Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

Protocol 7 Anti-Semitism is so baked into the fabric of European history that narrowing down the worst tracts, polemics, and writings is hard to accomplish. The Protocols stand out because they were published and within a decade Europe erupted into war. The Protocols looked like it was revealing a secret, but then, we must remember that the Protocols were plagiarized from a criticism of Napolean III, who was a warmonger and for original author Maurice Joly to predict that Napolean III would start a new war, was like predicting that fish are going to be wet.  No one pays attention to that, because it's boring. Knowing that war was inevitable in Europe in the 1900s because of the intense animosities in the Balkans and all of the alliances and treaties; is equally boring. Claiming that the "Great War" was the result of the machinations of a secret cabal that needed European society to get checked...that's much more interesting.  This Protocol is about the coming war. Thi

Protocol 6 We begin with the Elder, " We shall soon begin to establish huge monopolies, reservoirs of colossal riches, upon which even large fortunes of the goyim will depend to such an extent that they will go to the bottom together with the credit of the States on the day after the political smash... " Protocol 6 is "the Jews own the banks." The Elder isn't making a claim that they will monopolize industry, but that of finance. Oddly, this carries a thread from the last protocol where he laid out the plan to keep the people dependent on gold and drown in them in abstract ideas. Early in the book Cooper quoted Mayer Rothschild, "Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws;" the idea being that a powerful enough economic force is beyond the reach of the law. It doesn't matter that the quotation of Rothschild is false, it can be sourced nowhere but in weirdo conspiracy books (see the book "Jewish Space Lasers&

Protocol 5 The way the Protocols works is that it alternates between two tones. The first tone is the one that we expect, it's the plan of the Elders to rule the world of the goyim  (or "cattle" according to Cooper's disclaimer). The other is his complaints about the world and how the current world stands in the way of their plans. Most people point out that the real danger in the Protocols is the first tone. This makes sense when we consider that the publishers of the Protocols are trying to expose the plan of the Elders. The reader, knowing the plan, can stop it.  This isn't correct. The real danger in the Protocols is the second tone. In the last two posts, I pointed out that the Elder had a problem with intellectuals being their real obstacle. The plan, according to the Elder, was not to stop the intellectuals but to inject so much vocabulary and "-isms" that the words would become meaningless and ideas would lose meaning. So what is the audience goi

I've decided that as we read through this book within a book, I need to make a change to the format. I've always had the intent to do a walkthrough of the Protocols. I was preparing to do it two books from now. With a book as infamous and as anti-Semitic as this I needed a book break and was planning on doing something light first. Yet, Cooper has thrown me into it anyway so, here we are. I've always known that the Protocols was in Behold a Pale Horse, but I assumed that it was an abridged version, or that there would be commentary to it. I never assumed it would be the whole bloody thing.  So the format change is super minor but here it is: the Protocols are divided up by Protocol. I'm not going to do more than one protocol a week, but some of the longer ones may take more than one post. I mention this because where we are now, Protocol 4, is a short one.  The original document that the Protocols is a plagiarism of, is a work by an opponent of Napoleon III named Mauric