Mick West - Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect

Copyright 2018 by Mick West

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3580-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3581-1

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

The backbone of this book is the collection of accounts from people who have escaped from the rabbit hole. I am very grateful to each of them for the time they took to share their stories with me, and for their continued resilience. My thanks go to Willie, Martin Beard, Steve, Stephanie Wittschier, Karl, Richard, and Bob. Thanks also to the many other people whom I interviewed or simply chatted with online. While I did not get everyones story in, their input greatly informed this book. Many of them I only know by internet pseudonyms, or they wished to remain anonymous, so I shall list only first names, thanking Nathan, Elliot, Scooter, Michael, Adam, Julie, David, Ed, Marty, Frank, Johnny, DJ, and Joshua.

Thanks to the members of Metabunk, my main forum for discussing these topics. I am particularly grateful to Deirdre, both for useful feedback on my communication style, and invaluable help in moderating Metabunk while I was distracted with writing. Thanks also to Trailblazer, Pete Tar, Landru, Trailspotter, TEEJ, JFDee, Efftup, Jay Reynolds, TWCobra, MikeC, NoParty, Ross Marsden, Scombid, Skephu, Whitebeard, MikeG, and many others.

Thanks to the prolific skeptical author Benjamin Radford, who took the time to read an early draft and gave many valuable suggestions. I just wish Id asked him earlier!

Thanks to Joe Rogan, a rabbit hole escapee himself, who invited me on his show to explain Chemtrails, then later Flat Earth and other conspiracies, helping create the platform for this book.

Thanks to my agent Jill Marr and my editor Andrew Geller for their support and guidance through the entire process. Special thanks must go to Andrew for taming my random mid-Atlantic spelling and punctuation into some kind of consistency.

My deepest thanks must go to my wife, Holly. For many years she has been supportive of my vague ramblings about someday writing a book. The fact that I have finally produced something is in large part due to her encouragement, her constructive suggestions, and her motivating beratements. As an accomplished author herself, she helped me navigate the obstacles and pitfalls of both writing and publication. Thank you, Holly, for being my partner both in work and in life.

PROLOGUE

Willie Rabbit Hole Escapee

When Willie first discovered the conspiracy theory rabbit hole he was a young man living in the Pacific Northwest. His hometown was, as he puts it, a very liberal, hippy-dippy kind of community. He listened to Art Bell, an apocalyptic conspiracy theorist on short-wave radio, and hed wake up every morning thinking the world was going to end.

Willie got his information about what was going on in the outside world from a variety of sources. The most significant was What Really Happened, a website with the tagline, The history the government hopes you dont learn! Heres Willie:

So I started every morning, reading the news on What Really Happened. It was all just that kind of conspiracy thing, and every once in a while they would link to one of those other sites, like Alex Jones Infowars And, as with a lot of people, I was just like, Oh my God! Look at all this news that no one else has ever seen before, and Im seeing it!

Willie was an avid consumer of this special type of news, reading about all kinds of conspiracy theories. He read the theory that TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a missile, and conspiracy theories about the Waco siege and the Oklahoma City bombing. He read how the government was planning to shepherd people into concentration camps, and how they added fluoride to the water to keep us weak. He read about the JFK assassination being a CIA plot and how the attacks on 9/11 were an inside job. He read and believed many theories in the years he spent down the rabbit hole.

Hed heard about the Chemtrail theory early on, but he didnt pay much attention. Generally speaking, the theory says that the trails that planes leave behind in the sky are not, as science tells us, just condensation clouds, but are actually some kind of deliberate toxic spraying. These theories date back to 1997 when the focus was on the health effects of the supposed chemicals. These concerns didnt resonate much with Willie, a healthy young man, so he didnt really look into it.

What eventually drew him deep down the Chemtrails corner of the rabbit hole was a photo of Chemtrail tanks on a plane. A popular example of evidence used by promoters of the Chemtrail theory is photos of suspicious looking metal barrels on planes with tubing coming out of them. These are actually just photos of the interiors of test aircraft. The barrels contain water, used as ballast to simulate the weight of the passengers for flight testing. But if you dont know this then these photos could easily look like evidence of some kind of spraying campaign.

The Chemtrail theory was in the background for quite a long time; I believed that they, the government, or somebody, was capable of something like that. But I never said, Im feeling health effects from Chemtrails or anything like that. The smoking gun for me, [in support of] Chemtrails, was the barrels thing. When I saw that I was like, Oh well, that proves it, oh my God. I was somewhat devastated because it confirmed that it was true.

Willie stayed down the rabbit hole for years, consuming all the information he could find about conspiracy theories, and occasionally sharing the information in the comments section of his local newspaper. We often think of conspiracy theorists as ardent campaigners for what they think is the truthevangelical proselytizers who harangue everyone with their alternative ideas. But many of them largely keep their theories to themselves.

I didnt really go around proselytizing, but I did sign my comments on the local newspaper website with a little blurb about 9/11 being an inside job. But it wasnt like I was standing with a microphone. I was in a band, and I never said this onstage or anything like that.

When I asked Willie how he dealt with people around him who tried to dissuade him from his conspiracy beliefs, it turns out the situation was remarkably infrequent. He was living in something of a cultural bubble.

No, no one argued! Where I live theres a lot of people who believe in this stuff; I guess that says a lot about how I have a limited group of friends, or whatever. But I never really got any pushback. It was like I got radicalized online.

Maybe one time someone challenged me, and I gave them the [sarcastic] line, Sure, governments always tell the truth. He came back to me with, Well, no thats not true. Yes, governments lie, but in this case, there isnt really convincing evidence of what you say. The people on the local newspaper website comments section who were always commenting to me, I thought of them as way too rational. Not enough feeling, you know? They were just too data-driven, mostly Apollonian in thinking rather than Dionysian, you know?