Blog companion to my course "Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking." Taught as part of the general writing curriculum at SUNY Geneseo.
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No post this week. It's the end of the semester and I must focus on grading.
Protocol 17 A good start is what you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea. And fortunately, the Elder agrees...sort of. This protocol is a strange one, it is more evidence that the Protocols are not meant to be read like a normal book. We are supposed to cherry pick sections of it as evidence of the conspiracy while making the assumption that the rest of the book offers support for the part we cherry picked. I'll spoil the surprise now, this protocol contains three distinct subjects, which are unrelated narratively from each other. I] The practice of advocacy produces men cold, cruel, persistent, un-principled, who in all cases take up an impersonal, purely legal standpoint. The elder is going to discuss lawyers and the legal profession. I know that hating the lawyers is as old as the legal profession. We have Shakespeare's Dick the Butcher and Jack Cade discussing the formation of a new society and Dick the Butcher suggests, "First thing we do, let's kill...
This chapter is a cheat. It's one page, and Cooper is purporting that this isn't even his writing...again. The title of this chapter is, " ARE THE SHEEP READY TO SHEAR? Oklahoma H.B. 1750 TEST CASE FOR THE POLICE STATE." Two things thwarted my attempts to research this subject: paywalls and time. Oddly enough, I had plenty of time to do the research but the documents in question are not online. The Oklahoma legislature's website only goes back to 1993 and I need 1988. The University of Oklahoma which also maintains an archive returned a 404 error. So I decided to just find what I can about the bill and move forward. The further problem is that Cooper's source, Gary North , a new name to add to our gallery of conspiracy theorist; maintained a website but his own archives do not go any earlier than 2004. The article that North wrote, is on a website called the " McAlvany Intelligence Advisory " but that article is locked behind a paywall. For people i...
The chapter begins like all of Cooper's chapters with a title and then a bunch of sub-titles. The title of this chapter is "Lessons from Lithuania" and then it subtitles with the Second Amendment--surprisingly the whole thing. Cooper does not ignore that inconvenient first half that modern gun fetishists concentrate on. He then goes on to Patrick Henry's famous quote, but again he gives the full thing: " I know not what others may do. But as for me, give me liberty or give me death." Cooper is unlikely to know this: it's very doubtful that Patrick Henry uttered these words. What we know is that he gave a speech in Virginia in 1775 which pushed the Virginia legislature toward desiring independence from England, but his speech was never recorded. The line comes from the recollection of people decades later. As much as I would like to attack Cooper for getting this wrong, I cannot do so, he would not have access to the scholarly research on the subject, a...
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