Jason Colavito
@JasonColavito
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Author, researcher. Pop culture, science, & history. Bylines @esquire , @NewRepublic , @CNN , @Slate , etc. My new book, "Jimmy," about James Dean coming this fall.
Delmar, New York
Joined February 2011
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A client informed me that he will no longer pay me to write content for his website because A.I. can write it for free, but he wants to pay me a fraction of my usual rate to "rewrite it" in different words so it can pass Google's A.I. detection screening.
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This is the same A.I. that the assholes in charge trained on my writing, since it spits back lightly rewritten versions of my own words.
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@Checkmite
In his mind, it means I am getting better value by getting money for "easier" work, so in theory I'd make it up in volume. Businesspeople don't understand how writing works. They see it as words per minute.
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Listening to Bill Maher talk with Megyn Kelly and Ezra Klein makes a good case that one of the biggest problems with our political discourse is mistaking being on TV for being insightful or thoughtful or knowledgeable.
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@aribendersky
I told him that rewriting it is still writing, so it will still cost the same as a full edit/rewrite of human-generated text (which I also do). He wasn't too happy about that but seems to think that A.I. generates more perfect (i.e. generic) text than humans.
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I hope when the Supreme Court conservatives go out to eat, every restaurant in D.C. turns them away and tells them that serving judges is against their religion (Matthew 7:1-2).
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Forbidden from saying the word "gay," a Florida teen gives a graduation speech about the struggles of curly-haired youth in Florida's climate of humidity. Apparently we are at the "malicious compliance" stage of political oppression.
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The publishing figures for 2022 were rather depressing. In a country of 332 million people, only 28 books out of ~300,000 titles sold more than 500,000 copies. Eight were by one author, Colleen Hoover, and no book of history or politics sold more than 295,000 copies.
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Conservatives' masculinity panic has been a constant as far back as we care to look, back to Antiquity. Tucker Carlson's version of shrewish harpies feminizing men is straight out of a misogynist '50s comedy, either the 1950s or the 350s BCE.
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I'm sorry, but
@bariweiss
and
@billmaher
can talk all they want about being "over" COVID and calling public health measures a "moral crime," but some of us have kids too young to vaccinate, and I'm sorry that their health is "inconvenient" to your clubbing and partying.
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Past the top 100 books, the numbers are dire. The average book sells 200 copies. An average "bestseller" sells about 2,000 copies. Almost all significant book sales are to "communities," typically book clubs, authors' social media followers, or interest groups (like true crime).
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@CraigDudeHollis
No, like corporate blogs and newsletters, landing pages, PR materials, etc.
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Bill Maher admitting that he only cares about bad things that directly affect his pleasure and doesn't care about things that don't personally affect him is probably the most honest thing he ever said.
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Here's the NPD BookScan chart of last year's top 25 books:
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Because publishers put out too many titles each year (~300,000 or up to 4 million if you count self-publishing), choice paralysis sends readers to familiar titles. Back catalog sales have expanded each year, shrinking sales of new titles.
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In the 1980s members of Congress, including high-ranking senators, accused the CIA of hiding satellite photos of Noah's Ark. They demanded classified evidence be released. Years later, declassified reports revealed classification protected missile locations. There was no Ark.
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The library had a total of 3 children's books on LGBTQ themes, and 173 on Christian topics.
A library in Iowa has closed after nearly all of its employees quit due to anti-LGBTQ harassment against-staff, complaints about LGBTQ titles, and whipped up controversies. The town now has no library.
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Speaking to the LA Times,
@adamconover
has it exactly right: Hollywood purposely broke a model that worked relatively well and delivered profits and replaced it with an ineffective, pricey kludge that primarily serves to line executives' pockets.
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A man disguised as an old woman in a wheelchair attacked the Mona Lisa with cake at the Louvre today. The painting was unharmed thanks to its protective glass case.
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@mr_modular
It's just somebody discovering a new toy. We'll see whether it amounts to anything after he discovers the limits of A.I. writing.
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Graham Hancock claims to have been "conned" in a debate he proposed, with an opponent he chose, in a forum he selected, and by evidence publicly available to him.
After our debate on JRE 2136 I emailed
@FlintDibble
to tell him: "You speak well for your cause. I was impressed". It's disappointing, now new information has come to light, to discover that
@joerogan
and I were conned. Evidence here:
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I sat through all eight episodes of "Ancient Apocalypse" so you don't have to. It's basically an adaptation of Graham Hancock's "Magicians of the Gods," but superficial and worse.
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So many of the bad ideas infesting our public discourse right now were floated on the History Channel conspiracy shows like Ancient Aliens, America Unearthed, etc. years before. I wrote about them, warned about what was coming, and got attacked over and over. Told you so.
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What got me in last night's "Ancient Aliens" was how in the space of a couple of minutes they went from telling us that the Romans transported Egyptian obelisks to Rome to telling us that the Egyptians needed aliens to move them because they're impossible for humans to move.
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@paleofuture
He seems to think users are attracted to Twitter as a product rather than the content users generate on it.
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Many have asked why Graham Hancock's opponents don't make their own rebuttal TV series. Let me tell you why. I've never actively sought a TV role (I've turned down 20+ programs that wanted me to spout lies), but I have been involved in a few efforts to make true history shows. 🧵
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They already did. UFO belief has made the world worse in many ways: more distrustful of science and government, more paranoid and afraid, more willing to embrace illogic and magical thinking.
UFO research 'could change the world,' Blink-182 co-founder says | Fox News
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@BradStone
@jackshafer
Sorry, the context isn't clear from this excerpt: Are you praising his freshman-English-level understanding of storytelling, or calling out its shallowness?
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Back in the 1990s, Graham Hancock coauthored "The Mars Mystery," claiming that Mars bore evidence of buildings constructed along the same lines as the "lost civilization" he sought on Earth. Remarkably, he stopped talking about it and pretends it never happened.
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If you're a horror genre fan, you probably noticed more than a passing similarity between Graham Hancock's "Ancient Apocalypse" and H. P. Lovecraft's stories of prehistoric civilizations, lost cities, and cosmic catastrophes. There's a good reason: The Necronomicon. (cont.).
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Ex-Trump advisor Steven Bannon endorses Alex Jones's claim that "intergalactic" space demons are taking over human bodies, as recorded in ancient texts.
Once again, we see the intersection of rightwing extremism, ancient astronaut theory, and apocalyptic religious claims.
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The UFO hearing seems to be less about providing evidence of secret space alien technology and more about canonizing familiar, low-evidence recent allegations in the Congressional Record as a selling point for military hardware, consulting services, and media products.
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Did you know that Victorians and Edwardians loved to produce hoaxes about lost prehistoric super-civilizations? Many in the 19th and 20th centuries fell victim to these hoaxes because they wanted to believe in a lost antediluvian world. Let's look at a few (cont.).
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“It’s become what it is today, which is some out-of-control juggernaut that I barely have control of,” Rogan said. No, he has complete control over his show. He can choose not to spread conspiracies. What he means is that the lies are more profitable.
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I'm not even going to touch the Ye thing except to say that maybe
@HISTORY
airing decades of shows saying "Look how cool Nazis were! They had super weapons and time machines and the Holy Grail and found Atlantis and met space aliens!" wasn't such a good idea.
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Mormons are searching for an imaginary lost ancient Jewish mega-city in Iowa and claim to know where it is.
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The great vampire panic of the 1700s started with Serbian villagers claiming that the undead were murdering their friends and family. The Habsburg government sent the military to investigate. They exhumed, decapitated, and burned blood-filled vampire corpses. 🧵
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Nashville bomber's rambling manifesto is a hodgepodge of
@AncientAliens
-style conspiracies about UFOs, aliens, DNA manipulation, hidden history, and the occult nature of reality. As I've said for years, these ideas aren't "fun." They are dangerous.
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So, the military can hide space aliens for nearly a century and reverse-engineer their technology, but didn't notice Chinese malware on their computers that can take down the military?
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If the aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, why did their flying saucers only start crashing after World War II? I'm curious why the space monsters were so good at leaving no trace down to 1947 and then suddenly turned into demolition derby drivers.
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I finished proofreading and formatting almost 100 pages of ancient Chinese accounts of the Roman Empire because the OCR of the 1885 book on Google Books and is almost unusably bad and no one has posted cleaned and searchable text.
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LEAKED: A classified photo from inside the secret Pentagon UFO program shows a government insider making a treaty with a non-human intelligence.
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@holden
Yes. That's why they don't print the numbers for most book sales. They are so much lower than you would ever imagine. My books are significantly above average in sales, and yet they don't make enough money to cover a mortgage payment.
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If you watched Graham Hancock's "Ancient Apocalypse," you really need to know about the man who inspired Hancock's ideas. No, not Ignatius Donnelly. Today we're talking about Abu Ma'shar, the ninth century Persian astrologer who invented Hancock's vision of history. (cont.)
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I don't know what
@MSN
thinks it's doing by platforming hate speech, but this piece ranting about Popeye being "woke" and promoting "sexual degeneracy" by adding a gay character shouldn't be a featured story on any mainstream platform.
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If any of that were true, you wouldn't be hearing about it first on a cable TV reality show.
There is something in the sky & happening at Skinwalker Ranch. Preparing to unveil Season 4 which is going to blow minds & change how people view our world & reality itself. April 18th is just around the corner…
#skinwalkerranch
@HISTORY
#ufotwitter
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A reminder that humans knew how to sculpt long before Göbekli Tepe, and hunter-gatherers did not require Atlantis to teach them how.
The Venus of Brassempouy (or Lady of Brassempouy) is one of the earliest representations of the human face. It was sculpted in mammoth ivory about 25,000 years ago. It was discovered in a cave at Brassempouy, France in 1892.
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@TiffanyLSpencer
@aribendersky
A big chunk of website writing is never meant to actually be read by humans for enjoyment but simply for other machines to read, score, and rank before redirecting human users to the homepage.
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Pretty much what I and other researchers have said for years: It's a small group of paranormal enthusiasts who all know and work with each other, all growing out of the Skinwalker Ranch poltergeist hunt.
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The manifesto of the man arrested in the New Zealand mosque attacks asked the "reborn" Knights Templar for their blessing. ARE YOU LISTENING
@HISTORY
and
@travelchannel
? Stop broadcasting white nationalist Templar conspiracy theories.
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Didn't the ufologists and their media enablers (I'm looking at you, Slate) promise that after today, civilization itself would change and "nothing would ever be the same again"? It feels very much the same.
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Conservatives, 30 seconds after learning Kevin Conroy is gay:
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If you see this "UFO Journal" magazine cover circulating on Twitter, it's a fake made from a genuine issue of The American Legion Magazine.
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Yes, they are called birds.
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I appreciate that Twitter is trying to moderate content. I do not appreciate that it lets bigots make comments suggesting gay people like me are pedophiles but warns me that I can't say otherwise.
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A behind the scenes photo taken before the UFO hearing shows witnesses and UFO celebrities gathering. The fix has always been in. Congress only listens to UFO propagandists--and they all work together.
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This whole flap will gradually fizzle as no evidence of aliens emerges, but not before everyone has gotten their taxpayer funding and contracts.
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Remember, folks, the U.S. government once considered this man the most important proof of paranormal power, and the people tasked with researching him for the government became its UFO researchers.
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I am truly amazed at the number of people who think that the Director of National Intelligence joining a panel discussion covering how UFOs will impact religion is totally normal for a high-ranking government official.
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George Knapp asserted on Ancient Aliens tonight that aliens are in "direct" contact with "certain bloodlines." That isn't a dangerous ideology to be promoting on national TV, no, sir.
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The idea that acknowledging the existence of gay people is inherently sexual and inappropriate is basically a demand to rebuild the closet. Being gay is no more a sex act than being straight, and no one freaks out over mentions of straight spouses.
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I received my University of Oklahoma royalty and sales statement today for the period ending Oct. 3, and I was genuinely surprised that in its third year of release, sales of "The Mound Builder Myth" spiked to a new high. It genuinely sold well!
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TikTok isn't sure that ancient Rome really existed after an influential history TikToker posted a series of videos claiming Roman history is a fabrication and Roman ruins are Greek.
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Rare to see such blatant agenda-setting. It's very hard to attribute to ignorance or incompetence using last year's poll to allege support for this year's legislative attacks.
Lest you think WaPo is capable of appropriately responding to criticism, this piece of garbage story inciting human rights violations was on the front page this morning
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Does it bother anyone that
@archaeology_aia
has
@joshuagates
as a trustee, a man who literally went on TV to talk about believing space aliens built ancient sites, gives Brien Foerster airtime, and said that the ancient astronaut theory is "awesome" and "compelling"?
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I think we can all agree that the whole UFO thing is amateur hour all the way around. It's almost parody.
I legitimately don’t think I’ve ever seen a senior civil-servant publicly admonish Congress, and Congressional witnesses, including one with an active whistleblower investigation. 😳
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For everyone who says Congress would never be involved in ufology if crashed saucers weren't real, it's worth remembering the great vampire panic of the 1700s, which saw some of the most learned men European governments convinced they had physical evidence of a vampire invasion.
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It was interesting how unprepared Graham Hancock was to deal with direct factual challenges from Flint Dibble on the JRE. His only real argument was a god-of-the-gaps claim that somehow everyone missed Atlantis. I got the feeling he rarely has to address substantive critiques.
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I never anticipated the hardest part of writing my book about James Dean and 1950s gay panic would be the number of people in publishing who, while claiming not to be themselves, are afraid that others in the industry won't touch the subject matter.
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Someone emailed me today to let me know that Atlantis has been located.
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Maltese archaeologists are pushing back on "Ancient Apocalypse" and explaining what Graham Hancock got wrong about Malta's temples. My review of the series got a mention!
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In a shockingly bad article, business reporter
@DSegalNYTimes
delivers a puff piece celebrating Uri Geller, claiming he "won" by destroying the very nature of truth and replacing facts with entertainment, thus making millions--the highest
@nytimes
praise.
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This seems so charming for a moment, until you realize she is Rebecca (Latimer) Felton, the first female U.S. senator, a white supremacist, and the last slaveholder to have served in Congress. She advocated for lynching.
Incredible footage of a woman who was born in 1835 being interviewed in 1929.
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This new book out in April looks interesting. It's a study of the shifting ways we imagine prehistory, why these ideas are largely reflections of the politics and social tensions of their eras, and how dogmas about prehistory became foundations for repressive regimes.
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The author is Sarah Underwood and her YA "sapphic reimagining" of Greek mythology, "Lies We Sing to the Sea," will be published in March 2023. Let this sink in: She wrote and sold a book rewriting the Odyssey without reading the source text but expects to help kids understand it.
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A strong piece in the New Yorker about the complete lack of even a single unambiguous photograph of an alien spaceship. The entire "alien" idea has always been a 1940s sci-fi mythology imposed on bad data and ambiguity, just as the FBI concluded in 1948.
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Fun fact: Marvel and its ancient astronaut theory-influenced superheroes are owned by Disney, which is a co-owner of the parent company of the History Channel, which makes bank off of the "Ancient Aliens" lifestyle brand. This is just another brand extension.
.
@MarvelStudios
is set to link Atlantis and ancient Mesoamerica in
#WakandaForever
.
Please Marvel, I beg you as a scholar and a fan, hire a cultural consultant who can help you avoid the pit traps that come with Atlantis, including cultural appropriation & colonial racism.
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The best way to earn top dollar self-publishing is to put out dozens or hundreds of cut-and-paste or bait-and-switch titles of low-quality, public-domain text. Each might earn a handful of sales, but across all the titles, you can get hefty returns.
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Here is my new article on how Washington got hooked on UFOs.
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I had to turn off my notifications. The volume of vitriolic hate messages after my CNN piece yesterday was overwhelming--by email, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, website comments, etc. etc.
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It bothers me how many aerospace companies and defense contractors have hired History Channel ufologists and ancient astronaut theorists.
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It's not simple to get a TV show and tell the truth. The media industry is biased toward sensationalism and controversy. To tell the truth, you either need a major celebrity or a truth more headline-grabbing than the famous, standard, and fake sci-fi "mysteries."
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A little-remembered fact is that many of the early reports of flying saucers in the late 1940s and early 1950s involved discs that were less than 10 feet across. Many of the earlier "crash retrievals" involved these miniature discs. No one talks about mini-aliens. (1/2)
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And, of course, he neglected to tell Congress during the hearing, when, in theory, all the important people were watching. Naturally, he saved it for Joe Rogan.
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It's not quite that black-and-white. Graham Hancock isn't personally racist. His books don't explicitly promote racism. But they do use 19th c. imperialist and colonialist texts and arguments that are built on racism, so Hancock's books reinforce and reinvigorate these ideas.
Archaeologists are accusing of
#AncientApocalypse
promulgating far right and Nazi ideology - but supporters of lost civilisation hypothesis say 'woke argument' from academia is a sign of 'desperation' and 'jealousy'
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Tucker Carlson now says that after all the "deception" he's experienced from UFO cover-ups and political conspiracies, he's "open" to the flat earth theory and thinks scientists might be hiding the truth about the shape of the earth.
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Take a look at what just arrived. These are actual chimes once used to introduce NBC programming during the early days of NBC radio in the 1930s and 1940s.
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You can’t turn kids gay. If that were possible, then “conversion therapy” would also work rather than being a psychologically devastating trauma.
I'd never heard of a Gender & Sexuality Art Club but assuming this mother isn't making this up or exaggerating (seems unlikely when you watch it) this is an example of how activist teachers nudge 11-13 year olds into being LGBTQ through suggestion & reward
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A strong, solid overview of the small group of UFO activists who hijacked Congress and the media to promote space alien fantasies.
A UFO "religion" has infiltrated the US government and influenced Congress to hunt aliens that aren't there, says recently-resigned Pentagon official.
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It's depressing to watch "Ancient Aliens" and know that the people on there are advising Congress.
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It's probably worth remembering that for all his bluster about disclosure, Lue Elizondo has disclosed no verifiable evidence of any extraordinary craft, nor has he independently gathered and published such evidence since 2017 despite such craft allegedly being here every day.
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I'm confused--if this is all super-classified information, why are Grusch, Elizondo, and Nolan spilling secrets to foreign governments? And if it isn't classified, why aren't they sharing their "evidence" with us?
CONFIRMED!
#Whistleblower
#DavidGrusch
has met with
#Canadian
government officials regarding
#UFOs
#UAP
#CrashRetrievals
in
#Canada
. The
#FiveEyes
are involved.
#Crashes
happened in western and central Canada of interest. Best I got right now.
#ufotwitter
#SpacedOutRadio
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I for one am glad
@elonmusk
is rebranding Twitter as "X." It's basic truth in advertising. Most of what trends now is conspiracy theories and UFOs, so it's really the only appropriate brand name.
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I thought it might be fun to take a look back at one of Graham Hancock's most embarrassing books, "The Mars Mystery" (1998), written with Robert Bauval and John Grigsby. The book was inspired by the 1996 claim of microbial life on Mars, which led Hancock to conspiracy theories.
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A tweet about Romans in Vietnam got me interested in ancient Chinese accounts of the Roman Empire, and I am amused to learn that the Chinese called the Roman emperors "An-tun," after the emperors' frequent name, Antoninus.
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Readers weren't just "unsure," as the article states. In 1948, the New Yorker didn't label fiction and nonfiction, so many readers believed the story to be true. To Shirley Jackson's horror, a significant number wrote to ask the location of the town so they could watch in person.
How “The Lottery” influenced “The Purge” movies -- as well as the writers Stephen King, Carmen Maria Machado and Paul Tremblay.
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"Your conclusions are wrong" is not a personal insult; "you included false information" is not gnashing of teeth; "you interviewed the author of a book about Atlantis's 'superior' white genes" is not a low blow.
My Netflix docuseries Ancient Apocalypse is today IMDB's No 1 of top 50 documentaries in the world: . Prediction: the result will be more wailing, gnashing of teeth, low blows and unfounded personal insults flung at me by the archaeological fraternity.
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