Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 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...

  In Gary Allen’s “None Dare Call It Conspiracy” he explains that if you ask the average person what Communism is, they’ll give some answer about Russia. If they’re an academic, they’ll probably talk about the differences between Socialism, Marxism, and Communism. None of those, according to him, are correct, because Communism is something else. His view, and that of the John Birch Society as well as the current presidential administration is that COMMUNISM (Allen does all caps for this) is just a word for whatever they don’t like. Usually this is anything that is progressive or liberal. Increase taxes on the ultra-wealthy an extra 1%? COMMUNISM! Make law enforcement accountable for their actions? COMMUNISM! Etc. It’s all very stupid because the word has no meaning. What I didn’t know when I covered Gary Allen’s book was that he blatantly stole this framing from Webster, “ In the same way the word ‘Communism’ has a double meaning.” She goes on to explain that the average person...

  It is a good thing that this book is wrapping up because Webster is all over the place now. Last week I hypothesized that Webster was beginning to end this book when someone handed her an English copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which had just been published in England. She had to work extra hard to write that forgery into her book while at the same time discrediting it because she’s so racist against Germans that it actually overrides her anti-Semitism. Perhaps 1918 was just a different time. An important thing to remember about this time is that racism isn’t just about skin color. That aspect of racism still exists but there is also the racism against ethnic groups as well. When Webster attacks Germans, it’s racist—it’s just not what we are used to. Webster hates anyone that isn’t Anglo, Napoleanic French, or Bakunin specifically. Her book has to do the conspiracy theory move of making us afraid of the imminent future, so she has to look at the most immediate past....

Last week we glossed over the long period where Webster compared selections of the Protocols to selections of whatever she could use to show that the world revolution was being controlled by a single entity. She failed in this, but the point was to never create a case—this far in the book, you are buying her story. Her intended audience is not going to fact check her assertions about the other books. She’s been handed a gift in the form of an English translation of the Protocols which not only justifies her anti-Semitism but also her conspiracy. Because the Protocols are too good of evidence she questions their authenticity. This is a good move, a surprising one for her, but I would give her credit if I didn’t suspect that it was disingenuous. A little background for any new readers. This book was published in 1921. The first English version of the Protocols was published in Britian in 1920. While she’s writing this book, the Protocols are going to hit the shops. It had been widely c...

 After learning some Webster’s absolutely deniable opinions, with two basic facts thrown in, she wants us to begin focusing on who the real Illuminati is, “ who are the modern Illuminati, the authors of the plot?” Can you guess? I’ll give you two attempts only because the first one is going to be “isn’t the modern Illuminati the modern Illuminati? No. To find who the modern Illuminati are, we need only look at the Russian revolution. The revolution that three posts ago she said wasn’t worth covering. She characterizes the Russian revolution as having no motive other than a campaign of ceaseless destruction. This motiveless violent revolution has “ led many people to believe in the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity,” and that, “ to the unprejudiced observer Bolshevism in Russia may well appear to be a wholly Jewish movement.” Anti-Semitism was a rife in England during the interwar period. There may have very well been people who blamed the Russian Revolution ...

We’re hitting the final stretch of this book, and I realize with foreboding that I am going to have to find another one to keep going. I can say, without hyperbole, that I have probably read more of these conspiracy books than any other person. Not that I’ve read more conspiracy books, but that I’ve read more of the books. I’m actually reading them page by page and I doubt that anyone else has really done that. So, self-aggrandizement aside, even Webster knows that it’s time to wrap this thing up in a bow. She asks us to ponder the question that if the last 140 years of world history are not being directed by a single power then, “ how are we to account for the following undeniable facts?” Now, the last time she attempted to go line by line she absolutely flubbed it. To her advantage she hasn’t given us a specific number of undeniable facts so she’s learned from her earlier attempt. Her first is that the “ grievances of the people throughout this period have varied according to t...

  Works like this survive on vibes, and one of the vibes that they have to exploit is fear. Most of that fear is about changing the orthodoxy that the reader regards as “the default.” People hate change, especially Americans. An American will brag about surviving suffering rather than every question why they suffered in the first place. When the Communist/Socialists takeover (in Webster’s view these ideologies are the same), one of the cultural institutions that they target are the religious ones. From the perspective of the revolutionaries the reason that this is a necessary step is because religious institutions are part of the problem. The French revolution targeted the Catholic church because the Catholic church, at the time, was part of the oppression of the French peasantry. They not only blessed the Aristocracy they were inextricable from it. The Russian Orthodox church was the same. The Tsarist government was endorsed by the church and benefitted from it. What Webster lik...

We are treated to some long quotes by Lenin, the good one, the one that didn’t beat his wife and kid. The thing about Lenin is that he represents exactly the type of person that people like Webster hated: he was smart, educated, non-religious, anti-Capitalist, and Jewish (ethincally). He’s also quite the character in history. Lenin is the force of the Bolshevik revolution and an idealist willing to execute his position at nearly any cost. It’s hard to argue against Lenin aside from just disagreeing as well. He’s an idealist and moreso a true believer. So what, if anything is Webster going to do with him? Well, she’s going to just use his speeches to prove her point, what’s her point? That Bolshevism then is not Synidcalism, it is state Socialism, it is Marxism, it is Communism, in a word it is Babouvisme.” She’s arguing against something no one is saying. She quotes a twenty-line position of Lenin from one of his writings and then thinks that she’s breaking new ground by telling us t...

This chapter is titled “The Revolution of 1917;”   to which we assume our intrepid author means the Russian Revolution, the final toppling of the Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the USSR. This is the subject of the chapter, so it’s very odd that she writes the following, “ This is no the place to recount the story of the Russian Revolution, which is still too fresh in the minds of the public to need repeating…” If this is the case then why is the chapter titled this way? I have made the observation in my recounting of this book that no one really reads conspiracy books. They read the first chapter, which is also where the author has spent the most time crafting the book. The only reason to include a chapter titled “The Revolution of 1917” and then dismiss any need to actually write about that revolution is so it would seem that she did. If some hapless debunker asks, “well, what does she cover the Bolshevik Revolution?” the conspiracy believer can say, “Why yes, right here i...

The woozle effect is a method of arguing where you just place the responsibility of a piece of information on some source, then just repeatedly claim that the source said the thing. It doesn’t matter if the source said it or not because most people are not going to check and just assume that it’s true. This is Webster’s favorite conspiracy theory trick. The reader, by this point 2/3 of the way through the book, is just taking it at face value. She claims that the punishment for being an idler or objector to the syndicalist/socialist system is death, but we’ve seen no evidence for that. We have a quote, “ If a man will not work neither shall he eat!” and we are told that this is a rule that must be carried out by a Socialist state. We are given neither the source for this quote or a document which states that it is to be a rule. I’d even take one of her anti-Socialist writers saying it, but it’s just her attempt to imply that this is a thing. The attempt here is to frame Socialism a...

  “ Democracy is the land of plenty dreamt of by unscrupulous financiers ,” Webster quotes Sorel. This is the kind of comment where we must suspect that Webster either does not understand context is ignoring it because her audience won’t care. At this point in our journey, it should be apparent that Webster’s biggest crime is in committing the informal fallacy of cherry picking. She’s looking for out-of-context soundbites that she can then twist. We can see this from her footnotes where in successive citations she jumps from pg. 320 to 321 (ok, good), then to 186, 233, 112, 101, 236, and then 234.   Sorel, Georges Sorel, is being accused of harboring anti-democracy sentiments in his support of Socialism. Sorel thinks democracy is bad because of the corruption so we should assent to whatever it is that she wants us to think his solution is: probably some kind of dictatorship. We could however do a page hop citation for nearly any book to prove any point, this is why cherry pi...

  The problem with conspiracy theories like Webster’s is that the looming danger is always just around the corner. It’s coming, and probably tomorrow; so be prepared but also be afraid. During 2020, conspiracy theorists liked to claim that the Summer of Protests was evidence of the conspiracy. It was Soros funded antifa-BLM designed to disrupt society and cause a total collapse of the government. The thing you have to ignore is that none of the conspiracy theorists predicted it, it was always a post-hoc prediction. Take some vague statement about unrest the theorist made several years ago and then pretend that it links up to that Summer. Webster makes the mistake of attempting an actual prediction. She describes “ the Great Day of Revolution.” She describes cutting the telephone/telegraph wires, smashing stores, looting, burning, and sabotaging the railways. This will prompt police and military to respond with the hope that some of them will join the revolution. Then the capital ...

  The working people of the world are vastly outclassed in conflicts by the powers that be. In US history we can look at the Coal Wars, when the US military was used to protect the interests of coal companies by literally bombing the striking miners with planes. The US diverted military resources fighting World War I to attack its own citizens. Open conflict is inadvisable in these cases. The solution to fighting for the rights of the common person is the general strike. As Webster describes it, this is a tool of the anarchist—well, one of the tools. She claims that Mermeix defines three types of general strike: “ 1) the corporative general strike of the workers, 2) the Parliamentary general strike of the Socialists, and 3) the Revolutionary General strike of the Syndicalist leaders. ” She’s going to define each of them and I assume why they are all the tool of the Illuminati/Jews. For the corporative strike, she seems to be in support, writing that it was the only method that ...

We begin this section with Webster attempting to explain why the population would attach themselves to syndicalism rather than socialism. She writes that the workers were frustrated with their leaders taking trips to Switzerland and sleeping in gilded beds while they died on the barricades in France and Russia. This is a fair question and one of the likely reasons that the Internationale collapsed. This is a problem of any organization, the leaders appear as though they are living in luxury while everyone else grovels. It’s a system that looks especially bad for Socialism as everyone is supposed to be equal. It’s a valid issue to raise as the difference between theory and practice becomes practice. Our problem is in someone like Webster raising this issue. Webster has favored aristocrats like the Tsars of Russia, the aristocrats of the France, and even Napolean III. There is no way she can consistently raise the fact that a Socialist leader once staying in a hotel as a problem for th...