Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

Finally, about halfway through the book, and we get a proper introduction to our main villain. WWI has ended and the world is at peace--for now. We know how this story ends. As Allen claimed that Lord Cuzon commented, "It is not a peace treaty, it is simply a break in hostilities."  Now, I'm going to be charitable and not fact-check the Cuzon quote. We know that the way in which the Great War ended directly led to the next war. It was so apparent that in 1945, the goal in treating the Japanese surrender was to not create a situation in which we would have Japanese Hitler stepping into the void left by the Emperor. The enormous debt that was levied against the Kaiser and Germany for the war is probably the cause that most people are familiar with, but there were others. WWI is so fascinating in both its beginning and end because of all the little pieces that worked together (and didn't).  So it's pretty insulting that Allen is going to wipe all of that away and put...

 The hardest thing about this book is writing after I've rejected the premise. The whole book is essentially that, but each chapter is a new claim. Way back in September we started this chapter on the Russian Revolution in which Allen took five pages to get into the actual Revolution. Now, we've passed the Revolution but we still have to continue on about the Soviet Union. I've got one word for you Allen: EDITOR. The last post should have ended the chapter. The Revolution was over, the war was over, and the Russian Empire had become the USSR. If you want to talk about the USSR, fine, but it's another chapter. Nevertheless, we must persist.  Conspiracy theorists do this trick in their mammoth tomes. They begin a statement like this, "We may assume that..." or "In theory X could be responsible..."   then further down the line they'll refer back to it like this "Having established X..." or "We know that X..." The first part is ho...

The problem with researching conspiracy theories is that because they are mostly fiction, the authors can just assume a new layer of the conspiracy without any proof. So far, COMMUNISM is being introduced by some powerful wealthy people in the United States...but then, it's also in the UK as well. But, then, it's the Federal Reserve that controls both countries. Now, like a Final Fantasy IX, just when we think we've beaten the final boss a new boss arises. Why? Because Allen can't name concrete things without the facts making him realize that he's a liar.  We are still talking about the Bolshevik revolution, funded mind you, by the wealthy elite in order to push SOCIALISM across the world. All of the sudden, apropos of nothing, he begins talking about the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).  The problem is that he is claiming that Jacob Shiff, a wealthy banker who helped finance the American railroad expansion and Japan's war against Russia in 1904, and his part...

Creed of Gold is a 2014 movie that no one has seen. In fact, I haven't seen this movie either, but I have listened to the August 8th episode of God Awful Movies where they reviewed it. The movie is chock full of anti-federal reserve conspiracy theories and pretty much goes full-on anti-semitic with it. The evil characters are, shall we say, Jewish-adjacent. In the movie, they repeat a claim concerning the formation of the Federal Reserve by discussing a train full of gold that disappeared in Russia. Intrigued about this gold train I spent a few days trying to figure out what the hell that conspiracy was, and what host Eli Boznick was talking about when he described it. Every time I searched I kept getting results about Vladimir Lenin and WWI, but that couldn't have been it...right? We're through Allen's clumsy attempt at a history of WWI. It's clumsy because I know that he doesn't care about any of this, he's more interested in attacking two targets: the fir...