In defense of conspiracy theories

We need more conspiracy theories, not less

It annoys me when people denigrate “conspiracy theories.” Are we really to believe that people don’t conspire? We don’t think that people sometimes collaborate in secret to commit nefarious or illegal or subversive acts? That seems incredibly naive.

We’ve been propagandized to believe that conspiracy theorizing should be relegated to the fringes. So I made a video to push back:

Here’s the same video on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v6s04ph-the-case-for-conspiracy-theories.html

It argues for why we need to stop trashing “conspiracy theorists.” It goes over real conspiracies that have happened, and how we’ve been propagandized to denigrate conspiracy theories. It also goes into the details of a real conspiracy, as told by the conspirators themselves. In the final section, it suggests some ideas for how we might become better, more nuanced conspiracy theorists.

I’ve also included the script of the video in this Substack. It contains some extra material that was cut from the video, as well as links to some articles and books.

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Your support allows me to continue with this work. Thank you, and enjoy!

The script (with some bonus material):

In our society, we tend to deny the existence of conspiracies. We assume that they’re too difficult to keep secret, or too difficult to get away with. We stigmatize people by calling them “conspiracy theorists.” The media portrays them as gullible, or dumb.

But a conspiracy is just when two or more people secretly collude to accomplish something. That “something” is typically subversive, or unlawful in nature. It might involve fraud or some other way to take advantage of people. When we put it this way, do we really think this kind of collusion doesn’t happen all the time?

Moreover, history shows many examples of wild conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. Even agencies like the CIA and the FBI have admitted as much.

And as we’ll get into later, many of the most egregious conspiracies were even kept secret for decades.

Yet for some reason, knowledge of these conspiracies doesn’t change people’s worldviews.

If some conspiracies are real, isn’t it rational to entertain “conspiracy theories” at least some of the time?

That’s not to say that we should uncritically believe most or all conspiracy theories. But the stigma attached to conspiracy theories prevents us from critical thinking. By being overly skeptical of conspiracy theories, we are unknowingly closing our eyes to the workings of power and strategy in our society today.

In Part I of this video, we’ll go over some crazy sounding conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. In most of these cases, the entities that pulled off the conspiracies even admitted to them.

In Part II, we’ll look into how the public was propagandized into stigmatizing conspiracy theories.

In Part III, we’ll study how a real conspiracy was implemented, as told by the conspirators themselves.

In Part IV, we’ll explore how to become better, more nuanced conspiracy theorists.

By the end of this video, you will most likely be convinced that we should be engaging in more conspiracy theories, not less.

Part I. True conspiracy theories

PHARMA CONSPIRACIES

Let’s start with a kind of conspiracy that probably happens all the time. It involves executives at the pharmaceutical company Merck, and how they covered up the dangers of their drug, Vioxx.

The reason we know about this particular conspiracy is that numerous lawsuits were raised against the company in the early 2000s, and as a result of the lawsuits, we have numerous internal emails and memos from the company. They reveal that Merck made a hit list of doctors that criticized Vioxx. The list of doctors’ names had labels like “neutralize,” "neutralised" or "discredit" next to them.

Another email showed company executives complaining about doctors who criticized their drug: “We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live…” they said.

Merck even created a fake “peer reviewed” journal in which to publish articles that were favorable to Vioxx.

And their clinical trial, which was supposed to study the safety of the drug, left out key data, which made the risk of cardiovascular side effects from their drug look lower.

Emails showed that company executives were aware of the cardiovascular risks associated with Vioxx, years before the drug was pulled from the market in 2004.

It’s estimated that up to 140,000 Americans suffered heart attacks or strokes as a result of their drug.

COMPANIES COLLUDING WITH EACH OTHER

There have also been cases of companies colluding with each other.

This is what happened when on December 14, 1953, the CEOs of the six largest tobacco manufacturers met at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, to discuss how to react to a very inconvenient study that had gotten a lot of attention, which showed a link between smoking and lung disease.

During the meeting, they agreed not to acknowledge the dangers of smoking, and set up a coordinated defense for their industry. They decided on tactics to refute the accumulating evidence and support industry-friendly science. Later on the tobacco companies created a front organization that operated on their behalf.

They also schemed about monitoring anti-tobacco organizations, identifying and enlisting allies, or rebutting data that was negative towards smoking.

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES COLLUDING WITH COMPANIES

Members of government agencies have also colluded with the very companies they were supposed to regulate. We occasionally discover these collusions as a result of lawsuits against the companies. This is how we know that Jess Rowland, an official at the EPA, or the Environmental Protection Agency, was colluding with Monsanto. This official actively worked to help keep the dangers of glyphosate hidden.

According to Monsantos’ own internal memos from 2015, Rowland said he would kill an investigation into the safety of glyphosate. Specifically, he he said, “if I can kill this I should get a medal.”

Internal emails also showed a Monsanto executive suggesting that they hire academics to put their names on ghostwritten research papers.

"We would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak," he wrote. He also mentioned that this was how Monsanto had "handled" an earlier paper on glyphosate's safety.

MK-ULTRA

Members of US government agencies have participated in even more egregious conspiracies. A famous example, was MK-ULTRA, which was a CIA program that experimented on humans, often without their knowledge or consent.

The aim of the project was to learn how to control the human mind and figure out ways to weaken individuals, or force confessions using brainwashing or psychological torture.

The CIA does not deny any of this. In fact you can find more information on it by going to the CIA’s website. Go under “Library” then go to “FOIA reading room” and do a search for MKUltra.

The program manipulated its subjects by using drugs like LSD, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and torture. We don’t even know the full extent of what happened under the program because the CIA director at the time ordered that all the MKUltra files be destroyed. The only reason we know about the program was that some documents survived, and were discovered in 1977.

It wasn’t just the government that was involved. “Several prominent medical research institutions and Government hospitals in the United States and Canada were involved in secret.”

A sub project of MKUltra was Operation Midnight Climax. The CIA hired prostitutes to lure clients to safe houses where they gave the men drugs like LSD. The men were not aware that they were being drugged. The prostitutes were then instructed to investigate whether the victims could be convinced to involuntarily reveal secrets. The victims were also sometimes fed subliminal messaging to induce them to perform involuntary actions such as robbery, assault or assassination. The encounters were monitored behind one-way glass.

THE TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENTS

The CIA was not the only government agency that experimented on humans without their informed consent.

In 1932, the public health service led a study called the “Tuskegee Study of untreated syphilis in the negro male” and recruited 600 Black American men for the study. The men were not informed of the nature of the experiment, and for 40 years these men were given dangerous chemicals and unnecessary medical procedures.

It gets even worse. By 1947, we had a cure for syphilis: penicillin. But this was withheld from the men.

MILITARY EXPERIMENTS

The military has also secretly experimented on people.

In just one example of many, in 1950, the US Navy sprayed certain types of bacteria over the San Francisco Bay Area in order to determine how vulnerable it could be to a bioweapon attack. It killed at least one American and hospitalized at least 10 more.

The outbreak was so unusual that doctors wrote it up for a medical journal.

Certain types of bacteria were also sprayed on New York City subway riders in 1966.

And there were multiple times when the army sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide over much of the United states and Canada in order to test dispersal patterns and the geographic range of chemical or biological weapons. In the 50s and 60s they sprayed the particles over the San Francisco bay area, South Carolina, Georgia, Minnesota, and other places. The long term health effects of this are unknown. The tests did not become public until the early 1990s.

COINTELPRO

The US government has also admitted to surveilling, infiltrating, and purposefully discrediting American political organizations that they perceived as subversive. One example of this was a series of projects that the FBI conducted from 1956 to 1971, called COINTELPRO. Again, the FBI has admitted to this.

The purpose of this program was to disrupt dissident political organizations like communist parties, anti-war activists, white supremacist groups, civil rights and black power activists. They infiltrated these groups to splinter the groups from within, or steer them towards negative actions that would turn the public against them.

They planted false media stories about them, spread misinformation about meetings and events, abused the legal system to harass dissidents to make them appear to be criminals, conspired with local police departments to threaten them and conduct illegal break-ins. They oversaw the creation of documentaries and other propaganda to undermine organizations or paint them as aggressive. They monitored Martin Luther King Jr and bugged his home and hotel rooms.

The only reason we know about the program was because a group of activists burgled an FBI office and took several documents and exposed them to news agencies. Many news organizations initially refused to publish the information. Some of the documents were also revealed during Senator Frank Church’s investigation into the FBI in 1976. Unfortunately, many of the documents were partly or entirely redacted.

The investigation revealed that the FBI had been doing these kinds of things as far back as World War I.

According to the investigation:

While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the "national security" or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power.

They even surveilled John Lennon.

CIA ACTIVITY AGAINST AMERICAN CITIZENS

The CIA also targeted American citizens. In the 60s and 70s they spied on and infiltrated anti war movements, and even feminist and religious groups. Agents sometimes went to universities across the United States, where they infiltrated and learned the culture and lingo of these groups.

All this activity went directly against the CIA’s own charter, which was drafted when the agency was created in 1947. The charter explicitly forbids it from conducting domestic operations.

NSA SPYING

The CIA and FBI weren’t the only ones who illegally spied on Americans. In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was Illegally spying on American citizens.

It wasn’t just that the NSA listened in on the conversations of Americans without their knowledge. They even did things like intercept people’s packages to implant tracking or surveillance devices. So if you ordered a computer or other hardware from a company, you could have someone from the NSA intercepting and tampering with it. Here was a photo showing agents removing packaging tape from someone’s Cisco package:

CIA PROPAGANDA

The CIA have also admitted to feeding lies to the media in order to propagandize the public.

They embedded people who posed as journalists or editors into major media networks; people who had the power to steer the direction of narratives or prevent certain stories from getting out.

By the 1950s there were thousands of CIA employees and dozens of large global media outlets working as part of this propaganda machine. The investigations of Senator Church’s commission exposed this in 1975. Later, a 1977 Rolling Stone article by Carl Bernstein, expanded on the investigation and found that more than 400 US press members had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA, including members of the New York Times and Time magazine.

CIA PROPAGANDA ON THE JFK ASSASSINATION

The CIA also sought to denigrate conspiracy theorists after the JFK assassination. In 1967 they released a dispatch called “Countering criticism of the Warren Report” which outlined ways to discredit anyone who questioned the official narrative about the assassination.

It included things like:

Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propaganda. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

It promoted the use of “friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)” and other “propaganda assets” like “Book reviews and feature articles” to help spread their propaganda.

The term “conspiracy theory” has been around since at least the 1800s.

New York Times, January 11, 1863.

However, since the JFK assassination, use of the term “conspiracy theory” increased, and often served to denigrate conspiracy theorists; more on that later.

The CIA has also had a long history of using Hollywood to spread its propaganda.

The agency’s precursor during WWII, The Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, created this memo which was eventually declassified. It details how the motion picture can be used as a weapon of psychological warfare.

Even more information can be found in the book The CIA in Hollywood, by Tricia Jenkins.

MILITARY PROPAGANDA

The amount of influence that the CIA has had on entertainment might be small compared to The Pentagon. This report found that between 1911 and 2017 more than 800 films received support from the Department of Defense. This included films like Transformers and Iron Man. Over 1100 titles on television also received Pentagon backing.

The Pentagon has also used the media to spread its propaganda. This NYTimes article revealed that Pentagon records “reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.”

It detailed a pattern of retired officers going on to become “analysts” on networks. These analysts would act as “media Trojan horses” — intended to shape coverage from inside the networks. Most of the analysts had ties to military contractors, and were therefore incentivized to promote war. Those business relationships were hardly ever disclosed to the viewers.

This phenomenon, of military or security state officials going on to work for media networks, is still happening today. In fact, much of it is out in the open. For example, former CIA Director John Brennan, went on to work at NBC as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst.” And James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, went on to work at CNN.

Lesser known agencies like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy have also increasingly played a role in propagandizing the public, both domestically and overseas.

CIA COUPS

The CIA has also admitted to overthrowing governments. Here was just one example, from 1953, when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran at the time, and installed someone else.

In fact, the US government is responsible for multiple coup attempts; according to the work of Lindsey O’Rourke, whose dissertation on this topic turned into the book Covert Regime Change.

According to her research, there were 64 attempted covert regime changes during just the Cold War period of 1947-89, of which 25 succeeded. In some cases, the country in which the regime change happened knew that the US was involved and even wanted to keep it secret because they didn’t want to reveal any weakness that they had.

Some methods to implement coups included: Assassination, election meddling, and supporting armed dissidents.

The CIA also attempted to assassinate Castro numerous times.

Some details of this came out in 1975, again as a result of Senator Church’s committee investigations.

Another thing we learned from this commission was that the CIA had developed what was called a heart attack gun. This was a pistol with a neurotoxin derived from shellfish. This neurotoxin could be frozen and fired from the pistol; the poison would then melt, and within minutes, the victim would be dead. The only evidence of foul play would be a small red puncture wound, one not easily found by a coroner. The cause of death would appear to be a heart attack, even to a medical examiner.

SEXUAL BLACKMAIL

The last conspiracy we’ll talk about involves Jeffrey Epstein. Most people have heard about how he and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, were involved in sex trafficking of minors. But there was an entire network of people who helped them, and even more people who had various degrees of awareness of what they were doing, and didn’t do anything about them.

Moreover, this included people in the US government. In 2008, despite evidence that he had abused teenage girls for years, he was given a very lenient sentence. Later on, the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida who had handled Epstein’s case in 2008 had stated to interviewers that “I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence” and to “leave it alone” and that Epstein was above his pay grade.

What was Epstein’s role in intelligence? It’s hard to know for sure, but what we do know is that the CIA has a history of recruiting unsavory people for all kinds of purposes. Again, if you go to the CIA website, you can find this:

“They have to recruit some drug addicts and sex deviates to contact others like them…

The “top secret” agreement allows the sexual deviate to acquire immunity… provided he acts as a ‘double agent’ for CIA.”

The CIA has also used sexual blackmail. Again, you can find this on the CIA website:

For years, the Central Intelligence Agency operated love traps in New York City and San Francisco where foreign diplomats were lured by prostitutes in the pay of the CIA. Through hidden one way mirrors, CIA agents filmed the sexual adventures and later tried to blackmail the victims into becoming informants.

This may just be the tip of the iceberg of what someone like Jeffrey Epstein was involved in. And we have go assume that there are others out there like him. More recently, Sean “Diddy” Combs has been accused of being involved in similar schemes.

SUMMARY

So to sum up, the government:

• Secretly experimented on people without their consent

• Infiltrated and disrupted dissident groups

• Regularly tried to overthrow other governments

• Purposely fed lies to the media

• Spied on its own citizens without warrants or consent

• Colluded with the companies they were supposed to regulate

• Intelligence agencies have used sexual blackmail

Among the examples of private sector collusion:

• Executives of companies discussing ways to lie about the harms of their products

• Pharmaceutical companies have bribed doctors

• Instigated hit jobs on critics

• Set up fake studies

There were many others we could have covered, like Operation Paperclip, which was a US intelligence program that brought Nazi scientists to the US, Operation Northwood, which was a proposal to enact a false flag operation to commit acts of terrorism against Americans and then blame it on the Cuban government.

We could have talked about the role of intelligence agencies in the Charles Manson murders, or the revelations of Wikileaks or Daniel Ellsberg.

Given that crazy conspiracies like this have actually happened, we don’t spend enough time thinking about what this means. Knowing that these things happened should shift our worldview.

Now, it’s possible to get too paranoid and think that everything is a conspiracy; we’ll address this more later. But in our society today, we err too much on the side of discounting conspiracies. There’s this assumption that conspiracies are too difficult to get away with, that they can’t be kept secret.

But we already know this can’t be true.

Many of the most egregious conspiracies were kept hidden for decades. MKUltra first started in 1953, but didn’t become public till two decades later. The Tuskegee experiments went on for 3 decades.

How are these things kept secret for so long? Well, we already know that military or intelligence agencies infiltrate the media. This means that they can shape narratives, and prevent inconvenient stories from coming out.

But sometimes there are more mundane factors at play. Edward Snowden, in his book Permanent Record, wrote about how we overestimate the media’s ability to uncover secrets, especially with topics that involve specialized knowledge. This was how they missed the story that Snowden would eventually uncover; how the NSA had been conducting secret mass surveillance on its citizens. He wrote:

It was this lack of expertise or even interest in tech that largely caused journalists to miss two events that stunned me during the course of my fact-gathering about mass surveillance.

The first thing that journalists missed was the NSA’s announcement of the construction of a vast new data facility. Snowden wrote:

There was simply no reason to build something to those specs unless you were planning on storing absolutely everything, forever. Here was, to my mind… the plain-as-day corroboration of a crime… and no one was paying attention.

The second event was when the chief technology officer of the CIA, Ira “Gus” Hunt spoke at a data conference in New York. Anyone with $40 could get in. Here is the full talk here:

He told the journalists that the agency could track their smartphones, even when they were turned off- that the agency could surveil every single one of their communications.”

He even said:

Technology is moving faster than government or law can keep up… it’s moving faster.. Than you can keep up: you should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.

He said things like: “At the CIA we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” and “It is nearly within our grasp to compute on ALL human generated information.”

Snowden reported that he was “floored” by these admissions, but this confession was only covered by one media outlet, the Huffington Post.

For every conspiracy that we know about, there are probably many more that are hidden. In their book, Top Secret America, by Dana Priest and William Arkin, they write:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy, and so secretive, that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it, or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

There are programs that no one outside a “small circle of people executing the operations” know about. Ones that even the Secretary of State don’t know about or the members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who are supposed to oversee every major operation by agencies.

The congressional oversight committees actually don’t hold much power.

Consider what Jay Rockefeller said in 2007, who was Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time:

Don't you understand the way Intelligence works? Do you think that because I'm Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time. I only get, and my committee only gets, what they want to give me.

This all amounts to (From Top Secret America): “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight."

From Top Secret America:

We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.

This is what is often referred to as the “deep state.” It includes permanent bureaucrats in the government who survive through the tenure of many different presidents, and though they may be part of the Executive Branch, they sometimes subvert the will of Presidents.

Presidents in the past have attested to this. Truman wrote in an op-ed that he was disturbed by how the CIA would slant the reports given to Presidents for biased reasons, and even became a “policy making arm” of the government.

JFK was also famously antagonistic with the CIA.

And Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the military industrial complex in his farewell address:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Some things can even exist for decades as “open secrets,” in that large groups of people or whole industries can know of something, but keep it from the consciousness of the general public.

This applies to Jeffrey Epstein’s network, where for years, lots of people in the know, openly called his private jet the “Lolita Express.”

Similarly, there are open secrets among the people involved at the top levels of military.

From Top Secret America (P. 188):

“It hits you like a ton of bricks when you think about it,” fumed a senior officer who has been in the military for nearly thirty years and was in Afghanistan when he has this revelation. “The department of defense is no longer a war fighting organization. It’s a business enterprise. Afghanistan is a great example of it. There’s so much money being made off this place.”

And:

“The money to be made, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, isn’t lost to the people at the top. Thanks to their security clearances and their access to highly guarded information, those running the most sensitive government departments and agencies possess insider information any Wall Streeter would long for and any corporate CEO would pay through the nose for; they know where the government is heading with its intelligence and counterterrorism program, and what goods and services it needs to get there.”

So we know that egregious conspiracies have happened in the past, and we know that they can be hidden for decades, and that the conspiracies we do know of are probably only the tip of the iceberg. And yet people still don’t like to admit that “conspiracies happen.”

Why are we so hesitant to admit that conspiracies happen?

Part II We’ve been propagandized into submission

We can find many media articles denigrating conspiracy theories, and even calling them “dangerous.” We’ve been propagandized to believe that conspiracy theorizing is shameful.

Since we know that government agencies and the military have infiltrated media outlets in the past, it’s not overly paranoid to ask whether at least some of these articles might be part of a deliberate propaganda campaign.

Let’s look at a recent example of what might have been coordinated propaganda; the numerous attacks in the media against the lab leak theory for the origins of SARS-COV-2. This is the theory that the virus came from a lab.

During the early years of covid, corporate media outlets told us that this was just a fringe conspiracy theory.

But it’s no longer considered a fringe theory. More recently it was announced that even the CIA favors the lab leak theory to explain covid’s origins.

It should never have been denigrated as a fringe conspiracy theory in the first place, given that lab leaks have happened many times in the recent past.

For example, in this report from 2004 from the journal Science, it says that investigators were convinced that there were “two separate biosafety lapses within the Institute of Virology at China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing… With four separate infections within the last year at three different institutions…”

So we have to consider that at least some of the media outlets that denigrated the lab leak theory, were either knowingly or unknowingly, part of a deliberate propaganda campaign.

Another recent example is how the corporate media denigrated anyone who raised concerns about Biden’s mental decline during his presidency. The idea was called a “right wing conspiracy..”

But after his debate with Trump in 2024, almost everyone could see that he had been in mental decline, which was why he was replaced by Kamala Harris on the presidential ticket.

What are the consequences of this kind of propaganda?

For one, it stops critical thinking in its tracks. It’s censorship at the thought level, when we don’t even let our minds speculate on mere ideas. It kills the capacity for creative thought, which needs to feel safe to ask questions, even if they seem stupid. Our worldviews are impoverished as a result.

Even worse, it enlists the populace into becoming its unwitting lackeys. The propagandist depends on the population imprisoning itself. The general population doesn’t realize what they’re participating in.

Here’s how the philosopher and scientist Charles Sander Peirce described it:

“Let their passions be enlisted so that they may regard private and unusual opinions with hatred and horror. Then, let all men who reject the established belief be terrified into silence.”

Every time you have a hard time believing this, remember that even nature is hard to believe sometimes.

There’s a type of fungus called the zombie-ant fungus that has evolved ways to manipulate its hosts. The fungus can infect an ant, spread throughout its body, and steer it into conditions that are good for dispersing its spores. The ant is compelled to climb up a nearby twig or stem, after which a large fruiting body erupts from the poor ant, to release the fungus’s spores.

When we live in a world where a fungus, which is literally brainless, can end up being able to manipulate ants, maybe it’s not so far fetched to think that humans can figure out ways to get you to spread their ideas.

Propaganda also taps into people’s insecurities. The stigmatization of conspiracy theorists makes us want to avoid getting lumped in with the uneducated people, the ignorant masses. This is especially the case with people who care about credentials and degrees. In fact, this attitude is especially pervasive among academics.

Take for example Steven Pinker, a professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and public intellectual:

In the video, Pinker lists a hodgepodge of the most extreme versions of conspiracy theories; he mentions the conspiracy theory that, “vaccines are microchips designed to surveil us,” instead of one of the more moderate or commonly held concerns that people have about vaccines. He mentions the conspiracy theory that, “covid was deliberately engineered as a bioweapon,” instead of bringing up a more commonly held theory, which is that SARS-COV-2 leaked from a lab.

On a side note, governments, including our own, have bioweapons programs; these are 100% real things. But that’s besides the point.

The worst part is when Pinker uses the phrase “Carried out by sinister all powerful forces.” By using that phrase, he’s sending the subtle message to you, the listener, that conspiracy theorists are superstitious and backwards, and blame negative world events on all-powerful entities.

Sure, probably some people think that, but it’s much more likely that most people have more moderate views, like that there are powerful people out there that have the ability to create important changes around them. We’ll talk more about such people in the next section.

What Pinker does here is called “strawmanning.” He doesn’t engage with any of the better versions of conspiracy theories. It’s intellectually lazy, but this is what passes as an “expert” or “intellectual” today.

Part of the problem is that most modern schooling doesn’t foster critical thinking.

In 1946, Albert Einstein wrote that:

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom.

He was especially critical of how education centered around preparing for exams. He wrote that this:

… had such a deterring effect that after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

In his book Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky wrote:

Given the external power structure of the society in which they function, the institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity, and to make them controllable and indoctrinated.

In his book Weapons of Mass Instruction, former public schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto writes that our educational system is “designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens- all in order to render the populace ‘manageable.’”

“The classroom would never be used to produce knowledge, but only to consume it; it would not encourage the confined to produce ideas, only to consume the ideas of others. The ultimate goal implanted in student minds, which replaced the earlier goal of independent livelihoods, was getting a good job.”

He writes that this “new forced schooling octopus taught anyone unable to escape its tentacles that inert knowledge-memorizing the dots-is the gold standard of intellectual achievement. Not connecting those dots.”

This factory “schooling” creates passive human beings. They don’t feel very effective or like they have much control over their lives. They are easily directed by others.

Factory schooling also neuters the imagination, and cripples the ability to see novel possibilities like how others could commit fraud or abuse.

This may not solely be the fault of propaganda and factory schooling. It may actually be a problem of modernity.

In his fascinating book, The Master and his Emissary, Iain McGilchrist argues that at different times in history, societies have shifted in what and how they’ve paid attention, and that this has to do with how we use our brains; in particular, how dominant one hemisphere of the brain is over the other.

The left hemisphere of the brain excels at narrow, focused attention, while the right hemisphere excels at broad, open attention, how things fit into a larger picture, or making connections. The left sees the parts, the right the whole. The left tends to quickly categorize an experience as something it’s seen before, and deny any discrepancies that do not fit its already generated schema of things. But the right hemisphere stops and says, no maybe this is different, and plays devil’s advocate. It’s more open to possibilities, more flexible in thought, and more comfortable with uncertainty.

McGilchrist argues that in modern times, the dominant tendency has been for an over reliance on the left hemisphere. The scientific and technological revolutions ushered in an era of hyperspecialization, and overfocus on individual data points, as well as skepticism of intuition. Modern reliance on the left hemisphere has made us demand clear justifications, standardization, and predictability, rather than entertain possibilities that could be true but lack immediate substantiation. Our culture and institutions- the bureaucracies, and academia- amplify these left-hemisphere tendencies.

Regardless of the cause, our passivity and failure of imagination also make it difficult to identify with people who are, what we call, “high agency.” These are people who feel that they can affect change, who try to shape events rather than simply be shaped by them. They are strategic, and see opportunities where others don’t. They recognize untapped niches in both life and business- these are some of the same traits that make great investors or entrepreneurs.

Most of us also can’t imagine the kind of resources that are available to people with billions of dollars at their disposal. These people obviously have niches open to them that are not open to the average person. By the way, in the next section we will dig into the mind of just such a person, and a conspiracy he was involved in.

There are many such people on the planet. In fact, we’ve never had so many billionaires on the planet. We’ve never lived in a time of so many elites. We’ve also never had such large, bureaucratic governments that create all kinds of loopholes that only a few will understand. That makes the current environment ripe for all kinds of schemes that aren’t easily visible or understood by the public. With enough powerful people around, it’s hard to imagine that any unoccupied niche that’s highly lucrative would stay untapped for long.

In his autobiography, Edward Snowden (p.117) wrote “If something can be done, it will be done, and possibly already has been.” The context under which he said this was when he learned about all the ways the Chinese spied on its citizens; this was even before he learned about mass surveillance in America. When he learned what the Chinese were doing, he thought:

“There was simply no way for America to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same things itself.”

We’ve now gotten to a point where schemes have gotten incredibly imaginative. One such example was described in the book Moneyland (p.87). This was a scheme for Chinese elites to get around tax laws. They would extract eggs from their wives, fertilize them, then have them implanted in women in Japan. According to Japanese law, the child’s birth certificate would list the surrogate as the mother, thus making the child eligible for Japanese citizenship. The Chinese couple could therefore transfer one’s wealth to their biological child, but make it appear that it was going to an unrelated Japanese child. Aside from tax benefits, this made it easier for the Chinese couple to flee China, since they had someone in the family with Japanese citizenship.

These people were willing to have their biological children raised by someone else, to the point where they would barely see them. Most of us probably couldn’t imagine do ing this. But then again, most of us aren’t in a position where we could have so much to gain from such a scheme.

Most of us also couldn’t have imagined such a scheme in the first place, and this highlights how it’s hard to know all the different ways to commit fraud until you get a certain level of access or expertise.

So in fact, the type of person who denigrates conspiracy theories, is also the type of person who either doesn’t have much access to power or expertise, or can’t even imagine what it’s like to have these things. When we put it that way, perhaps these people deserve denigration even more than the gullible people who believe every conspiracy theory that comes their way.

Part III. Anatomy of a real conspiracy

We’ll now look at an actual conspiracy that went on for nearly a decade. This is a story that you may have heard of in the news, but the real story, as told by the people involved, is much more fascinating than what was revealed in the media. It’s also imperative that we study and understand cases like this, if we want to understand how the world really works.

This is the story of how Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and entrepreneur, took down the media and gossip website Gawker. What makes this case special is that we have have unprecedented knowledge of how this conspiracy went down, because a writer, Ryan Holiday, was in the unique position of having access to both the conspirators and its victims, and wrote about it in his book Conspiracy.

If you look at most media articles about this story, they will say that the reason Thiel went after Gawker was because he was angry that Gawker had published an article that outed him as gay in 2007. But this isn’t quite right. Thiel was pissed off about that article, but it was only the inciting incident. For Thiel, Gawker wasn’t just an unscrupulous site that embarrassed or ruined people’s careers or lied about people.

Thiel saw Gawker as emblematic of the broader problem of political correctness, which he saw as a toxic force in intellectual life and free society.

His view was that this had a chilling effect on what people were comfortable with saying, and killed the space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. For Thiel, this cost society as a whole, because this was where most progress came from.

It was only years after that 2007 Gawker piece, that he decided to do something about what he called “the Gawker problem.” This happened in 2011 when a 26 year old protogee, who’s called “Mr A” in Ryan Holiday’s book, pitched Thiel with a plan: Thiel should create a shell company to hire former investigative reporters and lawyers to find causes of action against Gawker. Mr A even came up with a timeline and budget: 3 to 5 years and 10 million.

Mr A’s motivations were different from Thiel’s. Destroying Gawker was a way for him to make his mark and impress a big and important person. This served Thiel well; it was paramount that Thiel not be associated with the plot in any way, and a young kid would attract less attention. As a messenger, Mr A could travel without getting noticed, plus Thiel was too busy to do all the work himself.

The two got to scheming and contacted lawyers that could help. Mr A settled on an unlikely conspirator, a lawyer that didn’t have a particularly exceptional reputation, Charles Harder. Mr A’s pitch to the lawyer was “I have been charged to take down a major media outlet by a group of wealthy individuals who will fund causes of action. Would you be interested?”

Charles Harder was recruited. He was entirely comfortable acting on behalf of an unknown entity with unknown motivations. He and his staff would not learn the identity of his funder till years later.

For months, Charles Harder watched Gawker like an ambush predator, waiting for them to slip up somehow. In 2012, that opportunity came when Gawker published a tape that showed Terry Bollea, otherwise known as Hulk Hogan, having sex with his best friend’s wife. Hulk Hogan was devastated, and loudly and publicly said that the video was recorded without consent. Charles Harder contacted Hogan’s lawyer, and together they launched a $100 million dollar lawsuit against Gawker. The lawsuit would be backed by Peter Thiel, but Hogan wouldn’t find out who his benefactor was until the case was over, four years later.

During that time, the Gawker people would make many mistakes that would later haunt them. They assumed the Hulk Hogan case was just another straightforward case with a celebrity. They knew Hogan was just a single digit millionaire, so they dragged the case out thinking that there was no way Hogan could afford to keep the case going. They assumed he would eventually have to settle. When Hogan didn’t settle, and didn’t behave in the way they expected, they didn’t adjust their assumptions.

Nick Denton, the founder and owner of Gawker, would express to a reporter how puzzled he was that Hogan would bother to pursue this seemingly minor case with such intensity. He said:

Hogan has pursued every single possible avenue, and I don’t really understand the logic of it… I don’t understand what they want… It must be very expensive for them, and I don’t see that they have a particular prospect of some kind of mega-payday. Sometimes it’s hard to deal with seemingly irrational antagonists.

Their assumption that Hogan was just “irrational” and their lack of curiosity about the situation, would lead to their downfall. At multiple points during this saga they probably could have peeled Hogan away from the conspiracy if they had apologized to him and offered a better settlement. This would have put Thiel’s and Hogan’s goals in conflict. But instead they taunted Hogan, which only lit a fire in him to completely destroy them.

They also didn’t take the initial depositions seriously, which would be videotaped and later shown to a jury. At the time, Gawker thought there was no way these tapes would ever get shown to a jury. Again, they were so sure that they would settle, just like every other case they’d been involved in. During the deposition, they weren’t prepared and even cracked jokes that would later make them look heartless and sociopathic.

While they pursued the Hulk Hogan case, Thiel’s team also looked for ways to hurt Gawker on other fronts. They quietly got involved in other cases against Gawker. They hired investigative reporters to interview ex-employees and pump them for information. When they learned that gawker used unpaid interns, Harder got an employment attorney to sue Gawker on behalf of the interns. This spawned a case that would drag on for three years. In Ryan Holiday’s book, he also suggests that Thiel might have gotten involved in Gamergate, which was a leaderless online movement that, among other things, launched a massive campaign to pressure Gawker’s advertisers to pull out. This cost Gawker hundreds of thousands to millions in lost ad revenue.

“A good entrepreneur could deal with a couple of these things,” Mr. A would say of their position. “But five or six is too much.”

During this time, what Gawker was NOT doing was preparing for trial, because they were distracted- again, because they assumed the case would never go to trial.

From Peter Thiel:

There are two pro wrestling terms that I learned in this whole process. One of them is ‘Kayfabe,’ and that means something that looks real but is fake as in all pro wrestling. And a second term, ‘Shoot.’ A Shoot is when things become real. One of the messages I relayed to Hulk Hogan on the eve of the trial early 2016 was. The other side thought it was Kayfabe but it was actually a shoot. We were going to go to trial we were going to win. They sincerely didn’t even think we were going to trial the day before.

What’s especially ironic is that just a week into trial, a legal blog would speculate “Might a Gawker Hater Be Covering Hulk Hogan’s Legal Bills?” but it was mostly ignored. It just seemed too insane.

From Peter Thiel:

One reporter got wind that something like this was going on, wrote an article… It got covered on Reddit. In the Reddit thread where they were discussing the writer who was saying the person behind it was Thiel and everyone just attacked the writer. ‘This is a pathetic conspiracy theory’ etc. I certainly made the mistake… I bragged about it to way too many people… By the eve of the trial I had told twenty people. It’s amazing that it hadn’t come out already. People either didn’t believe me… The idea was audacious in a way that gave that a surprising amount of cover.

What’s even more ironic is that it had occurred to Nick Denton, the founder and owner of Gawker, that there could have been more going on with this case, but according to someone who was close to Nick at the time, “Nick refused to believe it because he did not want to get wrapped up in any kind of conspiracy theories.”

From Ryan Holiday:

Talking to people close to Nick, one of the reasons for why he didn’t suspect what was going on… was that he didn’t want to be seen as believing in conspiracy theories.

Finally, in 2016, Hogan won the case, and Gawker had to pay $141 million dollars in damages. This was an existential event for Gawker; they had nowhere near that amount of money available. Moreover, they couldn’t appeal. Thiel’s team had thought of that . In Florida, which is where the trial was, one had to have a bond equal to the amount of the verdict, capped at 50 million dollars. Gawker did not have 50 million dollars lying around, which Peter Thiel’s team already knew. So in June of 2016, Gawker filed for bankruptcy.

Thiel would later say:

What kind of investigative journalism outlet can’t even aggressively investigate the conspiracy directed against it?

We learn several interesting things from this account.

1. There are high agency people out there with the means and patience to do significant, elaborate things.

From Ryan Holiday:

It strikes me as unlikely that the Thiels of this world are going to amass billions of dollars… and then not utilize that power. You need to understand this Gawker conspiracy… you need to understand and study it because we’re going to see this happen over and over again… Like the robber barons. The whole point of power, is to use it… The idea to think that they’re just going to sit around and tweet about things is naive.

2. Not everything in a conspiracy has to be planned from the beginning.

A big part of the battle was being patient enough to wait for opportunities to come. Conspiracies often sound crazy and meticulously planned in retrospect because of how elaborate they are, but this doesn’t take into account how much of it was just taking opportunities as they came.

3. People can be involved in a conspiracy on a need-to-know basis.

In this conspiracy, even Hulk Hogan didn’t know who was backing him, until the trial was over.

4. Conspiracies can be kept secret.

Remember, Thiel had said that by the eve of the trial he had told something like 20 people about the scheme. But somehow it still remained a secret.

5. Stigmatization of “conspiracy theories” helps conspirators get away with conspiracies.

An advantage that the conspirators had was that their opposition would not let themselves entertain “conspiracy theories.”

“We live in a world where people don’t think conspiracies are possible,” Thiel once told Ryan Holiday. “We tend to denounce ‘conspiracy theories’ because we are skeptical of privileged claims to knowledge and of strong claims of human agency. Many people think they are not possible, that they can’t be pulled off.”

Part IV. How can we be better conspiracy theorists?

In his book, Conspiracy Theory in America, Lance DeHaven-Smith made the argument that it was part of our civic tradition to be paranoid. From the nation’s beginning, Americans were suspicious of political leaders, and our founders understood that power was a corrupting influence that made conspiracies against people almost inevitable. They were not naive about human nature.

So the fact that our society now denigrates conspiracy theorists, is an alarming development in American history. It signals a shift away from the nation’s early distrust in power.

Even though we think of our society today as being very tolerant, oddly this so-called tolerance tends to only get applied to groups of people who are perceived as being disadvantaged, like certain minorities. When it comes to tolerance of individual perspectives or heterodox ideas, however, it’s unclear whether we’re any less dogmatic as highly religious societies of the past.

The people who are deeply invested in academia may be the most dogmatic of all. There is conspiracy denial in academia. There are entire sub disciplines that treat people who engage in conspiracy theorizing as sick subjects to be studied by psychologists, but no disciplines that study true conspiracies, or how to spot a good conspiracy theory vs a bad one.

What we should be asking ourselves is, how do we become better conspiracy theorists?

A few things come to mind.

1–Conspiracies are real

For one, we should start by admitting that conspiracies are real.

In particular, we should pay attention to things that are genuinely puzzling and don’t fit the prevailing narrative.

As just one example: why is it that governments throughout the Western world have adopted some of the same unpopular platforms? For example, most of them have imposed loose immigration policies, which is not something that the people asked for, and in fact has unleashed widespread backlash from the populace. Is this just a coincidence or is there something more going on behind the scenes?

If this seems far fetched, read Carroll Quigley’s book Tragedy and Hope. Quigley was not some fringe person; he was a historian who also happened to be one of Bill Clinton’s favorite professors when he was a student at Georgetown (hear him mentioned here):

Clinton also listed one of Quigley’s books as one of the books that had a profound impact on his thinking.

In his book Tragedy and Hope, Quigley wrote of how Cecil Rhodes, the English magnate and politician in Southern Africa, spent much of his income on “his desire to federate the English-speaking people and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control” (p. 131).

Quigley also wrote of an Anglophile network which formed in the late 1800s in England and created front groups to exercise its agendas:

“I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies…but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

He wrote:

“Naturally, the influence of bankers over governments during the age of financial capitalism was not something about which anyone talked freely, but it has been admitted frequently enough by those on the inside, especially in England.”

He wrote of groups who “from its control of funds, academic recommendations, and research and publication opportunities, could favor persons who accepted the established consensus and could injure, financially or in professional development, persons who did not accept it.”

2–Study history.

We should apply what we know about the past to the present. For example, now that we know that our government has infiltrated the media in the past and was involved in discrediting dissident groups, this should make us wary when we see media articles denigrating groups or calling them “hate groups” or “fringe conspiracists.” That narrative could have come from the state department or the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy or USAID, or other agency.

3–Take history with a grain of salt

Given that powerful interests have manipulated narratives in the past, any history we read has to be taken with a grain of salt.

This is especially the case for topics that people tend to get very emotional about. The reason they get emotional might be because they’ve been propagandized to become lackeys for a certain viewpoint.

4–Learn the landscape that we’re in.

The ways to commit fraud are not the same as what they were a hundred years ago. We now have a globalized society, with complicated laws and financial systems, giant bureaucratic governments, and multinational corporations. This makes for a complicated ecosystem with many new niches that have opened up for people to manipulate or defraud others.

In the 1960s, C. Wright Mills, in his book The Power Elite, wrote: “These hierarchies of state and corporation and army constitute the means of power; as such they are now of a consequence not before equaled in human society…”

To bring up an example, for the first time in history, it’s possible for a pharmaceutical company to have so much money that they can buy off all the major corporate media outlets, doctor’s organizations, the top medical schools, and journals, and influence bureaucrats in agencies like the FDA, and the CDC. As a consumer and voter, if you don’t recognize this new landscape, you’ll open yourself up to manipulation.

5–Be wary of becoming overly cynical.

It’s possible to become cynical to the point where you believe that everyone who’s powerful or a billionaire, is nefarious, or on the same team. We have to resist the urge to turn people into cartoon villains.

If we apply what we know about human nature and the dynamics of groups, we’d realize that even within small groups, factions will form. There’s no reason to think that all powerful people are on the same side, or bad intentioned. We can keep this in mind while also acknowledging that there are sociopaths out there.

Similarly, it’s possible to read too much into connections. For example, if someone was once an intern at some organization decades ago, it doesn’t mean that they are meaningfully “linked to” or align with that organization’s agenda today. People are complicated and sometimes they change their minds.

We should also keep in mind that sometimes groups of people can seem to be part of a conspiracy because they all seem to be acting towards the same goal, but it may just be that their interests are aligned.

In the example with Gawker, we know that some of the lawsuits against it were funded by Peter Thiel, but some weren’t. Gawker had made a lot of enemies over the years.

6–Be careful with Hanlon’s Razor

Hanlon’s Razor says to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Although this is something to keep in mind, I think in our society today it tends to get used to discount conspiracy theories. Again, remember how easily the Gawker people just dismissed Hulk Hogan’s actions as simply “irrational.”

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of stupidity or incompetence in the world. But if you treat this like a rule of thumb, you may end up like Gawker.

7–Get better at knowing who to trust.

None of us will be able to look deeply into every issue. On many issues we will have to rely on others for help. That means it’s imperative that you get good at judging who to trust.

The people you trust should have a good track record when it comes to predicting things correctly. They don’t have to have gotten everything right, since this is impossible. But trustworthy people will not shy away from correcting their mistakes. Beware of individuals who refuse to admit mistakes.

8–Get comfortable with ambiguity

Last but not least, we should get comfortable with ambiguity

We should practice holding several ambiguous possibilities at once without premature closure on one outcome. This will require epistemic humility.

We may never get all the information we need to get the full picture about something, and that is going to have to be ok.

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