Con-spiracies

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“Union Jackboot” (North American Union)

NAUFLAG

In the late 1990s, Michael Moore previewed an upcoming episode of The Awful Truth by announcing he would be helping aliens illegally enter the United States. This teaser included a video of him ushering people across the border under cover of darkness. During the episode, the full truth was revealed, as viewers came to learn Moore was assisting with an invasion of Canadians.  

Moore was pointing out the hypocrisy of persons having far less of a problem with that than with helping aliens cross the southern border. However, there is a difference between racial bigotry and xenophobia. While they often go together, and many persons exhibit both, there are subtleties that distinguish them.

I saw an interview with a racist who admitted he would have no trouble with immigrants, legal or otherwise, coming from Sweden. It was the Latinos he had an issue with, and he freely admitted it was the amount of melanin in their skin that he took issue with.

By contrast, let’s consider the Birthers. Certainly, it is no coincidence that the movement arose once a man with dark skin ascended to the presidency. When someone sees their world being upended in ways they find discomforting, they look to reassert control and seek revenge on those responsible. But even in the wacky Birther world, there was a difference between the hard-core adherents and the less strident. For the latter, the theory was primarily a way of coping with election results they were unable to handle. Rather than asking, “Where did we go wrong, why did we fail,” it was more reassuring to insist, “The other side cheated.”

But the hardcore Birthers, while just as wrong and also spurred in part by racial bigotry, were driven more by xenophobia. These types also objected to John McCain’s presidential bid because he was born in the Canal Zone. Eight years later, they created memes in which Ted Cruz was a puppet of either Canada or Cuba. Even birth in the United States was insufficient, as venom was also flung at Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, and even the lilywhite Rick Santorum, all for daring to have foreign parents.

For these folks, a Caucasian Christian Conservative candidate would be opposed if he moved the United States from London when he was three days old. Again, I’m not denying racial animus on the part of these people. They would likely not be OK with their daughter showing up with a black man (or a woman of any color, for that matter). Still, their overriding bigotry is xenophobia, and they are the types who endorse the idea that U.S. sovereignty is about to be sacrificed to a North American Union.

Jerome Corsi, who championed the idea before giving his considerable conspiracy energies to the Birther movement, described the NAU as a globalist attempt by  to surreptitiously dismantle the borders between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The three federal governments will then be dissolved and in their place will be communist policies, barbed wire, and Kafkaesque courts.

Some say this takeover is already underway, while others think it’s in the planning stages. Either way, the goal is for unspecified elites to oversee a new government that allows allows them almost unlimited power and profit. This will all be buoyed by 500,000,000 involuntary laborers toiling in a totalitarian dystopia.

There is no evidence this is taking place, but believers point to disparate catastrophes as being part of the plot. The Sept. 11 attacks, for instance, were perpetuated to give the government a chance to increase control of the populace and smooth the way to stand up the Union. While the Patriot Act includes many chilling provisions that potentially makes the U.S. more authoritarian, this actually runs counter to the NAU theory, which presupposes the U.S. will sacrifice its sovereignty.

Believers also assert that Hurricane Katrina was created and controlled by HAARP weapons. The reason was to provide a guise under which the usual suspects could be rounded up and ushered into FEMA camps.

For being central to the theory, these camps are conspicuously missing, as is an extra wide highway that will run the run the length of the three countries. This construction project would be exceedingly difficult to pull off clandestinely, yet NAU believers continually insist it is being built or planned.

The most frequently-cited evidence for the coming NAU is the supposed existence of the amero, a currency that will replace the U.S. and Canadian dollars and the peso. There are examples of such bills and coins, but they were created as novelties by individuals and private companies, not government mints.

The coins were the brainchild of Daniel Carr, who designed the New York and Rhode Island statehood quarters. Unauthorized postings of images taken from his website were touted in conspiracy circles as proof the NAU is imminent.  

Before being sentenced to prison for encouraging the assassination of federal judges, white nationalist Hal Turner was the primary promoter of the coin/collective roundup connection. After Carr explained the truth on his website, Turner played the classic conspiracy theory card of claiming evidence that disproved the theory was instead part of it. Turner claimed Carr’s coin website had been created overnight for the express purpose of discrediting him. In truth, the website had been up for years.

From there, Turner moved onto highlighting paper money. His blog ran photos of amero bills in different denominations. He deflected inquiries as to where they came from, citing only “my sources.” Sources other than his own revealed the images had been pilfered from a Flickr user who had created them for purposes of artistic and political commentary.

In what passes for one of their arguments, supporters of the theory point out that many European countries adopted the euro. Besides being irrelevant, this glosses over significant differences between European and North American countries and economies. Also, the euro was publicly announced and planned, whereas the amero is supposedly shrouded in sinister secrecy.

Plus, the euro was created to solve problems specific to Europe, which featured dozens of small countries doing business among each another. This became an issue because each nation had separately fluctuating currencies, exchange was inefficient and costly, interest rates spiked and dipped wildly, and there were varied, continually changing inflation rates. All this turned almost every transaction between European nations into guesswork.  

The euro cleared up these problems, so much so that U.S. soldiers who had received four Deutschemarks for every dollar were, 10 years later, getting just 75 Euro cents for that buck.

North American countries, meanwhile, do not experience the myriad economic issues that plagued Europe before it adopted a common currency. There are only three economies and exchange rates in play, and NAFTA has solved many of the economic issues the North American countries had faced.

Likewise, there’s little comparison between the EU and the nefarious NAU. EU members retain sovereignty, hold elections, issue passports, raise armed forces, collect customs, and have the option of maintaining a border presence. More tellingly, the EU is not imprisoning citizens without trial or shipping them to slave labor camps.

Two groups are cited by theorists as evidence for the planned Union: the Independent Task Force on North America, and the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. The former is a group of business owners and academics, while the latter consisted primarily of government officials, whose stated goals were information sharing, improved productivity, reducing trade costs, environmental protection, disease reduction, and ensuring access to clean food and water.

It mattered little to the theorists that neither of these groups entered into any treaties or agreements. Lou Dobbs, probably the most conspiratorial-minded mainstream media personality, called the SPP as an agreement which would establish the North American Union without Congressional consent. In fact, it was not an agreement, it formed no Union, and attempted no end run around Congress, and indeed had nothing to try and sneak past it.  

Pointedly, neither Dobbs nor any other theory subscriber considered the 2009 dissolution of the SPP to be evidence the NAU proposal had been abandoned.

Another supposed piece of evidence is a Council on Foreign Relations report that calls for more economic cooperation and intelligence-sharing among the three countries. However, the CFR is a non-governmental organization that has no relevance to policy making in any of the countries.

Besides, the paper calls for little more than streamlined customs procedures that would eliminate tariffs between the countries and employ a common tariff for goods imported from outside the three nations. The paper also calls for greater border security, which would be antithetical to the NAU’s supposed goal, and which would stifle Moore’s Canadian interlopers.

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“I Fought the Law of Thermodynamics” (Stanley Meyer)

WATERCAR

If setting out to find a microcosm for all things pseudoscience, one might well end up at Stanley Meyer. He hit most of the major hallmarks: Remarkable, untestable claims; working in isolation; never producing a working model to be examined; showing his device to reporters, not researchers; claiming to defy the laws of physics without offering evidence this was being done or demonstrating the method by which this was achieved.

Even in death, the pseudoscience hallmarks continued to spring forth, as his believers insisted he was murdered in order to keep his invention hidden.    

Meyer claimed to have modified a dune buggy engine so that the vehicle could run on a water-fuel cell that operated via an unexplained, advanced form of electrolysis. He said an oxygen-hydrogen generator enabled this Magic Bus to go 100 miles on a gallon of water.

When Meyer died, he left behind no known blueprints, working models, correspondence with scientists, or anything that would substantiate his sizable claims. He never submitted anything for peer review or offered an explanation for how he had managed to violate the First Law of Thermodynamics.

This Law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. Meyer’s device purportedly split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then caused the hydrogen to burn and generate energy, and finally reconstituted the water molecules and started the process over. The first two steps describe what happens in a fuel cell and is well-understood science. The third step describes a perpetual motion machine and is pseudoscientific folly. His fuel cell purportedly split water with less energy than what was released by the recombination of the elements.

A glaring red flag was that Meyer made his pitch not to scientific journal editors but to investors. Or litigants as they were later known. Meyer was successfully sued by those he had duped into purchasing dealerships that never received anything to deal. His water-fuel cell was examined by three expert witnesses in his fraud case and they testified that it employed only conventional electrolysis. Unlike the fraud laws he was found to have violated, the laws of thermodynamics could not be ignored just because Meyer found them inconvenient.

Meyer died on March 20, 1998, after a restaurant meal. According to his brother, he had been meeting with two investors, when he suddenly exited the restaurant, declaring, “They poisoned me.” It’s unclear who ‘they’ were. It could have meant the chefs, the investors, or those he had previously tricked out of their money. But conspiracy theorists have filled in the blanks to mean it was those whose livelihood and fortunes would be threatened if Meyer’s device worked.  

Despite the poisoning claim, the county coroner found the cause of death to be a cerebral aneurism. This, of course, is meaningless to a conspiracy theorist, for whom any contradictory information is more evidence of a cover-up. In this case, that means that the coroner was in on the plot or was threatened with a similar fate unless he falsified his report.  

Beyond the total lack of evidence for the poisoning claim, murdering him would do little good because if his methods were real, researchers into alternative fuel sources would also discover them.

Besides, most successful businesses adapt and embrace change. Restaurants alter the menu when faced with demands for healthier options or vegetarian fare. Newspapers have established an online presence with subscription fees for full access. When baseball integrated, bigoted owners and scouts began signing former Negro League players and started gauging the talent on Hispaniola and in Cuba. If a water-powered car prototype were a reality, automobile manufacturers and petroleum companies would want to find a way to profit from it, not eliminate the man who would make this possible.

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“Get Into the Grove” (Bohemian Club)

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While many conspiracy theories and pseudoscience concepts are about notions not proven to exist, such as the Illuminati, Nibiru, or chupacabra, others are verified but misrepresented. These include Rothschilds, Bilderbergers, and today’s topic, the Bohemian Grove. This locale is where members of the Bohemian Club meet. The Club is a men-only group of extreme status and includes leaders in politics, banking, arts, science, and business. The Club was formed during the Gold Rush and was meant to bring together the top artists and scientists.

Today, Grove members meet yearly for three weeks near San Francisco to take a break from their extreme high-pressure jobs. Their motto, “Weaving spiders come not here,” refers to the stipulation that no work business can be discussed at the Grove.

Some detractors insist Grove members use the meeting to try and control interest rates, drive technology stocks up or down, and impact who might be the next presidential candidates. When titans of various industries meet, they may discuss such matters, but this would be no reason to criticize the Grove, any more than it would be to lambaste Augusta National, New York’s finest eatery, or a Leer jet speeding to the Azores if these topics were broached in these locations.

Certainly, these matters are discussed by the powerful in some places, and that could include the Grove. But for the stuff that might get Kyrie Irving excited, we need to move onto the rumors about Sleestak overlords, sex slave dungeons, and mock human sacrifices to Moloch.

For such tales, we are mostly limited to supposed insider reports that are impossible to either corroborate or dispute. This applies whether it’s relatively mundane Wall Street strategizing, the more bizarre worship of a Canaanite demigod in the contemporary Bay Area, or a highly implausible race of master lizards.

Among the few outsiders who have been allowed in were staff members from the relatively short-lived dry humor satirical magazine Spy. They were able to grab some photos of cloaked figures burning a coffin on an altar in the shadow of a large cement owl. It was explained that this was called the Cremation of Care Ceremony, and it symbolized that these giant men’s worries can be buried for a few weeks. As to the owl, it represents knowledge.

Spy writer Philip Wiess concluded the shindig was like any other male bonding ritual, just with a much more powerful clientele than what one finds at fishing holes, sports bars, or hardware stores.

As to how Moloch plays into this, he doesn’t. Canaanites, according to the Bible, sacrificed their children to this demigod, who was portrayed as possessing a human’s body and bull’s head. Brian Dunning at Skeptoid reported, “As far as I can tell, any connection between the demigod Moloch and the Bohemians is simply made up by people who are so desperately trying to find something to dislike about them.”

However, another standard claim about the Grove is true, with a substantial caveat. It is technically accurate that the Manhattan Project was planned there. Dr. Edward Teller was a club member and he reserved the Grove to hold a key planning meeting about the Project. No other members were present and it was not a Bohemian Club undertaking. Detractors don’t mention these parts and leave the unspoken implication that the Club controls weapons of mass destruction and can wipe out millions if the genocidal whim hits.

Such believers include Alex Jones, who is convinced the Grove is where many malevolent matters manifest. However, he usually lacks specifics and he always lacks proof.

More specificity is offered on Jesus_is_savior.com. This website is mostly a series of disjointed Bible verses, most of them without an accompanying explanation as to their relevance to Bohemian Grove. It also features an extreme close up of the one dollar bill and proposes that a part of the upper right corner reveals an owl. To me, it looks more like a random design that apophenia and strong desire to believe can turn into an owl. It more resembles an eagle or hawk if determined to get an ornithological connection out of it, but it doesn’t really appear to be anything. Even if it was an owl put there at the behest of the Bohemian Club, there is no explanation about why this would matter.

Meanwhile, Cathy O’Brian wrote a first-hand account about allegedly being captive at the Grove. Despite being held as a sex slave in an underground dungeon by the world’s most evil and powerful men, she never messes with the details of her miraculous escape. She did, however, relate that the Bohemian Club agenda was solely to implement the New World Order by means of mind control.

This combination of unlimited power, no conscience, and many decades of existence render the portrait O’Brian makes of Grove members a highly impractical one.

Rush Limbaugh related that when he was starting out in the late 1980s, members of the John Birch Society approached him about membership. He was flattered by the attention and the initial overtures were full of the usual conservative talking points, so it seemed to be a good match. But then Society members began talking of secret cabals and ruthless and powerful men out to inflict assorted misdeeds and evils on the world. The claims became more bizarre, and Limbaugh questioned why, if these shadowy men were so powerful and evil, why were some of them dying without their goals being met or even attempted? He got no good answer and the final straw was when John Birchers told him William Buckley was a communist.

Bilderbergers, Illuminati, and Rothschilds are all said to have the means and ability to carry out their nefarious plots, yet nothing happens, even after centuries of opportunity.

Similarly, Bohemian Grove members are said to have evil that is matched only by their wealth and power. Yet, after 170 years of existence, this unlimited power and ruthlessness has yet to produce a New World Order, a one-world government, or the enslavement of large swaths of the populace for Grove members’ labor and amusement.

That’s what allows us to be dismissive of claims the like of Henry Mankow. Unbothered by procuring any evidence, Mankow asserts that Grove members engage in Satanic rituals that may even include human sacrifice. His threshold for proof is so low that he quotes from the Learned Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For a more modern source, he quotes an anonymous Las Vegas woman who proposes that some Club members belong to an alien reptilian species that occupy humans a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She describes these literal leaping lizards as “a fourth-dimension race that have three hearts, shift shapes, and develop human feelings from devouring human flesh and blood.”

While respecting his source, Mankow thinks Grove members are Satanists rather than reptilians. What kind of false dilemma nonsense is that? Maybe they’re both.

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“Devil may scare” (Satanic Panic)

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There is Sasquatch, Yeti, Nessie, and dozens of less-celebrated cryptos. But the most enduring monster whose existence has yet to be verified is Beelzebub, the devil, Lucifer, Apollyon, Satan, the Dark Lord. This many-monikered beast, unlike the rest of the monsters, is indirectly responsible for much misery.   

Now, for being the embodiment of evil, the cloven-hoofed one has never harmed anybody himself. But there have been some who committed atrocities in his name, such as Richard Ramirez who went on a spree of break-ins, rapes, and murders with an inverted pentagram tattooed on his palm. There were a few others who did similar deeds, but the most frequent Satanic byproduct are baseless accusations made against someone.

Those took place in 17th Century Salem and continue today with Pizzagate. I saw one online poster who claimed that 800,000 children are snatched each year by Satanists. She was basing the figure on information provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited children. But she was basing the reason for their disappearance on negative evidence, wild speculation, and filling in the sizable gaps with her agenda. While about 2,000 children a day are reported missing, this figure includes children who show up 45 minutes later to announce they had taken the scenic route home from school. It includes those who got hurt while hiking and are rescued four days later. It includes runaways, children who are abandoned by their parents, and those who are kidnapped by noncustodial mothers or fathers. Just 1.4 percent of missing children are taken by strangers, and most of these kidnappers worship another deity besides Satan or no deity at all.

So even if five percent of the kidnappers were Satanists, this means that six children are year are taken by devil worshippers, not 800,000. The poster had made the preposterous claim to bolster the case for her belief in Pizzagate – a tale twisted and bizarre even by the ridiculous standards of conspiracy theorists. This theory has expanded to potentially include any pizza joint, any business adjacent to a pizza joint, and anyone who even once patronizes these establishments. All this is said to be part of a nationwide kidnapping and child rape ring, led by Lucifer his Satanic sidekicks, Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

This is a new twist on an ancient idea. The devil figured prominently in Paradise Lost. New Testament writers blamed him for sending a herd of pigs over a cliff and for causing people to fling themselves into a fire. He even appears to win an argument with the archangel Michael over an unspecified issue regarding Moses’ corpse in Jude –  perhaps the most unhinged, bizarre, paranoid, threatening, rambling, and doomsday-desiring book in the Bible. And though it was likely due to a translation error, Satan makes one cameo in the Old Testament when God permits him to destroy Job. The horned one even takes the blame for future carnage and calamity, in Revelation.

But our focus will be relatively modern. Anton LaVey penned the Satanic Bible in the 1960s and become a cult celebrity. He played the devil in Rosemary’s Baby in the 1970s, a decade that also gave us The Exorcist, The Omen, and cattle mutilations that some pegged on Satanists.

In 1972, Mike Warnke wrote a book in which he claimed to have previously been a Satanic high priest, a position from which he witnessed mandatory blood sacrifices, ritual rape, and child abuse. A few years later, Michelle Smith wrote Michelle Remembers, in which she insisted the she recalled seeing children kept in cages, adults having fingers sliced off, and even baby sacrifices. Neither Warnke nor Smith could provide any names and were unable to lead police to any perpetrators, victims, or corpses. This set the tone for what was to come: Over-the-top claims followed by panic and sometimes false convictions, but never a capture of any felonious Satanists.  

Onto the 1980s, lowlighted by Geraldo specials and the almost-requisite inclusion of the adjective “Satanic” before the phrase “heavy metal band.” This, even though for every genuinely Satanic band like Deicide, there were 100 Judas Priests, for whom 666 was just another number. And for all the panic about devil worshippers, the damage was actually being done by child-molesting Catholic priests and Christian televangelists caught in a series of scandals.

A few wayward derelicts may have dabbled in the dark arts and performed a few silly rituals, but most were doing it for the thrill of being iconoclastic outcasts, not because they were truly evil. For instance, when I was 20, I saw a truck that had been spray painted with the slogan, “Kill For Satin.” It had been thrown on there by a hoodlum who was either linguistically-challenged or who was showing unusual fealty to smooth fabric.  

To be clear, there were about half a dozen murders attributed to demons’ minions in the 70s and 80s, but this was uncovered by means of traditional law enforcement and confessions, not from the revelations of someone privy to the inner workings of Satanic cults or from daytime talk show investigations.

On Saturday Night Live, Jon Lovitz portrayed a devil who made failed attempts at wickedness, while the Church Lady chastised her guests for being under Satan’s spell. Indeed, much of this had a comic edge to it, but there was a much darker side that featured many ruined lives. Not ruined by Satanic cult members, who killed very few, and who certainly represented a microscopic percentage of the homicidal maniacs. Rather, innocent lives were ruined by the collective hysteria of parents, press, and prosecutors. The result was the loss of freedom for innocent persons accused of kidnapping, torture, sexual abuse and murder.

This Satanic Panic was an example of a moral panic, which Blake Smith of Skeptoid defines as “a cultural event wherein people become hypervigilant to a threat to the status quo and tend to throw reason and rationality out in favor of seeking protection from the perceived threat at all costs.”

A recent moral panic example would be last year’s glut of clown sightings. Past examples include the 1920s Red Scare, which was a virtual Commie lovefest compared to the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy hearings 30 years later.

With regard to the Satanic Panic, it promoted the notion that organized cults of Luciferians were clandestinely controlling childcare facilities and using their positions to molest, murder, dismember, and torment. 

The most infamous case was the McMartin Daycare trial. Judy Johnson’s 2-year-old son had a reddened rectum and trouble using the toilet, two facts which convinced her he was being molested at the daycare center. Other parents were asked to look for evidence this was happening to their children as well.

Toddlers barely old enough to talk were coached into giving the “correct” answer and, eager to please adults, did so. The paranoia was so extreme that Johnson even claimed her son had reported seeing daycare members fly about the room and many persons believed this. There were reports of secret tunnels and rail tracks beneath the daycare center that would transport the children to other buildings to be tortured and molested. Hot air balloons were offered as another means of transportation, though this would seemingly be superfluous for someone who could fly. Despite the ease with which such ideas as hot air balloon rental and subterranean transportation could be checked out, this wasn’t about logic or facts, it was about fear and revenge.

None of the McMartin defendants were convicted and some were never even formally charged, but some still spent years in jail, unable to pay the seven-figure bail amounts that were also part of the panic. It was at the time the longest, most expensive trial in U.S. history and it was all based on such notions as flying Satanic daycare workers.

This injustice was not enough to slow the paranoia. Dan and Fran Keller spent 20 years in prison after being convicted of molesting children at their daycare center in Oak Hill, Texas. Transportation again figured prominently in the case, with the victims allegedly flown out of the country to be molested in a Satanic orgy perpetrated by Mexican soldiers before being shuttled back in time to be picked up by their parents. Other claims were babies used as shark food and children being forced to watch the sacrificial slaughter of kittens and puppies. The Kellers were released when the doctor who had provided the only physical evidence at their trial recanted.

In both daycare cases, children ages 2 to 5 were asked leading questions and praised when they gave the desired response. They were even allowed to mix with each other in between giving testimonies and were encouraged to collaborate and come to shared conclusions.

A bizarre false confession led to another conviction, this time of Paul Igraham, whose daughter accused him of sexual abuse. Imgram was a committed Pentecostal who had no memory of the alleged attacks, but surmised that a demon must have seized control of him.

So when his daughter claimed to have been in ceremonies in which 25 babies were sacrificed and in which she was raped 800 times, he figured it must be true and that the devil made him do it. There was no physical evidence or other witnesses despite these horrors being allegedly being perpetrated by a large cult over many years. No matter in the era of the Satanic Panic, and Ingraham spent two decades in prison.

While these devilish tales took place in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Pizzagate shows that the notion still has life. When it comes to getting people to act irrationally and believe the farfetched, few things can match the fear that the devil inspires. As our spray painting buddy would put it, “Satin rules!”

 

  

   

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“Water haphazard” (Fluoridation studies)


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In the mid-1940s, some U.S. cities began adding tiny amounts of fluoride to public water supplies in hopes of fighting tooth decay. John Birch types suspected this was a communist plot and some eventually considered it a danger right up there with Buddy Holly and A Catcher in the Rye (although the Society itself only formally objected to the concept of governments making unilateral health decisions for the populace).

These days, Nazis have replaced Commies as the oppressive regime most associated with fluoridated water. There are some baseless online assertions that it was used in death camps to make the captives either compliant or stupid. Politifact interviewed U.S. Holocaust Museum historian Patricia Heberer, who insisted that none of the Nazi’s infamous medical experiments involved fluoride. Even if they had, it would be fallacious thinking to declare, “Nazis were evil. Nazis used fluoridated water. Therefore fluoridated water is evil.” The specific fallacy here is one of composition, where it is asserted that something that is true as a whole is true of any part of it.   

About 75 percent of U.S. homes today receive fluoridated water. I’m unsure what Minnesota’s policy was in the late 1990s, but fluoridated water there had a powerful opponent at the time, Gov. Jesse Ventura. In an interview with Salon, Ventura gave the  obligatory Third Reich reference, followed by a more reasoned stance about health care decisions being left to the parents, before getting to his primary point. “Fluoride is the main component of Prozac! What you’ve got is people drinking Prozac-water! Prozac calms you and dumbs you down so you’re less emotional.” With a rant like that, we can be sure Ventura hadn’t had any Prozac water beforehand. But equating one ingredient in a substance with the substance itself would be like calling Ventura a glass of water since his body is about two-thirds that.  

When Politifact contacted Ventura about his source for these claims, he provided them a link to prisonplanet.com, an Alex Jones site. Jones calls fluoridated water a chemical weapon meant to depopulate, which if true serves as a shining example of government inefficiency. Since this genocide-by-faucet effort began 70 years ago, the U.S. population has increased 130 percent.

Another fluoride folly from Jones is claiming that studies have shown that fluoridated water brings downs children’s IQ. Joseph Mercola and Mike Adams have also championed this idea, which they based on a press release distributed by Fluoride Action Now. Reuters mistakenly ran the release as a news article, thus spooking more people than if it had just appeared on Natural News or InfoWars. The release claimed that a Harvard review of 42 studies showed that U.S. children exposed to fluoridated drinking water suffered lower IQs. But going beyond the exclamation points and panic over stealthy mind control, we find the review made no such claim. In fact, none of the studies were about U.S. fluoridated water.

Mercola wrote that the studies linked moderate-to-high high fluoride exposure with reduced intelligence. These conclusions were likely correct, but Mercola is playing a word game here and hoping no one notices. He used these studies to bolster his contention that fluoridated water was a danger. Yet the amount of fluoride in most U.S. drinking water is between one-half and one milligram per liter, while the studies Mercola cited were dealing with persons exposed to between 2 to 10 milligrams per liter and who also ingested fluoride from burning coal.  

So while the studies showed that children who lived in areas with high fluoride exposure had lower IQ scores than those who lived in low-exposure areas, scale and context must be considered. With regard to scale, Dr. Steven Novella said: “Most of these studies’ high-fluoride groups used concentrations many times higher than allowable limits in the United States, and many of the low-fluoride groups had concentrations in the range that is optimal by water fluoridation regulations.” This means the negative IQ impact occurred only in areas where fluoride levels were much higher than what the EPA permits.  

As far as context, none of the studies involved populations exposed to artificially-fluoridated drinking water. Instead, all the studies came from parts of China or Iran that have endemic high-fluoride well water, in addition to the burning coal.

Many chemicals are benign at low doses, harmful at medium amounts, and fatal in high concentrations. The same Mercola website that called fluoridated water a danger to children ran an article that referred to kale as “a superfood unparalleled among green leafy vegetables.”

Yet Snopes pointed out that kale contains thiocyanate, which can kill if ingested in sufficient quantities. It would be absurd to suggest that kale could kill, but no more ridiculous than asserting fluoridated water is a public health menace. To the contrary, the CDC lists it as one of the 10 Great Public Health Achievements of the 20th Century. Drink it, brush your teeth with it, wash your kale off with it, you’ll be fine.

 

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“Space Oddity” (Lucifer Project)

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NASA space probes and the works of Arthur C. Clarke can both be appreciated on their substantial merits. But some feel the need to fuse these elements, with the result being the creation of new habitable worlds. Only a select few will be allowed to access these worlds, which will be on the moons of a former gas planet that transformed into a star. Meanwhile the rest of us will be pulled or pushed into a fiery or icy death by the creation of this second sun.

The idea seems lifted from Clarke’s Space Odyssey works in which an alien monolith orbits Jupiter and replicates itself billions of times by using Jovian matter to condense the planet until nuclear fusion is attained. This leads to a freshly-minted star, which is capable of sustaining life on the moons it pilfered from Jupiter. The central feature of the associated conspiracy theory is that NASA is attempting the real thing in a project uncreatively named the Lucifer Project.

Theorists say this was first tried in 2003 when NASA plunged the Galileo probe into Jupiter. Scientists were worried that allowing it to crash into a Jovian moon would run the risk of contaminating any potential microbial life that resided there. Theorists, however, dismissed this as a cover story and said the real intent was to turn Jupiter into a star.

In what would seem a fatal blow to the theory, Jupiter maintained its planetary status. But apocalyptic soothsayers seldom settle back into the fabric of their extant planet when their panicky predictions fizzle. So the destruction of Galileo was written off as a practice run and, fortunately for the theorists, our solar system houses more than one gas giant, so they can afford a doomsday do-over.

The isthmus of common ground shared by NASA and the theorists is that the administration will end its current Cassini mission in nine months by plunging it into Saturn. NASA says this is to avoid contaminating the planet’s moons, while theorists say Freemasons, Illuminati, or Bilderbergers have ordered its plunge in order to create nuclear fusion that will produce a sun capable of sustaining the elites’ life on Saturnian moons.

Some astronomers believe that if Jupiter or Saturn had much more mass, they could have become stars, and the theorists weld this plausible scenario with the notion that space probes could serve as a the fuel that ignites this nuclear fusion.

In order for Gemini and Cassini to travel, they require a non-solar fuel source once they get about three blocks past Mars. Hence, these probes are propelled by the radioactive decay of plutonium 238 pellets inside of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs). But this fuel source also plays the key role in Saturn’s manmade fusion, according to the theory. Astronomy blogger Ian O’Neill explained how the theorists think this will work:

“Dropping Cassini into a place with large atmospheric pressure will compress the probe and detonate it like a nuclear bomb. This will trigger a chain reaction, kick-starting nuclear fusion, and turning Saturn into a fireball. This second sun will have dire consequences for us on Earth, killing millions from the huge influx of radiation by this newborn star.” By then, the elite will be aboard their salvation spaceship and headed to this new home.

There are several reasons why using NASA probes to create new suns and habitable zones will remain in the realm of science fiction. The first sizable obstacle is that plutonium 238 is not weapons grade. Also, the tiny pellets of plutonium 238 that are used to heat and power the probes are in separate, damage-proof cylinders. Finally, the probes burn and break up, eliminating any chance of the plutonium reaching critical mass.

Brian Dunning at Skeptoid further explained, “This critical mass has to be imploded with a simultaneous explosion from all sides, applying sudden pressure precisely from all angles at the exact instant. This couldn’t happen with an RTG design. Although each RTG does theoretically have enough plutonium to make up a critical mass, there isn’t any way that it could all be brought together into the right shape. Any type of pressure or crash event has already sent all the separate impact shells scattering about space, and each is far too small to ever achieve critical mass and implode.”

And even if this all magically happened, Saturn wouldn’t morph into a star anyway. Unless nuclear fusion can be maintained within a stellar body, the reaction would quickly fizzle out. Astronomers estimate this would require a body at least 80 times the size of Jupiter in order to have adequate gravitational confinement.

In response to his column, Dunning received an e-mail from someone identifying himself as Conrado Salas Cano. Cano explained that these obstacles will be overcome because of the advanced knowledge of aliens with whom NASA is secretly working. This enables Cano to confidently assert that in nine months we will see “the sudden appearance of a second bright star in place of Saturn when Cassini is disposed of in the atmosphere of this giant ringed planet.”

So you can look at the night sky next September to see if this has happened. But if feeling the need for unrealistic space entertainment, I suggest reading Clarke instead.

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“Deep Blue Nothing” (NASA image)

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Two weeks ago, photos from a NASA spacecraft were released on the administration’s website, with a couple of the images appearing to show a huge blue sphere passing in front of the sun.

How this was handled depended on which group one was in. The UFO enthusiasts, Nibiru believers, and New Age conspiracy theorists made impetuous declarations of vindication, which they accused NASA of trying to cover up. Astronomers and skeptics, meanwhile, considered what we know about how these photos are taken and processed, then solicited input from experts. 

Scott Brando at Doubtful News learned that the blue sphere was nothing more captivating that a computer glitch. It turned out that not everything that makes it onto the images are related to the sun. Some quirks are caused by telescope optics, camera characteristics, or spacecraft operation.

NASA further explained: “On rare occasions, the image processor onboard becomes overloaded and produces corrupted images. Generally, these take the form of images from one telescope processed as if they were from another telescope. Because the images from the Heliospheric Imager (HI) telescopes are built up from a large number of exposures added together, this sometimes results in double exposures, where data from several telescopes appear in the same image.” Put most simply, two images from two different cameras can be combined into one.

As this explanation makes clear, these images did not “mystify scientists” as the ironically-titled Sun newspaper claimed. The publication might have known that if it had bothered reaching out to NASA scientists, mystified or otherwise. That’s what astronomer and Slate columnist Phil Plait did, interviewing those involved with the spacecraft and the images it sends back.

As to why the sun appears blue, which is obviously not its true color, there is a simple answer. Because our eyes are unable to see in the ultraviolet, each wavelength is displayed using a different color to help viewers distinguish them. That means the images in question are of an object that has been artificially colored and are not really of a massive, floating azure sphere.

Plait also noted, “Planets are bright and overload the detectors a bit, bleeding light into neighboring pixels. This happens all the time in digital detectors, including spacecraft that observe the sun. UFO hunters and Planet X conspiracy theorists tend to go bananas over such things.”

Leading this Elongated Yellow Fruit charge is Pamela Johnson, a formerly unknown Facebook user whose post on the blue image went viral. Her lone accuracy was noting that “this huge object was captured on NASA’S SECCHI STEREO HI1 satellite on November 17, 2016. Our sun is casting the light that is coming in from the left side of the frame.”

From there, she made a sharp veer into lala land: “I have added a photo that clearly shows NASA has tried and failed to use images of the sun to hide the sphere. NASA tried to cover it up by overlaying images of the sun on top of it.”

As to what specifically NASA was trying to hide, Johnson suggested it might be the latest Gaia Portal, not explaining what that is, why she would know that, or why NASA would want that kept secret. She did let us know, however, that “Astro-glances compel the masses to action. Whatever it is, it wanted to be seen and the Galactics wanted me to see it and make it go viral.” While she did not contact NASA, she did query one source, noting, “I consulted my divining rods.”

As to the more measured response Plait received from NASA, Johnson considers this proof of the cover-up. That leaves unexplained why the administration would try to keep something hidden by means of a taxpayer-funded source that operates under a mandate that images be made available immediately.

Indeed, one YouTube commenter stated that NASA would never carelessly allow this image to reach the public. He asserts it was done on purpose, by means of a hologram, to mess with our minds for unspecified reasons.

According to the imaginative sky gazers at UFO Sightings Hotspot, the object was either “a giant extraterrestrial or interdimensional spacecraft or an unknown celestial body like Nibiru.” If it was the latter, this object precisely as large as the sun managed to keep its gravitational pull in check when it passed by Earth.

While Nirbiru believers, UFO enthusiasts, and New Agers rejected NASA’s explanation, they could get excited about it if they would let themselves. As Plait put it, we have these images because “a space probe launched on a huge rocket that took it around Earth’s orbit to the other side where it uses a complex and sophisticated suite of powerful scientific instruments to track our sun in wavelengths invisible to the human eye so that we can better understand what it’s like to live in the outer atmosphere of a star.”

That makes it fascinating enough and negates any reason to concoct a tale about spacefaring aliens from a secret planet accessing a Gaia Portal.

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“Family fiendly restaurant” (Pizzagate)

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Some conspiracy theorists make claims whose extraordinary size is matched only by the theorists’ arrogance and resistance to reality. They exhibit a combination of paranoia and narcissism that cause them to believe that anyone who expresses a different opinion is being paid to do so. Those who are slightly more charitable to their opponents will concede that those who see it otherwise are genuine, but that they are too stupid to realize they are being duped by scripted newscasts that cover up government and corporate corruption. These theorists paint themselves as independent thinkers even though they uncritically swallow whatever conspiracy mongers peddle.

They cannot be laughingly dismissed because they do not limit themselves to online forums and echo chambers. They also harass, threaten, and sometimes physically confront those at the center of their twisted thinking.

The most recent example of this centers on a Beltway pizza joint, Comet Ping Pong. This bizarre tale got its start with the Wikileaks exposure of John Podesta’s e-mails. One of the e-mails contained a reference to spirit cooking, which some persons impetuously took as proof Podesta was involved in a Satanic ritual of blood drinking with children.

Anonymous posters next targeted James Alefantis, the pizzeria owner who casually knows Podesta’s brother, Tony, and who was listed by GQ as the 49th most powerful person in Washington, D.C. Believers have dubbed this alleged story “Pizzagate.”

The Washington City Paper explained: “The Wikileaks release of John Podesta’s hacked e-mails inspired a feverish and mostly hapless search for salacious scandal evidence. Why, they wondered, did Podesta get so many e-mails about eating pizza? The answer to any reasonable person would be that Podesta eats pizza. To the alt-right, though, ‘pizza’ became a suspected code word for illegal sex trafficking. Theorists also drew attention to the restaurant’s murals, which they declared ‘creepy,’ and the sliding doors in front of the restaurant’s restrooms, dubbed “hidden rooms” where sex abuse could take place.”

So with extremely elastic thinking, conspiracy theorists turned some references to flatbread with sauce and cheese into a child sex abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton and Podesta, and run out of Comet Ping Pong. Little of what the theorists produced could be investigated or falsified. One cannot disprove the notion of creepiness, which is a subjective quality. And examining the rooms for hidden compartments and coming up empty could be dismissed on the grounds that they are so well hidden.

Moreover, Snopes noted that 90 percent of child molestation is done by family members or friends, with most of the other 10 percent being done by random sickos. There are no documented cases of it being facilitated en masse via coded pizza menus.

I spent 90 minutes I’ll never get back looking into the alleged evidence, which consisted almost entirely of photos taken from social media accounts of Comet Ping Pong’s employees and patrons. Without exception, these purported pieces of evidence were manifestations of the appeal to ignorance fallacy. This is when a lack of evidence to the contrary is touted as proof that the allegation is true. For instance, there is a photo of a smiling girl with her hands loosely taped to one of the restaurant’s tables. The photo contains no context and we have no idea who she is or what this means. And this ignorance is touted as evidence the pizza joint is running a mass pedophile ring.

Another photo is of a young girl standing in a small basket and a theorist asks, “Are they going to sell her???!!” Over the years, I have noticed a direct correlation between the number of punctuation marks a person uses and their level of paranoia.

A photo of a pill bottle is assumed be the date rape drug, while one of a baby holding Euros is said to symbolize traveling internationally to molest children. Another shot is of a man innocently holding a girl. The child has grabbed the man’s bead necklace and pulled it over the top of her head, which a poster declared “weird.” The poster then noted that the photo contained the hashtag #chickenlover and insisted this was slang for a man who likes boys. That it could refer to man who loves wings is never considered and the fact that the child in the photo is a girl is likewise glossed over.

Commenters on these conspiracy theory sites praise the “journalism” of those who posted these photos. Yet true journalism would include tracking down the persons who took the photos and asking them whey they did it, then seeking to confirm or refute this. Evidence for child sex abuse would be victims coming forward, eyewitnesses, or DNA. None of that is present on these sites.

Their investigations were so shallow they failed to realize that most of the photos did not come from Alefantis’ account, but from persons who had tagged the pizzeria, along with employees and their family members and friends. No connection was too tenuous to be excluded as theorist fodder. So what was presented as damning evidence was instead a hodgepodge of unrelated Instagram screen shots and images from random websites.

The rest of the “evidence” reads like a contest for which contributor could draw the most absurd conclusion. Someone with plenty of free time figured out that the owner’s name is a near-anagram of the French phrase for “I love children.” When someone pointed out this name was given at his birth, the counter was that this was a pseudonym he had created to subtly announce his pedophilia. No evidence was given for this, nor was any requested by those who belittle others for blindly accepting mainstream media stories.

Another absurdity was noting the words “Play-Eat-Drink” on the menu form an acronym for the first three words in pedophile. Crossed ping pong paddles on the menu are said to resemble a butterfly, which is then assumed to be a pedophile symbol. The theorists attribute hidden meaning to words, drawings, or hashtags, and if they can’t come up with anything, they decide the code has yet to be broken. All this is not jumping to conclusions, it’s taking a quantum leap.

The appeal to ignorance abounds throughout these sites, such as asking, “Why would the 49th most powerful man in DC need a pizza shop?”  Probably because he is a successful businessman, which helped him achieve that ranking. But these questions aren’t meant to have answers, they are meant to be unquestionably accepted as more proof.

In the wake of this misinformation release, hundreds of death threats and menacing phone calls have been made to the restaurant. Even band members who played there and family members of employees have been targeted. At least two persons have shown up at the restaurant to confront the workers and diners.

The hysteria threatens to envelope anyone who has ever left a review of the restaurant or referenced it on social media since. The accusation is that they were there not for a calzone but for child rape. Images of patrons’ children have already been posted to dozens of conspiracy theory websites. The parents are working with attorneys to get them removed but are doing so anonymously for fear of retribution. One believer wrote, “Everyone associated with the business is making inferences towards sex with minors.”

This provides a window to the sick thinking of conspiracy theorists. In this case, they applaud themselves for being independent citizen warriors out to eliminate a danger, yet they are actually a mob that has created the danger by anonymously targeting innocent parents and exploiting their children.

The somewhat right-leaning news site Heatstreet explained some of the theorists’ errors that I have mentioned here. But there was no fooling reader Goldcoath, who fumed, “It’s clear the author of this article is actively part of the cover-up.” While theorists portray their questioning of the media as a sign of their independence, they afford no such distinction to anyone who questions their conclusions. In this corner of  humanity, anyone who doubts the theory is part of the conspiracy.

Similarly, when Reddit’s Pizzagate thread was removed because theorists kept violating the website’s policy of not revealing personal information, theorists insisted it was more proof of a cover-up. “The globalists are desperately lashing out,” one believer excitedly wrote. “We have them on the run.” Other users labeled Reddit CEO Steve Huffman a pedophile.

Then we have fired Huffington Post reporter David Seaman who declared that “the entire world is watching” his Pizzagate coverage, which he equated to liberating Nazi death camps.  Now that’s crazy any way you slice it. 

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“Mistake a memo” (CIA conspiracy theory)

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There is a claim that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was coined by the CIA in 1967, with agents encouraged to deploy it against those who were exposing government misdeeds and corporate corruption. According to this narrative, the government is desperate to portray the theorists in a negative light so their exposures won’t be taken seriously.

In truth, however, conspiracy theorists have never exposed anything. Genuine government or corporate malfeasance has always been exposed by investigative reporters or whistleblowers. Persons seriously interested in exposing evildoing will be following Seymour Hersh, not Alex Jones.

Examples of wrongdoings exposed by reporters or insiders include Abu Ghraib, Watergate, NSA abuses, and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Conspiracy theorists try to use these outrages to bolster claims such as these: The Pulse nightclub shooting was staged; A cancer cure is being repressed: AIDS is a government concoction to eradicate gays and blacks. But the earlier examples came from deep digging or from someone who had access to the secrets. The latter are shallow and kneejerk, and require that the conclusion be crafted first, with alleged evidence then sought, created, mangled, and shoehorned in. No actual journalism is allowed, as contrary evidence is rabidly rejected, sometimes in the form of death threats against those presenting it.

Similarly, there have been false flags before, but it is a non sequitur to conclude that other attacks or incidents are false flags as well. When the Nazis invaded Poland, they invented a story about having been attacked first, and conspiracy theorists will point to this type of example and think it lends credence to their assertion that our  government is doing the same today. However, the Nazis maintained complete control over the German press and there was no social media. A western government attempting a similar charade today would be quickly rooted out.

Conspiracy theorists rely primarily on negative evidence and anomaly hunting.

One negative evidence example is a claim that those identified as the Sept. 11 terrorists are not seen on security camera footage boarding the aircraft. The only exceptions are a duo that are seen boarding a flight from Portland, Maine, to Boston, and this was the first leg so they were not getting on an airplane about to be hijacked for a kamikaze mission.

(Note: Video evidence of terrorists boarding the planes HAS been presented, but my intent here is not to delve into the minutiae of a specific claim, but rather to highlight the theorists’ use of negative evidence).

The fact that a person cannot explain why no footage of terrorists boarding the plane is available is supposed to be a point for the conspiracy theorist. But this absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It would be more of a point if the theorists had security camera footage of all persons checking in and boarding the ill-fated aircraft, with none of the terrorists visible. But just pointing out the lack of available footage is negative evidence and is of no value.

In truth, every piece of evidence I’ve seen from 9/11 Truthers has been of the negative variety. Granted, I have not poured over every second of the multiple five-hour YouTube videos they have put together for us sheeple. But I have seen plenty from the Truthers, most frequently on the anniversary of the attacks when they are unable to put their zeal on hold for one day in order to mourn the victims, or at least do nothing, as opposed to furthering a personal vendetta.

Another staple of conspiracy theorists is anomaly hunting, where they grab onto something that seems out of place and ignore everything else.

For example, they have noted that a man interviewed about a mass shooting was laughing before the interview, then cried when it began, and present this as irrefutable proof that he was acting. The theorist will then ignore any ballistic evidence, videos of the shooting, death certificates, or police statements. They also gloss over the fact that grief can be a strange, complex, irrational beast that can manifest itself in the form of a man chuckling before breaking into tears.

Also, out of place doesn’t even have to mean that it seems inconsistent with the “official” narrative. Two examples from the JFK assassination are the Umbrella Man and the Babushka Lady. Their relevance to the assassination is nonexistent, but theorists spent decades trying to track down what their presence might mean. Why was the man holding an umbrella? Why was the lady taking photos when most others were sprawled on the ground for their safety? These highly-open ended questions welcome all kinds of speculation and tangents, to the theorists’ delight. They concentrate on these highly trivial issues instead of looking at the ample evidence that Oswald acted alone and certainly wasn’t conspiring with these two historical footnotes.

Getting back to the CIA memo, it was released following a 1976 FOIA request. The key phrase in the memo states, “The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists.”

The memo did not create the term “conspiracy theorist,” nor did it suggest using those words to discredit those espousing them. It just accurately identifies them as such, goes over their arguments, and offers counters to them.

In this next passage, the memo outlines why it is unsound to conclude that the assassination was  funded by a Bilderberger/Bohemian Grove/Rothschild type:

“A conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy’s brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.”

Elsewhere, the memo highlights the flaws of anomaly hunting:

“Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses, which are less reliable and more divergent and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism, and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence.”

These two snippets offer good arguments against conspiracy theory claims and are not exhortations to employ a freshly-minted term to belittle those making such assertions.

That is why conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett was way off when he wrote, “The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! The CIA’s campaign was to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility.”

The fact that the agency didn’t bother to define the term shows that it was not a CIA original. Indeed, the Center for Skeptical Inquiry researched the term and found that it was already in use closer to the time of Lincoln’s assassination than to Kennedy’s. Examples of use prior to the CIA memo include:

  • A 1964 New Statesman article that concluded, “Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed by the absence of a dogmatic introduction.”
  • A 1909 American Historical Review piece that read, “The claim that Atchison was the originator of the repeal may be termed a recrudescence of the conspiracy theory first asserted by Colonel John A. Parker of Virginia in 1880.
  • A May 1890 article in a psychical research journal that dubbed the exposure of medium Helena Blavatsky as “a conspiracy theory.”
  • In 1881, a reporter for the Rhodes Journal of Banking wrote, “As evidence of a conspiracy this showing is pitiful, and in any view, the charge is ridiculous, as no conspiracy theory is needed to account for the facts.”
  • From the Journal of Mental Science in 1870: “The theory of Dr. Sankey as to the manner in which these injuries to the chest occurred in asylums deserved our careful attention. It was at least more plausible than the conspiracy theory of Mr. Charles Reade.”

Not that these examples would have much impact on conspiracy theorists. To them, this likely would just be proof that the attempt to stigmatize them began much earlier than they had expected.

So the phrase was not coined by the CIA and the agency attached no negative meaning to it. Conspiracy theories did not get their stigma from a CIA plot. Rather, that happened because their adherents insisted that a Kenyan birth was announced in Honolulu newspapers, that Antonin Scalia’s pillow is proof he was murdered, and because they threaten family members of mass shooting victims.

 

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“Bill kill” (Clinton conspiracy)

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Jill Stein is afforded no Secret Service protection, leaving her extremely vulnerable. Not from a modern-day Booth or Oswald. Nor even from John Hinckley, as assassinating someone who is polling a distant fourth would impress no one.

But there is a slim chance Stein could become this year’s Ralph Nader, garnering enough far-left votes in a swing state to defeat the Democratic candidate. This year, that candidate is Hillary Clinton, who with her husband, controls the most efficient killing machines since Kevorkian. At least according to ever-growing number of Internet lists containing supposed enemies or inconveniences the Clintons have had taken care of.

Unlike most conspiracy theories of the Cyber Age, this one has a known starting point: The demented mind of Linda Thompson. In the course of investigating the ATF raid on the Branch Davidian compound, Thompson found 24 persons who she suspected Bill Clinton of having offed.

She wrote every member of Congress with her suspicions, and while none responded, she did gain an ally in former Rep. William Dannemeyer. With his influence, Thompson’s list went from obscurity to something that was at least indirectly endorsed by Jerry Falwell. The number of persons forwarding the list went from dozens to thousands. Dannemeyer called for Congressional hearings, which were not held, thereby providing theorists with more proof of a cover-up.

The list expanded to 34 victims before Thompson died of an overdose of prescription pills, which were presumably force fed to her by Janet Reno. Thompson left behind a list void of any sources or references and which periodically veered into rants about black helicopters and FEMA camps.

The most well-known name on the list is Vince Foster, whose death resulted in five independent investigations affirming it was a suicide. Among Thompson’s unsubstantiated assertions were that the Clintons ordered Foster’s death to be only investigated by park rangers and that the gun and suicide note were both planted on him after he died.

The other prominent figure included is Ron Brown, who died in a plane crash. In one way, Brown’s inclusion is inconsistent, as Clinton’s secretary of commerce dying would be of no benefit to him. At the same time, it is consistent with a list built on wild speculation and making no attempt to present any evidence. Believers assert the deaths benefited Clintons in some way and let it be assumed they ordered the hits.

The names on these various lists have ballooned to nearly 100, with very few of the deaths suspicious. They are heart attacks, suicides, airplane crashes, and automobile accidents. These persons allegedly were causing the Clintons varying levels of discomfort, which almost always turns out to be untrue. But even if true, it is a non sequitur to deduce that the Clintons had them killed. They could benefit from the deaths without being the cause of them.  

Percentagewise, the Clintons have had no more associates die than anyone else. Their rise to power necessitated that they have a much larger, ever changing circle of persons that came in and out of their lives. That leaves a very large pool of persons with potential to make it on the lists. And these lists include persons having only the most fleeting, irrelevant connection to the Clintons. In some cases, the lone tie is having worked for the government during Bill Clinton’s time as governor or president, or during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as senator or secretary of state.

Then there are the glaring omissions, in the form of a still-breathing Ken Starr, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Rush Limbaugh.

There are many lists out there, but all have these distinctions:

  1. They include deceased persons with even the most ridiculously tenuous connection to the villainous Clintons. Cause of death or relationship to the accused is irrelevant. The important factor is to get the list as long as possible, both so the presidential perpetrators will seem more sociopathic, and because few persons beyond the Snopes gang are going to investigate the whole thing.
  2. They lean heavily on words like mysterious, suspicious, alleged, or unexplained. If an autopsy determines the cause of death to be a suicide, natural causes or an overdose, it is said to have been “ruled” that. This implies that a more sinister cause of death was dismissed by coroners on the Clinton payroll.
  3. They gloss over 99 percent of the published reports in order to highlight strange details that would have no bearing on the person’s demise. Snopes put it thusly: “If an obvious suicide is discovered wearing only one shoe, ignore the physical evidence of self-inflicted death and dwell on the missing shoe. You don’t have to establish an alternate theory of the death; just keep harping that the missing shoe can’t be explained.”

By following these guidelines, any unexplained death (or even explained ones) can automatically be attributed to the former and possibly future Presidents Clinton.

A trio of quick examples. James McDougal, the Clintons’ Whitewater partner, died in prison from a heart attack. These lists never explain what the point is supposed to be. There was nothing suspicious, there was no gain for the Clintons, and no evidence they were responsible for it.

Also, former White House intern Mary Mahoney was one of three persons murdered in a Starbucks during a robbery gone wrong. The accompanying claim is that she was going to testify about Bill Clinton sexually harassing White House workers. In truth, she was not going to testify and she is one of hundreds of former Clinton White House interns, almost all of whom are still alive.

Paul Tully’s death is on the list and is labeled suspicious and without an autopsy. In fact, there was an autopsy and it concluded that the cause was the not-at-all suspicious heart attack.

The overriding claim is that these lists are full of victims killed for exposing or hindering the Clintons. That persons are alive to circulate these lists makes the claim self-defeating.