With so many believing that world events are orchestrated by elite forces, and others taking a Pollyanna view of near-universal innocence, how do you find the rational between conspiracy theories and gullibility?
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10 replies on “Naive or Skeptical: How to Find the Rational Between Conspiracy Theories and Gullibility”
If you seek a deep understanding of how “they” took over, the best book to read is G. Edward Griffin’s “The Creature from Jekyll Island” https://www.amazon.com/dp/091298645X . It is a hard slog full of technical stuff (I chose to listen to a recorded version while driving on a long road trip). The world banking cartel, represented by John Pierpont Morgan (among others) in the United States, financed the Bull Moose Party in support of candidate Theodore Roosevelt to split the Republican vote between Roosevelt and Taft. They financed Wilson as well, putting him in office to do their bidding. Once Wilson had been inaugurated, he paid off handsomely with the Revenue Act of 1913 (income tax) (October 3, 1913), and the Federal Reserve Act (December 23, 1913). These acts permitted takeover of the American government by the moneyed interests who remain in ultimate control today.
This explanation is greatly over-simplified because there was much coordination with legislators, including Oscar Underwood and Nelson Aldrich, and a lot of money changing hands, but that is the gist of it. With the Federal Reserve in control, the moneyed interests became free to manipulate the American economy to suit their needs, drive interest rates up or down, increase federal debt and then inflate it away as needed. The inflation we are experiencing today is nothing more than a hidden tax, paid in addition to confiscatory federal income taxes.
Jefferson’s words from 1816 sound prophetic today: “And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; & that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
Some thoughts from an old book:
[T]here are really only two theories of history. Either things happen by accident neither planned nor caused by anybody, or they happen because they are planned and somebody causes them to happen.
If we were merely dealing with the law of averages, half of the events affecting our nation’s well-being should be good for America. If we were dealing with mere incompetence, our leaders should occasionally make a mistake in our favor.
In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
That works as a sort of nebulous generalization but it doesn’t explain how Donald Trump got elected by planning of a global economic political conspiracy “on purpose”.
If people were planning the future of America with a goal of ultimate power for them and the downfall of the American Republic for us … Then the last thing they wanted is for someone like Donald Trump to come along and show us what could be done with national defense and the economy when the right person is sitting in the Oval Office. That was an example that no Cabal of Controlling Conspirators would want to see made writ large on the world stage.
I have no doubt there’s a lot of planning going on. I have no doubt that any given group of people would be acting in concert to further their own interests. It’s not surprising in the least that extremely wealthy people would act to use their wealth in a manner that increases and permanently solidifies their influence. It’s not at all surprising that some in the military would work in concert with the defense industry to create an ever greater need for defense and resulting defense spending increases. Etcetera. Similar interests are always going to garner cooperation. That is the nature of human beings.
It’s the matter of how effective they are that is the crucial point.
There’s no way that the election of Donald J. Trump worked in favor of that sort of people. Trump was far from a true, great conservative but he also threw a whole boatload of monkeywrenchs into the workings of that sort of planning. Perhaps the one thing Trump accomplished above all, and to the greatest detriment of any conspiratorial cabal, was that he showed us what could be done.
Trump showed the world that the American System could be made to work and work exceptionally well. The people who are working together against us hated him for that and pulled out all the stops to negate his influence. Even then with all they could throw at him he largely succeeded as the President of the United States to a degree that many of us thought was a thing of the past.
There are forces moving behind the scenes attempting to make certain that never happens again. I think they are less a group of erudite elites working in a secret room in an obscure castle somewhere than they are a bunch of like minded evil people pushing events as best they can with what they have.
Trump showed us that no matter how powerful those people might be, they can still be beaten. If we can keep our election process in a form that maintains the effectiveness it had when Trump was elected … We can still beat them.
I like where you’re going with this. I’m going to have to go like it everywhere, then make up fake ids and like them all again.
I don’t think things “orchestrated” necessarily from the beginning — very few things, maybe. But I think definitely things are taken advantage of, as in “never waste a good crisis”.
I think the widespread voter …. “irregularities” … certainly an organized effort that has been a long time in the making — the creating of voting laws that make fraud difficult to detect. This way they can argue there is no [direct] evidence!” This is not an accident.
And as far as them continuing to run the guy for president … compare Biden speaking 2 years ago with 5 or 8 years ago. The dude is clearly in serious mental decline, and those closest to him obviously KNEW it DURING THE CAMPAIGN. So there has to be a serious coverup effort there. And there is a LOT of back scratching between the “news” media, the democrats, and a lot of our corporate institutions. Not like there is a convention where they all come together and hatch a plan, but there are sympathies and meetings within the smaller groups and phone calls between the groups, for sure.
On the other hand … COVID being a “plandemic” … I think this is definitely a case of “never waste a good crisis”. I doubt it was released on purpose, though I do hold out a sliver that it is possible, just very unlikely. What I DO believe is that once it was out it was used and inflated beyond its severity and used as cover to advance progressive ideals. Expansion of government spending and footprint, mainly. Increase division, increase marginalization of government skeptics, etc.
And I think there is a lot of reciprocal “looking the other way” with people at the level of a Hillary Clinton. These people never go to jail. Lackeys below them might, usually on procedural perjury traps.
Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
Great line, Bill. Before you connect the dots, make sure the dots are real.
Also, make sure your lines make sense.
I agree with everything you said and with the way you said it too. You described the enemy well and it’s vital that in order to beat him we must see, acknowledge and know his nature.
A formative experience for this engineering college student, c.1984, during the Reagan-Mondale election cycle: I noticed that on any given policy/topic, one candidate would talk for about a minute and then Dan Rather would recap for a minute. Whenever the other candidate would speak, you would see video of him at the podium, but you would never actually hear him talk – it was all Dan Rather’s supposed synopsis. Notice that I did not say which candidate was which, but you can probably guess.
Then, on a campaign topic especially important to me, it appeared that both candidates came off as idiots – until I remembered that I’d never heard one of them actually speak. Went to the university library, found the respective texts of the speeches and my eyes were opened forever. It was blatantly obvious who was lying, how they were doing it and why they were doing it.
I’ve since viewed the MSM as a mortal enemy of American freedom and parse them to the molecular level, as able. The more I learned about Soviet Influence Operations in later life, the more obvious those strings became. Always more to learn; vigilance is a life skill.
Doom On Them
While there are a few meetings of people who conspire to do despicable things, the PRIMARY “conspiracy” is spiritual. Satan’s useful idiots are are herded by him in a similar direction. This is why muslims and homosexuals can ally themselves, in spite of being completely inconsistent in their own positions. The Pharisees, Sadducees and Herodians, all hated each other, but were able to conspire together against Jesus because they ultimately worked for the same boss, i.e., Satan.
There are conspiracy theories and there are conspiracy theories. Meaning that not all conspiracy theories are equal. Neither equally valid nor equally invalid.
There are things labelled conspiracy theories in order to discredit them. This is an attempt to lump something that is possible or even likely in with things that are ridiculous in order to give the possible/likely things the color of absurdity. This is an extremely effective tactic.
It’s important to understand the difference. Because if you’re advocating for absurdities then you look like a nut and no one with two brain cells to keep each other company will listen to anything you have to say. Nor should they because you have blasted your credibility all to pieces.
Because of this factor anything that might be labelled a conspiracy theory has to be taken on individual, case-by-case basis.
Generally, the more unlikely sounding a thing is, the more evidence it takes to support it. If something has little or no evidence in support it may be a conspiracy theory or it may not. This is where a lot of problems arise with people knowing what is really absurd, what is simply unlikely to be factual, what is factual but as yet unprovable and what is factual and provable. Much here depends on what an individual is willing to accept as facts and proof. What you consider proof may be completely unacceptable to another person and vice-versa.
The way you determine if something is factual, or likely to be factual, is to do exactly as bill says. Before you connect the dots, make sure the dots are real.
An example of dots that are not real is the idea of “chemtrails”. This is an actual conspiracy theory not supported by facts. It is often pointed out that jet airplanes seem to be leaving condensation trails (contrails) in the sky that are unlike contrails from previous decades. This is true but the reason for it is not that some nefarious chemicals are being sprayed into the atmosphere by jet airplanes in flight.
The explanation is pretty simple actually. Jet engines have changed over the years. The previously used turbojet engines of say a Boeing 707 airliner have been replaced by high-bypass turbofan engines. Essentially the new engines are a lot of propellers driven by a smaller turbojet engine to produce thrust whereas the older engines were just straight turbojets. High-bypass turbofan engines are more fuel efficient and quieter than the older straight turbojet engines. The characteristic contrail of each is different than the other and much also depends on atmospheric conditions that the jet is passing through.
I live where many air traffic corridors pass overhead and I spend a lot of time outside. There are days when I can count more than a dozen jet airplanes in the sky overhead at any given time. Strangely enough when one set of atmospheric conditions exist the contrails are all narrow, disperse rapidly and straight whereas when another set of conditions exist they are all fluffy, persistent and disperse very slowly. It is unreasonable to assume that all the jets in the air at any given time on any given day are either all spraying chemtrails or all are not. The only thing all those jets have in common with each other is high-bypass turbofan engines and the air they’re flying through.
If I look up what planes are in the air I find that they all originate from highly varied places. They may be from Europe, the US, many different airports in the US, etc. In order for all of them to be spraying a chemical of some sort or not, that would necessitate coordination by all those varied points of origin where someone decides “today we’re going to spray chemtrails” … or not.
Chemtrail conspiracy adherents claim that the chemicals being sprayed are a cocktail of aluminum, strontium and barium. Yet in order for “chemtrails” to have any effect at all the world markets of those substances would show a very pronounced flow of those chemicals to sources that would be producing that mix. They do not. In fact, the world market for just aluminum is wholly accounted for and shows no indications of anything secretive occurring at all.
For something like chemtrails to exist and be operational it takes huge quantities of those chemicals to be sprayed. This is not something you can just strap a 20 gallon tank in the cargo hold of a jet airplane and run a feed line from tank to engines. It is absolutely not something that can be mixed into jet fuels. A jet’s fuel load and range would be reduced drastically in proportion to the non-fuel substances in its fuel tanks. That would be a serious problem.
It would take massive tanks of chemicals mounted in jets used solely for the purpose of producing chemtrails. Yet no photos of jets modified for that purpose can be found on the internet anywhere. It’s unreasonable and absurd to just say those pictures are being suppressed, there are thousands and thousands of people from baggage handlers to jet mechanics that would have to handle those planes each day and none of them has managed to get any photos published anywhere? The idea is beyond belief, literally.
Chemtrails are not real. The dots that you have to connect to end up with chemtrails are not real.
There are other absurd conspiracies of this sort. Everything from Nazis running a secret base in the Antarctic in an attempt at global domination to Lizard People secretly heading every nation and major institution on Earth to Weather Control/Mind Control by HAARP to the claim that the Pentagon was not hit by an airliner on 9/11 but was attacked by a missile fired from a submarine (or other platforms also are cited).
Let’s look at that last one quick. The Pentagon was hit and severely damaged by a flying object on 9/11 during a period of heavy road traffic as people were making their way to work. The event was witnessed by thousands of people on roads near the Pentagon who said it was an airliner. There is security footage of the event showing an airliner in a few frames of video. Yet there are people right here on BWC that swear the Pentagon was attacked by a missile and not a jet airliner.
How can this be? Because people will believe whatever they want to believe and ignore the fact that the dots they are connecting are not real.
This is why it is so effective to label real events as conspiracy theories. When the Left does that they create sufficient doubt among people ignorant of facts to lump something like Russiagate in with chemtrails and a missile attack on the Pentagon. This works precisely because people want to believe that anyone who says the Democrat Party conspired against Donald Trump to accuse him of being a Russian pawn are the same sort of nuts that believe in chemtrails and Lizard People. It works with that kind of person for exactly the same reason that the idea the Pentagon was struck by a missile and not an airliner works with a genuine conspiracy nut.
This problem is compounded by the fact that there are real conspiracies and those real conspiracies are every bit as ignored by common people as the nutty idea of chemtrails is.
It’s a winning strategy right up until the real conspiracy is proven true or not, like Russiagate and the facts now coming to light regarding the Hunter Biden laptop.
As conservatives we are locked in an existential battle with a dangerous, destructive, proven failure in ideology. It is vital that we do not fail to connect the dots that are real because if we don’t it negates everything else we have to say. So if you suspect something is connected by dots that are not real it is your responsibility to do your due diligence and differentiate fact from fiction, real conspiracy from nutty conspiracy theories and stay in the realm of reality. Or you might as well just not bother at all.
The opposite of the naif is not the skeptic; it’s the cynic. Skepticism is what we should all strive for.
The great reset is both transparently real and the easiest way to get an eye roll from the naive. It is the obvious motor of the coming totalitarianism of one-world government as well as the “King Wears No Clothes” reaction of the Democrats/’squishy’ Republicans/mainstream media when its reality is questioned.
“What is the Great Reset?” by Michael Rectenwald in the Imprimus from Hillsdale College, Dec 2021, volume 50, number 12 explains it efficiently and disturbingly.