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A Brief Introduction to Conspiracies
by Doniphan Blair
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The planes piloted by al-Qaeda operatives, which flew into the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, are said by some conspiracy theorists to be an American self-attack. photo: unknownBACK IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS, A COUPLE
of years ago, people routinely dismissed conspiracy theorists as something akin to stamp collectors: slightly kooky aficionados of an odd discipline. But that’s getting very hard to do today, as they attract ever greater numbers, seize the spotlight and push us all towards a surreal tipping point.
They became a major fringe phenomena about eighteen years ago when Theorists, or Truthers, as they prefer to be called, researched the 9/11 attacks and discovered they were an inside job. Although most Theorists decline to be definitive, the al-Qaeda operatives who flew the planes were evidently agents working for either the CIA or a more clandestine American entity.
These forces are so powerful, according to Theorists, they are able to perpetrate enormous crimes while leaving little or no trace or witnesses.
It was Donald Trump, however, who ushered conspiracies into the mainstream when he became the most prominent backer of “Birtherism,” the notion that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Then he kicked off his presidential bid with his theory that Mexicans were sneaking across the border, not to work hard at low pay but to rob and rape Americans.
Now Trump is trumpeting new conspiracies almost daily. Obviously, his strategy is to promote manipulative, half-believable stories, sow the suspicion needed to render everything a form of fake news and rule as the greatest faker.
Donald J. Trump's long involvement with glitz, fakery and cheating as well as his emotional intelligence drew him directly to conspiracy theory. photo: courtesy Vanity FairNaturally, having a conspiracy king in the White House enfranchised the conspiracists, as well as the ambidextrous extremists out to exploit them. But over the last four months they have become even more addled by the historical fluke of quarantine isolation, economic collapse and, starting at the end of May, street demonstrations.
Welcome to our golden age of conspiracies, one so glitteringly grotesque it makes the 19th century Illuminati look like children’s theater.
Of course, there are conspiracies by corporate criminals, corrupt officials and criminal enterprises, as well as foreign agents, which warrant investigation—indeed, we need to allocate our resources there.
And sure, there are dilettante conspiracists who are hardly hurting anyone by googling “Federal Reserve” or “contrails,” say, for a few hours a week—just keeping an open mind, they explain.
But they have been overshadowed and outgunned by the many disciples of QAnon (an anonymous leaker supposedly high up in the intelligence services), who scour the news for signals concerning Trump’s impending declaration of martial law, arrest of leading liberals and break up of what they claim is a massive international ring of Satanists, who also are cannibals and pedophiles.
Indeed, some Republicans are now running as QAnon candidates, and Trump’s disgraced and indicted former national security advisor, General Michael Flynn, recently showed his QAnon colors. (See that story here, a new piece on QAnon in The New Republic, an older one in The Atlantic or one with more psychological perspective from Behavioral Scientist.)
Then there’s Alex Jones’s Infowarriors or the followers of the London Real show, who claim Covid-19 is a lab-engineered bio-weapon or a by-product of the new 5G network. And then there's—and this is no joke—the Boogaloo Bois (boys), an actual conspiratorial group.
To get our terminology straight, that means they are plotting or doing unlawful or harmful actions and can be properly called conspirators. Then there are their schemes, the conspiracies. Finally, there are the conspiracy theorists, who sift the runic sands for traces of plots, often in the land of make believe.
The Boogalooers, however, are all too real. Known for their mixed metaphors—old movie and dance references and Hawaiian shirts combined with large arsenals—their romantic dream for America is to foment riots, kill police and be agent provocateurs—though they’d never use a French term—for a “white revolution.”
One mile from where I sit in Oakland, a Boogalooer murdered Patrick David Underwood, a Black, 53-year-old security guard, on May 29th, the first night of Oakland's George Floyd protests. He was captured within a week but only after killing another policeman, Damon Gutzwiller (white that time).
As the Boogalooers illustrate, there are some very active, aggressive and dangerous conspiracies, which should be sleuthed, tracked and stopped. But there are also a lot of fabricated conspiracies accusing innocent people. Even conspiracy-lite feeds conspiracism, which increases prejudices against minorities, especially Jewish people, given all of the ancient accusations against them, as we will examine in the fourth part of this essay.
The Kennedy killing on November 22th, 1963 is probably the largest major event studied by conspiracy theorists that stands a reasonable chance of being associated with an actual conspiracy. photo: unknownThere has always been conspiratorial thinking—not people plotting, which there has also always been, rather people looking for plots. But it was largely confined to the FBI’s Mafia task force, paranoid schizophrenics or demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed to have uncovered dozens of communists in the upper echelons of the US government and military. (A direct heir to McCarthy, Trump is connected through his lawyer, Roy Cohn, who became Trump’s mentor as well as councilor.)
Modern conspiratorial thinking started with the Kennedy assassination and the obvious inconsistencies in the official reports (although why such sophisticated conspirators would enlist Lee Harvey Oswald, a nutcase just back from defecting to the Soviet Union, is also hard to explain).
Conspiratorial thinking jumped a level with the arrival of the internet, which opened vast forums for free speech just in time for 9/11. A decade later, emerging social media companies doubled down on those proclivities when they developed algorithms to stimulate interest and ad revenue by favoring viewers’ prejudices.
Post-9/11 increases in state and corporate surveillance didn’t help, either.
Then there’s humanity’s periodic production of a person of exceptional quality. In troubled times, people understandably either hope for such a messiah or decry their opposite: evil masterminds.
More fundamental, I believe, is how the conspiracists themselves feel aggrieved. Obviously, they derive substantial self-esteem and status from attacking hidden enemies and purveying secret information. As in any espionage situation, the more tightly held the secret, the more valuable. Even in casual settings, like shoptalk or gossip, people love to control information.
Among conspiracists, if you challenge their evidence, you enter a funhouse debate of dubious indicators, diverging levels of science and full-on fabrications. Plus, once one conspiracy has been revealed, to retain the dominant information spot, they have to up the ante.
Moreover, hidden enemies are just that. They rarely rebut claims, let alone strike back (although bin Laden was said to have been incensed by how conspiracists erased his efforts). That is why, a few years after 9/11, Theorists had to stop proclaiming their bravery on Pacifica Radio, say, since everyone knew no one would ever be coming for them.
The US dollar's eye on the pyramid was derived from the private, if not always secret, Free Masons and referenced the Egyptians and their prodigious knowledge. photo: courtesy US TreasuryBut that insult to their humanity is minimal. The big injury, according to my ad hoc research among conspiracist friends and acquaintances in the US, Brazil, Germany, Poland and Mexico, is that their fathers did not treat them right. Unable to simply reject their patriarch, which would be standard for the empowered adult but risky for the injured adolescent, they craft a psychological work-around.
The little patriarch—be it Dad, the employer, the nation—would have done more for them, or so their subconscious speculates, had it not been for the big patriarch—the capitalists, the CIA, the deep state—which they are now free to attack without alienating their community, although family and friends often become sick of their endless theorizing.
In fact, the new book, “Too Much and Never Enough”, by Trump's niece, Mary Trump, evidently documents that he was abused by his father, which would give him a classical conspiracist's childhood (see article). Released on July 16th, it broke records with almost a million copies sold on its first day.
Conspiracism may be related to paranoid schizophrenia, which induces its sufferers to hear people talking about them or voices in their head, essentially the universe communicating with them. A more moderate malaise seems to afflict conspiracists, to whom the universe is talking through bits of news, shreds of evidence or other signs which, when pieced together, express their desires and politics.
I’m especially chagrined by how conspiracism bewitched so many of my old friends and has its modern roots in the ‘60s. Rejecting authority and embracing new ideas are essential, but for the transition to work efficiently it requires rationalism, proportionality and tolerance.
In fact, many conspiracists have taken up the ‘60s mantle of accepting new paradigms, coming together and seeing the truth.
Unfortunately, underneath their new age cant, the truth they want us to see is a fallen, evil world. Humanity is controlled by puppet masters or reptilian underworld beings, according to one of the most asinine but powerful purveyors of conspira-crap, David Icke, an English former sportswriter. Indeed, a lot of conspiracism smacks of leftovers from a bygone era, Satanism, which, true to form, the conspiracies have returned to in force.
We will all be one, they proclaim, albeit only after eliminating the evildoers, the reverse of a Kumbaya moment. Most religious and shamanic traditions are unified by the basic tenets of responsibility, helping others and tolerance, which is often defined as “Do onto others as you would want to be done unto you.”
It is known as the Golden Rule not simply due to citings by patriarchal monotheists but because it is a precise and functional formula for becoming a conscious adult. To become fully human, we have to recognize the humanity of others—not just our friends, but our opponents.
That is because we were all created by one god, according to monotheists, or one evolutionary process, according to science. Alas, conspiracists doubt such unity and see the world as dominated by devils, with no hope in sight.
Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830), the liberal scholar who founded the Bavarian Illuminati, a secret society whose deeds were mostly scholarly or advocacy, but which became a scapegoat and then a myth. photo: courtesy Bavarian MuseumIndeed, few conspiracists, as far as I know, have retracted their claims or admitted error, let alone abandon conspiratorial thinking. Naturally, they can always muddle through, given the details of a conspiracy are fuzzy, fungible or fabricated. The hard facts of their injuries and grievances, however, remain unchanged and impossible to deny.
Making up secret cabals and scapegoats used to require its own secret cabal, replete with spies, forgers and printing presses. Nowadays, however, QAnon, London Real and Boogaloo are Facebook groups, YouTube channels or 4chan threads, easily weaponized by trolls and bots, domestic and foreign, as well as by their registered users.
Even newcomer Tiktok, the biggest social medium to emerge outside the US (it is from China) and a source of charming entertainment for sheltering-in-place (see cineSOURCE article), is dragging a new generation—the millennials, who were too young to enjoy 9/11 conspiracy theory—down that mirror-lined rabbit hole.
Indeed, Tiktok has logged millions of views of posts about PizzaGate—arguably the most disgusting and absurd of all the conspiracy theories, given its odd combination of child abuse and innocuous locations, which were discovered by deciphering references in the emails of John Podesta, the former Democratic National Committee director.
Although Podesta’s emails were hacked by the Russians of Fancy Bear, one of Putin’s cyber spy groups, they were published by WikiLeaks, directed by Julian Assange, who is currently doing a year in an English prison. Assange uploaded them on October 7th, 2016, just weeks before Trump's election, suggesting an actual conspiracy.
With so many people of the left and right, white collar and working class, fixated on the deep state, vaccine poisoning—amid an actual pandemic, no less—and the hundreds of other conspiracies, not to forget the foreign politicians who spout conspiracy theories while organizing actual conspiracies to interfere in the American elections—only four months away—it’s a four-alarm-fire, all-hands-on-deck, person-the-barricades situation.
I haven’t completely cracked the conpiracist’s code, which would require well-funded research, big data and extensive psychological surveys. But I have had many discussions—OK, often arguments—with a wide variety of conspiracists since 2002; I have observed ample evidence of the actual internal object of their anger; and I am petrified.
Perhaps the only thing worse then an uptight, square, stuck-in-the-mud person is a loose cannon, with no real interest in coming to grips with complex situations or their own psychology, but who is ready, willing and able to feed the rising tide of confusion, chaos and fear.
'A Brief Introduction to Conspiracies' has three companion pieces which together make up the full essay 'Our Golden Age of Conspiracies': 'The Anti-Conspiracy Manifesto', a rehabilitation regimen in 13 steps; 'An Open Letter to My Dear Friend John Edmiston Milich', an attempt to reach one person by reminding him of his brilliant and loving former self; and 'Anti-Jewish Conspiracies and the Conspiracy of Love', a review of conspiracies committed AGAINST the Jewish people and the efforts of many people to do the right thing, which are based on the Holocaust experiences of Tonia Rotkopf Blair and detailed in her upcoming book “Love at the End of the World” (Fall 2020, Austin Macauley).
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Jul 08, 2020 - 01:25 AM
by Doniphan Blair
Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!
The planes piloted by al-Qaeda operatives, which flew into the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, are said by some conspiracy theorists to be an American self-attack. photo: unknownof years ago, people routinely dismissed conspiracy theorists as something akin to stamp collectors: slightly kooky aficionados of an odd discipline. But that’s getting very hard to do today, as they attract ever greater numbers, seize the spotlight and push us all towards a surreal tipping point.
They became a major fringe phenomena about eighteen years ago when Theorists, or Truthers, as they prefer to be called, researched the 9/11 attacks and discovered they were an inside job. Although most Theorists decline to be definitive, the al-Qaeda operatives who flew the planes were evidently agents working for either the CIA or a more clandestine American entity.
These forces are so powerful, according to Theorists, they are able to perpetrate enormous crimes while leaving little or no trace or witnesses.
It was Donald Trump, however, who ushered conspiracies into the mainstream when he became the most prominent backer of “Birtherism,” the notion that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Then he kicked off his presidential bid with his theory that Mexicans were sneaking across the border, not to work hard at low pay but to rob and rape Americans.
Now Trump is trumpeting new conspiracies almost daily. Obviously, his strategy is to promote manipulative, half-believable stories, sow the suspicion needed to render everything a form of fake news and rule as the greatest faker.
Donald J. Trump's long involvement with glitz, fakery and cheating as well as his emotional intelligence drew him directly to conspiracy theory. photo: courtesy Vanity FairWelcome to our golden age of conspiracies, one so glitteringly grotesque it makes the 19th century Illuminati look like children’s theater.
Of course, there are conspiracies by corporate criminals, corrupt officials and criminal enterprises, as well as foreign agents, which warrant investigation—indeed, we need to allocate our resources there.
And sure, there are dilettante conspiracists who are hardly hurting anyone by googling “Federal Reserve” or “contrails,” say, for a few hours a week—just keeping an open mind, they explain.
But they have been overshadowed and outgunned by the many disciples of QAnon (an anonymous leaker supposedly high up in the intelligence services), who scour the news for signals concerning Trump’s impending declaration of martial law, arrest of leading liberals and break up of what they claim is a massive international ring of Satanists, who also are cannibals and pedophiles.
Indeed, some Republicans are now running as QAnon candidates, and Trump’s disgraced and indicted former national security advisor, General Michael Flynn, recently showed his QAnon colors. (See that story here, a new piece on QAnon in The New Republic, an older one in The Atlantic or one with more psychological perspective from Behavioral Scientist.)
Then there’s Alex Jones’s Infowarriors or the followers of the London Real show, who claim Covid-19 is a lab-engineered bio-weapon or a by-product of the new 5G network. And then there's—and this is no joke—the Boogaloo Bois (boys), an actual conspiratorial group.
To get our terminology straight, that means they are plotting or doing unlawful or harmful actions and can be properly called conspirators. Then there are their schemes, the conspiracies. Finally, there are the conspiracy theorists, who sift the runic sands for traces of plots, often in the land of make believe.
The Boogalooers, however, are all too real. Known for their mixed metaphors—old movie and dance references and Hawaiian shirts combined with large arsenals—their romantic dream for America is to foment riots, kill police and be agent provocateurs—though they’d never use a French term—for a “white revolution.”
One mile from where I sit in Oakland, a Boogalooer murdered Patrick David Underwood, a Black, 53-year-old security guard, on May 29th, the first night of Oakland's George Floyd protests. He was captured within a week but only after killing another policeman, Damon Gutzwiller (white that time).
As the Boogalooers illustrate, there are some very active, aggressive and dangerous conspiracies, which should be sleuthed, tracked and stopped. But there are also a lot of fabricated conspiracies accusing innocent people. Even conspiracy-lite feeds conspiracism, which increases prejudices against minorities, especially Jewish people, given all of the ancient accusations against them, as we will examine in the fourth part of this essay.
The Kennedy killing on November 22th, 1963 is probably the largest major event studied by conspiracy theorists that stands a reasonable chance of being associated with an actual conspiracy. photo: unknownModern conspiratorial thinking started with the Kennedy assassination and the obvious inconsistencies in the official reports (although why such sophisticated conspirators would enlist Lee Harvey Oswald, a nutcase just back from defecting to the Soviet Union, is also hard to explain).
Conspiratorial thinking jumped a level with the arrival of the internet, which opened vast forums for free speech just in time for 9/11. A decade later, emerging social media companies doubled down on those proclivities when they developed algorithms to stimulate interest and ad revenue by favoring viewers’ prejudices.
Post-9/11 increases in state and corporate surveillance didn’t help, either.
Then there’s humanity’s periodic production of a person of exceptional quality. In troubled times, people understandably either hope for such a messiah or decry their opposite: evil masterminds.
More fundamental, I believe, is how the conspiracists themselves feel aggrieved. Obviously, they derive substantial self-esteem and status from attacking hidden enemies and purveying secret information. As in any espionage situation, the more tightly held the secret, the more valuable. Even in casual settings, like shoptalk or gossip, people love to control information.
Among conspiracists, if you challenge their evidence, you enter a funhouse debate of dubious indicators, diverging levels of science and full-on fabrications. Plus, once one conspiracy has been revealed, to retain the dominant information spot, they have to up the ante.
Moreover, hidden enemies are just that. They rarely rebut claims, let alone strike back (although bin Laden was said to have been incensed by how conspiracists erased his efforts). That is why, a few years after 9/11, Theorists had to stop proclaiming their bravery on Pacifica Radio, say, since everyone knew no one would ever be coming for them.
The US dollar's eye on the pyramid was derived from the private, if not always secret, Free Masons and referenced the Egyptians and their prodigious knowledge. photo: courtesy US TreasuryThe little patriarch—be it Dad, the employer, the nation—would have done more for them, or so their subconscious speculates, had it not been for the big patriarch—the capitalists, the CIA, the deep state—which they are now free to attack without alienating their community, although family and friends often become sick of their endless theorizing.
In fact, the new book, “Too Much and Never Enough”, by Trump's niece, Mary Trump, evidently documents that he was abused by his father, which would give him a classical conspiracist's childhood (see article). Released on July 16th, it broke records with almost a million copies sold on its first day.
Conspiracism may be related to paranoid schizophrenia, which induces its sufferers to hear people talking about them or voices in their head, essentially the universe communicating with them. A more moderate malaise seems to afflict conspiracists, to whom the universe is talking through bits of news, shreds of evidence or other signs which, when pieced together, express their desires and politics.
I’m especially chagrined by how conspiracism bewitched so many of my old friends and has its modern roots in the ‘60s. Rejecting authority and embracing new ideas are essential, but for the transition to work efficiently it requires rationalism, proportionality and tolerance.
In fact, many conspiracists have taken up the ‘60s mantle of accepting new paradigms, coming together and seeing the truth.
Unfortunately, underneath their new age cant, the truth they want us to see is a fallen, evil world. Humanity is controlled by puppet masters or reptilian underworld beings, according to one of the most asinine but powerful purveyors of conspira-crap, David Icke, an English former sportswriter. Indeed, a lot of conspiracism smacks of leftovers from a bygone era, Satanism, which, true to form, the conspiracies have returned to in force.
We will all be one, they proclaim, albeit only after eliminating the evildoers, the reverse of a Kumbaya moment. Most religious and shamanic traditions are unified by the basic tenets of responsibility, helping others and tolerance, which is often defined as “Do onto others as you would want to be done unto you.”
It is known as the Golden Rule not simply due to citings by patriarchal monotheists but because it is a precise and functional formula for becoming a conscious adult. To become fully human, we have to recognize the humanity of others—not just our friends, but our opponents.
That is because we were all created by one god, according to monotheists, or one evolutionary process, according to science. Alas, conspiracists doubt such unity and see the world as dominated by devils, with no hope in sight.
Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830), the liberal scholar who founded the Bavarian Illuminati, a secret society whose deeds were mostly scholarly or advocacy, but which became a scapegoat and then a myth. photo: courtesy Bavarian MuseumMaking up secret cabals and scapegoats used to require its own secret cabal, replete with spies, forgers and printing presses. Nowadays, however, QAnon, London Real and Boogaloo are Facebook groups, YouTube channels or 4chan threads, easily weaponized by trolls and bots, domestic and foreign, as well as by their registered users.
Even newcomer Tiktok, the biggest social medium to emerge outside the US (it is from China) and a source of charming entertainment for sheltering-in-place (see cineSOURCE article), is dragging a new generation—the millennials, who were too young to enjoy 9/11 conspiracy theory—down that mirror-lined rabbit hole.
Indeed, Tiktok has logged millions of views of posts about PizzaGate—arguably the most disgusting and absurd of all the conspiracy theories, given its odd combination of child abuse and innocuous locations, which were discovered by deciphering references in the emails of John Podesta, the former Democratic National Committee director.
Although Podesta’s emails were hacked by the Russians of Fancy Bear, one of Putin’s cyber spy groups, they were published by WikiLeaks, directed by Julian Assange, who is currently doing a year in an English prison. Assange uploaded them on October 7th, 2016, just weeks before Trump's election, suggesting an actual conspiracy.
With so many people of the left and right, white collar and working class, fixated on the deep state, vaccine poisoning—amid an actual pandemic, no less—and the hundreds of other conspiracies, not to forget the foreign politicians who spout conspiracy theories while organizing actual conspiracies to interfere in the American elections—only four months away—it’s a four-alarm-fire, all-hands-on-deck, person-the-barricades situation.
I haven’t completely cracked the conpiracist’s code, which would require well-funded research, big data and extensive psychological surveys. But I have had many discussions—OK, often arguments—with a wide variety of conspiracists since 2002; I have observed ample evidence of the actual internal object of their anger; and I am petrified.
Perhaps the only thing worse then an uptight, square, stuck-in-the-mud person is a loose cannon, with no real interest in coming to grips with complex situations or their own psychology, but who is ready, willing and able to feed the rising tide of confusion, chaos and fear.
'A Brief Introduction to Conspiracies' has three companion pieces which together make up the full essay 'Our Golden Age of Conspiracies': 'The Anti-Conspiracy Manifesto', a rehabilitation regimen in 13 steps; 'An Open Letter to My Dear Friend John Edmiston Milich', an attempt to reach one person by reminding him of his brilliant and loving former self; and 'Anti-Jewish Conspiracies and the Conspiracy of Love', a review of conspiracies committed AGAINST the Jewish people and the efforts of many people to do the right thing, which are based on the Holocaust experiences of Tonia Rotkopf Blair and detailed in her upcoming book “Love at the End of the World” (Fall 2020, Austin Macauley).
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Jul 08, 2020 - 01:25 AM
