The Final Word on the Crackpot Conspiracist Mindset « NewsReal Blog

The Final Word on the Crackpot Conspiracist Mindset « NewsReal Blog

Last night I introduced my wife to this film, one of my favorite documentaries. In it a quirky engineer named Fred Leuchter stumbles into thinking he's proven the Holocaust didn't happen. In other words, he becomes a crackpot conspiracist.

From October 4 through October 8 NewsReal featured “Crackpot Chronicles: Van Jones, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul, Rorschach, the Truthers, And Me.” The series’s purpose was to define and explain the “Crackpot Conspiracist Mindset” through analyzing a dialogue I had stumbled into with a 9/11 Truther. In doing so we could understand why A) former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones needed to be fired, B) how popular talker Glenn Beck did not fit into this pattern of thinking, and C) why conspiracists need to be shunned from mainstream political movements.

Here’s a listing of all the parts of the series for those who missed it:

• Click here for Part I
• Click here for Part II
• Click here for Part III
• Click here for Part IV
• Click here for Part V

The series also inspired a few subsequent posts highlighting various notable “Truther Punksmacks” by commenters:

• One of Our Regulars Take on a Truther Crackpot
• Nixon and Cults
• Making the Point

Throughout the series various conspiracist crackpots showed up to protest in the comments and promptly proved my point to NewsReal’s readers. (Many especially didn’t like my use of the word “crackpot” to describe them, no matter how clearly they fit the term’s definition.) They showed that I was exactly right in that this sort of thinking is a specific mentality. It’s not whatever the individual conspiracy might be that’s the issue. The problem is that those who stumble into conspiracy advocacy have a certain style of thinking which is deeply different than the rest of us. This approach makes it so it’s all but impossible to reason with them.

In engaging one of the crackpots I pointed out that my series was not about disproving 9/11 Truther garbage but explaining the Crackpot Conspiracist Mindset. He seemed to have missed this and demanded that I write a cliffs notes summary of the series.

I initially balked at the crackpot’s demand. Eventually, though, it seemed like perhaps it might be valuable to make a listing of the various aspects of crackpot conspiracist thinking. In fact there were probably a few more that I didn’t mention in the series which could be added to the list.

So let’s begin: