I suspect as a writer of fantasy fiction and someone who has enjoyed reading the works of its leading lights over the years, including obviously J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, not to mention biographies about them, I will be accused of having a predisposition of being taken in by a line of reasoning after analysis of facts identified by the putative elites as “conspiracy theories.” And through my readings at LewRockwell.com, I have indeed discovered perspectives and conclusions altogether different than what is purveyed by these so-called elites, from mass media to government panels, many being worthy of consideration and not dismissal.

As discussed in this Daily Bell post, the term “conspiracy theory” was created by the C.I.A. to discredit challenges to the mainstream narrative, as this excerpt from a 2015 post with the actual document on Zero Hedge confirms:

Conspiracy Theorists USED TO Be Accepted As Normal

Democracy and free market capitalism were founded on conspiracy theories. Conspiracy Theory in A... deHaven-Smith, Lance Buy New $11.94 (as of 05:30 UTC - Details)

The Magna Carta, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and other  founding Western documents were based on conspiracy theories. Greek democracy and free market capitalism were also based on conspiracy theories.

But those were the bad old days …Things have now changed.

The CIA Coined the Term Conspiracy Theorist In 1967

That all changed in the 1960s.

Specifically, in April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories”…and recommended methods for discrediting such theories.  The dispatch was marked “psych”—short for “psychological operations” or disinformation—and “CS” for the CIA’s “Clandestine Services” unit.

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Nevertheless, reading Paul Craig Roberts’ essay on LewRockwell, Are You a Mind-Controlled CIA Stooge? led me to the book he recommended, Conspiracy Theory In America, and I purchased the Kindle edition. I noted the following, which describes one approach to dealing with conspiracy theories:

In a book on technology and public opinion, Sunstein argues further that conspiracy-theory groups and networks are proliferating because the highly decentralized form of mass communication made possible by the Internet is altering the character of public discourse. Whereas television and radio provide platforms for debating competing viewpoints on matters of widely shared interest, the Internet tends to segment discussion into a multitude of small groups, each focusing on a separate and distinct topic. Sunstein argues that this splintering of discourse encourages extremism because it allows proponents of false or one-sided beliefs to locate others with similar views while at the same time avoiding interaction with competing perspectives. In Sunstein’s words, “The Internet produces a process of spontaneous creation of groups of like-minded types, fueling group polarization. People who would otherwise be loners, or isolated in their objections and concerns, congregate into social networks.” [9 pp. 82– 83] Sunstein acknowledges that this consequence of the Internet is unavoidable, but he says polarization can and should be mitigated by a combination of government action and voluntarily adopted norms. The objective, he says, should be to ensure that those who hold conspiracy theories “are exposed to credible counterarguments and are not living in an echo chamber of their own design.” [9] In their law review article, Sunstein and Vermeule expand this idea and propose covert government action reminiscent of the FBI’s efforts against the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s. They consider a number of options for countering the influence of conspiracy theories, including public information campaigns, censorship, and fines for Internet service providers hosting conspiracy-theory websites. Ultimately rejecting those options as impractical because they would attract attention and reinforce antigovernment suspicions, they call for a program of “cognitive infiltration” in which groups and networks popularizing conspiracy theories would be infiltrated and “disrupted.”

As these examples illustrate, conspiracy deniers assume that what qualifies as a conspiracy theory is self-evident. In their view, the phrase “conspiracy theory” as it is conventionally understood simply names this objectively identifiable phenomenon. Conspiracy theories are easy to spot because they posit secret plots that are too wacky to be taken seriously. Indeed, the theories are deemed so far-fetched they require no reply or rejoinder; they are objects of derision, not ideas for discussion.

After reading these words, I had in effect an epiphany: there is now one individual who has become America’s foremost conspiracy theorist, someone whose ideas are disseminated 24/7, someone whose rantings we cannot escape. Conspiracy Theory in A... Lance deHaven-Smith Best Price: $5.66 Buy New $13.40 (as of 04:25 UTC - Details)

And no, it’s not Alex Jones.

As Sunstein observed, when appropriate, the individual’s theories should be “deemed so far-fetched they require no reply or rejoinder; they are objects of derision, not ideas for discussion.” An intervention is necessary and disdain and scorn, not to mention facts in abundance, are the best defensive weapons in our arsenal.

Obviously, I’m speaking about the theories given extensive mass media coverage that Presidential candidate Ms Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed, the ones about the rise of the Alt-Right, not to mention the “vast right wing conspiracy” and now most dangerously, her allegations of Russian hacking and a “treasonous Trump.” Ms Rodham Clinton has repeatedly alleged the Russians are responsible for hacking the DNC.

In a recent speech to an American Legion convention in Cincinnati, she once again blamed the Russians but this time discussed retaliatory measures:

She reasserted unsubstantiated claims that state-operated Russian intelligence services were behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The Kremlin has strongly denied any involvement in the breach.

“You’ve seen reports—Russia has hacked into a lot of things, China has hacked into a lot of things —Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee!” Clinton repeated. “Maybe even some state election systems, so we’ve gotta step up our game.” Clinton, her campaign, and her party, have continuously claimed that Russia was behind the DNC hack, and have accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of working with Putin to meddle in the US election, despite multiple officials and experts pointing out that there is no evidence that Russia was involved in the hack.

Immediately after making her claims, Clinton threatened that she would offer a military response to cyber threats. “Make sure we are well defended and able to take the fight to those who go after us. As president I will make it clear that we will treat cyber-attacks just like any other attack,” Clinton said. “We will be ready with serious political, economic, and military responses.” Clinton also asserted that she wants to increase control of the internet, because if the “US doesn’t, someone else will.”

Of course, there are many who challenge Ms Clinton’s conclusion, including Glenn Greenwald who noted:

Democrats have adopted a “Cold War McCarthyite kind of rhetoric” by accusing many [of] its critics of having ties to Russia. “It’s sort of this constant rhetorical tactic to try and insinuate that anyone opposing the Clintons are somehow Russian agents, when it’s the Clintons who actually have a lot of ties to Russia, as well,” Greenwald said. “I mean, the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton helped Russian companies take over uranium industries in various parts of the world. He received lots of Russian money for speeches.”

In fact, the details regarding Uranium One are in a New York Times Bestseller, Clinton Cash. There was also a documentary, available on YouTube, discussed by Zero Hedge:

Just to highlight a few of the scandals detailed in the documentary:

• Russian Purchase of US Uranium Assets in Return for $145mm in Contributions to the Clinton Foundation—Bill Clinton Cash: The Unto... Schweizer, Peter Best Price: $2.30 Buy New $9.99 (as of 03:10 UTC - Details) and Hillary Clinton assisted a Canadian financier, Frank Giustra, and his company, Uranium One, in the acquisition of uranium mining concessions in Kazakhstan and the United States. Subsequently, the Russian government sought to purchase Uranium One but required approval from the Obama administration given the strategic importance of the uranium assets. In the run-up to the approval of the deal by the State Department, nine shareholders of Uranium One just happened to make $145mm in donations to the Clinton Foundation. Moreover, the New Yorker confirmed that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in speaking fees from a Russian investment bank, with ties to the Kremlin, around the same time. Needless to say, the State Department approved the deal giving Russia ownership of 20% of U.S. uranium assets.

Zero Hedge also detailed Hillary’s Latest Headache: Skolkovo

Russians tied to Skolkovo also flowed funds to the Clinton Foundation. Andrey Vavilov, the chairman of SuperOx, which is part of Skolkovo’s nuclear-research cluster, donated between $10,000 and $25,000 (donations are reported in ranges, not exact amounts) to the Clinton’s family charity”

Thus far, this should not be surprising. It is yet another instance of crony capitalism that has so well characterized the Clintons over the years. However, as US intelligence agencies including the FBI were soon to find out, the Russian Silicon Valley served other purposes as well.

More from the WSJ op-ed: “The state-of-the-art technological research coming out of Skolkovo raised alarms among U.S. military experts and federal law-enforcement officials. Research conducted in 2012 on Skolkovo by the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth declared that the purpose of Skolkovo was to serve as a “vehicle for world-wide technology transfer to Russia in the areas of information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology, and nuclear technology.” Moreover, the report said: “the Skolkovo Foundation has, in fact, been involved in defense-related activities since December 2011, when it approved the first weapons-related project—the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine. . . . Not all of the center’s efforts are civilian in nature…”

“The FBI believes the true motives of the Russian partners, who are often funded by their government, is to gain access to classified, sensitive, and emerging technology from the companies. The [Skolkovo] foundation may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application.”

To me, it is evident that Ms Rodham Clinton in engaging in projecting; if there are any conspiracies or shady dealings that merit our consideration, they are the ones detailed above, ones in which she herself is intimately involved. Of course, it’s highly likely that Ms Clinton and her supporters will state that the true conspiracy theorists are Zero Hedge and Glenn Greenwald. However, my own suggestion is that there is compelling evidence and analysis that her allegations are false as are the allegations of Russian hacking of the NSA, some elaborated below.

However, Lance De Haven makes the following critical observation in Conspiracy Theory in America:

As a label for irrational political suspicions about secret plots by powerful people, the concept is obviously defective because political conspiracies in high office do, in fact, happen. Officials in the Nixon administration did conspire to steal the 1972 The New Tsar: The Rise... Steven Lee Myers Best Price: $4.64 Buy New $35.11 (as of 06:40 UTC - Details) presidential election. [10] Officials in the Reagan White House did participate in a criminal scheme to sell arms to Iran and channel profits to the Contras, a rebel army in Nicaragua. [11] The Bush-Cheney administration did collude to mislead Congress and the public about the strength of its evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. [12] If some conspiracy theories are true, then it is nonsensical to dismiss all unsubstantiated suspicions of elite intrigue as false by definition.

deHaven-Smith, Lance.

Conspiracy Theory in America (Discovering America) (Kindle Locations 160-166). University of Texas Press. Kindle Edition.

The conspiracies that should concern us are the verifiable ones initiated by U.S. actors—not Russians. As this recent article that The American Committee for East-West Accord featured on its home page proclaims, whose Board Members include Professor Stephen Cohen, The Arizona Election Hack Story Is An Embarrassment To Everyone Involved (Jeffrey Carr):

It’s an embarrassment to Ellen Nakashima and the Washington Post who ran the salacious and inaccurate headline “Russian hackers targeted Arizona election system”, and to every news organization that ran the same story including Financial Times (Geoff Dyer), the Washington Times (Douglas Ernst), and of course Yahoo (Michael Isikoff) who broke the story and published an FBI TLP:Amber alert that is need to know only / not to be shared with media.

It’s an embarrassment to Rich Barger at ThreatConnect along with their investors GroTech and SAP. Barger has been pumping the media with his Red Menace speculation at every opportunity, and in the case of this non-story, he’s basing it solely upon the fact that the attacker used a Russian-owned hosting service called King Servers, along with IP addresses from two Netherlands-based hosting companies. The Russian hackers who coordinated the attack against Georgian government websites in 2008 used Texas-based Softlayer Technologies as their hosting provider. According to Barger’s logic, the attackers must have been Texan, not Russian.

If we can trust Putin’s recent statements—and I personally don’t trust the man implicitly—he has in an interview with Bloomberg (full interview transcripts with video will shortly be posted here) nevertheless attempted to rebut the allegations:

“There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it,” Putin said of the DNC breach. “But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.”

“Frankly, I couldn’t imagine that such information could provoke such interest from the American public,” he said. “One would have to ‘feel the nerve’ and peculiarities of the US domestic political life. I’m not sure that even our Foreign Ministry experts have that level of comprehension.” Putin, 63, said the state of hacking is so sophisticated that it’s impossible to know the identities or locations of the people ultimately behind them.

“You know how many hackers there are today?” Putin said. “They act so delicately and precisely that they can leave their mark—or even the mark of others—at the necessary time and place, camouflaging their activities as that of other hackers from other territories or countries. It’s an extremely difficult thing to check, if it’s even possible to check. At any rate, we definitely don’t do this at a state level.”

See also from East-West Accord the article Trump, Russia, and the Washington Post: Reader Beware (Philip Giraldi): “So an Son of Thunder: The Sp... Yvonne Lorenzo Buy New $12.00 (as of 04:45 UTC - Details) article loaded with innuendo has appeared on the front page of a major U.S. newspaper, located in Washington, DC, stating that Russia is engaged in widespread subversion in Europe and is trying to do the same on behalf of Donald Trump in the United States. But the evidence presented in the story does not support what is being suggested, and spreading tales about foreign-government misbehaviour can have unintended consequences. It is particularly shortsighted and even dangerous in this case, as a stable relationship with a nuclear-armed and militarily very capable Moscow should rightly be regarded as critical,” writes former CIA official Philip Giraldi.

Regarding Putin, I think it is important to read Understanding Putin’s Intentions and the Right Course of Action in Dealing with Russia (John E. Pepper), also featured at The American Committee for East-West Accord, where Mr Pepper reviews The New Czar:  The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin” by Steven Lee Myers:

Still, he began his Presidency wanting to become part of the West. This was reflected in his being the first leader to reach out to President Bush right after the 9-11 terrorist attack. This manifested not only his desire to reach out to the West but, above all, his fear of terrorism, of unrest, of chaos, which he had experienced in many forms.

There is no mistaking Putin’s passion or genuineness as he reacted to the news of the 9/11 bombing.  He went on television and expressed his condolences to the victims of what he called “an unprecedented act of aggression…the event that occurred in the United States today goes beyond national borders.  It is a brazen challenge to the whole of humanity, at least to civilized humanity.” As Myers says in his book, Putin made it clear that the tragedy was an opportunity to refashion into national relations—to fight, in Putin’s words ‘the plague of the 21^st century…Russia knows first-hand what terrorism is, so we understand as well as anyone the feelings of the American people. Addressing the people of the United States on behalf of Russia,” Putin continued.  “I would like to say that we are with you, we entirely and fully share and experience your pain.”

In a later conversation with President Bush, Putin said it simply, “Good will triumph over evil.  I want you to know that in this struggle, we will stand together.” Words like these were not contrived.

There is no overestimating in my view the impact on Putin of the multiple terrorist attacks in Moscow, Beslan, Volgograd and other cities of Russia and then the brutal Chechnya war…

Putin’s desire to work constructively with the West had other manifestations. Putin invested heavily in developing a personal relationship with Bush.  Already the first Russian or Soviet leader since Lenin to speak a foreign language, he took lessons in English for an hour a day, learning the language of American diplomacy and commerce, and he used his rudimentary skill to speak privately with Bush to break the ice. In private, he felt he could be candid with Bush about their differences…trying to make him understand the difficulties that Russia—that he—faced in the transition from the Soviet ruins. He sought some kind of accommodation with the United States, even with NATO, Myers continues.

What is to be done? Well, obviously, I think as Sunstein wrote it’s about time for an intervention; notwithstanding the health allegations made against Ms Rodham Clinton, in my opinion—but obviously not as a physician, which I’m not, just an interested observer—she is suffering from conspiracy theory delusions, she and so many of her enablers in the media and the DNC. This condition is nothing new; it now has evidently been growing stronger. F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and lecturer, who holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, has gone so far as to write and question A Brain-damaged US President with Finger on the Nuclear Button?

However, if the latter part of the twentieth century was the age of the Prozac Nation, perhaps Ms Rodham Clinton can become an even greater role model to her supporters, especially star-struck women. Certainly, twenty-first century America has now transformed into the Abilify Nation. Group therapy is a must, to include former CIA Head Morell and most of the staff and operatives of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the DNC; think of the potential heartwarming Oprah or Ellen moment, not to neglect Dr Phil. Think of the merchandising alone, surely a major boost to what’s left of our free markets: “I went to Group Therapy with Hillary and all I got is this lousy shirt. But I’ve lost my delusions!”

It’s time to say no to lunatic conspiracy theories that make America an even bigger laughing stock on the world stage. It’s time for #AbilifyHillary since sadly as a member of the ruling elite she won’t consider the alternative health methods proposed by The Walsh Institute that Bill Sardi has discussed at LewRockwell.com.

And if nothing works, if Sunstein doesn’t step in where he’s needed most, if no one else has the courage to intervene, we can just laugh at Ms. Rodham Clinton and her minions and resist their siren call to believe in ludicrous and truly dangerous conspiracy theories that have no The Cloak of Freya: Th... Yvonne Lorenzo Buy New $14.00 (as of 04:45 UTC - Details) basis in fact, evidence or reason. We can challenge them; they don’t have complete control yet and they never will: that is another of their delusions.

There’s nothing wrong in feeling some compassion for Ms Rodham Clinton, as long as she has the courage to seek help—and for everyone’s sake soon.

Some conspiracy theories are just plain nuts…or simply the delusions of people who need immediate, competent, compassionate intervention, which might be medical in part.

The rest of us don’t have to be swayed by obvious paranoia and lies; it will only make the suffering individuals worse. Even Alex Jones offers his sympathy. We don’t want to enable delusional, megalomaniacs. Our obligation is to seek the truth and make as many aware of it as possible, to let rational voices rise above the shrill, hysterical din.

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