For the most part, the show, screening as part of the CBC's Doc Zone, is much like various other confused efforts that bundle together a bunch of unrelated things - JFK, Princess Di, 9/11, Roswell, elite reptilians, you name it - in order to sweep them all away in a smug gust of intellectual dishonesty. Indeed, that's why professional debunkers like Michael Shermer were invented.
As is the convention with Shermer and his ilk, you're either a conspiracy theorist - as represented in Conspiracy Rising by Alex Jones, seen frequently here at his apoplectic worst - or you're a professor of psychology like the University of New England's David Livingstone Smith, who gravely intones that a society enamoured with conspiracy theory is "sliding into barbarity." Bloodshed is the logical conclusion, he states (cue footage of Hitler).
Typically, there are no shades of grey in Conspiracy Rising. If you think there are reasonable grounds to suspect 9/11 was inadequately investigated, but you feel that Alex Jones is a fairly despicable invention of fringe marketing - well, you don't exist.
It's a false dichotomy; a device as blunt and indiscriminate as the very phrase "conspiracy theory" itself (can we stop using it, please?).
In this public letter, political researcher John Judge writes, "Not all 'conspiracies' are created equal. The government did kill JFK, and they lied about it. That does not mean there was never a Holocaust, or that the world is run by the Illuminati." Similarly, Michael Parenti has written about the creeping effect of "conspiracy phobia" on the left.
But people like Judge or Parenti are never asked to appear on popcorn like Conspiracy Rising, which isn't interested in nuance or fair debate. The real purpose of the show is to demonize the "conspiratorial mindset" with dubious science, descending to brave new lows of self-deflating silliness when the viewer is actually asked to take an onscreen test in order to determine whether "you are a potential conspiracy believer."
I'll be damned, turns out that I am. According to Conspiracy Rising, this makes me a most untrustworthy fellow. "Research is showing those who conspire against friends and co-workers are more likely to be believers," says narrator Ann Marie MacDonald, sounding increasingly like a female version of HAL.
Not only that, I'm also probably either unemployed or an ethnic minority - there's evidently research for that, too, says Conspiracy Rising. Of course, it's worth remembering that a key difference between insulated white academics and, say, the black population of south central L.A. is that one habitually scoffs at the idea of something like CIA drug trafficking, while the other holds a town-hall meeting about it.
Conspiracy Rising ends with one of those insulated white academics advising us that we can prevent the influence of pernicious conspiracy theory on our feeble brains by avoiding exposure. It would have been better to conclude with the words of Shermer, who delivers one of the show's great inadvertent ironies and a true masterpiece of doublethink when he says, "We're pre-wired to believe what we're being told."
Abandon all logic, ye who enter here.
Its like this,"The truth doesn't fear investigation"."PERIOD"!!!