Jezebel Writer Attends ConspiraSea Cruise, Experiences the Full Range of Fringe, from Goofy to Scary

Regular readers will remember that Sean David Morton, the self-professed psychic and accused fraudster, appeared a few times on Ancient Aliens while masquerading as a dual doctorate holder in theology and some bullshit pseudo-psychological subject. You will also likely recall that he appeared on the show two years after being sued by the government for defrauding clients out of millions of dollars by claiming he could psychically predict stock market swings. He was just charged with income tax fraud because he refuses to pay tax on the money he collects from his clients and his other activities. Anyway, if you didn’t have enough evidence that Morton is a terrible human being, Jezebel writer Anna Merlan has some choice bon mots from Morton’s lecture and MC duties during the ConspiraSea conspiracy theory cruise in an exceptionally detailed account of the event. 

Morton began by making a joke encouraging the women on the cruise to make themselves sexually available. “Once we’re in international waters, every woman on the ship gets to make love to whoever she wants,” Morton is quoted as saying, despite there being no U.S. law barring women from choosing their own sexual partners within the United States.
 
Morton went on to apparently endorse 9/11 conspiracy theories, and he made a crude joke about domestic abuse (comparing Deflategate to Ray Rice knocking his fiancée unconscious) followed by another about gay people and oral sex: “What do Brokeback Mountain and Dallas have in common? They both have cowboys who suck!”
 
Later on in the cruise, Morton is quoted as endorsing a conspiracy theory that Pres. Obama is uniquely sympathetic to Muslims, with what the author believes is Morton’s attempt to imitate the ululation often associated with Arabs, probably thinking of the zaghārīt​, even though other cultures use ululation as well: “There are no [vaccine] exemptions anymore. Not even if you’re Jewish. But I think Obama made an exception for Muslims. Ay yi yi!” He then likened vaccination to child rape.
 
Morton also claimed that the bar, in reality a word derived from the dividing bar in a medieval courtroom that separated participants and observers, is really the “British Aristocratic Registry,” and all lawyers therefore work for the Queen of England. (Since David Icke claims she is a Reptilian serpent-person, that would certainly give new meaning the claim that lawyers are snakes!)
 
Jezebel also reports that Morton alleges that the IRS raided one of Morton’s “cats’ bedrooms” in order to seize his marriage license and other items. It must be nice to make so much money from conspiracy theories that multiple cats can each have a bedroom in your mansion!
 
Besides the monstrosity that is Morton, I was struck by the scene that Anna Merlan described when she attended a screening of conspiracy film alleging that Jewish talent agent Ari Emmanuel orchestrated the recent Paris terrorist attacks with the Muslim Qatari government as part of a global depopulation effort. The filmmaker, Shari Kane, accused a journalist of taking photographs of the “wrong” parts of their movie, the parts where they show advertisements for their New Age health supplement business. This led to much shouting and commotion, after which Kane followed Merlan and accused her of being part of a media conspiracy against her, filming the encounter for a future “documentary.” Her partner accused Merlan of being a brainwashed CIA plant. Morton had to step in to prevent Kane from continuing to harass Merlan and other journalists with her paranoid beliefs.
 
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t direct readers to the section where legal fantasist Winston Shrout revealed that he believes he meets with space aliens, fairies, and elves to plot strategy. He said a fairy helped him to move the prime meridian (?) and that the aliens had plugged up a black hole that was impacting international finance.
 
The whole article is well worth a read, and Merlan is undoubtedly correct that the fluorescence of conspiracy theories is traceable in part to the powerlessness many people feel in the face of the complexity of modern life and the impersonal nature of large institutions. But overall, it was just sad, and the detailed description of a boat full of con artists, paranoid true believers, the terrified, and the delusional really drives home the point that so many people live in a completely different mental reality where facts don’t matter and even a vulgar buffoon can be mistaken for a guru as long as he reflects back to the audience their own prejudices and fears and tells them everything can be fixed easily. Oh, wait: That’s Donald Trump.