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an 8 26

White House UFO adviser says space aliens don't care about Trump

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AN 7 26

On Tuesday President Donald Trump appointed a famous and controversial Harvard theoretical physicist, cosmologist and astronomer to lead a group of scientists to investigate UFOs and whether they pose a national security threat.

Dr. Avi Loeb, who led Harvard’s astronomy department until 2020 and is widely respected for his research into black holes, was publicly tapped by the Trump administration on Tuesday, according to a report by the Associated Press. In 2022, Dr. Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science writer who frequently criticized Loeb’s work, told this journalist for Salon that Loeb’s research into a mysterious space object that crashed into the ocean, ‘Oumuamua, was a “travesty.” By contrast, Loeb is very popular among the lay UFO fan community, and more than three dozen scientists co-authored a 2023 paper with him in the scientific publication Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation advocating his recommended methods for learning more about UFOs (unidentified flying objects) and UAPS (unidentified anomalous phenomena).

Speaking to AlterNet about his recent appointment, Loeb broke down how he learned about his appointment and what he believes it could mean for American politics.

“I was contacted by the office of the Director of National Intelligence and was asked to lead a council that will advise that office, the ODNI, the White House, the FBI, and the intelligence community, and of course the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon, providing scientific advice to figure out the nature of unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAP,” Loeb told AlterNet. “And it looks like, if they were sure that they're dealing with human-made objects, they would have a classified memo exchange within the Pentagon or the intelligence agencies. But the fact that they're reaching out to the scientific community for help implies that they cannot really tell that some of these things are definitely human-made. And obviously, if they're human-made, there would be concern for national security, given that these objects are found near strategic assets.”

Because the Trump administration reached out to Loeb, he believes this means that “they really need advice.” He continued by explaining how he will apply the scientific method to his directives.

“First we have to review any information that they can share with us, with the council,” Loeb told AlterNet. “So I first assembled a team of 15 scientists who are exceptional, who have expertise in the physics of oceanography, statistics, and psychology, because these objects are interacting with humans. And we need all these aspects to understand the reported events. And we already submitted, since I assembled this team — and it's really an exceptional team, people who have a fresh mind with respect to the phenomena, I deliberately did not select people with an agenda or baggage regarding their views on the subject, because we need to provide scientific advice — and we already submitted a request for more than 50 items of information on specific incidents, and perhaps materials that the US government might have, and we should see what we hear in response.”

Because Loeb and his scientific team will only analyze unclassified information, they will be able to share their findings with the public, guaranteeing transparency about a subject that is often contentious. Coincidentally, he noted that he recently examined materials released on June 12th of this year, the same day as the Steven Spielberg movie “Disclosure Day,” which explicitly discusses how humanity could be brought together by the revelation that extraterrestrial life exists.

While Loeb admitted that he is not a fan of science fiction “because very often it violates the laws of physics,” he admitted that he feels the sense of wonder and hope captured by Spielberg’s motion picture.

“I feel like a kid in a candy store, in a way, as long as we receive sufficient information that is substantive — because the quality of our deliberations, our analysis, will reflect the quality of the data that we receive,” Loeb told AlterNet. “Science is guided by data. So what I say is, let's keep our eyes on the orbs, not on social media. It's not a matter of opinions — we just need the data, the evidence, just like a detective. So it's a great privilege for me to be involved in figuring things out.”

He added, “Of course, if we find a non-human-made technological object, the implications would be huge for our future. Because, first, we might learn about new science, new technologies. Second, it might imply that we're not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking.

And my hope is that it'll be just like a knock on the door — when all family members in the house hear a knock on the door by a neighbor, all the loud arguments quiet down. So it'll change our priorities from conflicts, which you find every day in the news, to cooperation and response to this neighbor that we just found. It's sort of akin to finding a sibling in our family of intelligent civilizations. And for those people who have religious beliefs, they should not necessarily assume that God is a parent who can attend to only one child.”

Also like “Disclosure Day,” Loeb believes that the discovery of alien organisms could help humanity overcome the differences that sharply divide us. When asked about whether he has yet met President Trump (he said has not), he pivoted to that subject.

“The interesting aspect of this is that both Republican and Democrat members of the House and the Senate are working together on this subject of disclosure, and everyone is excited,” Loeb told AlterNet while laughing. “It's a reminder that science is better than politics. What do I mean by science is better than politics? It brings people together rather than separating them. So in an age where you have a lot of polarization as a result of social media, as a result of political upheaval and so forth, it's really refreshing to find a subject where everyone comes together.”

He then observed, “I was in the US Senate on Thursday for the UAP Disclosure Forum, and there were members of Congress there — you could see half of them were Republicans, half were Democrats, and they were all rooting for it. I find that very refreshing. And I think that is a reflection of what will happen if we do find that we are being visited, because then the mindset will change. People will stop arguing with each other on relatively mundane matters when they realize something cosmologically important — that we are not alone. And it'll change everything.”

Responding to a question from AlterNet about Loeb’s appointment, Siegel reiterated the disdain for Loeb he first expressed to this journalist four years ago.

“This is extremely typical and to be expected of the Trump Administration,” Siegel told AlterNet. “Legitimate science conducted by those who value truth, facts, and the common good of humanity has repeatedly been rejected by this Presidential Administration in favor of sensationalism, grift, and self-enrichment. On those metrics, there is no better qualified astronomer in the country than Avi Loeb, who will no doubt find himself surrounded by like-minded individuals like Dr. Oz, Lee Zeldin, and RFK Jr. in the quest to destroy what remains of the American scientific enterprise entirely, and to replace it with Lysenko-esque policies that will lead to both long-term and short-term harm to all.”

Unlike Siegel, Dr. Franck Marchis — the CEO of and an astronomer at the SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) — had a mixture of praise and criticism for Loeb.

“I also think Avi too often starts with the exciting explanation before the data are strong enough to support it,” Marchis told AlterNet. “That is not how science works. Science is not about making a bold assumption first and then looking for evidence to confirm it. Science is about collecting calibrated data, sharing it, letting other teams verify it, and being ready to change your mind.”

He added, “I also disagree with the idea that scientists are somehow hiding the truth. Most scientists, including my colleagues at the SETI Institute, I know are open, curious, imaginative, and very happy to be surprised. We just know that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Check ourrecent discussion with Jill Tarter [a fellow SETI astronomer] for instance. This is exactly why we are building SkyMapper and SkySphere. The goal is to observe the sky all the time, from many places, with instruments that can produce time-stamped and verifiable data.”

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rww

05/14/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

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AN 5 26

Lauren Boebert: Space aliens are 'fallen angels' - Alternet.org

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WHO WAS TELEPORTED TO WAFFLE HOUSE

MSN

https://www.msn.com › en-us › news › us › fema-chief-doubles-down-on-wild-claim-he-teleported-to-waffle-house › ar-AA1ZUzFG

FEMA chief doubles down on wild claim he teleported to Waffle House - MSN

A top FEMA official is doubling down on claims he was teleported over 50 miles to a Waffle House, slamming "haters" who don't believe him.

GUK

  1. https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › 2026 › mar › 20 › fema-gregg-phillips-waffle-house
Top US Fema official claims to have teleported to a Waffle House before

Mar 20, 2026A far-right conspiracy theorist turned high-ranking official at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) claims to have once teleported to a Waffle House. Gregg Phillips, who in December ...

NEW REP

President Donald Trump has finally weighed in on that FEMA official who claims he teleported to a Waffle House—and it’s a doozy.

Gregg Phillips, who serves as associate administrator for the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has repeatedly doubled down on claims that he was instantaneously transported 50 miles to one of the popular chain restaurant’s locations.

In a brief interview with CNN’s KFile, Trump was directly asked about Phillips’s wild journey.

“What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?” Trump said.

After being assured that Phillips was very much not kidding, Trump replied: “I don’t know anything about him teleporting.… It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.”

Trump’s apparent disbelief underscores just how little the president knows—or cares—about anyone who works for him. Phillips has made a slew of outrageous claims in the past. He previously claimed to have spoken with God and with Satan, and claimed that he was “already dead” but was kept around to do God’s work. Phillips has said that many of these instances occurred while he was undergoing self-directed treatment for metastatic bone cancer, using ivermectin and fenbendazole.

After a 2025 incident where he said he collapsed at a Lowes and came to in a McDonald’s parking lot, with 15,000 steps logged in his health app and a Big Mac in his lap, he insisted: “The whole space and time thing, continuum, got all—it fell with me.”

“This isn’t a health thing. This isn’t the cancer. This isn’t me. This is a spiritual thing,” he said.

But one of his rather outrageous claims may have been exactly what kept him in Trump’s circles. Phillips is a major proponent of the “Big Lie,” the conspiracy theory that Trump only lost the 2020 election because it was rigged against him.

Since Phillips’s outlandish claims first began to circulate in March, FEMA’s No. 3 official has been relegated to the sidelines of his own agency—enraging Phillips, multiple insiders at FEMA told CNN.

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maj report

4 26 gaetz ufo breeding

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BOEBERT HILLARY DEPO EPSTEIN PIZZAGATE AND UFO; SHE SAID RELAESE FILES?

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AN TC LEGIT 3 26

President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon and other federal agencies to begin releasing government files related to UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena – called UAP – in February 2026, following years of pressure from Congress, military whistleblowers and the public.

Congress formally mandated UAP investigations through the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2022. The Pentagon’s official UAP investigative body, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, now carries a caseload exceeding 2,000 reports dating back to 1945. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed this figure earlier this year.

The cases were submitted by military personnel, pilots and government employees describing aerial objects that could not be explained as known aircraft, drones or weather phenomena. Governments in Japan, France, Brazil and Canada also have their own formal UAP investigation programs.

Yet modern research universities remain almost entirely absent from this conversation. No major university has established a dedicated UAP research center. No federal science agency offers competitive grants for UAP inquiry. No doctoral programs train researchers in UAP methodology. The gap between what governments openly acknowledge and what universities are willing to study is, at this point, difficult to explain on purely intellectual grounds.

I have navigated this gap while conducting my own UAP research. My work developing the temporal aerospace correlation tool, a standardized framework for correlating civilian UAP sighting reports with documented rocket launch activity from Cape Canaveral, is currently under peer review at Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies.

Designing that framework meant making methodological decisions without community standards, without institutional funding and without the professional infrastructure many researchers in established fields take for granted. What is missing is not interest or data – it is the shared scaffolding that turns isolated curiosity into cumulative science.

Stigma is measurable

The most rigorous evidence for the gap between faculty interest in UAP and faculty willingness to study it UAP comes from peer-reviewed studies by Marissa Yingling, Charlton Yingling and Bethany Bell, published in the scholarly journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Across 14 disciplines at 144 major U.S. research universities, 1,460 faculty responded to their 2023 national survey. Most surveyed believed UAP research was important. Curiosity outweighed skepticism in every discipline that was part of the study. Nearly one-fifth had personally observed something aerial they could not identify. Yet fewer than 1% had ever conducted UAP-related research.

The gap was not explained by intellectual dismissal, but it was in part explained by fear. Researchers were not primarily deterred by intellectual skepticism because they doubted the topic’s merits. Instead, they feared they might lose funding, face ridicule from colleagues or find their careers quietly derailed. Faculty reported being told to “be careful.”

A 2024 follow-up study found that roughly 28% said they might vote against a colleague’s tenure case for conducting UAP research, even when they personally believed the topic warranted study.

Historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities suppress anomalous questions not because those questions are unanswerable, but because they fall outside the boundaries the community has collectively decided are worth investigating.

Sociologist Thomas Gieryn called this suppression “boundary work,” referring to the active process by which scientists police what counts as legitimate science.

For UAP researchers, the data and tools to study the phenomenon exist. What may not exist is social permission to use them without professional consequence.

Creating an academic discipline

Academic disciplines do not emerge spontaneously. They require dedicated journals, agreed-upon methods, graduate programs and professional societies.

The history of cognitive neuroscience demonstrates how disciplines emerge. Before the 1980s, researchers at the intersection of neuroscience and cognitive psychology faced resistance from both parent disciplines.

These fields achieved mainstream acceptance only after targeted funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, new brain-imaging tools and the gradual formation of academic programs that created career pathways for researchers. Researchers at the nexus of these fields did not wait for central questions to be resolved. They built infrastructure, and the infrastructure made progress possible.

UAP studies as a discipline is developing some of these elements, but largely outside universities. The Society for UAP Studies, a nonprofit of scholars and researchers, operates Limina as a double-blind, peer-reviewed journal and has convened international symposia drawing researchers from physics, philosophy of science and the social sciences. But a nonprofit scholarly society without tenured faculty does not constitute a discipline.

To turn UAP studies into a recognized academic field would require three things.

First, funding. The Yingling studies found that competitive research grants would do more to unlock faculty participation than any other single factor. Without grants, researchers cannot hire students to assist them, maintain instruments or sustain the multiyear projects that produce meaningful results.

Second, shared methodological standards – these would entail agreed-upon procedures for collecting, recording and evaluating UAP reports – would mean findings from one research group can be compared and built upon by others.

Third, institutions could publicly affirm that they will evaluate appropriately rigorous UAP scholarship on its scientific merits during tenure reviews. Several universities have already done this for gun violence research and psychedelic-assisted therapy studies.

These are not isolated examples. Research into near-death experiences and adverse childhood experiences followed similar trajectories, moving from being a professional liability to mainstream legitimacy after the removal of institutional barriers.

The international comparison

This gap in UAP scholarship is unique to the United States. France’s GEIPAN, a dedicated investigation unit within its national space agency, has operated since 1977. It has publicly archived approximately 5,300 French UAP cases, of which about 2% to 3% remain unexplained after rigorous analysis.

In 2020, Japan formalized UAP reporting protocols for its Self-Defense Forces, the branch of the Japanese military responsible for national defense. By June 2024, more than 80 lawmakers had formed a parliamentary UAP investigation group that by May 2025 had formally proposed a dedicated UAP research office to the defense minister. Canada launched its own multiagency UAP investigation survey in 2023.

None of these actions has produced a corresponding response from American research universities. Universities provide independent, peer-reviewed analyses that government programs structurally cannot.

The University of Würzburg in Germany became the first Western university to officially recognize UAP as a legitimate object of academic research in 2022, when it formally added UAP investigation to its research canon. Researchers at Stockholm University and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden have been actively publishing peer-reviewed UAP research since 2017, most recently in Scientific Reports in October 2025.

Congress has passed legislation, the Pentagon is reporting on its investigations, and the president has directed federal agencies to begin releasing records. So the question no longer is whether governments take UAP seriously – it is whether universities will follow, and which ones will get there first.

Darrell Evans, Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability, Purdue University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AN 11 25

A 1956 book favored by UFO believers that is considered "an enduring classic in the fields of new religious studies, cult research, and social psychology," is being called into question as a potential lie, according to Anna Merlan in Mother Jones.

When Prophecy Fails, written by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, details a study of a UFO cult known as the Seekers that predicted the end of the world.

The book also introduced the theory of cognitive dissonance, which explains the psychological mechanisms for how people cope when theirdeeply held beliefs are contradicted by reality.

"The book is gripping, an in-depth social and psychological study of Martin’s group and how they behaved, both as it was forming and after their prophetic visions failed to take place," Merlan explains, adding that "it has served as a key basis for the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance."

That theory "was taken further by Festinger, who wrote a widely-cited followup book on cognitive dissonance and how people try to engage in 'dissonance reduction' to reduce the psychological pressure and unease they experience when confronted with conflicting information," she notes.

But a new study that examined Festinger’s recently unsealed papers claims that the book "leans on lies, omissions and serious manipulation," Merlan says.

"The article, published this month in the peer-reviewed Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,also argues that, contrary to the researchers’ longstanding narrative, the group members all showed clear signs of quickly abandoning their beliefs when the UFOs failed to arrive, and that the group soon dissolved," Mother Jones reports.

Thomas Kelly, the author of the article, says "while core members of the group stayed active in UFO spaces, they did not keep insisting on a world-ending flood, or that aliens would land and take them away."

The Seekers, Kelly notes, were quick to disavow those beliefs and eventually rebranded.

The group's leader Dorothy Martin "distanced herself completely from these events, even rewriting the story of how she developed her psychic powers," Kelly writes.

"Kelly’s paper not only undercuts the researchers’ claims and their application of the theory developed from them, but also alleges they committed scientific misconduct, including 'fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation,'" Merlan explains.

Kelly says that researchers "twisted the group’s behavior to fit their thesis, downplaying the proselytization they did before the prophecy failed and playing up any proselytization that occurred after."

Merlan notes that this interpretation is key, "because the thesis of When Prophecy Fails is clear: after Martin’s failed prophecy, her group doubled down, not only by refusing to acknowledge that their core predictions had utterly failed, but banding together with a new zeal to spread them."

"The interference Kelly uncovered goes beyond manipulation," Merlan notes, but not everyone agrees with Kelly's interpretation.

Poulomi Saha, a University of California-Berkeley associate professor in critical theory who is writing a book on the cultural fascination with cults, says Kelly used a narrow reading of limited materials to draw his conclusion.

"This author ends up doing what he accuses the authors of When Prophecy Fails of doing, which is cherrypicking evidence," Saha says of Kelly, adding, “if we want to critique the methods and think about how methodology has changed in 70 years, I would encourage that. We’re talking about different academic and scholarly methods 70 years ago around things like participant observation.”

Saha also says that Kelly was “very dismissive” of the fact that group members continued to believe in UFOs.

Thibault Le Texier, an associate researcher at France’s European Centre for Sociology and Political Science, says that "There are findings that people want to hear and findings that people don’t want to hear,” and regardless of what people believe, the book will probably continue to "gain a lot of attention in spite of being debunked."

"It’s also because these are fascinating stories, as riveting as a great movie," he adds.

Merlan agrees, saying, "For now, at least, Prophecycontinues to be widely referred to as a classic of the genre. The aliens, it must be said, have not yet landed."

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10/09/2025 rww

by Kyle Mantyla

Nathan J. Robinson @ Current Affairs: The Rise of Nick Fuentes Should Horrify Us All

A neo-Nazi is trying to fill the void left by the failures of the two major parties. Unless Americans are offered a visionary alternative, Fuentes’ toxic ideology may flourish.

Edith Olmstead @ The New Republic: Pizzagate Guy Compares Trump Fighting Antifa to Rise of Hitler

Did MAGA activist Jack Posobiec just accidentally compare President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler?

Mary C. Curtis @ Roll Call: Where are those ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags now?

The outrage on the right is gone, even as their nightmares come true.

J. David Goodman @ The New York Times: Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Criticizes National Guard Deployment in Chicago

Gov. Kevin Stitt, the current chairman of the National Governors Association, broke with Texas, saying, “Oklahomans would lose their mind” if Illinois sent troops to their red state.

Thomas Zimmer @ Democracy Americana: We need to talk about Russell Vought – But Properly

Why certain mainstream outlets insist on sanitizing Vought as a devout “small government” conservative – and what actually animates his war against pluralistic democracy.

David Moye @ HuffPost: Rep. Lauren Boebert Running For Reelection On 'Are Aliens Real?' Platform

One political analyst predicted the pro-ET platform might "raise a few thousand dollars, but she’s also going to get a lot of really weird looks.”

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SYNCRETIC MEME REMIX?

AFP has debunked other claims about the Los Angeles fires.

Addressing the spread of conspiracies

By coincidence, on the day the wildfires started, Facebook announced it was ending its third party fact checking program and loosening its automated systems that police policy violations, instead relying more on users to report issues before they take action. The platform is adopting a crowdsourced "community notes" system, similar to Elon Musk's X.

Dancy said conspiracy theorists are "benefitting from the information revolution" we live in. "It's an attention economy, and conspiracy theories get attention," Dancy said.

He advocates for regulating social media algorithms that prioritize sensational content.

Richards, who wrote a thesis about climate conspiracy theories circulating on TikTok, agreed.

The Storm Is Coming: Climate Change and Conspiracy Theories on TikTok Written by Abbie Richards 1048585 MSc. Thesis Environmental Policy Group Supervisor: Dr. Mattijs Smits December 2022

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DL file:///C:/Users/patmc/OneDrive/Documents/BOOK/storm_is_coming_climate_change_and_conspiracy_the-groen_kennisnet_590388.pdf

"You're fighting against algorithms that are designed for profit and not for creating a well-informed and healthy society," she said.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition and to Friends of the Earth for their support. Many thanks to the kind researchers at the Algorithmic Transparency Institute who allowed me to use their tool Junkipedia. Special thanks to Dr. Rhianna Rogers for her mentorship. To EcoTok, thank you for teaching me about the power of community.

Abstract

:{ :{Conspiracy theories are sense-making tools that frequently arise during periods of high anxiety and uncertainty. It is a reasonable assumption that they may proliferate in response to the increasing devastation caused by anthropogenic climate change. While previous research into climate change conspiracy theories has explored the relationship between conspiracy theories and climate change denialism, little is known about their broader relationship with climate change as an experience of the material and social worlds.}:

:{To examine this interaction, this thesis provides a qualitative analysis of 96 socio-ecological conspiracy theories on the social media platform TikTok. Collected via a user-centric, exploratory research methodology, these videos were found to contain:{ six dominant themes: anti-oil, weather manipulation, fear of a “green agenda,” supply control, science rejection, and apocalypse. }:

Further analysis found that conspiracy narratives related to climate change in either cause, significance, effect, or response. These conspiracy theories were found to provide a means of interpreting climate change outside of a climate science framework. }:

This conspiratorial framework of interpretation seemingly allowed users to experience climate change without attributing it to anthropogenic causes such as the dependence on fossil fuels. Using theoretical elements from political ecology as well as system justification theory from social psychology, these major themes were largely found to dismiss the need for urgent systemic climate action. While the consequences of climate change were recognized, users frequently attributed them to scapegoated groups or higher powers rather than to systems in which they are complicit.}:

... By applying system justification theory to the conspiracy themes

identified, I examined the conspiracy narratives’ relationship to support for climate action. I

:{:{found that these narratives provided users with a framework for experiencing and processing climate change outside of a climate science framework.}:

Furthermore, most of these conspiracy}:

narratives implicitly rejected the need for climate action and frequently offered alternative

solutions to climate change such as scapegoating or spiritual solutionism.

Using a political ecology framework to interpret this phenomenon within a socio-ecological

context, I identified the implementation of conspiracy frameworks as means of interpreting

:{:{climate change outside of the scope of climate science.}:

These frameworks allow for the lived}:

experience of anthropogenic climate change to coexist while still justifying a societal

dependence on fossil fuels. In this sense, these frameworks serve as extensions of traditional

climate denialism.

As climate change continues to impact society to increasingly devastating degrees, causing

feelings of existential threat, conspiracy frameworks of interpretation may become a means of

sense-making. These frameworks may provide mEANING AND CERTAINTY IN THE FACE OF

74

existential threat while simultaneously relieving believers’ feelings of complicity and

responsibility. Furthermore, the tendency of the conspiracy narratives in the data set to blame

environmental problems on an out-group is extremely concerning, both for the implications for

support of climate action as well as for potential harm to vulnerable groups. Conspiratorial

scapegoating during moments of societal crisis has historically been a motivating factor for

violence committed by individuals as well as by state governments...

...

6.3.3 Spiritual Solutionism

One interesting theme which tied together seemingly unrelated conspiracy theories was

spiritual solutionism. Regardless of whether the narratives feature the Earth shifting into a new

universe, an Anunnaki alien princess warning of climate catastrophes (Figure 24), or language

about “awakenings” and “spiritual warfare,” their relationships to climate action are similar.

While these narratives may present climate change as real (though often not anthropogenic),

the solution they offer is one of internal contemplation and the spiritual unification of humanity.

While this sounds lovely, it alone does not address any causes of climate change. Presenting

spirituality as the solution to the climate crisis may address some of the anxiety of the climate

crisis, but it may also discourage participation in solutions.

Spiritual solutionism seemingly allows for believers to experience anthropogenic climate

change but attribute it to the actions of some higher power. This framework of interpretation

functions as a reinforcement to the fossil fuel status quo. If the effects of climate change are

attributed to an act of God, intergalactic energetic forces, or a shift into a higher dimension,

then they must also be interpreted as beyond humanity’s control. Not only do these conspiracy

57

theories appear to negate the role of fossil fuels in climate change, but they comprehensively

reject the possibility for mitigative action through legislation. No international environmental

policy, no matter how vast, could change the planet’s fate as determined by God (or aliens or

galactic rotations or lapses into parallel universes PIX OF UFO PRINCESS BABE...

SAMPLE SEARCH TERMS:

14

Climate change conspiracy theory: “climate change hoax” or “global warming hoax” or

“climate change fake” or “global warming fake” or “climate conspiracy” or “Great Reset”

or “green scam” or “chemtrails” or “direct energy weapon” or “DEW” or “flat Earth” or

“hollow Earth” or “NASA lies” or “unknown planet” or “ninth planet” or “Nibiru” or

“firmament” or “local sun”

OR

Conspiracy rhetoric: “conspiracy” or “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy tiktok” or

“conspiracytok” or “spiritualitytok” or “woketok” or “conspiracies coming true” or “open

your eyes” or “awake” or “awakened” or “awakening” or “great awakening” or “wake up”

or “spiritual awakening” or “end times” or “media lies” or “matrix” or “redpill” or

“blackpill” or “truth seeker” or “deep state” or “illuminati” or “new world order” or “NWO”

AND

Socio-ecological component: “Climate” or “climate change” or “global warming” or

“weather” or “snow” or “rain” or “storm” or “hail” or “drought” or “flood” or “heat” or “heat

wave” or “high temperature” or “gas” or “gasoline” or “red meat” or “animal agriculture” or

“food shortage” or “water shortage” or “blackouts” or “power outage” or “ESG” or

“Agenda21” or “Agenda 2030” or “United Nations” or “HAARP” or “green agenda” or

“LED lights” or “electric vehicle” or “green energy” or “renewable energy” or “power” or

“electricity” or “renewable” or “recycle” or “plant-based” or “vegan” or “geoengineering”

or “weather modification” or “weather manipulation” or “cloud seeding” or “block out the

sUN...

...

2.2 System-justifying function of conspiracy theories

To understand the political ecology of conspiracy theories, I employ system justification

theory. System justification theory posits that our assessments of social systems and institutions

are influenced by epistemic, existential, and social needs (Feygina, Jost, & Goldsmith, 2009).

People are drawn to conspiracy theories when they promise to satisfy these needs (Douglas,

Sutton, & Cichocka, 2017; Douglas et al., 2019). Though intuition, popular belief, proponents,

and some scholars suggest that conspiracy theories challenge power and subvert social systems

(Sapountzis & Condor, 2013), research suggests that conspiracy theories may reinforce the

status quo (Jolley, Douglas, & Sutton, 2017). Conspiracy theories identify a small group of

wrongdoers, a tangible group who are responsible for the ills of society. These wrongdoers are

not representations of social issues; rather, they are perceived as what is wrong with society.

In this sense, conspiracy theories deflect blame for societal problems to small evil groups often

with nearly supernatural power. By attributing problems to malevolent individuals, conspiracy

theories appear to divert people away from questioning the inherent limitations of their society

and toward accepting the status quo (Jolley, Douglas, & Sutton, 2017). This acceptance of the

status quo also aligns with Douglas and Sutton’s (2014) findings that exposure to conspiracy

theories weakens political engagement. After all, what is the point in voting if the outcome is

already decided by reptilian overlords?

The reality of anthropogenic climate change is not only a threat to our safety and well-being

but also to our identities. It challenges the belief systems of those who have benefited the most

from the fossil fuel status quo and see the existing political and economic structures as fair.

Daggett (2018) and Nelson (2019), argue that it is therefore no coincidence that white,

politically conservative men, at all socioeconomic levels, have consistently been found to

endorse climate change denial more than members of any other demographic in the United

:{:{States.}:

Accepting the reality of a changing climate also requires accepting that the political,}:

social, and economic beliefs and norms that govern our world are imperfect and require change.

For those whom this fossil-fueled society most serves, it may be easier to accept conspiracy

theories than to change their political and economic worldview. In this sense, conspiracy

theories, like all discourse, are a means of enacting power upon socio-ecological systems.

These rhetorical devices tug on the political-ecological web of connections, shaping everything

from consumer habits to global climate policy....

Western Wildfires}:

More

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an 3 25

Two Arizona lawmakers and President Donald Trump’s nominee for a top Pentagon job spoke at a conspiracy theory convention over the weekend, appearing alongside a man who claims God is telling him to sell cryptocurrency.

Arizona lawmakers Sen. Mark Finchem, R-Prescott, and Rep. Leo Biasiucci, R-Lake Havasu, each spoke on multiple panels at the Quantum Summit 2 event, a convention for a fringe conspiracy theory that claims extraterrestrials are helping shape national and global policy.

During one presentation, Finchem was joined by retired Gen. Anthony Tata, Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness at the Pentagon.

Tata had previously been nominated by Trump during his first presidency, but his past inflammatory remarks referring to President Barack Obama as a “terrorist” and a series of Islamaphobic tweets scuttled his appointment.

Tata has appeared at a Quantum Summit event before, speaking at the inaugural event in 2024; photographs of his participation were posted on the event website and in other promotional materials. The White House did not respond to a request for comment or answer questions if they were aware of Tata’s planned attendance.

In a program for the event posted to BlueSky by anonymous independent extremist researcher Arizona Right Watch, Tata was listed as speaking on a panel with Finchem and two individuals who frequently post videos with QAnon related themes. Both Biasucci and Finchem also held their own presentations separately, with Biasucci speaking about his legislation and Finchem about his work with a former Tennessee cop in which Finchem has pursued spurious fraud claims.

“We are a very small team,” Finchem said, alluding to a nonprofit he created that has spread debunked election fraud claims and whose “head researcher,” a former Tennessee cop named Shawn Taylor, was also present at the event. Finchem suggested that those in attendance should donate to help fund his nonprofit’s work.

Quantum Summit 2 was put on in Cape Canaveral, Florida, by believers in the NESARA/GESARA conspiracy theory. In its most basic form, NESARA/GESARA is a conspiracy theory that revolves around a proposed piece of economic reforms from the 1990s called the National Economic Security and Recovery Act that conspiracy theorists believe was enacted in secret by President Bill Clinton but was covered up by the U.S. Supreme Court via a gag order and suppressed by the 9/11 attacks, which were orchestrated by President George W. Bush.

GESARA refers to a supposed global version of the economic reforms that adherents similarly believe were instituted and then hidden.

In the early 2000s, the conspiracy theory gained popularity in the early internet days as Shaini Goodwin, calling herself the “Dove of Oneness,” made bold predictions about NESARA and world events with dubious claims of “insider knowledge.”

Goodwin is a “graduate” of a New-Age school whose leader often goes on homophobic and antisemitic rants and has teamed up with QAnon. It is also tied to the NXIVM cult that was investigated for sex crimes and much more.

The conspiracy theory has regained traction in recent years, as QAnon adherents have flocked to it due to its many similarities.

NESARA/GESARA has often also been called the “grandfather” of the QAnon conspiracy movement. Goodwin initially promoted it as part of a larger scam that defrauded investors of millions of dollars, with promises of the erasure of all debts and the eventual abolishment of the Internal Revenue Services.

Believers often claim that extraterrestrials have been in communication with them or leaders within the movement and are working to promote the NESARA/GESARA agenda. A promotional video for the Cape Canaveral event that Finchem and Biasiucci spoke at mentions discussions around encouraging the U.S. Space Force to work with the “Galactic Federation.” The idea of a Galactic Federation is often discussed in the context of UFO religions and New Age movements.

The event was the brainchild of a man named Mel Carmine, who believes that Trump, using the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is ushering in the NESARA/GESARA plan.

Carmine also has violent beliefs as to what the government should be doing to Trump’s perceived enemies.

“Everything you buy, everything you touch, has a tax,” Carmine said in aFeb. 11 interview with Finchem and Biasucci. “People are tired of the thievery…I believe I’m speaking for the American people. I’m pissed off and I know the American people are pissed off. I know I wanna see guillotines and I’m very sure the American people want to see the guillotines and people hanging from ropes. Are we going to see these people perp walked? Are we going to see these people taken care of?”

Neither Arizona lawmaker responded to the statement, and instead spoke about legislation they’re running about taxes in Arizona.

In that same interview, Finchem claimed that Attorney General Kris Mayes had sent a “threatening” letter to lawmakers regarding cryptocurrency. A spokesperson for Mayes said they were unaware of any letter and noted they were working with Republican lawmaker Rep. Jeff Weninger, R-Chandler, on a cryptocurrency bill.

Neither Biasucci nor Finchem responded to repeated requests for comment.

In an opening video for the event, Carmine also claimed that God showed him the logo of a cryptocurrency in the sky that he is now pushing as the currency that will be backed by NESARA/GESARA. That cryptocurrency was featured prominently throughout the event and is pushed heavily on Carmine’s social media.

The event included a litany of speakers with conspiratorial ties and beliefs ranging from UFOs to a man who claimed that he was the original author of The Matrix movie, a claim that was rejected in court.

On Telegram during the conference, Carmine interviewed a person who claimed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which left 20 children and 6 adults dead, was faked by the government and claimed “anti-gravity tech” and the scam technology known as “med beds” would be forthcoming.

Biasiucci and Finchem are not strangers to conspiracy conventions. In 2021, both spoke at a QAnon convention full of conspiracy theories and antisemitic propaganda.

Finchem has also fundraised with QAnon adherents and had major support from the QAnon community during his failed bid for statewide office in 2022. One of those major supporters, Juan O. Savin, was also a speaker at Quantum Summit 2.

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Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.

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mma 12 24

Right-wing media use reported drone sightings to push conspiracy theories

With bizarre speculation about aliens, missing nuclear weapons, and government plots to fake an alien invasion or hinder a forthcoming Trump presidency, right-wing media figures have stoked panic over recent reports of drone sightings

Written by Jack Winstanley & Gideon Taaffe

Research contributions from Jack Wheatley

Published 12/20/24 mma

Even though officials have stated that recent reports of unidentified drone sightings were mostly innocuous “commercial drones” or “even stars that were mistakenly reported as drones,” right-wing media figures have peddled conspiracy theories alleging the sightings indicated some sort of nefarious activity. While some have pushed wild claims about a supposed “dirty bomb” missing in New Jersey and alien UFOs coming to Earth, others have baselessly alleged various government conspiracy theories, including a “psyop” to hinder Trump's forthcoming presidency, a fake alien invasion, or a power grab.

Some contend the drones are part of a government plot to fake an alien invasion. This idea mirrors the “Project Blue Beam” conspiracy theory alleging global elites will create an alien invasion to justify authoritarian control.

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/alex-jones-declares-independence-aliens/

7 22 an

Infowars host, notorious right-wing provocateur, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has issued a proclamation urging Americans – or whoever is as concerned as he is – to join him in rejecting the tyrannical kakistocracy of humanity's sinister extraterrestrial overlords.

“I declare this July 4th, 2022 to be a Declaration of Independence against the alien force on this planet today waging war against humans and our biology and our very future that is attempting to exterminate the majority of us and force the minority that's left to merge with AI computers and become cyborg slaves of Satan," Jones said on his show.

Watch below via Ron Filipkowski:

READ MORE:Alex Jones claims that 'Donald Trump is set to announce his run for 2024' on Monday July 4th

This was not the first time that Jones has warned the public about the opaque operations that are supposedly undertaken within the federal government's purported evil netherworld.

In 2017, Media Matters for America uncovered a clip of Jones giving a nod to an allegation that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was spearheading a kidnapping ring to deport young Earthlings to Mars to work as forced laborers.

He based this on the occasional failures of exploratory scientific equipment and claimed that he had primary source asseverations by NASA personnel.

Ex-Central Intelligence Agency officer and fellow conspiracy theorist Robert David Steele expressed to Jones that "this may strike your listeners as way out but we actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride. So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony."

Jones gobbled up the bait.

"Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret and I’ve been told by high-level NASA engineers that you have no idea, there is so much stuff going on. But then it goes off into all that, that’s the kind of thing media jumps on. But I know this: we see a bunch of mechanical wreckage on Mars and people say, 'oh look, it looks like mechanics.' They go, 'oh, you’re a conspiracy theorist.' Clearly, they don’t want us looking into what is happening. Every time probes go over they turn them off," he said. "I don’t know about Mars bases, but I know they’ve created massive, thousands of different types of chimeras that are alien lifeforms on this Earth now."

Watch below:

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/tucker-carlson-2653475417/

salon

The American people live in the same country. That does not mean they share a common reality. This inability to agree upon basic empirical facts and the nature of the truth is undermining the country's democracy.

Moreover, a type of collective malignant narcissism, in which entire communities of people believe that their opinions supersede empirical reality and scientific fact, is undermining America's present and future prosperity, stability and freedom, not to mention the basic health of our society.

To wit: A majority of Republicans apparently believe the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that it was somehow "stolen" from him and his followers by Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Roughly 30 percent of Republicans claim to believe that Trump will be reinstated as president this year, something that is not possible under current U.S. law. In addition, 50 percent of Republican voters have convinced themselves that Donald Trump is still the "real" president.

Approximately one in four Republican voters believes in significant portions of the interlocking antisemitic conspiracy theories of the QAnon fictional universe, with its claims about a "deep state" that controls American society and the world through Satanic rituals and human sacrifice. Of course, in the QAnon universe Donald Trump is imagined as a great hero and leader who will defeat this evil plot and restore American "greatness," not-so-subtly understood as a privileged state for white people.

In a season of death during which the coronavirus pandemic has killed at least 600,000 Americans, a new CBS/YouGov poll shows that 29 percent of Republicans will refuse the lifesaving vaccines. They have made this decision largely because of Trump and the right-wing media's disinformation and outright lies about the coronavirus pandemic.

This crisis is far greater than what historian and political scientist Richard Hofstadter warned about in his seminal 1964 Harper's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." In a moment when a proto-fascist white supremacist Republican Party is waging a war on democracy and the truth, the white right's conspiracist thinking represents an existential threat to the safety and security of the United States.

In a recent conversation with Salon about Trump and his followers,psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes offered this warning:

It certainly is a public mental health emergency, and one that has occurred many times in human history. Followers adopt the belief system of a populist tyrant which becomes the new permitted reality, spreading to others who are swept up by their need to be included. That belief system, however fantastical or delusional, remains accepted truth until it is finally shown to be false. Those who have been conned into believing the tyrant's lies find comfort in their conviction that they know the truth, enabling them to feel superior to doubters.

On Jan. 6, right-wing conspiracy theories and other delusional ideas came together in a type of synergistic disaster in the form of the Trump regime's attempted coup and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, as a mass of white supremacists, Christian fascists, right-wing paramilitaries and QAnon believers attempted to nullify the results of the 2020 Election. These groups and ideas are not altogether distinct; there is considerable overlap of ideas and believers between them.

Those outside of the right-wing conspiracy community are likely unaware of the other fantastical beliefs and delusions that played a role in the events of Jan. 6.

Jason Colavito is a professional skeptic, researcher and author whose essays have been featured at The New Republic and Slate. He has also appeared on the History Channel and the American Heroes Channel. Colavito is the author of several books, including "The Mound Builder Myth," "Jason and the Argonauts Through the Ages" and the forthcoming "The Legends of the Pyramids:Myths and Misconceptions about Ancient Egypt."

In this conversation, Colavito places these "new" conspiracy theories about QAnon and the Big Lie about the 2020 election — as well as the decades-long popular obsession with UFOs — in a larger context of fear and anxiety about social change in America, arguing that a particular version of insecure white masculinity (and white supremacy more generally) is central to many of today's most widely believed conspiracy theories.

Colavito also details how right-wing extremists are using UFOs, "ancient aliens" and other supposedly "fun" conspiracy theories to radicalize and recruit new members, and discusses how figures like Rudy Giuliani and Tucker Carlson as well as the "Stop the Steal" plotters figure in that dynamic.

At the end of this conversation, Jason Colavito shares his thoughts about the soon-to-be-released Pentagon report on UFOs — which will almost certainly not report that the Earth is being visited by extraterrestrials.

QAnon, the "Deep State," Donald Trump's Big Lie and and now a report by the U.S. government on UFOs. How do you explain this confluence of events?

First, it's important to understand that all these conspiracy theories are interrelated. It's not like QAnon is completely separate from UFOs and that is completely separate from a conspiracy about Jewish bankers taking over the world — as Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested, by using "Jewish space lasers."These conspiracies are all connected by this idea of rejected knowledge — that there is a secret body of knowledge that can tell a person how the world really works, and is being hidden away from the public by elites.

People who believe in conspiracy theories are searching for a means to understand a complex and changing world in a simple way, one that flatters their own particular prejudices, particular beliefs and feelings that they should be the ones at the center of the historical narrative.

One of the foundational issues involved in all of these conspiracy theories is white supremacy. It doesn't always seem obvious. In many cases, some of the people who believe in one particular variety of conspiracy or another are not themselves motivated primarily by white supremacy, and may not even be aware of the connections to white supremacy. But at their core, many of these conspiracy theories revolve around ideas about the way things were in a semi-idealized past, whether that semi-idealized past was Donald Trump's presidency, the 1950s, the 19th century or some other period. These were times when white people were at the center of the historical narrative in America and the West. In this worldview, everything was great and good and wonderful.

What we see in the United States are demographic trends which are causing a deep disconnect and deep concern among many white people who believe that they are losing economic power, losing status and losing their privileged social position. Of course this is not necessarily true in reality, because white people still control the overwhelming amount of political and economic power in the United States. However, they do see themselves as losing that power because in large measure the actual elites — the people who are running the economy, running politics and so on — have created a situation where the middle-class lifestyle of my generation's parents and grandparents simply does not exist anymore unless you have multiple incomes and the kind of education that requires enormous amounts of debt.

There are all these different societal changes going on and conspiracy theories are a way to try to explain it that lets a person feel as though they are still in control of the narrative. When you look at conspiracy theories in the aggregate, that is the underlying motive behind all of the different expressions of weird and extreme ideas.

How do we explain these waves of conspiracy theories in a larger context?

This is something that we see in United States history over and over again. In the wake of social change people turn toward extreme ideas such as the supernatural and the paranormal and toward conspiracy theories.

Much of what we see today is very similar to what was going on in the 1950s and the 1960s. There was a confluence of paranormal and political conspiracies at the same time. The UFO panic emerged in the late 1940s through the 1960s and did not occur in isolation. It was happening at the same time that McCarthyism and the second Red Scare was burning through the country. People were seeing communists behind every bush and trying to use the power of government to destroy what they perceived to be communist infiltration of the country.

Joe McCarthy had stoked nativism, nationalism and many forms of bigotry in order to gin up a vast conspiracy theory that there was massive communist infiltration. McCarthy, incidentally, didn't limit his hatred just to communists. He assumed that communists, being deviants, were close allies of the homosexuals and therefore he and his allies created a massive purge of gay people from government, leading to decades of oppression and some of the strictest anti-gay laws that the country has ever had. But while he's doing this, the UFO panic is happening outside of Washington and eventually in D.C. itself.

That isn't entirely a coincidence, because in both cases, what you're seeing is that beneath the placid surface of what should have been the most prosperous, peaceful time in American history there is also a deep anxiety because World War II had shaken the foundations of the American Dream. While it was patched together with suburbia and sitcoms and all of those things that conservatives love to hold up as the idealized post-war world, in reality it was a Band-Aid over massive amounts of social change, particularly in terms of the role of women. Women had experienced great liberation during the war years because the men were off fighting abroad.

After the war, men tried to force women back into those pre-war gender roles. The postwar years also saw a growth in the African American civil rights movement.

This comes together with how these social tensions and changes manifest in almost a spiritual way when people look up into the sky and see saviors or demons flying in the heavens. UFOs, right from the beginning, were identified not just as space aliens. Some people thought they were angels harboring the end times of revelation.Others thought that UFOs were secret communist technology infiltrating our skies. This is an example of tensions and ideas that are percolating through politics and society being remixed in symbolic form and ascribed to a supernatural cause. What we're seeing today, I believe, is closely related to that same process, that social tensions are driving a symbolic expression of tension as various conspiracies and supernatural occurrences.

How do we apply those questions of identity and agency to these current conspiracy theories?

It is important to recognize that many of the conspiracy theories are driven by people who are looking for ways to express control over the historical narrative. Most of what later became QAnon was already in circulation on the internet and on cable television years before it came together as a pro-Trump conspiracy theory. QAnon reaches all the way from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" straight through to UFO conspiracy theories, and draws in the Satanic panic and related ideas

These are narratives that we already found circulating on programs like "Ancient Aliens" or "America Unearthed" and other History Channel shows and cable TV series years before. This happened because the cable TV networks understood that their audience is primarily older and white, and in the case of the History Channel largely male, and they program towards that demographic.

To qualify my point: I do not think that cable TV networks were purposely planning to have white nationalist programming or anything like that. We are talking about TV networks staffed by hundreds of people using production companies around the world to produce content. But you have media all over the world driving toward the same ends because they're chasing the same audience. And once you start trying to flatter your audience into thinking that they are empowered and that they are the dynamic drivers of history, you end up in the same place every time.

What did you see in the events of Jan 6. when Trump's followers attacked the U.S. Capitol? In particular, what did you make of the "QAnon shaman," who is a known figure in the right-wing conspiracy world.

The QAnon shaman— who goes by a couple of different names, by the way — represented not just the neo-pagan theme in the QAnon movement and the white nationalist-adjacent conspiracies, but he was appropriating, to himself, other themes and ideas as well. The QAnon shaman has a series of videos that he put up on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms prior to the Jan. 6 attack in which he talked about a vast number of bizarre conspiracy theories.

There he cites people who had appeared on the History Channel by name, discussing a conspiracy theory that was popular among the ancient aliens crowd about "the secret space program." This is the idea that there is a secret space program in which the United States is engaged in warfare with one group of space aliens with the help of another group of space aliens. There is a spiritual component as well, which involves psychic powers.

The secret space program conspiracy theory has been circulating for years. But the QAnon shaman, in his videos, claimed to believe that he had been recruited, apparently against his will, into the secret space program because of his great psychic powers. He also claims that he was using those powers to combat space aliens on behalf of the U.S. government by traveling to another dimension.

Yes, it is easy to make fun of such claims, but such conspiracies played a role among the people at the Capitol rioting on Jan. 6. Incidentally, at least one of the Capitol rioters was wearing an "Ancient Aliens" sweatshirt with Giorgio Tsoukalos' face on it. [Tsoukalos is a ufologist who has frequently appeared on "Ancient Aliens."] I do not believe that was entirely a coincidence, because it is the same set of conspiracy theories about the "deep state," space aliens, secret cults and how elites are hiding things from the public that animate both the ancient conspiracy theories and the QAnon conspiracy theories. There is significant overlap, where some QAnon beliefs are derived directly from beliefs that also appear on "Ancient Aliens."

One of the huge failures of the mainstream news media is that they are not paying attention to what people are actually consuming. Among the most extreme fringes of American political and social life there is see a very deep and abiding interest in these conspiracy theories, and we don't see the U.S. mainstream media engaging with that enough — especially not before the 2016 election, and not even fully until after the Jan. 6 riot.

It is easy to say we're not going to take this seriously, but something can be both ridiculous and dangerous at the same time.

For example, QAnon is an antisemitic conspiracy theory. It is also a white male power fantasy. More generally, how are these right-wing fantasies a space for a particular type of white masculinity?

The History Channel adventure mystery shows tend to have the same aesthetic. They feature very big blocky fonts, lots of dramatic music. These shows also feature middle-aged white men in either Indiana Jones cosplay or in tactical military gear marching around, having adventures and bonding in brotherhood over historical mysteries that flatter their own prejudices, mysteries that just happened to find that white men were here before Columbus and built this country from scratch even before Native Americans had come to the Americas.

The aesthetic is laughable, but it is also one that's desirable for a certain demographic in the United States. There is also an important overlap between these shows and their political consequences. A man named J. Hutton Pulitzer, who also goes by Jovan Pulitzer and a couple of other names, appeared on "The Curse of Oak Island" and some other ancient mystery-style shows, described as a treasure hunter, a historian and many other titles. On "Curse of Oak Island" they went looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Pulitzer's persona at the time was "the treasure force commander," who was supposedly leading a "crack team of historical investigators as they hunted history's greatest artifacts."

Where did he go next? Rudy Giuliani and the Donald Trump campaign used his ideas about ballot fraud to help create the recounts that we see in Arizona and the ongoing efforts to do the same in Georgia. In both instances, Pulitzer is being paid as a consultant to find evidence of ballot fraud through his amazing technology of looking for bamboo in the ballotsto prove they came from China. This also involves looking for creases in what Pulitzer calls the "origami ballots" to "prove" that they were folded up by Asian people.

This guy went right from the History Channel straight to a Trump conspiracy world. While he might be the most direct line between History Channel conspiracies and the extreme right-wing pro-Trump community, he's not the only one. Just the other day, Nick Pope, one of the ancient-astronauts theorists from the "Ancient Aliens" show, appeared on Rudy Giuliani's podcast. There you have the former lawyer for Donald Trump talking UFOs with a guy from "Ancient Aliens." Tucker Carlson was also on "Ancient Aliens" talking to Nick Pope. Carlson has UFO theorists from the History Channel on his show.

What is Tucker Carlson's relationship to the UFO and ancient aliens conspiracy world?

In a speech that Tucker Carlson gave a while ago, he said that after the 2016 election, he was so completely dumbfounded by the unlikely probability of Donald Trump winning that he started to think that other improbable things might be true. As a result he developed an interest in UFOs and flying saucers. But in a more practical sense, Carlson has been all in on pushing flying-saucer conspiracy theories, in large measure because flying-saucer conspiracy theories have long been associated with right-wing extremism.

Now, that is not to say that everyone who is interested in UFOs and flying saucers is a right-wing conspiracy theorist — but right-wing extremist groups have made a concerted effort to infiltrate flying saucer and UFO communities in order to use that belief in conspiracy theory as a wedge issue to draw more people into that type of conspiratorial thinking.

What happens is that UFO and flying saucer beliefs become a wedge issue that draws people into more extreme beliefs, because once you feel that one conspiracy theory may be true, it becomes easier to believe that the next conspiracy theory may be true. When you see Tucker Carlson going all in on UFOs and flying saucers, he is creating a situation where people can embrace one conspiracy theory and be led to another.

How have you been processing this new hysteria about UFOs (which are now described by the U.S. government as "UAPs") and the soon-to-be-released Pentagon report?

What we can do is emphasize what we know, what we don't know and what needs to be investigated. Many of these videos of UFOs can be explained in conventional terms. Now, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily conventional, but if you can explain it that way, that is a very strong indication that we shouldn't be looking at space aliens.

In the case of claims that we have wreckage of flying saucers and other alien artifacts, you need to listen to what the experts, the involved parties, are actually saying. [Former Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid has repeatedly said that he keeps getting misquoted. He does not in fact believe that there is any wreckage. Moreover, all of the supposed alien metal that has ever been seen in public and tested turned out not to have extraterrestrial composition. The only tests that were made publicly available indicated that the alleged alien metals were in fact industrial waste. This has happened several times over the decades, going all the way back to 1947.

What we need to do as science educators, journalists and historians is to educate the public — not necessarily on the specifics of each and every case but on the rules of evidence, the burden of proof and how experts come to an understanding of what something is or what it could be. That's a difficult task. It's a lot easier to say, "Could be aliens," or "Maybe not aliens," than to say, "There are a range of possibilities. Some are more likely than others. We base our conclusions on a preponderance of evidence and so on." That is complicated and hard, and it does not fit in a 30-second soundbite.

The Pentagon report on UFOs is probably going to be sufficiently vague. People are going to see what they want to see in it. What do you do with that moment when you read the same report and conclude that there is no proof of alien visitations, and true believers conclude the opposite? In essence, true believers will default to the script that lack of sufficient evidence is in fact proof of the conspiracy.

I wish there were a good answer for that. But unfortunately, what you suggest is likely going to be the outcome. People will see in the report what they want to see, and it will just move on to the next stage of the conspiracy. This is what happened with all previous government reports that found no evidence of space aliens and no UFO threat. The UFO community will take that as more fuel for their belief system. They'll look for ways to spin it into a focus for a new round of conspiracy theories, a new round of demands for disclosure and research, and a new round of accusations that the government is hiding the truth.

Perhaps the most devastating answer of all is that the government doesn't actually have the truth, because government is made up of people, and people have many different belief systems and ideas. You will find people in government who believe that flying saucers and UFOs are alien spacecraft. You will find people in government who think that they're Satan's minions and could provoke the forces of hell. You will find people who believe that flying saucers are nothing but optical illusions and misidentified drones and weather phenomena. Just because the government says something does not give it the weight of holy writ. The government and its reports are the work of people, and as such are fallible.

The New York Times preview of the report's content seems to suggest that the government will say that they don't know in some cases — but that's been the case for the last 70-some years. Each and every report has said that there are a number of UFO cases that cannot be explained. Being unexplained doesn't mean they're unexplainable, it means that we don't have the knowledge or the information to make a determination right now, and maybe not ever.

Sometimes you have to live in the ambiguity and to understand that the preponderance of evidence is sometimes the best that we can do. Science, after all, isn't a complete description of the entirety of existence. It is the best description we have at any one time, and sometimes you just have to live with the fact that there are going to be some things that don't quite fit in, some things that it may take years or lifetimes to fully investigate and understand.

So far, we haven't had any evidence that indicates space aliens. Until one of those space aliens decides to let us see a flying saucer and the aliens waving inside, we're going to have to go with the best evidence that we have and the preponderance of evidence and what it indicates.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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new 'Heaven's Gate' series looks to Christianity to explain the method to the cult's madness

Ashlie D. Stevens Salon

Many people first became aware of the Heaven's Gate cult in 1997, when — after an anonymous tip was called into the San Diego Police Department — the bodies of 39 men and women...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/skeptics-explain-the-rational-explanations-for-military-pilots-ufo-videos/

matt r salon

Pentagon announced Thursday that it is creating a task force to investigate UFO sightings. Though the notion that the military is investigating UFOs sounds like a fringe conspiracy theorist’s ultimate redemption, the military’s actions are far from preposterous. That’s because their own trusted soldiers have credibly encountered UFOs while piloting military aircraft.

The Pentagon’s footage from these sightings, which has been made public, depicts objects zooming quickly through the sky, as recorded by military pilots. Though these objects fit the technical definition of a UFO — meaning an unidentified flying object — they may not adhere to the folk understanding of “UFO” as synonymous with an extraterrestrial spacecraft. That’s because there isn’t exactly any evidence that these objects are of extraterrestrial origin, or that they defy any existing laws of physics that might hint at their development by a more scientifically advanced species.

“To understand the videos, all you need to do is ask any fighter pilot familiar with the FLIR camera system,” Brian Dunning, a professional scientific skeptic and podcaster, told Salon by email. “What looks like great speed and wild maneuvers is just a common optical illusion combined with the effects of the FLIR’s gimbal and glare filter.” FLIR cameras, short for forward-looking infrared cameras, are capable of seeing slightly into the infrared spectrum, meaning that heat sources light up on FLIR camera footage.

Dunning zeroed in on a released video that appears to show a bat-winged shaped craft, noting that “the object you’re seeing is a single point of heat from an unidentified plane, probably a distant commercial jet, flying away from the F-18. The camera is looking out the side of the F-18 which is speeding past nearby clouds, making the object appear to be moving relative to the clouds."

he added, “Its bat-wing shape is how the FLIR’s glare filter always depicts single bright points (there are plenty of examples of this on YouTube), and whenever the object appears to turn, this is simply the FLIRs gimbal rotating to keep the target in view as the F-18 maneuvers. The other videos also have similarly prosaic explanations.”

Timothy Caulfield, a law professor at the University of Alberta who also hosts a TV series that debunks pseudoscience (titled “A User’s Guide to Cheating Death”), explained to Salon that there are a number of potentially innocuous explanations — many of them involving military or other highly secretive scientific experiments — that get ignored due to sensationalism.

“I get why people are fascinated by this topic. It’s exciting, it’s intriguing, it’s mysterious,” Caulfield said. “But the idea that these things are UFOs and alien sightings, and that there is alien material left on our planet, is scientifically implausible and highly unlikely. It’s an Occam’s Razor story. I think there is probably a more straightforward explanation, but we will just never know with the deep uncertainty. People want answers.”

He drew particular attention to how the pilots that spotted these UFOs may have inadvertently fanned the flames of conspiracy theorists.

“When people look at those kinds of videos and the reaction of the pilots, for example, I think that’s often also used to give them more credibility with these expert pilots, often military pilots, commenting on the behavior of the shifts,” Caulfield explained. “I’m not a physicist, I’m not an engineer. I can understand what people are intrigued. They don’t know what this object is and it’s moving in a manner that seems impossible given our current technology.”

Alexander Wendt, an international relations professor at Ohio State University who has become a prominent amateur ufologist, pointed to the reactions of the military pilots as a sign that these new UFOs should be taken seriously.

“I challenge anybody to do better than the Navy to explain what’s in those videos. If the Navy couldn’t do it…” Wendt told Salon, before adding that “they had every reason to want this off their plate.”

As Wendt pointed out, “I think what’s unique about these Navy videos is that the whole issue arose from the pilots… I think the upset pilots is really a key thing. These guys are the experts on what’s in the sky. They have thousands of hours of experience flying up there. You see some of the interviews with these pilots and they think something is going on, and they were the ones that pushed this whole issue to the front.”

Another Ohio State University professor, political scientist Thomas Wood, opened up to Salon about why people embrace UFO conspiracy theories.

“If you look at the data on public opinion on this, it is really sort of incredible,” Wood explained. (A Gallup poll last year found that 33 percent of Americans believe that some UFO sightings were caused by alien visitation; a YouGov poll last month found that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government would hide UFO evidence from the public.) “The American public fascination with UFOs is one of the very durable conspiracy theories in the American public’s imagination. Most conspiracy theories may become popular and then quiet quickly — for instance, the Barack Obama was born in Kenya theory, the American government planned the 9/11 terrorist attack theory. The UFO conspiracy theory is one of those that just sort of stuck around.”

Dunning was quite cynical about the reasons for people believing in UFOs.

“Two words: Sensationalism sells,” Dunning emailed Salon. “Nobody is excited about the artifacts of the FLIR glare filter; everyone is excited about the prospect of the Pentagon hiding the ‘truth about aliens.'”

He added, “Humans are hardwired for anecdotal thinking. Our brains gravitate toward the simple and the desirable, and away from the complicated and the boring. The people in the business of selling TV programming are well aware of this, and that’s why we see UFOs, ghosts, psychics, and miracle cures dominating pop culture.”

Many famous people claim to have encountered either UFOs or aliens, from singers Elvis Presley and Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge and President Jimmy Carter. They were able to have successful careers despite the stigma associated with such an alleged experience, though many other believers were not.

Earlier this year, the TV series “Unsolved Mysteries” devoted an episode to a group of people from a small town in western Massachusetts who claim they encountered a UFO in 1969. They described being socially rejected, viciously bullied, and in one case even harassed to the point where they moved away. it makes sense why they wouldn’t go to the police or the local press at the time with their story. Many other reports of UFO sightings and encounters follow the same pattern — those who come forward suffer for doing so. As one of the people in the episode puts it, the town devolved from “Norman Rockwell to Salvador Dali” as public opinion and un-visited citizens turned against the purported witnesses.

==

ref eh

https://www.salon.com/2020/08/14/pentagon-announces-a-new-ufo-task-force_partner/

---

https://www.salon.com/2016/07/11/aliens_in_the_21st_century_more_and_more_people_are_starting_to_believe_in_ufos_again_partner/

 The Conversation.

The 1990s were a high-water mark for public interest in UFOs and alien abduction. Shows like “The X-Files” and Fox’s “alien autopsy” hoax were prime-time events, while MIT even hosted an academic conference on the abduction phenomenon.

But in the first decade of the 21st century, interest in UFOs began to wane. Fewer sightings were reported, and established amateur research groups like the British Flying Saucer Bureau disbanded.

In 2006 historian Ben Macintyre suggested in the Times that the internet had “chased off” the UFOs. The web’s free-flowing, easy exchange of ideas and information had allowed UFO skeptics to prevail, and, to Macintyre, people were no longer seeing UFOs because they no longer believed in them.

Data seemed to back up Macintyre’s argument that, when it came to belief in UFOs, reason was winning out. A 1990 Gallup poll found that 27 percent of Americans believed “extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth at some time in the past.” That number rose to 33 percent in 2001, before dropping back to 24 percent in 2005.

But now “The X-Files” is back, and Hillary Clinton has even pledged to disclose what the government knows about aliens if elected president. Meanwhile, a recent Boston Globe article by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie suggests that belief in UFOs may be growing.

She points to a 2015 Ipsos poll, which reported that 45 percent of Americans believe extraterrestrials have visited the Earth. So much for reason.

Why does Western society continue to be fascinated with the paranormal? If science doesn’t automatically kill belief in UFOs, why do reports of UFOs and alien abductions go in and out of fashion?

To some extent, this is political. Even though government agents like “Men in Black” may be the stuff of folklore, powerful people and institutions can influence the level of stigma surrounding these topics.

Sociologists of religion have also suggested that skepticism is countered by a different societal trend, something they’ve dubbed “re-enchantment.” They argue that while science can temporarily suppress belief in mysterious forces, these beliefs will always return — that the need to believe is ingrained in the human psyche.

A new mythology

The narrative of triumphant reason dates back, at least, to German sociologist Max Weber’s 1918 speech “Science as a Vocation,” in which he argued that the modern world takes for granted that everything is reducible to scientific explanations. “The world,” he declared, “is disenchanted.”

As with many inexplicable events, UFOs were initially treated as an important topic of scientific inquiry. The public wondered what was going on; scientists studied the issue and then “demystified” the topic.

Modern UFOlogy — the study of UFOs — is typically dated to a sighting made by a pilot named Kenneth Arnold. While flying over Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947, Arnold described nine disk-like objects that the media dubbed “flying saucers.”

A few weeks later the Roswell Daily Register reported that the military had recovered a crashed flying saucer. By the end of 1947, Americans had reported an additional 850 sightings.

During the 1950s, people started reporting that they’d made contact with the inhabitants of these craft. Frequently, the encounters were erotic.

For example, one of the first “abductees” was a mechanic from California named Truman Bethurum. Bethurum was taken aboard a spaceship from Planet Clarion, which he said was captained by a beautiful woman named Aura Rhanes. (Bethurum’s wife eventually divorced him, citing his obsession with Rhanes.) In 1957, Antonio Villas-Boas of Brazil reported a similar encounter in which he was taken aboard a ship and forced to breed with a female alien.

Psychologists and sociologists proposed a few theories about the phenomenon. In 1957, psychoanalyst Carl Jung theorized that UFOs served a mythological function that helped 20th-century people adapt to the stresses of the Cold War. (For Jung, this did not preclude the possibility that UFOs might be real.)

Furthermore, American social mores were rapidly changing in the mid-20th century, especially around issues of race, gender and sexuality. According to historian W. Scott Poole, stories of sex with aliens could have been a way of processing and talking about these changes. For example, when the Supreme Court finally declared laws banning interracial marriage unconstitutional in 1967, the country had already been talking for years about Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple who claimed to have been probed by aliens.

Contactee lore also started applying “scientific ideas” as a way to repackage some of the mysterious forces associated with traditional religions. Folklore expert Daniel Wojcik has termed belief in benevolent space aliens as “techno-millennarianism.” Instead of God, some UFO believers think forms of alien technology will be what redeems the world. Heaven’s Gate — whose members famously committed mass suicide in 1995 — was one of several religious groups awaiting the arrival of the aliens.

You’re not supposed to talk about it

Despite some dubious stories from contactees, the Air Force took UFO sightings seriously, organizing a series of studies, including Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1969.

In 1966, the Air Force tapped a team of University of Colorado scientists headed by physicist Edward Condon to investigate reports of UFOs. Even though the team failed to identify 30 percent of the 91 sightings it examined, its 1968 report concluded that it wouldn’t be useful to continue studying the phenomenon. Condon added that schoolteachers who allowed their students to read UFO-related books for classroom credit were doing a grave disservice to the students’ critical faculties and ability to think scientifically.

Basing its decision off the report, the Air Force terminated Project Blue Book, and Congress ended all funding for UFO research.

As religion scholar Darryl Caterine explained in his book “Haunted Ground," "With civil rights riots, hippie lovefests and antiwar protests raging throughout the nation, Washington gave its official support to a rational universe.”

While people still believed in UFOs, expressing too much interest in the subject now came with a price. In 2010, sociologists Christopher D. Bader, F. Carson Mencken and Joseph O. Baker found that 69 percent of Americans reported belief in at least one paranormal subject (astrology, ghosts, UFOs, etc.).

But their findings also suggested that the more status and social connections someone has, the less likely he or she is to report paranormal belief. Single people report more paranormal beliefs than married people, and those with low incomes report more paranormal belief than those with high incomes. It may be that people with “something to lose” have reason not to believe in the paranormal (or at least not to talk about it).

In 1973, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics surveyed its membership about UFOs. Several scientists reported that they had seen unidentified objects and a few even answered that UFOs are extraterrestrial or at least “real.” However, physicist Peter A. Sturrock suggested that scientists felt comfortable answering these questions only because their anonymity was guaranteed.

Harvard psychiatrist John Mack came to symbolize the stigma of UFO research. Mack worked closely with abductees, whom he dubbed “experiencers.” While he remained cagey about whether aliens actually existed, he advocated for the experiencers and argued that their stories should be taken seriously.

His bosses weren’t happy. In 1994, Harvard Medical School opened an investigation into his research — an unprecedented action against a tenured professor. In the end, Harvard dropped the case and affirmed Mack’s academic freedom. But the message was clear: Being open-minded about aliens was bad for one’s career.

Reason and re-enchantment

So if Hillary Clinton is running for president, why is she talking about UFOs?

Part of the answer may be that the Clintons have ties to a network of influential people who have lobbied the government to disclose the truth about UFOs. This includes the late millionaire Laurence Rockefeller (who funded John Mack’s research) and John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign and a long-time disclosure advocate.

But there may also be a broader cultural cycle at work. Sociologists such as Christopher Partridge have suggested that disenchantment leads to re-enchantment. While secularization may have weakened the influence of traditional churches, this doesn’t mean that people have become disenchanted skeptics. Instead, many have explored alternate spiritualities that churches had previously stigmatized as “superstitions” (everything from holistic healing to Mayan prophecies). The rise of scientific authority may have paradoxically paved the way for UFO mythology.

A similar change may be happening in the political sphere where the language of critical thinking has been turned against the scientific establishment. In the 1960s, Congress deferred to the Condon Report. Today, conservative politicians regularly challenge ideas like climate change, evolution and the efficacy of vaccines. These dissenters never frame their claims as “anti-science” but rather as courageous examples of free inquiry.

Donald Trump may have been the first candidate to discover that weird ideas are now an asset instead of a liability. In a political climate where the language of reason is used to attack the authority of science, musing over the possibility of UFOs simply doesn’t carry the stigma that it used to.

Joseph P. Laycock is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University.

==

https://www.salon.com/2020/08/16/what-is-qanon-a-not-so-brief-introduction-to-the-conspiracy-theory-thats-eating-america/

pt 1

I've  been involved in the wild world of conspiracy theories for 24 years now, ever since I published my first article in the pages of Paranoia Magazine in the spring of 1996 when I was 24 years old. What most impressed me about Paranoia was the anarchy of information available within its pages. It wasn't a right-wing conspiracy magazine. It wasn't a left-wing conspiracy magazine. It didn't even exist between these two poles. Its editorial mission (or non-mission) was beholden to values (or non-values) that lay far beyond these limiting parameters, a dedication to cataloging and analyzing the extremes of fringe beliefs from multiple points of view. 

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}:

As Marshall McLuhan once said,"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." The editors of Paranoia dedicated themselves to not having a point of view. It was the exact opposite of propaganda. By its very nature, propaganda excludes any information that contradicts or undermines the message the dedicated propagandist is intent on disseminating.

Conspiracy theories have always been used by what we now call "persuasion engineers" as tools of mass indoctrination. A good conspiracy theory that seems plausible and frightening enough can be worth more than a thousand well-reasoned stump speeches.

In my first book, "Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form,"I broke conspiracy theories down into five distinct categories: 1) Insanity, 2) Disinformation, 3) Misinformation, 4) Satire, and 5) Legitimate Research. Some theories manage to merge two or more categories into one. Only on very rare occasions do such theories manage to combine allfive categories. The most recent — and arguably most impactful — strain of this hybrid form of conspiracy-mongering first emerged in 2017, promulgated by an anonymous 4chan poster known only as "Q" — or "QAnon." You've been hearing a lot about this lately, most likely. At least one QAnon supporter is almost certain to be elected to Congress in November, and devotees of this particular conspiracy theory are eagerly supporting the re-election of Donald Trump. 

The average person, who has not spent the past couple of decades studying the origins of conspiracy theories (a reasonable choice, I might add), would probably not recognize the origins of most of the quasi-surreal elements that make up the convoluted QAnon narrative.

Earlier this year, in March, I was talking to a friend about COVID-19 and the national lockdown. He's 10 years older than me and lives in a small town in the Midwest. I live in Long Beach, California. While chatting with him on the phone about all the unexpected difficulties that have arisen from teaching my English classes online, he suddenly volunteered the opinion that COVID-19 would be a positivedevelopment in 2020. 

"Yeah?" I asked. "How so?" 

He proceeded to tell me, with complete sincerity, thatafter Trump is re-elected in 2020, he will deliver "free energy" to the people of America. Not only that, he's also going to abolish the income tax. Right now, at this very moment, United States troops have been deployed underground where they're busy "cleaning out" covert subterranean tunnels, "saving hundreds of children from satanic slaves," and kicking out the "black hats." Without skipping a beat, my friend then insisted that news of this game-changing development would be "coming out" soon. 

"It's a great thing," he told me in measured tones. "Trump will have to use the Emergency Broadcast System to give this news to the American people because the media keeps lying and social media like Twitter and YouTube are censoring and deleting videos that report reality the way it actually is." 

Furthermore, my friend said in tones of absolute certainty, Trump supporters working behind the scenes (referred to by my friend as the "white hats") had recently wrested control of the entire Google corporation from devil worshippers,which is why you could now retrieve "accurate information" from that particular search engine. 

"Uh … where are you getting all this?" I asked.

He seemed reluctant to tell me. At first he hemmed and hawed, then muttered, "Oh … just these message boards." 

"Well … what message boards?" He wouldn't say. "Could you send me the links?" I asked.

"There are no links," he replied.

"No links? What is this, the dark web or something?"

He chuckled. "Kind of."

When I pushed further and asked for more details about this "accurate information," in a conspiratorial whisper he urged me to search the word "Adrenochrome" in Google.

*  *  *

I first read Hunter S. Thompson's classic nonfiction book, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" when I was 18. I've taught the book in my English composition classes at Cal State Long Beach, off and on, since 2002. I'm well aware that Thompson's alter ego, Raoul Duke, encounters Adrenochrome when Dr. Gonzo (Duke's speed-fueled attorney) suggests that he ingest the drug because it "makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer." He also warns Duke, "You'll go completely crazy if you take too much." Duke claims that the hallucinogenic effects of Adrenochrome work best when the substance is harvested from the adrenaline glands of living human bodies. 

Even at the tender age of 18, I knew that this inspired idea was one of Thompson's many phantasmagorical asides in an otherwise journalistic narrative. Thompson was famous for these detours into Munchausen-level jabberwocky, like the time he claimed that Sen. Ed Muskie was taking "massive doses" of a psychedelic drug called Ibogaine during the 1972 presidential campaign, a hilarious (and entirely false) tale related in Thompson's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail." 

On the commentary track that accompanies the 2003 Criterion DVD release of Terry Gilliam's film adaptation of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Gilliam confirms that Adrenochrome is "a totally invented nonsense-drug that Hunter [made up]." Gilliam follows this with an eerily prescient statement that almost foreshadows the introduction of the drug into QAnon's ever-expanding mythology: "This scene had such an effect on so many people that afterwards I was hearing kids say, 'Oh, I've had Adrenochrome!' They were talking about where they get it. 'Oh, there's a guy who can get me Adrenochrome.' I just love how the Big Lie always works. It worked for Hitler, and it can work for people like us [i.e., artists and storytellers]." 

It appears to be working for QAnon as well, since "totally invented nonsense" has a way of becoming facts in the minds of the gullible, the semi-informed, the frustrated and the insane.

So I did exactly as my friend suggested. I googled the word "Adrenochrome." Keep in mind that my friend insisted that Trump-supporting "white hats" had taken control of Google, so I would receive only accurate information from that search engine when inputting this particular word.

The first result that popped up was Emily Writes' March 17, 2020, article in Spinoff entitled "Down the Rabbit Hole With the COVID-19 Conspiracy Theorists," which begins as follows:

Today I fell down a rabbit hole of rabid Trump supporters who are convinced COVID-19 is both a hoax and also Trump's greatest moment as president. He has acted decisively apparently, while also knowing that COVID-19 is a Hollywood Liberal Elite cover-up ….Adrenochromeis a drug for the liberal elite of Hollywood made from actual human brain stem containing hormones from the adrenal gland. Hillary Clinton manufactures this drug by torturing children in a pizza shop …. Tom Hanks is addicted to Adrenochrome and he caught COVID-19 from the latest batch of tainted Adrenochrome that came through Celine Dion who is a high priestess from the Church of Satan. She is well-versed in poison as she's been lacing her children's clothing line with a chemical that makes our children "gender neutral." Tom Hanks signalled to the Hollywood Liberal Elite Cabal DeepState in his Golden Globes acceptance speech that there would be a shortage of Adrenochrome.Ellen has closed her studio audience because she's addicted as well. 

After reading this article in its entirety, I emailed my friend and pointed out that when I put his advice to the test and Googled "Adrenochrome," the first article that popped up sardonically tore the entire conspiracy theory to shreds. How did this jibe with the notion that Trump-supporting "white hats" had total control over Google?

I received no direct answer to this question. I was told, instead, to search the name "Rachel Chandler." This would somehow answer all my questions. Bypassing those pesky "white hats" at Google, I decided to use a different search engine called Millionshort, and almost immediately found a March 22, 2019, Daily Dot article entitled "QAnon Is Attacking a Random Woman in a Disturbing and Dangerous Way," which detailed how QAnon posts had become strangely focused on a photographer and casting director named Rachel Chandler, who is part of the newspaper-owning Chandler family but has no visible political footprint and is not otherwise a public figure:

Q made a seemingly endless stream of posts referencing Chandler, insinuating that she took a 2017 picture of Bill Clinton and registered child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (whose light prison sentence handed down by current Trump cabinet official Alexander Acosta is currently under investigation) hanging out together in a pool.

Beyond that, QAnon accused Chandler of "procuring" "girls" for Epstein, having her photography studio funded by elite Satanists who used it for rituals, flaunting Epstein's "sex and torture room victims" with her pictures, having a link to a still-unexplained (yet supposedly horrific) event at the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood ….

To be clear, Chandler has not been accused of any wrongdoing by any law enforcement agency …. There's no evidence she took the pool picture that QAnon claims proves she's linked to Epstein, and it doesn't even feature him — though it does feature George Nader, the convicted pedophile who's providing evidence in the Mueller investigation regarding President Donald Trump's link to meetings with Russian officials.

And yet Chandler's name has been dragged into the conspiracy so completely that the first page of a Google search shows nothing but QAnon-related content, while five of the top six videos that come up when searching her name are by QAnon acolytes.

None of the many videos and speculations posted by QAnon and his numerous supporters provide any definitive links between Chandler and Jeffrey Epstein, yet somehow this red herring has received intense focus from thousands of amateur detectives, most of whom no doubt have a sincere desire to get to "the truth." 

One might argue, as does Emily Writes in her above-mentioned Spinoff article, that when "people feel like they have no control over their lives — like in the midst of a global pandemic — the comforting certainty of conspiracy theories seems increasingly attractive." One might also argue that racism, xenophobia and (perhaps most deadly of all) neophobia fuel the interest in such theories. But I think these explanations, while partially valid, ignore the heart-meat core of the real issue plaguing America at this moment.

The real problem is that genuine conspiracies are unfolding before our eyes every day, but when the mainstream media avoids reporting on such conspiracies — for a whole variety of reasons, the main one being that it's simply easier to get paid rewriting corporate press releases and slapping one's byline on the end product than by actually putting one's reputation on the line tackling a plethora of inconvenient truths — it becomes necessary for average people to fill in the gaps on their own. These people may be ignorant, but they're not stupid. They know instinctively that they're being victimized by blatant lies every day. So, with no training whatsoever, they perform "research" on their own by scouring through a multiplicity of such "reliable" online sources as 4chan, 8chan, 8kun and Reddit.

As award-winning science fiction writer Cory Doctorow wrote in May of this year:

[W]hy is it so easy to find people who want to believe in conspiracies[?] My answer: because so many of the things that have traumatized so many people ARE conspiracies.

The opioid epidemic was a conspiracy between rich families like the Sacklers and regulators who rotate in and out of industry. The 737 crisis was caused by Boeing's conspiracy to cut corners and aviation regulators' conspiracy to allow aerospace to regulate itself.

Senators conspire to liquidate their positions ahead of coronavirus lockdown, well-heeled multinationals conspire to get 94.5% of the "small business" PPP fund, Big Tech conspires to fix wages with illegal collusion while fast food franchises do the same with noncompetes.

In a world of constant real conspiracy scandals that destroy lives and the planet, conspiracy theories take on real explanatory power. 

Everything Doctorow says here is true; however, we rarely apply such clinical observations to people we know personally. Often, we use such explanations to dismiss the cockeyed beliefs of peculiar strangers encountered online. Before March of this year, I had known my friend to be a rational person with a fair amount of real-world experience and common sense, not someone who would be swayed easily by illogical rhetoric or over-the-top nonsense. On the other hand, I hadn't been in close contact with him since the last presidential election and the birth of QAnon, who emerged from internet obscurity in November of 2017.  This was, coincidentally, the same time period when Trump's approval ratings had reached a "near-record low." (The full effect of QAnon on Trump's approval ratings since November of 2017 has not been studied in any substantial way.) 

After about four weeks had passed, I emailed my friend and asked him a few more questions about QAnon, trying to understand how anyone could believe so many unsubstantiated claims with so little skepticism. Surely, I thought, there must be something at least halfway reasonable to back up these outrageous statements. I needed to know the source so I could evaluate the claims myself. On May 3, I sent him the following email:

I'm trying to wrap my head around this whole QAnon thing, so maybe you can help me. I have a few questions.

Why would the United States military be "cleaning out" covert underground bases when they're the ones who *built *the bases in the first place? Who else but the U.S. military would be in charge of massive underground bases built on U.S. soil? 

Why would Trump be interested in implementing free energy? Isn't he trying to revive the coal industry? It would seem to me that free energy would undermine all of his business interests.

According to most reliable sources, censorship on Google seems to be alive and well at the moment, which is nothing new. (In my experience, I've found thatmillionshort.com is a far better search engine tool.) 

I'm not certain that "white hats" exist in our current political situation. Perhaps "black hats," "slightly-less-black hats," and "gray hats" would be more accurate terms?

Didn't the whole concept of "Adrenochrome" being harvested from live human beings originate with Hunter S. Thompson — as a satirical concept? I always thought that passage in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was intended as a joke. Is QAnon claiming that Hunter S. Thompson had "insider knowledge" when he wrote the book?

The next day, my friend responded to my questions with another question: "You're a researcher. Why are you playing D.U.M.B.?" That's it. Nothing else.

Since I had no idea why he had written the word "dumb" as an acronym, I replied, "I'm not playing 'D.U.M.B.' I honestly don't know the answers to those questions. I'm trying to understand the proposed scenario. If you have the answers, I'd love to hear them."

Later that day, he wrote me back and explained that "D.U.M.B." stood for "Deep Underground Military Bases." The explanation rendered the first message even more confusing than before. (How could I possibly be playing "Deep Underground Military Bases"? I resisted the urge to ask him to elucidate further, as I suspected the response would just add to my befuddlement.) He sent me several links as well, despite the fact that a month earlier he had insisted that there were no links he could possibly send me. He never bothered to explain how or why this situation had changed during the past four weeks. 

Inevitably, the first link led me to QAnon's posts. Most of these posts were so cryptic, they didn't answer any of my questions. 

Addressing my question about Trump delivering free energy to the American people, my friend responded, "President Trump's uncle John was asked by the F.B.I. to investigate Nikola Tesla's papers." This terse sentence was then followed by a link to an Aug. 2, 2017, post at Heavy.com entitled "John Trump, Donald's Uncle: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know." Right after the link, my friend wrote, "And you wonder where I come up with free energy for the nation in the future." 

Nothing* *in the Heavy.com post suggested that Donald Trump was working on delivering free energy to the United States during his second term in office. 

Attempting to address one of my other questions, he wrote, "If Google's censorship is on, then why, when you search 'Rachel Chandler,' you get all of this information about her?" 

Of course this is a perfect example of "circular reasoning." Everything QAnon says about Rachel Chandler is true because, when you Google "Rachel Chandler," all of QAnon's posts pop up. Therefore, everything QAnon said about Rachel Chandler is true. (If A, then B. If B, then A. Or perhaps I should say, "If Q, then Q. If Q, then Q.")

To answer my other questions, he sent me links to three different YouTube videos, one of which dealt with the untold story of the Deep Underground Military Bases. 

The first video (entitled "The Underground War, Happening Now") features a "Christian Patriot" named "Rick B2T" in conversation with an anonymous fellow calling himself "Gene." I subjected myself to 38 minutes and 16 seconds of unsubstantiated rumors about U.S. Christian soldiers battling demon-worshipping members of the Illuminati in deep underground bases. 

:{This directed me to an even more convoluted YouTube video entitled "}:{:{1 of 2 — Best of 'Underground War Details! Part 8' — Gene Decode — B2T Show:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::{," in which I learned that Gene had decided to risk his life going public with these dangerous secrets because, one fateful day, God had contacted Gene and expressly told him, "This information }::{has}::{ to come out!" At this point, Gene teamed up with an anonymous former "Canadian military officer" to reveal the disturbing truths about these "Deep Underground Military Bases" where (and this is a direct quote) "animal and human sacrifices nourish the bowels of creatures — in other words, we're talking demonic, terrible }::{things}::{ that inhabited Earth long before Man arrived." }:

After this startling revelation, Gene elaborated on the scenario further: "The New World Order is in the final stages — that is, they were, until Trump came along — the final stages of their satanic plan to reduce the current world population by 80 to 90 percent[…]. If it weren't for Trump, most of us would not be listening to anything right now." [Gene chuckles darkly.] "Instead of the Word of Christ, you'd be listening to the angels."

As of May 28, only 10 days after being posted, this video had already received 33,105 views and only 34 dislikes. I've seen YouTube videos of random kids opening birthday presents get more dislikes than that. The Blessed to Teach YouTube channel has 92,600 subscribers. 

If it's not clear to you yet, let me spell this out: Even as you're reading these words, there are thousands of "Christian Patriots" living in the United States who sincerely believe that Donald Trump saved them from being eaten by demons when he entered the White House. This is not hyperbole. This is a literal interpretation of what they believe. 

This is the mentality you're dealing with. No amount of logic, common sense or reason can combat such convoluted delusions. These people are clearly the product of incessant brainwashing, and yet they think everyone else in the country is mind-controlled to such an extreme degree that people who do not support Trump are either A) soulless demon-worshippers or B) poor unfortunates incapable of understanding the obvious truths being unveiled by geniuses like "Rick B2T" and his pal "Gene." On Nov. 18, 1978, hundreds of "True Believers" in Guyana held similar beliefs, only seconds before they literally drank the Kool-Aid.

You might assume that most of Rick's viewers are hardcore evangelicals dwelling in a deep pit in the Ozarks. But my friend wasn't raised a hardcore Christian and had never expressed such views in my presence over the course of many, many years. Something happened to change him radically between the emergence of QAnon in 2017 and the advent of the national lockdown in 2020. Even a regular Joe can be swayed by nonsense with a fair amount of ease.

Nonsense has always been an essential part of the American landscape, from Salem witch hunts in the 1690s to New Age UFO cults in the 1990s, but QAnon takes this tradition of nonsense to a whole new level.

Next installment: The roots of QAnon: From 1940s science fiction to 19th-century anti-Masonic propaganda

ROBERT GUFFEY

Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. His books include the novel "Until the Last Dog Dies" and "Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security." Visit his website.

MORE FROM ROBERT GUFFEY

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-deep-twisted-roots-of-qanon-delusions-of-demon-cannibal-conspiracies/

salon robt guffey pt 2:

those among you who are familiar with the strange realm of UFOlogy may know about William Cooper, one of the most outrageous figures to appear on the UFO lecture circuit in the 1980s and author of the 1991 underground bestseller “Behold a Pale Horse.” Nobody else at the time could beat the wildness of Cooper’s claims, which included the idea that the U.S. military, nefarious extraterrestrial forces and ancient secret societies like the Illuminati had banded together for the express purpose of destroying the United States and God-fearing people everywhere.

As crazy as Cooper could often appear, in almost every lecture I’ve ever seen he would often pause to say something along these lines: “Don’t believe me. Do your own research. Look at my sources and tell me I’m wrong!” He once dedicated an entire hour-long episode of his shortwave radio show, “Hour of the Time,” to reviewing the lengthy list of books he had read in order to produce his epic, 43-part series entitled “Mystery Babylon,” an in-depth analysis of how hermetic philosophies had impacted world history. You could disagree with Cooper’s eccentric conclusions, but you really had to respect someone with the temerity to broadcast an hour-long bibliography over the radio. Even more surprisingly, his listeners hung on every word.

If Cooper’s listeners decided to follow his advice to fact check his numerous claims, they would have to read such lengthy and difficult tomes as “The Secret Teachings of All Ages” by Manly P. Hall and “Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry” by Albert Pike — and that’s just scratching the surface.

Furthermore, Cooper never shirked from sharing details of his personal background, the sometimes sensationalistic episodes of his military career in the Navy, his years spent fighting in Vietnam, or the ruins of his many marriages. He was a real person. He wasn’t “anonymous.” It was possible to verify the facts about Cooper’s military background, which were crucial to his claims of having had access to insider knowledge.

in the late 1980s and early 1990s, mainstream UFOlogists with academic backgrounds (researchers like Jacques Vallée and Stanton Friedman) believed that Cooper represented the bottom of the barrel of P.T. Barnum-style hucksterism in the fields of UFOlogy and conspiratology. Neither of them could possibly have predicted what was coming: a 21st century in which QAnon cultists — a word I do not use lightly or flippantly — believe that performing “research” means typing a few names into Google images, seeing QAnon’s own posts pop up, and concluding within seconds that QAnon’s theories have all been confirmed. Why bother reading Hall’s 578-page “Secret Teachings” when you can just glance at a subject header in Reddit and convince yourself you’ve solved the mysteries of the universe?

Compared to QAnon, William Cooper was Buckminster Fuller.

It wouldn’t take much research to figure out that many of QAnon’s claims can be traced back to the late 19th century, and some even earlier than that.This is one of the reasons it’s important to study conspiracy theories. If more people understood their origins, perhaps they would be a little more skeptical when they see these theories being strategically repackaged as political propaganda aimed at a new generation of easy marks.

The supposed links between devil worship among the “elites” and secret societies like the Illuminati can be traced back at least as far as the 1870s, when French journalist Léo Taxil published “Les mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie,” a volume that purported to reveal the eyewitness accounts of a woman named Diana Vaughan. After converting to Catholicism, Vaughan confessed to having engaged in numerous satanic rituals with Freemasons. During one of these rituals, she saw a demon shape-shift into a crocodile and play the piano. The book was a huge success among Roman Catholics, many of whom were eager to lap up the most insane claims as long as they made the Masons look bad. Then, on April 25, 1897,  the French newspaper Le Frondeur published Taxil’s confession that Vaughan was wholly fictitious. Taxil boasted that his book was “the most fantastic hoax of our times.”

But even after his confession, people continued to believe in his 12-year prank. Indeed, fundamentalists of all varieties insist on quoting Taxil to this day. Jack T. Chick, the wildly successful cartoonist who founded Chick Publications (a California-based Christian publishing company designated as an “active hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center) used Taxil as a source in his most popular anti-Masonic tract, “The Curse of Baphomet.”

Rick and Gene’s wild tales about “underground wars” between “white hats” and “black cats”  — discussed in the first installment of this series — appear to have a more recent source: the Lovecraft-inflected 1940s horror stories of Richard Sharpe Shaver. In 1943, at the age of 36, Shaver became infamous among American science fiction fans for a series of allegedly true accounts he began publishing in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. Shaver claimed he had discovered a race of prehistoric extraterrestrials known as the Titans. Most of the Titans had abandoned Earth long ago, but a few remnants of their society had been left behind. There were two types of Titans still living on Earth, although they were hidden deep underground: the angelic Teros (“white hats” who sometimes intervened positively in human affairs) and the demonic Deros (“black hats,” whose entire existence revolved around kidnapping, torturing and eating human beings).

Unbeknownst to the fake-news-spewing mainstream media, the Deros often snatch humans from the surface world and drag them down into their underground caverns where they rape, torment and kill their captives in creatively sadistic ways. How did Shaver know about the Deros’ existence? Because, he claimed, he had been imprisoned in their subterranean realm for eight years. This is from Walter Kafton-Minkel’s 1989 book, “Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races & UFOs from Inside the Earth”:

Shaver witnessed many of the horrible dero torture sessions, in which young women abducted from the surface were flogged, torn to pieces, roasted, or devoured by the evil dwarfs.

More than anything else, the dero are sexual perverts. Although they must reproduce somehow, they do not seem to engage in conventional sex; they … find their arousal in torture and dismemberment.

Sadomasochistic sex was one of the dero’s major pleasures. One of the weirder stories in [Shaver’s magazine] The Hidden World was illustrated with a crude drawing by Shaver of a dero pitching dagger-tipped darts into an unfortunate young woman who had been stripped naked and chained to the wall of a cave.

And here’s a brief passage from Fred Nadis’ 2013 book “The Man From Mars,” a biography of Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer:

[Shaver] recalled a woman with a spider’s body visiting him in his cell, offering both horror and ecstasy. He reported, “It mounted me and playfully bit me — its fangs shooting me full of poison — tobacco juice you know — with appropriate sexual sensations of impregnation. After a time my skin began to pop with little spiders and they swarmed out of me by the million.” [A helpful Tero named] Sue … had a blind daughter with whom he fell in love. He called her Nydia. They became lovers. Nydia helped teleport him to an underground cavern where he saw amazing machinery and a chamber where the thought records and history of the Elder Races were recorded.

Even after Shaver’s dramatic escape from their underground realm, the Deros continued to beam negative messages into his head. In fact, the Deros had been using their “amazing machinery” to invade the minds of humans for centuries, manipulating them to commit the darkest sins imaginable.

To the dismay of rationalist science fiction fans the world over, hordes of readers began writing letters to the magazine insisting that Shaver was correct — they, too, had encountered the subterranean Deros! Soon, Shaver’s followers became part of the ongoing saga, adding suggestive tidbits of intrigue that were then woven into the growing tapestry by Shaver and Ray Palmer.

Much the same is being done today by QAnon, whose posts often contain only a few words or a single image, but whose cryptic messages will spark endless internet speculation that adds to the unfolding drama, upon which QAnon will then build yet another layer. Not long ago, on May 29 of this year, QAnon posted a link to Mike Rothschild’s Daily Dot article entitled “Inside the First Church of QAnon, Where Jesus Helps Fight the Deep State,” in which Rothschild analyzes the cult-like aspects of QAnon:

Since its first 4chan posts in 2017, the QAnon conspiracy theory has become a movement encompassing everything from commerce to politics.

And increasingly, this includes religion, as QAnon believers infuse their complex mythos with elements of spiritual warfare and Biblical theology.

But some Christian QAnon followers are taking this merger even further, using the text of Q drops as scripture to form what seems like a hybrid Q/Christian denomination.

And it might be the future of QAnon.

Along with the link, QAnon posted the following message: “Fear. Panic. Loss of narrative control. You are the news now.”

You hear that? You are the news now. Participatory fiction. Choose your own adventure. A role-playing game for Christians. Virtual reality, but with no goggles necessary.

To Shaver’s credit, he never tried to base a church on his theories. What became known as “The Shaver Mystery” continued to be a popular, though highly controversial, topic in science-fiction fandom for about 10 years. Eventually, Shaver drifted into obscurity and began turning his attention to more artistic pursuits, producing one wonderfully bizarre painting after another, all of which fall into the category we would now deem “outsider art.” After his death, Shaver left behind scores of bizarre tales from which the real mind manipulators — not subterranean Deros, but human beings who work for political think tanks — can plunder nifty ideas and reboot them for our New Dark Age of Unenlightenment.

A strange fascination with subterranean beings kidnapping humans, dragging them underground and sexually assaulting them recurs throughout the QAnon theories that have spread across the internet since 2017. Similar obsessions also run throughout Cathy O’Brien’s infamous 1995 memoir, “Trance Formation of America,” which, like QAnon’s theories, is a fascinating mixture of truth and untruth, information and disinformation, reality and unreality. At one point in “Trance Formation,” O’Brien claims she was sexually assaulted by Hillary Clinton in a hotel room. She describes this encounter with such intense attention to detail that one can’t help but feel that the true goal of the book is something other than pamphleteering.

I sent a copy of this book to my friend Damien sometime around 2001. He was working as a fry cook in San Diego, and had no academic background whatsoever. His immediate reaction to the book was to say, “This is just pornography for right-wing Christians!” Since Damien had actually been paid to write pornography (for a company called Evil Angel Productions based in Van Nuys, California), I’ll take his word for it.His instinctive conclusion was that Christians felt safe reading O’Brien’s lurid tale because they could unconsciously get off on the pornographic details while feeling outraged at the same time. Who else but Christian conservatives could figure out how to merge sexual gratification with judgmental loathing?

QAnon’s obsession with penny-dreadful tales of Hollywood and Washington “elites” raping underage children becomes suspicious when seen in such numbers, in post after post after post, in video after video after video. QAnon followers just can’t stop themselves, it seems, from dwelling on this disturbing notion. Some of the Christians who make these videos will even illustrate their outrage with digitally blurred photographs that barely obscure the illegal images. One wonders if “outrage” accurately describes the emotion they’re experiencing while viewing — and reviewing and re-reviewing — these salacious images.

This reminds me of the numerous past occasions when the respectable “PBS NewsHour” featured roundtable discussions about the worst excesses of what its hosts and correspondents called “tabloid media.” The hosts would lead a high-toned conversation with academics and fellow journalists about how the nasty tabloids had been irresponsibly publishing graphic, bloody crime photographs just to raise sales. Of course, the producers of the “NewsHour” would invariably spotlight these same images throughout the segment, reframing them as educational illustrations of how low the depraved tabloids would go to sell newspapers. The truth, of course, is that PBS producers desperately wanted to draw in the same numbers as The Star and The National Enquirer, but the only way to approximate that was to air the same images while pretending to be disgusted by it all.

Who else but intellectual liberals could figure out how to merge capitalism with judgmental loathing?

In the end, one thing is clear when it comes to the creation of QAnon: Someone who was highly familiar with conspiracy-theory folklore figured out how to give these retro spook stories a facelift, specifically warping them to match the paradigm of Donald Trump’s America.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/sean-hannity-gives-platform-to-man-who-claims-hillary-is-evil-bisexual-secret-sex-freak.html

no links

Sean Hannity Gives Platform to Man Who Claims Hillary Is ‘Evil,’ Bisexual ‘Secret Sex Freak’

Before interviewing Mike Pence and Kellyanne Conway on Monday night, the Fox News personality had an ‘EXCLUSIVE’ interview with Jeff Rovin, a man with a shocking ‘secret.’

ASAWIN SUEBSAENG

BETSY WOODRUFF

10.24.16 10:00 PM ET

On Monday night, unpaid Donald Trump adviser and current Fox News host Sean Hannity broadcasted his “EXCLUSIVE” interview with Jeff Rovin, novelist and self-identified “fixer” for Hillary and Bill Clinton. Rovin first told his story to supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer last week, opening up about his alleged past as a Clinton ally who would help the powerful couple manipulate the press and (also!) set up secret, extramarital sexual liaisons.

Hannity emphasized that Fox News could not “independently verify” Rovin’s story. He also noted that the Clinton presidential campaign—“shockingly”—did not respond to his team’s multiple requests seeking comment.

“I was fixing [for the Clintons], I really don’t like that term, but there it is,” Rovin told Hannity. “I was fixing something for an actor who was in their inner circle.”

Hannity proceeded to gently and credulously ask Rovin about his explosive claims about working to kill negative Clinton stories in the press, and about the Clintons’ “open marriage” and how he’d “help them hide their scandals.”

Rovin, who said he wanted to appear on Hannity’s program to offer a “less hyperbolic” version of the Enquirer cover story, was awfully cagey for someone who was outing himself as a notorious Clinton “fixer.” He did assert that it was an “open secret” among his fellow Clintonite cohorts that Hillary Clinton had a romantic relationship with Vince Foster,the former White House aide who committed suicide and has since become a fascination of Clinton conspiracy theorists. Rovin said he’d been at the Clinton White House “twice.” He discussed how “the world is upside down [and] we have to set it right, again.”

He apparently identifies as a libertarian, who is ABSOLUTELY NOT doing this to help the Trump campaign. When pressed by Hannity on who he’d be voting for in November, Rovin demurred but conceded, “I like Trump, sure.”

…OK, there’s a lot to unpack here.

First, the Enquirer “bombshell,” of which Rovin was the star subject, is a “WORLD EXCLUSIVE 9-PAGE SPECIAL INVESTIGATION.” The story breathlessly details how the former secretary of State and first lady is a sex-crazed, “evil,” “polyamorous,” bisexual (or at least bi-curious), and “ruthless power-hungry” supervillain, one prolific in the dark arts of criminal conspiracy and character assassination aimed at Bill’s “bimbos.”

The Enquirer article is jam-packed with clandestine sex romps, mysterious death, prostitutes, “LIES AND SPIES,” and a woman (now the Democratic presidential nominee!) hell-bent on manipulating her sex-crazed self all the way to becoming leader of the free world.

Rovin—who was interviewed anonymously by the Enquirer and labeled Hillary’s “BAGMAN”—spilled his guts to the tabloid about the Clintons’ alleged sex-hypocrisy, detailing an “endless string of sexual stories arising from what effectively was the Clintons’ open, polyamorous marriage.”

“[Her fixer] arranged a lesbian romp for bisexual Hillary with a prominent Hollywood identity!” the Enquirer reported. “[He] squealed about a lusty rendezvous he arranged for Hillary that FINALLY proves the lesbian rumors that have dogged her for decades!”

“I arranged a meeting for Hillary and a woman in an exclusive Beverly Hills hotel,” he told the publication. “From the moment the Clintons found their feet in Los Angeles and began to meet the stars, they became addicted to power… It’s ironic their own scandalous truths are worthy of a movie script!”

Compelling stuff.

Rumors that Hillary is a lesbian murderer—or that Bill is a cocaine-addled deviant—have proliferated in fringe corners of the internet and right-wing circles for ages. Authors Robert Morrow, Edward Klein, and Trump’s longtime adviser and political ally Roger Stone have written books making outlandish claims about supposed Clinton drug habits, sexual preferences, and bloody, bloody history. (Trump himself suggested this month that Hillary was screwing around on former president Bill.)

Rovin has had a decently impressive career as a fiction writer. He has co-authored sci-fi novels with William Shatner and X-Files star Gillian Anderson. He took over Tom Clancy’s Op-Center novel series after the author died in 2013.And his Penguin Random House author page notes he is “a student of the martial arts”—much like Hannity himself.

...

Rovin also edited theWeekly World Newstabloid for a time. As The Atlantic has noted, the publication “highlighted tabloid journalism’s thin line between fiction and nonfiction,” until its print edition folded in 2007. The tabloid pushed self-consciously outlandish stories, like the classic “BAT CHILD ESCAPES!” It also had its fair share of Hillary Clinton-related tall tales.

“BILL CATCHES HILLARY WITH SPACE ALIEN!” blared one headline.

“HILLARY ADOPTS ALIEN BABY,” read a 1993 cover.

When Rovin started editing the publication, he stressed the importance of its coverage of space aliens.

“National, international, and even interplanetary events are being suppressed,” he wrote in an editor’s note on May 2, 2005. “Newspapers, television, and the internet are feeding us what dolphins call ‘meep… meepahh… marp’—Literally, lies as deep as the ocean.”

“When the government tries to cover up visits from space aliens and time travelers, we’ll be there,” Rovin continued.“(Weekly World News will even tell you what investments, if any, people from the future are making in the stock market. You won’t find that in Forbes!)”

The Trump campaign did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on whether Republican nominee sees any merit in this Enquirerstory on his Democratic rival. However, the *Enquirer* (a Trump-endorsingtabloid long famous for printing unsubstantiated gossip and stories about space aliens and the Illuminati) and Hannity have become two of Trump’s most reliable allies in the media during this election—and sometimes in concert.

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Alex Jones

Alex Jones is the proprietor of InfoWars.com, a fringe conspiracy website that promotes the idea that the government was behind the 9/11 attacks. Jones also believes the Brussels attacks were “the ultimate false flag,” Beyonce is funded by the CIA to create mayhem, and the government uses estrogen-mimicking chemicals in juice boxes to turn children gay. Jones also warned listeners of transgender people “vomiting and crapping all over the place” if protected by non-discrimination ordinances.

For more about Alex Jones, click here.

Alex Jones' Influence On The Trump Campaign

Jones Praised For Playing An “Important Role” Supporting Trump, 

Used His Website To Help Campaign.Trump surrogate Roger Stone commended Jones for playing an “important role” in the Trump campaign. On his website, Infowars, Jones also took credit for “devastating the Trumpian opposition.” Jones has bragged about his private conversations with Trump, claiming the presumptive Republican nominee “listens to what we have to say,” and has claimed that Trump based his support for auditing the Federal Reserve on Jones’ beliefs. Trump has lavished praise on Jones’ “amazing” reputation, and the campaign previously partnered with Infowars to get out the vote. [Media Matters, 12/2/15, 2/10/16, 2/22/16, 3/22/16, 5/4/16, 5/4/16]

Media Have Noted Jones And Trump’s “Relationship”. Chris Hayes noted that Jones and Trump’s relationship “is not a one-way relationship” on the May 5 edition of MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes. Hayes highlighted a December 2015 interview between Trump and Jones in whichJones defended Trump’s claims that New Jersey Muslims celebrated 9/11. [MSNBC, All In with Chris Hayes, 5/5/16]

Alex Jones: Conspiracies, Transphobia, Homophobia, Violence Promotion

Jones Promoted Conspiracy Theories About The Brussels Attacks, 9/11, Aliens, Beyonce, Joan Rivers, And More. Alex Jones’ site Infowars formerly described him as “one of the very first founding fathers of the 9-11 truth movement.” Jones has also called the Brussels terror attacks “the ultimate false flag”, accused Beyonce of spreading “CIA propaganda”, and warned of “an alien force” “attacking humanity.” Jones also accused Obama of “basically running ISIS” and intentionally “letting Ebola in” America “to start a civil war.” Recently,Jones accused Michelle Obama of murdering Joan Rivers because Rivers exposed Michelle Obama as transgender. In the wake of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, Jones hosted Roger Stone on his show to assert that “Hillary’s girlfriend” Huma Abedin is a “Saudi spy.” [Media Matters, 10/14/14, 12/3/15, 3/17/16, 3/22/16, 4/25/16, 6/14/16; InfoWars.com, 2/2/11 via Internet Archive; YouTube, 5/16/16]

Jones Wished Violence On Political Opponents. Alex Jones has a history of wishing violence on his political opponents and their supporters. On the night of Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary, Jones posted, then deleted, a YouTube video in which he called George Will a “piece of filth,” and told him to “look in the mirror, realize you’re a traitor, and do the right thing … blow what little is left of your brains out all over yourself.” Jones threatened to “slap” supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) “upside your moron heads until you wake up.” Jones later told Sanders supporters they “need to have [their] jaws broken.” Jones subsequently claimed he was speaking “figuratively”, but added “I don’t apologize overall.” [Media Matters, 2/11/16, 4/5/16]

Jones Used Transphobic, Homophobic Language To Oppose LGBT Rights. Jones warned of the “globalist mafia” forcing the transgender community’s “fake rights” on Americans and claimed it would lead to “transvestite[s]” going into bathrooms “hopped out of their brain on drugs vomiting and crapping all over the place.” Jones also claimed to “have the government documents” proving federal authorities “encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children.” In response to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, Jones blamed “the LGBT community in general for endangering America.” [Media Matters, 2/25/11, 5/1/13, 6/13/16]

Jones, Infowars Repeatedly Accused Marco Rubio Of Having A Secret “Gay Past.” Jones frequently used his radio show and website to allege that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) was secretly homosexual. The Alex Jones Show featured a segment speculating that in the ‘90s Rubio engaged with gay prostitutes in a Miami park that was “a haven for drug dealers and gang members.” Infowars also ran reports claiming Rubio was “a very extroverted homosexual” in college, and that the Republican establishment is trying to “bury” his secret “gay past” of parties with “scantily-clad men ... covered in suds to camouflage homosexual acts.” On the March 1 edition of Jones’ show, Jones insinuated that Rubio was “obsessed with Donald Trump’s package.” [Infowars, 1/27/16, 3/1/16, 3/1/16; Right Wing Watch, 3/1/16]

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