Vince “Bananas” Foster.
Search engines generally do a lousy job of separating fact from fiction, even if algorithms for certain subjects have been tweaked to filter out most of the garbage in top search results.
MK Ultra is a classic example of a secret government operation that was not uncovered by curious amateur investigators. Thus it was not the subject of a conspiracy theory.
There are virtually no examples of far-flung conspiracies being unraveled in this manner. None. Criminal investigations, leaks and solid investigative reporting can turn them up. Joe Schmoe and his Internet buddies? Not a chance.
As I’ve mentioned previously, the only example I know of a major conspiracy* being outed by amateurs involves the Dreyfus Affair in France around the turn of the 20th century. In that case a handful of Dreyfus supporters, authors and newspaper types were, through long-term dogged effort, able to expose a military conspiracy first to frame Dreyfus for espionage and then to cover up the truth.
*I use the qualifier “major” because there are undoubtedly examples of traditional minor criminal conspiracies reported and exposed by individuals. The big stuff like the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing etc. is a different story.
There are many CTers, not all are racist, not all are stupid. Some want the sense that they’re in a special group that’s in the know about something, thinking themselves better than the common guys who believe the Warren Report or that the moon landings happened or whatever. Some want to embrace the CTs that make people that they hate be the bad guys, like Antifa and BLM being behind the failed coup in DC in January. People will believe what they want, and for some objective truth doesn’t exist. Paying attention to them or trying to talk them out of their nuttery is a waste of time.
There is at least one conspiracy theory underlying MK Ultra that I can think of, and that’s the theory that the CIA and the MK Ultra program had some connection to Charles Manson and conspired to impede the investigation and prosecution of the Tate/LaBianca murders.
I don’t really believe this is true. A writer named Tom O’Neill took a hard fall down the rabbit hole with this one while writing a story on the prosecutorial screw-ups around the Manson murder, but although there were a LOT of suspicious events and connections, he never quite managed to pull it all together in a way that made sense -even though he let the effort subsume his life. But the existence of MK Ultra makes a theory like this seem more plausible. When powerful people and organizations are caught doing big bad things in secret, it changes the tone around some of the CT’s. While they still might be untrue, they aren’t really crazy in the way that theories like 9/11 and JADE HELM are.
The other one like this is the theory that the Kennedy’s and/or the CIA had Marilyn Monroe murdered. Again, I don’t think this one is true, but considering the events around her death, the attempts to clean up the scene and the fact that she had illicit relationships with both Kennedy brothers and probably saw Bobby the day she died, makes that one less than crazy even if it it’s not true.
I think the term “conspiracy theory” is flung about way too freely these days. Bad actors will try to label the people that look too hard at their misdeeds as conspiracy theorists. IF someone had sniffed out MK Ultra, they probably would’ve been dismissed as conspiracy theorists. I try not to let the CT label keep me from looking at something unless it’s full out crazy.
When a massive conspiracy is proposed, the best answer is to show us the evidence.
If evidence is lacking and all proponents have is “the government has done some bad things so you must respect my bizarre theory”, then sorry, not buying.
And IF your mama had wheels, she’d be a shopping cart.
As I’ve said before, I’m disgusted by the amount of attention given to outlandish conspiracy theories for the following main reasons: they’re a big waste of time and energy (including the time and resources used for debunking them), they promote distrust and hatred of good people in and out of government, cause denial of problems needing solution (i.e. climate change) and lead to rejection of valuable technologies, and lastly, they’re generally so mind-numbingly illogical and stupid that they offend anyone with decent critical thinking capacity.*
*which should be instilled in children starting at a young age. It’s my soapbox and I’ll rant if I want to. 
Failure of imagination, matching the intended audience.
Dan
“The fact that there is no evidence available shows that everyone who knows about it has been silenced!”
“And that fact that you are flapping your gums about it to one and all without consequence means…?”
Wait, that was an engineered version of sickle-cell anemia. Or was it crack cocaine? Why aren’t all black people gone, already?
Dan
I know one “public” who is convinced; betcha there are others…
There’s cash in it? “Power” over the ding-dongs?
Isn’t “knowing” a thing next door to “believing”, maybe in the same bedroom?
I prefer the descriptor “batshit crazy”.
Perhaps my mediocre mind is misunderstanding you, and you’re not really contradicting yourself.
Dan
I used to jokingly prank people that Delaware doesnt exist, it was just a big building full of drawers and offices for Corporations. I asked- have you ever been there? Do you know anyone from there? One person claimed to have driven thru there, but I pointed out that road signs are easily faked.
We even, long afterwards had a SDMB thread about it, and there was a Tumblr page on it, all starting after my pranks in the 1980s. Of course, that doesnt mean the jokes originated from me, it is a peculiar state.
My dad had a friend that worked there, he came to America afterwards, my Dad had met him in the Pacific Theatre. Sure, they knew they worked on code breaking and stuff, but not Enigma. The Nazis had a lot of codes. Intercepted spy messages and the like.
Well, we know that Oswald was the lone assassin. But who backed him up, did he get orders? Thinking that Oswald didnt pull the trigger is a crazy but thinking Oswald had people behind him is not so crazy. Same thing with James Earl Ray, he certainly pulled the trigger but did he have support?
That was my response when The Davinci Code first came out, and a friend totally bought into the “fact” that it was full of secrets. And the Catholic Church had spent centuries killing to suppress those secrets.
So I asked him “So, how did Dan Brown die?”
“Huh, I’m pretty sure he’s…”
“Under cover! Witness Protection, under 24 hour guard, right?”
“What??”
“Uh oh, what about the people who’ve already read the book? The Pope’s assassins will be after them… especially anyone who’s mentioned that they believe the secrets. Omigod, have you talked about the book?!? In public?!?”
“Very funny.”
Well, there’s one. A theory. But with some truth in that while not actually rue.
The CIA didn’t invent crack cocaine. Which is often the presented CT. Did their behaviour in funding unofficial armed rebellion in Central America produce an overabundance of cocaine in the early 80s on the West Coast of the US? Almost certainly. The CIA have done a bunch of weird and illegal stuff, especially pre-Carter who cracked down on it. They were involved in the heroin trade in South East Asia during the Vietnam War period. They did attempt to assassinate Castro in an almost hilarious way.
It may have been a byproduct of their actions, but not deliberate. It might even be a suitable and beneficial action to a government which isn’t going to get the Black vote even. This could be an indirect effect of their actions which mutates into a CT about it being deliberate. So in a way it’s an educational thing about the world, but needs shot down on actual details.
The trouble is not simply with Conspiracy Theories, it is that they have become highly weaponised in recent years by the far right, and crazy christians.
I tried engaging a friend in dialogue about why he, as a cook/photographer, thought that 5G was causing illnesses “something is going on and it might be to do with covid” and he might believe me who has worked in the Telecoms industry in the last 20 years, so I took his phrases and watched some videos. Insane people, a lot of them. A lot of apocalyptic christians which merge RF fear, Anti-science and a whole lot of lying, coming up with something based around the numbers 2130 which is pretty much about the rapture, or being rounded up and killed. Anyone sane watching/listening to these will shoot down easily. Such questions I asked quickly were:
“They don’t know the difference between a bacteria and a virus”
“They are using 4G/5G and Wifi as terms interchangable, they don’t even know they are very different technologies”
“Why was head the of a department of Vodaphone in Swindon” (the type of detail which sways the uninformed) " also the head pastor in an evagelical church now?"
I eventually concluded the real culprit here was the long term usage of very high strength cannabis had reduced all critical reasoning and basic questions such as “I don’t know f**k all about that subject really”.
However, under all of this, they have largely been a source of entertainment for a lot of us for a long time. It is certainly possible for a rational person to read up about such things and recognise the nuggets of truth, and laugh at the conclusions made. There’s a highly entertaining internet video called “A rich mans Trick”, which clearly seems to have been funded from russian propaganda. Over it’s three and a half hours, it concludes and names around nine different shooters in the JFK assassination, most of which missed. It explains weird shit with clearly weird shit back. It has moments of truth, but tellingly some of the basic information is wrong (Prince Phillip is said to have had a brother who was a high ranking member of the Nazis/SS. He hasn’t got any brothers. They are referring to a Brother in Law, which is clearly a different thing). You can see the mad leaps, you can see the paranoid schizophrenic reasoning. It’s like a window into lunancy. And interesting.
That has been their function for a long time. To be heard and laughed at. Apparently there’s a definite link between believing ONE of them completely once, to believing ALL of them, that border crossed. It might be linked to depressive personalities and binary thinking.
That, however, has been weaponised to be a window into lunancy and they seem to be a completely different thing now than they were ten years ago. I’d hazard that there is a difference between someone willing to listen out to explanations for the weirdness of the JFK assassination, a normal conspiracy theory, and a nutjob one such as the Paedoleader bloodsuckers.
On an interesting side note, a lot of scifi concepts seem to have entered into the science explanations of some of them. Such as the anti-vaxxers belief in tracking often ends up with reference to the type of nano-bot only seen in the likes of the Stargate series (SG-1/Atlantis). Nanobots do exist at the moment. But nothing like that. That difference seems unimportant to them, and I assume that they think the 10 years since they finished broadcasting had filled that gap in technology, the same way we had Star Trek transporters in the late 70s.
People often mention the science fiction story “A Logic Named Joe” by Murray Leinster when discussing the internet. Unfortunately, “I Remember Babylon” by Arthur C. Clarke now seems more appropriate.
As far as critical thinking, I wish I could remember the source “If you wanted to destroy the United States, all that you would have to do is to give it the current educational system.”
Via the great skeptoid site, I see that none of the CIA 8 assassination attempts of Castro were even close, the one with the poison cigars (which I always think of as comedy exploding cigars), were delivered somewhere, there was no evidence they got anywhere near Catro.
The conspiracy theory was that the CIA was brainwashing people into being assassins. What the CIA did was henious, but they weren’t making robot killers.
Everyone knows transporter tech was bought up and suppressed by Big Oil. Sheesh!
From what I’ve seen, anti-5G fearmongering (much like antivaccine advocacy) comes from all over the political spectrum and cannot be linked predominantly to right-wingers. Groups that proclaim themselves to be pro-environment have hopped on the bandwagon. For instance, the Organic Consumers Association views 5G as “Technology vs. Humanity”. Others who appear to have left-of-center leanings (or refer to themselves as apolitical, like Erin Brockovitch) espouse similar views.
They seemed to have pulled in kooksih groups which have sympathy for full lunatic end of the spectrum, ie: Organic food industry has overlapping with Veganism also has overlapping with the full kooks, the “Homeopathic industry” (I wave my hand and you’re cured. Here’s some garlic as well). What some of these industries do have in common is often supporters with binary thinking, and once you’ve got that, you’re an exploitable loon. I’m not saying the likes of Vegans are loons, but there are a perchance for them to believe in a singular “truth” which will make them think eating organic fruit will protect them from covid. I know at least one of those.