There’s an old meme that you’ve surely seen. To paraphrase, it holds that conspiracy nuts are really just six months ahead of everybody else.
Then there’s the other meme that asks if you’ve apologized to your conspiracy theorist friends for doubting them.
These days, we’re beginning to shed our assumptions that the comfortable, boring normal we grew up with, in which most cops and politicians were honest and we could trust our institutions to act in beneficent ways, would continue. Americans know that those assumptions don’t hold anymore, and we’re beginning to come to terms with the fact that we’re in decline as a country, and active measures — and real reforms — have to be engaged if we don’t want to see the end of our republic as we know it.
But that realization doesn’t necessarily mean all of the conspiracy theories out there are true.
Here’s the thing: the line about how the conspiracy nuts are six months ahead of everybody else has a little validity to it. The thing about your conspiracy nut friends is that most of them are pretty intelligent people, and intelligent people tend to be pretty good at picking up patterns and connecting dots from them.
Of course, without all the information, and there is so much information out there both available and hidden that it’s really tough to get a full picture of the kinds of subjects about which so-called conspiracy theories are advanced, you’re bound to be wrong often when you see those patterns.
And that’s why people who attempt to see past the facade the people who run our institutions usually put up, especially when there are shenanigans or utter incompetence afoot, often come out looking like nuts.
Who knows? Maybe the five items below aren’t part of a sinister pattern our evil elites are constructing with our demise in mind.
Or maybe they are.
What we can say is that these are interesting times. And when the Chinese coined that “may you live in interesting times” line, they meant it as a curse. This week felt a little like that curse was paying out.
For a long time, conservatives and others have been screaming that the “mainstream” media was nothing more than a collection of propaganda outlets pushing out narratives for the entrenched power elite, and the response to that is, well, all together now…
“That’s a conspiracy theory!”
OK, fine, but what about this?:
“Anyone who isn’t confused really doesn’t understand the situation.” Those words, from CBS icon Edward R. Murrow, came to mind this week after I spoke with journalists at the network.
There is trouble brewing at Black Rock, the headquarters of CBS, after the firing of Catherine Herridge, an acclaimed investigative reporter. Many of us were shocked after Herridge was included in layoffs this month, but those concerns have increased after CBS officials took the unusual step of seizing her files, computers and records, including information on privileged sources.
The position of CBS has alarmed many, including the union, as an attack on free press principles by one of the nation’s most esteemed press organizations.
I have spoken confidentially with current and former CBS employees who have stated that they could not recall the company ever taking such a step before. One former CBS journalist said that many employees “are confused why [Herridge] was laid off, as one of the correspondents who broke news regularly and did a lot of original reporting.”
That has led to concerns about the source of the pressure. He added that he had never seen a seizure of records from a departing journalist, and that the move had sent a “chilling signal” in the ranks of CBS.
That’s from Jonathan Turley, writing at the Hill. Is Turley a conspiracy theorist? That’s not his reputation.
You’ll remember that Catherine Herridge not two months ago was talking about the strong possibility of a “black swan” national security event happening this year…
Then she gets fired, and CBS — which is as Deep State Media as you can get, so much so that Herridge, a former Fox News investigative reporter, never really fit in there — seizes all of her work product.
I hope she made copies.
The electric vehicle mandates and the never-ending fuel efficiency demands by Democrats at the federal and, where they can get away with it, the state level have always been fodder for many to allege that taking away Americans’ freedom of movement rather than saving the planet was the aim.
Yes, but…
“That’s a conspiracy theory!”
Is it?
These draconian and silly moves — coming for your water heater and gas stove, stopping you from eating meat, taking away your plastic straws and plenty else — carry virtually no persuasive justification. We all know that. But yet the narrative continues.
Then you have something like the city of Chicago now filing a “climate change” lawsuit against BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips this week. They’re not the first to do it, but it’s starting to look like the legal system is just corrupt enough that one of these suits will stick, at least at the district court level.
What I wrote about this earlier in the week was that those oil companies ought to embargo the city of Chicago for two weeks. Just close the 200-something gas stations they operate in the Windy City, and watch Chicago descend into chaos. Then ask the idiot mayor, Brandon Johnson, if he’s ready to drop his stupid lawsuit. There aren’t enough consequences for these evil ignoramuses.
But of course, Brandon Johnson isn’t really in charge of Chicago. The people who are? They’re not stupid like he is. But they’re very, very evil — and attempting to bankrupt Big Oil in order to “save the planet” simply means only the rich elites get to drive around in their cars.
You? You get to ride the subway. Or a bicycle, like they do in all those chaotic Third World cities.
“It’s just a conspiracy theory!” goes the complaint about those who point out the risks that artificial intelligence poses to our understanding of how knowledge and truth might survive in an AI age. This is a topic that will only get hotter and hotter.
I actually use a lot of AI for image generation because what I’ve found out in my years of being in independent media is that photojournalism is a field populated by a whole lot of snarling leftists who are attached to the most unscrupulous lawyers you’ve ever seen, and the only way to ensure these people won’t attempt to rake you over the coals even if you adhere to the most rigid and widely accepted principles of fair use is AI.
But the AI image generators operate on the garbage-in, garbage-out principle. And it isn’t just that if you give the generator a bad prompt it’ll give you a bad image. Many of them suffer from atrocious programming by the radical snowflakes who built them.
Take Google’s new Gemini AI image generator, which is revealed to be stupid to such an extent that it’s actually dangerous:
Here it is apologizing for deviating from my prompt, and offering to create images that "strictly adhere to the traditional definition of "Founding Fathers," in line with my wishes. So I give the prompt to do that. But it doesn't seem to work pic.twitter.com/6dfb4Exqsg
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 21, 2024
I asked Google Gemini to generate images of the Founding Fathers. It seems to think George Washington was black. pic.twitter.com/CsSrNlpXKF
— Patrick Ganley (@Patworx) February 21, 2024
Google Gemini can’t generate a “Norman Rockwell style image of American life in the 1940s” because Rockwell “idealized” American life pic.twitter.com/lpUV39tSUb
— Echo Chamber (@echo_chamberz) February 21, 2024
Gemini is terrible. Adobe Firefly, which is actually pretty good at generating images depending on what you ask it to do, is similarly infused with stupid wokeness.
Well, at least in two out of the four images, Adobe managed not to deliver Zulus instead of Vikings.
Here’s another one. This one is a hoot…
Here’s the problem with all of this: when woke propaganda is plugged into the core code of these AI apps, not just with imagery but more importantly with text, and then when people start using AI to do research or get their news, we will lose the truth.
And that isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s reality, and it’s in your face.
Oh, how they scoff at you when you bring this one up. But if the federal government had nothing to do with turning a protest into a riot on Jan. 6 that the power elite could monetize to drain the America First movement of its momentum and throw cold water on the outrage about the 2020 presidential election, then how do you explain the bizarre pipe bombs story?
Luke Rosiak at the Daily Wire had a fascinating piece containing an interview with Kenneth Capolino, a former Capitol Police officer who is now the RNC’s director of security. He discussed the pipe bombs found at the DNC’s headquarters and the Capitol Hill Club, a big hangout for Republican politicos across the street from the RNC’s headquarters. The whole thing is well worth a read; it recounts bizarre fact after bizarre fact about those bombs as well as the utter disinterest in finding or punishing the culprits.
Go ahead and read it. Then you can come back and explain any of the pipe bomb story without conceding that the federal role in the chaos of that day wasn’t quite active.
Finally…
Most people concede this isn’t a conspiracy theory, but you can still find some of the Haley boosters who’ll deny that she’s a stooge for the Democrats and the ruling elite in an effort to throw sand in the gears of Donald Trump’s campaign.
The fact that most of her votes in the first two primary contests of this cycle came from Democrats crossing over party lines to vote for her was a dead giveaway. Some of the stupid things she’s said on the campaign trail haven’t helped her cause much, either.
But this? I don’t know how you can refuse to concede the question after this:
Nimarata ‘Nikki’ Haley’s failing presidential campaign is being bankrolled by over 5,200 former donors to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, lending credence to Donald Trump’s contention that she is only remaining in the race to try and damage him ahead of the general election.
The Biden donors underwriting Haley include 1,600 people who donated over $500,000 in January alone — her biggest month for donations ever, despite the fact she was crushed by Trump in Iowa, where she placed third, and New Hampshire.
That National Pulse piece noted that Haley’s top backer has been Jeffrey Epstein Pedo Island A-lister Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn fame; Hoffman’s other anti-Trump exploit was his bankrolling of the E. Jean Carroll fake rape/defamation litigation against Trump. Nobody who’s a conservative would have anything to do with Hoffman, and yet Haley took his money eagerly. He’s not giving her any more, not because she’s rejected him but because he realizes he’s setting that money on fire by funding her campaign.
But hey — most political candidates these days are frauds and shills for the power elite. What’s one more at the end of the day? We should at least be able to identify them when it’s this obvious.
