A Very American Madness
America is not fallen; it is simply given to periodic bouts of insanity. The patient is tiresome; the patient is ridiculous; but the patient is stable.
Ronald W. Dworkin
· 17 min read
Conspiracy Theories
A collection of 16 posts
Populism and Power
Why a right-wing populist has qualms about J.D. Vance and his postliberal ideology.
Dennis Saffran
· 18 min read
The Paranoid Style in Shakespeare Denialism
Against conspiracist trends, there is an obligation on defenders of a liberal society to uphold the integrity of its intellectual methods.
Oliver Kamm
· 25 min read
Aliens...Again!
This time, they always say, it could be different.
Michael Shermer
· 10 min read
Military-Industrial Complexities
President Eisenhower’s warning deserves to be better understood.
George Case
· 7 min read
The Rise of the Respectable Conspiracy Theory
COVID, Trump, Brexit—everybody’s had something to break their brains in recent years and some people may never recover.
Christopher J. Snowdon
· 14 min read
Fantastical Beliefs in a Post-Christian Age
Without a faith, people must find new sources of meaning, new congregations to which they can belong.
Patrick Parkinson
· 12 min read
At the Corner of Camp and Lafayette
New Orleans has a starring role in many JFK conspiracy theories—as I learned during an odd but memorable street tour.
Jonathan Kay
· 10 min read
Wired for Conspiracism
The fact that some conspiracy theories do sometimes turn out to be true helps explain why our minds are evolutionarily programmed to catastrophize.
Michael Shermer
· 8 min read
Lessons from Hannah Arendt on Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality’
Fascism, communism, and transhumanism all lure us into rejecting the real human condition in favor of ideological constructs.
Roger Berkowitz
· 13 min read
An Outback Conspiracy
Misinformation results from the toxic combination of these two defining features, a lack of proximity to the Territory, and viewing the world through the lens of oppression.
Matthew Blackwell
· 13 min read
Understanding the Motivated Reasoning of Anti-Vax Refuseniks
Vaccine refusal also correlates with a feeling of alienation from the wider culture—what sociologists call “anomie.”
Richard Redding
· 6 min read
Twenty Years Later, Engineering Experts Explain How The Twin Towers Collapsed
Some have questioned why the buildings did not “topple over” after being struck side-on by aircraft. But the answer becomes clear once you consider the details.
Quillette
· 6 min read
In Defence of Absolute Truth
By rejecting any universally applicable standards of reason, it destroys the possibility of true conversation, of learning from and compromising with each other.
Alan S. Rome
· 18 min read
COVID-19 Conspiracists and Their Discontents
The mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. So when gaps in knowledge open up, the empty spaces are filled with available explanations that, however implausible, seem morally compelling.
Michael Shermer
· 9 min read