Esquire magazine takes a stab at "conspiracy theorists" in a recent piece ostensibly intended to coincide with the release of Angels and Demons.

This article is so jam-packed with nonsense, it's a veritable Hit Pieces for Dummies. The by-line reads:

"The difference between the millions obsessed with Angels and Demons and the whack jobs denying 9/11 and the Holocaust says a lot about Obama's hopes for a new era of responsibility"

Check out the first paragraph, in which 9/11 Truth is equated with antisemitism, the moon landing, and the New World Order:

Conspiracy theorists — 9/11 deniers, moon-landing paranoiacs, Cassandras of the New World Order — are the holy fools of our age. Things are not what they seem, they preach to us daily from their street corners and Web sites, and try as we might to ignore them, we can't help but soak up their toxic paranoia and narcissism in our best sellers and blockbusters. Pop culture has always had plots and conspiracies, of course — the first blockbuster was the white-supremacist epic Birth of a Nation, whose major theme was the secret agenda behind Southern Reconstruction. Back then conspiracy theory was a shocking device; today it's a marketing tool. This month Angels and Demons will be released, the latest installment of the conspiracy-themed global franchise spawned by Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. While Da Vinci starred Opus Dei, a Catholic organization whose secret, unstated mission is to suppress the knowledge that Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene, Angels and Demons takes on the Illuminati, a secular secret society that supposedly exists to impose Enlightenment on the world against its will. As far as Brown and his readers are concerned, it doesn't matter what purpose any given secret society serves — religion or atheism, the church or its opposite — just so long as there's a conspiracy. The hunger that Brown's books feed is not a hatred of one group or another but the fantasy that someone, whoever it may be, is running the show from behind the scenes. The rumor circulating about his next book, putatively titled The Solomon Key, is that it's about the Freemasons. Maybe Mel Gibson will get lucky and Brown will then move on to the Jews.