Conspiracy Theory or Conspiracy Fact? Part 2
Continuing the dialogue between myself and fellow Substack writer Monika Ullmann.
See Part 1
Geoff Olson: According to historians studying Ancient Rome, at least 5 Caesars were assassinated through in-house conspiracies. Ever since, secret schemes by powerful insiders targeting domestic populations, leaders, and foreign states have grown ever more sophisticated in tradecraft. A great many of these plots have been exposed over time, while others are still argued over by researchers and historians. And of course, there are those that will remain forever unknown, with the conspirators long dead.
Yet sometimes officially acknowledged conspiracies in the past take on an entirely new light when historical documents are reexamined.
From Caesar to Snowden, conspiracies are hardly aberrations and outliers in the human experience. They are history. (A good guide on this is Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano’s aphoristic book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. It reveals history as a broken record of the prosperous few preying on the restless many - often nibbling and sometimes feasting.)
Within more recent memory, how many exposed ‘operations’ does it take to understand that conspiracies aren’t complete outliers, but reliable instruments of covert statecraft? Operation Condor, Operation Mockingbird, Artichoke, Operation Mongoose, Operation Northwoods…the list goes on.
The retrospective truth of documented conspiracies creates an unacknowledged but obvious problem for those who freely traffic in the “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” slurs, which we’ll get to. Arch-debunker Michael Shermer uses them frequently, even though he correctly defines conspiracy as “two or more people or a group plotting or acting in secret to gain an advantage or harm others immorally or illegally.”
Debunkers generally concede very real past conspiracies that have since been exposed, from the Reichstag Fire to the Iran-Contra scandal to the Gulf of Tonkin false flag to Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and beyond. But they have difficulties with scale. They still recoil at the suggestion that anything massively criminal at a national or particularly global scale could succeed without being exposed by the free press. If the fingerprints of the conspirators are all over multiple crime scenes, they’d be on to it, right away!
But yes, there are the rare times when the legacy press nails an actual conspiracy in close-to real time. So there are no absolutes here.
So the problem for the slur-slingers is this: prior to the exposure and official acknowledgement, a given conspiracy exists by definition in the realm of theory, as investigators labour to identify a signal in the noise. So conspiracy theory necessarily prefaces conspiracy fact. That’s the only sense in which the term ‘conspiracy theory’ isn’t incoherent!
However, when a given “conspiracy theory” transforms into yesterday’s news, it gets moved from the boggy territory of unhinged nonsense to the brightly lit precincts of ‘we knew it all along.’ This has been happening recently with the unrelated topics of UFOs and the Kennedy assassination, and to some degree the massive deaths and injuries associated with the Covid vaccine. The formerly “conspiratorial” narrative on those matters is giving way to a wider discussion, though I suspect much of it likely involves “limited hangouts.”
Over to you, Monika!
Monika Ullman: Speaking of which, I am asking if it is possible to believe in widespread conspiracies while simultaneously dismissing crazy conspiracy theories altogether. Holding two contradictory ideas at the same time is said to be a sign of intelligence, so here we go. First up, consider the widespread and well understood phenom of monopolies. We have so many of them that they are as familiar and normal as furniture in our living rooms. Indeed, we probably wouldn’t have much furniture, real or mental, if it weren’t for these giant companies that are threatening to swallow everything until there’s only one giant Mothercorporation left, benignly ruling us. Amazon is surely one of them, but it is, to me, not the real danger. That position is reserved for Google and it’s worth our attention to have a brief reminder of who and what that company is and how it got to be the arbiter of the furniture in our heads. How it became the omnipresent company nobody can live without and why our politicians failed to contain Google though they have had serious second thoughts recently. More on that later.
Once upon a time, Google’s watchword was don’t be evil. Let’s see how they have lived up to that ambitious moral precept. The first thing they did was declare that they would hoover up any and all books that were not explicitly saying that they didn’t want to be digitized. I remember stalking in a state of rage to the Post office and sending them a money order and a message that I didn’t want them to get their digital paws on the biography I had recently written about David Marshall, a Vancouver sculptor. Maybe being old has some advantages because this entire scandal has long been forgotten. Google did what it wanted and that was that and continued to be that until this year.
To refresh our collective memory, we might want to re- read When Google Met Wikileaks (2014), by Julian Assange. It’s a brilliant little book, an edited version of the taped conversations between Eric Schmidt, then Google’s CEO and Assange.
Schmidt had requested ‘a chat’ with Assange in June 2011 because he was planning to write a book about the exciting future that a company like Google might play in the geopolitical arena. Assange thought it might be interesting to discover how a guy like that thinks, and so they met at the country estate where Assange was under house arrest while fighting to release the damning data he had amassed. Schmidt had brought along his co-writer, Jared Cohen, a highly connected speech writer for Susan Rice, the editor Scott Malcolmson, as well as Lisa Shields, VP for the Council of Foreign Relations and also, Schmidt’s partner. As JA remarks, “the delegation was three parts foreign policy establishment and one part Google.”
Geoff Olson: I read the whole thing online when it came out. Not surprisingly, Assange intellectually outmatched the crew that came to visit him.
Monika Ullman: Assange says, he didn’t initially grasp that this was a fishing expedition sponsored by Washington until Schmidt’s book was actually published in 2013 as The New Digital Age, which turned out to be a fervent love letter in which Google was offering to be Washington’s geopolitical visionary and enabler.
The book was lavishly praised by all the right people, like Kissinger, Fukuyama, Hilary Clinton and of course, Obama. It was a signal that the marriage of Big Tech and Big Government was being consummated, and now we’re all living in the capitalist surveillance state that Assange, Snowden, Zuboff et al, tried to warn us about. In a surprising reversal, that same state is now in a bitter war with its erstwhile enabler and partner in crime. It seems the great bromance has fizzled, and we now have the spectacle of every government in the west enacting legislation to stop ‘misinformation’, disinformation’ and even ‘malinformation’, all defined by them or not defined at all, the better to criminalize free speech. Government wants to be, no insists, that it be the controlling partner and so far, it is winning. Even Musk and X had to capitulate to the Brazilian government recently.
But in the spirit of ‘inclusiveness’ we have advanced from the days when only professionals like Assange were persecuted; now it’s everybody with an unsanctioned opinion. In other words. This is a nasty conspiracy out in the open and thus, not a mere ‘theory’. There is little doubt in my mind that this entire process of lying about falsely accused liars will backfire, and backfire badly, at the upcoming presidential election. Americans are smelling a big fat ugly misinformation rat.
Geoff Olson: Wish I could believe anything will be resolved by the upcoming US election, in spite of all that’s been exposed online. Orange Thing signed on to Operation Warp Speed and he’s still reciting the mantra, ‘Covid jabs good.’ Let’s also not forget Assange’s description of Trump’s two appointees (CIA director Pompeo and Attorney General Barr), who came after him hammers and tongs: “two wolves in MAGA hats.”
In any case, if it wasn’t for the Internet, those who act as guardians for the status quo — complicitly if not deliberately — would dominate the means of communications, and we’d have way more of an information monoculture. There’s a good term circulating to describe such guardians, who apply the broad brush of “coincidence” to whitewash all and any patterns suggestive of conspiracy: “coincidence theorists.”
Monika Ullman: Great term and almost as effective in stifling unwanted digging beneath the surface of said coincidence as conspiracy theorist. Assange himself makes the excellent point that information shared freely acts as a restraint on bad actors who thrive on secrets but rewards those who are blameless. Without ever saying the crazy-making word ‘conspiracy’, Assange defines the harm that is done when things are kept in the dark, even linking the free flow of information to the advancement of humanity:
Why do powerful organizations engage in secrecy? Usually it’s because if the plans that they have were made public, the public would oppose them…and human civilization, the good part, is based upon our full intellectual record…it should be as large as possible if humanity is to be as advanced as possible…in practice, releasing information is positive to those engaged in acts the public would support and negative to those engaged in acts the public doesn’t support…it can create a redress for an act of injustice that is revealed. The larger effect is that it creates disincentives for organizations that create unjust plans…
When Schmidt asks him how freedom of information will play out in the future, Assange says ‘it could go either way’.
As of this writing, it’s clearly gone the wrong way.
Let’s return to the subject of monopolies, an underserved aspect of conspiracies involving the collusion of big companies to fix prices, keep competition out and generally do whatever they like. It’s fascinating to me that these widespread and common practices to defraud the consumer are almost never fingered as ‘conspiracies’. These abuses have a long history going back to the ‘twenties when an array of antitrust laws was passed. Lack of enforcement under Reagan, Clinton and Obama is now coming to an end. It seems that the US government has finally decided that the hands-off policies of the last forty years were a mistake. According to Matt Stoller, the best journalist on this subject, Lina Khan, the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appointed in 2022, is putting the fear of God into monopolies like Google. He is the best source of information on Google’s fight to evade regulation which came to a head under Obama. As Stoller asks, how many times did Google executives meet with Obama’s officials? Why did they do nothing?
Because of Khan’s efforts, it’s not inconceivable that Google, guilty of buying up every company that could be a competitor, gets broken into parts. You can read all about it in a cover article in Harper’s Magazine, The Antitrust Revolution and Liberal Democracy’s last stand against Big Tech. Barry C Lynn, the author, is clearly on the side of Khan and explains in great detail how Google has become the Emperor of Information.
“…one or another of Google’s platforms today stands between you and your parents, between you and your children, and between you and your friends. Between you and your doctor, your druggist and your therapist…you and your coworkers and professors.”
This position as all-seeing middleman does indeed allow Google to collect vast tranches of information about you. It is a vital service provider akin to the old AT&T or even the Post Office, with a big difference. What is different, says Lynn, is that we have failed to put constraints on its power to collect your data, manipulate you with it and sell it to other big players. Google is the gatekeeper to just about any and all activities humans engage in, and the lack of oversight has given it everything it ever wanted to the detriment of western values, western freedom, western democracy. Lynn’s argument that we have waited too long to acknowledge or do anything about it rings true. This is an ongoing fight but let’s just imagine that the NY Times “…agrees to accept a lucrative under the table payment from Google or Facebook. It’s hard not to conclude (CT Alert!) that such a publisher will think twice before joining such a fight.”
The massive litany of Google malfeasance takes up several pages and he makes a very powerful argument for reigning in this new emperor of info by going back all the way to the beheading of King Charles I who simply would not accept any restraints on his power. Ultimately this fight is about who wields the power over speech, thought and action; everything that makes us human.
Whatever you may think of Assange, he is the arch-revealer of government conspiracies and the deep collusion between these immensely powerful players. For that, he was severely punished. It’s a miracle that he is still alive, though not very well.
And here is the newly free Assange telling it like it is, again!
Geoff Olson: Amazing - and heartening - that’s Assange still alive, much less free.
Here’s a good question for a “coincidence theorist”: if powerful figures at very high levels, right up to a national scale, never risk networking covertly to undercut the public interest through criminal activity, why and how are there are federal statutes on the books against “conspiracy” and “racketeering”? These make up the antitrust laws, very rarely enforced, which Lisa Khan is trying to leverage against big tech.
Monika Ullman: And now for something completely different: Eric Weinstein, brother to Bret, a physicist and mathematician gone rogue, who is not afraid to wade into the murky, often contradictory issues and questions surrounding who and what Jeffrey Epstein was. Nothing but conspiracy to see here.
The discussion revolves around why it is that nobody can agree on the truth anymore and then gets into the bizarre, menacing charmer that JE was. Weinstein says he met him and had an immediate visceral reaction of the kind that all animals have when confronted with a deadly enemy. I found it highly instructive that Weinstein sidesteps whether or not JE was involved in any kind of conspiracy by calling him ‘a construct’, that is, a false front manufactured by someone for their benefit. Weinstein is highly aware that even using the term CT is like uttering a dangerously effective curse that inhibits rational thinking. So ‘construct’ JE is. Making sense of it does require a rather different way of thinking and Weinstein takes a good stab at it without ever saying he knows for sure. He’s just asking the right questions, the ones that only someone with his background would think of asking. Asking the right questions is actually the first move in the chess game of GOTPTOC. Which is why our overlords want to ban the asking of inconvenient questions altogether and why doing so is equated with shouting Fire in a crowded room, as Walz did in that mostly boring debate recently.
Weinstein’s not quite spelled out view is disturbing. What if the world isn’t as we mostly imagine it? What if it’s really a paradoxical Möbius strip of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in which finding the Truth is a never ending quest, as Weinstein suggests? What if Collusion/Conspiracy between BigTech+BigGov=Totalitarianism? I think this merits the title of Grand Overarching Totally Paranoid Theory of Conspiracies or GOTPTOC.
Call me crazy, but I think it’s GOTPTOC, all the way down.
Geoff Olson: Weinstein was good in that interview. As you noted, it was as much what he didn’t say as what he did. Allusion over illusion. As for Epstein himself, the mass media inquiry into him stopped at ‘wealthy creep with the means and motive to engage in his perverse fantasies with underage girls without inordinate risk,’ which is both accurate and a convenient first-level analysis.
If they are big enough, conspiracies become difficult to manage and conceal. Ergo, they need cover stories, which often work more effectively when invoking and stoking public fear. And that’s where the experts-for-hire come in.
Consider the strange case of Canadian journalist Naomi Klein. She literally wrote the book on disaster capitalism, The Shock Doctrine. The premise is that powerful figures working in influential circles sometimes take advantage of disasters, natural or otherwise, to ram through policies that would otherwise be met with stiff resistance from the public. When asked if it was possible that such figures sometimes may not wait around for a disaster to happen, but covertly engineer or encourage them - she rejected this as going way too far. But why?
Eric Weinstein might have supplied a clue in another recent interview. If you are going to be “a member in good standing with the expert class,” you’re expected to recite certain tropes, such as “correlation does not imply causation,” and “data is not the plural of anecdote.” Along with the old chestnut, “never explain by malice what can be understood through incompetence.”
“All of these things you're expected to run if you're part of the expert class, so that the expert class doesn't turn on their masters,” Weinstein observes.
Beyond that, its obvious why the legacy media utterly reject the idea that powerful interests work behind the scenes to incentivize politicians, policy wonks, publishers, broadcasters and pundits to play along (even when it’s right out in the open, as in the many news and infotainment programs “brought to you by Pfizer”). It’s because they have serious skin in the game.
Anyway, time to wind this up! How is that so many of the “conspiracy theories” over the past few theories — involving gain-of-function virus research in Wuhan, the ineffectiveness of Covid shots against infection and transmission, neoNazi elements within Ukraine forces, and US involvement in the attack on Nordstream 2 — were not only unfalsifiable, but were eventually conceded to in whole or in part by the mainstream press? Or in the case of vaccine passports and “15-minute cities,” actually came into being? Isn’t agreement with empirical findings the gold standard for any given theory’s strength? By that measure, some recent conspiracy theories —“nutty” or otherwise, were retrospectively scientific propositions!
A final thought: a subscriber once asked, ‘how can they be conspiracies when they’re out in the open?’ That may well be the new wrinkle in an age of information overload. From Event 201 to Agenda 2030 to “The Great Reset” (the title of a June 2020 book co-authored by Klaus Schwab) to the WEF-endorsed nostrum, “you will own nothing and be happy,” the elites have learned that the best way to invent the future is to prophecy it. Incentivization structures within governments, professional bodies and civil society ensure buy-in by “stakeholders,” and by putting things into the open, albeit with a good story of elite benevolence, any suspect elements immediately evaporate into a fog of public relations….at least for the majority of news consumers, who remain off-balance long enough for the ‘masters of the universe’ to “flood the zone” and get their disaster capitalism on without mass resistance.
That said, I suspect it came as a bit of a surprise that nearly a full quarter of the adult populations in industrialized nations would refuse to buy into the Covid/vaccine/mandates narrative.
(Big brother ➕ Big Business🟰Big Problem) ➗(Angry➕discerning citizens) 🟰APOCALYPSE, closely followed by 🦄➕🦋