Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

  Note for new readers: page numbers are based on the PDF of the book found at the internet archive. “ One might see in these events a quickening of the conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, God and Satan.” The events he lists are the civil rights movement, the Watts Riot, a massive power blackout in the Northeast US and Southeast Canada (it only lasted 13 hours), and the Pope visited the US for the first time. He phrases the Watts Riots as a white guy in the 1960s, so I’m actually prepared to let that one go—as he’s probably only getting the official story and not the LAPD doing LAPD things. Aside from that, there’s no good versus evil battles here. He calls 1965 the downward pivot in world history and he’s not talking about music. He sees a blossoming world of drug use which to him says, “ Evil seemed to be afoot on Planet Earth.” This book is charting a clear path: alcohol à marijuana à “drugs” à Satanism. The point of the book is to illustrate that if lit...

I will begin by confessing that I’ve never been a drug user. I drink alcoholic beverages; I used to smoke cigarettes/vape; but the closest experience I have to drug use was getting contact high at a party. I confess this because I don’t have the personal knowledge of what it’s like to be on “drugs” but I also have a good idea that Warnke doesn’t either. This entire next section reads like someone trying to convince us way too hard that he was on drugs. The biggest clue is that I have plenty of alcohol experience and Warnke’s description of drinking doesn’t make sense. He knows that people who drink too much vomit, so in order to convince us that he was totally drunk all the time, we left off with him leaving class to go throw up. What Warnke doesn’t understand is that if you’re so drunk that you feel the need to throw up all the time, you also aren’t going to be able to do many other things—like walk around, attend classes, or convince someone that you aren’t drunk. I know that somet...

  We’re in California and Mike Warnke is a bit bored. Not actually bored because he’s going to parties, clubs, bars, cafés, and hooking up with either one girl or many girls. He, however, claims to be bored because he needs a reason to claim that he began drinking. I don’t know what the word is, but Warnke is “regret bragging.” This is when someone acts regretful about their past behavior but also touts how good they were at it. He drank so much and hooked up with so many girls he knew was wrong, but he was just so awesome at it. Last post he was going back to visit his relatives back in the Midwest. If you’re thinking that he’s going to have a confrontation with his Protestant aunts, you are thinking just like I did, and you would be wrong. His trip back is covered in a sentence where he notices that his life in California was just so much better. Mike, however, can’t just enjoy his life. He’s got to be a gadfly to the Catholic religion teachers that he was so enamored with tw...

  Writing a long narrative is difficult. You have to keep track of many different things, especially when you’re dealing with internal thoughts. I keep a small B5 sized notebook for important notes when I’m writing. It would have served Warnke to do something like this too because chapter 2 has a few contradictions that simple note taking would have resolved. “California isn’t a state, it’s an experience.” I think Governor Schwarzenegger used this as a slogan, which makes me think that Warnke didn’t come up with it. Warnke has left the Midwest and is now living in (or near) San Bernadino California with the Papists. The first few pages he’s describing the San Bernadino valley and it’s not a bad job of laying out the environment. I might be overly picky here but I think that this belonged in the chapter where he moved to California. I get that he’s setting the stage for the California bit, it seems like he realized he forgot like a a person telling a joke and then going back “t...

  “ 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...

 We’re finally at the end of this book. Let’s see how she wraps it up. Last week we were treated to her rather late introduction to Christianity as being the savior of, uh, human civilization. She claims that only Christianity can save us, but throughout this whole book I haven’t been able to pin down what Christianity has power over. She wants us to believe that this (whatever “this” means) is a fight between good and evil, and to get there we have to jump through some special pleading hoops, “ The words of Joseph de Maistre who, like Barruel, regarded the French Revolution merely as the first stage in the campaign, must be taken as the battle-cry of the White Army today: ‘the French Revolution is Satanic in its principle and can be only really killed, exterminated, and finished by the contrary principle. ” Right after quote she puts the French original in parenthesis, which is not something she’s consistently done throughout this book. Once in a great while, we got the origin...

  The biggest hurdle atheist and secular groups face is establishing the kind of community that religions have because of their history. Everyone gathers at the place of worship because that’s what people have always done, whether the individuals gathering are really into it or not. It’s just the default practice and the non-religious organizations have to find a way to crack that. Webster begins this section with an attack on Weishaupt’s alleged claim that the Illuminati needed to appeal to those with a “ hankering for religion.” This is precisely the problem, but that problem is largely addressed by the actual Illuminati when they adopted some of the practices of the Masons. Webster is afraid that the people are going to abandon their religion for Socialism. She cites an unnamed “dignitary” of the Church of England who claimed that Jesus would be a Bolshevik had he returned to 1920s England. If this person said it, I get what they mean. There is a problem that this entire p...

  I wonder if you could have a conservative conspiracy theorist that is actually pro-women’s rights. I’ve never run across one. All conspiracy theorists that I have read, have viewed any progress on women’s rights as being part of the conspiracy. Webster, a woman, is no different. The Illuminati, we must remember, was about as progressive on women’s issues as one could get in 1776. They attempted to educate women and include them in their organization. They would not be on par with the male members but for a club of this kind to include women at all is a positive step, of course Webster is going to have a problem with this. Our selection this week begins with her attack on “Feminism.” This book is going to be published in 1921, which means that Webster was working on it for at least a year. Keep this in mind because it was not until 1918 that women were given the right to vote in the UK—provided that they were over the age of 30 and owned property through marriage. This, as a s...

  Towards the end of the Robison book that is the origin story for this conspiracy theory, Robison began complaining about a German reading society. For Robison the Illuminati thing had run its course and it was difficult for him to pretend that that an organization that lasted just over a decade was secretly in charge. He sought a new enemy, someone was running continental Masonry, and he jumped from place to place and target to target. The German Reading Societies were his final target. These societies were going to do two things: the first began publishing as many books as cheaply as possible. The second was that they were going to establish a system within the German speaking states so that a person in Berlin could request a book from a library in Bavaria and have it delivered to them. This was a problem, but Robison never explains why this is an issue. Webster tells us what the problem is: they’ll be reading unapproved books, “ Not only have the moden Illuminati succeeded in...

 We are beginning to wrap this book up with our final chapter “Conclusion.” I really want to be petty about the title, but I won’t be. Conclusions in books are supposed to be recap, but conclusions in conspiracy theory books are usually not. Usually, they do a slight bit of recapping and then infodump. We also have a problem of time. This book is a little over a century old and some conventions in historical writing may have changed. She begins by telling us that that many “things that are happening today which appear at first inexplicable become clear as daylight; for not only do the six points of Weishaupt form the exact programme of the revolutionary party in England, but it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that every device now employed by it can be traced back to the code of the Illuminati.” What a modern book would do is just drop a quick footnote as to where the “six points of Weishaupt” were discussed. It should read “Six points of Weishaupt (ch. 2).” I mention this...