Is it true that there is a little bit of truth in every conspiracy theory or prejudice?

[noname223]

I heard it more often about prejudices. But recently I heard it about conspiracy theories.
Today I read an article on the Epstein files in Der Spiegel. The magazine does a disastrous job when it comes to conspiracy theories. It denies every single one of them. And if one of them turns out to be true they are even wrong when covering it. I read an article about the Epstein files and I could not grasp how wrong they were. They called the actions of the Trump administration a proof for maximum transparency. So it is maximum transparency deleting files related to Trump after they released them. Without mentioning a reason?

I had a debate with a friend today who is annoyed by some family members who talked too much about conspiracy theories. And arguibly I think they believed a lot of bullshit. But his take everyone who believes conspiracy theories lacks ambiguity tolerance and was brainwashed isn't nuanced. In my opinion this is also of proof for the lack of ambiguity tolerance.

I studied politics at the university. And I think most lecturers were against all conspiracy theories. One of them used the lab theory as proof for absurd conspiracy theories after US intelligence services considered it very likely to be true. I think some see conspiracy theories as anti-intellectualism. I can remember where a conspiracy head talked in a lecture like a waterfall about vaccines. It was so fucking cringe. He couldn't stop talking about them.

My take is: comparing people who only believe conspiracy theories and people who mostly read mainstream press the latter one's come closer to reality. Though, I think the way the media reports about stories is still very biased, distorted and you won't get the full picture. The way media reports is skewed and often gets it wrong. But you won't believe in lizard, vaccines that implant microchips etc.

I think there is a lot of talk about conspiracy theories due to the Epstein files. It is ironic Qanon spreaded theories about pedophile elites. And it turned out their guy Trump was among them. So there was at least some skewed truth in it.

They said vaccines had no side effects. At least in my country. It turned out a small percentage got long covid through them. It was more likely to get it through covid itself. And I would take the shot again. But doctors were scared to talk about this because they were afraid being called a conspiracy theorist.

A friend mentioned 9/11 conspiracy theories. I said something like the crisis actor conspiracy theories are absurd. And people like Alex Jones rather deflect from real conspiracy theories (like his reporting on the Trump/Epstein relation). I think an inside job is very unlikely but not impossible. Maybe the small truth is: US intelligence services profited from the attacks and used them for their agenda. They creared a surveillance state and mass surveillance. Things that turned out to be true eventually.

For the moon landing I have no core truth. But I don't know the theory enough. For flat earth I used an argument of the philsopher Markus Gabriel it is real in our imagination and stories like Santa Clause therefore it exists. But I think his argument is more intricate. The lizard theory is end game bullshit.

Now to the second question. I heard this quite often that there is a core truth for every prejudice. My first instinct was this is totally wrong and only ignorant people think that. I think Slavoj Ziziek used a very specific example in RT Russia show about fake news.

I should go to sleep soon. I will use an AI summary to give you an overview alternatively you can simply watch the video.


The Illusion of Fact-Based Truth
Žižek argues that the most dangerous form of "Fake News" is not based on invented facts, but on selective truth. He posits that a report consisting entirely of verifiable, accurate data can still function as a profound lie.

The Example of Pre-Nazi Germany
He provides a provocative example regarding antisemitic propaganda in Germany before Hitler's rise to power:

• Selective Data: A writer could compile a book on "Jewish influence" in Germany, citing accurate statistics showing that Jews held a high percentage of positions in banking, journalism, and art criticism.
• The Deceptive Narrative: Even if every single statistic in that book is true ("no fake news" in the literal sense), the work remains fundamentally a lie because of its antisemitic intention.
• The Mechanism of the Lie: The lie is created by the way the author selects certain facts while ignoring others. By isolating specific data points to create a "manufactured narrative," the truth is weaponized to support a predetermined ideological conclusion.

Why We Tell the Story
Following a psychoanalytic logic, Žižek concludes that the crucial question is not "Is it true?" but "Why are you telling this story in this specific way?". He criticizes "naive positivism"—the belief that simply reporting facts is enough—because the way we organize and prioritize those facts is always influenced by an underlying ideological standpoint.

 

[Dejected 55]

There doesn't have to be any truth in prejudice or conspiracy. It's just much easier to spread IF there is a little truth in there for people to latch onto. The whole Jewish space laser that controls the weather thing didn't catch a lot of traction because it was so fantastical that there was nothing to believe in plausibly... but the pizza gate conspiracy had just enough possibility (that something shady could be happening in the backroom of a place somewhere) for the crazies to latch onto...

 

[Forever Sleep]

I'm not sure there's some truth in every conspiracy theory but, there likely is some truth in some of them. The problem being that they often surround events that are fairly shady. Where certain details or evidence are witheld so- it's almost predictable theories would start springing up.

Some of them are inaccurate though. I watched a documentary once about the Titanic. There had existed the conspiracy theory that it was in fact the Olympic- her sister ship- that sank that day. It would have made financial sense for the company to set that up. The Olympic had been badly damaged colliding with another ship previously. I think the theory went that it had been patched up, launched as Titanic and deliberately sunk for the insurance payout. I was even starting to believe that could have happened when the documentary itself revealed that it was in fact the Titanic that sank. There were still small differences they could identify to tell the two apart.

So, some of them likely aren't true at all. That said- people who think our governments tell us the whole truth about everything I think are hugely naive.

Plus, they do sometimes at least try to follow the known evidence to come up with theories. Why shouldn't they at least be considered?

I loved that scene in 'Men in Black' where Agent K says it's the trashy tabloids that get it right:

 

[X-sanguinate86]

For the 911 tower attacks it is a documented fact that Israelis had foreknowledge that wasn't shared so it's not outrageous to imagine that they were actually behind it. All the wars in the mid-east that followed benefited that state. It's also now documented that the Jewish pedocrime organizers in the Epstein thing used a derogatory term ("goyim") to refer to non-Jews, who they see as subhuman slaves. The Epstein survivor Maria Farmer also mentioned that years ago.

 

[DarkRange55]

What do you mean by conspiracy theory?

Like FDR said, "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." Like that?

 

[ShadowOfASelf]

no

 

[DarkRange55]

 

[noname223]

What do you mean by conspiracy theory?

Like FDR said, "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." Like that?

Good question.

I know there is criticism of the term conspiracy theory. And scholars (where I live) prefer the term conspiracy narration. Because a theory sounds like a scientifical construct that has an inherent logic and not all conspiracy narrations have that.

I probably refer to narrations that are being shared by people that pretend to have insider knowledge, involve shady businesses and a bigger plan behind actions that also could be explained by coincidence. Theories should be able to be falsified and not all conspiracy theories can be falsified. One reason why they prefer the term conspiracy narration. I think my definition is not perfect but for now I will go with that.

 

[DarkRange55]

Good question.

I know there is criticism of the term conspiracy theory. And scholars (where I live) prefer the term conspiracy narration. Because a theory sounds like a scientifical construct that has an inherent logic and not all conspiracy narrations have that.

I probably refer to narrations that are being shared by people that pretend to have insider knowledge, involve shady businesses and a bigger plan behind actions that also could be explained by coincidence. Theories should be able to be falsified and not all conspiracy theories can be falsified. One reason why they prefer the term conspiracy narration. I think my definition is not perfect but for now I will go with that.

Many people believe conspiracy theorists are people like Alex Jones. People who are spouting all sorts of crazy ideas. Some of which might have some grain of truth in them but in general it feels like an exercise in talking to the tin foil hat crowd. I believe there is a fair amount of organization behind the scenes usually of a relatively low-level of organization that is unknown to the people that who are watching TV or listening to say NPR. A storyline or narrative that many institutions claim to believe but would easily be disrupted if outsiders were allowed to comment on it. There have been attempts to wall them off so that these narratives can in effect govern the American mindset and get people talking about things that they would normally never choose to talk about in terms that seem completely unnatural. As a society, we are expected to believe in narratives that anyone with a modicum of intelligence and a certain awareness of history could not believe.

I think it's important not to be definite about things we don't know. It is possible that Epstein was a perverted very rich man who is dead by his own hand in custody through an unlikely but not impossible set of circumstances.
A good question is when looking at the framework is, has something similar happened before?

Is it possible that mainstream media can be weaponized by the intelligence community for the purpose of destroying a well-known individual? The best example of this is perhaps the destruction of Jean Seberg. She was an actress originally found by Otto Preminger to play Joan of Arc and also used by Jean-Luc Godard in the film Breathless as the heroine. She was accused, due to her radical politics active in the Black Panther Party, of cuckolding her husband and bearing the child of a Black Panther, in a news article that was planted by the FBI with Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times, later repeated by Newsweek.

Does the U.S. have the ability to assassinate its own people who may be trying to do good? Well, in the case of the person who invented the term "Rainbow Coalition," this appears to be the case. It wasn't Jesse Jackson, it was, in fact, a man named Fred Hampton. My understanding is he was trying to get Black street gangs to stop warring with each other to form a political coalition, and was assassinated for his attempt to do so in his bed in Chicago, Illinois. So this shows that assassinations by the intelligence community, in America's particular form of secret police, the FBI, is also possible.

Can you have a highly coordinated silent hit with tremendous complexity going off almost without a hitch? I believe that the surveillance photos that we have seen in Dubai indicate that this has in fact occurred recently. I'm not going to say who carried out the hit because that is not known, but it is widely believed to be a particular country that is not hard to guess.

Is it possible to "suicide" someone? Normally we think of committing suicide as an individual action, but do we ever find the intelligence communities attempting to, in the sense of a transitive verb, suicide someone by letting them know that they will turn their life into a living hell so that committing suicide is the only way out? In fact, this is what the subject of the FBI's letter, by the hand of Sullivan to Martin Luther King Jr., was — when the attempt was to tell King that he was finished and that if he didn't commit suicide, his legacy and his name would be tarnished.

Would an intelligence community ever contemplate using organized crime such as the Cosa Nostra in order to carry out an act that it didn't want to do itself? This is what we found the comedian Dick Gregory was considered being subjected to when we found out that the FBI was thinking about having La Cosa Nostra be informed that he had been talking about union activities and labor racketeering. So yes, it is quite possible that the intelligence community would use organized crime — this is also a proven fact.

Would we ever have the use of orgies and honeypots together with an elaborately constructed backstory in which an actor and the character they played were entirely different? This is in fact the story of Eli Cohen, perhaps Israel's most famous spy, discovered in Damascus as if he was an Arab who had come from Argentina as a playboy, using alcohol and women in order to integrate himself into the highest echelons of Syrian society, particularly the intelligence and defense communities. So yes, people are constructed to be something other than they are, and honeypots are very much a possible use in the intelligence world.

Is there intelligence community interest in control of the media? I would recommend that you look at Project Mockingbird. Is there any attempt to gain control of innocent influencers, that is, are there any circumstances in which people simply have the crime of being influential used against them? In fact, you can look for Section A of the Reserve Index: people to be rounded up in times of national emergency inside the United States. This might include professors, labor organizers, professionals, authors, the independently wealthy, in other words, there is very much an interest in keeping track of people who have done nothing wrong but in times of national emergency you might want to make sure that none of these people are capable of influencing the population.

Lastly, one of the things that we hear most frequently is that there is no ability to have conspiracies because any large group of people would not be able to keep a secret. It's a really silly idea because COINTELPRO, which was discovered by the Citizens' Committee to Investigate the FBI in 1971 when the word showed up in documents they stole from an office of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania and then they used the Freedom of Information Act in order to find out what COINTELPRO was and it turned out that it was a permanent dirty tricks campaign living inside of the FBI. And that the "Deep Throat" construct inside of the Watergate story of Woodward and Bernstein was in fact Mark Felt, who I believe was the head of COINTELPRO after J. Edgar Hoover.

IF Epstein was an intelligence community construct, either U.S. or foreign, then he was a very poor intelligence construct. It was easy to trip over Jeffrey Epstein. He was not well constructed.

Look up the Church & Pike Committees. They were an attempt to investigate the US's own intelligence community in order to understand what the U.S. had become in an era that was rife with dirty tricks campaigns, often against its own citizens and often against people who had done nothing wrong other than exercising their constitutional rights to dissent from official narrative and, in general, mainstream perspectives.

 

[DarkRange55]

 

[LetMeOut67]

Funny how no one talks about this incident

2001 Mexican Chamber of Deputies bombing attempt - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org