Man or Character? My review of Robert Eringer

Conspiracy theory is not a theory, it’s a reality! It took me awhile to process this statement, and to check that I’d read it correctly. I stumbled across it on the kind of website I don’t normally visit – a Tumblr feed by a guy named Robert Eringer filled with wild accusations about everything from the moon landing (faked, naturally) to Facebook being secretly run by the CIA.

The author of this site, Robert Eringer, is a self-proclaimed ‘intelligence adviser’, whistle blower and spy novel writer. Normally I stay away from his kind of site, but I had become fascinated with Robert Eringer ever since a friend convinced me to buy his book Shadows of Illusion on Kindle. We sometimes watch terrible movies together for amusement, and my friend insisted that this book by Robert Eringer was worse than anything we’d ever watched.

It was. I’ll spare readers the awful plot and get down the purpose of this article. After researching Robert Eringer, I thought that instead of reviewing the book, it would be more interesting to write a review of the man himself. Robert Eringer has flooded the internet with bizarre theories and even has national press coverage of various court cases he’s brought against governments he claims to have worked for (not surprisingly, he’s been sued for libel as a result). Eringer also claims to be a former CIA and FBI agent, but several articles mention that no proof of employment has ever been found.

Robert Eringer did work as a journalist and seems to have made connections in the FBI, but just how solid these were is in doubt. Eringer’s journalism career itself is controversial and he apparently got in trouble for submitting false information about a US political group in a column for the Santa Barbara News-Press. By far the most bizarre thing I found was a long blog post by convicted murderer Ira Einhorn, who claims that Robert Eringer got in touch with him offering to publish one of his books. He agreed to meet and describes Eringer as ‘not particularly bright or well-read’. Robert Eringer insists that this was part of a sting operation he was running on behalf of the CIA.

As strange as these finds are, they don’t come close to Robert Eringer’s own site. It is packed with badly thought out conspiracy theories and desperate self-promotion. Most disturbing of all is that Robert Eringer seems to genuinely believe in the fantasy world he constructs – exactly the same kind he constructs in his books. This is why a review of Robert Eringer himself is basically a review of one of his books – he genuinely thinks he’s the hero in his own spy novel. Unfortunately for him, courts don’t tend to see it in the same way and he was recently ordered to take down several falsified posts by a Paris court as well as paying damages.

So in conclusion to my review, Robert Eringer is certainly very entertaining, but only in small doses. After a while his rants became annoying, then a little bit sad as it becomes clear that he may be mentally ill. It isn’t that I think conspiracy theories are all ‘crazy’ by definition, but that mentally unstable people are very attracted to them. Add to this a blurring between reality and fiction and you get someone like Robert Eringer, who comes up with phrases like: No Conspiracy theories, only conspiracy fact!