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SKEPTOID BLOG:

Conspiracy Nuts Disrespect The Victims Of Moore, OK

by Alison Hudson

May 25, 2013

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Donate It didn't take long for the vultures to appear in Moore, Oklahoma.No, I'm not talking about the lawyers, or the charity scammers (though I'm sure they showed up just as quickly). I'm talking about Alex Jones and his fellow conspiracy-mongers.

For those who haven't heard it yet, Media Matters has the video clip of Jones making the claim on his May 21st show. The short version of Jones' rambling sound byte: the government spends billions of dollars a year studying weather modification so that they can destroy the heartland, and that the Moore tornado was very possibly a demonstration of this technology.

I'm not going to spend time here eviscerating the logic of the theory itself. That's already being done far and wide on the Internet in the past few days. What I'm more concerned with here is how Jones and his ilk are disrespecting the actual tragedy that occurred.

By trying to turn the tragedy in Moore, OK, into proof of his wild conspiracy theories, Jones has insulted everyone who suffered that day. Every life lost, every dollar of destruction is belittled by his exploitation. It's bad enough that Moore is already being slapped in the face by its own senators, who seem intent on holding disaster relief hostage as a political maneuver. It's bad enough that they've had to suffer this in the first place! But to use their example as a means to justifying his extremist worldview? That's like kicking someone while they're down.

This is not the first time Jones has used tragedy as a means to support his whack-job theories. Just last month he suggested that the Boston Marathon bombing was a "false flag" military operation. This is his MO: he takes a real tragedy, one where real people have been hurt, real lives lost, and he tries to turn that tragedy into evidence that the government is out to get us.

Not that Jones would ever be open to criticism of his choice. If Jones were confronted about this, he'd play the martyr. We're criticizing him, we must be in on the conspiracy! Everything that doesn't fit the theory is evidence of a cover-up!

Sadly, conspiracy theorists like Jones are, and will remain, a part of the national conversation. It's their right to say what they want to say. And it's our job, as skeptics, to call them to task for their idiocy.

by Alison Hudson

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