Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

The main problem with the previous chapter was that Cooper tried to cram too much into it. Any society that he ever heard about was pushed into his vast web. It doesn't even make a compelling conspiracy theory at that point because it says nothing. A conspiracy theory, according to my research for my dissertation, needs a cover-up; and with the number of secret societies that Cooper names, there isn't room for one. The Vatican isn't a secret society, and neither is the CFR, the Tri-Laterals, or the attendees of the Bilderberg Meeting. These are just the groups, according to Cooper, that are supposed to be in charge. I'm not interested in those. What I'm interested in, and what I think is more important is the ground-level workers. A conspiracy, by definition (not a "conspiracy theory") needs more than one person. I've often pondered how recruitment works. Who guards the Ice Wall in the Flat Earth conspiracy theory? Someone needs to. I've mentioned

 When a conspiracy theory gets large enough it becomes incoherent. I've mentioned this before but no person could look at the " Q-Map " and understand it. By the time a person understands one entry, they've veered off into dozens of others. This, I must stress, is by design. If you stopped at "The Vatican" on the Q-map and seriously delved into it, you'd be mystified at why it is on there. You would find a very interesting piece of world history (and an actual historical conspiracy), but no relationship to Q-anon. Similarly, Cooper must include the Vatican in his worldview but it's impossible for him to link it to the UFOs or the New World Order. This presents a problem. The Vatican, even to an atheist like myself, is a pretty important political force in world history. A person must be purposefully ignorant to not understand this. Its importance means that it has to be involved in the world conspiracy, but in what fashion? The Vatican, at the time C

" The goal of the Council on Foreign Relations is a New World Order. George Bush is a member of the CFR. Knights of Malta play a powerful role in this scenario. In the 1930s they recruited General Smedley Butler to help take over the White House."  This is three sentences and it's just so packed with claims that it does a good job of elucidating how difficult it is to read these books. I've done some unpacking of the CFR in the Gary Allen book, but it's not a secret society, you can go to their website and read their list , they publish a magazine. The reason that accusing the CFR of anything other than a slight political leaning works is because the magazine is boring to people not used to reading this kind of material. It makes sense in the same way that a child not understanding how a phone works will settle on magic. Was George Bush a member of the CFR? I don't know, but it also doesn't matter. Bush (I'm assuming he means George H W Bush) as a dire

Evil turns on itself, Hickman and Weiss wrote in the third book of the original Dragonlance Trilogy, and Cooper is going to inadvertently describe why his conspiracy theory cannot work. Last week I fell into the "bewilder gambit;" this is a conspiracy theory technique of blasting the listener with overly-complicated factoids that they become confused and assume that it must be plausible. Think of the nonsense that a Flat Earther will spout off trying to explain why there is no such thing as gravity: the goal isn't to argue for a position but rather confuse the other person so that they can no longer argue back.  It would be helpful to keep in mind that Cooper's big worry is the New World Order and some kind of UFO invasion. Ultimately, his big apocalypse concerns aliens, maybe some kind of spiritual entity, but this is the 90s and the X-Files grand conspiracy is largely his view (in fact, some of it was taken from Cooper, and Cooper took some of it back).  Cooper clai