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Escaping of the Rabbit Hole - Former Believers
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Why some people fall down the rabbit hole
Discussion in 'Escaping of the Rabbit Hole - Former Believers' started by McGurnicle, Jul 27, 2017.



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McGurnicle
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A lot of conspiracism is motivated by political and religious ideology. Libertarians want unfettered capitalism so it's to their advantage to vilify government. Religious fundamentalists oppose secularism so it's politically expedient for them to demonize secular culture as a deliberate construction of Satanic elites. Most of the major conspiracy theorists are from one or both of these camps. The paranoid style is effective in whipping up hysterical support for crank political theories and religious extremism. This is a standard criticism of conspiracy culture and I think it's a valid one, but there is another type of conspiracy theorist, one who doesn't hold radical or extreme views but winds up down the rabbit hole all the same. It's this type I want to focus on because I was on the path to becoming this type of conspiracist.

I've always pretty much been a religious agnostic and a political moderate, I've never really held strong opinions in those areas and I try to be reasonable and fair minded by at least attempting to understand issues from all the relevant perspectives. I've found that on most issues every side has at least one or two valid point so it's always a good idea keep an open mind and take the time to carefully consider different viewpoints. It was in the course of researching one of these contentious issues that I confirmed a sort of shocking explanation of the structure and function of one of our major institutions. The explanation itself wasn't controversial, it's accepted by everyone who has bothered to look into it, it's just most people aren't aware of how the sausage is made and when you find out it's pretty hard to believe at first. That led me to scrutinize many other major institutions, and in most cases what I found was very disconcerting. I became disoriented, what was once for me a decent society by, for, and of the people now appeared to be an undemocratic plutocracy, a system "for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools" where everything is corrupt and nothing can be trusted.

Now there are many prominent people on both the left and the right who have been saying essentially this for a long time and none of them could be considered "conspiracy theorists", in itself that perspective is largely legitimate. My close call with the rabbit hole came after those revelations and began with the question: If this is true, then what can't be? If people are clueless enough to allow rampant corporatism, private control of the money supply, mass consolidation of corporate controlled media, money in politics, mass surveillance, etc, with none of it ever being mentioned in school or in the media, then maybe Illuminati type grand conspiracies aren't so far fetched after all?

I did begin to look into many of the different claims for who's behind it all and what the ultimate agenda might be and I found a lot of interesting obscure facts and footnotes that do lend support to those ideas. I won't lie, for a while I was half convinced that there was something to it although I never really settled on any one theory. I think what really saved me from full blown delusion is the skeptics and debunkers who maintain an active presence on conspiracy forums and keep blogs that show up in search results on conspiracy related queries. Maybe I encountered the skeptics just in time before the paranoia really took hold and I was still able to recognize good sense when presented with it.


I always try to tell conspiracy leaning people that debunkers are your best friends, that if you're really interested in synthesizing the most reasonable, coherent perspective then you really do need to let honest skeptics tear into your ideas and be willing to let go of rationally untenable commitments. And for conspiracists of my type that usually works, because there the conspiriacism is just due to simple confusion or disorientation, these types really just need to get their bearings and learn to practice some critical thinking. This type of conspiracy theorist is low hanging fruit for the skeptic, they can be reasoned out of the nonsense because they reasoned their way into it. The other type is much more difficult to get through to because their conspiricism is ideologically motivated.


Anyway, I hope that might provide a little more insight into the conspiracy phenomenon, and maybe help skeptics tailor their approach when engaging with the different types.

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Home » Case for Complicity » Propaganda » Down the 9-11 Rabbit Hole We Go
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Down the 9-11 Rabbit Hole We Go
Attempting to tease apart the magical thinking surrounding our national tragedy is harder than spotting a white rabbit.
By Staff -
September 9, 2008
51


We’re hurtling down the rabbit hole. Gravity’s refuted. Black is white, and white turns bitter, transfigured by a mawkish Mad Hatter blithely chewing up our Constitution, juggling missile-shaped teacups, splashing sweet, light crude and cold blood everywhere. To anyone who’s passed through the last eight years believing whatever George W. Bush and his minions have blown their way, well, best of luck to you, because most of it hasn’t been true.
It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.
–Alice, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Does that mean, then, that W. and his cronies were behind the 9-11 attacks? Of course not. Some say, however, if it looks, waddles and quacks like a duck and lays duck eggs, then perhaps it’s time we re-examine it under oath, because it just might be a friggin’ duck. (Fact: Nixon White House audiotapes reveal Tricky Dick literally quacking like a duck. Nixon was a lot of things, but ducky wasn’t one of them.)
We’re all mad here.
–the Cheshire Cat
Ken Jenkins, a Marin-based videographer, electrical engineer and activist with the 9-11 Truth group, tells of one who responded to certain provocative conjecture with “I wouldn’t believe it–even if it were true.” It , of course, is the widely held and yet wildly contentious belief that elements within our own government bear responsibility for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; and that the 596 pages of the official 9/11 Commission Report comprise lies, half-truths and intentional omissions. Like the rift between those who detected a foul stench behind the Warren Commission’s report on JFK’s assassination and those who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, deeply held 9-11 beliefs place Americans at increasing loggerheads with one another.
Mainstream media and not a few on both sides of the political divide condemn, belittle and ridicule conspiracy theorists, who, in turn, have graced their own movement with the weighty word “Truth.” And, just like backers of the official account, the “Truthers” boast vast legions of supporters from across the doctrinaire landscape.
Each side contains its sober thinkers, its celebrities, rational researchers, experts, well-meaning patriots, rabid supporters and total nutballs. Bizarre and contradictory political alliances abound. Reams of paper, books, reports, magazine articles; ceilinged stacks of film and video documentaries; and tens of thousands of blogs and websites–one source contends there are more than 600,000–vie for our attention, proving this issue will not soon disappear.
In one corner there are the “official report” backers, including not only Bush & Co. sycophants, but an armada of Bush-bashers, including such well-regarded lefties as professor Noam Chomsky, journalist Greg Palast, satirist Bill Maher, columnist Alexander Cockburn and the comedy team Penn and Teller. They think the 9-11 Truthers are cranks.
The other side of the ledger boasts its own raft of notables calling for a new independent investigation into the attacks. These include former U.S. senators Lincoln Chafee and Mike Gravel, fellow politicos Ron Paul, Jesse Ventura and Dennis Kucinich, historian Howard Zinn, doc maker Michael Moore, actors Martin and Charlie Sheen, Ed Asner and Rosie O’Donnell, former U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and retired CIA chairman of the National Intelligence Estimates, Ray McGovern.
‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first–verdict afterwards.’
Richard Gage is a Bay Area-based architect and the founding member of Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth. He presently has over 400 fellow architects and engineers who’ve signed on with him, demanding a new investigation. Gage contends that the WTC Twin Towers came down as the result of controlled demolitions. Citing the 10,000-page National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 2005 report on the tower collapses, Gage notes that the report stops before the collapses actually occur. Why? “Because,” Gage charges, “if they had gone any further in their analysis they would have had to account for the massive quantity of evidence for the demolition of these two towers.”
Well, further they have gone. The NIST last week released a new report centering solely on WTC Tower 7, the focus of much speculation for its hours-later tumble, and now pronounced to be the first steel skyscraper to ever succumb to mere fire.
Even that bastion of the handy-guy, Popular Mechanics , has stepped into the fray, releasing a special report entitled “Debunking the 9/11 Myths.” Popular Mechanics says, “Plane debris sliced through the utility shafts at the North Tower’s core, creating a conduit for burning jet fuel–and fiery destruction throughout the building.”
Jet fuel burns at about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, while steel doesn’t begin to melt until about 2,700 degrees. Even if the steel lost structural strength at somewhat lower temps, and building materials and furnishings stoked the blaze, a 1,200-degree meltdown differential does raise certain questions.
Curiouser and curiouser!
–Alice
Lots of people think conspiracies never happen, that life at or near the top, where we’d expect conspiracies to originate, is far too intricate and subtle for such shenanigans. Nicholas Lemann, writing on conspiracies last year for the New Yorker , claims conspiracy theories amount to “a view of how the world works that mistakenly empowers particular, and evil, forces with the ability to determine the course of events, and it misses the messiness and contingency with which life actually unfolds.”
If we buy into Lemann’s argument, then how about the Gulf of Tonkin affair and the explosion on the Battleship Maine? What about Watergate and Iran-Contra, the Tuskegee Study or innumerable covert adventures in foreign coups, economic hits and political assassinations? And what about the 1999 trial when Dr. Marin Luther King Jr.’s family won a wrongful death civil suit against “unknown co-conspirators”? Six white and six black jurors found that “governmental agencies were parties” to Dr. King’s assassination plot.
Then there are lesser known but equally real conspiracies. Some were actually foisted upon us or else were disrupted or energetically disappeared from official records. Take, for example, the CIA’s nefarious mind-altering Cold War-era drug testing known as MK-ULTRA. Its scientists and hirelings dosed thousands of unwitting U.S. citizens with mind-altering drugs over the course of two decades.
Operation Mockingbird was another long-running top-secret CIA operation, which co-opted prominent print and electronic media journalists to spy and propagandize the American public. Mockingbird is largely the reason why it is illegal–wink, wink, nudge, nudge–to do so today.
Perhaps the most revealing and least known conspiracy in U.S. history was the stillborn 1933 “Business Plot,” intended to overthrow newly elected president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and put in place a fascist regime designed to be fronted by retired Marine Corps major general Smedley Butler. Fortunately for us, the patriotic Butler spilled the beans. He even remembered what the recruiters said. “You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. . . . And the dumb American people will fall for it in a second,” Butler told the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, the first body convened by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, on Nov. 20, 1934.
FDR had been in office for but a few months. The economy was wrecked, and those who wrecked it didn’t like Roosevelt’s plans for something called the New Deal. A group of businessmen, industrialists and bankers including J. P. Morgan, Irénée du Pont and an up-and-comer named Prescott Bush were fingered by Butler as plot intimates. Afterward, sworn testimony and evidence placed before McCormack-Dickstein disappeared from the official record altogether.
“Like most committees,” Butler said after the report of the attempted coup was released, “it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape. The big shots weren’t even called to testify. They were all mentioned in my testimony. Why was all mention of these names suppressed from the testimony?”
What is the use of repeating all that stuff, if you don’t explain it as you go on? It’s by far the most confusing thing I ever heard!
–the Mock Turtle
So could the official 9/11 Commission Report itself be defined as a conspiracy theory? Put another way, does this report stand up to rational and/or forensic scrutiny?
“The Jersey Girls” think not. Against the considerable will of the Bush administration, these four widows waged a 441-day campaign to force the 9-11 Commission into existence. By comparison, similar investigations into the space shuttle disaster, Pearl Harbor and the JFK assassination were launched within a few days of the events occurring. And, say the Jersey Girls, few of their questions got answered by the commission’s report.
But what about plain, old-fashioned forensics? “It’s hard for the mind to reject rational forensic evidence which agrees with logic that’s science-based,” says architect Gage. Later he adds, “I, along with many others, are treated as conspiracy theorists, basically, because people aren’t ready to look at this stuff seriously. But once you get the evidence in front of them, it’s a whole different thing.”
OK, then, why the resistance to a second investigation into what was surely the crime of the last half-century? Ken Jenkins thinks he understands why. “People just don’t want to know it. They don’t want to know how bad things are, and accepting that 9-11 was an inside job is just way too horrendous for a lot of people to seriously consider. They don’t approach it rationally. They approach it emotionally, that in terms of the implications of what you’re presenting is too scary.”
Well, maybe. But then again, who’s to say the initial investigation’s case isn’t actually airtight? One way to answer that is to follow the money. Crimes of this magnitude require enormous sums of money in order to be both properly executed and investigated. Another way of determining the extent to which 9-11 was investigated is to ask precisely who led the investigation?
President Bill Clinton was impeached following an investigation in which he lied under oath about a sexual peccadillo. That investigation, conducted by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, cost taxpayers a cool $39.2 million.
While it cost us nearly $40 million to hear Clinton parse the meaning of blowjob, a mere $3 million got earmarked for the 9-11 investigation. And when it finally came time to actually investigate, who was chosen to lead the team? Philip D. Zelikow, a close personal friend of, former colleague of and book co-author with Condoleezza Rice.
Zelikow also happened to be a White House mole. In fact, unbeknownst to other members of the committee, as executive director of the commission, Zelikow briefed the White House on a near daily basis. Judging from this, one might conclude that the independent investigation into events surrounding 9-11 was about as independent as Fox News is fair and balanced.
And when the White House finally relented and allowed an investigation to take place, no independent counsel was deemed necessary in order to get to the bottom of the disaster. Neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney would agree to have their testimony recorded, transcribed or even to have notes taken. They refused to testify separately, in public, or under oath.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World , George W. Bush had direct and personal knowledge that Saddam had no WMD. Bush lied about it, and then covered up his lie by having the CIA forge a document. But Bush also lied about holding administration officials accountable for leaking the identity of Valerie Plame. He has lied about Brownie and Katrina, about torture, wiretapping, habeas corpus, tax relief to the middle class and the health of our economy.
He’s lied about global warming, his military record, his cocaine use, about his relationships with slime buckets like Ken Lay and Jack Abramoff and about the scientific data’s he’s had altered or deleted from public documents. Bush has been a virtual one-man lying industry, and yet clear thinkers among us would have us believe that, when it comes to this single overarching issue of 9-11, he speaks nothing but the truth.
Alice, spinning through Wonderland, had certain insight into that particular notion: “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
Source URL: [www.bohemian.com]
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By P. Joseph Potocki
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If this is the best TrumpTurd and NumbNuts Dunes can do, I hope they have good lawyers because Muller will “fry” everyone last one of them over HOT coals before giving them indictments . . . . This is a Good day for America  . . . now back to work and get ready for the mid-terms!


10

I understand about that warm fuzzy feeling, But this Obama bashing is getting very old. Lots of wackado charges based on nothing but rumor and wishful fantasy.

And you will prove nothing in a Judge Judy's peoples court, It not th way it works sorry, Try a real court with some real evidence!


Obama’s Fault?
A more difficult truth may be that we, the American people, are collectively at fault for this political/media dysfunction. But it’s a lot easier and a lot more fun to blame President Obama for not being a superman who could swoop in and immediately solve all these intractable problems by himself