9/11 Conspiracy Theories: Who Cares What Freepers Think? [View All]

I've been noticing a new meme floating around the various conspiracy theorists here at DU (God love you, you know who you are). It's a reaction to almost every thread concerning 9/11 conspiracy theories being moved to the "basement" of the 9/11 forum.

The meme is simply stated: Who cares what Freepers think?

The implication being that the only reason for moving the threads is avoid the derision of Freepers, as if DU was concerned about what Freepers thought about this site.

Well, folks, that's a load of hogwash. The Freeper opinion of DU couldn't get any worse, frankly, 9/11 conspiracy theories or no. I don't care what anyone who posts at the Free Republic thinks about this site at all.

What I do care about is giving the Freepers ammunition to ruin DU's reputation among otherwise disinterested people. Those people are the opinions I do care about. If a Freeper can email a politically neutral acquaintance and say, "Get a load what DU is saying now - they all believe that Flight 77 didn't hit the Pentagon!" and can provide an actual link to a General Discussion thread where such loopy ideas go unchallenged, then the politically neutral person writes off DU.

So I'm glad the administrators have chosen to keep discussion about these topics open and free, yet slightly off the beaten track. You will note that they haven't gone so far as to give people the option of ignoring the 9/11 threads like we can the DU Lounge threads. The discussion space is there for people who want to participate, and the boundaries of the forum provides a second layer of defense against writing off DU as a conspiracy theory site. (The first, of course, being that DU isn't responsible for what individual people post here anyway.)

So who cares what freepers think? Nobody at DU should. But who cares what mischief Freepers can make of the more irrational theories being publicized and sold as DVDs and books and donation requests? Everyone should.