"extreme is the new mainstream"
It is impossible for extremism to also be mainstream. How can unpopular ( extreme ) views also be popular ( mainstream ) views?
Conspiracy theories flourish when people suspect that the media have abandoned their responsibility to thoroughly investigate the halls of power. I can almost guarantee that shrieking 'You're an EXTREMIST!' at anyone who holds skeptical views about some officially-sanctioned history is probably not how the dominant media are going to win back the trust of the masses, not after their gross failures to uncover both the fraudulent intelligence that put us in Iraq and the organized looting of the housing bubble before it imploded.
Message to the dominant media: do your jobs better, and the conspiracy theories will lose favor. Demonizing the public for asking questions about things that smell funny will only reinforce the suspicion that the media has traded in its sword for a rubber stamp.
quoting comment from J G H:
Their is healthy skepticism which asks questions, but will accept good answers. There is also unhealthy skepticism which assumes that since the government has lied in specific instances in the past, that it always lies. These unhealthy skeptics then turn around and place unwavering faith in non-government sources which have their own flaws. The government does not always lie, and opponents to the government are often wrong, indeed often lie because they want to become the government.
No one has said that government 'always lies'. That would be an extremist view, and it's not my view.
Whenever people start dividing skeptics up into 'healthy' and 'unhealthy', they're headed right down the same path with those who think that free speech can be divided up into 'healthy' and 'unhealthy'. Except for very specific examples ( fire in a theater ), free speech and skepticism share equal boundaries, and that would be 'none'. Any attempts to grade free speech or skepticism are efforts to restrict free speech and skepticism. There can be no objective arbitration of either. All who would attempt to ration skepticism have self-serving motives- most especially anyone carrying the weight of the government or the dominant media.
The public square cannot be cleansed of offensive speech or misguided skepticism by anything other than a police state and organized media censorship. If Americans are so feeble of mind that we require any portion of a police state or a censoring media to rescue us from the thoughts of a Sarah Palin, then we have really lost sight of the big picture.
Sarah Palin is scary?? Really? She's about one one thousandth as scary as a country where people are reluctant to speak their minds for fear of being called 'extremists' or 'unhealthy'.
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