If you’ve followed me for a while, you might have seen one of ten articles I’ve written about the January 5th pipe bomb case at the U.S. Capitol in 2021. In fact, I’m working on my first non-fiction book about this case, but there are at least two trials that need to unfold before the story is complete. A criminal trial against the accused, Brian Cole, Jr., and a civil case by a Capitol police officer against the news outlet, The Blaze and two of their former reporters for defaming her as the suspect. You can read one of many comprehensive articles I’ve written here.
The case comes as we are seeing more allegations of “conspiracy” everywhere we look, mostly on social media, and it has me thinking about this fascination with conspiracies.
By the way, A major counter narrative by people who don’t believe Cole is the right suspect involves a government wide “fedsurrection,” designed to trick January 6 protesters into the Capitol to riot, blame it on Trump, impeach him again, and be done with him for good. The two J5 pipe bombs, the theory goes, were to divert police resources away from the Capitol allowing the protesters easier access to enter and cause havoc.
Continuing. According to Black's Law Dictionary, a conspiracy is a combination or confederacy between two or more people to commit an unlawful act, or to achieve a lawful act through unlawful means. It is treated as a partnership in crime where the core offense is the agreement itself.
Modern definitions at the state and federal level require one or more of the conspirators to commit an act in furtherance of the conspiracy. The overt act doesn’t have to be itself illegal. Think buying ski masks as part of the plan after you and your college roommate agree to rob the First National Bank. You don’t have to rob the bank to be guilty of conspiracy.
Generally, at the state and federal level, the punishment for conspiracy is the same as if you completed the crime. At the federal level, 18 USC 371 is the general conspiracy statute that can be charged by itself.
A lot of people, me included, blame the 1997 Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts movie Conspiracy Theory for the modern conspiracy movement. In the movie, Gibson’s character flits in and out of numerous conspiracy theories, one of which turns out to be true. (In the movie.) The one involving secret government programs and mind control. That’s based loosely on an actual CIA program, MK Ultra. If you are not aware of it, you can read about MK Ultra here.
The movie was awful with many critics panning it as almost comedic. Today’s conspiracy theorists often refer back to MK Ultra as the basis for their beliefs in wide-spread government conspiracies, and they see MK Ultra’s in many stories. Here are just a few:
Obviously, the J5 pipe bomb I mentioned; the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 attacks, the Epstein files, the Thomas Crooks/Butler PA assassination attempt against former president and then candidate Trump, the Tyler Robinson assassination of Charlie Kirk, allegations that Israel talked Donald Trump into war with Iran, the moon landing, and the granddaddy of them all, the JFK assassination in 1963.
The concept of time is important. For years, most did not consider the JFK assassination an unsolved conspiracy. It wasn’t until the Zupruder film became public in 1975 that the magic bullet and the grassy knoll widely entered our lexicon.
When the former Navy SEAL/author Jack Carr interviewed fellow author Brad Metzler about the JFK assassination, Metzler posed an interesting theory about conspiracies. That we tend to think of the conspirators in terms of our current national bogyman. Those thought to be involved in JFK’s murder went from being the CIA, to the Mafia, to the Russians, depending on who we feared the most at the time. You can see that podcast here
I blame Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie with reviving the JFK conspiracy theories, as many people viewed the film as a docudrama, not something Stone has admitted he totally made up.
Time factors into the other conspiracy theories too. I’m old enough to remember watching the moon landing on T.V. For decades, nobody believed it was faked as part of a government conspiracy to trick Americans and the Soviets into believing we won the space race. A majority of young people today now believe it was fake.
I worked on both the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks. For years, until social media became a significant part of life, conspiracy theories about these attacks were considered fringe. Today, many people believe the government was in on them. Especially the collapse of Tower 7. Memo to the file, if you believe the government destroyed Tower 7, you also have to believe they were in on the whole plot that killed three thousand of your fellow Americans. It’s nonsense.
In the case of the J6 “fedsurrection,” Epstein, and Robinson, and Crooks, social media has allowed people to jump straight to the conspiracy theory mantra. And what a lot of those conspiracy theories have in common are prominent social media figures like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson leading the charge.
Which causes aspiring social media superstars to jump on the crazy train for fun and profit. Candace Owens is believed to make $10M a year on her podcast. Carlson makes $20M. Jones had a net worth of approximately $250M before being sued, maybe into bankruptcy, over his conspiracy theory almost nobody else promoted or believed about the Sandy Hook School shooting.
Rogan is a little different. He hosts presidents, authors, comics, athletes, and many other people who are either celebrities or people of interest. But he also has a lot of conspiracy theorists on, and he’s a big moon landing skeptic. He said last week he thinks Candace Owens is correct about the Charlie Kirk assassination. He’s estimated to make $87M a year on his podcast, and has a $250M deal with Spotify.
You can see why aspiring grifters and hucksters are popping up all over social media pushing outrageous conspiracies. It can be a very lucrative business.
I’ve gotten pushback being a conspiracy theory skeptic that goes something like, “Yeah, how about Russia Collusion, Covid, and the Hunter Biden Laptop story? We told you those were conspiracies too, and we were right.”
My answer is, “I’m glad you asked about those.”
Because my BS detector for uncovering what is and is not a conspiracy theory centers on one thing. Evidence.
I was an early skeptic about what we were being told about all three of those cases. (Russia Collusion, Covid origin, and the Biden laptop.) And I can prove how quickly actual evidence came out, which allowed skeptics to question the narratives we were being told about them at the time, often by those in government.
Back to Black’s Law Dictionary which defines evidence as any-thing—including testimony, documents, and physical objects—that tends to prove or disprove the truth of an alleged fact. It is also described as the collective mass of things presented before a court or tribunal in a dispute.
The allegations Donald Trump was actively colluding with Russia started in the summer of 2016. There were two vectors: The famous Steele Dossier, and allegations that a low level Trump volunteer, George Papadopoulos, told an Australian Ambassador in May of 2016 that he heard from a professor in Malta, that the Russians had compromising materials from Hillary Clinton’s emails. That’s it.
Recall the Clinton email scandal started in 2013, three years earlier when a Clinton confidant, Sidney Blumenthal, accidentally disclosed she’d been using a private server and not her State Department email as Secretary of State.
That turned into “Trump was colluding with Russia,” because of the 2016 DNC hack attributed to Russia, even though Papadopoulos said he was talking about the 2013 emails case, not the DNC breach.
Part two was the so-called Steele Dossier that contained allegations Trump was colluding with Russia. In the summer of 2016, before the election, the Dossier was well known among journalists and politicos in D.C. Steele was urging them to out it for him which none would do until late October through early January. Mostly because a lot of them knew it was fake too.
My point is there was reams of documentary evidence, that so-called Russia Collusion was false. Not that everybody chooses to believe that for ideological or political reasons, but it was demonstrably false based on the evidence. And lack of evidence.
Ditto for Covid and the lab leak theory. Early in 2021, the American people were told by government officials that Covid was caused by animal to human transmission from a bat in a Chinese wet market. Not everybody bought it. There was a viral laboratory that experimented on the Covid virus just down the street from the wet market in Wuhan. Non-scientists and everyday Americans were asking, “Maybe it’s related.” People challenged the efficacy social distancing, shutdowns, and vaccine information. The government worked with social media to shut some of it down.
In October, the Great Barrington Declaration came out that challenged much we were being told about Covid, and today, it’s almost accepted science by people willing to look at the evidence that everything we were initially told was not true. Like Russia Collusion, there was a body of evidence to look at.
That the Biden laptop had “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation,” was literally a disinformation operation started by a former acting CIA Director and signed onto by 51 former intelligence professionals. It’s not debatable that Michael Morell was asked by the Biden campaign to generate the memo as a debate talking point for Biden. It worked. Joe Biden brought it up as evidence the laptop story was bogus. News organizations and social media sites shut down any discussion of Hunter’s laptop.
My point? We eventually got Morell’s congressional testimony and documentary evidence from the repair shop Hunter Biden dropped off the laptop, as well as FBI reports that the story was true.
There was actual testimonial and documentary evidence that all three of these conspiracies were not true, and the evidence came out fairly quickly.
January 6, 2021 was almost six years ago. 9/11, twenty-five years ago. Oklahoma City, thirty-six years ago. The moon landing, forty-seven years ago. And the JFK assassination, fifty-three years ago. Yes, there are theories, but theories are not evidence. No substantial evidence exists that these were part of government conspiracies.
And while the cases involving Butler, PA, the Kirk assassination, the Epstein files, and Israel/Iran are newer conspiracies, I’ll leave you with this writ-large caveat about conspiracies:
The old saying that two people can keep a secret as long as one of them is dead, is true.
WHAT I’M WORKING ON:
A very short update, because the most important thing to know is that my latest novel, GRAY GHOST, An Air America Thriller, comes out one week from today. And if you are a subscriber to this newsletter, you are going to get the first three chapters before that. So if you are not already subscribed, go ahead and do that, and pre-order the book here.
