Tag: conspiracy theories

Disaster Troll Propaganda

So-called conspiracy theories abound, especially among those who attack others by calling them conspiracy theorists. There are official conspiracy theories, such as the government-approved stories about 9/11, the 7/7 bombings, the Manchester Arena attack and so on. There are also unofficial conspiracy theories, such as the expressed opinion of Richard D. Hall that the Manchester arena attack was a staged simulation without injury or death but performed and reported as if real.

We have to use the term “conspiracy theory” advisedly because, as we shall see, conspiracy theory, as we understand the term, doesn’t exist. “Conspiracy theory” is really just an opinion that the state does not wish anyone to either hold or express.

The BBC’s special disinformation and social media correspondent, Marianna Spring, calls Richard D. Hall a “disaster troll.” She claims that Hall lives in a “dark world” and that his “warped views” have “led him to the doors of terror victims.” Spring says that Hall is spreading “obscene lies” and that he is “at the centre of a network of conspiracies.”

Spring is utilising the propaganda technique of “othering.” She is trying to cast Hall as subhuman—a troll—and, by association, applies the same dehumanising propaganda label to anyone who shares Hall’s concerns about the official account of the alleged Manchester Arena bombing.

“Othering” is an applied psychological strategy widely used by authoritarian political regimes. Prominent historical examples include the “othering” of Jews in Germany during the 1930s by Nazi propagandists.

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Conspiracy theorists made Tiffany Dover into an anti-vaccine icon. She’s finally ready to talk about it.

Tiffany Dover is alive. Sitting across from Tiffany at her kitchen table, this is obvious. She breathes in and out. She gestures with her hands. She laughs generously. Dimples carve into both cheeks when she smiles, which she does a lot. Her eyes are wide and bright and terribly blue.

“I didn’t die that day,” Tiffany tells me. “But the life I knew did.”

I’d been following Tiffany since that day, Dec. 17, 2020. Like thousands of others, I first saw her on a livestream during the national rollout of Covid vaccines to front-line workers, where Tiffany became one of the first people in the U.S. to get a shot. I was also watching when she fainted immediately after, launching a wave of misinformation and conspiracy theories that would eventually unravel her life. 

The modern anti-vaccine movement was powered by unverified stories of the dead and damaged. Tiffany wasn’t the first person to be swallowed up in an anti-vaccine propaganda campaign, and she wouldn’t be the last. 

The unsettling thing about it — to me and the more well-meaning conspiracy theorists who took up an interest in Tiffany’s case — was that she seemed to just disappear. 

I called and sent emails, but Tiffany never got back to me. Her employer declined media interviews on her behalf, and she stopped posting on her own social media accounts. I made several visits to her Alabama home and to CHI Memorial Hospital Chattanooga. But I never spoke to her. 

So all I could do was watch, as Tiffany became the worst kind of internet celebrity, as she trended on every social media platform, as fact-checkers around the world worked to dispel reports of her death, and as the theories about her evolved, spun up by a phenomenon researchers call participatory misinformation. On Instagram, users flooded posts of her children with demands that she speak. People hounded her husband on Facebook and branched out to the social media pages of extended family members, colleagues and acquaintances, urging them to come clean about what had happened to Tiffany and the cover-up afterward. They made websites. They led Facebook groups. They recorded songs. They came to her house. Everyone wanted to know what happened to Tiffany. 

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Do You Have the JFK Secret Society Speech? – Questions For Corbett #099

“Paul writes in to ask if I have the full JFK “secret society” speech. Why, yes, I do! And guess what? The full speech shows that those highly-edited two-minute YouTube videos you saw back in the day were misleading at best and downright dishonest at worst. Wait until you hear what JFK was actually saying.”

Watch the video HERE

The Case Against Flat Earth Theory

You might say, “John, do we REALLY need a column explaining why the Earth can’t be flat?” Unfortunately, yes we do. Why? Well, because among others, here are some of the celebrities who have come out at one time or another and said that the Earth is flat or at least, that they’re not sure about it: Shaquille O’Neal, Kyrie Irving, B.O.B., Tila Tequila, Thomas Dolby, A.J. Styles, Sherri Shepherd, and Draymond Green. There are also millions of other people, most of whom were probably convinced by the YouTube algorithm, who also believe that we live on a flat Earth:

Researchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube.

Their suspicion was raised when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year.

Interviews with 30 attendees revealed a pattern in the stories people told about how they came to be convinced that the Earth was not a large round rock spinning through space but a large flat disc doing much the same thing.

Of the 30, all but one said they had not considered the Earth to be flat two years ago but changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube. “The only person who didn’t say this was there with his daughter and his son-in-law and they had seen it on YouTube and told him about it,” said Asheley Landrum, who led the research at Texas Tech University.

The interviews revealed that most had been watching videos about other conspiracies, with alternative takes on 9/11, the Sandy Hook school shooting, and whether Nasa really went to the moon, when YouTube offered up Flat Earth videos for them to watch next.

Some said they watched the videos only in order to debunk them but soon found themselves won over by the material.

Typically, most people just roll their eyes at this kind of thing, but I am from the mindset that it’s a mistake not to counter conspiracy theories. Maybe at one point in time, when there were a handful of gatekeeper news sources, that was a viable strategy, but today? Bad ideas can spread easily among like-minded thinkers if people aren’t exposed to counterpoints.

So, let’s start with the basics. First of all, the Flat Earth Theory IS NOT being offered in a vacuum. There is a popular competing theory that has been around for thousands of years (around 500 BC, the Greeks figured out that the world was round and at around 240 BC, Eratosthenes figured out the circumference of the Earth) that has large amounts of scientific proof undergirding it. So, for the Flat Earth Theory to be viable, it has to make more sense than the idea that the Earth is round. That is not an easy task because of some very big, very obvious flaws in the Flat Earth Theory.

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“Disinformation experts” blame “conspiratorial narratives,” “far-right websites,” for Silicon Valley Bank panic

Just days after a Senator was caught asking whether there were systems in place to censor social media in an attempt to prevent a bank run, “disinformation experts” are partially blaming the Silicon Valley bank collapse exacerbation on online conspiracy theorists on social media.

“Russian media outlets, far-right websites, short sellers and doomsday preppers were among those who pushed and amplified conspiracy theories online focused on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,” Bloomberg alleges.

According to anti-disinformation for-profit firm Alethea, a wide range of accounts used the bank’s collapse to promote their own agendas.

The firm’s founder Lisa Kaplan told Bloomberg that the claims by venture capitalists speculating the collapse of the bank that were amplified “propagandists and foreign influencers” contributed to the collapse of the bank.

“We assess that these outlets may have increased online panic and contributed to the broader cross-platform spread of false or misleading content about SVB,” Kaplan said to Bloomberg.

“We also assess that conspiratorial narratives may have accelerated panic, which then posed a risk to the broader financial system,” she said.

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Congressman Claims Alien Tech Is Secretly Being Reverse Engineered By US Government

Recovered UFO technology may be “being reverse-engineered right now,” but we “don’t understand” how it functions, according to a U.S. Representative.

Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett told Newsweek that he believed “we have recovered a craft at some point, and possible beings.”

“I think that a lot of that’s being reverse-engineered right now, but we just don’t understand it,” he continued.

In early February, four objects were shot down over North America in quick succession. The first was identified by the Pentagon as a Chinese surveillance balloon and was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. China has stated it was a civilian airship collecting meteorological data.

The Defense Department has not confirmed the nature of the remaining three objects, which were targeted by U.S. fighter jet missiles over Alaska, Canada, and Lake Huron, Michigan.

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Conspiracy Theories Become Conspiracy Facts

At first slowly but in recent weeks with seemingly gathering pace, two trends have emerged. On the one hand, many of the core claims behind lockdowns, masks, and vaccines are unravelling and the prevailing narrative has been in retreat on all three fronts. But there is still a long way to go, as indicated by the cussed refusal of the Biden administration to let Novak Djokovic play at Indian Wells.

On the other hand, the explosive lockdown files in the UK have blown apart the official narrative. We the sceptics were right in our dark suspicions of the motives, scientific basis, and evidence behind government decisions, but even we did not fully grasp just how venal, evil, and utterly contemptuous of their citizens some of the bastards in charge of our health, lives, livelihoods, and children’s future were. “Hell is empty, And all the devils are here” (Shakespeare, The Tempest) indeed. They will have to build a new circle of hell to accommodate all the perpetrators of evil let loose upon the world since 2020.

A mistake is when you spill coffee or take the wrong exit ramp off the highway. Lockdown was a policy pushed hard by politicians and health chiefs even against scientific dissent and substantial public opposition, using tools from every tyrants’ playbook of disinformation and lies whilst attacking and censoring truth. The depth of public opposition went unrecognized because the fear-peddling media colluded in not reporting on protests.

Genuine mistakes were few and are forgivable. Most were deliberate distortions of reality, outright falsehoods, and a systematic campaign to terrorize people into compliance with arbitrary diktats interspersed with efforts to vilify, silence, and cancel all critics by using the full powers of the state to co-opt, bribe, and bully. All in pursuit of the most maddening public policy insanity of modern times because it ignored existing canons of pandemic planning in blind panic just when calm was most needed. To call lockdown a mistake is to trivialize the shock to society.

Before coming to that, a few preliminary observations to summarize where we are at.

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The QAnon Queen Is Printing Her Own Currency Now

Flanked by two of her closest followers, the QAnon Queen of Canada gave a gracious thank you to her followers who—with their hard-earned, real-world cash—funded her most recent venture: so-called “loyalty” money. 

“Thank you to those who sent money to help print your loyalty money,” the self-proclaimed queen Romana Didulo said in a Telegram live stream in late January, when she introduced the bills and proudly presented them to her followers. “Everyone, continue to send money so that we can continue to print.”

The bills, which say 100,000 on them referring to an unknown currency, are white and feature her emblem in the middle flanked by two flags. Larger than normal cash, they have the look of a novelty check or board game money. Despite their cheap look, Didulo promised her fans they have interdimensional security devices on them. 

In chat rooms dedicated to Didulo, her fans celebrated the false hope given to them. One person said that he’s going to attempt to pay his utility bills with the money, and another said she’s excited because they’ve been living in their car and this could get a roof over their heads. 

“I am so hopeful that the loyalty money will allow me to purchase a prefab home or one of those tiny homes,” she wrote. “How wonderful that would be for me and many others like me around Canada.”

“I can’t wait to hear when or how I can use this loyalty money for this purpose.” 

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COVID-19 ‘conspiracy theories’ turned out to be true

One by one, the myths and lies propagated by the ruling elites about COVID-19 are falling like dominoes.

What was supposed to have been “misinformation” is the real deal.

The “wet market” theory, which never made sense, is turning out to be all wet. Major government agencies — the Department of Energy and the FBI — now say that the virus probably leaked from China’s Wuhan virology lab. It didn’t come from a bat sandwich after all. 

Likewise, the lockdowns imposed all over the country did not slow the pandemic but did enormous damage. A year ago, Johns Hopkins issued a meta-analysis stating that while “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.”

We now know that natural immunity derived from infection is far superior to that of the so-called vaccines, which prevent neither infection nor transmission. The February edition of the liberal Lancet medical journal reviewed 68 studies, concluding that the vaccines lose effectiveness sooner than natural immunity. 

Keep in mind that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health authorities dismissed natural immunity in favor of the vaccines for nearly two years.

“The Lancet study’s vindication of natural immunity fits a pandemic pattern,” Allysia Finley wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “The public-health clerisy rejects an argument that ostensibly threatens its authority; eventually it’s forced to soften its position in the face of incontrovertible evidence; and yet not once does it acknowledge its opponents were right.”

The CDC owes an apology to the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, not to mention the public. Released in October 2020 and now signed by nearly a million “infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists,” the declaration recommends targeting shots to vulnerable people (older adults and those with other health conditions) and achieving herd immunity by allowing the healthy and young to get COVID-19 as they would any other virus. 

For this medically sound advice, the Barrington signers were slandered and canceled. On Oct. 8, 2020, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins sent an email to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 

“There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?” A week later, Dr. Collins told The Washington Post: “This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” 

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Gaslighting: “Conspiracy Theories” Already Proven True in 2023

Preppers get called conspiracy theorists a lot.  It’s supposed to be demeaning, but considering how many conspiracy theories have been proven correct lately, I no longer consider it an insult.  The more time goes by, the more “conspiracy theorists” just seem ahead of the game.

Quite a few “conspiracy theories” have recently come to light as actual facts in 2023 already. And it’s only the beginning of March.

Let’s look at a recent batch of “conspiracy theories” that aren’t really theories any more.

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