Not So Crazy After All
A friend on social media asked her audience – including me – to provide two instances in which conspiracy theories were later proven to be fact, so I told her that I would give it a shot. Said friend and I agree roughly 98% of the time and, of course, respect each other's opinions. But she thinks that conspiracy theories are bunk, and I think that some of them are valid.
First, I think it’s helpful to present the definitions of the words ‘conspiracy,’ and ‘theory,’ along with the definition of the phrase itself. Why? Because sometimes – many times – we think that we know what widely-used words and terms mean, then, with a little cursory investigation, we find that we don’t.
Conspiracy: from Dictionary.com.
Many people forget definition number 5 - that morally and legally neutral conspiracies exist.
Theory:
Related: hypothesis.
Already been substantiated by data.
(Be advised that the first step of the scientific method mentioned is left out. That step? Observation.)
Now for the term conspiracy theory. Without the pejorative connotation the term holds, it is simply a plan which two or more people make and execute while keeping its existence and/or details to themselves. As I already pointed out, that plan is sometimes villainous, but need not be. What makes it a theory? When others outside of the web of secrecy observe facts and speculate about the plan’s existence, its nature, and/or its goals, they are theorizing because they don’t have all the facts, just some of them.
Now for the meat.
[T]hey are the 51 former intelligence who said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a “Russian disinformation operation.” This assertion was made right before the 2020 presidential election while the laptop story was being censored by Twitter and others. Any who mentioned the story had their accounts suspended and the story removed. The New York Post was one of the most shocking cases.
These two conspiracies were just the crowning glory on a long practice by pre-Elon Musk Twitter of muzzling conservative voices and stories.
Most of us conservatives knew that our accounts were being throttled along with our follower counts. Anecdotally speaking, my own follower count and languished between 6700 and 6900 for about three years, but when Musk became the CEO, the count has gone upward from that very day. Additionally, I’m seeing accounts that I haven’t seen in years.
(Accounts that were far more influential than mine were banned outright; many of them have been restored.)
The old Twitter cabal became emboldened by this practice - after all what could any of us do about it? - and laid out a secret rationalization - now exposed - for banning the Biggest Fish of them all, Donald J. Trump.
Obviously, only they knew the particulars of their censorship practices, while we peons could only speculate about it, using the information we had observed and/or knew to be true.
We could only formulate conspiracy theories about these things.
A while back, I said the following:
Now, the friend mentioned earlier is most definitely not crazy, but I hope that recent events have broadened her perspective. Yours, too.
Good one. I think many liberals still don't know the facts, whether by the action of refusing to read the facts, or the design of the mainstream in still not allowing the facts to be known. I am using the "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, is there still sound?" question. Yes, of course there is still sound, but no one heard it. If progressives and liberals don't see the facts, and don't know the facts, they are still facts.
Carroll Quigley has a book about conspiracies. You can download a pdf of it for free from his website, carrollquigley dot net