Last night I wound up in a several hour long distance phone
conversation with an old high school buddy. I have not seen him in many years,
and though we stay in touch, I had not spoken with him in many months. The conversation began innocently, discussing
the current status of old friends and our own social and economic
situations. As the subject turned to
politics, I began to realize that my old friend had embraced some radical
ideas.
He is a very intelligent man, and has always been
fairly moderate politically in his beliefs. I spent
most of the conversation trying to ferret out how he came to his viewpoints,
what his sources for his ideas were, and most important I think: The reason he,
or anyone of similar character, is embracing such stuff.
The exploration of this topic began as my friend described
the economic situation of the Northern California
town where he and I grew up and went to school.
His description was disheartening: businesses shuttered, unemployment
rampant, crime (including home invasions) way up. He talked about the streets being unsafe,
with street gangs roaming everywhere.
All this social and economic decay in a town I recall primarily as a
middle class bedroom community. He
talked about being personally trapped in his own seemingly hopeless economic
circumstances. He described his
situation as being in a cage.
It was then he made a comment that made my jaw drop. I had asked him about his plans for the
future and what he was going to do to move forward. His reply was “It doesn’t matter. The world banking system and the government
are all going to collapse in a few months anyway and I have enough guns and
ammo to hold the lawless hoards off for a while”. He didn’t say this sarcastically or
metaphorically. He really meant it
My friend has always been a gun enthusiast. I recall many years ago going out in the
country with him on numerous occasions to do target shooting. This interest, along with his internet skills
(which are substantial), had led him eventually onto blogs posted by fringe
groups and militias, many of which actively desire the downfall of the US government
and the world economic system. Some of
these groups are purely anarchist in nature, while others have xenophobic and
racist overtones. To be clear: I do not believe my friend (who like me is
Caucasian) has a racist bone in his body.
He does however have a lot of frustration with non-English speaking
Hispanics that now make up a considerable portion of the population of his
hometown.
These fringe websites and blogs told him something that he
really wanted to hear. They told him
that his circumstances are in no way his own fault. They told him that his situation is the
product of a conspiracy by rich people, banks, and the government aimed at
repressing him and those like him. They
gave him someone to blame other than himself.
We went through a number of the conspiracy theories that are
current with these groups, all of which I am satisfied I was able to
debunk. Most importantly, I was able to
get my friend to question the efficacy of these theories. Questioning facts and sources of everything
reported in the media or online is essential to exposing lies, spin, and
hypocrisy. Radicalism thrives when you
unquestioningly believe things that affirm your own emotional attachment to a
cause or issue. To keep centered on any subject, you must always doubt, you must always
be able to ask yourself: “is it possible that what I believe is wrong?”
At this point, I should articulate my viewpoint on
conspiracy theories. They usually appeal
to an emotional need to believe a particular viewpoint and are seldom backed by
thoroughly convincing data, thus the term “theories”. I don’t find evidence for bigfoot or alien
autopsies very compelling. I don’t think
the government has crashed flying sauces stored at Area 51 or Wright-Patterson
AFB. I think John Kennedy was most
likely shot by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone and Robert Kennedy was most
likely shot by Sirhan Sirhan acting alone.
My reasoning for all this is uncomplicated. I find the argument known as Occam’s Razor to
be compelling: When offered competing
hypotheses, by far the most likely is the one which makes the fewest
assumptions. All the conspiracy theories
I just mentioned do have well known alternative explanations, but when unbiased
light is shined brightly on the known facts, the less convoluted explanations
seem far more plausible.
My conversation with my old friend covered a wide range of
conspiracies. The first was birtherism,
the belief that President Barack Obama is somehow not an American. My friend was familiar with the arguments of Arizona sheriff Joe
Arpaio, and his contention that the president’s birth certificate is a
forgery. I pointed out that his recent
contentions have been thoroughly refuted by the state of Hawaii
and even Arizona
governor Jan Brewer, who is well known for her dislike of the president. Her position was reported in the March 6,
2012 edition of the Phoenix
area newspaper, the East Valley Tribune.
The conversation went further into the weeds from
there. My friend stated that the United States
was made a corporation by the “Act of 1871” which made it a wholly owned
subsidiary of the Bank of England and the Rothschild family. While I did find articles about this on some
conspiracy websites, finding the source document itself was more of a
challenge. Eventually I found that this
theory was based on an otherwise non-descript law passed that year that
detailed somewhat how the process the US government can use to collect
debts should work. They were making an amazing
stretch of logic to construe that this somehow made the US government
beholden to the huge banking interests of the time. It reminded me of an episode of the animated
show Southpark, where underwear gnomes were stealing underwear from dryers to
somehow make a profit. The process to
achieve the end result was not comprehendible to anyone except these gnomes.
My friend then brought up a story about multi-billionaire
George Soros selling off ALL of his stock to buy gold so he could weather the
coming economic collapse. This is proof
he said of this eminent catastrophe.
Again the sources were a variety of militia and conspiracy sites, and
can be easily googled. My research found
that Earlier this year Soros had spoken about gold in a negative light, stating
at the time that gold was artificially high.
Indeed his statement alone may have caused gold prices to stabilize or
even go down slightly. More recently, he
sold $130 million in stock and bought gold with it. Not his entire $20 billion portfolio, mind
you, but 1/150th of it. This
is a substantial sum, but not unprecedented.
Simply buying gold negated the effect of his previous statement and the
purchase caused the price of gold to rise. There is no data on whether he held this
position or sold it. He could have sold
all that gold in hours or days. He would
have made $1.3 million on that sale for every 1% increase in the price of gold
his actions caused. I find this profit
motive far more compelling then the conspiracy claim that he was preparing for
some bizarre coming “economic Armageddon”.
The conversation later turned to a lawsuit filed by a man
named Neil Keenan. The lawsuit itself
seems to be real, but I found myself questioning the factual basis for it. The conspiracy consists of the idea that all
the world's gold is somehow actually controlled by the family of the former
dictator of Indonesia ,
Suharto, and that he was a just a controlling entity for the actual owner, a
shadowy group from China
known as the “Dragon Family”. The gold
was stolen by European banks and the US Federal Reserve somehow through shadowy
dealings with the Vatican Illuminati (isn't "Vatican" and "Illuminati" contradictory terms?). Is
your BS filter going off? I know mine
was, but somehow my intelligent friend was buying all this. He wants these “government/federal
reserve/banker /rich people/ bastards” to pay for their sins. He belived that this suit would bring about
the downfall of the entire banking system and somehow usher in a new “golden
age” by doing so. He wants this so badly
that he was willing to believe even this convoluted tale.
The Neil Keenan suit as best as I can tell is real. It’s the basis of reality for its facts that
I question. For transparency sake here
is a conspiracy site source: http://www.fourwinds10.net/siterun_data/government/judicial_and_courts/news.php?q=1336095731
Here is a more detailed and better written explanation. I can’t speak for the editorial bent of this
site either way, though I strongly suspect a “conspiracy sympathetic”
bent: http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/12/05/41930.htm
That website link above is dated from December of 2011, so I
sought more updated info on the lawsuit and found this:
This article, besides stating the suit had been withdrawn,
extensively discusses the work of one Benjamin Fulford in substantiating the
suit’s claims. I wanted to therefore
know who Fulford is, and quickly found his bio on Wikipedia:
This Wikipedia article states in part that “After the 2011 TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami, Fulford claimed on
Japanese television that "[t]he American government in cooperation with
[the] Federal Reserve, the Rockefellers, and other powerful groups, they are
planning the eruption of Mt. Fuji Volcano”.
OK. I’m done. We are into the tin foil hat country of alien
abductions and Illuminati. I can’t
accept anything this guy says with a straight face, and no intelligent well
grounded person should. If this is the
best quality of support Neil Keenan can get for this convoluted and withdrawn
lawsuit, I must allow this to be the final straw. He too is most likely in
the tin foil hat business.
My point in giving this stuff
attention is that there are a great number of disaffected Americans who want a
scapegoat for their issues. They aren’t
taught to be skeptical and to question sources.
If they are told something that gives them comfort, they believe it with
all their hearts. There is a lot of
anger out there, and these conspiracy folks are working hard to tap into that
anger through convoluted stories that seem to explain how the powers of the
world are screwing the little guy. I
don’t have an answer for how to combat this.
My best suggestion is that the mainstream media outlets like Fox, CNN
and MSNBC should discuss the most popular crackpot theories on a regular basis,
using the time to explain in detail why these things are just not true. they need to expose who is
originating this stuff, and explain exactly what motivates them to spread this venom.
