Reading Time: 5 minutes From COVID-19 to climate change, scientists who speak out are facing a flood of hate mail, threats and harassment from conspiracy theorists who don’t want to hear facts that contradict their beliefs.
conspiracy theories
Posted inNews
Dominion and democracy: What Fox News avoided, for now, and what comes next
Reading Time: 4 minutes Last year, I asked a rhetorical question in the wake of the nearly one billion dollar verdict in the Alex Jones fake news case, which involved relentlessly broadcast lies stoking conspiracy theories around the Sandy Hook massacre. Yesterday, as everyone reported the settlement with Fox News and parent company Fox Corp, of $787.5 million to […]
Posted inTechnology
Camera phones don’t prove God’s existence
Reading Time: 3 minutes Smartphones have created video evidence for many claims both unknown and underappreciated, but they’ve failed to support religious beliefs.
Posted inCritical thinking
The boring conspiracy
Reading Time: 4 minutes The Illuminati. The Knights Templar. The Freemasons. The New World Order. The Bilderbergers. The Elders of Zion. The Deep State. Chances are, you’ve heard these names. Each of them, at one time or another, has been identified as the shadowy cabal running the planet from behind the scenes, pulling the strings to make world leaders […]
Posted inCritical thinking
‘When a man ceases to believe in God, he will believe anything’
Reading Time: 5 minutes The famous Chesterton quote is wrong: belief in God makes a person more likely, empirically, to fall for fads and conspiracy theories.
Posted inCritical thinking
Paul Pelosi’s attacker and Gamergate: Old conspiracy theories never die
Reading Time: 8 minutes On Friday morning, 42-year-old David DePape attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul at their home in San Francisco. Internet sleuths quickly found that his extensive internet footprint began with one of the dumbest conspiracy theories to sprout in decades: Gamergate. No matter how many years separate us from Gamergate, it never seems to go away. There’s […]
Posted inCritical thinking
Conspiracy theories and poor thinking without facts, oh my!
Reading Time: 3 minutes A conservative article sees a scary Leftist hiding in every closet and under every bed. I’m not used to reading this level of rage. Let’s try to understand the argument.
Posted inLaw
Conspiracists rejoice after ‘Satanic’ Georgia Guidestones destroyed
Reading Time: 3 minutes On Wednesday morning, before the sun came up in the city of Elberton, the Georgia Guidestones were destroyed in an act of vandalism that was immediately celebrated by fundamentalist Christians who felt a Satanic threat had been destroyed. And if you have no idea what we’re talking about, strap in, because this story is wild. […]
Posted inCritical thinking
Authority! What is it good for?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Greetings, Shoptalkers! In my last column, “Conspiracy cultivation”, I explored three rhetorical moves that our info silos share with the communities that create fringe theorists. In this week’s “Tooling Around”, let’s hash out ways that we can make the conversation less toxic. By reducing our fixation on authority “from the margins”, we can become better […]
Posted inCritical thinking
Conspiracy cultivation (and me, and you)
Reading Time: 5 minutes In October 2020, I had to leave Colombia for a week to reset my legal status. I spent that week in a hostel in Panamá. The old Spanish-colonial building, nestled on a hill closer to the stark residences of year-round locals than to the brightly painted walls of the tourist quarter, was musty and run […]