I was just emailed this link to “Professors of Paranoia? Academics give a scholarly stamp to 9/11 conspiracy theories.” At one point the author writes:

the first keynote address was delivered by Alex Jones (no relation to Steven), a radio personality from Austin, Tex., who has developed a cult following by railing against the New World Order. He is a bellicose, boyish-looking man with a voice that makes him sound like a cross between a preacher and an announcer at a cage wrestling match.

“It energizes my soul at its very core to be here with so many like-minded people,” he began, “defending the very soul of humanity against the parasitic controllers of this world government, who are orchestrating terror attacks as a pretext to sell us into even greater slavery.”

“If they think they’re gonna get away with declaring war on humanity,” he thundered, “they’ve got another think coming!”

Good ol’ Alex Jones. I had an encounter with him after naming a 9/11 conspiracy course by the late “Professor of Paranoia” Jane Christensen a Course of the Month. Christensen’s syllabus included Alex Jones’ web sites in her daily readings, and further called that Jones’ infowars.com one of the best sites on the web. Other sites included rense.com and the World Socialist Web site. As far as I could tell, Christensen’s syllabus fitted out the looney rainbow.

Jones invited me to appear on his radio show because of my article. He was outraged that I had sought, in his view, to discredit him by putting his site along with the other kook sites. As I said then, that was Christensen’s doing; I was writing about her course, not him. Jones was adamant to twist my column into an attack on him, and he introduced me as a “CIA-funded” writer! Jones never did answer my challenge to find for me anything factually wrong with my article, but insisted that I was part of a plot to discredit him by association with obvious kook sites that report on UFOs and the government fluoridation conspiracy. It was too bad for him that, as I pointed out to him on the air, his site that day carried an article about Bigfoot.

The Chronicle report carries a point I tried to make on Jones’ show and afterward:

One of the most common intuitive problems people have with conspiracy theories is that they require positing such complicated webs of secret actions. If the twin towers fell in a carefully orchestrated demolition shortly after being hit by planes, who set the charges? Who did the planning? And how could hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in the murder of their own countrymen keep quiet? Usually, Occam’s razor intervenes.

Another common problem with conspiracy theories is that they tend to impute cartoonish motives to “them” ? the elites who operate in the shadows. The end result often feels like a heavily plotted movie whose characters do not ring true.

Then there are other cognitive Do Not Enter signs: When history ceases to resemble a train of conflicts and ambiguities and becomes instead a series of disinformation campaigns, you sense that a basic self-correcting mechanism of thought has been disabled. A bridge is out, and paranoia yawns below.

Since the article talks about the “9/11 Truth Movement,” I should add that when the Pentagon released video footage of Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon, Jones’ web site hilariously declared the release itself a “Direct Assault On 9/11 Truth Movement.” And I couldn’t help noticing that on May 28 the site hit on several kook themes in quick succession (a screen shot).