Secret History: From the Fringes to the Mainstream

BY GREG GUMA

Part One: Bilderbergers come to Vermont and the CFR’s school for statesmen

Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Holland, site of the first Bilderberger conference

Exclusive groups with hidden agendas aren’t paranoid fantasies, or just popular plot points for movies. There have been, and continue to be, actual covert schemes and conspiracies, both above and under ground, and secretive elites with hidden, manipulative or sometimes dangerous game plans. Not all of them are bent on destruction; some just want to disrupt the status quo, others may even have altruistic goals. And fortunately, no one of them yet has put all of humanity completely under their thumbs. On the other hand, they are not to be underestimated or ignored.

In the late 1970s, the Trilateral Commission took the lead through President Jimmy Carter, looking toward a global power-sharing arrangement between the US, Europe (led by Germany), and Japan. That plan didn’t get too far. During the Reagan Years, trilateralism gave way to the Heritage Foundation, which developed a more nativist blueprint, a bit like Trump’s Project 2025. Heritage didn’t just promote a militant response to foreign threats. It took direct aim at “the un-American nature of so much so-called dissidence.” Reagan gave the implementation job largely to his chief lawyer, Edwin Meese, who had attended Heritage meetings and reportedly “relied heavily” on its advice as attorney general.

Before either Heritage or the Trilateralists, there was the Bilderberg group, whose mere existence was once hard to swallow. Maybe it was that unlikely name. If you added that it met annually — with no press coverage, and yet made major international policy decisions, the usual reaction was an arched eyebrow. Today, however, with the idea of a “deep state” and “great replacement” conspiracy widely accepted on the right, plus historical revisions being pushed into textbooks and schools, it doesn’t sound as far-fetched.

The name came from the hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland used for the first session in 1954. After that, meetings were held around the world, including a 1971 gathering in Woodstock, Vermont. "The purpose of the conference," said Prince Bernhard, the Dutch aristocrat who promoted the group and chaired meetings for more than 30 years, "is that eminent persons in every field get the opportunity to speak freely without being hindered by the knowledge that their words and ideas will be analyzed, commented upon and eventually criticized in the press." At the time, Bernhard, who married Holland’s Princess Juliana, was a spokesman for NATO as well as Dutch interests in South America. 

Nevertheless, US Senator James Buckley wrote in 1974 that, "I don’t subscribe to the theory that there exists an organization of international bankers called the Bilderbergers." A strange reaction since his brother, William F. Buckley, was on the guest list that year.

Or consider this evasion. In response to an inquiry in 1975 a US Justice Department official said the White House knew nothing about the Bilderbergers. Yet President Ford attended meetings of the group throughout the 1960s, and Donald Rumsfeld, both Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense under Ford, knew the group as "an open forum for the exchange of ideas." 

The Bilderberg Group rarely appeared in CIA files. In 1975, however, declassified staff notes mentioned the conference in one paragraph. They revealed that the event would be held in Turkey that April. Inflation was to be discussed  and UK Prime Minister Thatcher had been invited. 

After the 1971 Vermont session, a hotel employee put it succinctly: "They get together once a year to talk about what is going to happen in the world." 

In May 1958, Joseph Johnson, a member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee, responded to an inquiry by the CIA’s Allen Dulles about the group’s activities. 

Officially, the Bilderberg meeting in Woodstock, convening April 23, 1971, was billed as "an international peace conference." US State Department officials had conferred with Vermont State Police about the security arrangements. The state supplied 30 men in plain clothes to support a private, armed security force, the FBI and Secret Service, even though several Vermont officials claimed they knew nothing about the event. 

One-hundred-fifty guards and officers blanketed what was then a small town of 1,600, sealing off Laurence Rockefeller’s hotel and estate. Everything was set for the arrival of 85 leaders from around the world. Limousines brought them from Lebanon, New Hampshire, where an air shuttle from Boston had been arranged. 

Although Bernhard issued a terse press statement when his plane touched ground at Boston’s Logan Airport, one participant, Francois Duchene of the London Institute of Strategic Studies, who attended with then British Defense Minister Denis Healey, later explained that, "America must face a Western Europe and Japan that are more independent." That fit, since one scheduled topic was, "A change in the US role in the world." 

To Major Glenn Davis of the Vermont State Police it was "a hairy scene. No one seemed to know just who was in charge of what." But in the conference room, once all employees had been cleared from the building, order reigned. Seating was arranged alphabetically with Bernhard at the head of the table. Remarks were normally limited to five minutes, with two "working papers" as discussion foci. 

Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s National Security Advisor, missed the first session, but became the main event when he delivered a briefing on US plans. Months later, he was charged by conservatives with leaking news about an upcoming China trip by President Nixon and a devaluation of the dollar. After the 1971 conference banks and major corporations shifted capital out of the US, mainly to West Germany. Nixon’s China initiative eventually became public information. In December, the dollar was devalued, resulting in gains for people who had already converted to European currency. A "change in the US role" was under way, Bilderbergers may have helped make it happen, and clearly knew in advance. 

When I wrote about it later, Marcellus Parsons, news director at WCAX, Burlington’s leading TV station, complained to my editor about the story. The event wasn’t so secret, he claimed, comparing my coverage to a story in the conservative Manchester Union Leader, which headlined it as “Secret Meeting in Secluded Resort.” Journalists just couldn’t get in to cover it, he argued. “These meetings are not as secret in Europe as they are here,” Parsons added, but mainly because the US press “really didn’t give a damn.” And what was so wrong, he concluded, with economic and political leaders “who just want to sit down for a giant off the record bull session.”

The truth is that private groups like the Bilderbergers, which helped to build a post-war system of de facto global management, didn’t often actually discuss peace. Rather, their main concern was managing the world economy. Originally, Bilderberg meetings were meant to strengthen the Atlantic alliance, and gradually became an open conspiracy to develop consensus among political and business leaders beyond the power of nation states. In the 1950s, Prince Bernhard brought the idea to the CIA, and with its assistance won support from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. The money flowed through the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, whose director, Joseph Johnson, coordinated US Bilderberg activities. 

Over the years the group became a model for transnational diplomacy, lending support to European integration and oil company policies. Its steering committee was a who’s who of international finance; David Rockefeller, Gabriel Hauge (Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust), Emilio Collado (Standard Oil, later Exxon), and international lawyers such as Arthur Dean and George Ball. All US steering committee members were also members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which had dominated US foreign policy planning since World War II. 

One key member was George Ball, a long-time CFR member, director of the Trilateral Commission, Undersecretary of State, and lawyer with Lehman Brothers. Another was Arthur Dean, CFR member, and partner in the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, whose other partners included John Foster and Allen Dulles. Before World War II Sullivan and Cromwell had worked with German chemical and steel monopolies. By the time the Bilderbergers began to meet, attorney Allen Dulles had become CIA director.

The Council on Foreign Relations had ties to the financial empires of Rockefeller, Rothschild and Morgan. Although its philosophical roots can be traced back to Fabian Socialism, it was later instrumental in creating the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. For decades, its resident members and "international citizens" formed an aristocracy of financiers, academics, lawyers, journalists and public officials who profoundly influenced US foreign policy from the 1940s to the rise of Trump. It still publishes a monthly journal, Foreign Affairs.

Columnist Joseph Kraft, a CFR member, once called this semi- secret elite a "school for statesmen." For more than half a century, its main objective  was to create a “new international order." To many leftists that read as US imperialism; to right-wingers it translated roughly as world government.

The CFR was born at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, May 19, 1919, just as the World War I peace talks were winding down. The meeting to create an international planning group was called by "Colonel" Edward Mandell House, Texas oil man, power broker and presidential advisor, whom Wilson called his "alter ego." The Colonel’s Paris conference was geared to generate support from finance czars (the gold and dollars alliance of Rothschild and Rockefeller) and liberal internationalists. 

By 1950 CFR members and influencers filled many American cabinet posts. Its members were a new nobility: Nelson Rockefeller, Averill Harriman, Dean Rusk, Walter Lippman, and Allen Dulles, to name but a few.  

When Dulles died in 1969, President Nixon said, "In the nature of his task, his achievements were known to only a few." Dulles’ main tasks from the 1940s on were intelligence gathering, spreading disinformation and staging covert operations. He viewed this as a craft, and managed to elevate espionage to professional status. As much the architect as the prosecutor of the Cold War, he handled many of the CFR’s and CIA’s "dirty tricks." 

Back in 1919 Dulles had attended the Paris talks with “Colonel” House, then joined the US State Department. By the late 1920s he had become a partner in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which worked with Adolph Hitler’s financial agent to acquire the largest German monopolies, steel and chemicals, as clients. Dulles joined the board of the Henry Schroeder Trust banking group in the 1930s, while Schroeder helped to bankroll the Nazis. 

But allegiances changed when the war began. Dulles left the firm and began spying at a high level in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a new US intelligence and subversion network that evolved into the CIA. In 1944 the spymaster worked on two key covert missions: liquidating the Fuhrer and working out peace terms with other Nazis without letting Russia find out.

Also on Center for Global Research

Part Two: Spy Games, the Kennedy Case, and Secrets of the Illuminati 

Espionage is the business of secrecy, manipulation and deception. It breeds conspiracies, including hidden networks of mercenaries that transcend national interests. The Reagan years brought the public exposure of a “secret team” that pursued covert operations around the world for decades. But long before that, in the summer of 1944, another covert network blanketed Europe as the Allies broke into German territory. 

One spy on the job was George deMohrenschildt, a career agent who knew German intelligence well from work with the Abwehr 2 (Nazi spies within the US) before the war. In the 1940s he shot film in Poland, built ties with French and German agents, and scouted for oil interests. 

Allen Dulles was running OSS operations in Switzerland, while another agent, Joseph Retinger, promoted Polish liberation from Germany. Like deMohrenschildt, Retinger also had oil contacts; his were Mexican, dating back to the 1920s. He had worked in London with the exiled Polish government. In August 1944, at age 58, he parachuted into Nazi territory near Warsaw just before liberation, bringing money to Polish nationalists. 

Meanwhile, Dulles, who had urged US entry into the war on grounds of "enlightened selfishness," was handling other parts of the plan. With German Abwehr and diplomats he tried to assassinate Hitler, and although the plots failed, Hitler soon died — presumably a suicide. A year later, following Retinger’s lead, Dulles helped to launch the Cold War by scheming to cut Russia out of the surrender negotiations. The larger point is that the old networks did not simply dissolve, and may have led to President Kennedy’s death. 

The daring Joseph Retinger went on to become the philosophical father of a united Europe, as well as the man who urged Prince Bernhard to launch the Bilderberg conferences. Allen Dulles, of course, went well beyond the OSS, which amassed a $75 million budget and developed a worldwide network by the time Truman disbanded it. Dulles attended Bilderberg sessions, drafted the plan for the CIA, and ran the agency for nine years, beating back legislative drives to crack the web of secrecy. 

Dulles’ friends said he had a "zest for conspiracy." Be that as it may, he believed that, "We cannot safely limit our response to the Communist strategy of take-over solely to those cases where we are invited in by a government still in power." He felt so strongly about taking the initiative that the CIA secretly helped to oust liberal regimes in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.

Five years later the CIA saw a new threat: Fidel Castro. That’s where deMohrenschildt fits in. After the war, he resettled in Dallas, and renewed his ties with other anti-Communist Russians. He worked on contract with both the CIA and oil companies, his cover occupation "petroleum geologist." His walking tour from Dallas to Panama in 1961 landed him in Guatemala City, where he made contact with anti-Castro Cubans and mercenaries revving up for a failed invasion eventually called the Bay of Pigs. 

Two years later, working with money from right-wing Dallas oil baron H.L. Hunt, a core of CIA agents unhappy with Kennedy’s crackdown on "the company," and some bitter Bay of Pigs survivors, deMohrenschildt found a new mission: helping to orchestrate the assassination of a president. Coordinating things for him locally was an FBI informer, Jack Ruby. 

When John Kennedy visited Dallas in November, 1963 the American dream was shattered, the beginning of a slow but inexorable disillusionment with democracy. Ever since, millions have searched for the how and why of his assassination. Over the last 50 years, between 60% and 80% of Americans have accepted some kind of JFK conspiracy theory. A 2023 Galuppoll indicated that 65% believe others were involved. Only 29% thought Oswald acted alone. But even if it was a group, who was involved? The CIA, Cuba, mafia hitmen, all of the above? What role did Jack Ruby play? How about the cops or FBI?

In 1976, ex-agent Robert Morrow told his version of Kennedy’s murder to the House Assassination Committee. The assassination team, he claimed, combined CIA agents and anti-Castro Cubans with whom he had previously worked on schemes to run guns and pump bogus money into Cuba. On November 22, 1963, according to Morrow, it went this way: 

Three teams were in place by 12:30, linked via walkie-talkie to Guy Bannister, a former Chicago FBI chief who handled anti-Castro operations in New Orleans. Two men were stationed behind a stockade fence near the grassy knoll, with another two inside the county court building overlooking Dealey Plaza; one of them was Jack Ruby. 

Ruby had worked in Chicago in the 1950s, a mafia soldier accused at the time of murdering the treasurer of the Waste Handlers Union. In Dallas Ruby built ties with police while running a bar, and ran guns to Cuban exiles under orders from alleged CIA agent Clay Shaw. Ruby also worked with George deMohrenschildt, the veteran spy with ties to H.L. Hunt. 

Lee Oswald, the fall guy, was in the Texas Book Depository that day, according to Morrow, but probably on the second floor — while a "second Oswald" fired from the sixth-floor window. 

Ruby’s police contacts came in handy after the job. In The Assassination Tapes, researcher George O’Toole revealed that Ruby knew Sgt. Gerry Hill, who not only found the rifle shells used in the murder but arrived early at the shooting of Officer Tippit and helped to arrest Oswald. He may have arranged evidence to implicate Oswald before the investigation began. 

The coverup was almost instinctive. Hoover and the FBI were embarrassed at having used Oswald as an informer. The CIA was directly implicated, since several conspirators had worked on covert Cuban projects, even after the Bay of Pigs. False trails threw investigators off the scent, the most insidious of these promoted by a journalist, Lonnie Hudkins, shortly after Kennedy’s death. Hudkins asserted that the President was killed in retaliation by Cuban agents, including Oswald, when they learned about US plots to assassinate Castro. But Hudkins was a friend of Jack Ruby’s, working with him in gun smuggling days. He was also a former employee of both the CIA and H.L. Hunt. 

Morrow claimed that it wasn’t Cubans, but a group within the CIA that wanted to stop Kennedy’s drive to subordinate "the company" to the Defense Intelligence Agency. They and Cuban exiles also held a specific grudge — namely, that Kennedy had held back on naval support during the Bay of Pigs invasion. But oil interests and organized crime also had much to gain: a "liberated" Cuba open to investments and an end to organized crime investigations. 

Of course, that’s just Morrow’s take on the tragedy.

Since the 1960s countless theories have been advanced about the assassination. One that received more favorable press coverage was the work of Edward Epstein, He received $500,000 from Reader’s Digest for a tale about Oswald as a Marxist, who supposedly gave U-2 spy plane secrets to Russia and then worked through the FBI to kill Kennedy. But it was similar to Lonnie Hudkins’ version.

In the 1960s, when New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison started to investigate the Kennedy plot, Epstein had attacked him. That drew praise from CIA chief Richard Helms, a friend of Shaw’s, who circulated the writing as a model debunking of the prevailing conspiracy theory. While Epstein prepared his book, Legend, in the late 1970s, several important sources died suddenly, either shortly before or after meeting him. 

In March 1977, for example, deMohrenschildt talked with Epstein, and within minutes was found dead of gunshot wounds. The old spy had apparently agreed to testify on his part in Kennedy’s death. But digging into those events could have led to a new surge of suspicions. Like secret agents before him, deMohrenschildt turned out to be a disposable asset.

Kerry Thornley, who was in the Marines with Oswald and later founded the "Discordian" religion, developed an even stranger theory. He believed the culprits were the Bavarian Illuminati, a 200-year-old secret society. Oddly enough, Jim Garrison thought for a while that Thornley was the "second Oswald." In time, Thornley came to think that Garrison, and even his own friends, were Illuminati agents. 

"All conspiracy buffs are persecuted eventually," joked Robert Anton Wilson, author of an imaginative conspiracy-based trilogy of novels, Illuminatus. Wilson knew Thornley and watched his obsession consume him; yet Wilson managed to transcend paranoia, transforming the strange, divergent theories surrounding Kennedy’s death — and other conspiracies — into inventive satire. 

In Illuminatus the death of Kennedy is part of a speculative history which begins in Atlantis and extends into politics, mythology, and the occult. The central mystery is the true identity of the Illuminati: Are they defunct, a secret society founded in 1776 and suppressed by the Bavarian government within 10 years? Was the eye in the pyramid on US currency an Illuminati symbol given to Thomas Jefferson by a stranger in a black cloak? Is the Council on Foreign Relations a more recent manifestation of the original Illuminati? Are they controlled by bankers or anarchists, Jesuits or Satanists? Were they revived by the Nazis, or are they instead extraterrestrial visitors who want to help humanity evolve? 

I tend to agree with Wilson, who argues that the world is full of competing conspiracies, the sacred and profane, and has the good sense to maintain a dark sense of humor about them all. 

Pursuit of hidden knowledge leads naturally to belief in one conspiracy or another. Since I began looking into this complex web of connections, the theories have moved from the political fringe to the mainstream. Trump’s MAGA movement, not to mention QAnon, thrives on them, while his core supporters, advisers and allies look more and more like an open conspiracy of corporate gangsters and grifters. They have even begun to rewrite history. In Oklahoma, for example, history teachers will soon have to teach the so-called “theory” that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 presidential election from Trump. In several states educational gag orders have been proposed to limit the teaching and discussion of certain topics.

As Shelley Wolfe, the psychopathic oligarch in my sci fi novel, Dons of Time, explains, “We’re going to own history.” His goal, using advanced technology, is to decide which moments are “suitable for public consumption, and which to bury or ignore.” Or as Trump puts it, “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening." The phrase "fake news" is Trump’s way of telling people to rely on him and disbelieve anything inconvenient.

Personally, I continue to think that instability, chaos and lies, being stoked by elites and demagogues in a quest for cultural dominance and both political and economic power, could ultimately backfire, becoming the prologue to some evolutionary progress, an overdue awakening from primal fear. That doesn’t lessen the pain or impacts of repression and abuse in the meantime. But perhaps the current crisis can  open new possibilities and help point the way. 

If humanity does develop higher (as opposed to artificial) intelligence, the fear of conspiracies must be challenged and disarmed at its roots — secrecy and deception. This calls for more trust, compassion and positive energy than we appear to possess at the moment, something visionary, inclusive and empathetic to combat the cynicism, myopia and control inherent in the lust for power. 

"Positive energy is as real as gravity," wrote Wilson. If that epigram contains a vital kernel of truth, the antidote to negativity, secrecy and lies is to come back with all the positive energy you can muster. He called that the final secret of the Illuminati.

Earlier versions of this material were published by the Vermont Vanguard Press (1978), Upstart (1998) and Toward Freedom (2005).

Battling Truth Decay: A Social Virus Can Also Be Deadly

Corruption of truth has been contributing to social division and civic decay for years. Yet there are few consequences for peddling lies and paranoia, intentionally confusing speculation with fact, or perpetrating a vile premeditated hoax.

By Greg Guma

Conspiracy theories. They used to be good fun, provocative dinner table conversation and the focus of action movie plots. They were like certain parts of the body. Everybody had them and, most of the time, no one got hurt.

But that’s no longer true. Now believing in conspiracies can get people killed— like thinking a virus infecting millions is just more fake news— or cause confusion and havoc at the very least.

2019 Podcast

Listen to "The People’s Republic #5: Conspiracies" on Spreaker.

— Conspiracy History: From the Illuminati to Kennedy —

According to the FBI — itself the focus of considerable theorizing —  “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory are now officially a “domestic terror threat.” What’s QAnon? Also known as The Storm, it’s a secretive network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and also in Pizzagate, a related theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant — which didn’t actually have a basement.

Forget Jeffrey Epstein. These are the real perverts. Epstein is just another deep state victim. That’s how this thinking works.

Back in reality, supporters of QAnon have been linked to multiple threats, attempted acts of violence, even murders. And Trump has amplified Q messages dozens of times on Twitter. Just days before he destroyed part of downtown Nashville and killed himself last week, the Christmas Day bomber sent packages containing writings and videos promoting conspiracy theories to multiple people.

In October 2017,  QAnon jumped to the mainstream in the form of shirts and signs that were prominently visible at a Trump campaign rally in Tampa, FL. After that Trump met with several supporters of the conspiracy theory — at the White House. A QAnon supporter co-chaired a coalition group for Trump’s reelection campaign, and several believers have since been elected to Congress. In 2021, they are challenging the legitimacy of the last presidential election.

Do more people buy into conspiracies today? Or is it mainly more media coverage? Either way, for most of the last 50 years, between 60 and 80 percent of the country has believed in some form of JFK conspiracy theory. They’re obviously not all “conspiracy nuts.”

On the other hand, conspiracy thinking did cross over in 2016 — probably with foreign help — from Internet chat groups to mainstream news coverage. For example, a Yahoo News podcast, aptly named "Conspiracyland,” revealed that Russia’s foreign intelligence service was the origin of a hoax report that tied the murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, to Hillary Clinton. Washington police concluded that Rich was killed in a botched robbery. There was no proof that his murder had any political connections. But many people believed there were.

Among the violent conspiracy theories cited by the FBI is one involving a man who thinks Transportation Security Administration agents are part of a New World Order elite. Another focuses on the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a government-funded facility in Alaska that has been linked to everything from death beams to mind control. (See Podcast Extra for more on HAARP.)

Whatever the truth about HAARP, two men were arrested in 2019 for “stockpiling weapons, ammunition and other tactical gear in preparation to attack” the Alaska facility. They believe it is being used “to control the weather and prevent humans from talking to God.”

 

Source: Reliable Sources/CNN

In response to the spread of conspiracy-motivated violence, the FBI is applying the same radicalization analysis it has used against foreign terrorism. They essentially focus on the ideological motives. FBI Director Wray claims that the Bureau is only concerned with violence, not with what people believe. 

But the number of extremist categories has certainly grown. According to Michael German, a former FBI agent with the Brennan Center for Justice, “It’s part of the radicalization theory the FBI has promoted despite empirical studies that show it’s bogus.”

“They like the radicalization theory because it justifies mass surveillance,” the former agent claims. “If we know everyone who will do harm is coming from this particular community, mass surveillance is important. We keep broadening the number of communities we include in extremist categories.”

But this argument is also, basically, a conspiracy theory. And that’s the problem. It’s increasingly hard to tell which ones to give credibility.

Not all conspiracy theories are dangerous. Even the FBI admits that much. Some may even be benign. But others have led to attempted or successful violent attacks. The Pizzagate conspiracy, for example, led a 28-year-old man to invade a Washington, D.C., restaurant to rescue the children he believed were being kept there and fire an assault-style weapon.

Or the related, overarching Deep State conspiracy theory. The FBI cites an unnamed California man, arrested in December 2018 after being found with what appeared to be bomb-making materials in his car. He was allegedly planning to “blow up a satanic temple monument” in the Capitol rotunda in Springfield, Ill. Why? To “make Americans aware of Pizzagate and the New World Order, who are dismantling society.”

The FBI’s intelligence analysis doesn’t mention Alex Jones or InfoWars by name. But it does include some of the conspiracy theories frequently associated with him, especially the New World Order theory. Jones claimed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which 26 children were killed, was a hoax, a false flag operation intended as a pretext for the government to seize or outlaw firearms. The families of a number of victims sued Jones for defamation, saying his conspiracy-mongering contributed to death threats and online abuse.

Following the conspiracy trail a bit further, you quickly come to President Trump, who promotes a number of theories. Here’s a short list: He often talks about the Deep State, and frequently retweets output from QAnon. He’s the godfather of Spygate, which alleges that Obama and others wiretapped him, and a big pusher of the voter impersonation lie, aka the existence of millions of phantom voters. There is also white genocide theory, baked into his output, and of course, the Obama citizenship theory — which launched the movement that launched his presidential candidacy.

Yet it’s highly unlikely that the FBI will be investigating Trump for peddling conspiracies — no matter who they hurt — even after he is no longer in power. Instead, Michael C. McGarrity, the FBI’s assistant director of the counterterrorism division, has told Congress that the bureau now classifies domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: 

* racially motivated violent extremism 

* anti-government/anti-authority extremism 

* animal rights/environmental extremism, and

* abortion extremism, used to classify pro-choice and anti-abortion extremists

The new focus on conspiracy theories falls under the broader category of anti-government extremism. And that’s a slippery slope.

A decade ago, the most successful right wing conspiracy theory involved Obama as a secret Muslim. Before Trump piled on, millions of people already believed it. They also believed that secular humanists wanted to repress religion, and that liberals were plotting to confiscate people’s guns and push a “gay agenda.” All of that set the context for Trump’s election.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, however, there is the idea that 9/11 was an inside job — and all that entails. On the first 2021 broadcast of Meet the Press, Chuck Todd raised that theory from the conspiracy graveyard, comparing the idea to Sen. Ron Johnson’s allegations about election fraud. Tit for tat.

In the past, I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist myself —for example, for saying that we should know more about the attack on the Twin Towers. Nevertheless, I also think that a modern-day Reichstag fire at multiple locations qualifies as a radical, somewhat implausible conclusion.

On the other hand, despite the fact that conspiracy theories can be distractions, even deliberate deceptions, some are worth consideration, as long as we stipulate that they aren’t necessarily 100 percent accurate, and certainly resist exaggeration or total buy-in. But some theories definitely pose a real and present danger as incitements to violence.

The problem is that it has become difficult for millions of people to tell the difference between the strange and the dangerous in an era when facts have been so seriously devalued. There are so many possibilities, the standard of proof appears to be in decline, and the theories tend to evolve, expand and mutate rapidly in unexpected ways as they circulate through cyberspace. There is often also too little follow up to see whether new facts reinforce or discredit a particular theory.

For several years, corruption of truth has been contributing to social division and civic decay. Yet there are few consequences for peddling paranoia, intentionally confusing speculation with fact, or perpetrating a premeditated hoax. Instead, more actors are weaponizing these things to expand or hold onto power.

For all the false prophets, gross opportunists, and irresponsible rumor-mongers who currently threaten societies with truth decay, real accountability has been hard to get so far. But we do know who many of them are. 

So, how about this as a start? Let’s call them out, publicly, maybe even post their names on billboards, banner ads, and Trump’s Great Wall of Lies down at the border. And on the wall, please make the names big enough to be seen from space. Then let’s all stop listening to them.

Podcast Extra: REALITY CHECK

Let’s keep things in perspective — if that’s possible in such a confusing world — with a look back. Here’s some of what I observed on the same topic about ten years ago:

I usually resist the urge to challenge the controversial theories of fellow travelers, at least in public. Years ago, during an after-dinner discussion about Al-Qaeda after Osama, someone casually asserted that President Roosevelt knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and let it happen. No one objected or said a word. I thought about it, but let the moment pass.

Anything’s possible, right? Why be rude? But some theories and predictions are just too important. They are widely accepted as indisputable and part of an overall world view, usually linked with an anti-establishment ideology. They have practical consequences for social action, can spark deep divisions, and influence how people see and treat others. In some groups, if you question the conclusions of a prevailing theory you’re either a dupe or a collaborator.

Deep skepticism is often at the root, a good thing in general. After all, so much of what we once believed has turned out to be a lie, or at least a very selective version of reality. But still, shouldn’t there be standards? Also, why do some theories get all the attention while others, perhaps more credible ones, get buried? And can’t we at least call people to account when their claims repeatedly lead down false trails?

In 2004, when friends claimed that George W. Bush would invade someplace – probably Cuba – before the election, I was skeptical but said nothing. Four year later, when colleagues embraced the idea that either a) there would be a pre-election invasion – Syria this time, or b) federal troops would be used to install Bush as dictator and block Obama’s election – in short, Martial Law was imminent – I took bets.

In 2011, word spread in activist circles that the rise in US Drone strikes and NATO helicopter attacks inside Pakistan were harbingers of something bigger. The war was going to be extended into Pakistan with the ultimate goal of seizing that nation’s nuclear weapons. Turns out they went after Osama, although many people believe that is also a lie and bin Laden was killed years earlier. 

These death conspiracies sound like the classic one about a fake moon landing – we never went there, right? – including phony video and a staged photo of the National Security brain trust looking at…what? Seal Team Six on a Top Secret movie set?

But speaking of plots, depopulation has been getting some attention, specifically related to the use of covert technology to allegedly cause earthquakes and tsunamis. (Which bring me back to HAARP — The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a joint military program involved in classified experiments involving the ionosphere.) 

The basic claim is that it has been involved for decades in developing various types of weather-based and environmental warfare capabilities. It doesn’t help that the military has a name for this kind of thing – weather modification. (That’s why the two men were stockpiling ammunition for an attack.)

Still, using HAARP to cause earthquakes, wipe out regions and thin the herd is something else. The theory went like this: Supporters of the depopulation theory say Haiti was a transparent example, and claimed as evidence that a US task force was ready to invade before the earthquake occurred. And before that came the Indian Ocean tsunami, where people weren’t warned as soon as possible. Afterward came Fukushima, a full-scale assault not only on Japan, but on the oceans and atmosphere.

“The established pattern, with disasters and invasions, is incremental escalation,” explained a friend who supported the theory. Nuclear reactors in the US are therefore sitting ducks, just waiting for a HAARP attack. “And they have made it clear that an 80% reduction in world population is their goal,” he explained. Who made it clear? The overseers of the New World Order. Them.

Early in 2011 a rumor also began circulating that Wikileaks was a CIA plot. The idea was that the leaks actually supported the US imperial agenda around the world. In short, Wikileaks was a US intelligence con job that would be used to crack down on the Internet and advance a long-standing anti-civil liberties agenda. 

Evidence used to support this idea included the shutting down of Wikileaks servers in the US and the 2009 introduction of S. 773, The Cybersecurity Act, which, if it had passed, would have given the president the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet. We dodged a bullet there.

The problem was that, while the Wikileaks-CIA plot looked even then like a distraction, the Department of Homeland Security had actually begun to seize and shut down web domains without due process or trial. The focus was sites that supposedly “violate copyrights.” But the risk was that cyber censorship could be extended to, let’s say, combat alleged cyber terrorism.  A very slippery slope.

After several more websites were shut down, DHS held a hearing on the move to give the President more authority over the Internet during an emergency. Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Joe Lieberman noted that China “can disconnect parts of the Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too.” In this context, the Wiklieaks-CIA story may have been an attempt at disinformation, one that didn’t go viral.

(Additional comments from the August 8, 2019 podcast)