Interpretation and Investigation: The Conspiracy Theory Trap

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The creation of events that will promote irreconcilable interpretations in different interpretive communities has become a cottage industry for the rich and powerful. The radically divergent tales concerning mass shootings and attacks on minorities does wonders to exacerbate rifts between groups in the United States who might otherwise find common ground. These deep fissures in the basic assumptions about events render cooperation between these groups impossible.

Two common themes among conservatives are that attacks on minorities, and major mass shootings, are fake, false flag operations, and that climate change is a fraud used for the interests of the rich and powerful.

Let me start with a disclaimer. As no open, international investigations have ever been conducted concerning the incidents that I describe, my interpretation is by nature speculative. I would venture, however, that the critical points that I make, purposely are left out of coverage in both the mainstream media and in conspiracy blogs.

What is clear is that public intellectuals and reporters intentionally avoid difficult questions concerning these incidents, falling back on the argument that it is disrespectful of the families of those who were killed to suggest that the event was fabricated.

Two central cases are the Sandy Hook Elementary School (2012) shooting and the Boston Marathon Bombing (2013).

In the case of Sandy Hook, it is certainly possible that the attack was by a loner suffering from mental illness. Yet the vicious manner in which the mere suggestion that there might have been an incentive to create an event so as to increase police powers raises questions as to the motivations of those who deny even the possibility of a conspiracy.

In the case of the Boston Marathon Bombing, significant evidence exists that chronology of the bombing is inconsistent. The remarkably clean manner in which the entire event was pinned on Chechens who supposedly killed a police officer while trying to steal his gun sounds rather far-fetched. It is undeniable, however, that the Boston Marathon bombing was used to carry out an unprecedented lockdown of the entire city of Boston without any constitutional guarantees for citizens, or due process.

That event was a frightening adumberation of the lockdowns of the United States in the name of COVID19 seven years later.

The significance of the Boston Marathon as commemoration of Patriot’s Day (granted it was held a few days earlier that year), a critical day in Boston history when American militia opened fire on the British at Lexington, was completely ignored by the media when they pinned the story on two terrorist bombers.

Yet, it was on Patriot’s Day, April 19, 1993 that the Federal government brutally crushed the Branch Davidians at Waco, an assault that included a needless fire which left dead seventy-six people.

It was on Patriot’s Day, April 19, 1995, that the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was destroyed in an attack attributed to Timothy McVeigh—an incident about which many questions still remain unanswered.

In addition, two days after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, a massive explosion (employing ammonium nitrate just like the explosion in Oklahoma) near Waco, Texas, killed fifteen people. None of these facts were mentioned in the media.

The Las Vegas shootings (October 1, 2017) suggest a possible strategy behind these attacks. The suspect Stephen Craig Paddock supposedly killed more than 60 people in less than 15 minutes of shooting from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel. This fact alone raised serious questions among experts.

As he committed suicide we never learned Paddock’s version of the story.

The striking part of the story is the contradictory reports from eyewitnesses.

Although they have vanished from the internet, there were videos posted of both real shootings with live ammunition in one part of the hotel and in other areas the sounds of gunfire were broadcast over a speaker.

The intension of such an approach (which may well have been used in other incidents) might well have been to create divergent interpretations of the event from the start. Those who argued that there was a real shooting had facts to back up their claims. Those who suggested that the shootings were a fraud, a false flag, were given also solid evidence.

A similar game appears to be under way concerning climate change.

Scientific evidence for catastrophic climate change in terms of spreading deserts, the warming and the acidification of oceans, the spread of micro-plastics through the water and soil, and the long-term warming of the atmosphere is indisputable. The campaigns of fake scientists receiving corporate funding to dismiss this complex phenomenon has not succeeded in convincing the public.

Because the launch of the COVID19 operation is directly linked to climate change, specifically to the need to assure the wellbeing of the 0.5% at the expense of the rest of the Earth, in light of the impending collapse of the ecological system, the highest priority is to make sure that no political figure emerges who addresses both COVID19 fraud and the threat of climate change.

Climate change advocates covered by the media, and funded by foundations, must argue for big green projects led by financial institutions that Bill Gates and friends can control, and they must back the COVID 19 myth.

The conservatives claim that climate change is a conspiracy cooked up by the rich and powerful to oppress us and they present evidence in alternative news to support their perspective.

The assumption among the progressives, however, is that granted the scientific evidence for climate change, the conservatives must be “crazy” or “stupid.” Whether it is Rachel Maddow or Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, or even socialist activists, the assumption is the same.

But might there be a more complex game at play?

Let us consider the case of the forest fires that swept the Earth in 2018, specifically the California wildfires. The gradual warming of the Earth, the reduction in rainfall, and the siphoning of water from aquafers for use in commercial agriculture is clearly the cause of the increase in forest fires globally.

But can we be certain that the argument made by conservatives that the California wildfires were started by arson, or enhanced thereby, with the purpose of frightening citizens into adopting a response to climate change commandeered by corporate power is ludicrous?

When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that the wildfires were started by lasers in orbit owned by the Rothchilds as part of a conspiracy to get a high-speed rail project approved by the state of California, she set off a firestorm in the liberal media. Everyone, literally everyone, rushed out to attack her as a “nut” without considering for a moment that perhaps some part of her story might be accurate.

I have read her claims carefully, and I have read related materials concerning the political conflicts in California at the time, and I do not find her argument convincing. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that because progressive causes attack her for anti-Semitism, and climate change advocates attack her for her ignorance of science, that her claims are unfounded.

Let us take a look at the official photos selected by the BBC for the report “California wildfires: The day Paradise burned down.”

Specifically consider the following two photos.

In the first photo, we see that the houses in a development have been cleared down to the foundations in a manner that would be absolutely impossible in a forest fire, while the trees nearby stand virtually untouched.

This photograph, from a mainstream media source (Reuters), presents information that immediately raises serious questions.

The second photographs indicates what appears to be melted aluminum that flowed from the automobiles burned in the forest fire. It is similarly improbable that a forest fire would burn at a temperature sufficient to melt steel or aluminum.

Following the basic principle of Occam’s razor, I would like to propose a more probable explanation for what happened. Perhaps the California wildfires, which are slowly increasing due to climate change, were purposely enhanced by artificial means, and in this case the houses were destroyed either by a strike from low-orbit military satellites, or were simply demolished in manner so as to suggest that such an attack had happened. Similarly, weapons were employed that were hot enough to melt metal, or perhaps this photograph was simply inserted in the article so as to suggest such an interpretation.

The real conspiracy might not be the alleged Rothschild family’s ambitions in California, but rather the creation of an event that will be read in a radically divergent manner by different interpretive communities, so as to inhibit the formation of a broad consensus on the danger of corporate power and to discredit the real threat of climate change by creating real examples of falsified climate disaster.

Operation Civil War

The media of the left and of the right are cranking out stories about a possible civil war in the United States like there is no tomorrow. There are real reasons for fearing that such a domestic conflict may be in the offing. Already the low-intensity killings involving police and other vigilante groups are approaching the level of “Bleeding Kansas” in scale.

We must also ask ourselves whether the fascination of the mainsteam media with this theme suggests a more devious plan to divide and conquer. Forcing authority figures to put their reputations on the line pushing a COVID19 narrative that they do not buy has completely discredited the Federal Government, universities, the mainstream media and all the experts we rely on. The stage is set for open defiance of the entire system—which was perhaps the plan all along.

Civil war would serve to tear institutions apart and create an environment in which the super-rich, unimpeded, can push through even more radical institutional change. The actual class war between a handful of multibillionaires and the rest of the country would be hidden behind orchestrated fighting between “white nationalist terrorists” and “black lives matters” minorities that would be narrated in different media so as to stoke emotions, and to blind people to the real agenda.

This work is rendered easier by of the mistaken assumption of the upper middle class that they are on the same side as the super-rich, that Bill Gates or Elon Musk are just like them, only more successful.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The super-rich have so completely monopolized the financial system, and amassed such wealth, that for them the difference between a Harvard Professor, a US senator, a successful real estate mogul and a homeless man is insignificant. They have launched against the rest of humanity that targets not only workers and immigrants, but the entire upper middle class as well.

It is critical for the strategy, however, that the upper-middle class, all those with measly assets under one brick (100 million dollars) be convinced that they are on the side of the super-rich, and not on the side of the working class.

The new economic reality, however, is clear. The forced quarantine at airports, the forced lockdowns of schools, even in upper-middle class neighborhoods, makes it clear that policy is made for a handful of people and that even families with millions of dollars of assets are not significant for the planners.

The decision of Princeton University to require COVID19 vaccines of all students over the summer, or be denied registration, indicates just how extreme the concentration of wealth and power has become.

Most people assume that the students at elite Ivy League colleges are so privileged that they could not possibly be sacrificed for corporate profits through the use of dangerous “vaccine.” If Princeton students must to take the vaccine, obviously students in India, Brazil, Spain and Japan will have to too.

As far as the super-rich are concerned, however, the lawyers, doctors, bankers and professors who send their children to Princeton are no consequence. They are betting that the lag time between the start of this COVID19 operation and the point when educated people finally grasp the new political reality will be sufficient to vaccinate the vast majority of humanity.

The Collapse of civilization

Ultimately, the contagion of massive fictions in the United States cannot be explained simply in terms of the economic interests of the rich. Much of the scientific evidence about COVID19 is accessible on the internet with a bit of effort and anyone who reads it with care will be forced to admit that the testimony of hundreds of scientists is convincing. Moreover, advocates for mandatory vaccines are never forced to enter into public debates with the medical experts who criticize the entire COVID19 regime.

Educated Americans willingly refuse to read these scientific materials, or to engage in a thoughtful discussions with their peers.

American lawyers and doctors, executives and professors resemble the characters in “The Sleepwalkers” (Die Schlafwandler), an novel by the Austrian writer Hermann Broch that describes the lives of the ruling class of Germany caught up in the collapsing cultural order before the First World War. Broch’s novel describes the bizarre psychological state of the educated classes of Germany. People lived like sleepwalkers; functional in society, competent at their jobs, even capable of appreciating fine music and art. Yet those same intellectuals were in the most profound sense blind, completely oblivious to the signs of systemic collapse. Because they could perform sophisticated jobs while remaining oblivious to the spread of militarism, the end of the rule of law and the demands on the economy made by overproduction, they made the unthinkable possible.

The Origin of this crisis is not corrupt politicians and CEOs, or bad policies and poor planning.

Deep down the entire system, the civilization, is decaying. The educated and informed who could be leaders are left confused, engaged in self-destructive acts as a result. We see unfolding the human version of colony collapse disorder, when the majority of worker bees in a honey bee hive inexplicably disappear, leaving behind the queen, plenty of food, and a few nurse bees.

We cannot even start to get a handle on this civilizational crisis because our discussions of politics and economics have been stripped of all discussion of philosophy and literature, aesthetics and history. The push for the efficient and practical forced on education by corporations has left us blind and helpless, unable to grasp the invisible shifts taking place at a subterranean level within society.

Paul Levy argues that our current society is wracked by the psycho-spiritual disease “wetiko” (the native American term) which is impervious to the anti-psychotics dished out by therapists like candy at Halloween. Wekiko is a disease in our civilization that feeds like a parasite on the spirit, a collective psychosis that has seized control of the entire system of things.

Levy notes that for those captured by wekiko,

“You’re blind and you do not know you are blind, and in fact imagine that you can see clearly. You come to believe that you can see more clearly than those who are clear-sighted. You then become unaware of what it is to be sighted, as you have no reference point for comparison. You do not see how you are unwittingly colluding with wetiko’s pernicious effects and thereby you are unaware of how you are having negative or ill effects upon others and the world.”

Such words describe perfectly the vast majority of the ruling class in the United States who, now spiritually crippled, are leading the entire population of the Earth to the edge of the cliff.

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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

Featured image is from Emanuel Pastreich


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