When conspiracy theorists attack

Okay, so I’m late in talking about the Holocaust Museum attack and everyone already knows. But as Orac has done already, I just wanted to take a moment to emphasize that while the shooter, James W. von Brunn, was a racist, he was also a denialist and grand conspiracy theorist who was convinced that the Holocaust was nothing but propaganda from the big “Jew Conspiracy” and was motivated to take violent action only after he became convinced that nefarious parties were going to take his guns. He described his website, Holy Western Empire (not responding now but available at Archive.org), as. . .

“A new, hard-hitting exposé of the JEW CONSPIRACY to destroy the White gene-pool”

The site is full of some of the most vitriolic anti-Jewish accusations you’ll find anywhere. And Mark Hoofnagle points out that the shooter was also a 9/11 Denialist. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, it’s textbook denialism/conspiracism to buy into not just one of the many popular grand conspiracy beliefs but many. And although there’s really nothing original about this blog entry anyway, I thought I’d include Hoofnagle’s conclusion, which I totally agree with:

This type of thinking isn’t just unscientific, historically bankrupt, irrational, and just plain crazy, it also leads to extremism as it feeds into persecutory delusions, and as people become more disenfranchised due to their insane beliefs, it eventually will cause violence. This violence, evidenced by shootings loosely directed at liberals and gays like at the Knoxville Unitarian Church, is likely being ratcheted up by the increasingly unhinged conspiracy-mongering coming from the right. Liberals are being described as destroying America, major right-wing media moguls like Andrew Breitbart are spreading conspiracies about the liberal intent to destroy the country, Glenn Beck is spouting off total gibberish about how his country is being destroyed by liberals, etc. This is only going to get worse and the paranoid conspiracy-mongering from the right is stoking the flames.

So while some conspiracists may be fairly benign, von Brunn illustrates the potential danger in such beliefs. There’s no “Jew Conspiracy.” The Holocaust really happened. And nobody was coming to take his guns away. But because he believed that nonsense with such absolute certainty, it led to him becoming a danger to society and to his own undoing as well.

It’s stories like this that remind me why I do what I do. While I express my opinions freely on this blog, I’m not out to make everyone necessarily believe what I believe. What I care about is promoting critical thinking tools that will hopefully help prevent people from devoting their lives to delusional beliefs and from becoming dangerous fanatics like von Brunn.