Where most of these Gold Bugs are concerned, it's a bit of both. They more often or not do know their stuff. However there's a strong tendency in a fairly large subgroup to paranoid ranting.
The trick is to figure out what's ranting and what's not. Going on about fiat currency being fake money and fractional reserve banking being fraud sounds lunatic at first, but when one thinks about it, they're pretty much on the ball and it's just that until there's a crisis, the rest of us have all agreed to pretend that funny money isn't a problem.
Then there's all the stuff about conspiracies like the Plunge Protection team and an agreement amongst the central banks to rig the gold price. Looked like dead cert paranoia at first, but now most commentators would accept that while there's no smoking gun, there was a Plunge Protection Team of some sort at the end of the 90's. As for the latter, it can't be said to be out of the question either. Rigging markets is what central bankers are there to do. A Central Bank is a Soviet construct. If the intention weren't to rig markets we'd just leave it to markets and the price mechanism to sort out stuff like interest rates through supply and demand for money.
The most wacky of it shades into survivalism and hiding gold, food and ammo in the desert for the fall of global capitalism. It's pretty much Way Out There, but then there is the thought at the back of one's mind that we are using funny money and we have run up debts unprecedented in history. That sort of behaviour does almost always end in unpleasantness.
So in short, I'm afraid the answer is: yes and no.
FoFP