Nutty conspiracy theories bridge far left and far right...

[Green_Lantern]

I found an article from 2004 which I think applies to Tea baggers now but also applies to certain DUers when Bush was President:


" This is the frightening prospect, soberly presented by Michael Barkun in his important, just-published book A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. To understand the novelty of this potential requires knowing something about the history of conspiracy theories.

Fears of a petty conspiracy - a political rival or business competitor plotting to do you harm - are as old as the human psyche. But fears of a grand conspiracy - that the Illuminati or Jews plan to take over the world - go back only 900 years and have been operational for just two centuries, since the French Revolution. Conspiracy theories grew in importance from then until World War II, when two arch-conspiracy theorists, Hitler and Stalin, faced off against each other, causing the greatest blood- letting in human history.

THE MAJOR new development, reports Barkun, professor of political science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, is not just an erosion in the divisions between these two groups, but their joining forces with occultists, persons bored by rationalism. Occultists are drawn to what Barkun calls the "cultural dumping ground of the heretical, the scandalous, the unfashionable, and the dangerous" - such as spiritualism, Theosophy, alternative medicine, alchemy, and astrology."----http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/jpost/access/525174951.html?dids=525174951:525174951&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Jan+14%2C+2004&author=DANIEL+PIPES&pub=Jerusalem+Post&edition=&startpage=13&desc=Fusion+paranoia

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Too bad that you have to pay to see the full article -

otherwise this bullshit could be exposed as just that.

[Green_Lantern]

2. how is it bullshit?

Conspiracy theories drive the Tea party movement.

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. fears of a grand conspiracy - that the Illuminati or Jews plan to take over the world - go back only

900 years and have been operational for just two centuries, since the French Revolution -

A rather truncated view of history.

Never heard of the Knights Templar? Crushing them might be called 'operational'. How about the grand conspiracy that the Christians are going to subvert the Roman Empire?

The teaser posits something that is clearly wrong - which may be the fault of the guy who wrote it, rather than the author of the book - but to be so wrong in just a paragraph or two suggests the entire thing is bullshit.

EDIT: I will call bullshit on ANYTHING that attempts to draw equivalency between DUers and Teabaggers.

[EFerrari]

15. I second that objection although it would be good to be able to read

the whole article.

[AuntPatsy]

19. Thank you you speak for me

[Rex]

3. Ah nothing like being teased about a CT that obviously is so out there

they won't print it for the public to see... :eyes:

Typical.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

4. How do you know --

how "certain DUers" were "when Bush was President"? Seriously, you just joined DU during the Obama years. :shrug: Are you admitting that you are a tombstoned zombie?

[Soylent Brice]

45. it would appear so.

[Rambis]

6. Some nutter told me

that Canada and Mexico will merge with the United States and they will create a currency called the amerow? (dont know the spelling):wtf: :crazy:

[NoPasaran]

9. It gets worse than that

Tacos will be filled with ground rabbit and cottage cheese! :scared:

[Rambis]

12. That tears it!

;)

[tritsofme]

7. I've always said the truthers and the birthers are cut from the same cloth.

If 9/11 didn't happen under a Republican president, they would probably be truthers too.

[EFerrari]

10. Except Obama did not lie about his birth certificate and BushCo lied repeatedly

about 9//1 and Amerithrax. There's not much of a comparison.

Yeah, there are people who are over the top about 9/11 but they have no reason to trust anything BushCo says about it.

[Green_Lantern]

16. Truthers think the 9/11 commission lied too...

They don't base it on the Bush administration lies. None of their "evidence" is based on fact.

Truthers spread factually incorrect pieces of evidence they don't just point out Bush lies.

[EFerrari]

23. The 9/11 Commission was stacked. It was a whitewash

just probably not the kind "truthers" think it was.

And none of their evidence is based on fact, really?

That's quite a claim. :)

[Green_Lantern]

27. not really...

I've seen their so called evidence. It's mostly regurgitated OKC bombing theories.

[EFerrari]

29. That's another very big claim. n/t

[JuniperLea]

28. Everything was in BushCo control...

The entire aftermath... the collection and disposition of evidence, etc., so we have no real way of knowing that the "facts based on evidence" are either.

In order to believe any of this, I would have to completely forget how many lies BushCo told... yeah, that's likely, right?

[Green_Lantern]

33. the President doesn't have unilateral control of FBI investigations....

Yeah sure th FBI covered it up :sarcasm:

[JuniperLea]

37. Oh please...

who was in charge of the FBI? You can't be serious.

[Green_Lantern]

43. that's just plain silly....

The FBI is kept very independent from the WH after Nixon.

Now you're slandering the FBI with zero evidence.

[JuniperLea]

48. Did the FBI present the evidence to the public?

Or did the commission?

You're not making much sense, and your insults about silliness don't help you at all either.

[JuniperLea]

25. Not all "Truthers" are like that...

I don't involve myself with the minutiae of disputing "evidence" at all, and I feel there's a very good chance that MIHOP or LIHOP are exactly what happened, based solely on the fact that BushCo was in control of the aftermath, the gathering of and disposition of evidence, and the fact that they lied more than they told the truth during the full 8 years.

Ask anyone in the dungeon...

[EFerrari]

32. The very term "truthers" is a way to marginalize people

who don't trust the official story which they have no reason to trust in the first place.

And to try to equate people who have a legitimate doubt about, say, ANYTHING BushCo says, and the people who are riding Obama's birth certificate as a dog whistle for their racism is ridiculous.

[JuniperLea]

34. Yep, hence the "irony quotes" in my post...

The official story is based on the "evidence" as stated by BushCo... I rest my case. I never get involved with the details because believing any of the details as presented by "the official story" goes against my better judgment.

I will always, always assume Bush is/was lying. Period. There is far more evidence to support that notion than not.

[EFerrari]

39. Agreed. It's not reasonable to simply trust a criminal administration.

[Green_Lantern]

40. you act like Bush and Cheney did evidence collection....

But conspiracy theorists would think the FBI was in on it....

[EFerrari]

42. The FBI has always been a political tool of the right wing in this country

but they are too incompetent to do something like cover up an inside job. They can't even get their own stories to make sense most of the time.

[Green_Lantern]

44. you are being very funny...

The FBI is a right-wing political tool? The same FBI that was the only reprieve blacks had against the Klan?

[EFerrari]

47. Are you effing kidding me? You know, right, that Hoover refused to protect MLK

or to act on the many death threats against him? Not to mention, he wiretapped him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TydECsHWvLI

Or, do you mean the reprieve they gave Fred Hampton?

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/290956-1

[EFerrari]

49. King and Hoover, Encore

Published on Monday, January 16, 2006 by the Boston Globe
King and Hoover, Encore
Editorial


This year's celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday should be an occasion to reflect on the unlearning of history's lessons. Today, as in the 1960s, federal agencies flout the Constitution in the name of a war against a foreign threat.

Thirty years ago a Senate select committee on intelligence activities, headed by Frank Church of Idaho, issued a report on abuses that included an 80-page chapter on the FBI's six-year counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO. It was designed not merely to spy on King, but to neutralize and destroy him. Today more than ever, remembering the vendetta that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was allowed to pursue against King seems as important as commemorating King's nonviolent quest for civil rights and social justice.

The FBI wiretapped King's home and his offices at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as well as the phones of his colleagues. Agents installed microphones in hotel rooms to obtain information about the ''private activities of King and his advisers," information that could be used, in the words of an FBI memo, to ''completely discredit" them. These taped conversations were then used not as evidence in a legal procedure but in efforts to ruin King's reputation, to force him to stop trying to make America live up to its professed ideals, and even to try to push him to commit suicide.

Hoover's pretext for this scheme was an investigation of alleged communist infiltration. Two of King's advisers were suspected of being members of the Communist Party or being controlled by the party. Although it was never proved that either of the two was acting as a communist infiltrator, this rationale persuaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1962 to authorize the COINTELPRO that made it possible for Hoover to pursue his obsessive efforts to destroy King.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0116-23.htm

[Old and In the Way]

50. Yet you believe the official conspiracy theory.

The one where 19 hijackers conspired to commandeer 4 planes within 2 hours of each other. A group that somehow evaded CIA/FBI before 9/11, yet the FBI had it all figured out within 24 hours. And our $700BB/year Defense Department was totally caught off guard and couldn't even protect the Pentagon with a 45 minute's "heads up". If only our radar had been pointing inward instead of outward! Of course, without 9/11, Bush couldn't have started his illegal and immoral war that killed 100's of thousands of innocent Iraqi's and drained the US Treasury of a Trillion dollars.

Bush stopped a public investigation for almost 2 years and underfunded ($3MM was his original budget) it. And Bush/Cheney got to meet with the Commission together (wonder why?) with no official transcript and not under oath. That's the basis of what you believe. I want the truth about why 3000 Americans died on 9/11. You are willing to take Bush's word for it...the same Bush that lied about a casus belli to invade and destroy Iraq.

[JuniperLea]

53. That sums it up nicely...

:applause:

[Old and In the Way]

56. Green Lantern must have missed my comment.

Because, I'm a nutcase! :rofl:

[Green_Lantern]

54. yeah sure...

Black helicopters are coming for me now you told me "the truth."

[EFerrari]

8. During the Bush years, there was no need to MAKE UP conspiracy theories

because there were plenty of conspiracies lying around ready to hand. Election fraud, faking evidence to go to war, detaining innocent people, torture, politically purging DoJ, stacking regulatory agencies with industry hitmen, stacking the 9/11 commission. Christ, there was no need to "make up" anything.

[Green_Lantern]

13. How about the 9/11 truthers....

The conspiracy about 9/11 being an inside job...

[EFerrari]

14. Some of those people are over the top but

I can't blame them. They were lied to repeatedly and in the absence of trustworthy information, people fill in the gaps for themselves.

[Green_Lantern]

21. I do blame them...

They intentionally spread information that was factually incorrect.

[EFerrari]

24. That's a pretty broad statement, not to mention, how in the world

does the group of people you're talking about qualify as "the left"? There are all kinds of people involved in that discussion, not only lefties.

Whatever.

[JuniperLea]

30. Do you believe BushCo's evidence as presented is correctly presented?

You think BushCo told the truth about the evidence they collected?

[Green_Lantern]

35. yes I believe the FBI was truthful about evidence it collected...

Otherwise no evidence in any federal criminal case could be used in a federal trial.

[JuniperLea]

38. That's a mighty broad brush you paint with...

I'm not buying it.

[EFerrari]

41. Do you remember what Richard Clarke said about the FBI?

"The FBI doesn't even know what it knows".

Of course, their fabulous resolution of the Amerithrax case should seal the deal!

[gratuitous]

20. How about them?

Did you see anywhere near the popular media coverage of 9/11 theorists that you see for birthers? What was the relative tone of media coverage for 9/11 truthers (crackpots) compared to the birthers (an important question that must be analyzed carefully)? Are there people in positions of authority (state legislatures and governor's chairs) who advanced or who are advancing 9/11 theories? Have the courts been clogged with 9/11 lawsuits the way Orly Taitz has wasted court resources on her endless string of lawsuits?

I don't see it at all.

[JuniperLea]

22. Well stated...

I don't see it either.

[EFerrari]

26. That's a good point. NO ONE is supposed to challenge the official story

of 9/11 even now -- let alone get wall to wall coverage of that challenge every time 3 or 4 protesters get together.

[Green_Lantern]

31. because Truthers spout their theory without backing it up....

And then act like everyone else are sheep.

[EFerrari]

36. Can you tell me the difference between that

and the claims you have been making on this thread?

I don't want to pick a fight with you, GL, but a big unsubstantiated claim like any other big unsubstantiated claim -- except to the people who make them and "know" they are right.

[gratuitous]

46. As opposed to the birther folks?

I haven't seen any evidence to support their theories, either. But again, I have to return to the coverage and the popular media tone with respect to each one. The 9/11 truthers get no traction that I can see (and not that they deserve any); whereas the birthers, armed with little more than incoherent rage backed by small arms, seem to get a full hearing, with the media going so far as to rephrase some of their loonier pronouncements and excuse or ignore the presence of the complete whackos.

I don't think your comparison is valid.

[unpossibles]

51. yeah, considering a decent amount of those things have ALREADy seen light of day

such as the torture, the trumped up "evidence" for the invasion of Iraq, the DOJ, etc., and other things will probably come to light eventually, such as the election fraud.

I don't know I'd put it in the same category as thinking Obama is a time traveling Socialist Kenyan black super-Nazi. Another difference: the news actually is favorable to the teabaggers.

[EFerrari]

52. The press corpse covered up for BushCo and encourages the teaklanners.

We're through the looking glass. :crazy:

[Fumesucker]

11. Saddam has Weapons of Mass Destruction..

Truth or conspiracy theory?

And yet we went to war based on that.

[JuniperLea]

18. Bingo...

That was a pretty big damn conspiracy too. Much of what we hold against BushCo is exactly that... and not only were there conspiracies involved, they were successful in that the mission was always accomplished.

[ShortnFiery]

17. There is NO far left in America today. The Political Parties are both right-wing corporate. eom

[KG]

55. what do truthers have to do with the 'left' or 'far left'?