Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

"Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of our secret society."--FBI Lawyer Lisa Page. This text revealed earlier this week sent a lot of people into a titter because it apparently confirms the existence of a secret society within the FBI that is apparently in opposition to the president. Senate Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin claimed that he had corroborating information and that the revelation didn't surprise him. This single text along with the revelation that the FBI "lost" about 50,000 texts between Page and FBI agent Peter Strozk (though they are beginning to be recovered) "confirmed" the story that supporters of the president and the president himself has been pushing for what seems to be forever--though it's only been a year. First off let's address the secret society comment in the text. I read the text has sarcastic and missing an eye roll emoji, but o...

I've covered this before , but that was five months ago and I've been really bad at making updates. Don't blame me, well, blame me, but I have a course on this stuff to teach and sometimes just making the lectures work takes far more work than I anticipated. However, I'm beginning a "Plan B'' in pursuit of my PhD and that's forced me to delve into the academic literature surrounding this topic...more than I had to before. One of the problems is that there is scarce literature on the topic. Sure there's enough but the debate is just beginning, and that means going backward to the years before conspiracy theories were not uttered out of the mouth of the president of the United States...at least publicly. The problem lies not necessarily with the scarcity of material but that within that set there is good and bad. So far the standard piece to work with is Brian Keeley's "Of Conspiracy Theories" (99). This work deals with laying out a s...