Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 One of the more interesting (in a frightening way) aspects of the conspiracy world is how much they seem to hate women. This isn’t hyperbole either. Conspiracy theorists on the right-wing extremist side want to return the world to an idealistic utopia where the men are in charge, everything is earned by their own grit, and women have literally no place in that world. Poke and prod enough with the question: what do you want to see happen; and you’ll get there. This is especially the case now where you have the case for “trad wives” and the conspiracy world effectively dominated by alleged “alpha males” who view people like Jordan Peterson as philosophers and aspire to the ranks of accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate. It’s more open now and in our past books we haven’t really seen it either. The Protocols was written at a time when no one assumed a woman could hold a position of power, Robison is writing at a time where if voting was a possibility, women weren’t allowed to do it, and...

 Since I started doing conspiracy books (5 in total, not counting this one); I think I’ve had Adam Weishaupt come up in four of them. What I should do is write a generic version of the Weishaupt story and then insert it when it comes up. The only person that didn’t mention him was Kaysing, but I’m sure he would have gotten around to it. The most important thing to realize about Webster’s take is how influential it will become. I ask this in my class: why do we, in the 21st century know anything about a weird nerd club in an 18th century German province? The answer to this question is Nesta Webster and this book. She made it popular after everyone forgot about Robison’s claims. What we know that we can prove, is that Adam Weishaupt was a theology professor in Bavaria at the University of Ingolstadt. He was a student and philosopher of the Enlightenment. As such he wanted to form a society dedicated to spreading literacy, rationalism, and equality throughout his world. His order was ...

 I want to say that I like Webster’s writing, but I also want to caveat that statement with a “so far…” It seems that conspiracy literature always front loads the good writing. My research into conspiracy phenomenon would support this hypothesis, and eventually this blog will provide the evidence for that conclusion. The conspiracy theorist has all this information, energy, and emotion to start. Then it just kind of peters out. Webster, coming from historical writing, is probably going to go the distance longer than someone like Kaysing or Robison (Cooper only wrote about half of his book), but I fear that she will eventually just start rambling. It’s too bad, because so far the writing is very good and I can see why this book had the impact it did. She’s still focusing on the French Revolution of 1789, and attempting to push the narrative that the Masons did it. She’s got nothing as far as evidence is concerned and she’s leaning on Robison’s dubious claims, but also a citation to ...

 We’re in the chapter titled “Illuminism” and we’ve only talked about the philosophy of Rousseau. I’m going to hazard a guess that the reason we’re concentrating on Rousseau and French philosophy is because Webster’s big book, the one she became famous for was about the French revolution. I’m not going to criticize; you go with what you know. Unfortunately, Webster, doesn’t really know French Philosophy, “ Even eighteenth-century France, with all its avidity for novelty and its dreams of “a return to nature,” never regarded the primitive Utopia of Rousseau in the light of an attainable ideal.” Even Rousseau didn’t think a return to a state of nature was a good idea. He was merely offering, as a thought experiment, where inequality came from. Webster is correct that Rousseau’s ideas never really trickled down to the common folk, but that’s only because of literacy rates. The ideas that the poor were only poor because the rich made them and are keeping them so; those ideas spread. Ro...