Essays Contents
On Conspiracy Theories
December 29, 2022
Michael Knowles at University of Kentucky, November 1, 2022
The difference between "conspiracy theory" and "truth"
Note: YAF is "Young America's Foundation"
Video transcript:
00:02:10 - A short introduction, then Michael Knowles begins:
"Thank you, so much. It is great... great to be with you... always a pleasure to be in Kentucky. I'm looking forward to lots and lots of Bourbon after tonight's event. I was strongly considering sampling the local fare when I first arrived here today, but I just decided it would be better not to give this speech in cursive tonight... so I'm going to wait.
I want to thank the students here at the University of Kentucky for the invitation. Thank you to YAF, as always, for hosting... and thank you to T.W.Lewis Foundation for sponsoring this event. I'm very grateful to all of you, so I will hold off on the Bourbon until just after the speech.
The other reason why it would have probably been a bad idea to show up hammered for tonight's event is that it would have given the Libs yet another excuse to write off everything that we say as "crazy." They're going to do that anyway, that's what they always do when conservatives cite facts and make sound logical arguments. And they do that because they have no sound logical arguments of their own. So when they're not calling us "nuts" and "fascists" and "terrorists", they're calling us "nuts" and "kooks" and "conspiracy theorists."
00:03:40
Now, that last one... that is my favorite one, because it is so incredibly effective. It doesn't mean anything, but it is very, very effective. After "racist" - "conspiracy theorist" is probably the single worst thing that you can be called in our society. The minute that you get labeled a "conspiracy theorist," pretty much everything that you have to say ceases to be taken seriously... by the Left, certainly... but even by many in the Center and on the Right.
Yet, easy as it is to destroy someone with accusations of "conspiracy theorism"... the same with accusations of "racism"... it is much easier to ruin someone by calling him a "conspiracy theorist" than it is to define precisely what a "conspiracy theory" is.
A number of "conspiracy theories" have cropped up in recent years, particularly regarding Covid. Maybe you've heard of some of them. For instance, in the early days of Covid, there was a "conspiracy theory" that Covid most likely originated in a Chinese laboratory and not in nature or in a bad bowl of bat soup.
Now, all of the established scientific and political authorities... Dr. Fauci... Rochelle Walensky, the CDC Director... Joe Biden... all of them... the entire establishment media... they all denounced this theory as "crazy" "absurd" "scientifically impossible." Then, after a year and a half of denouncing it... when the evidence in support of the theory became undeniable... they quickly admitted that it was true.
Now, once the authorities admitted that the virus most likely came from the Chinese lab, another conspiracy theory cropped up... the theory that the United States had actually funded the sort of research associated with viruses like Covid-19... at the very laboratory where the virus originated.
00:05:35
This conspiracy theory... this was outrageous. Not only did the serious, credible, scientific authorities in all the fancy lab coats deny this theory, but Dr. Fauci himself denied it under penalty of perjury before the U.S. Senate. Now, that was, of course, before a Freedom of Information Act request produced the receipts showing that the United States HAD, in fact, funded the risky research on bat corona viruses with specific sub-grants for the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And guess who signed off on the funding... you'll never guess... yea, you will guess... it was... Dr. Fauci. It's amazing! He's so smart! He's such a genius! His memory... not so great, I guess. A little bit of a selective memory, that Dr. Fauci.
Now, after THAT crazy Covid conspiracy theory turned out to be true, another one emerged... this being... the "crazy conspiracy theory" that the Covid vaccines were neither "totally safe" nor particularly "effective."
(This is when YouTube turns us off, by the way, so goodnight everybody... lovely to be with you... hope you've enjoyed four minutes of my speech, but... THAT'S when they get you.)
So... the moment that the vaccines became available to the public, the established authorities all insisted that they were "safe and totally effective." Biden... Fauci... Walensky... they all promised that the shots would prevent infection and transmission of the virus.
Quote: "You're not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations."... Joe Biden.
Fauci assured us,
(Knowles spoofs Fauci's accent) "When people are vaccinated they can feel safe that they are not going to get infected."
Rochelle Walensky insisted, "Vaccinated people" (I don't do a good Walensky, so I"ll just put that back in my regular voice)... Walensky insisted, "Vaccinated people do not carry the virus, do not get sick."
On the one side, you had just about every single established authority in the country... on the other side, you had the "crazy conspiracy theorists." Guess who was right... the conspiracy theorists 100 percent. The established authorities... zero percent.
The authorities told us that reports of vaccine injuries were a "crazy conspiracy theory"... then people started coming down with blood clots... and myocarditis... and changes to womens' menstrual cycles. THAT one... that last one... we were told by the public health propagandists... was scientifically impossible.
And then... I don't know... it just started happening. Then the so-called "conspiracy theories" turned out to be true and according to recent studies... fairly wide-spread.
Did you see, just this week... just happened, I think, yesterday... a writer in the Atlantic called for a "pandemic amnesty." Did you see that?
"Let's declare a pandemic amnesty," the author wrote.
"We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid."
Yea. Uh huh.
For over two years, the Libs...
destroyed our economy...
usurped our rights...
kept our kids out of school...
left our loved ones to die alone...
forced us to inject ourselves with a dangerous and experimental drug... or lose our jobs...
and label us all "conspiracy theorists" to justify kicking us out of the public square when we rightly contradicted their false narrative...
but... that was then... and this is now, you see.
That was okay... that was back then... when the Libs had 100 percent of the power... now, though, we're headed into the midterm elections. Republicans might get a tiny bit of power... and so, you know... it's... let's just "say we're even, okay?"
The conservatives were tormented... the Libs did the tormenting... "we all did stuff." "Okay, you know, let's just forget about it"... right?
I don't think so.
"Tribunals" is what I'm responding to that offer with.
You are offering "amnesty." Okay, that's interesting... I'm hearing that.
I'm going to respond to that with... "military tribunals."
That's my negotiating position. Let's see where maybe where... how's that sound? Justice... may be good.
(I digress... I digress... we're already kicked off YouTube, so I can say whatever I want.)
00:10:05
We could go on about the vindication of conspiracy theories all night. We have barely scratched the surface. And that is... just Covid. Imagine that. That is just ONE part of ONE example from just the past few years. There are so many others.
I've got one...
how about THIS crazy "conspiracy theory" you may have heard of,
that the Democrats rigged the 2020 election.
Have you heard about THAT looney tune idea?
The notion that the Democrats... you see, this is crazy...
that the Democrats changed all the election rules right before the election...
in some cases illegally...
to disadvantage Donald Trump and the Republicans...
and to give the Democrats an advantage.
THAT... we were told... was "completely insane"...
"the delusions of tin-foil-hat clad lunatics"...
until the Liberals themselves admitted that they had done it.
They admitted it.
On February 4, 2021, Time Magazine published an account...
a very detailed account...
of the way that they rigged the election.
It was called...
"The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign
That Saved the 2020 Election."
Here's just a little sampling from that essay...
(He reads:)
"In a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes... one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast cross-partisan campaign.
Their work touched every aspect of the election.
They got states to change voting systems and laws,
and helped secure hundreds of millions in private and public funding.
They fended off voter suppression lawsuits.
They recruited armies of poll workers.
They got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.
They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against "disinformation" and
used data-driven strategies to fight "viral smears."
They executed national public awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days and weeks."
00:12:45
Just had to explain to Americans why we can't count our votes as quickly as Brazil does. You know, as quickly as tin-pot dictatorships in Latin America.
"No... it's perfectly normal! It just takes days and weeks to count the votes!"
Because, you understand... the Democrats need to figure out how many votes they NEED... and then, once they get that number, then it's very easy to find the ballots.
It's right there in black and white, folks. This is not the ravings of a madman. This is not my own theory on how things work. This is the words of the Liberals themselves, published in a very mainstream Liberal outlet. Not so much a "conspiracy theory" as a "confession"... of a conspiracy.
Now, I suspect many people in this room could recite a litany of famous conspiracies that turned out to be true. I bet you could do it right off the top of your heads. There's a very famous one... the Tuskegee Experiments.
1932... the U.S. Public Health Service conspired with the Tuskegee Institute to create a fake medical program. The program proported to treat syphilis, but instead it administered dangerous chemicals and procedures to roughly 400 black male participants. Only in the 1970s did the government cop to this conspiracy and pay out $10 million, plus lifetime health benefits, to the men that it had exploited.
00:13:48
How about a slightly lesser known conspiracy.
This one's fairly recent, too, though. The Nayirah Testimony.
The Nayirah Testimony... does anyone in the room remember the Nayirah Testimony? A lot of people actually don't know about this one. The Nayirah Testimony was 1990. A 15 year-old girl using the pseudonym "Nayirah" testified before Congress that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Iraqi soldiers had taken Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and left them to die on the hospital room floors... and watched it... and sort of mocked these babies as they died.
This testimony was cited countless times by the Bush Whitehouse
to justify American involvement in the Gulf War.
Turned out... the story was completely made up.
And it wasn't just accidentally made up...
it was made up by a PR firm that worked with the Bush Whitehouse.
It was made up, very likely, in coordination with the Whitehouse itself.
How about the gay frogs? Remember the gay frogs? That is 100 percent my favorite conspiracy theory... that turned out to be true.
When Alex Jones said On Air
(he begins spoofing Jones' voice)...
"they're turning the frickin' frogs gay"...
and then everybody made fun of him... and then he was totally right.
Whatever Alex Jones has ever said in his life... it is simply a fact... they WERE turning the frickin' frogs gay. There was a team of scientists from Yale that analyzed 21 ponds in suburban Conneticut, and found... actually... not only were they turning the frogs gay, they were turning them TRANS. Estrogenic waste in the water in these ponds was turning the frogs formaphrobic. So, not only was Alex Jones' "crazy conspiracy" true, it actually didn't go far enough. He was actually too modest in his commentary.
Now, of course, any list of conspiracy theories turning out to be true, is going to have to include a healthy dose of mentions of the CIA. The CIA would not be doing its job if it did not turn out on such a list. Some of these are famous... some of these are infamous. Some of these you've never heard of.
There is, of course, the usual fare of assassinating world leaders and covering that up. That has been well-documented. But there are certain CIA conspiracies that took place on American soil itself.
A very well-known one would be MK-Ultra, which is extremely weird... coincidentally also my nick-name I would like. I think that's a good nick-name... MK-Ultra, so... I think I'm going to try to make that happen.
(sarcasm)
The... uh... MK-Ultra conspiracy was the conspiracy of the CIA to supply unwitting Americans and Canadians with LSD... and then to pay off hospitals and universities to keep quiet about it. That conspiracy was not discovered until 1975. It was 2 years after CIA Director Richard Helms ordered that all the documents pertaining to Mk-Ultra be destroyed... though a 1977 Freedom of Information Act request did uncover some 20,000 remaining documents... to aid in the work of the Church Committee and the President's Commission on CIA activities in the U.S.
00:17:00
Then there's Operation Mockingbird. That one... again, very basic. It was the very effective CIA campaign to control the messaging coming out of the New York Times and Newsweek and CBS and lots of other news outlets. This is run-of-the-mill stuff. I don't think... does anyone in this room believe the New York Times is a serious journalistic outlet?
I don't think so. Frankly, I wish they were spending more time on CIA propaganda. Some of the stuff they run is much worse than that. Some of it was less run-of-the-mill, though.
Conspiracies such as Operation Northwoods... a 1962 CIA proposal to launch a false flag attack on American military and civilian targets... and then blame it on Fidel Castro... and then channel that outrage to launch a war against Cuba. That particular conspiracy, thankfully, never went into effect because the Kennedy Administration rejected it. But the Top Secret document outlining the proposal has been declassified. It was declassified in 1997. It's available in plain English for anyone to read. It sounds completely insane, but you can look it up You can read the actual document.
Operation Northwoods is about as crazy a conspiracy theory as one could possibly think up, and yet it happens to be true.
Putting the CIA aside for a moment, we learned just yesterday about a new sort of Operation Mockingbird... this time coming out of the Department of Homeland Security. It's happening right now. According to a reporting from The Intercept...
in the lead up to the 2020 election, big tech companies including... not just Twitter and Facebook... but Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn... and a number of others... met on a monthly basis with the FBI... with the cyber-security and infrastructure security agency... and with other government representatives. These meetings did not just concern... technology... hacking... that sort of thing... the meetings concerned "disinformation." And by "disinformation" I, of course, mean... information that was harmful to Democrats.
Twitter and Facebook had direct portals for the government request that inconvenient information be censored... direct portals they could go to. According to documents filed in Federal court, in a lawsuit brought by Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, two FBI agents, Elvis Chan and Laura Demlow were involved in high-level communication with tech executives that... quote:
"led to Facebook's suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story."
The Hunter Biden laptop story, which was suppressed by all the big tech platforms, which... according to most post-election polls...
single-handedly could have swung the election to Trump.
Why was that story stopped?
because of phone calls from the FBI.
It was a conspiracy... plain and simple.
So, if you observe historical facts... does that make you a "conspiracy theorist"? I guess it does. You are putting forward a theory about a conspiracy. But in the case of all the examples that I just cited... and countless others on top of that... you would be theorizing about conspiracies that indisputably occurred.
When a conspiracy theory is demonstrably true, who can deny it?
Only a fool, or a liar, or a coward.
And I think it's that last category there... that explains and describes most people in whom the phrase "conspiracy theory" still inspires fear and dread...
the sort of people who knew from the beginning that the official story on Covid's origins didn't really make a lot of sense...
the people who suspected that the vaccines were probably not quite as safe and effective as were were told...
the people who sense intuitively that there were some serious structural shenanigans in the 2020 elections... wide-spread mail-in ballots in contravention of the Pennsylvania constitution, to cite just one example...
people who suspect all of those things but don't dare raise the suggestion because they fear for their social media accounts...
or for their jobs...
or just their social standing...
which depends upon just going along to get along...
denying what on can see with one's own eyes...
people who understand that the true function of the label "conspiracy theorist" is not to separate truth from fantasy... but rather, simply, to get dissidents to shut up.
When did this fear of conspiracy theorizing begin?
Not all that long ago, it turns out.
A Google end-gram(?) analysis reveals that the term "conspiracy theory" appeared basically nowhere in the English language until the mid 1930s... and it only really took off after 1950.
The term "conspiracy theorist" is of an even more recent vintage... appearing basically nowhere until the mid '60s... not really taking off until 1990. I mentioned earlier that the term "conspiracy theorist" fulfills a similar function to the word "racist." That is, it's an accusation when successfully applied... completely destroys a man's reputation in the public square. It's a label that means little more than...
"this person is bad and/or stupid and you should not take him seriously."
The word "racist" follows almost exactly the same historical pattern of usage. "Racism" and "racist" appeared pretty much nowhere until the mid '30s, then became popular only after 1950. In other words, these two terms of abuse... these linguistic weapons... only came into fashion during the era of the post-war Liberal concensus... and during that entire time they have been used almost exclusively to attack Conservatives.
Liberals have a much worse record on race than Conservatives do... much more perverse view of race. Doesn't matter... the stench of racism only ever sticks to Conservatives.
Joe Biden says that Barak Obama is the first clean, articulate black man in American politics... doesn't matter.
The Democrat Party founds and runs the KKK for the entirety of its existence as an organization... doesn't matter.
But if a Conservative criticizes George Soros, the most prominent and prolific funder of far left causes in the world... that Conservative will instantly be labeled an "anti-Semite"... a "conspiracy theorist" too, actually.
If a Conservative criticizes Barak Obama, he will instantly be labeled a "racist." And the same goes for conspiracy theories.
Think of the absurd narratives that the mainstream Liberal establishment has tried to sell us in recent years. It's amazing to think back and remember that this actually happened. They told us for years on end that Donald Trump... Donald Trump, the man we've all known since what?... the '80s? or earlier?... Donald... the guy in Home Alone... you know, the guy that saved the ice rink in New York...
Donald Trump was secretly a Russian asset... some kind of sleeper KGB agent who was going to do Putin's bidding because Putin had a video tape of him urinating on prostitutes in Moscow.
It wasn't crazy radical... well, they are crazy and radical...
but it was the mainstream Liberals who told us this...
for years on all the mainstream news outlets.
Never mind that Donald Trump has been the most hard-line president on Russia in my lifetime. Never mind... that Donald Trump is the only president since Vladmir Putin's rise to power on whose watch Vladmir Putin did not invade a sovereign nation.
It's kind of weird, isn't it? George W. Bush... Putin invades Georgia.
Barak Obama... Putin invades Ukraine.
Donald Trump... (he gestures "what?", silent)...
we just kinda chill.
Ya know, and then Joe Biden... Putin goes even further into Ukraine.
Never mind... that these guys could not produce a single shred of evidence for their insane conspiracy theory... they just peddled it for years and years and then, when it completely fell apart during the Mueller investigation... they just moved on as if nothing had happened.
They're gonna call for amnesty.
They're gonna call for a truce.
Never mind... never mind that we undermined the Administration.
Move on... never mind.
Yet, the Left still has the audacity to accuse the Right... increasingly... of embracing "conspiracy theories."
Perhaps we are.
But if there is a rise in the conspiracy theorizing on the Right, it is not due to any defect in the rational faculties of Conservatives... it is due to a rise in actual conspiracies on the Left.
00:26:00
Conspiracy theories flourish when people lose trust in their political institutions, as we are seeing today. But the collapse in credibility of our institutions is not the fault of Conservatives... it is the fault of the Liberals, who have controlled those institutions for decades, and run them into the ground.
To be a "conspiracy theorist" during times of political order and transparency is "kooky" and "ridiculous"... but to be a "conspiracy theorist" during times of profuse conspiracy is rational and prudent.
In an age such as ours,
the difference between a "conspiracy theory" and "the truth"
is often not the difference between delusion and reality...
as our Liberal ruling class has shown so clearly over the past few years...
in an age such as ours...
the real difference between a conspiracy and the truth...
is about 3 to 6 months.
Thank you, very much.
00:27:00 thru 00:59:00
Knowles takes questions from the attendees.
Michael Knowles at University of Kentucky, November 1, 2022
The difference between "conspiracy theory" and "truth"
