Smoking-Bun

Are most conspiracy theorists loonies?

It seems normal to think so. That’s why we don’t have newspapers full of the heartfelt opinions of holocaust deniers and people who think the World elite are alien lizards. Instead we choose to read more rational opinions about MMR, weapons of mass destruction and revolutionary underpants embedded with bio-crystals that make cellulite vanish!

I don’t think journalists in the media have this quite right – they may think that conspiracy theories are irrational and plain wrong, but somehow they shrink from their duty to publicly reflect this. If you hold a heartfelt belief, and you find that the rest of the world seems to ignore it, you wonder why it is being ignored. On internet sites conspiracy theories are flourishing, and the ‘conspiracy of silence’ in the mainstream media only encourages them that they are right.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that conspiracy theories are unconvincing. If you watch the right video on the internet, or read the right article, you can be convinced of virtually anything. Read the heartfelt testimony of those who say they felt explosions in the twin towers before the planes ever hit, or the woman who swears she was sexually abused as a child by world leaders. You have to deny these people’s very essence to dispute them. Read the testimonies of Jesus’s disciples and tell me that you deny their essential belief – it’s not always easy.

It has happened with climate change. As the consensus has grown that climate change is man-made, the minority who disagree have found themselves given less and less of a platform in the media, and rather than just accept that more scientists believe one explanation over another, the idea that there is a conspiracy at work has grown. It’s a siege mentality. Whatever you believe in, you would like to see it given more column inches. It is this factor, over and above any of the scientific evidence, that has created this political divide.

As the 9/11 conspiracies grew virally on the internet, they found themselves left virtually unchallenged in the media. Soon a small army of internet investigators were uncovering thousands of anomalies in the 9/11 events that the media never bothered to address on their behalf. Left to their own devices, and with no legitimate form of redress, they have flourished. The force of the campaign promoting the ‘inside job’ theories of 9/11 has simply been left unchecked for far too long, creating a mountain of mistaken beliefs that it will take decades or even centuries to undo.

The Kennedy assassination conspiracies are a long-term example of this – the controversy around this event will never ever die. Millions of enthusiastic man-hours have been sunk into this conspiracy theory. Oliver Stone made a movie about it. It is so embedded in popular culture that you can be almost guaranteed that one of your friends will believe that Lee Harvey Oswald could never have killed Kennedy. And I think now that the Princess Diana theories will exist as long as time itself.

How did it come to this?

I think part of this comes down to the mistaken belief that conspiracy theorists are loonies. That they are slightly loopy eccentrics who, while fairly harmless, are not really to be engaged – leave them to their imaginary worlds. The idea that if you talk about them, it only encourages them and gives them unwelcome publicity.

In my dealings with conspiracy theorists, I have found some people I would describe as loonies. But by far the majority are people who simply have got the issues muddled in their heads, and have been left to their own devices to interpret them. Most are honest and some spend a lot of time on their campaigning activities, man-hours that could have been spent on something more progressive and less… wrong!

I blame the media as an entity. Or the establishment in general. For always peddling the middle line, and ignoring the polarised ends of every issue. For dismissing certain researchers as crackpots but refusing to tackle the actual content of their debate. For thinking that if you ignore something it will just go away – that doesn’t work.

There will always be a level of organised madness in life – I see it as much in the establishment as I do in the outliers who believe in lizards, or so-called religious cults who believe in the second coming of Elvis, or those who peddle what is essentially water as a progressive alternative medicine. Instead the establishment tell us that Jade Goody is some sort of saint, that the values of capitalist society are so superior to the alternatives, that the soap opera of political skullduggery is more important than the issues they are employed to address.

Please point out to me who the loonies are, because I could never work it out.