Bunkum & Bullsh*t - Who Built The Moon?
An area that has long fascinated me, and that intersects time and time again with my research into professional wrestling, is the long and ignoble history of hoaxers, conmen, bullshit artists, flim-flam men and charlatans of all stripes - those who can lie with impunity, who sell (sometimes literal) snake oil miracle cures and perpetual motion machines, and who, when at risk of being caught out, simply skip town, find a new mark, or else a new con, and start the ball rolling all over again. These are men like P.T. Barnum who, prior to being lionised as “The Greatest Showman”, was a byword for humbug and bunkum, selling phony mermaids and human oddities with backstories just as easily as he once sold lottery tickets and real estate, groups like The Mabray Gang, who swindled tens of thousands of dollars out of America’s gamblers and sports enthusiasts in the first decades of the 20th Century (you can read more about them in my upcoming book, so even in a non-wrestling post, excuse the obligatory cheap plug for Kayfabe: The Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling), and the opportunistic likes of Sterling Davis, whose dubious post-wrestling activities have been the subject of this blog before.
Of course, for all the charm and audacity of the professional conman and mountebank, there is a dark side - they are experts in exploitation, leaving a long line of credulous victims from Ogdenville to North Haverbrook, and often leaving more lasting damage than just an empty wallet. Fake psychics profit from the vulnerability of the grieving, and medical swindlers might no longer hawk their dubious wares on a travelling tent show, but you’ll still find them advertising miracle cures on Instagram, on podcasts, and in homeopathy centres all over the world, and they’re just as ghoulish, and pose just as much of a danger to the sick and suffering, today as the phony psychic surgeons that plagued Brazil and the Philippines in the 20th century.
A less immediate, but no less insidious, danger comes from the class of charlatan I’m going to talk about today, and likely in many subsequent blog entries (or, indeed, something else - I’ve long been stewing over the possibility of a podcast on the topic of conmen and showmen through history). These are the pseudo-historians and pseudo-archaeologists, a particular breed of bullshit artist who specialise in concocting fantasy worlds by raging against long out-of-date history textbooks and what they perceive to be an elitist cabal controlling academia and the officially recognised historical record - at their most extreme, they are Holocaust deniers and revisionists, and at their most seemingly harmless, they are believers in the most rote of bunk; ancient astronauts, Atlantis, advanced ancient civilisations, and the Anunnaki, accidental alliteration aside.
But there’s a reason I say only seemingly harmless, because I firmly believe that these people have wreaked untold damage on education, on the public understanding of history and science, and on the very notion of objective truth. By propagating nonsense in ostensibly credible seeming formats - whether a book found in the “Science” or “History” section of your local Waterstones, on a History Channel documentary, or unquestioned and unchallenged on a soft touch news programme - they muddy the waters of genuine research and understanding, and by undermining the institutions whose societal role it is to establish a sense of objective understanding of the world, they erode our sense of common understanding, of a shared and accepted objective reality.
We are living through an epistemological crisis, where it increasingly feels like we inhabit separate realities from one another, and where we’ve never been further from a common, accepted interpretation of world events. Where some estimates show more than a third of Americans believe that their last presidential election was stolen, and roughly the same proportion believe that Earth was visited by aliens in our ancient past. Roughly one in two believe that Atlantis was a real, historical site. It perhaps feels like hyperbole to suggest that these things are connected, that the online conspiracies and paranoid ramblings that led far-right paranoiacs to storm the Capitol Building are connected to the belief that the Pyramids of Ancient Egypt contain evidence of extra-terrestrial intervention in Earth’s affairs, but the steady drip-drip-drip of misinformation, pseudoscience and distrust in authority that gave us QAnon, Pizzagate, and January 6th wasn’t born of Donald Trump, or of Steve Bannon, or even of Alex Jones, it had festered in the works of ancient astronaut “theorists”, antisemitic and racist falsifiers of history, and a handful of fantasists and useful idiots, for decades before, just waiting for the right combination of government corruption, social media, and paranoid imagination to burst through the flood-gates of mainstream political discourse.
Today, I want to look at one such work of pseudo-history. A little book I picked up, second-hand, at my local bookstore in South-East London, with the impossibly tantalising title Who Built The Moon?.
The book’s authors are Christopher Knight, an advertising executive who, in best-sellers like The Hiram Key and Uriel’s Machine, ordinarily treads the hoary old ground of Masonic conspiracies and cryptic messages supposedly encoded in ancient architecture, and Alan Butler, an engineer who, both alone and in collaboration with Knight, specialises in books about the Knights Templar and astrology.
The Moon – It’s Weird.
The opening chapter begins with a flowery description of the solar eclipse of August 11th 1999 - I remember it well, as it happens; I watched it from the car park of an otter sanctuary in the Lake District.
The authors are in familiar territory for anyone who has encountered pseudohistory before - they wax lyrical about how “primitive” early man might have interpreted eclipses as sinister omens, and express shock and awe that ancient peoples could chart the phases of the moon, suggesting some shared, arcane knowledge that was surely beyond the understanding of such simple hunter-gatherers. It does our ancestors a grave disservice to assume them any less capable of interpreting the world around them than we are today, but that is the lifeblood of pseudohistory. It should be in no way surprising or shocking that our ancestors looked to the predictable behaviour of an object clearly visible in the night sky as a means of interpreting and recording the passage of time. The authors are particularly amazed that ancient humans were able to determine a connection between the phases of the Moon and menstruation – frankly, it would be more surprising if women in our ancient past hadn’t realised the regularity of their cycles.
When not underestimating the intelligence of our forebears, pseudo-historians and pseudo-scientists’ next trick is to point to the unlikely and the coincidental and present them as uncanny and impossible. The authors invoke Isaac Asimov, describing the alignment of Earth, Sun and Moon required to produce a solar eclipse as, “the most unlikely coincidence imaginable”. I’ve been unable to source that quote back to Asimov; there appears to be no mention of the quote online prior to the publication of this book, though it has subsequently popped up repeatedly in the annals of creationist and intelligent design websites, where Asimov is invariably described as a “scientist and atheist”. That’s not to say that Isaac Asimov definitely never made this observation, and it matters little to Knight and Butler’s premise whether he did or not, but an unsourced quote is a shaky foundation on which to build a theory, though par for the course in a “scientific” work that features a scanty 46 references in total. If you were wondering, six of those references are to Knight and Butler’s own previous works, one is to Fox News, and one to The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
The authors give a lot of space throughout the book to this astronomical coincidence, relying on an argument common to pseudo-scientists and tabloid journalists alike whenever confronted by scientific discourse that they don’t understand – “experts are baffled”.
From here, the argument is one of anthropocentrism – the illusion that all three celestial bodies line up perfectly only appears so from the point-of-view of a human being stood on the surface of the Earth, so any guiding hand behind that coincidence did so knowing from whence we would be looking. My family’s West Highland Terrier, Jess, with us at that otter sanctuary in 1999, might have objected to the suggestion that it was only humans capable of seeing an eclipse.
More importantly, though, solar eclipses don’t line up perfectly from the point-of-view of “someone standing on the Earth’s surface”, but from the point-of-view of someone standing in the precise part of the world where that particular alignment happens to be visible – Jess and I could see an eclipse from a car park in Cumbria, but a hypothetical dog standing in a hypothetical otter sanctuary car park in Brazil or China at that exact same time would have seen nothing of the sort.
What’s more, solar eclipses don’t necessarily line up perfectly at all. That 1999 eclipse was only partial in much of western Europe, and even in places where it was most visible, the Sun was not completely obscured - picture a solar eclipse in your mind; the Sun isn’t entirely covered by the Moon, the shadow of the Moon is encircled by a ring of luminous fire. It’s an awe-inspiring and humbling sight, but it’s not a perfect alignment, because the Moon isn’t exactly 400 times smaller than the Sun, nor is it exactly 1/400th of the distance between the Sun and the Earth, as Butler and Knight repeatedly claim. In 2012’s solar eclipse, the optical illusion was such as to make the Moon appear 94.4% the size of the Sun - an impressive coincidence all the same, and you might think that nit-picking over a few percentiles is getting lost in the weeds, but when dealing with a “theory” that rests entirely on the supposed precision and specificity of astronomical numbers, 6% may as well be 600. A number is either uncannily precise, or it isn’t.
Magical Numbers and Bad Science
Knight and Butler outline their belief in Scottish engineer Alexander Thom’s invention of the “Megalithic yard”, a supposedly precise and consistent measurement (2.722 feet or 0.83 metres) common across almost all European Stone Age structures, so accurate that any variance was a matter of millimetres. If that were true, it would call into question everything we know about the technological capacities of our Stone Age forefathers. Luckily for archaeologists and historians, it isn’t.
Our authors, though, disregard subsequent research showing no evidence for a precise or consistently applied unit of measurement in megaliths, and take the exact opposite approach - arguing that this unit was more precise, more consistent, and the basis for all subsequent forms of measurement. These are theories they espouse across multiple books, and are celebrated by the doyens of pseudo-history, the likes of Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, but are the result of fudged numbers and wishful thinking, not of archaeology or observation.
Throughout this chapter, the authors perform a dizzying array of numerical magic tricks, imagining a 366-degree geometry based on the Earth’s circumference, which they convert into Megalithic Yards, and then divide down into subcategories. They invent units of measurement based on the measurements of the Earth, and are repeatedly astonished when sums performed using those measurements equate to the dimensions of the Earth. This would be not unlike multiplying 2 by 4, then dividing the outcome by 2 and being surprised by the result.
They continue, breathless with excitement, as they explain how their arbitrary made-up measurements of distance correspond almost exactly with measurements of volume, though with no adequate explanation of their methods, it’s all meaningless. Their smoking gun conclusion is that “a sphere with a diameter of six megalithic inches held virtually one litre”. Why six? And virtually? Just as Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney taught us that “almost Christmas” means it wasn’t Christmas, “virtually one litre” is not a litre – what’s the margin of error covered for by that sneaky little word? If one is arguing for measurements of uncanny precision, then “virtually” has a lot to answer for.
On and on they go, with unexplained sum after unexplained sum, every outcome more significant than the last, some with a level of precision given to multiple decimal places, some as vague as their “virtual” litre. We hear nothing of failed experiments, or of sums that gave non-significant results, though they must have been innumerable. It is an exercise in magical thinking and numerology, and it’s textbook bad science – if you disregard every result that isn’t significant, all you’re left with is significant results.
From there, we get to the meat and potatoes of all this mathematical sleight of hand – by applying their numerology to the Moon, they claim results to an accuracy of 99.9%. Let’s not overlook that they work from the radius of the Moon but the circumference of the Earth, or that for their Moon measurements they used the equatorial radius and for the Earth the polar radius – how many other arbitrary combinations of Moon measurements did they apply their magical mathematics to before settling on this one? Again, when you only record significant results, then every result you record will be significant, but it won’t be science.
I’m far from a scientist, I have no hard science education to speak of, and when Knight and Butler talk of the oxygen content of rocks on the Moon compared to those on Earth, I know that I can’t speak on this with any authority. Nor, for that matter, am I an engineer, an archaeologist, or a qualified historian. I cannot profess expertise in any of these subjects. But what I can do, and what we can all do, is read the work of experts in their field, read peer-reviewed literature, and trust in the accumulated knowledge and expertise of people who actually know what they’re talking about, and, more importantly, trust in the processes and mechanisms by which we establish a shared sense of objective truth and reality.
When irresponsible publishers, podcasters, TV networks or social media platforms give credence to pseudo-science, pseudo-history, false claims and bullshit, they run the risk of what Terry Pratchett, in a prescient 1995 GQ interview with Bill Gates, called a “parity of esteem of information”, where legitimate research sits alongside the worst kinds of misinformation, with nothing to substantially distinguish one from the other. Any one of us could log into Facebook or Twitter right now and see someone either falling victim to or propagating misinformation. Books like this are part of the primordial soup from which conspiracy theories are birthed and mutated - I saw the same people who raged against COVID vaccination embrace Graham Hancock’s nonsensical Netflix pseudohistory series Ancient Apocalypse, on the grounds of, “what else aren’t they telling us?”.
(note: I’ll tell you what Graham Hancock, for one, isn’t telling you – that his son, Sean Hancock, is the director of “Unscripted Original Content” at Netflix)
The Moon, It’s Weird: Redux
You’ll be glad to know that the writers of Who Built The Moon? don’t believe in anything so absurd as the Moon landings being faked. Because if NASA didn’t go the Moon, we’d never have heard the report from Apollo 12 that when their Lunar Module crash-landed, “the Moon rang like a bell”.
This is a hallmark of Hollow Moon theory, the stepsibling of the peculiarly Victorian nonsense belief in a Hollow Earth. “Rang like a bell” referred to the seismic aftershock of the crash landing, a simple metaphor, rather than a literal description of the Moon’s internal resonance. To interpret it otherwise is to be wilfully obtuse, though it’s common in pseudohistory to take any metaphor or artistic representation literally, though we usually see this applied to ancient peoples and religious texts, robbing our ancestors of any capacity for imagination or creativity and assuming them all to be literal-minded dullards incapable of anything more than crudely describing what they see in front of them – it’s novel to see the same line of thought applied to NASA scientists for once.
A Cargo Cult Interpretation Of Science
Although it has absolutely nothing to do with their theory, beyond the vague supposition that the Moon has influence on human affairs, the authors compare folk myths about the Moon to studies showing heightened aggression among human and animals on a Full Moon. They could have picked any number of studies that show the opposite, or a 1985 meta-analysis of 37 available studies, looking at the exact same signifiers of violent behaviour that Knight and Butler used, and that determined that a Full Moon has no impact, positive or negative, on violent behaviour. All of these studies were readily available to Knight and Butler at the time they were writing, and shows either the dishonesty or laziness inherent in their research that they seemingly didn’t consider a single study that contradicted their hypothesis.
Richard Rampton KC, in his closing statements in the David Irving vs. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt case, described the Holocaust denier David Irving by way of analogy to a “dishonest waiter” – if a waiter who always gives the wrong change is honest, then we can expect that sometimes his mistakes will favour the customers and sometimes himself, but for the dishonest waiter, all of his mistakes will work in his favour. Whenever any pseudo-scientist or pseudo-historian willfully ignores the ample evidence against their hypothesis, they are behaving as a dishonest waiter.
The authors then detail how the Moon stabilises the Earth’s orbits, and how in many ways it allows our planet to be hospitable to life. This is inarguable, and uncontroversial. Where the authors go wrong, in yet another bad science red flag, is to work backwards from the outcome – they assume that because the Moon allows for the existence of life, that this is the Moon’s purpose. At its heart, this is a book that simply refuses to accept the possibility of coincidence.
Like so much pseudohistory and pseudoscience, this is little more than a search for a surrogate God in a secular world - using a cargo cult interpretation of science to find an answer to the meaning of life. We can’t be here through chance, there needs to have been a guiding hand or outside intervention, be that God, aliens, or Moon-builders whoever they may be.
The Moon Message
After a prolonged discussion of efforts to communicate with aliens, the authors cite astrobiologist Paul Davies, who argued that any intelligent alien life wishing to make contact would leave artefacts in the vicinity of the planet they were reaching out to, like the alien monoliths of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
What, Butler and Knight ask, if that message left for us was THE MOON? If it is, what is it intended to convey?
If you were wondering how the measurements of megaliths and ancient geometry could possibly get us to the science fiction proposition of an artificial Moon, we’re finally there - the Moon was intended to leave a message to aid primitive peoples in their development, by means of encoded numbers.
Which leads the authors to the three points that are essential to understanding their theory of “The Moon as Message”:
1. It’s designed to be meaningful only to intelligent creatures living on Earth’s surface
2. It is designed to be noticed at this specific point in time, give or take a million years each way, because the Moon only behaves the way it does at this time
3. It appears to be addressed to a species with ten fingers, because the ratio relationship between the Moon and the Sun is such a round number when expressed in base-ten.
Got all of that?
It is amusing that, after more than 100 pages of guff about the uncanny numerical precision of their measurements, we’re now living in the region of “give or take a million”, and as we’ve already seen, the ratio relationship between the Moon and the Sun isn’t a round number. What’s more, there are cultures that count in base-twelve (often using the twelve finger bones of each hand to count with, rather than each individual finger), or base-twenty, while the ancient Babylonians used base-sixty, so the presence of ten fingers is no guarantee of arriving at a base-ten counting system.
The Guiding Hand
This is where things get silly.
The authors posit the existence of an “Unknown Creative Agency” (UCA), who constructed the Moon 4.6 billion years ago with the precise intent of using it as an incubator for the eventual evolution of human life, and encoded specific measurements into the Moon for humans to eventually figure out. This is the kind of facile numerology I’m used to seeing applied to inaccurate measurements of Pyramids and ancient monuments, taken to absurd ends.
The UCA, we’re told, knew that the Universe was dying, and took it upon themselves to seed it with intelligent life, to “slowly halt and reverse the mindless spiral into entropy and eternal chaos”. We are fully in the realms of a secular creation myth.
So, they created the Moon as a “regulator”, and placed it in the sky where it would appear at roughly equivalent size to the nearest star, to ensure that any intelligent observer would be curious about it. In the authors’ words, “the realisation that the factor for each was precisely 400 would also indicate that the message would be delivered in base-ten arithmetic” – except that there’s no guarantee that the life they engendered would develop base-ten arithmetic, or that it would be much use when working with a definition of “precisely” that allows for a margin of error of around 2500 kilometres, or just slightly more than the distance from London to Ukraine.
It wouldn’t be pseudohistory without a detour to Ancient Egypt and Sumeria, courtesy of reference to the authors’ previous book, Civilisation One, where in a familiar refusal to allow ancient peoples the capacity for imagination, creativity or metaphor, they took literally claims that these civilisations were guided in arts and science by an external agency they called The Watchers. It’s worth noting, whenever “Ancient Egypt” is cited by writers of this ilk that they are referring to a civilisation spanning somewhere in the region of thirty centuries, with as many cultural, religious, and societal changes as such as vast timespan suggests, so any assertion of a common belief shared by its people should be taken with a grain of salt. It would be akin to making a sweeping statement about the beliefs of “the people of Europe” and expecting that to encompass everything from Iron Age Gaul to English TikTok influencers.
Finally, they claim that the Earth rotates at precisely 40,000 kilometres per day, which it doesn’t, and that the Moon turns at a “rather precise 100 times less”, which isn’t true whether you use the actual figure for the Earth’s rotation or their conveniently rounded number. Still, isn’t not like their entire premise rests on the accuracy of these numbers or anything.
Racist Aliens
After first extending to themselves and the Christian tradition an understanding of metaphor that they disavow in others, presenting the events of Genesis as an allegorical explanation of their theory, Knight and Butler tell us that the UCA visited Earth at least twice, first to “seed” humanity with the knowledge of the Megalithic yard, and second, to introduce systems of mathematics and geometry to Mesopotamia. It’s here that we see the most insidious aspect of this kind of pseudohistory.
By affording credit to a guiding hand – whether that be aliens, Atlanteans, God, The Watchers, or the UCA – for ancient civilisations’ advances in knowledge, those people are robbed of all agency. It is saying, “these people were too primitive to have achieved this on their own”. It is a paternal, colonialist mindset that is racist in origin if not always in explicit intent - the “primitives” are unvaryingly the people of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or South America, even if their saviours aren’t explicitly depicted as white overseers (though they often are). It’s Middle Eastern culture, Mayan and Aztec temples, and Egyptian Pyramids that we’re told required the external guidance of a saviour race, never the Parthenon, the cathedrals of Europe, or the science of Newton.
Let’s Do The Time Warp Again
Finally, in their last chapter, an explanation - could modern humans have built the Moon?
That takes some explaining, to account for a time difference of 4.6 billion years, sure. But “don’t worry, we’ve got you”, Knight and Butler say. Humanity is the only intelligent life we know of, we would have known that we’d evolve, and that we’d count in base-ten, because it’s already happened. If the Moon weren’t there, there would be no humans, so who has more motivation to build the Moon than us? Is your head spinning yet?
They posit an explanation, in which humans in our near future sent time-travelling “chronobots” back in time to construct the Moon, to create the conditions for which humans could evolve. It is another impossibility explained by a greater impossibility.
Some believers in Bigfoot will tell you that the reason no physical evidence is ever found is because it’s a trans-dimensional creature, phasing from one dimension to another to avoid getting captured by humans - a “theory” that tries to explain the lack of evidence in one fringe belief by creating an entirely new fringe belief that requires an even larger burden of proof than the original, and that’s what we’re seeing here. Like the trans-dimensional Bigfoot, this explanation for how the Moon could have been constructed only adds additional layers of impossibility to the mix -- a sure-fire way to identify an illogical belief.
And then we get the single most infuriating moment of the book. They address the “impossible loop” of where humans came from, if it was humans who went back and built the Moon in order for humans to evolve in the first place, by comparing it to “the chicken and the egg” and saying, “it really is not worth losing sleep about such problems, as the only way to deal with any paradox is simply to accept it”.
Oh right, that’s fine then. Our theory is built on a complete impossibility, but don’t worry your pretty little heads over it. They say it’s no different than religious types not answering the question of “who made God?”, or of the scientifically-minded believing in “the ridiculous improbability of an infinitely flowing stream of beneficial serendipity”, but it’s not, is it? They’ve posited a theory that hinges on a paradox, and make absolutely no effort to explain their way out of it, other than to point to their classmate’s desk and say, “sir, he hasn’t answered either!”. It is an argument for faith over evidence, faith over explanation, and circular reasoning, and relies on the mistaken belief that something being improbable is functionally the same as it being impossible. It is, yet again, a form of Creationism with the role of God played by man. As science, it’s fundamentally useless, as history it’s nonsense, and as religion it’s the very definition of blasphemous.
As for where the Message they’re looking for could have been hidden, they suggest that it was written into DNA, another concept that they assume to be impossible without some divine intervention, gleefully quoting scientists who found religion upon observing its complexity. They suggest that DNA was woven by the time-travelling humans who built the Moon, and their secret message was encoded therein – given that their message was meant for base-ten counting humans only, I wonder why our time-travelling friends went to the trouble of also writing the DNA for bullfrogs, blue tits and begonias. The book was published three years after the human genome had already been successfully mapped.
The book ends in self-aggrandising fashion, celebrating their great “discovery” and imagining the utopian possibilities of time travel, before subjecting themselves to Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit” and passing themselves with flying colours, in one of the most deluded things I’ve ever seen make print.
Crank or Conman?
A question I will ask myself in all of these posts is “Crank or Conman?” - that is to say, are they a true believer, or is it a grift? Are they lying and misleading their audience, or are they earnestly mistaken? Are they, or are they not, the dishonest waiter?
The authors seem beguiled by their own numerology, and I don’t doubt that they believe in the significance of the Megalithic Yard, and in secret knowledge of the ancients – areas in which they’re incorrect, but far from uniquely so. But do they honestly believe that it then follows that the Moon is the artificial creation of time travellers? It feels more insulting to suggest that they do believe such nonsense than that they made it all up, and Christopher Knight never touched upon the topic again in his subsequent works – though Alan Butler wrote one more book about time travel that was even more outlandish than this one. It suggests an uncomfortable pairing, one with a head full of ideas about ancient history, outside of the academy and with an axe to grind, the other with a pulp paperback understanding of science, and a horrendously flawed attempt to marry the two, and for that I would be tempted to call them cranks.
But there’s something sinister about this book that, despite a halfhearted disavowal of American creationists, seems to argue for a kind of creationism-minus-Jehovah, particularly when factoring in how Christopher Knight’s previous works take for granted the literal, historical truth of the Biblical flood. I cannot shake the feeling that this is a book with an ulterior motive. The authors seek to reincorporate the Divine into a secular understanding of the world – they have chosen an evocative, outlandish question to lure you through the door, but you’ll find once you’re inside that all they have to sell you is a gateway drug to creationism.
With that conclusion in mind, the scale tips from Crank to Conman.
Why Does It Matter?
It’s a stupid book by a couple of fringe authors – why does any of this matter?
Every Man-Made Moon, every story that “mainstream archaeologists don’t want you to know” is another brick chiselled out of the edifice of our collected knowledge and understanding of the world, and every fringe belief is a doorway to the next one, and that next step might not be as harmless as thinking very silly things about the Moon. The most likely indication that somebody is going to believe in a fringe belief or conspiracy theory is if they already believe in a different conspiracy theory.
There is no rational reason why somebody believing in the existence of Bigfoot would also make that person more inclined to think that Covid-19 was a hoax, or why thinking that the Great Pyramid was built by aliens would lead you to believe that JFK Jr. is going to show up at the next Trump rally, but time and time again, that is how these illogical beliefs propagate. Once you believe in one, you are more susceptible to the next, and you enter an ecosystem of illogical belief.
I don’t believe that writing about, or “debunking” conmen, cranks, and the bunk they try and sell us, will ever stop them, nor make any meaningful difference - the perverse logic of the conspiracy theorist is that any evidence against the conspiracy is really evidence for the conspiracy; because that’s what They want you to think.
But interrogating claims made by writers like Knight and Butler isn’t just a matter of arguing against their ridiculous theories, it’s an exercise in understanding and appreciating knowledge, and in understanding how we know what we know, and how we know it to be true. Living in a time of unprecedented misinformation, critical thinking, questioning everything, and reaching that understanding is more important than ever.
