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Comment by MSFT_Edging | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely think the true conspiracy theory is that many theories are made up and pushed in the same venues as more or less provable theories, and used to discredit the grain of truth within those conspiracies as generally crazy.

"CIA mind control" was a loony theory until it was basically proven that the CIA was in fact drugging tons of people in an attempt for mind control and then letting them loose on society.

Hell wasn't the NSA dragnet a "conspiracy theory" until proven by Snowden?

If you have all these "babies kept in the basement of a pizza parlor that hosts punk shows" theories surrounding a handful of real things, ie "why did Epstein have the reach he did? Why was he made the financial advisor to a billionaire with no experience?". It basically makes all these points lose credibility due to their closeness.

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People still claim Prism is a conspiracy theory TODAY, despite Edward Snowden, it's incredible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

The older "Project Echelon", I'm not sure how much has been confirmed about it's capabilities but it certainly did exist and was the precursor to Prism.

You can find lots of examples in movies from the 90s joking about how the NSA will know if you say certain words, like "bomb", on the telephone. They almost definitely did :)

in the San Francisco corners of counter-culture, CIA mind control with LSD was a common and well-known story past the late 1960s. Also J Edgar Hoover, terror of Red America, was a cross dresser; various stories about the JFK Assassination involving the US Secret Services; support of dictators in South America and the Middle East.. lots of things like that. Stories and attitude like that was one of the many reasons Mr Clean-cut Los Angeles Defense Ronald Reagan especially despised that crowd.

The thing that always gets me about the JFK assassination, is after JFK fired Dulles, he was then put in an important position in the Warren Commission and would work out of his home on the investigation, despite no longer working for the agencies.

People shout about "Deep state" stuff all the time but these guys really did have an inordinate amount of power that was not on a leash whatsoever. They do things the President is ignorant about. If the President can be considered not on a need-to-know basis, whatever is happening by that agency is effectively a "deep state" operation, regardless of if you believe there's a vast deep state conspiracy.

forgot to mention the most obvious one from that time.. millions of regular people against the Viet Nam war, and that war did not stop. Those ten years turned many ordinary US citizens into cynics, and gave fuel to the more extreme stories that were passed around.

Same with the Alex Jones "they're turning the frogs gay!" meme. Completely dismissed, but there's plenty of studies showing the pesticide atrazine (which is what Jones was referencing) is an endocrine disruptor.

Same with the "COVID came from a lab leak" theory. Because Trump said it in 2020, it was universally dismissed. 3 years later, there's now a strong case for it.

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