Category: Conspiracies

Weekend Omnibus: Younger Dryas Volcano, Elon Musk's Ancient Astronaut Tweet, Steve Quayle's Plagiarism, and More!

8/1/2020

Yesterday was an extraordinary day for news of interest to my readers. Let’s take a brief survey of just some of the things that happened.

I’ll put the science first. A new study in Science Advances concludes that the global cooling triggered during the Younger Dryas was not the work of a comet or meteor but was instead brought on by volcanic activity. From the press release announcing the study late yesterday:

19 Comments

Review of Forbidden History S06E08: “The Vatican’s Book of Secrets”

5/26/2020

35 Comments

The episode guide I consulted may have said that there were only seven episodes in this season of Forbidden History, but it turns out that more new episodes are still airing. So we’re stuck with it. As the show ages, it struggles to find new content, much like its current model, Ancient Aliens. Thus, the series has done multiple episodes on the Holy Grail, Hitler, etc. This episode, “The Vatican’s Book of Secrets,” is something of a sequel to season 4’s “The Secrets of the Vatican Archives,” moving from ancient conspiracies to more modern ones, albeit with more than a little overlap. Truth be told, none of this is very different from the anti-Catholic conspiracy theories that have swirled around the Roman church since the Protestant Reformation. Paranoid anti-papists think the Catholics are possessed of sinister secrets, other than the child molestation.

35 Comments

Journalist Describes Father's Path from "Ancient Aliens" to Q-Anon Obsession

5/23/2020

55 Comments

On the Narratively website, California college student and journalist Reed Ryley Grable provided a poignant and thought account of his father’s gradual slide into Q-Anon conspiracy madness. Grable describes his father’s growing paranoia and social isolation, and he talks eloquently about how his father’s strident conspiracy theory advocacy has alienated him from his family and his friends. While I am not particularly interested in Q-Anon conspiracies, I was neither shocked nor surprised to read Grable’s account of how Ancient Aliens served as a gateway drug leading his father from a nebulous interest in the mysterious and the bizarre to a raving world of online conspiracies.

55 Comments

Q-Anon, David Wilcock, and the Rise of a New Right-Wing Populist Religion

5/16/2020

75 Comments

This week, Vice and The Atlantic published two important articles outlining the growing religious fervor behind Q-Anon conspiracy theories. They make interesting comparison reading. In The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance traces the origins of the Q-Anon conspiracy theory and explains why faith in the unreason behind its patently false claims has the makings of an incipient religion. Leading figures in the Q movement openly declare that the conspiracy has divine sanction. One of the Q movement’s biggest names, David Hayes (a.k.a. PrayingMedic on Q forums), alleges that God has personally called him to Q-Anon. the Q-Anon conspiracy imagines an apocalyptic End Times when the blood of liberals will run in the streets and Donald Trump will usher in a new Great Awakening as the angels sing choruses of Kid Rock songs and clouds of sanctifying soot rain from a million coal-burning factories.

75 Comments

Researcher Discusses How the Media Weaponize Conspiracy Theories and Fake History

5/5/2020

19 Comments

Last week I receive a request from someone who is consulting on a documentary to take a meeting with a producer who works with Netflix about adapting one of my books into a documentary or potential documentary series. Normally, I don’t let this sort of thing get very far because it is always a huge waste of time, but since I have been stuck in quarantine, I figured it would serve as a bit of a distraction. So, we set up the meeting, and before the appointed day, I suggested that the producer should probably be aware that my work is not pro-alien. Regular readers of this blog can guess the rest. There was no meeting at the appointed hour. It wasn’t unexpected, but even so, it is disconcerting.

19 Comments

David Wilcock Says Democrats Should Love Baphomet: "He's a Trans. He Has Boobs."

4/21/2020

34 Comments

Do you remember David Wilcock, the erstwhile ancient astronaut theorist from Ancient Aliens and Gaia-TV, who unceremoniously parted ways with both? Wilcock’s right-wing patter turned out to be too extreme for Ancient Aliens, which prefers a softer rightist message, as with Saturday’s praise of Republicans for their supposed special access to extraterrestrial truths. Well, during a live chat in which Wilcock asked his followers to give him cash money to hear him rant—up to $100 a pop—Wilcock showed once again why he is the world’s worst cam-boy.

34 Comments

The Year in Review: 2019 in Pseudohistory, Space Aliens, and Conspiracy Theories

12/28/2019

81 Comments

Perhaps more than any year in recent memory, 2019 was the year in which fringe history stopped being fringe and went completely mainstream. This year, we saw pseudohistory and conspiracy theories top the literary bestseller lists, multiply across cable channels like mushrooms on a rotten log, and attract record crowds to traveling carnivals masquerading as pseudohistory “fan” conventions. It perfectly captures the tenor of the times for the post-truth era that the very notions of fact and fiction ceased to have meaning. This was a long, hard year, both for the world and also for me personally. After dealing with family health problems, buying and selling a house (and still not being able to close on selling the old one until early 2020, nearly half a year after the sale), writing two books, and a knot of lawyers for many different developments, I am ready for this unpleasant year to end. Let’s look back in anger:

81 Comments

FBI Designates Belief in Conspiracy Theories as a Motivator for Domestic Terror

8/2/2019

22 Comments

The FBI has officially designated belief in conspiracy theories as a domestic terror threat, according to a previously unreported document discovered and publicized by Yahoo! News this week. The FBI intelligence bulletin was published in May and specifically identifies fringe conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon as potential terror threats for the first time in the Bureau’s history. “The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document states. The document lists conspiracy theories regularly featured on cable television and social media, such as the New World Order and HAARP mind control beams, as potential threats.

22 Comments

David Wilcock Claims YouTube Is Part of an Anti-Trump, Population-Reduction Plot

7/2/2019

33 Comments

David Wilcock hasn’t been having a very good couple of years. Only a few years ago, he was the third most prominent ancient astronaut theorist on Ancient Aliens, behind Giorgio Tsoukalos and David Childress, and he was one of the biggest stars of the Gaia TV streaming service, which featured hundreds of hours of programming from him. He also had a lucrative line of books and DVDs and a speaking tour. But then Wilcock made the critical error of turning subtext into text. With the exception of Tsoukalos, nearly all of the Ancient Aliens crew and their colleagues are right-wingers, but they manage to keep their conservative ranting mostly confined to short asides in YouTube videos and tweets. Wilcock, on the other hand, has been outspoken in his embrace of the most extreme pro-Trump conspiracy theories, including both Pizzagate and Q-Anon, and he has proudly declared himself a recipient of Russian propaganda, which he repeats uncritically. Between this and his contentious departure from Gaia, even the brain trust behind Ancient Aliens finally cut ties with Wilcock, who has not appeared on the show since Wilcock refused to participate in their episode interviewing John Podesta, whom Wilcock considers part of an anti-Trump, child-raping alien death cult.

33 Comments

Study: Flat Earthers Believe Because of YouTube Conspiracy Videos

2/20/2019

33 Comments

Due to prior commitments this week, some of my blog posts are going to be a bit on the short side. Today I want to discuss a recent presentation discussing the results of interviews with Flat Earth believers at two conferences in 2017 and 2018. Speaking Sunday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, researchers who spoke with more thirty attendees placed the blame squarely on YouTube for creating a community of Flat Earth believers and providing the means for Flat Earth leaders to propagandize a credulous audience. An article in the Guardian summarized their findings:

33 Comments

<<Previous

Forward>>

Weekend Omnibus: Younger Dryas Volcano, Elon Musk's Ancient Astronaut Tweet, Steve Quayle's Plagiarism, and More!

Review of Forbidden History S06E08: “The Vatican’s Book of Secrets”

Journalist Describes Father's Path from "Ancient Aliens" to Q-Anon Obsession

Q-Anon, David Wilcock, and the Rise of a New Right-Wing Populist Religion

Researcher Discusses How the Media Weaponize Conspiracy Theories and Fake History

David Wilcock Says Democrats Should Love Baphomet: "He's a Trans. He Has Boobs."

The Year in Review: 2019 in Pseudohistory, Space Aliens, and Conspiracy Theories

FBI Designates Belief in Conspiracy Theories as a Motivator for Domestic Terror

David Wilcock Claims YouTube Is Part of an Anti-Trump, Population-Reduction Plot

Study: Flat Earthers Believe Because of YouTube Conspiracy Videos

Author

Newsletters

Categories

Terms & Conditions

Archives