Conspiracy Theorists

Earlier this week I wrote Gnosticism and Being Against the War in Iraq, expounding on people I believe “are dangerously naive, ill-informed, and suffer a need to feel superior (have access to secret information, be part of the “in-crowd”).”

There’s a series over at Eject! Eject! Eject! by Bill Whittle which takes a much longer and more thoughtful look at this phenomenon. SEEING THE UNSEEN, Part 2 is well worth a read, especially since conspiracy theories are going mainstream. I know people who actually believe that the Da Vinci Code is a work of non-fiction. I know people who honestly believe that George Bush – at the instigation of the Jooooos who actually run this country – engineered 9/11 in order to kill brown people. I know people who think the levees were deliberately blown up, causing most of New Orleans to flood after Hurricane Katrina. People who in other respects seem perfectly normal. It’s like learning someone has leprosy. (Hansen’s Disease) You have what?!

Whittle writes:

Some people see the Moon Hoax, Kennedy, 9/11 conspiracies and all the rest of that garbage as separate little fiefdoms of harmless lunacy. But I do not.

They all have one element in common, and it is a deadly poison which we must address if we want to regain our social health.

If you believe the lunar landing was a hoax, then you believe that your government was willing and able to lie to you in order to gain prestige it did not earn. You are willing to believe that there are thousands and thousands of engineers, astronauts, technicians, and so on, who are willing to lie on government orders: lie to their friends and family, lie to the press, lie to you. And all of them – tens if not hundreds of thousands of them – take their secret to the grave. …

Think about that, and weep. Think that there are people out there right now – people two cars over in traffic, or ahead of you in the check-out counter – who believe [regarding chemtrails] that our government is spraying high-altitude poisons designed to kill us all. That men and women – thousands of men and women – go to work every day, refilling the tankers with deadly chemicals, or flying top-secret missions in broad daylight indiscriminately spraying death down on their drinking buddies, fellow church-goers, co-workers, cousins and wives and children.

You need to read the whole thing. It’s a lot like gargling with Listerine. It takes longer than you’d really like to spend on it, you don’t really enjoy the taste, but in the end you are cleansed and refreshed and better off for having done it.

Not long after 9/11, a doctor I know believed the writings of a lunatic named Carol Valentine, who promoted the idea, among other things, that the “official story” of the plane hitting the Pentagon was a big hoax. Questions were raised! Doubts were aired! Exclamation points were used!! I was shocked that a grown, educated, intelligent man could fall for it. I copied her essay into a a Word doc and fisked it, line by line. I wrote about my own experiences in D.C. traffic. I researched Material Safety Data Sheets on jet fuel. I found plenty of documented occasions where firefighters do, in fact, use water on petroleum fires, and FAA policies where they are encouraged to do so. I located eyewitnesses’ direct accounts contradicting her assertions. Her page is now gone, and the link redirects to something equally ludicrous. After putting a couple of week’s worth of my spare time into this fisking, I showed it to my friend. He was completely unmoved. He couldn’t find a hole in it, so he suggested I email it to Valentine because he was sure that there were plenty of things I had overlooked. Why bother with pesky things like common sense, facts, testimony, and evidence? These people knew “truthiness” long before Stephen Colbert. So I checked out of the conversation and gave up on my friend. Whittle makes a compelling case that this was a big mistake, and that the sane people really need to push back against these increasingly crazy ideologies. The question is, how?

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