How is this relevant?

That Bill Gates calls the shots on what should and should not go forward is nothing new. Surprising is that he was willing to finance such a study in the first place. Why?

The honest results of the research would have shown the outright “climate change” fraud humanity has been exposed to for more than three decades.

The study’s outcome would have gone in the complete opposite direction of the current western globalist plan, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Reset and the UN Agenda 2030, One World Order, One World Government. Their success being largely based on the ”climate” lie.

Geoengineering serves two purposes, falsely demonstrating the Green Agenda’s fake CO2 emissions-based climate change, and – of equal importance – making weather and climate to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

The outcome of the study would have been against those who want to destroy the world’s economy and social structure as we know it, to rebuild it afresh, according to the elites’ desire. See Club of Rome’s “First Global Revolution” (1991); and this.

The revelation of the now canceled Harvard research would have allowed just about anyone marginally aware of what is happening to Mother Earth’s climate, to see through the scam. It would have been difficult to avoid leaking the study’s outcome of such a hyped-up topic, like “climate change”, to the public.

Imagine Harvard research would destroy a political agenda, as well as Big Business. It would reveal that the climate narrative of the “Green Agenda” is a lie and that the weather almost everywhere on the globe is manipulated – or to use the scientific term “geoengineered.”

More than three decades of intense “fake science” and media manipulation about humans’ CO2, methane, and similar greenhouse gas emissions, is the culprit for “climate change”, have left most people, even non-active, often “bought”, so-called scientists, under the impression that doomsday is just around the corner, if we keep using hydrocarbons (oil and gas) to fuel our economy and keep using agriculture to feed humanity.

These alarm bells are constant calls to decarbonize civilization. Yet, the use of hydrocarbons (mostly oil and gas) to run the world’s economies has hardly changed in the last three decades. In the early 1990s about 87% of all energy used worldwide came from oil and gas. The figure is almost the same today.

It is a big lie. The climate is NOT changing, at least not more than it has always changed over the past four billion years – normally by small increments, so that life on earth can adapt and adjust.

According to Spain’s State Meteorological Agency (AEMET), there are currently more than 50 countries which have at least some technologies to change the weather and climate. See this.

Those with the most sophisticated knowledge are the United States, Russia, and China.

It is fair to assume that the 50-plus nations are “modifying” the weather or climate according to what benefits them most. It is also fair to assume that today there is worldwide almost no weather completely natural, but influenced either directly, or indirectly, through modified weather patterns elsewhere in the world, the collateral effect of geoengineering.

In olden times, it was called “the butterfly effect” – meaning the butterfly flaps its wings and will have an effect somewhere in the world. You do not know where and what. With geoengineering that can be very dangerous.

Obviously, weather modifications, so far, serve primarily the fake climate change agenda. When a super hurricane hits the Caribbean, or a prolonged Monsoon floods and destroys two thirds of Pakistan, including her economy, it exponentially exceeds the “normal”. Blame it on “climate change”.

But most often there is an economic and / or political agenda behind it. Take Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans on 29 August 2005. Some 1,800 people died. With 230 km / hour, Katrina made landfall in Southeast Louisiana and destroyed New Orleans.

While the State of Louisiana evacuated about 1.5 million people before the hurricane hit, 150,000 to 200,000 stayed behind, mostly black people in “old” New Orleans, often run-down, but potential prime real estate for developers; was to be razed for luxury-style rebuilding.

The original owners were later force-evacuated to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency)-provided “emergency” camps (shacks), all over the country. So, the force-refugees could not organize. The properties were taken over by the state and city. This served both an economic and political agenda.

In June through August and into September 2022, Pakistan received about three times as much rain as normal. The deadly disaster was blamed on “climate change”. See this.

In reality, the catastrophe is suspected of having been geoengineered, and had a political agenda. On 10 April 2022, the popular, democratically and by a landslide elected President, Imram Khan, was ousted through a parliamentary non-confidence vote, instigated and “influenced” by the US because Mr. Khan refused to follow orders from Washington but instead intended to be President for an independent Pakistan and for the People of Pakistan.

For weeks, people took to the streets by the millions, creating national unrest, wanting their President Imran Khan back. Creating or geoengineering the destructive Monsoon floods was a means to stop the social upheaval so that the country could follow the western / Washington imposed political agenda, which meant foremost no political or business relations with China.

This is weaponized geoengineering.

When geoengineering serves as a weapon for Super-Powers, the dangers may be equivalent or worse than from nuclear weapons. Because most people have no clue that these weather “disturbances” and climate disasters are manmade and targeted for specific purposes at an “enemy”.

To get this right, geoengineering is NOT manmade in terms of what the Green Agenda interprets manmade “climate change”, as in CO2 emissions, greenhouse gases and more of the like. Geoengineering is dangerous. The Green Agenda climate change claims are sheer bullsh*t.

Geoengineering has been developed since the early 1940s. It started out with simple cloud-seeding, to prompt rainfall, mostly for agricultural purposes. It then moved to more sophisticated weather and climate manipulations, using the infamous chemtrails, white “vapor” stripes emanating from airplanes, crisscrossing the blue skies, disseminating poisonous chemicals and microscopic heavy metal particles, to influence the climate – but also, and possibly more important, to affect people’s health in very negative ways.

There are hundreds if not thousands of patents out there for these chemicals and heavy metals coming down from the planes into the ground, into the water, into plants and vegetables and finally into our bodies, killing our Pineal Gland and gradually weakening our bodies.

Geoengineering also includes the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) and similarly sophisticated technologies. HAARP, more recently under the auspices of the Pentagon-linked think tank DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is controlled by the US Air Force. HAARP is possibly the world’s most capable high-power, high-frequency electromagnetic waves transmitter, acting on the ionosphere.

HAARP technologies often applied from satellites, can emit electromagnetic waves piercing deep into the earth, creating earthquakes. It is suspected that HAARP technologies were used to cause the 6 February 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake of 7.8 Richter scale strength, killing more than 60,000 people.

The seism happened shortly before Recep Tayyip Erdogan was reelected in May 2023 as President of Turkey. The earthquake’s epicenter was in Turkey’s Kahramanmaras province, with seismic movement taking place along the Conjugated Tectonic Faults. Strangely and remarkably, however, the tremors defied the natural patterns and do not fit into the usual mainshock–aftershocks sequence.

This was also the time when President Erdogan refused to approve Sweden and Finland into NATO, despite the tremendous pressure of all 29 other NATO countries – to put NATO even closer to Russia, the western-made non-conform enemy that needed to be “subdued.”

This would be weaponized political geoengineering, with an economic side effect.

The 12 January 2010 Haiti earthquake of 7.0 magnitude left the capital city Port-au-Prince devastated and killed about 220,000 people. Sizable off-shore oil and gas deposits are all over the Caribbean, and also off-shore of Port-au-Prince.

These petrol reserves, are so deep that it is uneconomical to exploit them at current depths. A seismic event will break the tectonic plates, so that the earth’s core pressure pushes the oil to higher levels, where exploitation is easier and more economical.

Haiti has been in chaos ever since. The Clinton Foundation set up allegedly to help rebuild Haiti, has been a disaster, causing more harm than good, and making the Clintons richer. Destabilizing the country is a good reason for the US to maintain steady control.

Haiti is the world’s first and only country inhabited by black slaves that fought for and obtained independence 220 years ago (January 1, 1804). Washington pretends, Haiti could become a national security threat – like Cuba! – and must be controlled. See this.

The giant Haiti tremor also served two interests: economics, as in oil; and politics, as in control.

Geoengineering is a convenient and highly effective weapon to dominate or coerce countries into submission. The geo-weapon’s potential could explode exponentially during the coming years, decades, if people remain ignorant about its menace for humanity.

A Harvard study divulging what geoengineering does and can do would not only derail the entire fake “climate change” narrative, but might also risk taking steam out of the growing geo-weapons industry.

Therefore, “Solving the ‘climate crisis’ is indeed bad for business and bad for politics”, and even worse for strategic warfare planning. So, Bill Gates was right in stopping the Harvard Geoengineering Project. Geoengineering may, therefore, prosper, bringing rain, shine and – war.

1. We shouldn’t blindly trust anyone in power, whether it’s government managing the people, doctors managing healthcare, corporations managing our money, or journalists managing truth.
2. Freedom is under attack on multiple fronts and the separation between those who embrace liberty and those who do not has never been more crystal clear.
3. Many of those crazy “conspiracy theories” the masses were programmed to lambaste or ignore are turning out to be true in whole or in part.

This last realization is the one I want to focus on today. I’ll be doing a show on the topic of Agenda 2030 this week (be sure to subscribe to be notified) but I thought it best to post this primer with important information from former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization, Peter Koenig. He would know.

I vividly remember the responses I received to a podcast this time last year in which I had called on people to start talking more to their “normie” friends and family about the various conspiracies we were seeing in the world at the time. Keep in mind, this was before the Ukraine War. We were in the middle of what Joe Biden and corporate media were calling the “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated” so the indoctrinated masses were still thinking face masks, social distancing, and the jabs would keep them healthy. The responses to that podcast were almost universal. “I’d like to talk to them, but…”

The “but” that most referred to was an unresponsive audience among their friends and family. I get it. I do this for a living and I still have a hard time getting most of my relatives to understand what’s really happening. But the difference between this year and last year is that there’s a clear awakening happening amongst those who couldn’t be reached before. They are more “conspiracy curious” because the narratives they were told to embrace have been falling faster than Biden’s approval rating.

My call to start spreading the truth may have been premature last year. Today, I think the timing is much better. We need to make as many people aware as possible because we desperately need allies in this fight against the globalist elite cabal. The article below by Koenig as well as the attached video should act as a top boundary. It gives the most “fringe” understanding of Agenda 2030. Start there, learn what you can, and then filter whatever you think is necessary to suit whoever you’re talking to at the time. For some who are still mostly skeptical, you’ll have to feed them easy-to-digest Flintstone Vitamins of truth. For those who are ready to wake up, have the full regimen of truthbombs at your disposal.

To be clear, I do NOT agree with every part of Koenig’s assessment. But I don’t edit anyone’s perspectives and I’d say he’s mostly correct. I’ll take “mostly” on these types of topics because they’re based on opinions. We need to be 100% accurate on facts, but differing opinions allow for proper discourse which we desperately need in our world today. Here’s Koenig’s article…

The Plan: WHO’s Ten Years of Infectious Diseases (2020 to 2030), Leading to World Tyranny

Excess mortality is reported from Norway – and all over the western world or Global North. Excesses never heard before. In the ranges of between 15% and 25%. In some countries even higher. Worrisome. No clear causes can be detected. See this.

Already more than a year ago Dr. Michael Yeadon, former VP Pfizer and Chief of Science at Pfizer, warned that excess deaths will appear in the next 3-5 and even up to ten years, because of the false and criminal, untested mRNA vaxxes.

He elaborates. After all the boosters – 3 to 4 shots – the immune system has lost up to 80% of its defenses. Thus, people are more vulnerable to catching any kind of disease. Plus, myocarditis and sudden deaths are on the rise – even in young people, especially those who practice sport or are sports professionals.

In addition, graphene oxide injection and other concoctions being injected, cause all sorts of cancers, mostly in reproductive systems of men and women, as well as several types of cancers of the blood, of the eyes causing blindness… liver and kidney diseases… and much more.

In addition, these injections, called vaccines, also cause massive infertility. In some countries life-childbirth was down by up to 40% in 2022. Dr. Yeadon warned that the diseases will be very difficult to trace back to the vaxxes, but that’s where the origin is. A clear eugenics agenda, mass depopulation, unprecedented. Genocide is a word that doesn’t meet the extent of the atrocity that’s behind what we are living through — what the cabal is carrying out.

The UN Agenda 2030, alias Klaus Schwab’s (WEF) Great Reset and the nefarious, all-digitizing 4^th Industrial Revolution, also includes an asset-stripping plan never seen and experienced before in human history. Assets of covid mandates-caused bankruptcies are sucked upwards into the vaults of the financial oligarchs and the Dark Invisible Financial Cabal – which is funding and orchestrating the WEF and which is in control of over 90% of the world’s mainstream media. See this.

The Agenda 2030 (originally called Agenda 21) was prepared by a very long hand, dating back 60 to a hundred years. Be aware, the Dark Invisible Financial Cabal acts as a cult. In order to be successful, it has to tell the people what it is up to.

Indeed, over the past several decades we have received many warnings of what to expect – namely a Health Tyranny, enhanced by a fake Global Warming and Biodiversity Green agenda.

The New Green is a fascist neoliberal, make-believe environmental protection farse. In reality – far from environmental protection. To the contrary. Yet, people throughout the world fall for it. Propaganda is deadly. We have to stop it.

The Plan’s execution started in January 2020. First with a fake disease called Covid-19 – the mortality of which is about the same or less than that of the common flu, some 0.03% to 0.07%. And unbelievably – the Covid-19 pandemic, or rather the Plandemic – hit all 193 UN member countries at once, on the same day. The vast majority of the people believed it.

However, an intense media-driven fear-campaign, with strictly totalitarian-enforced mandates of lockdowns and face masking, distancing people from each other, lowering their moral even further, i.e. their self-esteem, their defenses, insecurity, dictatorial measures, led to world tyranny.

It sounds like a project collaborated by the Tavistock Institute on Social Engineering of the Masses. (See also Daniel Estulin’s book of the same title (Copyright 2015)). Tavistock in close collaboration with DARPA, the secretive Pentagon thinktank, specializing in mind-control, MK-Ultra and societal manipulation through the mass-media and often deadly false flag events.

The Global West has quietly suspended in most countries their Constitutions, either by silent decree, or by Parliamentary votes, where Parliamentarians were co-opted to be part of the crime. But the vast majority of populations have no idea. They still refer to democracy — when “democracy” we never had in the last 2000 years and beyond.

And just to be sure that we all understand what the Greek term of “democracy” really meant – supposedly born in Delphi, Greece, some 800 years BC and first practiced in ancient Athens 507 years BC by Athenian leader Cleisthenes. It meant one person one vote – but only for educated male, who were qualified for sociopolitical decisions.

Just a word on our sloganized and vastly over-used term democracy. This is what google has to say: Athenian democracy was a system of government where all male citizens [age 20 and above] could attend and participate in the assembly which governed the city-state. This was a democratic form of government where the people or ‘demos’ had real political power. Athens, therefore, had a direct democracy.

You may want to make a note of it before using the misleading term “democracy” freely again. Let’s first see what we mean by “democracy” and how we have learned to manipulate it for the service of the powerful. This brief observation on democracy may be important, if ever we get back to “democracy” in a new society. Let’s make sure that the term is defined clearly in every Constitution of every sovereign country.

Back to excess deaths. What can we do?

For most of the vaxxed population it’s too late. They can just hope that their shot was not deadly, or that it may have been a placebo. In every trial – which this entire vaxx crime was and is – there are placebos.

We should inform as many people as we can of these horrendous circumstances – of the excess deaths and of the whys – so that people wake up and do not get drawn into vaxxing anymore, and so that they help others waking up.

We should initiate criminal procedures against all governments who knowingly participated in this crime, especially the Health Ministers and the management of WHO, the UN system, the WEF — and the eugenist oligarch suspects we all know. And indeed, get to the bottom of the Cabal.

A Grand Jury trial has already determined the guilty – with evidence statements by witnesses from the key organizations behind this magnum crime. See all the sub-links in the “Stop World Control” video below.

We must immediately stop and resist any activity linked to the infamous UN Agenda 2030 and the WEF’s Great Reset; derail with all means we have at disposal the 4th Industrial Revolution’s digitization process, starting with undoing any advances that have been made with digital money, body-implanted chips – whose purpose it is to enslave humanity – and on a wider score to transhumanize humanity.

We must stop this monstrous crime of biblical proportions NOW. In short, we should prepare for a massive Nuremberg 2.0. Without delay.

See this Must-See 31-min video on THE PLAN with several links to related videos, including the one of the Grand Jury and its results – plus large-print easily understandable, down-to-earth text, explaining what we are living and how we can get out of it. See this.

Here, some key quotes from the Stop World Control text:

• “The Tyranny is 100% dependent on the ignorance of the public. The solution is, therefore, to inform the people around us.”
• “Once People know what is really happening, they will stop complying and will start resisting.”
• “We offer you a powerful tool to open the eyes of your friends, family and community.”
• “High level experts from the WHO, United Nations, US & UK Military, British Secret Services, CDC, Pfizer and the UK Government reveal the evidence that the pandemic is used to install a world dictatorship.”
• “They presented their evidence to the world during Grand Jury proceedings with 11 international lawyers and a judge.”
• “The experts identify the powerful entities that are able to install this powerful dictatorship. They explain how they orchestrate and implement it, and what their ultimate agenda is for humanity.”
• “The supreme level of brainwashing is when an entire population calls human history a conspiracy theory.”
• “All this information is revealed in the Grand Jury Evidence.  You can download it here: StopWorldControl.com/jury
• “This powerful document can wake up the world. Please share it far and wide.”

About the Author

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Blackrock pushes ESG

In January, 2020  on the eve of the economically and socially devastating covid lockdowns, the CEO of the world’s largest investment fund, Larry Fink of Blackrock, issued a letter to Wall Street colleagues and corporate CEOs on the future of investment flows. In the document, modestly titled “A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance”, Fink, who manages the world’s largest investment fund with some $7 trillion then under management, announced a radical departure for corporate investment. Money would “go green.” In his closely-followed 2020 letter Fink declared,

“In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant re-allocation of capital…Climate risk is investment risk.” Further he stated, “Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change.” [i]

In a separate letter to Blackrock investor clients, Fink delivered the new agenda for capital investing. He declared that Blackrock will exit certain high-carbon investments such as coal, the largest source of electricity for the USA and many other countries. He added that Blackrock would screen new investment in oil, gas and coal to determine their adherence to the UN Agenda 2030 “sustainability.”

Fink made clear the world’s largest fund would begin to disinvest in oil, gas and coal.  “Over time,” Fink wrote, “companies and governments that do not respond to stakeholders and address sustainability risks will encounter growing skepticism from the markets, and in turn, a higher cost of capital.” He added that, “Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects… we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.” [ii]

From that point on the so-called ESG investing, penalizing CO2 emitting companies like ExxonMobil, has become all the fashion among hedge funds and Wall Street banks and investment funds including State Street and Vanguard. Such is the power of Blackrock. Fink was also able to get four new board members in ExxonMobil committed to end the company’s oil and gas business.

The January 2020 Fink letter was a declaration of war by big finance against the conventional energy industry. BlackRock was a founding member of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (the TCFD) and is a signatory of the UN PRI— Principles for Responsible Investing, a UN-supported network of investors pushing zero carbon investing using the highly-corrupt ESG criteria—Environmental, Social and Governance factors into investment decisions. There is no objective control over fake data for a company’s ESG. As well Blackrock signed the Vatican’s 2019 statement advocating carbon pricing regimes. BlackRock in 2020 also joined  Climate Action 100, a coalition of almost 400 investment managers  managing US$40 trillion.

With that fateful January 2020 CEO letter, Larry Fink set in motion a colossal disinvestment in the trillion-dollar global oil and gas sector. Notably, that same year BlackRock’s Fink was named to the Board of Trustees of Klaus Schwab’s dystopian World Economic Forum, the corporate and political nexus of the Zero Carbon UN Agenda 2030. In June 2019, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations signed a strategic partnership framework to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.  WEF has a Strategic Intelligence platform which includes Agenda 2030’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

In his 2021 CEO letter, Fink doubled down on the attack on oil, gas and coal. “Given how central the energy transition will be to every company’s growth prospects, we are asking companies to disclose a plan for how their business model will be compatible with a net zero economy,” Fink wrote. Another BlackRock officer told a recent energy conference, “where BlackRock goes, others will follow.” ^[iii]

In just two years, by 2022 an estimated $1 trillion has exited investment in oil and gas exploration and development globally. Oil extraction is an expensive business and cut-off of external investment by BlackRock and other Wall Street investors spells the slow death of the industry.

Biden—A BlackRock President?

Early in his then-lackluster Presidential bid, Biden had a closed door meeting in late 2019 with Fink who reportedly told the candidate that, “I’m here to help.” After his fateful meeting with BlackRock’s Fink, candidate Biden announced, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels…” In December 2020, even before Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, he named BlackRock Global Head of Sustainable Investing,  Brian Deese, to be Assistant to the President and Director of the National Economic Council. Here, Deese, who played a key role for Obama in drafting the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, has quietly shaped the Biden war on energy.

This has been catastrophic for the oil and gas industry. Fink’s man Deese was active in giving the new President Biden a list of anti-oil measures to sign by Executive Order beginning day one in January 2021. That included closing the huge Keystone XL oil pipeline that would bring 830,000 barrels per day from Canada as far as Texas refineries, and halting any new leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Biden also rejoined the Paris Climate Accord that Deese had negotiated for Obama in 2015 and Trump cancelled.

The same day, Biden set in motion a change of the so-called “Social Cost of Carbon” that imposes a punitive $51 a ton of CO2 on the oil and gas industry. That one move, established under purely executive-branch authority without the consent of Congress, is dealing a devastating cost to investment in oil and gas in the US, a country only two years before that was the world’s largest oil producer.[iv]

Killing refinery capacity

Even worse, Biden’s  aggressive environmental rules and BlackRock ESG investing mandates are killing the US refinery capacity. Without refineries it doesn’t matter how many barrels of oil you take from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In the first two years of Biden’s Presidency the US has shut down some 1 million barrels a day of gasoline and diesel refining capacity, some due to covid demand collapse, the fastest decline in US history. The shutdowns are permanent. In 2023 an added 1.7 million bpd of capacity is set to close as a result of BlackRock and Wall Street ESG disinvesting and Biden regulations. [v]

Citing the heavy Wall Street disinvestment in oil and the Biden anti-oil policies, the CEO of Chevron in June 2022 declared that he doesn’t believe the US will ever build another new refinery.[vi]

Larry Fink, Board member of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, is joined by the EU whose President of the EU Commission, the notoriously corrupt Ursula von der Leyen left the WEF Board in 2019 to become EU Commission head. Her first major act in Brussels was to push through the EU Zero Carbon Fit for 55 agenda. That has imposed major carbon taxes and other constraints on oil, gas and coal in the EU well before the February  2022 Russian actions in Ukraine.  The combined impact of the Fink fraudulent ESG agenda in the Biden administration and the EU Zero Carbon madness is creating the worst energy and inflation crisis in history.

About the Author

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.

Article cross-posted from Global Research.

Among more vulnerable populations, more than 200 million were pushed into extreme poverty and 130 million into hunger. Our environment fared no better: trillions of disposable face masks and billions of test kits ended up in oceans, waterways and landfills around the world.

How could all this happen? How could policy response to a supposed health crisis turn out so extremely destructive? And how did so many of us buy into it all and comply with the program? By today we have some answers to these questions.

The pandemic was orchestrated to launch a covert agenda against the peoples of the world. The health emergency was used to justify the radical rollback of civil liberties and to introduce an authoritarian new world government and a global police state. And no, they did not overreact out of an abundance of caution but with calculated malice.

Public health experts knew, or should have known that lockdowns would be counterproductive and destructive: this is the core public health curriculum.

In 2006, the Bush administration commissioned one of the world’s foremost authorities on infectious disease, dr. Donald Henderson to advise on infectious disease outbreaks, including lockdowns, quarantines and business closure. Dr. Henderson concluded his report as follows:

“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics, or other adverse events, respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted…”

It was every public health official’s solemn duty to know this curriculum.

As to why so many among us did not suspect foul play, the answer is that it is not in our nature to even consider such evil. As J. Edgar Hoover said, “The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous, he cannot believe it exists.”

Our evolutionary history formed us to be predominantly gentle and trusting creatures; we spent 99% of that time living in small groups with our next of kin. Mutual support was the foundation of social life, and trust could be matter of survival. As a result, most of us are practically hardwired to trust figures of authority and to cooperate with them to assure the group’s safety against external threats.

Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome

But our trust and cooperation was exploited in a ruthless and cynical way by those who planned to use Covid 19 health “emergency” in order to force us and our children into their control matrix. The conspirators drew on historical experience, extensive planning and multiple simulations to plan their gambit. This particularly involved structuring the requisite command and control hierarchies and incentive systems which ensured that at all levels, including the policy makers, financiers, public health bureaucracies, law enforcement and the media all worked in lock-step towards the planned objectives.

Charlie Munger, believed by many to be one of the wisest men in finance said, “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.” Consider the case of the bubonic plague outbreak in Geneva in 1530, described in the 1867 book, “Chroniques de Genève.” (p. 396-402):

[Google translation] “When the bubonic plague struck Geneva in 1530, everything was ready. They opened an entire hospital for the plague victims. With doctors, paramedics and nurses. The traders contributed, the magistrate gave subsidies every month. The sick always gave money, and if so one of them died alone, all the goods went to the hospital.

But then a disaster struck: the plague was dying out, while the subsidies depended on the number of sick people. In 1530 there was no question of right and wrong for the Geneva hospital staff. If the plague produces money, then the plague is good. And then the doctors got organized. At first, they just poisoned patients to increase the mortality statistics, but they soon realized that the statistics they were not to be concerned only with mortality, but mortality from plague. So they began to cut the bubbles from the bodies of the dead, dry them, grind them in a mortar and give them to other patients as medicine. Then they started dusting off clothes, handkerchiefs and garters.

But somehow the plague continued to subside. Apparently, the dried buboes weren’t working well. Doctors went to town and scattered bubonic powder on the doorknobs at night, selecting those homes where they could then profit from them. As an eyewitness wrote of these events [stated], “this has been hidden for some time, but the devil is more concerned with increasing the number of sins than with hiding them.” … one of the doctors became so brash and lazy that he decided not to wander around the city at night, but simply to throw dust on the crowd during the day.” …

The epilogue of the story was that the perpetrators got caught and all met a cruel, gruesome punishment. But the story of pathogens and politics didn’t end there.

Of pathogens and politics

In 2013, the PLOS journal published an important research paper titled, “Pathogens and Politics: Further Evidence That Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism.” Its authors examined 90 cultural populations along two variables of their primary concern:

1. authoritarian governance and
2. historical prevalence of infectious disease.

They found that the correlation between infectious diseases and authoritarian governments was as high as 73%! In social sciences, this is an astonishingly high correlation; it is even higher than the correlation between IQ and test scores. As Harry Truman said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”

The history we didn’t know is the long-established tendency of autocratic rulers invoking invisible enemies to stoke fear, declare emergencies and coerce compliance in the name of greater good.

But fear or no fear, we must never abdicate our responsibility to our children and future generations – the responsibility to be vigilant and defend our hard-won liberties from would-be usurpers. We must defend liberty, if necessary with our lives, for if we fail then that one thing that makes life worth living could be lost for our children and their children. These are times to be brave and vigilant, to ask hard questions and demand truthful answers, to research and share our knowledge with all of humanity.

Today we are equipped with information resources and means of communications that were unfathomable to prior generations. We must make the best possible use of them and ensure that we gift future generations a much, much better future. With everything we have at our disposal, there can be no excuse ; armed with truth and courage, we will succeed.

Article cross-posted from Global Research.

The extent of the “cheap credit” bubble that the Fed, the ECB and Bank of Japan have engineered with buying up of bonds and maintaining unprecedented near-zero or even negative interest rates for now 14 years, is beyond imagination. Financial media cover it over with daily nonsense reporting , while the world economy is being readied, not for so-called “stagflation” or recession. What is coming now in the coming months, barring a dramatic policy reversal, is the worst economic depression in history to date. Thank you, globalization and Davos.

Globalization

The political pressures behind globalization and the creation of the World Trade Organization out of the Bretton Woods GATT trade rules with the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement, ensured that the advanced industrial manufacturing of the West, most especially the USA, could flee offshore, “outsource” to create production in extreme low wage countries. No country offered more benefit in the late 1990s than China. China joined WHO in 2001 and from then on the capital flows into China manufacture from the West have been staggering. So too has been the buildup of China dollar debt. Now that global world financial structure based on record debt is all beginning to come apart.

When Washington deliberately allowed the September 2008 Lehman Bros financial collapse, the Chinese leadership responded with panic and commissioned unprecedented credit to local governments to build infrastructure. Some of it was partly useful, such as a network of high-speed railways. Some of it was plainly wasteful, such as construction of empty “ghost cities.” For the rest of the world, the unprecedented China demand for construction steel, coal, oil, copper and such was welcome, as fears of a global depression receded. But the actions by the US Fed and ECB after 2008, and of their respective governments, did nothing to address the systemic financial abuse of the world’s major private banks on Wall Street and Europe , as well as Hong Kong.

The August 1971 Nixon decision to decouple the US dollar, the world reserve currency, from gold, opened the floodgates to global money flows. Ever more permissive laws favoring uncontrolled financial speculation in the US and abroad were imposed at every turn, from Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall at the behest of Wall Street in November 1999. That allowed creation of mega-banks so large that the government declared them “too big to fail.” That was a hoax, but the population believed it and bailed them out with hundreds of billions in taxpayer money.

Since the crisis of 2008 the Fed and other major global central banks have created unprecedented credit, so-called “helicopter money,” to bailout the major financial institutions. The health of the real economy was not a goal. In the case of the Fed, Bank of Japan, ECB and Bank of England, a combined $25 trillion was injected into the banking system via “quantitative easing” purchase of bonds, as well as dodgy assets like mortgage-backed securities over the past 14 years.

Quantitative madness

Here is where it began to go really bad. The largest Wall Street banks such as JP MorganChase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup or in London HSBC or Barclays, lent billions to their major corporate clients. The borrowers in turn used the liquidity, not to invest in new manufacturing or mining technology, but rather to inflate the value of their company stocks, so-called stock buy-backs, termed “maximizing shareholder value.”

BlackRock, Fidelity, banks and other investors loved the free ride. From the onset of Fed easing in 2008 to July 2020, some $5 trillions had been invested in such stock buybacks, creating the greatest stock market rally in history. Everything became financialized in the process. Corporations paid out $3.8 trillion in dividends in the period from 2010 to 2019. Companies like Tesla which had never earned a profit, became more valuable than Ford and GM combined. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin reached market cap valuation over $1 trillion by late 2021. With Fed money flowing freely, banks and investment funds invested in high-risk, high profit areas like junk bonds or emerging market debt in places like Turkey, Indonesia or, yes, China.

The post-2008 era of Quantitative Easing and zero Fed interest rates led to absurd US Government debt expansion. Since January 2020 the Fed, Bank of England, European Central Bank and Bank of Japan have injected a combined $9 trillion in near zero rate credit into the world banking system. Since a Fed policy change in September 2019, it enabled Washington to increase public debt by a staggering $10 trillion in less than 3 years. Then the Fed again covertly bailed out Wall Street by buying $120 billion per month of US Treasury bonds and Mortgage-Backed Securities creating a huge bond bubble.

A reckless Biden Administration began doling out trillions in so-called stimulus money to combat needless lockdowns of the economy. US Federal debt went from a manageable 35% of GDP in 1980 to more than 129% of GDP today. Only the Fed Quantitative Easing, buying of trillions of US government and mortgage debt and the near zero rates made that possible. Now the Fed has begun to unwind that and withdraw liquidity from the economy with QT or tightening, plus rate hikes. This is deliberate. It is not about a stumbling Fed mis-judging inflation.

Energy drives the collapse

Sadly, the Fed and other central bankers lie. Raising interest rates is not to cure inflation. It is to force a global reset in control over the world’s assets, it’s wealth, whether real estate, farmland, commodity production, industry, even water. The Fed knows very well that Inflation is only beginning to rip across the global economy. What is unique is that now Green Energy mandates across the industrial world are driving this inflation crisis for the first time, something deliberately ignored by Washington or Brussels or Berlin.

The global shortages of fertilizers, soaring prices of natural gas, and grain supply losses from global draught or exploding costs of fertilizers and fuel or the war in Ukraine, guarantee that, at latest this September-October harvest time, we will undergo a global additional food and energy price explosion. Those shortages all are a result of deliberate policies.

Moreover, far worse inflation is certain, due to the pathological insistence of the world’s leading industrial economies led by the Biden Administration’s anti-hydrocarbon agenda. That agenda is typified by the astonishing nonsense of the US Energy Secretary stating, “buy E-autos instead” as the answer to exploding gasoline prices.

Similarly, the European Union has decided to phase out Russian oil and gas with no viable substitute as its leading economy, Germany, moves to shut its last nuclear reactor and close more coal plants. Germany and other EU economies as a result will see power blackouts this winter and natural gas prices will continue to soar. In the second week of June in Germany gas prices rose another 60% alone. Both the Green-controlled German government and the Green Agenda “Fit for 55” by the EU Commission continue to push unreliable and costly wind and solar at the expense of far cheaper and reliable hydrocarbons, insuring an unprecedented energy-led inflation.

Fed has pulled the plug

With the 0.75% Fed rate hike, largest in almost 30 years, and promise of more to come, the US central bank has now guaranteed a collapse of not merely the US debt bubble, but also much of the post-2008 global debt of $303 trillion. Rising interest rates after almost 15 years mean collapsing bond values. Bonds, not stocks, are the heart of the global financial system.

US mortgage rates have now doubled in just 5 months to above 6%, and home sales were already plunging before the latest rate hike. US corporations took on record debt owing to the years of ultra-low rates. Some 70% of that debt is rated just above “junk” status. That corporate non-financial debt totaled $9 trillion in 2006. Today it exceeds $18 trillion. Now a large number of those marginal companies will not be able to rollover the old debt with new, and bankruptcies will follow in coming months. The cosmetics giant Revlon just declared bankruptcy.

The highly-speculative, unregulated Crypto market, led by Bitcoin, is collapsing as investors realize there is no bailout there. Last November the Crypto world had a $3 trillion valuation. Today it is less than half, and with more collapse underway. Even before the latest Fed rate hike the stock value of the US megabanks had lost some $300 billion. Now with stock market further panic selling guaranteed as a global economic collapse grows, those banks are pre-programmed for a new severe bank crisis over the coming months.

As US economist Doug Noland recently noted, “Today, there’s a massive “periphery” loaded with “subprime” junk bonds, leveraged loans, buy-now-pay-later, auto, credit card, housing, and solar securitizations, franchise loans, private Credit, crypto Credit, DeFi, and on and on. A massive infrastructure has evolved over this long cycle to spur consumption for tens of millions, while financing thousands of uneconomic enterprises. The “periphery” has become systemic like never before. And things have started to Break.”

The Federal Government will now find its interest cost of carrying a record $30 trillion in Federal debt far more costly. Unlike the 1930s Great Depression when Federal debt was near nothing, today the Government, especially since the Biden budget measures, is at the limits. The US is becoming a Third World economy. If the Fed no longer buys trillions of US debt, who will? China? Japan? Not likely.

Deleveraging the bubble

With the Fed now imposing a Quantitative Tightening, withdrawing tens of billions in bonds and other assets monthly, as well as raising key interest rates, financial markets have begun a deleveraging. It will likely be jerky, as key players like BlackRock and Fidelity seek to control the meltdown for their purposes. But the direction is clear.

By late last year investors had borrowed almost $1 trillion in margin debt to buy stocks. That was in a rising market. Now the opposite holds, and margin borrowers are forced to give more collateral or sell their stocks to avoid default. That feeds the coming meltdown. With collapse of both stocks and bonds in coming months, go the private retirement savings of tens of millions of Americans in programs like 401-k. Credit card auto loans and other consumer debt in the USA has ballooned in the past decade to a record $4.3 trillion at end of 2021. Now interest rates on that debt, especially credit card, will jump from an already high 16%. Defaults on those credit loans will skyrocket.

Outside the US what we will see now, as the Swiss National Bank, Bank of England and even ECB are forced to follow the Fed raising rates, is the global snowballing of defaults, bankruptcies, amid a soaring inflation which the central bank interest rates have no power to control. About 27% of global nonfinancial corporate debt is held by Chinese companies, estimated at $23 trillion. Another $32 trillion corporate debt is held by US and EU companies. Now China is in the midst of its worst economic crisis since 30 years and little sign of recovery. With the USA, China’s largest customer, going into an economic depression, China’s crisis can only worsen. That will not be good for the world economy.

Italy, with a national debt of $3.2 trillion, has a debt-to-GDP of 150%. Only ECB negative interest rates have kept that from exploding in a new banking crisis. Now that explosion is pre-programmed despite soothing words from Lagarde of the ECB. Japan, with a 260% debt level is the worst of all industrial nations, and is in a trap of zero rates with more than $7.5 trillion public debt. The yen is now falling seriously, and destabilizing all of Asia.

The heart of the world financial system, contrary to popular belief, is not stock markets. It is bond markets—government, corporate and agency bonds. This bond market has been losing value as inflation has soared and interest rates have risen since 2021 in the USA and EU. Globally this comprises some $250 trillion in asset value a sum that, with every fed interest rise , loses more value. The last time we had such a major reverse in bond values was forty years ago in the Paul Volcker era with 20% interest rates to “squeeze out inflation.”

As bond prices fall, the value of bank capital falls. The most exposed to such a loss of value are major French banks along with Deutsche Bank in the EU, along with the largest Japanese banks. US banks like JP MorganChase are believed to be only slightly less exposed to a major bond crash. Much of their risk is hidden in off-balance sheet derivatives and such. However, unlike in 2008, today central banks can’t rerun another decade of zero interest rates and QE. This time, as insiders like ex-Bank of England head Mark Carney noted three years ago, the crisis will be used to force the world to accept a new Central Bank Digital Currency, a world where all money will be centrally issued and controlled. This is also what Davos WEF people mean by their Great Reset. It will not be good. A Global Planned Financial Tsunami Has Just Begun.

About the Author

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Image via Shutterstock. Article cross-posted from Global Research.

On the afternoon of March 9th, 2022, the current White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, used the United States government official Twitter account, @PressSec, to make the following claims (among several others):

“We took note of Russia’s false claims about alleged U.S. biological weapons labs and chemical weapons development in Ukraine. We’ve also seen Chinese officials echo these conspiracy theories.”

“This is preposterous. It’s the kind of disinformation operation we’ve seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.”

This is preposterous. It’s the kind of disinformation operation we’ve seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.

— Karine Jean-Pierre (@PressSec) March 9, 2022

“It’s Russia that continues to support the Assad regime in Syria, which has repeatedly used chemical weapons. It’s Russia that has long maintained a biological weapons program in violation of international law.”

“Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them. It’s a clear pattern.”

Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them. It’s a clear pattern.

— Karine Jean-Pierre (@PressSec) March 9, 2022

When it comes to allegations of preposterous conspiracy theories and disinformation about false flag operations involving chemical weapons, the privileges afforded to Ms. Psaki allow her to avoid being accused of spreading propaganda and conspiracy theories, roughly synonymous with false claims.

For example, many people questioned the veracity of reports that Assad had used chemical weapons on his own citizens, but these claims were allegedly debunked by fact-checkers as characteristic of far-right conspiracy theories.

For making such claims, the Huffpost, acting as fact-checker, labeled Piers Robinson, Professor of Journalism at the University of Sheffield, and other academics involved with The Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), a “useful idiot” and “pro-Russian propagandist” along with calling for his dismissal from his teaching post for being a “9/11 Truther.” I doubt the table that turned on Piers Robinson will turn, also, on Jen Psaki.

I have not studied in depth the empirical claims about Assad’s alleged chemical weapons attacks, nor am I currently learned on empirical claims about biological or chemical weapons labs in Ukraine – though recently, a sitting Republican U.S. Senator accused a former Democratic U.S. Representative of being “a treasonous liar” for asserting that U.S.-based bio labs in Ukraine were under threat by the invading Russian military forces.

This is a remarkable tacit admission oddly made public. What I have studied is the nature of claims-making and how empirical claims operate in terms of conspiracy discourse. This is the first in a series of essays on the topic of conspiracy discourse. Rather than elaborating on what I personally or professionally believe to be evidence of criminal conspiracies, I am interested in discussing the nature of how people talk about conspiracies. In order to better understand how and why some claims of concerted and surreptitious wrongdoing are taken seriously (i.e. as credible) while others are not (i.e. as incredible), I have attended to labels designed to tarnish an individual’s ethos should they make such claims.

Supporting existing empirical research, what I have found is that the labels “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory” act as a tool of propaganda for those who attempt to defend official, authorized accounts of historically significant events from socially disturbing questions.

Those proffering and defending official, authorized accounts can use the same rhetoric as skeptics, yet only (or more often than not) the skeptics are scoffed at and scorned, sometimes with serious consequences. Take for instance James Tracey, a former communications professor who has noted that while credible allegations of “false flag” events have been quite common in non-U.S. news media, often times referring to them as legitimate tactics and strategies used in warfare, the use of “false flag” in U.S. news media associates the term with hoaxes related to conspiracy theories and propaganda. Now, take into consideration James Tracey’s public Wikipedia entry, which begins with the claims that he “is an American conspiracy theorist and former professor who has espoused the view that some American mass shootings did not occur, but are hoaxes.”

Compare this to the official statements issued by the current White House press secretary, and consider why it is that one person is labeled a “conspiracy theorist” and the other is not (nor likely will be). After all, it is now considered to be the case that Jen Psaki spread misinformation about the nature of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. Again, I cannot say what the truth of the situation is.

My interest in the nature of conspiracy discourse developed while I was taking a course on Social Movements during my final Ph.D. seminar at Oklahoma State University in the spring of 2012. My term paper, “’9/11 Was an Inside Job’? Discursive Opportunities and Obstructions for the 9/11 Truth Movement,” developed into my 2014 doctoral dissertation, “Discourse Among the Truthers and Deniers of 9/11: Movement-Counter-movement Dynamics and the Discursive Field of the 9/11 Truth Movement.”

Since 2011, I have conducted dozens upon dozens of face-to-face interviews with street activists when they gather for their annual demonstrations at “ground zero” during the memorial events for “9/11.” I have also spent countless hours conducting an online ethnography via Facebook, and I have spoken with hundreds of individuals about their concept of “9/11.” If you care to read my doctoral work, you will see that I discuss the difference between discursive devices such as “9/11,” which I often place within quotation marks, as compared to references to actual historical events, such as those of September 11, 2001.

Lastly, in that work, I devoted an entire chapter to discussing what the counter-movement of anti-conspiracists asserts is one among many hallmarks of conspiracy theorists, the tactic of “just asking questions.” Are we not allowed to ask questions, lest we be labeled a “conspiracy theorist?” Are there certain types of questions we are and are not allowed to ask, and who decides what are considered conspiracy theories and thereby who are the conspiracy theorists?

In this first installment, I discuss some of the discourse surrounding the alleged origins of the terms “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory,” which I refer to as the conspiracy label.

No, the CIA did not invent the conspiracy label, but the agency might have helped promote and popularize it as a pejorative. Whether or not operatives did is a matter of an empirical investigation into the rise of the label’s use. The fact of the matter is that there exists a network of functioning and well-funded organizations in operation today that carry out the mission of de-legitimizing what are regarded as “conspiracy theories.”

Origins of the Conspiracy Label

If you say, “The CIA invented the term ‘conspiracy theorist’,” you open yourself to being labeled a conspiracy theorist.

Like many aspects of conspiracy discourse, the expression itself immediately smacks of some type of logical fallacy, in this case, circular reasoning. If we were to say that a conspiracy theorist is a person who espouses conspiracy theories, we would need to take the next step, identifying what a conspiracy theory is and is not. In this case, simply alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency invented a disparaging label designed to dissuade people from making such claims is reasoning enough for many people to use the conspiracy label. Many online fact-checkers can be located in a search for “CIA invented conspiracy theorist” that illustrate my point, which is that it is not at all clear what exactly is meant by “conspiracy theorist” because it is not at all clear what is meant by “conspiracy theory.” These are crucial facts that many people, especially those who reflexively follow and obey power, tend to miss. To complicate matters further, it is not clear what the truth of the situation is, which is the entirety of the problem called into question when conspiracy theories are raised. Dismissing them on their face would again be circular reasoning, i.e. “you’re wrong because you’re wrong.” So, we need to investigate the matter.

One fact-checking site that has investigated the matter is AAP FactCheck, which “is accredited by the Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network and adheres to its rigorous protocols,” and bills itself as “Trusted Accurate Impartial” [sic]. The purported impartiality of AAP FactCheck comes into question with the derogatory title of their fact-checking piece, “Tinfoil hats not needed to repel CIA ‘conspiracy theorist’ creation claim [sic].” Whether or not the “tinfoil” hat reference is derogatory depends on who takes offense, and at least some people do consider it an insult. Here is the AAP FactCheck analysis of the CIA-conspiracy label connection:

“Adjunct Professor Stephen Andrews from the History Department at Indiana University Bloomington, told AAP FactCheck: ‘There is overwhelming evidence the term ‘conspiracy theory’ was used long before the creation of the CIA in the 1940s.’”

“While the CIA was **[established in 1947](https://www.cia.gov/legacy/cia-history/#:~:text=The National Security Act of, disseminating intelligence affecting national security.)**, an online search of the Library of Congress for the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ in newspapers prior to that year returns 294 results, with the earliest dated April 9, 1868.” [sic]

So, case closed, right? If the phrase “conspiracy theory” was used before the CIA was created, then the CIA could not have created the phrase. Notice here, though, that the title of the piece uses the phrase “conspiracy theorist” whereas the passages use “conspiracy theory.” Does the difference matter? Maybe, but let’s not split hairs (yet). I would rather quibble over the terms “invented” and “created.” Many results, for example, in a search for “CIA invented conspiracy theorist” claim that the CIA helped to popularize the phrase rather than claiming they had invented or created it. The distinctions are noteworthy.

One time while teaching Introductory Sociology, I was lecturing about myth-making processes, and I used the examples from the discourse surrounding flat Earth myths and the myth that Coca Cola (and Norman Rockwell) had created the modern depictions of Santa Claus. The notion that “At one point, everyone thought the Earth was flat,” as stated in an advertisement for Windows Vista, is itself a myth.

In the ad is pictured a Christopher Columbus-era sailing vessel, indicating the reference is to some storybook version of Columbus convincing kings and queens that he would not sail off the edge of the Earth if he ventured West.

Aside from the thousands of years of history of studying the shape of the Earth that even a child could understand, which is often simplified as just being round, ask yourself how on Earth could everybody everywhere hold the same exact belief about the Earth’s shape before there existed anything resembling a global information network? (Even with the Internet, there remains an annoying subculture of misinformed – or misguided – people keeping the myth of the flat Earth alive.)

So, people who believe that what the ad says is true are themselves succumbing to a myth about people believing in that myth – this is not circular reasoning, yet it is reifying, a concept I will pick up in a follow-up essay. But, did Coca Cola invent Santa?

After that particular lesson, I recall that I had a student approach me and adamantly assert that “Coca Cola did not invent Santa Claus.” “No,” I said, “and I didn’t say they did. I said they helped to popularize the modern image of Santa Claus. Big difference.” (One wonders if that young person still believed in the Santa Claus conspiracy, but more on that in the next essay.)

Now, take for instance the description of a YouTube video that currently has 945,000+ views on a channel, Vice, that has 15.4 million subscribers: “For as long as they’ve existed, conspiracy theories have been laughed off by the mainstream for being too ‘far-fetched’.” What does this even mean? How could this be?

Does all of the so-called “mainstream” (whatever that means) share the same opinions and background assumptions? How and why could that be? What social institutions and organizations could produce such an outcome, or is it a spontaneous coincidence that multitudes would share the same attitudes and, thus, form an emergent norm from the ground up?

And, for how long have conspiracy theories existed? Were the Founding Fathers of the USA conspiracy theorists when they wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence? As an example of what can be laughed off by the mainstream, the author of a webpage titled, “In 1967, the CIA Created the Label ‘Conspiracy Theorists’,” makes the following claims (complete with the same image included in the blog post):

“The Magna Carta, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and other founding Western documents were based on conspiracy theories. Greek democracy and free market capitalism were also based on conspiracy theories.

But those were the bad old days …Things have now changed.

The CIA Coined the Term Conspiracy Theorist in 1967

That all changed in the 1960s.

Specifically, in April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term ‘conspiracy theories’ … and recommended methods for discrediting such theories. The dispatch was marked ‘psych’ –  short for ‘psychological operations’ or disinformation – and ‘CS’ for the CIA’s ‘Clandestine Services’ unit.” [sic]

It is somewhat true to say “the CIA wrote [the] dispatch,” though an organization cannot do such a thing, only individuals operating within organizations can perform such actions as authoring memorandums. It is false to say the CIA or individuals operating within “coined the term ‘conspiracy theories’.”

After all, the term existed before the CIA was created, right? In any case, “the mainstream” can reflexively laugh off the notion that an organization, like the CIA – or rogue agents within, plotted to weaponize the conspiracy label to function as a tool of propaganda and cultural hegemony.

I am typically careful to even say that the CIA helped popularize the conspiracy label. After all, it could easily be misinterpreted as me claiming the CIA created, coined, or invented the term. One person who takes the distinction, as well as conspiracy theories, seriously is Michael Butter, author of numerous scholarly texts on conspiracy theories as well as a blog post titled, “There’s a conspiracy theory that the CIA invented the term ‘conspiracy theory’ – here’s why.” If you are the nitpicking type, compare this passage with that from AAP FactCheckers above:

“There are even two versions of this conspiracy theory. The more extreme version claims that the CIA literally invented the term in the sense that the words ‘conspiracy’ and ‘theory’ had never been used before in combination. A more moderate version acknowledges that the term existed before, but claims that the CIA intentionally created its negative connotations and so turned the label into a tool of political propaganda.”

“The more moderate version has been particularly popular in recent years for two reasons. First, it is very easy to disprove the more extreme claim that the CIA actually invented the term. As a search on Google Books quickly reveals, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ emerged around 1870 and began to be more frequently used during the 1950s. Even die-hard conspiracy theorists have a hard time trying to ignore this. Second, the more moderate version received a big boost in popularity a few years ago when American political scientist Lance DeHaven-Smith propagated it in a book published by a renowned university press.”

According to the publisher of Lance deHaven-Smith’s book, Conspiracy Theory in America (pictured above), it “raises crucial questions about the consequences of Americans’ unwillingness to suspect high government officials of criminal wrongdoing.” And, as noted above, for raising such questions, deHaven-Smith opens himself to the conspiracy label, i.e being labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”

I will return to deHaven-Smith’s book in a follow-up essay, but here is how one self-styled conspiracy theory debunker, journalist David Aaronovitch, **states the matter** about raising socially disturbing questions about historically significant events, i.e. posing “conspiracy theories”:

“Since 2001, a primary technique employed by more respectable conspiracists has been the advocation of the ‘It’s not a theory’ theory. The theorist is just asking certain disturbing questions because of a desire to seek out truth, and the reader is supposedly left to make up his or her mind. The questions asked, of course, only make sense if the questioner really believes that there is indeed a secret conspiracy.”

Presumably, I and any other credentialed scholar would be considered “respectable conspiracists” if we raise socially disturbing questions about the official accounts of historically significant events. One might wonder if we indeed must believe in a secret conspiracy, for if a conspiracy weren’t a secret, would it be a conspiracy? Moreover, what does it mean to say that the questions “only make sense if the questioner really believes…?” Am I not allowed to ask such questions as to why it is, for example, that a third skyscraper collapsed in Manhattan on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, without automatically being thought of as a conspiracy theorist, respectable or not? Doubt has been cast on the official explanation of that particular aspect of “9/11” in full-length book form as well as part of a major university study. Why can I not ask questions about why and how that particular event occurred and why the official explanation of it seems to be so severely undermined by competing narratives without retribution by those who would wield the conspiracy label? Who gets to decide what questions are permissible and what gives them such power and authority to decide?

Organizations Behind the Conspiracy Label

So, did the CIA help to popularize the conspiracy label? Who knows? If you ask Snopes, which bills itself as “the internet’s go-to source for discerning what is true and what is total nonsense,” they refer you back to Michael Butter’s essay, which is published by The Conversation: **

“The Conversation is a nonprofit, independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good. We publish trustworthy and informative articles written by academic experts for the general public…”

The publishers, editors, and contributors of the publication in which this essay appears might say much of the same thing, but since we, for various reasons and capacities, open ourselves to be targets of the conspiracy label, the veracity of our claims can more easily be called into question and by those very same sources allegedly debunking claims about the CIA’s role in promoting the conspiracy label. Why is this the case? Is it just coincidence that the very label used to discredit those who question its origins and uses is in fact a label that serves by its use the interests of powerful, secretive, legitimating institutions and interest groups otherwise entrenched in maintaining the status quo?

In line with this question, James Rankin authored his doctoral study in pursuit of the origins of the conspiracy label’s pejorative connotations, thus acting as a hegemonic tool of cultural control. He identified three root sources, Karl Popper’s 1945 book, Open Society and Its Enemies, Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and a CIA memo from 1967, Dispatch 1035-960, “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report.”

Popper argued that while conspiracies do sometimes happen, they are not typically carried successfully to fruition, which is an argument Michael Shermer uses to surmise why conspiracy theories are dismissable prima facie. One criticism of Popper contends with the fact that conspiracies abound throughout history, and while any given conspiracy theory can be wrong, dismissing a conspiracy theory offhand because it is a proposition that a conspiracy has occurred is illogical and disingenuous with respect to scientific practice.

Hofstadter’s essay is a mixture of selective attention to some alleged conspiracies throughout history, such as those about Freemasons and the Illuminati, and armchair psychological theories about how and why the “paranoid style” of “contemporary right-wing thought” led people to believe communists had infiltrated key social institutions in the 1940s and ’50s. Hofstadter’s essay continues to be influential among academicians who study conspiracy theorists.

As recently as 2021, a group of academics used his essay as the basis for their hypotheses, which they used to reach the conclusion that “paranoid ideation” and “distrust of officialdom” couple with conservatism to facilitate the “conspiratorial mindset.” (Never mind that their results explain only half of the variance.) As noted in a philosopher’s article published by The Conversation, consider that the conspiracy label’s discursive function is:

“similar to that served by the term “heresy” in medieval Europe. In both cases these are terms of propaganda, used to stigmatise and marginalise people who have beliefs that conflict with officially sanctioned or orthodox beliefs of the time and place in question.”

“If, as I believe, the treatment of those labelled as “conspiracy theorists” in our culture is analogous to the treatment of those labelled as “heretics” in medieval Europe, then the role of psychologists and social scientists in this treatment is analogous to that of the Inquisition.” [sic]

But was the term originally meant to be pejorative?

“Of course the term is pejorative,” notes Hofstadter at the outset of his 1964 essay, a reference to the “paranoid style” of conspiratorial thinking. As evidenced in a scholarly source from 2007 and a book published in the popular press in 2018, the use of the conspiracy label, both in the form of “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory,” increased in usage in newspapers, books, and academic articles starting in the mid-1960s.

Now, was this in any way connected to the CIA memo, Dispatch 1035-960? How can one say for sure? If the CIA did not meet its goal of providing “material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries,” a clause included in self-recognition that the CIA was authorized to operate only outside of the USA, then we might suspect their general efficacy.

As Rankin pointed out in his doctoral thesis, one popular rebuttal to claims about large-scale conspiracies involving government is that it is too large of a bureaucracy to be able to carry out such conspiracies as the JFK assassination or events of September 11, 2001. This squares with Popper’s and Shermer’s reasoning, which is that most conspiracies fail. So, did the CIA fail in its mission to “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics [of the Warren Commission report]?” We cannot say for certain, and the reason is twofold.

First, if we implicate the CIA in a secretive mission to undermine the work of citizen sleuths in investigating historically significant events in ways not sanctioned by officialdom, then we automatically run the risk of being targeted with the conspiracy label. Once issued, its target is immediately suspect of harboring a “paranoid style” of thought that need not be taken seriously (and that might even be harmful). Why run the risk? There exists no scientific study that tracks the rise of counteracting narratives to “JFK conspiracy theories” from the late ’60s on. I suspect that even if that were to happen, the study would be ignored or treated as an outgrowth of the “paranoid style.” Second, consider that there are today several large-scale efforts to combat the rise of conspiracy theories and other types of mis-, dis-, and malinformation, or what the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) simply refers to as MDM. CISA and its MDM team help disseminate propaganda and counter-propaganda in the form of Toolkits, such as is revealed in the following statement:

“These Toolkit resources are designed to help State, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) officials bring awareness to misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories appearing online related to COVID-19’s origin, scale, government response, prevention and treatment. Each product was designed to be tailored with local government websites and logos.”

Several organizations align with the organizational goals of CISA as related to its anti-MDM efforts. The Alliance for Science, for instance, covers several conspiracy theories about COVID-19, noting that the “virus escaped from a Chinese lab” claim “has the benefit of at least being plausible.” As reported by the BBC, “the controversial claim that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory – once dismissed by many as a fringe conspiracy theory – has been gaining traction.” The New York Post has documented the history of censoring the hotly contested “lab leak theory” by powerful and influential people and organizations, noting that the director of the “National Institutes of Health, immediately decreed this view to be a conspiracy theory that will do ‘great potential harm to science and international harmony’.”

The Alliance for Science is active in the fight against MDM. At the end of its page on COVID-19 conspiracy theories is this passage:

“How to recognize and debunk conspiracy theories

It is important to speak out and combat online misinformation and conspiracist narratives, whether on COVID or climate change or anything else. This handbook (PDF) by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky, both of whom have extensive experience in combating climate denialism, is an essential tool.

Note: As in previous coverage, it is our policy to avoid linking directly to websites and social media feeds that promote misinformation and conspiracy theories, so as not to drive traffic to them and give them higher visibility.“

Understandably, rather than sending readers to the sources of the conspiracy theories they address, they want you to refer to their own sources, such as The Conspiracy Theory Handbook. That handbook is similar in structure to the Toolkits provided by CISA, but it is not of the scholarly caliber of The Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, edited by Michael Butter and Peter Knight – this is the same Michael Butter whom I cited above with reference to the CIA’s role in popularizing the conspiracy label as a pejorative. In the Acknowledgements section, Butter and Knight state the following with regard to the origins of their handbook:

“This project results from the C.O.S.T. Action (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) project C.O.M.P.A.C.T. (Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories), whose generous funding enabled us to establish a network of scholars in Europe and beyond working on this interdisciplinary topic (www.conspiracytheories.eu).”

Following their link, you can find COMPACT’s Guide to Conspiracy Theories, which has two main sections, “Understanding Conspiracy Theories” and “Recommendations for Dealing with Conspiracy Theories.” Mind you, they do not suggest engaging in an honest investigation into the empirical claims of “conspiracy theorists.” Rather, they suggest techniques for rebutting conspiracy theories in ways intended to set conspiracy theorists on course to conventional, mainstream ways of understanding the world. Regardless of whether or not the CIA helped popularize the conspiracy label as a pejorative to be used to de-legitimate those who pose socially disturbing questions about historically significant events, there exists a consortium of groups and organizations in mutual support of that cause.

Conclusion

One might wonder if any of the anti-conspiracist toolkits, handbooks, or guides will be applied to those in power and positions of authority. After all, Press Secretary Jen Psaki has alleged that other countries will use “false flag” operations – this term is a keyword cited as a sign of a conspiracy theory; she denied conjectures of compromised political officials as being merely “**Russian disinformation,**” postulations now considered factual; and has recently claimed that the Russians “hacked our election” in 2016, a statement that might easily be interpreted as a conspiracy theory by any number of academics who study the topic. Existing research suggests that Psaki will get a pass while those of us who dare to raise disturbing questions contrary to officialdom will face the inquisition.

When the Bush W. administration’s framing of the events of September 11, 2001 took root in corporate media explanations of the event, it became a Sisyphean task to try and offer counter-explanations or even pose questions to the officialdom of “9/11.” The official accounts were activated by a cascade of voices echoing through a network of organizations and institutions with interests in amplifying the drumbeats that marched the U.S. and allied military forces to wars extending throughout the Middle East and through the succeeding Obama administration. Now that the drum beats seem to be signaling a change in the venue of the war theater, and considering corporate media is acting as the DOD’s megaphone, what will happen to those voices raising socially disturbing questions directed toward the current administration?

About the Author

Richard G. Ellefritz is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of The Bahamas. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Oklahoma State University after successfully defending his dissertation on how the conspiracy label is used to avoid offering direct and rigorous rebuttals to empirical claims made by so-called conspiracy theorists. His research interests range from conspiracy discourse to pedagogical techniques, and his main occupational focus is on teaching a variety of courses in the social and behavioral sciences.

Article cross-posted from Global Research.