Your Watchman believes Conspiracy Theory is the only valid interpretation of history. Was it a conspiracy to kill Christ? Was it a conspiracy to kill Caesar, Lincoln and JFK? Was it a conspiracy that brought the Bolsheviks back to Russia to seize communist power? The answer to all of the above is yes.
Conspiracy
theories have long been stigmatized and ridiculed by mainstream news
outlets, government-paid internet trolls, and "rational"
thinkers.More recently, politicians and the MSM have branded any outlet that
"dares" question the official narrative as "fake news" in
the hope of discrediting any genuine researchers. Whistleblowers such as
Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks, and generations of intrepid
journalists have helped to pave the way for the truth movement, opening
people's eyes to the facts that were once brushed aside as "wild
conspiracy theories". Here are 20 conspiracy facts that are well-documented
and profoundly disturbing…
1) The Gulf of Tonkin
Incident
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of US involvement in the Vietnam War, never actually occurred. It’s true. The original incident – also sometimes referred to as the USS Maddox Incident(s) –involved the destroyer USS Maddox supposedly engaging three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats as part of an intelligence patrol. The Maddox fired almost 300 shells. President Lyndon B. Johnson promptly drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became his administration’s legal justification for military involvement in Vietnam. The problem is the event never happened and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was written before the alleged incident. In 2005, a declassified internal National Security Agency study revealed that there were NO North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident. So, what was the Maddox firing at? In 1965, President Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”Worth pointing out: The NSA’s own historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote a report stating that the agency had deliberately distorted intelligence reports in 1964. He concluded: “The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964.”
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of US involvement in the Vietnam War, never actually occurred. It’s true. The original incident – also sometimes referred to as the USS Maddox Incident(s) –involved the destroyer USS Maddox supposedly engaging three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats as part of an intelligence patrol. The Maddox fired almost 300 shells. President Lyndon B. Johnson promptly drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became his administration’s legal justification for military involvement in Vietnam. The problem is the event never happened and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was written before the alleged incident. In 2005, a declassified internal National Security Agency study revealed that there were NO North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident. So, what was the Maddox firing at? In 1965, President Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”Worth pointing out: The NSA’s own historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote a report stating that the agency had deliberately distorted intelligence reports in 1964. He concluded: “The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964.”
2) Tuskegee Syphilis
Experiment
Between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on rural African American men who had contracted syphilis. The Public Health Service never informed these men they had a sexually transmitted disease, nor did they offer treatment, even after penicillin became available as a cure in the 1940s. Rather than receiving treatment, the subjects of these studies were told they had “bad blood.” When World War II began, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were only then, for the first time informed they had syphilis. Even then, the PHS denied them treatment. By the early 1970s 128 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis and syphilis-related complications, 40 of their wives had the disease and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. Worth pointing out: A similar experiment conducted on prisoners, soldiers, and patients of a mental hospital in Guatemala actually involved the PHS deliberately infecting the patients and then treating them with antibiotics.
3) Project MK Ultra
The CIA ran secret
mind control experiments on US citizens from the 1950s until 1973. In 1995 President Clinton actually issued a formal apology on behalf
of the US government. The CIA used drugs, electronics, hypnosis,
sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and torture to conduct
experimental behavioral engineering experiments on subjects. The program
subcontracted hundreds of these projects to over 80 different institutions,
including universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. Most
of this was uncovered in 1977 when a Freedom of Information Act exposed
20,000 previously classified documents and triggered a series of Senate
hearings. CIA Director Richard Helms had most of the more damning
MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973. Much of what actually occurred during these
experiments is still unknown and, of course, not a single person was brought to
justice.Worth pointing out: There is growing evidence that Theodore
Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, was a subject of the Project
MKULTRA while he was at Harvard in the late 1950s.
4) Operation Northwoods
4) Operation Northwoods
The Joint Chiefs of
Staff of the US military drew up and approved plans to create acts of terrorism
on US soil in order to sway the American public into supporting a war
against Cuba. Fortunately,
President Kennedy rejected the plan, which included: innocent Americans being
shot dead on the streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on
the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C.,
Miami, and elsewhere; people being framed for bombings they did not commit; and
planes being hijacked.Additionally, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Chairman
Lyman Lemnitzer, planned to fabricate evidence that would implicate Fidel
Castro and Cuban refugees as the perpetrators of the attacks. Perhaps most
horrifyingly, Lemnitzer planned for an elaborately staged incident whereby a
Cuban aircraft would attack and shoot down a plane full of college students.
5) CIA Drug
Trafficking
During the 1980s, the CIA facilitated the sale of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army. It’s convoluted and complex, Gary Webb’s book "Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion" outlines how CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into Arkansas during Bill Clinton's governershp and then distributed crack to Los Angeles gangs, pocketing the profits. The CIA directly aided the drug dealers to raise money for the Contras.“This drug network,” Webb wrote in a 1996 San Jose Mercury News article, “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.”Worth pointing out: On December 10, 2004, Webb was suicided by using two bullets to the head.
6) Operation
Mockingbird
In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was just getting underway, the CIA launched a top secret project called Operation Mockingbird. Their goal was to buy influence and control the major media outlets. They also planned to put journalists and reporters directly on the CIA payroll, which some claim is ongoing to this day. The architects of this plan were Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), who planned to enlist American news organizations and journalists to become spies and propagandists.Their list of entrenched agents eventually included journalists from ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, and Copley News Service. By the 1950s, the CIA had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives. Our "lame stream media" is lured in by corporations and the government to disseminate propaganda and disinformation.
7)
COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO, this was a series of clandestine, illegal FBI projects that infiltrated domestic political organizations to discredit and smear them. This included critics of the Vietnam War, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and a wide variety of activists and journalists.The acts committed against them included psychological warfare, slander using forged documents and false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment and, according to some, intimidation and possibly violence and assassination. Similar and possibly more sophisticated tactics are still used today, including NSA monitoring.
COINTELPRO, this was a series of clandestine, illegal FBI projects that infiltrated domestic political organizations to discredit and smear them. This included critics of the Vietnam War, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and a wide variety of activists and journalists.The acts committed against them included psychological warfare, slander using forged documents and false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment and, according to some, intimidation and possibly violence and assassination. Similar and possibly more sophisticated tactics are still used today, including NSA monitoring.
8) Operation Snow
White
Operation Snow White is the name given to an unprecedented infiltration of the US government by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s. They stole classified government files regarding Scientology from dozens of government agencies. In 1977, the FBI finally cracked Snow White open which led to the arrest and imprisonment of a senior Church official. The core mission of the program was to expose and legally expunge “all false and secret files of the nations of operating areas” and to enable Church seniors and L. Ron Hubbard himself to “frequent all Western nations without threat.” By the end, of course, there was nothing legal about their endeavors.
9) Secret Global
Economic Policies
For years, activists who feared a sinister globalist corporatocracy were told they were being paranoid. Whether you want to call it the New World Order or not: they were right. In 2013, WikiLeaks released the secretly negotiated draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. It revealed a closed-door regional free trade agreement being negotiated by countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says TPP has “extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and will hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate.” It is worth pointing out: In June 2014, WikiLeaks revealed the-even-more far-reaching Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), a 50-country agreement that will promote unprecedented levels of privatization across the world. The agreement will essentially prevent governments from returning public services into public hands. This could dramatically affect our ability to enact environmental regulations and keep workers safe.
10) The US Government Illegally Spies On Its Own Citizens
This used to be laughed at as a dystopian fantasy derived from an overactive imagination, Orwell’s 1984, and a juvenile distrust of the government. When you claimed “they” were spying on you, people labeled you a paranoid conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil hat-wearing loon. Even after it was revealed that the NSA has been illegally eavesdropping on us and collecting our cell phone metadata for over a decade, people still hedged on the meaning of it. Yes, they are analyzing our transmissions, but it’s under the auspices of national security. “In a post 9/11 world” certain liberties must be sacrificed for the sake of security, right? It turns out that is patently untrue. Not only is there no evidence that the NSA has protected us from terrorism, there is growing evidence that it makes us more vulnerable. Thanks to revelations about the NSA and their Prism project, we know that the scope of the NSA’s eavesdropping is even beyond what we originally believed. In early June of 2014, the Washington Post reported that almost 90% of the data being collected by NSA surveillance programs is from Internet users with no connection to terrorist activities. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, this is in clear violation of the constitution.The ACLU is pursuing a lawsuit against the NSA, claiming that the dragnet-style mass collection of data violates the Fourth Amendment right of privacy as well as the First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
11) Operation Ajax
The CIA’s Iranian coup In Iran was called 28 Mordad coup; the United Kingdom contributed under the name Operation Boot. Operation Ajax was an Iranian coup that in 1953 deposed the democratically elected Muhammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the monarchical power of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The primary cause of the coup was Mossadeq’s attempt to nationalize the Iran’s oil fields, which threatened the oil profits of Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company (AIOC). The U.S., in addition to protecting its ally’s petroleum monopoly, viewed Mossadeq’s move as communist aggression and therefore helped plan the return to power of the Shah, Operation Ajax resulted almost directly in 1979 Iranian revolution that created an anti-West Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.Though it was long considered an open secret, the U.S. government kept the truth behind Operation Ajax concealed from the American people until very recently. The CIA declassified various documents on the 60th anniversary of the coup. Because of the recent declassification, much information relevant to this CIA-sponsored coup is now available in the CIA’s archives. In describing Operation Ajax, the CIA itself has become rather oddly self-reflective: “The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.”
12) 'Nayirah', the False Pretext for the first Gulf War
It’s now commonly
believed that the second Iraq War was sold to the American people — and their
congressional representatives — based on an elaborate web of lies and
manipulated intelligence. What is less commonly known is that the first Iraq
War came about in a very similar fashion. While, surprisingly, there
is broad agreement that “Operation Desert Storm” was a worthwhile
war, many people overlook the role of a fifteen-year-old girl named “Nayirah,” whose 1990
testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus is credited with
cementing the idea of Iraqi war crimes in the American popular consciousness.
Nayirah testified to having witnessed Iraqi troops tearing babies from their
incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them to die on the floor. It’s a
profoundly disturbing image….and one that was entirely fictitious.After a
lengthy investigation, Amnesty International and other independent watchdog
groups discovered that the situation described by Nayirah was fabricated
by a PR firm named Hill & Knowlton (HK), which was hired by the group Citizens for a Free Kuwait in order to
create propaganda that would galvanize pro-war sentiment. The man overseeing
the campaign was Bush political confidante Craig Fuller. This was a massive
project utilizing 119 HK executives in 12 offices across the United States
and even involved casting Nayirah, who turned out to be Nayirah al-Sabah,
daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.
The Justice Department, which could have investigated the entire effort
under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, turned a blind eye, allowing
the Bush administration to pull off a massive “Wag the Dog”-style ideological
false flag. Others call it “atrocity propaganda,” a form of psyops (psychological operation). The “Nayirah” story is just another example of the
government falsifying a narrative in order to manipulate the public into
supporting a war. This kind of psychological propaganda continued all
through the second Iraq War and the War on Terror. Just recently, it was
revealed that the Pentagon paid PR firm Bell Pottinger $540 million
to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq.
13) Operation
Paperclip
Originally called Operation Overcast, Operation Paperclip was the codename of the secret American plan to conscript Nazi scientists into U.S. intelligence services at the end of World War II. This ushered in and shielded about 1,500 Germans, including engineers and technicians. Ostensibly, the purpose of this redeployment by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was to prevent Nazi scientific intelligence from helping reconstitute a new German government; it was also a tactic meant to ensure the Soviet Union didn’t acquire any new technology. The project gave American identities to some of the most ruthless war criminals the world has ever seen. The new Nazi CIA scientists helped develop chemical weapons and rockets for the U.S. and worked alongside American scientists to develop LSD, which the CIA viewed as a ‘truth serum.’
14) Operation Gladio
Was an anti-Communist false flags in Italy and other European nations. Operation Gladio was the post-World War II love-child of
a CIA/NATO/M16 plot to battle communism in Italy. The operation lasted two
decades and used CIA-created “stay behind” networks as part of a “Strategy of
Tension” that coordinated multiple terrorist attacks from the late 1960s to the
early 1980s. Authorities blamed these attacks on Marxists and
other left-wing political opponents in order to stigmatize and
condemn communism. The operation involved multiple bombings that killed
hundreds of innocent people, including children. The most notable attack was
August 2, 1980, bombing of the Bologna train station, which killed 85 people. In
an Anti-Media piece written about five confirmed false flag
operations (which includes Operation Gladio, I wrote: “How do we know about
Operation Gladio in spite of its incredibly clandestine nature? There are two
principle sources. One, the investigations of Italian judge Felice Casson,
whose presentation was so compelling it forced Italian Prime Minister Giulio
Andreotti to confirm Gladio’s existence. The second source is testimony from an
actual Gladio operative, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is serving a life sentence
for murder. In a 1990 interview with the Guardian, Vincenzo
stated that Gladio was designed to psychologically coerce the Italian
public to rely on the state for security.” Operation Gladio is a textbook
modern “false flag operation.” It used terror and violence to discredit communism. This came at a time before the internet when the CIA
didn’t have a fully entrenched "lame stream media" to trumpet, echo, and build
consensus around every little nuance. (though they were working on it with
COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird). Nowadays, the CIA has multinational
propaganda machines — the news networks and "presstitutes" — to make sure all terrorist attacks
fit into the carefully scripted narrative that manufactures consent around our
wars for oil, natural gas, and other resources.
15) Government uses insect and rodent drones to spy
It’s somewhat of a cliche to jokingly refer to a surrounding insect or bird as a clandestine spy deployed by the government to watch you. While we lack certain specifics on the ubiquity of the technology, we know definitively that the government has the technology to surveil citizens using insects and other small animals, and they use this technology in military applications. There is some evidence to suggest that insect drones are used domestically to spy on citizens. In 2007, this conspiracy theory took shape when anti-war protesters reported strange buzzing insects. Written off as tin foil material, officials dismissed the suggestion that the government used insect drones to spy. Multiple witnesses reported erratic dragonfly-type objects hovering in the sky. The very next year, the U.S. Air Force announced their intended use of insect-sized spies ‘as tiny as bumblebees’ to infiltrate buildings in order to ‘photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.‘ The government has come clean about its use of drones to spy on American citizens, While I can’t say with 100% certainty that there are insect drones spying on American citizens, though it’s exceedingly likely, what is irrefutable is the use of micro air vehicles (MAVs) and “spy animals” as war-time tools. DARPA launched its Stealthy Insect Sensor Project in 1999 as an effort to deputize bees as bomb locators in war zones. This was just the first phase in an ongoing project. In her book The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency, journalist Annie Jacobsen revealed that the agency’s near-future trajectory is to introduce “biohybrids” — part animal, part machine cyborgs — into the United States’ military arsenal. In an interview with Coast to Coast AM, Jacobsen said:“DARPA has already succeeded in creating a rat that will be steered by remote control by implanting an electrode in its brain.“And it’s done the same thing with a moth which is really remarkable because the scientists implanted the electrodes in the pupa stage of the moth when it was still a worm! And then it transformed into having wings, and those tiny little micro-sensors transformed with the moth and the DARPA scientists were able to steer that moth.” This section references information from The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen. Details not linked to external sources are cited in her book.
16) CIA assassinations
and coups in foreign countries
When operatives for the Democratic Party claim the 2016 United States presidential election was tampered with by a foreign entity, it’s hard not to cringe at the irony. Firstly, they’ve presented no evidence, except to claim that government intelligence agencies believe it to be true. Sorry, that’s not actually evidence. That’s like the police saying they have DNA evidence but never actually scientifically present it in court. It’s kind of unnerving that we even have to point that out. Secondly, our own government and intelligence agencies, namely the CIA, have actively and aggressively subverted countless foreign elections over the last century and, in some cases, have outright funded the assassinations of candidates.This subject could easily fill a multi-volume book, and countless authors have worked over the years to uncover the role of the CIA in foreign coups. Using every tool in their arsenal, including white, gray, and black psychological operations, counterinsurgencies, and brutal coups aimed at repressing and destroying radically democratic candidates, the CIA has subverted the “will of the people” across the world. The most commonly noted instances of the CIA meddling in foreign elections and governments include the following: South Korea (late-1940s); Italy (1948mid1970s); Guatemala (1954); Congo (1960), Dominican Republic (1961), SouthVietnam (1963), Brazil (1964); Uruguay (1969); Bolivia (1971); Chile (1970-1973); Argentina (1976); Australia (1975); El Salvador (1980); Iran (late1970s); Grenada (1983) Haiti (1986); Panama (1990) Nicaragua (1990); Czechoslovakia (1990); Peru (1990-2000) Yugoslavia (2000). This is but a small sampling of countries where "lame stream news" outlets and, in many cases, the CIA itself, admits calamitous U.S. involvement. There are literally dozens more and, of course, this is restricting the conversation to soft coups — otherwise, we could certainly include the complete military decimation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries during the War on Terror, as well as the myriad imperial wars against perceived communist threats. ‘A foreign government hacked and subverted our election!’ The irony is thick with this one. Payback’s a bitch…..which, of course, isn’t giving our intelligence agencies, who have proven themselves to be pathological liars, the benefit of the doubt regarding their claims of Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential election. It’s just to kind of say…..you reap the harvest you have sown. When you look at the track record of the United States government, it’s a wonder the average citizen is safe traveling abroad.
17) "Lamestream media
is a propaganda branch of the State Department
People have long accused the media of being a proxy branch of the State Department, a highly sophisticated and well-produced form of manufactured consensus and controlled opposition all rolled into one. In ostensibly democratic nations, a free and independent press is of paramount importance. But in the U.S., we find a cohesion of the state and corporate news networks that do not constitute ‘state-run media’ in the traditional sense — but it’s close.Our first solid documentation that the media is an echo chamber for the government came with the disclosure of what has come to be called Operation Mockingbird. This nefarious and far-reaching conspiracy involved the CIA essentially conscripting journalists, American news agencies, and major broadcasters to become domestic propagandists and spies. Eventually, this CIA/media symbiosis included journalists from all the top news organizations. Literally, thousands of people were involved. This infiltration of the American media and press took place during the 1950s, at the start of the Cold War, and was carried out under the auspices of fighting communism. The CIA began to restrict its use of journalists in the Operation Mockingbird program in 1976, but many people believe it has since transmogrified into something far more powerful, nefarious, and ubiquitous today. We’re still in the early stages of proving to the masses that "lame stream media" is little more than a mouthpiece and propaganda machine for the government and its various agencies, but the evidence is accumulating. During the 2016 presidential election, Wikileaks exposed a number of disturbing revelations showing collusion between the media and political operatives. This included collusion between the media, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. But it wasn’t just about swaying the election. New revelations showed that the government actively infiltrates powerful media corporations in order to shape their content and narratives. One of the best examples of this was the State Department’s role in affecting a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Julian Assange. A more comprehensive list of examples of the Orwellian symbiotic relationship between the press and the government can be found here. Perhaps the most disturbing recent addition to this chapter was the “Countering Disinformation Act” that President Obama slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Christmas Eve of last year. In the context of the still-festering narrative of foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, the act’s putative goal was to fight “fake news,” which many believe is actually a campaign to silence and dismantle alternative media on the Internet. In order to accomplish this, the government is establishing a Global Engagement Center for managing disinformation and propaganda. Since we already know our government routinely performs psychological operations (psyops, or as they’ve been recently rebranded, Military Information Support Operations [MISO]), it should come as no surprise that manipulating the civilian population is a permanent goal. In fact, in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, the government formally legalized the use of psyops on U.S. citizens. So how does this Global Engagement Center factor in?The new law states: “The Center is authorized to provide grants or contracts of financial support to civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions for the following purposes: To support local independent media who are best placed to refute foreign disinformation and manipulation in their own communities.To collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda directed at the United States and its allies and partners.To analyze and report on tactics, techniques, and procedures of foreign information warfare with respect to disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda.To support efforts by the Center to counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.”While it may not immediately strike one as sinister, this codification of repressing journalists and voices the government deems to be disinformation while creating an even more centralized infrastructure to control “fact-based narratives” in the media should be highly alarming to anyone who cares about a free press. It would seem that while the State already has a steel grip on corporate news networks, they are struggling to control the influence of online independent media. This new law may be the start of this century’s Operation Mockingbird, a new full-scale infiltration of the local news and a war against anti-establishment narratives on the Internet. This is already taking the form of algorithmic censorship through Facebook and Google, as well as a weaponization of the “fake news” narrative.
People have long accused the media of being a proxy branch of the State Department, a highly sophisticated and well-produced form of manufactured consensus and controlled opposition all rolled into one. In ostensibly democratic nations, a free and independent press is of paramount importance. But in the U.S., we find a cohesion of the state and corporate news networks that do not constitute ‘state-run media’ in the traditional sense — but it’s close.Our first solid documentation that the media is an echo chamber for the government came with the disclosure of what has come to be called Operation Mockingbird. This nefarious and far-reaching conspiracy involved the CIA essentially conscripting journalists, American news agencies, and major broadcasters to become domestic propagandists and spies. Eventually, this CIA/media symbiosis included journalists from all the top news organizations. Literally, thousands of people were involved. This infiltration of the American media and press took place during the 1950s, at the start of the Cold War, and was carried out under the auspices of fighting communism. The CIA began to restrict its use of journalists in the Operation Mockingbird program in 1976, but many people believe it has since transmogrified into something far more powerful, nefarious, and ubiquitous today. We’re still in the early stages of proving to the masses that "lame stream media" is little more than a mouthpiece and propaganda machine for the government and its various agencies, but the evidence is accumulating. During the 2016 presidential election, Wikileaks exposed a number of disturbing revelations showing collusion between the media and political operatives. This included collusion between the media, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. But it wasn’t just about swaying the election. New revelations showed that the government actively infiltrates powerful media corporations in order to shape their content and narratives. One of the best examples of this was the State Department’s role in affecting a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Julian Assange. A more comprehensive list of examples of the Orwellian symbiotic relationship between the press and the government can be found here. Perhaps the most disturbing recent addition to this chapter was the “Countering Disinformation Act” that President Obama slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Christmas Eve of last year. In the context of the still-festering narrative of foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, the act’s putative goal was to fight “fake news,” which many believe is actually a campaign to silence and dismantle alternative media on the Internet. In order to accomplish this, the government is establishing a Global Engagement Center for managing disinformation and propaganda. Since we already know our government routinely performs psychological operations (psyops, or as they’ve been recently rebranded, Military Information Support Operations [MISO]), it should come as no surprise that manipulating the civilian population is a permanent goal. In fact, in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, the government formally legalized the use of psyops on U.S. citizens. So how does this Global Engagement Center factor in?The new law states: “The Center is authorized to provide grants or contracts of financial support to civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions for the following purposes: To support local independent media who are best placed to refute foreign disinformation and manipulation in their own communities.To collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda directed at the United States and its allies and partners.To analyze and report on tactics, techniques, and procedures of foreign information warfare with respect to disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda.To support efforts by the Center to counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.”While it may not immediately strike one as sinister, this codification of repressing journalists and voices the government deems to be disinformation while creating an even more centralized infrastructure to control “fact-based narratives” in the media should be highly alarming to anyone who cares about a free press. It would seem that while the State already has a steel grip on corporate news networks, they are struggling to control the influence of online independent media. This new law may be the start of this century’s Operation Mockingbird, a new full-scale infiltration of the local news and a war against anti-establishment narratives on the Internet. This is already taking the form of algorithmic censorship through Facebook and Google, as well as a weaponization of the “fake news” narrative.
18) The Deep State
The Deep
State is described in depth in an article entitled “Forget the New World Order — Here’s Who
Really Runs the World.” In it I wrote:“For decades, extreme ideologies on both
the left and the right have clashed over the conspiratorial concept of a
shadowy secret government often called the New World Order pulling the strings
on the world’s heads of state and captains of industry. “The phrase New World
Order is largely derided as a sophomoric conspiracy theory entertained by minds
that lack the sophistication necessary to understand the nuances of
geopolitics. But it turns out the core idea, one of deep and overarching
collusion between Wall Street and government with a globalist agenda, is
operational in what a number of insiders call the “Deep State.” In the wake of
the 2016 election, the concept of the Deep State has grown into somewhat of a
common phrase in the lexicon of alternative media theorists, crossing political
boundaries and resonating across the ideological spectrum. Everyone from alt-left
socialists to alt-righters now agrees there is an unelected cabal of elite
neo-con corporatists and crony lawmakers running the geopolitical
show. Because it’s such a complex subject and permeates so many different
academic, economic, and state apparatuses, it’s virtually impossible to issue a
single, simple definition of the Deep State. If I were to hazard one, I would
call it “the nexus of Wall Street and the national security state — a
relationship where elected and unelected figures join forces to consolidate
power and serve vested interests.” But even that is vague. We could also
call it “the failure of our visible constitutional government and the
cross-fertilization of corporatism with the globalist war on terror.” Former
Republican congressional aide Mike Lofgren gets more specific with who is
involved: “It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the
Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland
Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also
include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over
financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic
symbiosis with Wall Street.”In his writing, Lofgren emphasized the role of FISA
international surveillance courts. This was confirmed in a very interesting way
when President Donald Trump accused former President Obama of tapping his
phones, a charge Obama aides deflected by saying that if such a warrant had
been issued, it would have been done through a FISA court. This shows how
presidents are able to skirt the constitution by outsourcing surveillance
requests. It also shows the interconnectedness of these agencies.However you
want to describe it, it’s the natural conclusion of Operation Mockingbird and
most certainly a reality that the elites would have rather kept under the
radar. Fortunately for the people of the Earth, revelations from Wikileaks and
other whistleblowers have, over the last couple decades, made it abundantly clear
that the Deep State (the New World Order) not only exists but also that
it’s far more sinister and powerful than early conspiracy theorists could have
ever imagined.
19) CIA used psychics to infiltrate the Soviet Union during The Cold War
It’s a plot in a
science fiction movie or TV show we’ve all seen: a psychic being leveraged by a
law enforcement agency to track down a criminal. The concept of a government
psychic program was popularized by the film The Men Who Stare at Goats,
which lampooned the mythical STARGATE program supposedly run by the CIA. Most
people scoffed at the reality of this and considered it a wacky conspiracy
theory, but a recently declassified trove of hundreds of thousands of CIA
files finally confirmed not only that psychics are regularly used by
police and other law enforcement agencies, but also that the government
actually weaponized psychics during the Cold War to try to infiltrate the
Soviet Union and gain information.The documents, made publicly
available thanks to the activist group Muckrock, confirm there were
top-secret CIA and Defense Department programs to use remote viewing to
infiltrate Soviet military installments. There were also programs developing
ways to engage in “psychic warfare,” including the development of a “psychic
shield” to block Soviet psychics.
20) CIA monitors U.S.
citizens via their smart devices
Early in 2017, Wikileaks began releasing their first post-2016 election cables
with a series of explosive data dumps regarding the CIA’s cyber hacking
abilities and exploits. It is called Vault 7. Updated serially in “Year
Zero,” “Dark Matter,” “Marble,” “Grasshopper,” “HIVE,” “Weeping Angel,” and
“Scribbles,” the documents show the unprecedented collection of cyber
vulnerabilities, exploits, and hacking abilities consolidated within the agency
that many believe constitute wide-ranging breaches of civil liberties.Chief
among these breaches is domestic surveillance and extrajudicial cyberhacking,
which the Wikileaks documents confirm are taking place in an
abundance of forms. The Vault 7 documents confirm that: The CIA can break into
Android and iPhone handsets and all kinds of computers; the agency has the
ability to hack into Apple iPhones and Android smartphones and actually assume
full remote control of the device; the CIA can access consumer smart TVs to
listen in on surrounding conversations; the agency looked into ways
to hack into cars and crash them, allowing ‘nearly undetectable
assassinations’ (an assertion that may be relevant to the Michael
Hastings case); the CIA concealed vulnerabilities that could be exploited
by hackers from other countries or governments.This is just the beginning.
Early in the release, Julian Assange said the documents released represented
only a tiny fraction of the total data that was forthcoming.
Wikileaks’ episodic data dumps on the CIA’s cyber hacking programs are nothing
less than stunning. The establishment’s reaction to the ongoing releases
verifies how big of a deal they are. One congressman went so far as
to refer to Julian Assange and his whistleblowing outfit as a “foreign
terrorist organization.” This isn’t new or unexpected, as the group’s slow but
inexorable drips of revelations about government malfeasance continue to
confound and disturb private citizens, consumer rights activists, tech
companies, and international leaders alike.
Conclusion
Of course, not all conspiracy theories are true. In fact, there are hundreds, even thousands, that have been roundly debunked. Unfortunately, there are those who seek to lie and invent fictions for monetary gain and fame. Disinformation, propaganda, and dishonesty exist at all levels of society. However, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Therefore, it’s worth assessing them, even if their claims appear wholly outlandish. Especially if their claims appear wholly outlandish.The conspiracy theory is a tool in a larger toolkit used by those who wish to decode the grossly imperfect and fluid narrative describing our world. When investigated responsibly, conspiracy theories function as part of a conceptual spectrum of analysis with which we can investigate government and corporate abuses of power and the manufacturing of ‘consensus reality.’ In the 21st century, when the very transmission of information can be considered criminal, being a responsible conspiracy theorist just means you practice due diligence and hunger for the truth.
Conclusion
Of course, not all conspiracy theories are true. In fact, there are hundreds, even thousands, that have been roundly debunked. Unfortunately, there are those who seek to lie and invent fictions for monetary gain and fame. Disinformation, propaganda, and dishonesty exist at all levels of society. However, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Therefore, it’s worth assessing them, even if their claims appear wholly outlandish. Especially if their claims appear wholly outlandish.The conspiracy theory is a tool in a larger toolkit used by those who wish to decode the grossly imperfect and fluid narrative describing our world. When investigated responsibly, conspiracy theories function as part of a conceptual spectrum of analysis with which we can investigate government and corporate abuses of power and the manufacturing of ‘consensus reality.’ In the 21st century, when the very transmission of information can be considered criminal, being a responsible conspiracy theorist just means you practice due diligence and hunger for the truth.
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