CONSPIRACY THEORIES

 

Did you know—

The “Illuminati” is a group seeking to establish a New World Order, in which they will control everything. It says so on the back of the American dollar bill. Novus Ordo Secolorum.

If the Illuminati don’t gain control of the world, the Jews will. You can read about it in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written early in the 20^th century.

When the Jews aren’t trying to seize control of the world, they are up to other kinds of mischief. They are responsible for the promotion of Communism. After all, Karl Marx was a Jew. George Soros, who was 14 at the end of World War 11, was a Nazi collaborator. Whenever there is a protest in the streets, Soros is handing out $100 bills to the protestors. He promotes Antifa. Such luminaries as Victor Orbon, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Bill O’Reilly, and Alex Jones have attested to this last statement. Incidentally, the holocaust is a hoax, designed to promote Jewish interests.

If the Jews and the Illuminati don’t seize control of the world, the Catholics might try. You can read about it on the Berean Beacon, written in 2000.

Look out for black helicopters. They may be carrying UN forces seeking to control the U.S.

Water condensation trails (contrails) from aircraft contain chemical and biologic agents under a secret government program.

The assassination of Jack Kennedy was a conspiracy by the CIA, the Mafia, LBJ, Fidel Castro, or the KGB. The federal government concealed crucial information to cover up the conspiracy.

Global Warming is another hoax invented for ideological and financial reasons. Donald Trump and Sen. James Inhofe promoted this explanation for global warming stories.

The Deepwater oil rig accident in 2010 was caused by sabotage by environmentalists. Or maybe it was just a Russian submarine, according to Rush Limbaugh.

The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School was another hoax, aimed to promoted gun control. However according to former KKK Grand Master David Duke, maybe the Zionists were responsible. Alex Jones suggested it might have been staged with actors. Rush Limbaugh noted that it might be the Mayan Calendar that caused Adam Lanza to make the attack.

Autism is caused by vaccinations. This was reported by a British doctor who published an article about it in Lancet. Later the article was denounced by Lancet, and the doctor lost his license to practice medicine.

QAnon promotes several theories: Civil servants (the Deep State) is in a plot to take control of the government away from elected officials. Many prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, are Satan worshiping pedophiles. She was said to be connected to a child pornography ring in a Washington, DC, restaurant in 2016. In recent month a number of Republicans have come out supporting the QAnon theories. Marjory Taylor Greene is one of these. She recently won a primary in Georgia and will probably be elected to Congress.

Televangelist John Hagee called COVID-19 a dress rehearsal for the New World Order. Some have called it a Jewish plot to force vaccinations and sterilization. Or perhaps its was manufactured by the Rockefellers and Bill Gates with the goal mass of vaccinations to reduce human population. Gates, whose foundations donated millions to vaccine research, may have wanted to use the vaccine to plant microchips in people’s bodies. That would allow him to monitor their movement.

It is difficult to understand how any otherwise intelligent person can fall for these outlandish theories, but a lot of people do. In later posts we will look at how people come to believe these things, the psychological difference between believers and skeptics, and how a reader can test the validity of theories like these.

 

 

TRUTH

According to the Washington Post, after Donald Trump had been in office for three and a half years, he had told 20,000 lies or misleading statements. Twenty thousand! The President of the United States!

It is hard to believe. It would have been unbelievable before Trump. Never before have we had a President so unfit for office. He is unfit morally, intellectually, psychologically, and temperamentally. He has created irreparable damage to the United States in many ways, much of it through his prevarications. He has destroyed the credibility of his office and of the United States itself. Promises made in the name of the United States under previous administrations have meant nothing to him. The message he has created: The United States is not good for its word.

His misinformation about the Covid 19 virus has caused the death of tens of thousands of Americans. In his eagerness to reopen institutions that had had been closed to limit people’s exposure to the virus, he encouraged many states, mostly under Republican governors, to reopen prematurely, causing death rates from the virus to shoot up. He has ignored advice from experts, from scientists. He has minimized the effects of Covid 19, calling it little more than a cold. He has said it will be gone in little time. He has called it a hoax. 

While Donald Trump has been the Great Prevaricator of our times, he is not alone in spreading misinformation. Alex Jones spread the message that the shooting of twenty school children in Sandy Hook, CT, was a hoax. Can you imagine how the parents must feel? To lose a child in that terrible event and then have an unprincipled person like Jones tell people that it was a hoax?

Jones also promoted the false story that Hillary Clinton was involved a child porn ring located in a pizza restaurant in Washington. One man was so convinced on the truth of that story that he went to the restaurant armed with a rifle, determined to free the children from the basement where they were held. There was no basement in the restaurant. Or any children.

QAnon is another group that promotes false conspiracy stories and accuses prominent people of child pornography. We now have a woman from Georgia, Marjorie Greene, who espouses the QAnon message. She will probably be elected to Congress in November. Anyone who believes Fox News and personalities like Rush Limbaugh does so at their peril. Misinformation is spread freely through the social networks, and gullible people believe these propagators of falsehood. Some people believe that social networks are reliable sources of news.

There have always been liars of course. The difference is that today liars can spread their poison on the internet, and gullible people are taken in by the falsehoods. Then they spread the false stories through the social media. It is difficult sometimes to know what to believe. 

The purpose of free education is to enable people to make wise choices in electing candidates to public office. If people are fed disinformation, they will elect candidates like Donald Trump. Clearly something must be done to limit the dissemination of lies about public events. We cannot afford the election of another candidate as woefully unfit for office as Donald Trump.

Something must be done. We can’t rely on the government to do it. An administration like the present one cannot be allowed to declare what is fake news and what is not. The social media cannot be trusted to do it. Mark Zuckerberg refused to remove Holocaust denial statements from Face Book, saying it was a matter of opinion. Of course it is not a matter of opinion. The Holocaust was a fact. To deny that it existed is a lie.

The answer is in education. Teaching people to think and to evaluate information is as important as the three Rs. Two professors at the University of Washington have a class that does just that. The name of the class is Calling Bullshit https://www.callingbullshit.org/index.html . The course teaches students how to evaluate data and check sources. Even though this is a college course, it has been taught on the secondary level as well.

As the course description says, the world is awash in bullshit. People are posting misinformation online about the coronavirus. They are denying climate change. They are electing people like Marjorie Greene and Donald Trump. We must educate everyone on how to detect bullshit.