Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 So, we’ve come to the end of the Cooper book. What we learned is nothing. Cooper’s work is stranger than the previous works we’ve covered ( None Dare Call it Conspiracy and Proofs of a Conspiracy… (both are wordpress links because I didn’t use Substack then)) because Cooper includes work by other authors. In fact, this book is primarily work from other authors with Cooper supplying maybe 30% of the work. This makes the “by William Cooper” a bit misleading. The most generous conception here would be “Edited by William Cooper” since he’s written so little of it. I’ve attempted to make the claim that the NWO conspiracy theorists were more earnest in their belief than the modern-day Deep State conspiracy theorists; they care more about what they let in to their worldview and kept out the real kooks. This book completely contradicts that claim. The difference, I have asserted in the past, was that the 90s era conspiracy theorists had to measure their time. If Cooper is going to writ...

 Conspiracy theorists have a strange relationship with “drugs” as a concept. On the one hand people like Bill Cooper seem to want a very limited government, a very hands-off police, and very few laws that are about the most basic of crimes. If it isn’t hurting anybody then there shouldn’t be any issue with it. On the other hand, they really hate the drugs. There are two reasons for them to hate the drugs: the first is simple racism. Drug crimes typically focus on the poor. The history of the United States’ drug laws is not only classicist but it also overtly racist. Drug laws targeting crack were far more strict than the ones targeting cocaine. The other reason that drugs are a focal point is that they offer proof of the grand conspiracy. Drugs provide an example of a problem that everyone sees, that makes lots of money, but no one seems “willing” to fix. In the conspiracy theorist’s mind, fixing the drug problem is as simple as sending in the military to destroy the cartels like i...

We continue to grind at the appendices, reading one of the people responsible for pushing the idea that FEMA was going to throw us in camps, take away our guns, and let the UN take over the United States (chapters 5, 6). Appendix E is supposed to be about the New World Order but the document on page 459 has nothing to do with it. This is a letter titled “S_T_A_T_E_M_E_N_T” (the letter was likely written on a typewriter, and this was the attempt at underlining). The author of the letter claims that between 1972-74, when Nixon was in trouble, a directive came through that messages from the White House were to be reported to the base commander. That’s it. This is the salient point in the signed letter [it looks like the person’s first name is either David or Daniel E. but I can’t be sure]. The writer refers to an article that he read saying, “ I recall that reason this article was so interesting was that some of us were trying to determine whether we believed that President Nixon would re...

Last week Cooper was droning about the aliens and in between the section we covered he introduced his theory about the Kennedy assassination. Then after a few pages, he went right back into his conspiracy theory about the UFOs. I've been saying this for a while now, but Cooper needed an editor. Keep the Majestic 12 conspiracy in its own thing, and place the tangents somewhere else. Perhaps, he could have devoted a chapter to the Kennedy assassination, when this book comes out Oliver Stone's movie would have been in the cultural Zeitgeist. An entire chapter detailing his own theory might have gotten him coverage on a newsmagazine show.  Kennedy is a weird figure in right-wing extremist circles. They tend to lionize him even though he was their opponent during his presidency. They claimed he was soft on Communism because he had discussions with Khrushchev. One of the John Birch Society's central conspiracy theories was that the civil rights movement was a Soviet Plot to under...

Last week, we covered the three alternatives that JASON suggested to the ruling elites to save the Earth from environmental catastrophe due to overpopulation. The three alternatives were: underground cities (ala Dr. Strangelove), fleeing into space, or blowing a hole in the atmosphere to let the heat out (like in Spaceballs...kind of). I cut the article short because Cooper settles on a strange combination of the two. The third was rejected, not because it's implausible to him but because it's objective. We would know if this had happened. Because open nuclear weapons testing had been banned and Starfish Prime had already been detonated which did not blast a hole in the atmosphere--Cooper cannot pretend that this is an actual solution.  I actually cut the article short because his combination of the two solutions was to accept that a plague was used to get the population down to manageable numbers. Cooper writes, " It was decided BY THE ELITE that since the population must...

I know that last week I said I was going to skip the very long introduction, though I did also say that there were some bits that needed to be explained...so we're going to cover the entire 40-page introduction in this post. There are some points that need to be covered as I think it gives us some insight into the author himself. One of my academic interests in this subject is how people got into it. What motivates a person to wake up one day and accept the conspiracy world as true. With Robison and Allen before him; the motivating factor seems to be a loss of control over the world. Not personal control but the shifting of the status quo for which they enjoyed an elevated position. In both works, the authors try their best to explain how it is that the world had changed around them and both blame it on nefarious controllers. So, with Cooper, it's going to be more interesting (hopefully).  The first 20 pages are a family history which is just biographical. It's not that int...

Note: Classes have started so my posts will get a but more infrequent. The fallacy of "suppressing the evidence" is about as straightforward as its name suggests. The conspiracist leaves out the information that would easily disprove what they are advocating. This is similar to cherry picking wherein the individual only picks information that supports their case. The two are related, and in some cases it would be very difficult to see the difference. Like in our past discussions, context is key. Quote mining is an example of cherry picking. I can find, in the voluminous writings of Thomas Jefferson, lines that would seem to support a stark religiosity as long. However, I'm not suppressing the evidence until I begin hiding the relevant details. There is a fine line to walk though, a person is not suppressing the evidence if they fail to address every possible objection to their theory. What matters is when they are ignoring or hiding facts that are obviously in contrad...