Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

Protocol 10: I want to take one step back before we get into Protocol 11 to quote the end of 10. The Elder is pointing out the various methods by which you can divide the people against their government through the use of " torture, by starvation, BY THE INOCULATION OF DISEASES, by want, to the Goyim see no other issue than to take refuge in our complete sovereignty in money and in all else." The all caps section is out of place here because at no point in the ten protocols so far have we seen this. The method is, as we know, something the Cooper has used throughout the work. I had been working under the assumption that Cooper never read the Protocols, that he was just using to pad out his work, but now, we know two things: that he has read this book and that he's anti-vaccination. He thinks vaccination was a tool to divide the government against the people. This, however doesn't make sense within his conspiracy--if "they" truly want us to be slaves then the...

Protocol 10 The people that Cooper is writing for claim to believe in one thing above all: The US Constitution. It's almost always clear that they have never read it, do not understand it, and think it says things that it does not. These are the people that think the Declaration of Independence is a legally binding document, are aware of something called the Federalist Papers but that's about it, and they usually tip in favor of odd sovereign citizen positions. It's important also to remember that this book was written in the 1990s and the right-wing militia movement hated Bill Clinton. To be fair, they didn't like George H.W. Bush either, but nothing like their vitriol for Bill Clinton.  In my opinion, there was nothing that Clinton did  to earn their ire. I think that he took office in 1992 and it just coincided with right-wing conspiracism as a movement. Yet he's the president, by default, he must be part of the conspiracy. The conspirators could not allow someon...

Protocol 9 Internal consistency is one hurdle that conspiracy theories like the one we see in the Protocols, and then in Cooper's book cannot get over. The biggest problem with this theory is the one that Cooper has been unwittingly revealing in this book. It's said outright by the Elder:                  " De facto we have already wiped out every kind of rule except our own, although de jure there still remain a good many of them. Nowadays, if any States raise a protest against us it is only pro forma at our discretion and by our direction, for their anti-Semitism is indefensible to use for the management of our lesser brethren." And later in the next paragraph the Elder claims: " For us there are no checks to limit the range of our activity. Our Super-Government subsists in extra-legal conditions which are described in the accepted terminology by the energetic and forcible word--Dictatorship."  [I also note that this is a departure fro...

Protocol 8 So far, the Elder, has been quite disappointing. This is, after all, a book which has done so much damage throughout the world. It was named dropped in the original Hamas Charter, it has been referred to in Mein Kempf, and fascist parties in Greece have read from it; but this book, it seems, is only giving a concentrated version of anti-Semitism. I guess, I expect more out of this (there is the possibility that I've read too much of these books to be surprised).  Protocol 8 is one of those that diverge from t he original source that it plagiarizes from. Protocol 8 follows an idea in Dialogue 8 (the numbers do not always match up), but the Protocols makes some shifts. Throughout our discussion of the Protocols I've mentioned that it is a plagiarism, and I've noted in the past that author Jonathan Kay argues that 60% of the Protocols is word for word (barring translation) lifted directly from the original source. I've referred a few times to that source and I...