Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

  “ They made dark threats about fire and brimstone if I didn’t shape up to Jesus. “Who’s that?” I wondered. One of my favorite questions to ask Christians who are trying to convince me with Bible quotes is, “Who do you think isn’t aware of Jesus?” If you live in an English-speaking country and have not heard about Jesus I’m very curious about you. I’m an atheist, my children do not go to church, and they know about Jesus because they live in a Christian culture. Warnke lives in the Midwest and even if his dad was the gun-toting badass that Warnke portrayed him as, he knows who Jesus is. The “they” in that sentence are Warnke’s two aunts who are going to raise him after the funeral. This is the 1950s and I guess custody just goes to whoever calls “dibs.” The aunts have him to fill with fear of Evangelical Jesus when in 1959 Warnke’s half-sister and husband explain to the aunts that they had secret dibs and were going to take Mike to San Bernadino California. There’s just one pr...

We begin our long journey. A couple of reminders for those of you who missed last week: the first is that I’m entirely aware that Mike Warnke is making most of this story up, there will be no need to remind me of that in the comments. The second thing is that for the most part I’m going to take the story he’s telling here at face value. This is because conspiracy books like this rarely hold up against themselves. This blog has covered 8 conspiracy books over several years and several different blog sites (the wordpress.com link is the oldest) and through that I can say one of two things happens: either the conspiracy begins unraveling due to the author’s incompetence (as in the case of Nesta Webster’s book that we just finished) or the conspiracy just descends into absurdity (Kaysing’s We Never Went to the Moon is a good example of that). The final note is that all page numbers are from the pdf not the book itself. I am using this version found at the internet archive . Preamble over...

Our next book is going to be the 1972 “memoir” The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke …with David Balsiger and Les Jones. I’ve chosen this book for a few reasons. The primary reason I’m choosing this book is that it’s the first domino in the debacle that will be called “The Satanic Panic.” We know the Satanic Panic from the 1980s and 90s; but the origins of it go back to the 1970s. During the 1970s a few things come together to create this panic that would sweep through the English-speaking world. The sexual revolution is one, I don’t have the expertise to really speak on the causes of the revolution, but I can write about the effect—women wanting to work…well not work, no one wants to work. They wanted autonomy and to break the chain of having to be considered a housewife. Once they left the house in pursuit of their own lives, someone needed to watch the kids and Christian men in 1970s America would rather be damned than raise their own children. The response was to scream about how wom...

We have reached the end of the Webster book and like most of the conspiracy books that we cover, we can say that we’ve read it. Like all conspiracy theory books, the main issue with the theory that Webster is trying to build is that of coherence. The book is a good example of an argument that is all emotion wrapped in a veneer of facts. We’ve spent over a year reading this book so let me ask one question: what is the conspiracy’s goal? I simply cannot answer this question because Webster has never provided it. Are they trying to destroy England? Sure, but that’s only in coincidence with other revolutions that they are planning. I’ll say this for Cooper’s book—in the few chapters that he was coherent about the conspiracy, it was clear that he was talking about a UFO assisted world conspiracy. He had about the same soundness with his theory that Webster had, but his conspiracy theory had a clear goal. Webster seems to vacillate between revolution for revolution’s sake and a revolutio...