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.

Category: American Voice, Establishment News

Comments (10)

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  1. rfdscarecrow says:

    Thank you for addressing this most important subject with such focus. Clearly, we are better served by looking for patterns, memes if you will, which lead back to the same origins–evolution and the innate desire to survive not only as individuals, but as members of a race. The White race, the Black race, the Jewish race and every other race on the planet is battling for survival, and that battle rages from macro to micro. It is genetic.

    I believe the tendency towards conspiracy theories is also genetic. It is the superior ability of Whites to imagine–to project thought into the future–that has enabled our race to build great cities and send humans into space. Our ability to imagine great things can also be exploited. If we can be made to imagine chemtrails, fake birth certificates, and a bogus lunar landing, we can certainly be led to believe that our race is evil.

    Our race’s ability to achieve and survive is directly linked to our superior ability to imagine a world system in which we thrive. Forget paying it forward. Imagine it forward. Leave the conspiracy theories behind.

  2. Bill says:

    Wow, fantastic article, it really clarifies a lot of issues for us all.

  3. Someday says:

    Nice job Matt.
    "Bleuler notes that in relatives of schizophrenic patients, one most frequently observes: … people who are shut-in, suspicious, incapable of discussion, people who in a narrow manner pursue vague purposes. [...] Gadelius, working in Scandinavia, wrote in 1910 of a peculiarity in character encountered in nearly all the parents or relatives. This type varies equally much in form as the clinical types of the disease itself, it is true, but one trait, a certain unreasonableness and inaccessibility to argument, characterizes all its variations. We find in these persons all kinds of preconceived notions, of superstition and of affected wisdom. From them are recruited the vegetarians, the fanatical outdoor enthusiasts and the champions of quacks and impostors."

  4. Pro-White Truther says:

    Strip away all the excess verbiage here, and it looks like your "argument" is that in order to challenge government and mass media assertions, you need to have peer-reviewed literature to back you up. If not, then one needs to shut up and believe what they are told. Is that correct?

    That's absurd, and frankly, desperate. Is that really the best you could come up with? If you were truly a skeptic (which self-proclaimed "skeptics" seldom are), you would know that the validity of an argument has nothing to do with peer review, or whether it is popular, or whether its proponent gets along well at dinner parties. There is not some magical distinction between "cranks" and "legitimate dissenters" that can be made. You are simply looking for a way to stifle people whom you know you cannot beat in an honest debate by branding their views as "illegitimate" and therefore not worthy of consideration, while paying nothing more than lip service to the ideal of "skeptical inquiry".

    Ultimately, there are people who are right, and people who are wrong, and in the case of 9/11, the defenders of the official story are simply wrong. The evidence against the 9/11 official story is overwhelming and it's clear that people who defend the official story have nothing but government and mass media assertion to bolster their opinions. Muslims did not do 9/11, "Al Qaeda" does not exist, and there is no "Islamic jihad against the West". Every last instance of "Islamic terrorism" has been a false flag attack. The whole "global jihad" has been concocted to sucker Whites into a fighting a "War on Terror" for the benefit of Israel, and to give Whites a "safe" outlet for their frustration at losing their country.

    The notion of a "global jihad" is thus deeply anti-White and enormously detrimental to our cause. It is important to reject the big lie of 9/11, and also important to reject this notion that we are somehow obligated to believe what the TV tells us lest we be branded "conspiracy kooks". We should feel no shame at all in questioning our anti-White ruling elites. The same mass media that lies to us about race is the same mass media that lies to us about terrorism, and we are not required to rely exclusively on peer-reviewed references or adhere to any other such silly constraints in order to defend ourselves against this aggression. That you would seek to impose such constraints on Whites is utterly reprehensible.

  5. Tanstaafl says:

    "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."

    "[A]ll members of their race" strawmen aside, I am reminded of a not very amusing non-parody reported by Times Online. Moon scientist Stewart Nozette held as Israeli spy in FBI sting:

    An American astrophysicist with top-level nuclear security clearances appeared in court yesterday after being arrested in an FBI sting and charged with trying to sell secrets to Israel.

    Stewart Nozette, who helped to discover water on the Moon and spent six years at a top-secret defence technology agency, was lured into a trap by federal agents.

    They posed as Israeli intelligence operatives who met him at a Washington hotel and agreed to pay him cash for classified papers.

    “I don’t get recruited by Mossad every day,” Mr Nozette allegedly said, according to wiretaps. “I knew this day would come. I just had a feeling.”

    Call me crazy but I believe Mossad and sayanim like Nozette actually exist.

  6. Trenchant says:

    Amen to PWT. Anyone who thinks Arabs did 9/11 hasn't adequately researched the debris. I confess to being in that camp until quite recently. The site reveals very strange things, completely inexplicable by the conventional story. .

  7. Trenchant says:

    One point of agreement, skepticism. I must say that originally I believed what I thought I'd witnessed, without giving the images much critical thought. TV can't lie! .

  8. Big Tim says:

    If Sagan were alive today and concocting a followup to his anti-White multiracial Pioneer plaque, he'd be busy figuring out how to depict two gays "doing it" and labeling anyone who objected as a bigot.

  9. JamesinUSA says:

    I thought this a great article. Even though I had my own questions concering Obama's birth it was more of why he flat-out refused to reveal his birth certificate than anything else. Now that has I'm willing to simply let it go! I think the problem with some people and these conspiracy theories is the degree that they allow these issues or rather non-issues to consume their attention, and how they can allow these issues to divert time better spent on more factual and pressing problems we have as a people.
    I remember at a small gathering of people for dinner one individual stated that he had it from a reliable source that there were 200,000 Russian soldiers in salt mines in New Orleans training to take ove American citizens. Unfortunately I was taking a sip of sweet tea at the same time of his revelation and almost bew it in his face!

  10. jack ellis says:

    Great comments.

    Conspiracy mongering kooks are a plague to our movement.

    As for Karl Sagan – I remember his self righteous TV programs coming out against nuclear war as it would be very "bad for the environment" – cause a nuclear winter or something.

    I was about 10 years old, but it seemed to me that this Jew was pushing the idea that only someone who is super smart like him could understand that a full scale nuclear war would be destructive.

    WOW – why didn't anyone else think of that?
    :-)