Truther steals playground sign, taunts Sandy Hook victim's mother

As part of work I did for a company which lost a number of people on September 11th (and had a lot survive), I came across a number of message boards devoted to the idea that 9/11 was an inside job. Scary to read the delusions of these people.

 

Makes you wonder why crackpottery is such a cottage industry here in the US. The answer is simple - some people make money off of it.

And when did all of this disbelief and distrust take root? Was it since the JFK assassination, or was it prevalent before then?

 

The JFK assassination certainly kicked it into gear, but mainly it's been since Vietnam and Watergate that it's been taken as a baseline assumption by a significant percentage of the population that every single thing the government says is always a lie.

An opinion which has been hugely amplified by 30 years of nonstop screech media pandering to paranoia and several key government officials repeating it too.

 

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And here is one of the truther assholes harassing the fire chief. The fire chief puts him in his place.

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As I said, save the hate for the robber barons who wrecked our economy.
It feels like we've let these fuckholes off the hook- and that sucks.
The president would rather we all just forget it.
Not here.

 

People who mock other people's grief deserve that kind of contempt, too.
When those guys visited Newtown to speak to the school committee, I hope somebody spat in their food.

 

http://bit.ly/1nVFWg4

According to Scaife, he was recently diagnosed with cancer that cannot be treated. He does still own Trib Total Media and I'm assuming the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is still as conservative as ever.

 

It's always been around.

But in the pre-Internet days, the local town whacko talking about the Freemasons or Jews or little gray aliens controlling the world was harmless. Once the Internet came along, they could find others to reinforce their crackpottery which made some of them dangerous.

 

I thought Slate had a pretty good five-part series on conspiracy theory people a few years ago: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/trutherism/2011/09/where_were_you_when_you_first_heard.html - I showed it to a buddy who believes in the Spare Change and 9/11 alternate theories, and his one line response was something like, "I can't take anyone seriously who dismisses the melting point of the metal in the towers." As long as there is a 1 percent aspect that isn't explained, it gives a lot of these people something to latch on to.

Ultimately, to paraphrase from the entirely reputable source of South Park, I think on one level it's more comforting to believe in conspiracies than to account for randomness, for some people. Meaning, if you believe that the government orchestrated X, that at least gives you a tangible thing to rally against, as opposed to having to accept that X percentage of people are capable of being pushed into mass murder.

 

Of course, some folks are just paranoid idiots.

 

Who see conspiracies in the bathroom during a piss test.