's nonsense about 5G mind control technology and online learning come through in much fewer articles that say the constant deluge of rancid sewer sludge on the Sate of the Nation or Millennium Report sites. Although Hank sometimes proclaims in very matter of fact tones that the COVID pandemic is a hoax, his focus still seems to be on the more exotic realms of MKULTRA-like brainwashing conspiracies. His work is both scattered and inept. It is not in the league of the shear, cold-blooded, opportunistic evil of a conspiracy site like State of the Nation that repeatedly implores its readers not to get vaccinated, not to wear masks if one is not vaccinated and in the company of strangers, and to avoid all safety precautions that might stop the spread of COVID-19. Hank Wolfe is but a sad, inept clown, a wannabe in a crowded field of aspiring conspiracy influencers. His competition, like State of the Nation, on the other hand, spreads information that's as close as one could get to attempted murder.

A piece of advice from a manipulative Svengali...

...please read beyond just the first paragraph or two of an article you are commenting on. That is a problem I recently noticed on the oddball "Before it's News" site of a certain Hank Wolfe who occasionally accuses me of using online education and secret 5G technology for mind control. Or something to that effect. Apparently he is attempting to blow the lid off of the sinister "Donovangate" plot I am masterminding to take over all of education or replace students in online classes with computer generated artificial intelligence avatars.

So looking at a recent post from Hank, I saw that he is still obsessed with Donovangate and mind control, looking for signs of it in my school newspaper's articles. In this piece, he comments on the length of an article I had posted about before. The Saint Peter's Pauw Wow - now renamed the Saint Peter's Tribune - had interviewed me about the QAnon phenomenon and Hank Wolfe, connecting those dots as he usually does, uncovered more clues to my occultic plot to bring on the new terrifying age of the New World Order.

And then Hank gives a warning about an SPU Tribune piece about marijuana legalization in New Jersey. Of Hank's work, this is actually one my favorites, as he calls me a "Svengali" who has complete control over the heart's and minds of all of Saint Peter's University. The SPU Tribune article, Hank warns portentously, is an endorsement of campus drug use. This drug use, he declares, is but a new attempt at enslaving the minds of students in the same vein as the Cold War-era MKULTRA drug experiments did.

Now, of course, Hank offers no concrete evidence of legalized pot in New Jersey somehow being a part of any mind control project, and also mischaracterizes the very point of the Tribune article. The article merely acknowledges the legal status of marijuana in New Jersey and reiterates that the smoke-free Saint Peter's campus does not allow pot smoking anywhere. But as any good conspiracy theorist, Hank quickly adds two and two to get five. Except when the true thesis of the Tribune article is so easy to check, I wonder why Hank would even bother to try and distort it as he does. It might be a better idea for Hank to move out of that basement at last, get a job somewhere, and put his efforts toward becoming a more productive member of society than a teller of weird, unprovable tall tales about Donovangate, 5G brainwashing, and Satanic plots.

So the lesson to take away from all this is to spend a mere two to three minutes double checking the sources of any nutter conspiracy sites like Before It's News and you'll wind up laughing at the crudest, clumsiest attempts at deception. Two or three minutes, that's it!

Cover reveal for my forthcoming novel!

A murder mystery in the world of professional bodybuilding.

In the city of Los Angeles, where fitness is almost a religion...

One of the most muscular...will soon fall!

Great piece on the mind-boggling weirdness that’s QAnon

I am quoted extensively in this excellent bit of investigative college journalism about the utterly bizarre roots of the great American derangement of QAnon. 

The Saint Peter’s University newspaper ran this article examining a part of the modern conspiracy culture whose beliefs appear to be stranger and stranger the more one looks at it in light of all the media coverage it received in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

 

From its unknown origins in the bowels of the 4chan message board in what might or might not have been a prank, this movement resembles both a role playing game from hell and a cult at the same time. It’s a sort of do it yourself, crowdsourced conspiracy where thousands of people have coalesced around a movement with no known leader—aside from whomever it is that has been posting unintelligible gibberish about “storms” and “great awakenings” on the Internet—and also a kind of a cult with no charismatic leader.

 

No matter how one looks at the ongoing saga of QAnon, I think any clear headed person will only see madness.

“Debris” is a fairly intriguing sci fi thriller

So here's a change of pace and a recommendation of a pretty good new science fiction/mystery series that just debuted on NBC.

In the vein of the X-Files, the story involves CIA agents Bryan Beneventi and MI6 agent Finola Jones working together to track down various pieces of debris that had rained down upon the Earth from a wrecked, derelict alien space ship. The bits of debris are scattered all over the world—thus the multinational effort sending agents around the globe to track down the pieces—and each of these bits of alien scrap metal appears to have a variety of paranormal effects on people that come in contact with it.

I always liked these kinds of ongoing supernatural/sci-fi/thriller shows built around an ongoing mythology and a vast, complex mystery that will take several seasons to unravel. The X-Files used to be this combination of the continuous mythology mixed in with the occasional standalone episode, or, as the X-Files used to call it, the “monster of the week” episode. Then, when Lost came along to zeitgeist-defining, smash hit ratings in 2004, the series eschewed any stand-alone episodes in order to focus its storyline on the labyrinthine mystery behind the true nature of a mysterious island in the Pacific. I enjoy this sort of a format—kind of like a soap-operaesque storytelling style adapted to a science fiction show—because they respect the attention span of their audiences and they always give me that feeling of rewarding the loyal and attentive fans who are willing to stick around and enjoy the slow-burn of a complicated mystery that will take a long time to completely unravel. Upon Lost’s success, a number of other shows jumped on this same stylistic bandwagon, but, unfortunately, most TV viewers did not have the patience to stick around for several years to see where all these other complicated mysteries were bound to go.

So this time Debris is taking a shot at the mythology-building story format and I’m intrigued by where the story could go. Although one slight flaw I’m finding in the first episode is that it doesn’t reflect at all on what the confirmation of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life does to the psyche of the rest of the world. Unlike other investigation-of-the-uncanny shows, in Debris the entire world knows about the fact that the strange metal that came from the skies is from an alien spacecraft. So it would be interesting to see the show examine how this sudden knowledge alien life impacts the psychology and the sociology or the rest of the world. What would undeniable proof like this do to belief systems, to religious systems? How would the mere knowledge of life beyond the stars effect people’s everyday outlook on life? Hopefully the show will deal with these questions at one point. 

I’m also somewhat intrigued to see that our heroes are government agents who are not butting heads with any kind of a deep mysterious conspiracy. Or at least not yet and not too obviously. There are a few hints that Bryan and Finola are not entire straight with each other about what each other’s government knows about and wants to do with the debris. And then the episode’s final scene also hints that Bryan might also not be aware of a deeper and darker agenda in the U.S. government. But at least so far the creaky old conspiracy tropes have not been pulled out of the mothballs and reused yet again, just as they have been used in decades’ worth of movies and TV shows. 

In the age of QAnon and Alex Jones, it would really be nice to leave the heroic conspiracy theorists back in the mothballs where they belong.

Imagine the creeps who would laugh at others' misfortune

Taking a deep dive into the conspiracy subculture for a project I am working on, I've been seeing the largely expected effort to keep current with the times, or explain that yet another major news event is not as it appears to be. Websites like Alex Jones' Info Wars, Before It's News, State of the Nation, and other such serial fabulists are very predictable arguing that the deep freeze that has been devastating Texas is either not real (Texas has been covered by white plastic-like goo and not snow, some conspiracists argue) or that the storms are a result of a weather-manipulation technology.

Wow!

And while the weather-manipulation technology is the more interesting of the two theories, the identity of the mastermind behind this fiendish plot to freeze the world in Texas is none other than...Bill Gates!

Gates, that overachiever of diabolical New World Order supervillains, must have had some free time on his hands after creating the COVID-19 virus and the microchips inside the vaccines, so he whipped up a quick storm to batter Texas.

The proof of this conspiracy, as usual, is nothing but a long list of links to other conspiracy sites. Or, as in the case of the State of the Nation - turning these days into perhaps the laziest of conspiracy mongers - the links to the evidence lead to yet other SOTN articles.

While the claims of these so-called "Texasgate" and "Stormgate" conspiracy theories are hardly worthy of examining and wasting one's time in refuting, their true repugnant nature emerges if one only spends a few minutes skimming their texts. These "theories" look like the handiwork of gleefully sadistic sociopaths who enjoy mocking others' pain and suffering. Why not take death, destruction, financial ruin, and illness, these people must ask themselves, and exploit them in these ludicrous exercises of cherry-picking facts, misquoting sources, and presenting information wildly out of context all for the entertainment of a collection of ghouls who like to use others misfortunes for entertainment?

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.