The Real Conspiracy Nuts
Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.—Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles
“If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” —George Orwell, “1984”
Soon after President Kennedy’s assassination, Texas historian J. Evetts Haley wrote:
[N]o … prefabricated image of dynamic leadership … can substitute for a diet of truth – for honest news. … On the contrary, healthy, moral people, even when denied the facts of national life – the truth essential to their survival – intuitively sense that something is wrong. … their confusion leads to suspicion, suspicion to distrust, and distrust to national disunity. … confidence between government and governed is destroyed by mutual fear. … Nor can it be cured … by any false front. The shallow deprecation of “hate” as the cause of national tragedy; the vilification of patriots as “extremists” … are dishonest resorts which exacerbate instead of healing the malady. Such fear cannot be banished by propaganda. It can only be restored by principle; principle based on moral character.1
Such fear cannot be banished by propaganda. Indeed, the propaganda has increased the suspicion, distrust, national disunity, destruction of confidence in government, and mutual fear. The use of the term “conspiracy theorist” as vilification, as a smear, as character assassination is now ubiquitous. Therein lies the most dangerous, Machiavellian propaganda of our time.
A conspiracy exists for a reason. The problem is the definition of conspiracy has been purposely altered to include anything unreasonable. A proper word for something without reason is “fantasy.” We live in a culture that defines conspiracies as fantasies. The Warren Commission Report and its apologists treat the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy as a fantasy. They call anyone who believes that fantasy nuts. Why have they relentlessly engaged in such extreme ad hominem gaslighting since the assassination? Even if it were a fantasy, which one is safer, pursuing a conspiracy that does not exist or ignoring one that does? Believing a fantasy is harmless compared to the danger of denying a conspiracy. Denying a conspiracy is nuts.
In fact, we live in a culture that cherishes belief in harmless fantasies, no matter how conspiratorial. There is a well-known fantasy that is believed, beloved, promoted, or at least tolerated by most everyone. The government and news media openly pretend this fantasy is real. If it were real, it would be a conspiracy. Government and media simply ignore that aspect.
Viewed as a “conspiracy theory” the fantasy goes like this: From a secretly financed hideout in the Arctic, using a giant, hidden surveillance apparatus, an ageless supervillain spies on everyone while he manufactures undetectable forgeries of brand-name consumer goods on a massive scale. Based on what he learns from his spying, he and his criminal network sneak into the homes of millions of sleeping residents to ditch their contraband. To accomplish this, the criminals fly around the world using exotic, free-energy anti-gravity propulsion and spacetime manipulation. The government and media act as willing accomplices in the conspiracy and report fake NORAD radar locations of the criminals’ flight in order to warn everyone to go to sleep before they arrive. The recipients gladly accept their illegal knockoffs, thus becoming accessories after the fact. This massive counterfeiting-smuggling conspiracy culminates annually on the night of December 24. The criminal enterprise’s best-known alias is “Santa Claus.”
As young children we truly believe that fantasy. We truly believe it is magical and benevolent. Then one day we learn the truth. We realize the adults are lying to us. It is a punch in the gut. We ask: If they are lying about that, what else are they lying about? Some of us pursue that question and seek the truth. Others avoid that search, preferring comforting lies over inconvenient truths. They convince themselves it is innocent fun and tell the same lies to their children. The cycle continues. Safer than ignoring a real conspiracy, of course, but it sets us up for the greater danger. We are pre-conditioned to deny conspiracies and consider them fantasies – which is nuts.
The real conspiracy nuts are those who deny them. If that idea strikes you as odd, it is your first clue that you have been mind-controlled or, if you prefer, conned. Certainly that is the case if you do not believe conspiracies exist. It also applies if you believe only some conspiracies exist.
The question of which conspiracies are genuine and which are fantasies is wrongheaded. It is based on the false premise that one can be the other. Psychological denial applies to both the denialist, one who denies the existence of something, and to the true believer, one who denies the nonexistence of something. Denial is the delusion. The worst students of conspiracies exist at those two extremes. Both extremes are an exercise in “thought-terminating” because their purpose is to end further inquiry.
Conspiracies and fantasies are two different things. Both are genuine, and one can never be the other. Both can be denied. The same is true of theories and fantasies. It has become common, due to successful CIA propaganda, to think of the words conspiracy, theory, and fantasy as synonyms. That trickery is reinforced by promoting the rhetoric of several fantasies as theories, like denial of the Apollo Moon missions, and flat-Earth sophism. That is why it has become common to preface talking about a conspiracy with the words: “I’m not a conspiracy theorist but …”.
The real question is: What is a theory and what is a fantasy? The difference between them is that the former is based on all of the known evidence and has greater explanatory power. We use theories properly every day. Today’s weather forecast is a theory. It does not have to be perfect, just rational. On a midsummer day, you could forecast tomorrow’s weather as a winter-like day, contrary to every other forecast. You could also have different reasons for your prediction, all evidence to the contrary. By some extraordinary chance, your highly improbable forecast might even happen. But if you didn’t give the right reasons, it was just a lucky guess, a coin-flip with no explanatory power, not a theory.
Physicist David Deutsch describes explanatory power by contrasting our understanding of weather between modern science and ancient myths:
For instance, we know – and can test independently of our experience of seasons – that surfaces tilted away from radiant heat are heated less than when they are facing it, and that a spinning sphere in space points in a constant direction. And we can explain why in terms of geometry, heat, and mechanics. Also, the same tilt appears in our explanation of where the sun appears relative to the horizon at different times of year. In the Persephone myth, in contrast, the coldness of the world is caused by Demeter’s sadness – but people do not generally cool their surroundings when they are sad, and we have no way of knowing Demeter is sad, or that she ever cools the world, other than the onset of winter itself. One could not substitute the moon for the sun in the axis-tilt story, because the position of the moon in the sky does not repeat itself once a year, and because the sun’s rays heating the Earth are integral to the explanation. Nor could one easily incorporate any stories about how the sun god feels about all this, because if the true explanation of winter is in the geometry of the Earthsun motion, then how anyone feels about it is irrelevant, and if there were some flaw in that explanation, then no story about how anyone felt would put it right.
The axis-tilt theory also predicts that the seasons will be out of phase in the two hemispheres. So if they had been found to be in phase, the theory would have been refuted, just as, in the event, the Persephone and Freyr myths were refuted by the opposite observation. But the difference is, if the axis-tilt theory had been refuted, its defenders would have nowhere to go. No easily implemented change could make tilted axes cause the same seasons all over the planet. Fundamentally new ideas would have been needed. That is what makes good explanations essential to science: It is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters that it is testable. Bad explanations are equally useless whether they are testable or not.2
Too many people have the false idea that if they learn a few facts and form a firm opinion based on them, then it is a theory. It is not. It is just a faulty opinion. Too many also conflate the right to an opinion with the opinion itself. Some use the idiom, “Whatever floats your boat,” to express freedom of thought and pursuit of happiness. Our right to an opinion is equal. Opinions themselves are not. Informed opinions are better. “Whatever” does not float boats. The Archimedes principle of displacement does. It works the same for everyone, believe it or not.
The “single bullet theory” of the JFK assassination is a good example of a bad explanation that has many variations.3 The false narrative behind the term was created by the Warren Commission in 1964, but the term itself was not coined by them. The lie was immediately attacked by critics of the Warren Report using early names like “magic bullet,” “theory of just three bullets,” “single bullet” (sans theory), and “single-assassin-in-the-rear theory.” The exact term was in use by 1966. Raymond J. Marcus possibly used it first at the beginning of his classic book, The Bastard Bullet.4
Calling it a theory gave the Warren Commission’s lie a degree of respect it never deserved. Critics noted that it ignores all of the known evidence, has no explanatory power, and is wrong. Once that lie was proved, it was a fantasy, not a theory. Mistakenly continuing to call it a theory set up the critics as victims of a CIA propaganda operation that continues successfully to this day.
“Single bullet theory” contradicts “conspiracy theory” by using “theory” in a non-derogatory context. That may be why “single bullet theory” is not used in CIA document 1035-960, which weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” as propaganda against Warren Commission critics in 1967.5 In the resulting Bizarro World, conspiracy realists try to use “theory” properly for a nonexistent bullet, while conspiracy deniers use the same word improperly to deny an existing conspiracy.
Long before the epithet “conspiracy buff,” J. Edgar Hoover prejudged those who would not accept the Commission’s findings as “… extremists who have very pronounced views, without any foundation for them, who will disagree violently with whatever findings the Commission makes.”6 But the Bizarro World eventually self-destructed. As I noted in the paper I coauthored with the late Walter F. Graf, “The Gun That Didn’t Smoke,” the Warren Commissioners themselves eventually admitted their faulty opinion was a lie:
From the beginning, there has been no reason to deny the conspiracy. Four of the seven Warren Commissioners – the majority – including the Commission’s chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, expressed doubts about the Commission’s conclusions within a decade of their report. They were joined by a fifth Commissioner in 1978, when John J. McCloy told the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), that “I no longer feel we had no credible evidence or reliable evidence in regard to a conspiracy… .” Lyndon Johnson never believed the report he commissioned. The official policy of the FBI is that the case is not closed, a policy begun by J. Edgar Hoover himself. And those were the people who had supposedly found the truth.
By any standard of historiography, the lone-assassin scenario must be considered a minority opinion which is contrary to the known evidence.7
What about the remaining two commissioners? The Assassination Records Review Board, in 1997, released a document proving Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford altered the first draft of the Warren Report to elevate the location of the back wound from the back to the neck to support the single bullet fantasy.8 Furthermore, in 1976, then U.S. President Gerald Ford told President Valery Giscard d’Estaing of France that the Commission knew it was a conspiracy all along.9 Moreover, evidence compiled for years by myself, David Talbot, and others is closer than ever to posthumously indicting Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles as a direct conspirator in the plot to kill Kennedy.
I further wrote about the big lie that all Americans are hardwired to be conspiracy nuts.
One of the biggest lies of those who desperately try to convince the public and/or themselves that the JFK murder conspiracy is a crazy notion is the one that says we are psychologically driven to invent fantastic conspiracy schemes because we cannot accept the deaths, by less significant circumstances, of our most powerful, popular leaders. The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, appointed by LBJ after the names James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan became household words, declared that doubts about lone gunmen are “a product of the primal anxieties created by the archetypal crime of parricide – not the inadequacy of the evidence of the lone assassin.” Three decades later, National Public Radio (NPR) news anchor Robert Segal retold this big lie in the form of sound bites from three writers and scholars: Columnist Robert Wilson said conspiracies are popular because people lack the education in common scientific disciplines to understand what is happening in the world today. Unintentionally undermining Wilson’s elitist view, NPR relied on a sociologist to supply the grotesque simplism that there are no conspiracies, only people with good intentions who do bad things. Similarly, Chris Carter, producer of the popular dramatic television series, “The X-Files” (which tapped into insecurities at the end of the millennium, according to NPR), said, “Confusion and failure … are things that ordinary people are sadly capable of.” NPR’s intended message was twofold: If we judge something a conspiracy, we are ignorant. And what we perceive as conspiracies are merely common mistakes. Whatever variation is used, the big lie of mass public retardation is another argument intended for the naive. If Americans are so emotionally and intellectually dependent on conspiratorial explanations for our leaders’ questionable deaths, political and physical, we should now be inundated with national discussions about the personal tragedies, illnesses, woundings and deaths of no less than Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. But we are neither obsessed nor preoccupied with the misfortunes of all of those men. The problem of President Kennedy’s murder is not with the psychology of the American people. The problem is with the evidence. The evidence is incongruous. Controversy and cognitive dissonance surround the subject because of 1) the reasonable conspiracy explanation, and 2) the continuing history of unreasonable dispute of that explanation.10
The Warren Commission Report was thus a political act with the purpose of frightening citizens into silence, denial, and tacit compliance with the conspiracy. There is a proper word for that too: terrorism. Feelings trump reason. Fear trumps other emotions. That’s how terror works. The Warren Commission Report was an act of terror. The terrorists who committed that act, and those who have supported it since, are the real conspiracy nuts.
(Originally published in Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 004, Jan. 2020, pp. 8-14.)
ENDNOTES:
Haley, J. Evetts, A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power. Canyon, Texas: Palo Duro Press, 1964, pp. 5-6.
Deutsch, David, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. New York: Viking Penguin, 2011, pp. 24-25.
For a clear understanding of the SBT fantasy, see my essay, “True Believers: Tom Snyder Talks to Arlen Specter”:
Marcus, Raymond J., The Bastard Bullet: A Search for Legitimacy for Commission Exhibit 399. Self published, 1966, p. i. Accessed November 16, 2019 https://m.box.com/shared_item/https%3A%2F%2Fapp. box.com%2Fs%2F8b408e6999f8799dfd0a/view/18309440886
DeHaven-Smith, Lance, Conspiracy Theory in America. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp. 21, 74, 107.
Warren Commission Hearings and Evidence. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964, v. V, p. 99.
Bartholomew, Richard, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas. San Antonio, Texas: Say Something Real Press, 2018, pp. 31-33; Graf, Walter F. and Bartholomew, Richard R., “The Gun that Didn’t Smoke.” Accessed December 3, 2019. http://www.assassinationresearch.com/ v1n2/gtds.html
Lardner, George, “Ford’s Editing Backed Single Bullet Theory,” The Washington Post, July 3, 1997. Accessed November 28, 2019. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/07/03/fords-editingbacked-single-bullet-theory/9054d41d-40e2-4e7f-8a52-fd8489aee9e5
“The Kennedy Assassination: The dream was assassinated along with the man, Giscard says.” Kennedys and King. November 21, 2013. Accessed November 28, 2019. https://kennedysandking.com/newsitems/the-kennedy-assassination-the-dream-was-assassinated-alongwith-the-man-giscard-says
Bartholomew, op. cit., pp. 118-119