Alex Jones vs. the chickens

Every so often, there is justice in the world.

This time, the fabled chickens coming home to roost are casting their beady eyes on none other than Alex Jones, that purveyor of wacko fringe conspiracy theories about everything from the New World Order to "Pizzagate."  His wife, Kelly Jones, filed for divorce in 2015, and they are now in a custody battle over their three children.  Understandably, the fact that Alex Jones gives every evidence of being a raving maniac came up more than once.

"He’s not a stable person," Kelly Jones said in court.  "He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck.  He wants J Lo to get raped...  He broadcasts from home.  The children are there, watching him broadcast."

Which would certainly be enough for me, were I in her shoes.

Alex Jones's lawyer, Randall Wilhite, responded with an approach that strikes me as risky; he claims that Jones doesn't actually believe what he's saying.  "He's playing a character," Wilhite said. "He's a performance artist...  Using his on-air Infowars persona to evaluate him as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in Batman."

Yes, well, no one is claiming that what the Joker says has any connection to reality, whereas there are lots of people who believe everything Alex Jones says, not least the President of the United States.  In fact, Donald Trump appeared on Infowars last year, and told Jones, "Your reputation is amazing.  I will not let you down."

That connection has only grown stronger since Trump won the election.  Two weeks ago, Jones said on air that Trump had invited him to Mar-a-Lago, but Jones had to respectfully decline "due to family obligations."

"I'm still in regular telephone contact with the president," Jones said.  "But I must apologize, because I can't always answer the phone when he calls."

Trump's not the only one who takes Jones seriously.  Just last week, Lucy Richards of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was arrested after she missed her court date stemming from charges of making death threats to Leonard Pozner, whose six-year-old son Noah died in the Sandy Hook massacre.  Guess why Richards threatened Pozner?

She believed that the Sandy Hook killings were a government-staged "false flag," that no children were killed, and that the grieving parents were "crisis actors" who had been hired to play the parts of bereaved family members of the supposed murdered children.  She wanted Pozner to confess that he was a government plant, and 'fess up that he didn't actually have a son named Noah.

All of which she found out by listening to Infowars and other alt-right conspiracy sites.

Pozner himself said he'd like to be at Jones's trial.  "I wish I could be there in the courtroom to stare him down to remind him of how he’s throwing salt on a wound," Pozner said, "and so he can remember how he handed out salt for other people to throw on mine."

As for Jones, you'd think the threat of losing custody of his children would be sufficient to get him to reconsider his loony on-air persona, whether or not he actually believes what he's saying.  But no: just last Friday, Jones had as a guest alt-right spokesperson Mike Cernovich (himself the focus of some scrutiny because of some horrific statements he made to the effect that most cases of rape are false accusations).  On this show, Jones and Cernovich discussed why the Obamas were in French Polynesia, and came to the conclusion that it's not because it's a nice place for a vacation, it's because French Polynesia doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States.  "Notice he’s staying out of the U.S. right as they move to try to overthrow Trump," Jones said.  About the Obamas' daughters, Sasha and Malia, Jones said, "The word is those are not even his kids."

"The word is."  Meaning "a goofy idea that Alex Jones just pulled out of his ass."

So apparently Jones doesn't think he's got anything to worry about regarding the upcoming custody case, even though if he wins it, he'll be effectively saying under oath "Your Honor, I am a big fat liar."  It's to be hoped that the judge won't buy this, and will slap him down hard, as he's richly deserved for some time now.  But the sad truth is that even if he does win -- in fact, even if he stood in the middle of Times Square and yelled, "Nothing I have ever said on air is the truth!  I lie every time I open my mouth!", it wouldn't diminish his popularity or trust amongst his listeners one bit.  Look at Trump's supporters; the man seems genetically incapable of uttering a true statement or living up to any of his campaign promises, but the diehards still consider him the next best thing to the Second Coming of Christ.  

Hell, they said Bill Clinton was slick.  I recall one comedian saying that Clinton could stand right in front of you and say, "I am not here," and everyone would look shocked and say, "Where'd he go?"  But Clinton was bush league with compared to either Trump or Jones.  The fact that Trump has a significant fraction of American voters convinced he's the Anointed One of God, despite the fact of being the only person I've ever seen who embodies all Seven Deadly Sins at the same time, is evidence of how fact-proof people have become.

And as for Jones, I am certain that however the custody trial comes out, he won't lose a single listener, and he'll be right there to launch the next round of horrible rumors and conspiracy theories.  Even if the chickens come home to roost, Jones probably won't have any difficulty converting most of them to fricassée.

Crazy claim pop quiz

Here at Skeptophilia we've talked about "Poe's Law" -- the general rule that a sufficiently well-done satire is indistinguishable from the real thing.  Usually, this happens because of the cleverness with which the satire is written -- matching in tone, style, and verbiage the particular slice of crazy that the writer is satirizing.

There's another force at work here, too, however.  And that is that the range of nutty things that people actually believe is frightening.  Every time I run into something that seems too completely batshit insane for anyone to take seriously, it always turns out that there is a whole cadre of folks who believe it fervently.  Sometimes there are schools where it's taught as fact.  Sometimes it's been turned into a religion.

I'm not sure where such irrational credulity comes from -- yet another question I've asked here more than once.  But to illustrate this capacity for people to buy into ideas no matter how completely ridiculous they are, I decided to have a little fun today.

Below are ten claims I dug up this morning.  Five of them are from satirical websites, and five are serious -- i.e., there are actually people who think these views are true.  See if you can figure out which are which.

1. The movie Despicable Me is rife with satanic messages.  In particular, the "minions" were designed to trick children into accepting their role as the mindless slaves of Lucifer.
2. The Israeli town of Petah Tivka is a model made out of cardboard.  Baron Edmond de Rothschild conspired with the Israeli government to make a beautiful-appearing town at the site to intimidate the Palestinians.
3. There is an attempted coup going on, right now, amongst the Illuminati.  A cabal of radical atheists have infiltrated the Illuminati and are trying to overthrow the leaders, and institute laws forcing atheism to be mandatory worldwide, and religious belief (of any kind) punishable by death.
4. The US has declared war on a coalition comprised of China and Russia, because the Chinese and Russians were trying to block the dominance of the American corporate world, headed by David Rothschild and the Jews.  There have already been nuclear detonations, but the US media is covering it up.
5. Ellen Pao, chairperson of Reddit, is a puppet of the New World Order and rules the site with an iron fist.  Her employees seed the site with disinformation, deleting or downvoting posts that don't toe the party line (or that might threaten to reveal what's going on).  The site also has links to satanism.
6. The mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia is paying pilots to chemtrail the city with chemicals that will turn the citizens into mindless zombies.  One guy found out about the plan, so the mayor sent cyborg sea otters up the Powell River to attack the guy's house.  They broke through a wall, but the guy got away.
7. The German city of Bielefeld does not exist.  The town that existed at the site was damaged during World War I and razed completely during World War II, and never rebuilt.  The German government has kept up the façade of Bielefeld's existence to save face.
8. The Charleston church shooting was a hoax, masterminded by President Obama and overseen by Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.  Reverend Clementa Pinkney is still alive and is in hiding.  Dylan Roof isn't a real person, and film footage showing him is faked.
9. Vladimir Putin is in cahoots with some secessionists in Texas to get Texas to break away from the United States, in hopes of triggering a domino effect of secessions similar to the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and the resultant destruction of the United States as a world power.
10. The Tour de France is a hoax.  Every year it is filmed in the same studio, out at Area 51, where the Moon landing films and photographs were made.

Ready for some answers?

1. Real.  This site claims that the whole game is given away by Despicable Me's tag line which is "When the world needed a hero... they called a villain."
2. Satire.  Petah Tivka is real, and the idea that it's only a lot of false fronts has become something of a running joke in Israel.
3. Satire.  As much as I'd love to see this happen, because the whole idea of a "cabal of radical atheists" cracks me up.  The site where this article appears, HardDawn, has tricked thousands of people.  The fact that it's a satire site becomes clearer when you say the website name out loud.  (Get it? Hur hur hur.)
4. Real.  This one is from the notorious site Before It's News, which should be all you need to know.
5. Satire.  Although to hear some Redditors talk, you'd think it was true.  Note that the website name is NaturalNewd -- one letter off from another notorious site.  The article further claims that the site Digg went down the tubes after its owner sacrificed a baby to Baphomet to boost their hit rate, and Jesus objected.
6. Real.  This site, owned by one Callum Houston, has a whole series called "Things I've Seen in the Powell River," which you should definitely check out  But the cyborg sea otters by far are my favorite.
7. Satire.  The "Bielefeld Conspiracy" started as an online joke amongst some German college students, after they kept receiving three "no" answers in a row from everyone they asked the following questions: (1) Have you ever been to Bielefeld? (2) Do you know anyone from Bielefeld? (3) Do you know anyone who has ever been to Bielefeld?  Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a little fun with it after she mentioned a town meeting she'd attended in Bielefeld, ending with, "... if it exists at all."  She then looked puzzled and added, "I had the impression I was there."
8. Real.  The whole "crisis actor" thing just makes me nauseated, but seems to crop up every time there's a well-publicized shooting.  I'm only surprised it took them this long to jump on the Charleston massacre.
9. Real.  That Putin is a pretty tricky guy.  Although I must say that it doesn't take much to get the secessionist wackos in Texas yammering.
10. Satire.  The Danish satirical news program De Uaktuelle Nyheder did a story a few years ago that the Tour de France was a hoax, and in subsequent followups went on to say first that the French language was gibberish, and finally that France itself didn't exist.

How'd you do?

You know, there's a problem with this whole thing, which is that once something appears in print, there will be people who will believe it.  Look at the fact that HardDawn (the same site that claims that radical atheists are taking over the Illuminati, #3 above) had an article back in 2013 that chemtrails were killing the angels in heaven, and I am still seeing that one posted as real on conspiracy sites.

So the line between satire and belief just keeps getting blurrier and blurrier.  Which should not surprise regular readers of this blog, but is a conclusion that makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

Shooting down the false flag

I'm frequently asked how I can write daily on this blog without losing my marbles.  Deliberately immersing myself in the silly things some people believe, you'd think, would be a recipe for cynicism and/or despair.

The truth is, I'm still generally an optimist.  When you think about it, it'd be kind of silly to have a blog like this if I thought gullibility was incurable.  I'm confident that people can adopt a skeptical outlook, and can choose to look at the world through the lens of evidence and logic.

But it doesn't mean I don't sometimes get angry.

The thing that pushes the rage button the hardest is the combination of stubborn ignorance and lack of compassion.  When someone makes a claim that not only flies in the face of rationality, but dehumanizes and demeans, that makes me see red.

Like the claim that is popping up all over conspiracy websites, that the whole Ebola epidemic is being faked by "crisis actors."

Scientists working at the site of an Ebola outbreak [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I've dealt with this topic before, but from the standpoint of actors staging school shootings -- a heinous enough claim.  But now, we have people saying that there's no such thing as Ebola.  The whole thing, they say, was invented so as to give world leaders (especially President Obama) the leverage to declare martial law and turn the United States into a dictatorship.

There's been buzz about this on the r/conspiracy subreddit, which is hardly surprising given that this is where the whole "crisis actors" nonsense gained traction after the Sandy Hook massacre.  Here's how it's being framed:

You have them in Africa, in New York, San Francisco, Haiti, and other places. Yes, they are sick and they are dying. But that doesn’t make an epidemic, because the tiny virus that was supposed to be at the bottom of all this is missing from the equation. 

This tells you how to invent a fake epidemic. You take many sick and dying people, and you claim there is one germ that is causing all the trouble. You promote a few diagnostic tests that ‘will confirm the presence of the germ’ and you tell people they must be tested. 

But the tests don’t really confirm the presence of the germ. They’re deceptive and useless. Of course, the test will register positive in many cases. These positive people are said to be victims of the one germ that is at the root of the epidemic. 

You tie together and link together people who are sick and dying for various reasons, and you claim they’re all dying because of the One Germ. That gives you a powerful psychological ploy, because people are always looking for the one unified thing that explains a whole host of disturbing facts. You give them what they want.

This is from a blog post from Jon Rappoport, who (by the way) also claims that there's no such thing as SARS, and that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

Mad yet?  Wait till you see the piece that showed up over at UFO Blogger yesterday -- that hospitals are hiring actors to feign symptoms of Ebola, for some undisclosed purpose.  The author of the post includes the following quote from New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation's chief medical officer, Dr. Ross Wilson: "If those patients have symptoms and a travel history we would expect them to be isolated within a few minutes in that emergency room.  Then we would call the Department of Health and complete a further work-up with the patient being isolated."

My guess is that the reason (assuming the story isn't an out-and-out lie) is to train hospital staff in proper protocol for dealing with a dangerous virus, but that isn't the implication.  The implication is that the whole thing is fake, that what the CDC is saying is nothing more than a smokescreen.

A "false flag."  Oh, how I hate that phrase.  And no, I'm not going to present the evidence to the contrary, because a simple online search for scientific papers about this disease will turn up so much information that I wouldn't have room to fit it in this post.

The degree to which this kind of claim is irresponsible is staggering, but so is the lack of simple compassion.  There have been 4,000 deaths from this hideous disease to date, with every indication that we haven't even neared the peak.  There are five suspected and one confirmed cases in Spain, and another couple of suspected cases here in the United States besides the one man who died two days ago -- pointing to the possibility that we may have a bigger problem than anyone thought at first.  To demean the suffering of the victims, and the efforts of the medical establishment to combat this virus, is disrespectful at best and ugly, belittling propaganda at worst.

So yeah, sometimes I do get angry.  Like this morning.  I will admit to having yelled, "Are you fucking kidding me?" at my computer when I discovered this story.  But I remain confident that the good guys -- the compassionate, rational, kind, honorable people -- still far outnumber the bad.

And as for the bottom-feeders who are currently claiming that the Ebola epidemic is fake; I'd like to suggest that you crawl back in your holes, and get out of the way of the people who are actually doing something to help the people who are suffering from this very real, and very dangerous, virus.

James Foley, and the moral bankruptcy of the conspiracy theorists

Every time I think the conspiracy theorists can sink no lower, they outdo themselves.

Not that it's easy.  These are the people who think that everything from the Sandy Hook massacre to the Boston Marathon bombing were "false flags" to distract us from what the Evil Government is doing, or else outright hoaxes staged by "crisis actors."  They've dogged the footsteps of bereaved parents who have lost children to school shooters, desperate to prove that their child never existed, thereby ranking even lower on the Great Chain of Being than the members of the Westboro Baptist Church (who fall somewhere below slime molds themselves).  They spread their fear messages amongst the gullible, turning jet contrails into toxic "chemtrails," fluoridation of water into a campaign by the government to convert us all into mindless drones, and vaccination programs into a plan by "Big Pharma" to give our children autism, ALS, and lord alone knows what else.

And now they have latched onto the brutal beheading of James Foley by the butchers of ISIS as the latest target of their poisonous nonsense.

The flag of jihad [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

We have the conversation over at the r/conspiracy subreddit claiming that ISIS is an arm of the CIA.  Worse still, from the site Epoch Times comes a claim that the execution video itself is a fake, and that the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is actually an Israeli Jew named Elliott Shimon who is on the payroll of Mossad.  Other claims are floating around various social media, suggesting that Obama operatives staged the execution (or possibly carried it out for real) to distract us from the riots in Ferguson or the illegal alien crisis or the ongoing non-scandal surrounding Benghazi.

(And just for the record: though I provided links to the r/conspiracy thread and the Epoch Times article, I am actively recommending that you don't click them, unless you really enjoy experiencing outrage at near-aneurysm levels.)

But to the people promoting these ridiculous claims, I have only the following to say:

Have you no shame at all?

A man died, for fuck's sake, slaughtered in the desert with less dignity than we accord cattle in an abattoir.  His executioner's blank eyes are the face of true human evil, and the cause he belongs to is representative of the worst human nature can do.  I am by nature and philosophy a pacifist, but reading about Foley's horrifying last moments (I refuse to watch the video, and so should you) makes me roundly in favor of tactical strikes to wipe every last member of ISIS off the face of the earth.  These subhumans deserve no better.

And you dare to bend this story to fit your twisted little view of humanity?  You have only proven your own moral bankruptcy, if there was any doubt of that left.  Your lies are nearly as sickening as the brutal jihadist message of ISIS itself, because you, like they, have no apparent regard for the life and dignity of a human being who (by all accounts) was a kind, courageous, intelligent man whose death should be mourned in peace by his family and friends, not used as a means for bolstering a warped worldview.

It shouldn't surprise me by now.  You people are willing to lie about damn near everything else, why wouldn't I expect you to lie about this?

But it always does, somehow.  I always think, "This, at least, is beneath even the conspiracy theorists."

And I'm always wrong.

"Crisis actors:" the conspiracy theorists reach a new low

Whenever I think the conspiracy theorists of the world have reached an all-time low, and can go no lower, they surprise me by getting out the shovels.

Of course, it's hard to beat the "9/11 is an inside job" thing.  Believe me, I'm no apologist for much of what our government does, but the idea that government operatives would bomb the World Trade Center, costing over a thousand lives, in order to provide false pretenses for entering a war against Iraq, is absurd and reprehensible.  And of course, you have the ongoing chemtrails foolishness, blaming the government (acting through HAARP, or some chemical additive to jet fuel, or both) for Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy -- as if nature by itself isn't good enough at cooking up disastrous storms.

But now we have a new nadir.  The contention:  the Sandy Hook massacre never happened.  No children were killed.  The grieving parents and horrified first-responders were actors.  The whole thing was set up by the government...

... to give momentum for overturning the Second Amendment.

Don't believe me?  Go here if you can stand to, where you can watch a video explaining the whole thing (I got through about five minutes of it before nausea forced me to shut it off).  Otherwise, perhaps a photograph will suffice:

The whole thing is thoroughly debunked in this link at Snopes; but that won't stop the conspiracy nuts, of course.  These are the same people who think that Theodore Roosevelt's son, Kermit Roosevelt, was an actor who played the part of Adolf Hitler during World War II (in this mythical version of world history, no Jews were killed in concentration camps), and was spirited away by American CIA agents after the war was over, and spent the rest of his life as... Walt Disney.

Again, if you don't believe me... [link]

So it's not like any amount of evidence is going to convince these people.  They have long since abandoned any respect for actual evidence, logic, and rationality for their own warped view of humanity.

You know, despite my poking fun at irrational beliefs, I really do try to be tolerant.  I do the best I can to understand people whose views differ from my own, and not just to be an arrogant asshole.  I really, honestly believe that everyone has a right to his/her own opinions, as long as those opinions don't include forcing me to believe differently than I do.

I might make an exception in the case of these folks, however.  It is my considered stance that these folks are badly in need of a punch in the jaw.  If they really think that anyone, anyone has the right to demean what the parents, friends, and community of the victims of the Sandy Hook killings went through (and are still going through), in order to promote their own ridiculous, counterfactual worldview -- well, all I can say is that they're wrong.  And somehow they should be forced to take down that website, and after that, vanish into the obscurity that they so richly deserve.