Ace of Spades:
Tea Party Spokesman: Let's Stop Talking About "Birthers" And Focus On All The "Racers" In The Media
Well. yes, why not?
Conspiracy theories are defined by several important elements:
1. They are constructed specifically to be nonfalsifiable.
2. They postulate "wheels within wheels" hidden reasons and secret agendas moving the world's events. They are crafted precisely as a means of ignoring the real, evidenced, surface reason for an event in favor of an imagined, unevidenced, allegedly "real" reason beneath it.
3. They broadly indict large numbers of vague, unnamed people as being part of the illicit conspiracy. "A conspiracy so vast" that it is pointless to name this specific person or that as being in the conspiracy.
4. They are purposely constructed by those with a less-than-exhaustive knowledge base about a subject in order to have a justification to ignore all that knowledge (of which the conspiracist is ignorant); that is, the conspiracist looks for a theory in which his lack of knowledge is irrelevant, and postulates further still that those with knowledge are actually compromised as analysts because their minds are clouded by petty details, whereas the more "unencumbered by knowledge" conspiracy theorist is not so blinded by facts and can see the "big picture."
5. A critical -- the critical -- psychological purpose of a conspiracy theory is to make a complex world simple enough for the simple to understand, and in addition give those believing in the conspiracy theory a moral sheen as well -- they are "brave" for seeing the truth that so many others refuse to see. In two ways, then -- intellectual and moral -- the conspiracy theory serves as a vanity, and as a dubious reason for self-valuation.
By those classic elements of a conspiracy theory, yes, the stupid media, lacking in knowledge about virtually everything except who they have to blow to get a desk-anchor gig, has bought into a simple, stupid, knowledge-diminishing conspiracy theory that everything that happens in America is because White Bitter Clingers Hate Obama Because He's Black.
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