Freeman Fly/Conspiracists

   Freeman Fly is another pundit, a softly smiling conspiracist with a shadowy, slightly threatening air of authority, like a haunted house tour guide, a disliked camp counselor, or an underestimated dungeon master. He speaks from behind a pile of important books, behind him mythic green-screened backgrounds of public-access-TV cosmoscape, a looming stone golem, scrolling codexes of Egyptian-inspired symbols, masonic cartoons, ancient cities and grinning people of power using signifying gestures. Freeman's manner is blank and robotic from drugs or mind control, broken occasionally with the prankster smile of a withered hippie with a nasty thought. He dresses simply, with tasteful talismans and an understated Amish/Wiccan/presidential assassin vibe. He speaks in a wandering, illustrative tone with lots of gentle rises of emphasis and revelatory halts. His voice has a friendly, mechanical drive that is clearly divorced from the actual content leaving his mouth. It can sound like a live news anchor filling an uncertain amount of time, or stuff you have to listen to while waiting for drugs. 

   Freeman has an associates degree in ancient and environmental architecture, predicted 9/11, and performed in and documented the first ever all-night Winter Solstice ceremony with the Mayans at the pyramids in Tikul. This gives you an idea of the kind of amalgamation going on in his field: the best conspiracists have room for every fringe idea in their world views. Big pundits of conspiracy have built a forum for every discredited vein of experience. Each refuted supernatural claim is a plank in a brain-melting platform of paranoia and esoteric knowledge. Freeman is for instance of the opinion that “Our space program is run by the occult”, and that “Atlantis is on the mind of the elite, Atlantis is Atolas the king of Atlantis, and that's the large Hadron collider.” Perusing the videos on his YouTube account truly shows the breadth of his content and further illustrates the kind of mix that is being packaged together: His YouTube channel of about 300 videos (most between one and three hours long), contains ruminations on “Human Cloning, Robots, and the Occult”, “Owls, ET, and Magic,” “Genetically Modified Attack Baboons”, “the Power of Music”, “Star Wars and White Genocide”, “What Happened at the Orlando Shooting”,”What is Wrong with Women These Days” “Chemtrails, Morgellons, and Black Goo”, “Pope Francis coming to America with CERN and Blood Moons”. 

   An aspirant of big players David Icke and Alex Jones, Freeman advertises his work as “where the esoteric meets the political” and is as alarmist and prolific as his heroes (Take, for instance, Jones' movie series of Police State 2000, Police State II: The Takeover, Police State 3: Total Enslavement, and Police State 4: the Rise of FEMA). Besides the YouTube channel, Mr. Fly has hundreds more hours of documentaries, podcasts, blogs and books and the forums on his personal site. He also makes sure to reach out to his community, the intrepid intellectual outsiders who have built a web of discredited thought united by a common enemy: reality. They are happy to appear on each others' media and talk about how right they are, and have taken a bunch of disjointed stories and hallucinations and constructed a nearly universally known community, a media network of connected commentators and enthusiasts consuming and reinforcing each other in a massive plenitude, through every modern medium available. The commentators of this platform are sources of news, philosophy, history, political rhetoric, mental health and spiritual knowledge. They can be any combination of critic, journalist, guru, pundit and priest, and their theories have bled into both the paranoid far-right and groovy gurus of transcendence and consciousness. They have attracted an audience of both fervent believers and cynical spectators. 

   However you feel about the veracity of the individual stories, conspiracists’ all-inclusive approach draws out the common themes of the material, which are often relevant, powerful and accessible: That truths are being obscured from the common people, that the elites collude together to consolidate power and information, that a more fantastic world is obscured from view by forces that distract and control our thinking, that our government seeks to invasively monitor our lives. The community also holds the admirable view that new channels of media with powerful scholarship and analysis can break open the web of coercive disinformation around us.  

Freeman and Paul Laffoley