I saw Naomi Wolf last night. She was very good. She talked about infiltration and surveillance. She says her mail arrives ripped open, she's on the watch list, and she never received any of the letters her daughter sent her from camp.
She also said that last year when she spoke at this particular venue, two very aggressive young men stuck a camera in her face and tried to make her say she thought 9/11 was an inside job. She thought they were agents of some kind. I don't blame her.
No, I don't blame her either...
When was it last year, after this article came out?
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.co...
This article from her, that Jon Gold reposted to 911 Blogger, http://www.911blogger.com/node/18343 is good:
The mainstream media's tendency to avoid checking out or reporting what is actually newsworthy in Internet conspiracy theories partly reflects class bias. Conspiracy theories are seen as vulgar and lowbrow. So even good, critical questions or well-sourced data unearthed by citizen investigators tend to be regarded as radioactive to highly educated formal journalists.
The real problem with this frantic conspiracy theorizing is that it leaves citizens emotionally agitated but without a solid ground of evidence upon which to base their worldview, and without constructive directions in which to turn their emotions. This is why so many threads of discussion turn from potentially interesting citizen speculation to hate speech and paranoia.
Much of the 9/11 TM is definitely ignorant and lacking in political/activist background. Many of us continue to humbly inform ourselves about the world in as rational a way as possible. But many others oversimplify, jump to conclusions, and are too lazy or unstable to assimilate new information, revise their conclusions, and make reasonable assertions.
Naomi Wolf's article may be taken by some in the 9/11 TM as unfair slander (or naive in its own right), but I think we should recognize the legitimate critiques she's making.
Conspiracy theories definitely are seen as lowbrow and this is a very effective means of isolating them in the most marginal and powerless segments of society. It's too bad that many of these people do not have the educational/informational background to effectively represent their theories or information, which may be totally valid.
It's not a question of whether conspiracy theories are real; they are. But not all of them; the real ones have rational, verifiable evidence to back them up.
The other side is, of course, the frantic anti-conspiracy theorizing that the establishment engages in. These people are at least as irrational as the people who believe in shapeshifting aliens from planet x in 2012, because they refuse to acknowledge hard evidence just because of where it leads or who is promoting it.
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