The Conspirastore, an odd-looking pyramidal bookstore in North Vancouver, BC, has been serving a solidly contrarian clientele - including me - for over 17 years.
Inside, the brightly painted walls are covered with posterized prints of Internet memes (such as, “The perfect gift for antivaxxers: LEAVE ME THE FA-COLOGNE.”) Often you’ll see the owner, the impressively monikored Thaddeus Q. Hardwick-Dalrymple, engaging his customers in thoughtful conversation, while the beloved store mascot Tinfoil weaves between the legs of browsing book lovers.
The hipster bookseller frequently referees between his two sparring employees, Rob and Andrea, a young couple originally from Norfolk. They were at it again when I ventured into The Conspirastore on a fine Saturday afternoon.
“….the furin cleavage site, you don’t have anything like that in a normally evolved virus. The virus was part of a gain-of function experiment - and it didn’t “escape” from the lab, it was set loose! Peter Daszak, Ecohealth Alliance, Fauci…it’s all been documented, Andrea!”
“Jezus,” groaned Rob’s multiply-tattooed partner, “the frigging New York Times just did a story on this. Can’t you smell a limited hangout at all? This second-level narrative of a killer virus is essential to continue the hoax of a deadly pandemic - and you and I both know there was greater excess mortality AFTER the vaccines were rolled out than BEFORE!”
From the times I’ve been in the store, it’s apparent the Covid pandemic remains one of the couple’s favourite boxing rings. The other ring involves Rob’s frequently voiced belief that we’re living in a digital simulation. “Rob’s Matrix hobbyhorse” is a particular sore spot for Andrea, who prefers to believe Earth is controlled by shape-shifting reptiles from the fourth dimension.
Suddenly the proprietor made an appearance, wearing an annoyed expression. He whispered something to the couple before looking in my direction. Recognizing me, his face broke into a broad grin.
The nattily attired bookseller almost tripped over Tinfoil as he limped over to me. “Geoff, how are you doing?”
“Not too badly, Ted” (he prefers being called Ted). Have you got anything new in?”
Ted stroked his beard and looked back to the counter, where his two employee lovebirds were quietly smoldering. “Um, I’ve got a few titles just in by Graham Hancock, want a look?”
Sure, I replied. Ted had good reason to be pleased to see me, as I may be one of his more valuable customers. I’ve probably spent thousands of dollars over the years on Conspirastore books and marginalia. Ted sells not just new and used books, but also DVDs and magazines and tracts - anything that counters officially endorsed viewpoints. Back issues of Nexus, Covert Action Quarterly, Prevailing Winds, New Age esoterica like Magical Blend, and even - under glass at the front - yellowed bulletins from the legendary JFK assassination researcher Mae Brussell.
The rarest and most expensive stuff for researchers and conspiracy buffs is housed in the base of the ‘pyramid’ upstairs. It’s priced online rather than viewable in-store.
Ted’s taste is ecumenical when it comes to his store selections He supplies customers with titles on all and anything with a contrarian angle, from political assassinations to 9/11 to Pizzagate to faked moon landings. He doesn’t actually buy into some of these topics (like the last two for example), but as a bookseller he’s decided he’s “not in the business of curating his own personal, limited and culturally conditioned idea of objective reality.” His prefers to believe that misinformation, disinformation and otherwise unsupportable ideas will eventually be exposed for what they are, and everyone should be encouraged to “build their own weltanschauung, whether it’s small and comfortable or large and forbidding.”
As for his fractious employees, it seems their battles of belief often make him cringe. Even if the negative energy is costing him a bit of business, I suspect he’s too fond of them to give either or both the boot.
As I flipped through a copy of Hancock’s America Before, Ted reiterated his belief in the importance of print media.
“Unless its on a mirror site, articles on digital media will forever be at risk of being bowdlerized, altered, or even disappeared. Totalitarians have to go straight to outright censorship or book-burning to fully contain problematic print media. I believe it’s very important to always have a freely accessible archived record of what every published writer thought and believed. Orwell said that whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past. In this respect, I feel I’m doing my own small bit with The Conspirastore.”
Ted then excused himself, saying he had to step out again. He shot a warning glance at Rob and Andrea as he grabbed his walking cane (Ted claims to have sustained a serious foot injury from what he calls an “anomalous transdimensional materialization episode” during a 2004 Ayahuasca ceremony in Ecuador).
There was some intense whispering behind the counter after Ted left, which built into another epistemological squabble between the couple. They weren’t done with the COVID debate, but as far as I could tell they never were.
“Anyhoo my dear Rob, the killer virus narrative was needed to justify the Covid jabs, to get this toxic shit into our bodies, and the Wuhan lab leak story buoys it up. You know it was a normal wave of a respiratory flu virus, with perhaps a few infectious clones throne in. It’s just one more layer of the onion. Jezus, Fred, the New York Times! Are you going to be quoting from Robert Malone next??”
Fred shifted uncomfortably at the counter. “C’mon Andrea, I never cited that rag. They’re only getting to this story years after researchers uncovered it, now that it’s safe. So let’s not play the gullible card. You’re the one who first thought they put snake venom in the Covid vaccines. It took ages for you to see the light on graphene nanoparticles.”
Andrea heavily made-up eyes narrowed. “I’m not a conspiratard, Rob.”
Heads popped up around the bookstore as browsers tuned into the argument. A portly fellow in a “Make 1984 Fiction Again” t-shirt raised a finger. “Excuse me,” he said tentatively, “It sounds like you both still believe in viruses. There’s no such thing, they’re actually exosomes. Germ theory has been completely disproven.”
“That’s crazy!” exclaimed Rob and Alison in unison, as if on cue.
That was my cue to leave. I often felt whiplashed listening to the couple’s back-and-forth. First I’d be silently siding with him and thinking her nuts, and then I’d be siding with her and thinking him nuts - sometimes several times over in the space of a store visit. I’d end up doubting them both, and then worst of all, myself.
As Tinfoil meowed plaintively over the couple’s verbal jousting, I returned the book to the counter and made my way out to my car.
Off to Legacy Media
Perhaps I needed another sort of information fix. Since the air conditioning doesn’t work in my car, I vectored over to the nearby Legacy Media Mega Mall, where I found relief in its spacious walkways.
I wandered into a magazine shop to browse a bit, but it didn’t take long leafing through the display racks to remind me how respectable journalism is now indistinguishable from its mentally challenged nephew, tabloid news. I was also reminded yet again, seeing the latest glossy edition of the boutique anarchist mag Adbusters, how capitalism has the magical power to co-opt almost anything - even so-called independent media.
Given that five big companies control most of what we see and read, and how one hedge fund alone - Blackrock - manages 10 trillion in assets, it’s no surprise that things are kind of looking kind of the same, in a mainstream media monoculture.
I browsed among the ‘serious’ news magazines with mounting distaste. The Guardian, for example. I once subscribed to the British publication, back when the great Alan Rusbridger was editor. It was the time of the Snowden revelations, and when some of its biggest scoops came through collaboration with publisher Julian Assange - who then became subject to sub-tabloid attacks by the same publication after Rusbridger left, involving character slurs and cooked information.
And there’s The Atlantic, which was among the worst offenders during the pandemic in trafficking Covid pseudoscience and Big Pharma propaganda (and after all its misinformation had the nerve to later call for a mistakes-were-made “pandemic amnesty”).
Time and Newsweek, the two longtime middlebrow garbage chutes for the letter agencies, Maclean’s, The Economist…largely weapons of mass distraction devoted to the “manufacture of consent.”
(I thought back to a decades-old quote from Noam Chomsky, from long before the MIT prof lost his shit: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”)
The fluorescent lighting bouncing off the glossy covers was getting to me. As I ambled off to my car, I thought of the biblical legend of the Tower of Babel. A wrathful Jehovah reportedly disrupted the work on a Babylonian temple by confusing the language of the workers so they could no longer understand one another. The partly-constructed temple was abandoned, and the people were dispersed across the earth, speaking different languages.
We’re now living in a time of increasingly contentious worldviews defended by warring tribes of belief - and that’s just on the secular side. How can people living in a Technological Tower of Babble effectively organize to defend their interests, when they can’t agree on a common language to describe the enemy?
I thought of the so-called “freedom movement” and how it’s become progressively divided and bitter since 2020. What once appeared to be a united front is now a fractured online landscape of contending leaders and battling followers.
The Romans knew it all well - “divide et impera.” Divide and rule.
Since the Conspirastore was on my way back home, I thought I’d drop in again to engage Ted in conversation. Hopefully Rob and Andrea had either left for home or were having an armistice. When I walked through the door I was surprised to see the couple in a laughing embrace, with Ted standing next to them, chuckling.
What’s so funny, I asked. Apparently a loquacious senior had just left with a new copy of The Greatest Lie on Earth: Proof That Our World Is Not a Moving Globe - and had also left the three in stitches. She had shared her findings from a recent flat earth conference in Tucson. In particular, if was true that Earth was round, pilots would have to keep the noses of jet planes pointed downward in flight, to follow the curve of the planet. Otherwise they would shoot off into space at an oblique angle.
She noted with satisfaction that when flying to Tucson at 30,000 feet, she couldn’t see a trace of curvature on the horizon. Not a smidgen. On return home, she had briefly questioned a pilot about the plane’s nose pointing downward. He simply looked at her with a strange expression and silently nodded, as if in secret acknowledgement of a truth that he could not publicly voice, for fear of his career and possibly his life.
“She was a sweet old lady and we were respectful,” Andrea said. “After all, we sold her a book that endorses her beliefs, so we’re kind of complicit in this.” Ted nodded ruefully, and looked toward me with a slightly embarrassed expression. “We all burst out laughing once she left the store,” Andrea added. She looked to her partner with a thin smile. “We’re going to hell, Rob.”
A fez-wearing customer overhearing our exchange offered his opinion. “I agree with you all on this topic,” he said with a grave demeanor. “I’ve investigated the arguments against heliocentricism thoroughly, and they’re nonsense. The planet is absolutely not flat. It’s hollow. The Nazis knew all about it.”
Sounds like a great store. Surprised that I've never heard of it. If it's the kind of place that has a gentleman's smoking lounge attached then I'll be there with my mixed tweeds and harrumphing monocled demeanor like a shot! You know me!
After 550 years, Brueghel’s painting sez more about all those memestream magazines than all those magazine covers could ever do.