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I don’t really believe them but there are a slew of harmless ones like cryptids: mothman, loch ness monster, hopkinsville goblins, etc. Lots of modern folk tales that are really interesting as long as you don’t take them too seriously.
The community and media reaction to these stories is usually as interesting as the stories themselves.
Here’s a few:
- Sections of the CIA under the direction of CIA director Alan Dulles conspired to assassinate JFK and cover up the plot. Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy.
- Julian Assange has been persecuted for several years and spent years in solitary confinement with the use of fabricated and trumped up charges in order to punish him for wikileaks and terrorise others who would think of doing something similar, and to create a chilling effect on journalists. The CIA also plotted to assassinate him, but the plot was not carried out.
- Major oil companies including Exxon have well known since at least the 1970’s how devastating climate change is and will be, and have used their advanced knowledge to devise a long-running propaganda campaign to deny and obfuscate the risks, while shaping politics to avoid any action on climate that would threaten their business model.
Are the second and third bullets actually theory though? Well, maybe the assassination plan in the second bullet is theory.
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interesting. I definitely never thought that was impossible. So I guess, my comment should have just been the first sentence…
That quote is likely a fabrication by the source that reported it, True Pundit. It was credited to an anonymous source and no one else has been able to corroborate or verify their claim. It just got repeated so much by the right wing echo chamber that many people assume it’s true.
A fun rant from Parenti regarding JFK assassination.
- DuckDuckGo is a honey pot produced by G**gle for privacy kiddies.
- USA authority can decrypt T*r network by military technology going more than 50 years ahead of civil.
- L*mmy devs made le**y to brainwash Americans into killing capitalism.
- G*d is dead.
- I’ll get miracle p*wer after 666 downvotes.
L*mmy devs made le**y to brainwash Americans into killing capitalism.
This one is true
I believe that conspirators push outlandish conspiracies to distract from real ones, and make level-headed people look down on conspiracy theorizing. For example, Alex Jones could be CIA.
Please remember to follow lemmy’s and this community’s rules while discussing sensitive topics like this, I suppose many theories could offend someone but no holocaust denial etc, thanks
I will start with the big one which is 9/11. Obviously there is a lot of speculation about who did it and why, but I will just mention one basic fact.
To start with, the first plane crashed into the world trade center at 8:46 am. The fourth plane crashed near the capital city at 10:03 am, over an hour later. One such attack should be enough to put all air defenses at maximum alert, and scramble interceptors. These systems are designed to intercept stealth aircraft and ballistic missiles, so they wont have any problem to track and destroy civilian airliners. Instead it seems that the military was completely asleep. There is simply no explanation for that, except so-called “conspiracy theories”.
I heard a story from a professor who used to be a contractor for the US Department of Defense, he was at the pentagon talking and walking with his boss when he followed his boss into a room where he didn’t have the clearance to be. It was an accident, and nothing came of it, but he said he saw a drone operator eating a poptart while surveying somewhere.
That image has always kinda stuck with me. We like to think of our institutions, governments, and militaries as exact infallible machines, but at the end of the day everything is run by regular people eating poptarts.
So, anytime I think “there’s no way a system could be that incompetent” I remember that everything is run by regular mistake-making people who are eating poptarts.
Eh, no. I value my time so I won’t refute but you are naive.
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I believe the Usonian media deliberately platforms outlandish conspiracy theories (think pizzagate, qanon, spirit cooking etc) that just happen to be critical of establishment politicians and the national security state, to poison legitimate criticism of such.
If we ignore a lot of strictly far-right oriented conspiracy theorism, there’s a surprising amount of theories that are at least very likely true but either governments or government organizations deny.
And, of course, some of the strictly far-right theories are based on likely true stuff, but they lean much too far into fantasy, or delude themselves by blaming the wrong elements of society - or just flat out linking likely true stuff to obviously fake stuff. (pizzagate comes to mind, for instance)
But, while talking about Pizzagate, there is an element of that does seem to be true. That being that there’s an illegal child sex-trafficking ring that this nation’s elites take part in, and the government murdered Epstein to keep covered up.
Then there’s a healthy amount of stuff that gets called ‘conspiracy’ by the establishment, but clearly doesn’t count as such because all of the evidence is out in the open, you just have to look anywhere but where mainstream media wants you to be looking. Stuff like the war on terror being a front to secure oil from the middle east and destabilize the governments of that region. The US using death squads and funding opposition groups around the world to destabilize governments that disagree with them diplomatically. There are others, but I don’t see much point in writing out a whole-ass list.
We could also talk about pseudo-conspiracies that are likely true, but which lack official evidence. Things like Facebook controlling narratives on the site. Twitter shadowbanning political opponents to the West. ETC. These theories are interesting and if you’re even slightly online you may have already either heard of or experienced them. But, of course, because these aren’t rigid theories with ample evidence you’re bound to see people on the far-right use these to ‘prove’ their far-right bullshit. So grain of salt them.
There are what I like to call “hybrid theories”, which is a conspiracy theory that ties into other conspiracies, while also using well-researched sources. Depending on if sources are to be trusted (I’m not going to say whether or not they should be) 9/11 would count as one of these. Though we’ll ignore the far-rights “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” line. In this case, 9/11 is a hybrid because it can be tied directly into the US’s support, funding, etc. of the Mujahadeen in the '70s and '80s against the USSR, previous disruption efforts carried out by the US prior to the event, and the US using the war on terror to do what I’ve previously discussed in this comment.
We could talk about “pop-theories” too (alt. “urban legends”). Things that are popular subjects that people will just talk about without having any evidence, but which spread before the internet age (or after it for that matter, but most are from before) via word of mouth. Walt Disney being frozen is one, Polybus is another. Both of those are false, but a couple of these were possibly true. A recent likely true one being that during the storming of the capital, the police guarding the white house just let people get by them, because the police in the US have become a mostly fascist-oriented career and so they tend to support fascist-oriented causes.
But, the big thing about conspiracy theories is that if you’re not in a top-level intelligence agency position, it’s very hard to know for absolutely sure if things are true or not until someone in that position either spills the beans, or documents leak. Which, due to the inherently negative effects of the internet and its cult-like communities, just feeds the cycle. There are a couple of theories that I’d argue are provably real (the child sex-trafficking ring, for instance) but won’t gather popular support, simply because certain elements of the internet take the evidence way too far, and makes so-called “rational” people sceptical of all theories, even when the evidence is laid out in front of them.
I know you asked about theories that I think are real, but I spend way too much time researching and learning about conspiracies (it and studying the far-right are fascinations of mine) and apparently I had a bit more of a ranty answer in me than I thought at the start.
I’ve never heard of polybus, what’s that one about.
the historical Illuminati was generally good
Smoleńsk plane crash, except it was Jarosław Kaczyński who did it so that he could off his brother
none because i am not a right-winger
Only right wingers believe in conspiracy theories?
yes
What?
What about the conspiracy to commit a military coup in Chile in the 1970’s and install a right-wing dictatorship to suppress the left?
What about the conspiracy to fabricate a cassus belli against Iraq in 2001- 2003 to invade the country under the pretext of a menace of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction?
What about mass surveillance via the internet?
What about the holocaust?
There are obviously true conspiracy theories, many are widely believed by the left and many are even public record at this point.
What about the conspiracy to commit a military coup in Chile in the 1970’s and install a right-wing dictatorship to suppress the left?
not a conspiracy theory, it’s simply true
What about the conspiracy to fabricate a cassus belli against Iraq in 2001- 2003 to invade the country under the pretext of a menace of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction?
not a conspiracy theory, it’s simply true
What about mass surveillance via the internet?
not a conspiracy theory, it’s simply true
What about the holocaust?
not a conspiracy theory, it’s simply true
reported and blocked
These are all simply true… NOW, I think is the point he was making, but they did start as theories (Except the holocaust part, not sure what he was getting at there)
The holocaust was a secret, it was a huge conspiracy among the German elite to carry out mass-executions of jews and others in the camps, a theory about which managed to circulate among the German population and elsewhere, but was doubted and contested. Until suddenly, allied armies liberated the camps and revealed to the world what was happening in them.
This is not to say that pogroms that happened earlier on were conspiracy theories, people knew about the pogroms that occurred as the nazis came to power, and afterwards. But the mass-extermination in camps was not widely known.
So it existed first as conspiracy and conspiracy-theory, before suddenly becoming a matter of public record.
Thank you for the report, unless I am misunderstanding he is saying these “theories” are the truth, given the context. Could have been worded better, but in this part
There are obviously true conspiracy theories, many are widely believed by the left and many are even public record at this point.
I think he is saying these are true even if some people call them theories. I interpret the thread as
Only right wingers believe in conspiracy theories?
yes
I disagree, I believe all these to be true
If I am missing something do let me know
edit: I was blocked by china, I will allow them to post normally but given I can’t respond to them anything rulebreaking will be a ban. This is a copy of my comment I would send to them:
Ok, that’s fine, I am just trying to understand your and @AnOrdinaryDog@lemmy.ml’s perspective, and understand if the issue is sensitive for you. To clarify, I absolutely believe the holocaust is real
Yes absolutely all these conspiracy theories are true. I’m not a peddler of holocaust denial, I simply just don’t buy that “being false” is a pre-requisite for a narrative to be a conspiracy theory.
All of these facts started off as contested and disbelieved by large parts of various publics.
The US’s involvement in the coup in Chile was certainly deduced by many Chileans and others outside Chile the day coup happened, thanks to a good understanding of the nature of the structure of US imperialism in latin america. However, there was little hard evidence at the time and US involvement was kept secret and denied by the US establishment and media. The fact that US military and intelligence agencies were intimately involved in the plotting and material support for the coup d’état was denied, covered up and obfuscated.
It was a conspiracy, and Chileans and others who said the US was involved were communicating a theory about a secret plot by the powerful, a conspiracy theory that was objectively true, but not accepted by the mainstream. Now it is widely accepted as historical fact.
The existence of weapons of mass-destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a hotly contested issue. The right campaigned to have it accepted as a fact, and their campaign was supported by much of the mainstream media in the United States, Britain, Australia and other allied countries. This involved the strategic leaking and revealing of reports from intelligence agencies that were designed to support the narrative that Iraq held a secret stash of weapons.
The anti-war left fought back with claims that this campaign was based on lies, that it had the goal of manufacturing consent for an illegal invasion. We claimed that Bush, his administration, Blair, his administration, and the military and intelligence agencies were conspiring to start an illegal war under false pretexts. This was a conspiracy theory. UN weapons inspectors denied the weapons existed, but the Bush administration cast doubt on their credibility and pointed to their own fabricated evidence that weapons existed.
In the end, the truth of the conspiracy was revealed bit by bit as the occupying armies in Iraq failed to turn up any evidence of the secret weapons.
The narrative of mass-surveillance on the internet emerged from the world of conspiracy theories in a similar way. First as concerns, then suspicions, then allegations, before finally becoming mainstream with the Snowden leaks. Even now there are many, perhaps a majority, who will look at you wide-eyed with disbelief if you try to explain the extent to which our activities online are monitored, recorded and monetized. Some will dismiss you: “you’re just a conspiracy theorist!”
But we live in a complex world, with different groups and forces in conflict with eachother. Groups often engage in conspiracies to achieve their goals, and conspiracies often must remain clandestine for some time up to and after their execution to be successful. This means that those seeking the truth about conspiracies will sometimes have to construct a conspiracy theory about the facts at hand, like a detective putting together the clues of an unsolved case. And like a detective who has multiple suspects in an unsolved murder, there will emerge multiple competing conspiracy theories around any conspiracy. It is in the pursuit of truth, the appearance of evidence that conspiracy theories are revealed as truth or not.
And so it is not wise to dismiss conspiracy theories as implicitly right-wing. To do so would give a pass to the powerful to engage in conspiracy without scrutiny.
i will not engage in bad faith argumentation. blocked
Right wingers (only from my online knowledge) seem to be more into conspiracy theories - but they tend to be theories that explain their hardships, also, their theories are insane and change with the wind. I get what you’re saying, but this bothers me as someone who is interested in conspiracy theories. I hate getting labeled as “right winger” as that is so far from the truth. There are actual past conspiracies that we now know they are true (Cointelpro for example, off the top of my head).
Anyway, just my two cents. It’s fine that you don’t entertain conspiracy theories, but keep in mind, there are sane theories out there and not all hard right serving - the right wingers are just louder.
