Poll Results: Most say "No Hidden Human Conspiracy"

My poll question was:

Do you believe there is a hidden human conspiracy responsible for much of the evil in the world?

Results were lopsidedly on the side of rational folks (in my opinion, anyway!). Of 40 people who voted, 29 were liberals and 11 conservatives. 33 folks (24 liberals, 9 conservatives) said "Nope, no hidden human conspiracy." 7 people (5 liberals, 2 conservatives) said they believed there was a hidden human conspiracy. Percentage-wise, that means virtually the same number of conservatives and liberals were skeptics. And that makes me happy. Of course the accuracy of this in any larger statistical way would likely be completely bogus. But one can hope.

New poll coming soon...

Poll about "hidden human conspiracies"

I'm a skeptic... real much so... and (I admit it) irrationally anti-conspiracy theory. For instance, Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald and that's all. So Glenn Beck drives me nuts. Also the 9/11 folks, liberal / progressives like me they may otherwise be but not 9/11. Some really mean people with a brilliantly simple plan did it. That's all. I do not like conspiracies! So... thought I'd throw a poll out there to see if others disagreed with me. And am a little surprised in a good way at the result so far.

Glenn Beck Implies racially-based Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments Never Happened

(An acquaintance informed me that MY facts were also partially incorrect regarding the nature of the Tuskegee Experiments, namely, that I said black men were injected with syphilis... they were not -- instead, men with syphilis were purposefully not treated over a period up to forty years. I have revised this post to reflect that reality, and appreciate the correction.)

Glenn Beck cites Jeremiah Wright talking about one of America's tragic crimes against African Americans... and he cites it as though it is fiction!

Beck's bizarre mix of nonsense phraseology with ulta-emotive imagery and conspiracy-theorist buzz words isn't enough, in itself, to brand him a racist. But the following comes darn close.

This passage comes from the FOX web site transcript of Beck's show (entire transcript):

GLENN: .... Now, this is from an interview he [Van Jones] did as the head of the Ella Baker Center.

VAN JONES: The white polluters and the white environmentals [sic] are essentially steering poison into the people of colored communities.

GLENN: Have you heard this any has the president ever been around anyone who has ever said anything like that before Van Jones?

REVEREND WRIGHT: The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment. They purposely infected African American men with syphilis.

GLENN: The president of the United States has tried to pass himself off as a guy who just sat in Jeremiah Wright's Black Liberation Theology church for 20 years. A friend. He's like an old uncle. He didn't even notice. He baptized Barack Obama's children. He baptized Barack Obama, but he never heard these things before. And even if he did hear them, he didn't really even notice. Okay, so that's the explanation for the crazy uncle. What is the explanation this time? What is the excuse this time for appointing the same type of radical, saying almost damn exact same words as Jeremiah Wright to an influential position in our government? Is it that you didn't vet these people? Because gee, that sounds like a problem, that our president of the United States didn't vet him enough to know. Is it that the FBI didn't do its job? I mean, we found all of this stuff. Sure, I only have a staff of seven producing books, TV, radio shows, I only have a staff of seven. And all of a sudden we can come up with these things. Gee, you'd think the FBI or the president of the United States would surely be able to find these things.

Let's review here.

Government poster advertising the syphilis study. (Wikipedia, source.)

First, the Tuskegee experiments, where black men with syphilis were sought out by doctors who pretended to treat them but then left them untreated for up to forty years, is HISTORIC FACT. The part Jeremiah Wright apparently got wrong was the claim that our government injected these men with syphilis. However, just how different is it to purposely not treat someone -- and without their knowledge! -- while you, as a representative of their government, tell them you are treating their disease? The nuance is not a large one.

Our government did, however, misrepresent itself as there to cure men some of whom it effectively murdered by intentionally withholding penicillin when that drug became known as curative of syphilis. Need it be said that the wives and any children of these infected men were, by intentional negligence, infected by the men who'd been left untreated? Just how wrong is Wright? Yes, the line is very, very thin.

Second, Mr. Beck, you fail to explain the difference above, leaving in the hearer's mind the impression that the entire story is false. No, most of it is not false. Only the active introduction of syphilis into healthy black men is, apparently, untrue. (I use the word "apparently" because in light of what else went on, I remain open to further revelations in this matter.)

Third, your argument actually ends by shoring up Mr. Van Jones' position -- as you cite historic racial crimes with which to compare his claims of such crimes. (I don't suggest it actually works -- but for those aware of history your argument is at best just more Beckian gobbledygook.)

Tuskegee University's web site summarizes the horror of that Beck-denied history:

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all.

The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

Now. What part of that was NOT our government? In short, though Jeremiah Wright has certainly not been correct on everything he's said, this instance is one where he is far closer to historic truth than Glenn Beck, who is exposed as a rabble-rousing racist. There is no excuse. FOX News has no excuse.

You wonder why liberals such as myself view the Right with such grave suspicion and active dislike?

Glenn Beck should be removed from FOX News. But as long as his non-factual jingoism remains popular with a large enough minority of Americans, FOX will keep him on TV. They don't care if he rants for five minutes about how the old artwork on Rockefeller Center is really part of a commie / fascist (never sure which) plot, and how it all somehow ties into Obama being President... and they don't care about him misrepresenting the Tuskegee Experiments as fiction rather than fact. So he'll keep it up.

Meanwhile, I will make it a personal mission to boycott FOX -- not only their news channels but also their entertainment channels. Racism is still alive in America. And I'm not gonna take it.

If other readers agree, please link to this on your blog or face book pages!

[This post has been revised a number of times since earlier today.]

Campaigning via Conspiracy Theory: Ayers, Acorn, and Obama the Alien

I have written quite a bit about conspiracy theories, most of them having to do with urban myths regarding "Satanic Ritual Abuse," alleged inter-generational Satanists who brainwash their followers and sacrifice adults and children to the devil. A major feature of almost all these myths requires the existence of a secret super-cell of Satanists, often said to be world leaders. [Photo at left from "Conspiracylol.com"]

During the 1980s and on into the 1990s, I wrote various articles exploring the Satanist myths. Most of them promulgated by (sigh) my fellow Evangelicals and/or (in the case of the infamous Michelle Remembers) Catholics. I also took part in co-researched and written articles (plus one book, Selling Satan: Mike Warnke and the Evangelical Media), which exposed various "former satanists" and/or "former victims of satanists" as fakes.

And as a result, I realized that questioning everything anyone told me was a pretty good idea. That went double when it came to conspiracy theories, which as incredible stories demanded incredible evidence to verify. Or so my suspicious mind works. Heck, I'm so hard to convince I actually believe John Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Alone.

Go with me just a little way on this.

Why, for instance, do we believe conspiracy theories. Or rather, believe some while disbelieving others? After all, by definition, a successful conspiracy has no evidential trail left to follow.

I think we believe conspiracy theories that agree with our own way of seeing, of understanding, and of locating evil. Locating? Yes, this is the single most important feature of a conspiracy theory. Evil must have a location. And, that location must be with other entities, almost always human, who are "other" than I and those closest to me. Commies (Joe McCarthy's insanity, remember?). Blacks (every black man wants to rape a white woman). Even whites... AIDS was designed to eliminate blacks, you know. And so on. There has to be an evil other.

One of the best examples of this is found in the painful, even terrifying novel by Bernard Malamud, The Fixer. A Russian-Jewish peasant finds his life in peril due to the false anti-Semitic myth that Jews often sacrificed babies in secret ceremonies. The novel is, of course, rooted in the reality of what Christians often believed about their Jewish neighbors (and in the reality of violence committed against Jews by such Christians).

Another example of this lies in the current distribution of a rabidly anti-Islamic video 18 million households nationwide (though particularly in "swing states" currently drifting toward Democrat Barack Obama). Radical Islam, the videos claim, has been discovered to have an inside plan to take over America, a plan led by seemingly innocent American leaders. By video's end, one suspects that all Islam is radical, and (by necessity) nearly all American Muslims (as well as Arab Christians) may be "one of them."

And of course playing into this conspiratorial theme above are threads from the Republican Party (via both the McCain/Palin campaign directly and others backing them but not officially connected). "Who is Barack Obama?" one McCain ad asks. "A friend of terrorist Ayers," is the answer, the "Ayers" of course not really being necesssary other than as a cover for running such an unhinged conspiratorial message. That beat goes on as of today via "Robo-calls" (automated calls) by the Republican National Committee:

Hello. I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee at [of course I deleted the number!].

The above illustrates the thing with conspiracy theories: Most conspiracy theories make no sense!

Break the above quote down, and it becomes a series of unconnected factoids which require the listener's own bias to make cohere into a single unified story. Obama knows a guy. The guy, when Obama was 8, was involved with the '60s radical group, Weather Underground. The group blew some stuff up and killed two people. Democrats will enact an "an extreme leftist agenda" if they "take control" of Washington. Obama and his terrorist/commie buddies lack the judgement to lead the USA.

Each sentence in itself is independent of the previous one or the next one. The parts do not make one whole, but instead are illogically thrown together. The reader processes them and by so doing experiences either an instinctive "a ha!" moment or (I hope) just as instinctive recoils from the attempt to create fear, and an explanation for that fear, at Obama's expense.

My most riveting moment re the absolute non-rationality of conspiracy theory came while interviewing a parent of one of the children allegedly abused by supposed satanist Ray Buckey (the now-infamous McMartin Preschool case, where both Ray and his mother were found not guilty). Looking very somber, this upper-middle class mother told me about how one child at McMartin was abused by Raymond... who at the time was over 100 miles away from where the abuse occurred.

Startled, I attempted to correct her. "But Ray was 100 miles away... he'd have had to be two places at the same time!"

She nodded understandingly. "Oh, yes. Those Satanists can do anything."

So, apparently, can the Republicans, at least where inventing conspiracy theories are concerned. Consider the latest one involving ACORN, a social activist group with whom I have worked a few times (though years back). The group among other things is known for regularly doing voter registration drives, paying folks to get others signed up to vote. The obvious happens. A small number of hired registrars end up falsifying voter cards, creating voters who do not exist.

So what does the Republican Party say about ACORN... with who their own candidate John McCain has worked in the past?

Allegedly, ACORN is involved in subverting the nation's voting process, despite the fact that non-existent voters can't very well vote. And, should someone show up to attempt voting for them, there is the small matter of signature comparison required by most polling places (all of them in Illinois, for instance).

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is attempting to strip new voters from Ohio's (and other swing states') registration logs. That's no conspiracy. That, for the Republican Party, seems business as usual.

And speaking of business as usual, how about yet another Republican Conspiracy Theory (RCT's we can call 'em) regarding the Democrats having started this financial mess by allowing Freddie Mac to lend to poor borrowers? John McCain's attempt to paint Barack Obama as fomenter of class warfare seems to be the classic case of man pointing one finger at other man while pointing three more back at himself.

Conspiracies in real life inevitably fall apart for the most pedestrian of reasons. A secret may be safe with one human, but once a second, third, or fourth human is included, the conspirators have the devil of a time not leaking it to someone.

Anyway, my favorite conspiracy theory about Barack Obama is that we know so little about him that it won't be until he is elected we find out his real name is Bxqz Oxynana from the planet Xerx, and that he's here to enslave humanity. Turns out Xerxians like nothing better than human beings... lightly toasted with a dab of Zyx spread.

Don't believe it? Disprove it, then!! Remember, beware the Alien Obama! Vote for Obama and we're ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!

Uh, pass me the Zyx.

Vicious Anti-Obama email

[Below is a response to email spam sent to me... and apparently also sent to thousands of others. I sent this to my friends, then decided I might as well post it here as well.]

I know most of us are media-savvy enough to recognize spammed lies when we see 'em. But I've gotten an anti-Barack Obama email -- sent, as too many are, by well-meaning evangelical friends -- that was outrageous. I figure others might appreciate having the record set straight. Though I do personally support Obama's candidacy, this isn't about whether you vote for him or not. Rather it is a lesson in lies.

The version of the email I got begins with this:

"Who is Barack Obama? If you do not ever forward anything else, please forward this to all your contacts...this is very scary to think of what lies ahead of us here in our own United States... better heed this and pray about it and share it. We checked this out on "snopes.com". It is factual. Check for yourself."

Wow. Snopes? That's a website where falsehoods on the web are exposed, and a good place to "bookmark" for research purposes. So, if Snopes says the email is true, well...

I guess the anti-Email's authors were hoping no one would take them up on their lies and actually go check Snopes.com. Because if you do, as I did, you find out what you strongly suspected: they are bald-faced LIARS. See: http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp

Snopes exposes every falsehood in the letter, from Obama's alleged ties to radical "Wahabi" Islam via the alleged "Wahabi" school he attended (LIE: exposed by both CNN and the Associated Press) to his being a Muslim, period (he was attending Catholic school at the age of six and has never claimed any faith except the Christian faith -- he currently attends a Chicago United Church of Christ.)

Where did the idea he was a Wahabi Muslim originate? Ha. Turns out that Insight magazine, a spin-off of the Washington Times, came up with the story. Both publications are owned by Sun Myung Moon, the head of the "Moonies" (Unification Church), which teaches that Moon is the Messiah and his wife is the Holy Spirit. Oh, and Moon made much of his fortune via arms dealing! (Gotta love it--a Messiah making firearms.)

But there's more. For instance, the email claims (again, wrongly) of Obama that "when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran."

Completely false. Actually, there was another congressman (Keith Ellison of Minnesota), who is openly Muslim and did get sworn in on the Koran.

But Barack was NOT sworn in that way. He's not a Muslim. And so on and so on... Oh, another great LIE had to do with Obama allegedly refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. Also untrue.

Anyway, if nothing else, this email is therapeutic for me. I was not intending to start my day upset.... but even for politics, this lying email was a new low.

One additional note. When an email begs you to "pass this on to your friends," please, please, make sure what you are passing on is actually fact. Use snopes.com and other sites to double-check the email's legitimacy. Ask around. As Christians, we can unwittingly participate in further lies and gossip which are highly destructive not only to someone's candidacy, but moreso to someone's personhood.

Blessings,
Jon Trott

...And as one blog addition to the above, may I say that having a Muslim president makes at least as much sense as having a president who's Mormon. Having an evangelical president certainly hasn't worked out all that well, and is a project a growing number of Christ followers (including me) have little interest in. So nothing I wrote above should be read as suggesting that someone's faith (of whatever flavor) should disqualify them for the Presidency.

tag: Barack Obama, conspiracy, evangelicals for obama, Obama 2008, obama koran, Obama Muslim, obama pledge of allegiance, obama school, obama wahabi, snopes