🧵 I'm reading Houdini's unmasking of 19th C spiritualist techniques 100 years after it was published. It seems to me that Trump, Alex Jones and other prominent conspiracists, adopt similar methods to the fraudulent mediums/psychics of old, to exploit people's core emotions and ability to reason.
If anyone wants to read it, it's on Project Gutenberg.
I love this book. "this person is my friend. He believes in spiritualism. Here's why he's wrong and an idiot."
Related but at a tangent is the work of Randi en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R... See especially the mention of him being called a "fraud" by a Prof, suggesting he was really using psychic powers to bend things and only pretending to do it with stage mqgic tricks...
Conspiracy theories, theorists, and the grifters exploiting them, play to people's perception of their own victimhood - there has to be a reason I'm screwed. Tap into that and you're home free, even when you're the one screwing. The details are just scenery, and can be changed with no dissonance
Derren Brown did an interesting program on a Liverpudlian "medium". The audience members he interviewed seemed oblivious to any evidence that it was just cold reading. They believed that it was possible to contact the dead and that was that.
Particularly telling is the way a fraudster (often greedy & narcissistic) reframes evidence *against* their claims into evidence *for*. Houdini writes of courts replicating/exposing multiply-convicted psychic fraudsters' methods, and yet this does not deter staunch believers. Quite the opposite.