Cranks and Credibility

By Matt Parrott | At 14, while most kids my age were probably out doing something healthy and normal, I was reading Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World“. I have been and always will be a skeptic and an admirer of the scientific process. While Sagan remains a cardinal influence, it’s more than a little ironic that the spirit of skeptical inquiry he inspired me to embrace ultimately led me to identify and explore the subversive Jewish influence on traditional American culture that he participated in. He inspired me to see through the pretense of “free thought” as more dogmatic and certainly more decadent than the traditional dogmas. Finally, he inspired me to recognize that his yearning for transcendence in the vacuum of outer space is an avatar of the very “god of the gaps” phenomenon he admonished religious folks for indulging.

I didn’t arrive at a Jew-wise, racial realist worldview because my forefathers fought for the Confederacy or because I want to make things awkward at dinner parties. I arrived at it because it’s the single most predictive model of reality; the simplest and most reliable framework for explaining not only how things got to be, but how they’re going to be.  I could have stood before Congress in 2001 and warned them that No Child Left Behind would fail. I can predict with a negligible margin of error that the next educational fad will flop, Detroit will continue deteriorating, Japan will bounce right back from its string of disasters, and the organized Jewish community will churn out more pop culture that’s hostile toward White America’s Christian majority.

While we may lack political power, as an ideological and philosophical force we have strength beyond our numbers. Why? Because we have the truth on our side. Our racially aware frame of reference gives us the power to find demonstrable truths and to falsify popularly accepted dogmas. Only a handful of dissidents hold the Jew-wise and race realist line in institutional academia, but the Bell Curve dealt a body blow to politically correct psychology.

Mearsheimer & Walt’s “The Israel Lobby” created a major row in policy circles. Steve Sailer’s humble blog often provokes responses from rarefied masters of multicult dogma like Malcolm Gladwell.

Personally, I believe many in our movement diminish the credibility of our fundamental insight by indulging in conspiracy theories and wild speculation. Our truth, opposed as it is by the near universally embraced secular religion of equality, can be made to sound like a crank’s conspiracy theory, and our enemies are all too eager to frame it as such. When we as individuals dive headfirst into the latest idle speculation about Obama’s birth certificate or the Bin Laden assassination “hoax”, we do more than merely set ourselves up to look like fools when the establishment trots out the long-form birth certificate and graphic photos of what’s left of Bin Laden’s head. We make it that much harder for ordinary people to take seriously  our decades of peer-reviewed research on differences in intelligence, or volumes of meticulous work on how the organized Jewish community is subverting their host population.

We set ourselves up to be even less trusted than the establishment. The establishment lies and deceives the public all the time, of course. They do it most often by omission and diversion rather than making bold statements that could be contradicted by dozens if not hundreds of different people scattered throughout multiple organizations and institutions.

No proposition should be suppressed, per se. If you’ve got proof that Obama was born in Kenya or that Bin Laden was killed a decade ago, make your case. If you know that colloidal silver has healing properties, direct us to a trusted reference to learn more. For all I know, fluoride may be poisoning us all and vaccines may be causing the spike in autism diagnoses. Conspiracies have happened in the past and are probably happening right now, but the same standard of skepticism should be applied to them as is applied to the establishment line.

For instance, shortly after Obama released the long form birth certificate, I was forwarded the video of the man explaining how the PDF document was a forgery because it contained “layers”. He never explained what were in the additional layers, leaving one to envision numbers and names being altered, damning stuff being excised, and such. He didn’t show us the layers, which on further examination were perfectly typical for some scanning software and didn’t contain anything that even appeared human generated.

While it’s appropriate to be skeptical about Obama’s birthplace, the skepticism has to cut both ways. There is far more evidence that he was born in Hawaii than in Kenya. For him to have been born in Kenya and to have pulled off this deception for this long would have required a pretty elaborate effort fit for jewel thieves. Sure, it could have happened, but is it the simplest and most likely explanation? No, I don’t trust Obama, but don’t we have more verifiable or at least more relevant points of fact to focus on?

The simplest explanation for his reluctance to disclose his birth certificate was the prominence of his middle name “Hussein” which he wanted concealed by the media during the presidential election.

Later this week, when the White House trots out their gory images of Osama’s body, few if any of the people who were claiming that this is an elaborate hoax will publicly recant. They’ll just move on to the next conspiracy theory, perhaps declaring that the images were doctored or that the concrete coffin dropped overboard contained a dummy. For all I know, any of that could be the case, though it seems pretty elaborate and it’s also pretty tangential. Whether or not Osama was already dead, was recently killed, or resides among the reptilians in a far away galaxy doesn’t make much of a difference, does it? Does it make enough of a difference to stake our credibility on it?

While at the AmRen 2008 Conference, I enjoyed Michael Walkers’ definition of a crank, which has stuck with me…

Many who point out unwelcome truths are called cranks. For those heavily invested in the conventional wisdom, anyone who denies that wisdom can be viewed as cranky and disagreeable. However, my definition of a crank is someone who cannot confine discussion of his dissenting or “cranky” views to appropriate settings and audiences. It is one whose views are either so persistent, so emphatic, or so extreme as to cause embarrassment in “normal” company. If you feel you might be embarrassed by, say, having someone to dinner with friends or relatives—especially relatives—then he is likely to be a crank.

Women have a better nose than men for cranks – those who lack awareness of socially appropriate boundaries and the reactions of others -  and women are less afraid to call a spade a spade. Some years ago I went with my wife to a meeting in Germany organized by a man who edited a publication I read regularly and enjoyed. When we arrived a little late he was in the middle of addressing a meeting in exactly the terms one might expect of someone who had just achieved supreme power. In fact he had reached about paragraph 20 of what he called the “Constitution of the Fourth Reich.” My wife was pitiless: “Quite definitely a nutter,” she told me.

I emphasize that one must distinguish between “cranks” and dissidents who are merely derided as cranks. There’s a very real difference. Walker at Amren 2008  described the crank as one who’s an embarrassment around normal company. That’s a pretty succinct working definition, but I would like to extend that with one observation: overclocked pattern recognition. We’re all designed to detect patterns in nature and in our social interactions. We couldn’t function without that capability, but we sometimes detect patterns where none exist: the man on the moon, the Virgin Mary on the grilled cheese, or the guy who’s trailing you because he happened to turn in the same direction you did an unlikely number of times.

As an example, the net effect of Jewish influence on its victims may feel like it was  the unanimous action of all 15 million members of that race organized by elders gathered from time to time to fashion and execute meticulous plans and protocols. But it is not. It’s the emergent effect of a group evolutionary strategy which has evolved and adapted over centuries to exploit weaknesses in a group that is unable to organize themselves to resist that influence.
It is the weakness of that host group that allows small and detached groups of Jews with similar interests to dominate whole industries and institutions and to shape the popular culture.

I am reminded of an amusing parody, “Local Jew Feels Left Out of Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy“. To believe that Jews could impose upon all members of their race the obligation to labor for and take orders from the ADL or SPLC is to believe that humans are far more submissive, loyal, discreet, and organized than they are. And if you talk to a crank long enough, you’ll often learn that this pattern of thinking isn’t limited to politics. They’re often into “numerology”, obsess over calendrical coincidences, and suspect close friends and family members of micro-conspiracies against them. They rarely if ever attribute anything to mere happenstance or seek a simple innocuous explanation.

There can be no worldwide Jewish conspiracy of the sort lampooned in the Onion article, because not even Jews are capable of the level of secrecy and organization necessary to pull that off. What they have is a milieu within which countless little conspiracies can succeed unopposed, such as the conspiracy to drag the US into the Iraq War, the conspiracy to bring as little attention as possible to the embarrassing relationship between Obama and Jeremiah Wright, or the conspiracy to ignore his illegal immigrant aunt.

There was evidently a conspiracy within Pakistan’s military elite to hide Bin Laden. While Pakistan’s military elite probably didn’t conspire as a cohesive unit to hide Bin Laden, it was sufficiently sympathetic to Bin Laden – and interested in continuing the foreign aid which his continued existence secured – to create an environment in which that large elite could ignore the small handful who did conspire to hide him for a long time. A couple neighborhood kids here and there probably knew about it, and others here and there probably knew or guessed. Some of the servants were probably in on it, as well. But it was the kind of subculture where “omerta” prevailed and people didn’t tend to turn in “freedom fighters” to the imperial Yankee invaders.

Conspiracies exist. After all, every profit making enterprise that employs the efforts of more than one person is a “conspiracy” of sorts. Most “conspiracies” are benign or beneficial. We tend to call them “conspiracies” only when they are doing something illegal or destructive and thus depend upon secrecy and deception for success.

But conspiracies are subject to the same rules of inquiry as any other subject. As Professor MacDonald has demonstrated with his trilogy and Mearsheimer and Walt have demonstrated with their report, it’s very possible to expose those conspiring against us with the illuminating glow of skeptical inquiry and methodical peer-reviewed research. If we divert our energy into “chemtrails”, obvious hoaxes, faked moon landings, or Kevin Trudeau’s nature cures then we invite our opponents to use such easy to understand foolishness to diminish our work and our message.

• Author: Matt Parrott is the Midwest Regional Director of the American Third Position and co-founder of Hoosier Nation, an advocacy group dedicated to celebrating and defending his White American heritage and way of life. He is also a partner in the Lighthouse Literature project.

Category: American Voice, Establishment News