Before the election, I'd love to get you on a Sustain What episode from my favorite propaganda literacy professor, Renee Hobbs, who did an amazing walk through media minefields here: https://bit.ly/propaganda_literacy . Deal?!
In the past four years, conspiracy theories have been proven to be true; there was a conspiracy to suppress accurate information regarding, for example, covid, which we were told were going to kill millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of people. We were told that ivermectin was a terrible medicine to take for the virus ("horse dewormer"), which were propagated by a conspiracy of politicians, media and government bureaucracies.
There was also the censorship conspiracy between YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the government which was first revealed when Elon Musk took over Twitter and fired 80% of the staff which was solely involved in censorship.
There is a trick to knowing whether or not there is a conspiracy in this day and age which I call the Principle of Simultaneity (not very catchy, I admit). The details can be read in a 2023 essay I wrote:
Much of what you call a conspiracy about Covid was actually just confusion over a brand new virus.
That last time it happened (AIDS) there was plenty of confusion. Granted AIDS was a lot more deadly but unlike AIDS, Covid is airborne and the entire population was susceptible.
Real conspiracies do exist. But there is a difference between seeing one that is really there and seeing them everywhere without any evidence. The tendency to become convinced of a conspiracy without actual evidence is due to having, as a small child, not ever having found out, at least not in a manner one could process, what Daddy and Mommy were doing in the bedroom with the door closed.
That childhood experience can cause one, years later, as an adult, to see everything in terms of Big People, doing Something Bad in Secret. The childhood experience gets projected onto other Big People who hold Great Power, usually the government, but also sometimes the Church, a hidden cabal of a distrusted minority group such as Jews or Muslims, or agents of a feared enemy nation.
The distribution of conspiracy theories is not equal among the population. It is most common on the right of the political spectrum because that is where the most sexual repression is found, so that is where there are more adults who were never able to discover what Daddy and Mommy were doing, or rather, were never able, later, when they reached puberty and should have been able to figure it out, could not assimilate the information and admit that was something Daddy and Mommy would do.
In recent years, as the feelings of helplessness in the face of authority figures with overwhelming power over the lives of helpless individuals has grown, more and more people are reverting to a childhood state of helplessness and dependency. And along with that revival of early feelings come the conviction that Big People are Up To Something Bad in Secret. One result of this reverting to childhood feelings of helplessness against these Big People is to see conspiracies by the Government everywhere.
But in almost all cases, it is only the particular conspiracies of the usual populist conspiracy-theoory movement that become popular enough for most people to believe them. There are any number of websites about HAARP, Chemtrails, and UFO cover-ups, but none on real, well-documented conspiracies like police cars that carry throw-down guns or FBI agents allowing gangsters like Whitey Bulgar to kill hundreds of people over decades in exchange for information on his competition.
Real conspiracies do exist.
The FBI runs drugs into African-American neighborhoods to destabilize them and prevent political organizing.
The CIA smuggles drugs to fund illegal programs like starting Protestant churches in Latin America to undermine the influence of Roman Catholic clergy.
The CIA illegally donates millions of dollars to right-wing parties in every country in Europe to help them win elections.
The Army hires journalists to plant favorable stories in the news media, deceiving the public.
Every police car in America carries a "throw-down gun", an unregistered cheap handgun with one shot fired, to throw down next to a body of someone they have shot to prove they killed him in self-defense.
The FBI taps phones of members of Congress to get information to blackmail them into passing laws the FBI wants passed.
Local police forces are often pressured into following orders from Federal agencies, despite the lack of Federal legal authority to give them orders.
The Forest Service conspires with Earth First! leaders to divert potential environmental activism into "harmless" channels like civil disobedience instead of more effective actions like sabotage.
The Bureau of Printing and Engraving adds cocaine to the ink used in printing paper money to give the police legal grounds to sieze any stash of banknotes they find.
The American prison system has been privatized and the prison companies spend millions each year on lobbying and campaign contributions to get as many laws passed as possible, with the longest possible sentences for every offense, to get more prisoners.
A researcher who found a mistake in the method of DNA identification, proving the method ineffective, was threatened by the FBI to keep him from publishing his data.
Fingerprinting is a hoax. Each year, for the past 100 years, thousands of people all over the world, are convicted on a basis of fingerprint evidence, but there is not a single peer-reviewed scientific study to show that no two people have identical prints. The claim that fingerprints are positive identification rests entirely on folklore, not science.
Government documents dealing with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln are still classified. There are reasons to suspect they reveal the involvement of the British Secret Service, and the U.S. government fears damage to the Anglo-American alliance if the American public found out, even at this late date.
The question that nobody is asking is, why is there such a large, and apparently well-funded movement promoting the obviously crackpot claims of someone deliberately spraying poisons from aircraft, or of miraculous free energy inventions being suppressed by some secret plotters for some incomprehensible reason, but no interest in investigating and exposing all these real conspiracies that have been going on for years without drawing any attention from the huge populist conspiracy-theory movement?
Could it be that someone is trying to distract attention from real conspiracies and prevent them from being taken seriously by spreading deliberate rubbish about nonsensical false conspiracies around to discredit anyone who claims to have uncovered a conspiracy?
Let's see what conspiracy theorists have to say about this well-reasoned argument.
Oh, right...they're shills for the CIA. How silly of me.
You know, the CIA budget must be higher than United Airlines' profits....otherwise how can they pay for all the stuff they do?
Before the election, I'd love to get you on a Sustain What episode from my favorite propaganda literacy professor, Renee Hobbs, who did an amazing walk through media minefields here: https://bit.ly/propaganda_literacy . Deal?!
In the past four years, conspiracy theories have been proven to be true; there was a conspiracy to suppress accurate information regarding, for example, covid, which we were told were going to kill millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of people. We were told that ivermectin was a terrible medicine to take for the virus ("horse dewormer"), which were propagated by a conspiracy of politicians, media and government bureaucracies.
There was also the censorship conspiracy between YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the government which was first revealed when Elon Musk took over Twitter and fired 80% of the staff which was solely involved in censorship.
There is a trick to knowing whether or not there is a conspiracy in this day and age which I call the Principle of Simultaneity (not very catchy, I admit). The details can be read in a 2023 essay I wrote:
https://www.newenglishreview.org/what-if-conspiracy-theories-are-real/
Much of what you call a conspiracy about Covid was actually just confusion over a brand new virus.
That last time it happened (AIDS) there was plenty of confusion. Granted AIDS was a lot more deadly but unlike AIDS, Covid is airborne and the entire population was susceptible.
This article is a bit overly convoluted. Would it not be simpler to treat conspiracies as true if facts support them and not true if otherwise?
You don’t always know the facts. At least not at first.
Real conspiracies do exist. But there is a difference between seeing one that is really there and seeing them everywhere without any evidence. The tendency to become convinced of a conspiracy without actual evidence is due to having, as a small child, not ever having found out, at least not in a manner one could process, what Daddy and Mommy were doing in the bedroom with the door closed.
That childhood experience can cause one, years later, as an adult, to see everything in terms of Big People, doing Something Bad in Secret. The childhood experience gets projected onto other Big People who hold Great Power, usually the government, but also sometimes the Church, a hidden cabal of a distrusted minority group such as Jews or Muslims, or agents of a feared enemy nation.
The distribution of conspiracy theories is not equal among the population. It is most common on the right of the political spectrum because that is where the most sexual repression is found, so that is where there are more adults who were never able to discover what Daddy and Mommy were doing, or rather, were never able, later, when they reached puberty and should have been able to figure it out, could not assimilate the information and admit that was something Daddy and Mommy would do.
In recent years, as the feelings of helplessness in the face of authority figures with overwhelming power over the lives of helpless individuals has grown, more and more people are reverting to a childhood state of helplessness and dependency. And along with that revival of early feelings come the conviction that Big People are Up To Something Bad in Secret. One result of this reverting to childhood feelings of helplessness against these Big People is to see conspiracies by the Government everywhere.
But in almost all cases, it is only the particular conspiracies of the usual populist conspiracy-theoory movement that become popular enough for most people to believe them. There are any number of websites about HAARP, Chemtrails, and UFO cover-ups, but none on real, well-documented conspiracies like police cars that carry throw-down guns or FBI agents allowing gangsters like Whitey Bulgar to kill hundreds of people over decades in exchange for information on his competition.
Real conspiracies do exist.
The FBI runs drugs into African-American neighborhoods to destabilize them and prevent political organizing.
The CIA smuggles drugs to fund illegal programs like starting Protestant churches in Latin America to undermine the influence of Roman Catholic clergy.
The CIA illegally donates millions of dollars to right-wing parties in every country in Europe to help them win elections.
The Army hires journalists to plant favorable stories in the news media, deceiving the public.
Every police car in America carries a "throw-down gun", an unregistered cheap handgun with one shot fired, to throw down next to a body of someone they have shot to prove they killed him in self-defense.
The FBI taps phones of members of Congress to get information to blackmail them into passing laws the FBI wants passed.
Local police forces are often pressured into following orders from Federal agencies, despite the lack of Federal legal authority to give them orders.
The Forest Service conspires with Earth First! leaders to divert potential environmental activism into "harmless" channels like civil disobedience instead of more effective actions like sabotage.
The Bureau of Printing and Engraving adds cocaine to the ink used in printing paper money to give the police legal grounds to sieze any stash of banknotes they find.
The American prison system has been privatized and the prison companies spend millions each year on lobbying and campaign contributions to get as many laws passed as possible, with the longest possible sentences for every offense, to get more prisoners.
A researcher who found a mistake in the method of DNA identification, proving the method ineffective, was threatened by the FBI to keep him from publishing his data.
Fingerprinting is a hoax. Each year, for the past 100 years, thousands of people all over the world, are convicted on a basis of fingerprint evidence, but there is not a single peer-reviewed scientific study to show that no two people have identical prints. The claim that fingerprints are positive identification rests entirely on folklore, not science.
Government documents dealing with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln are still classified. There are reasons to suspect they reveal the involvement of the British Secret Service, and the U.S. government fears damage to the Anglo-American alliance if the American public found out, even at this late date.
The question that nobody is asking is, why is there such a large, and apparently well-funded movement promoting the obviously crackpot claims of someone deliberately spraying poisons from aircraft, or of miraculous free energy inventions being suppressed by some secret plotters for some incomprehensible reason, but no interest in investigating and exposing all these real conspiracies that have been going on for years without drawing any attention from the huge populist conspiracy-theory movement?
Could it be that someone is trying to distract attention from real conspiracies and prevent them from being taken seriously by spreading deliberate rubbish about nonsensical false conspiracies around to discredit anyone who claims to have uncovered a conspiracy?
I’m confused. Are you joking or do you think fingerprinting is a conspiracy?
Skeptic, did you take the Covid vax?
It is a serious question with many implications on your work.
Why? Covid is not a conspiracy. There was confusion at first over a brand new virus.
Unfortunately you need a fairly reliable media/information distribution network, to even gather the data upon which conclusions are based.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/media-guide-part-1-the-invisible?r=1neg52
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/media-guide-part-2-narrative-uber?r=1neg52