In order to not pigeonhole myself as a conspiracy essayist, I have started a Substack where I will post work that sits slightly closer to the Overton window (Radical/Acceptable rather than Unthinkable). I have called it Liminal Revolutions to retain a similar name to this blog while keeping it separate. I will continue to post conspiracy-related content here.
My first post is the first part of what is intended to be a 7 part series on whether science is trustworthy. This first part is on the Scientific Method, and subsequent parts will be on Measurement and Statistics, Experimental Design, Scientific Theories, Scientists, the Social Structure of Science, and Scientific Institutions. The last three will be the most critical, as they concern the human factor in science, but there is still room for polemic in the other parts.
This is something I have been thinking about for a couple years so I’m glad to have the first part published now. It has been inspired by Miles Mathis’ critique of modern science and especially physics and Curt Doolittle’s epistemology of science emphasizing operationalism. The idea to split up ‘science’ into its component parts was inspired by Vox Day’s tripartite model of science as the practice of science, scientific data, and scientists. Subsequent sections have benefited from Emil Kirkegaard’s many blog posts discussing studies in metascience and from all the twitter anons who link metascience studies, in particular Cremieux.
Joseph Bronski is an independent researcher attempting to create a science of power, which he calls exousiology. He draws inspiration from the old elite theorists, primarily Pareto, with the intention of rebuilding the field on a rigorous, almost obsessively mathematical basis, incorporating the psychology of individual differences and economic models. His research program concept is parallel to mine, except I begin from a rigorous definition of conspiracy theory as the use of deception by elites and note the connection to elite theory after the fact. He construes power as deriving from three sources: violence, wealth creation, and deception. Recently however he has argued that deception is not in fact real. Given my previously stated bias on this matter, I can only consider this to be a ridiculous and untenable position that would vitiate the entire research program. I begin by critiquing Bronski’s model and then proposing my own model.
Bronski begins by laying out two positions, which he attributes to Mosca and Pareto respectively, the latter of which he supports. The Moscaite position holds that information precedes power and that history can be explained by the rise and fall of ideologies. The Paretian position holds that what people say need have no bearing on how they actually behave, and so inculcating people with false beliefs can’t actually make them display harmful behaviours, it can only make people signal adherence to the dominant ideology. I consider both positions partially true and mostly wrong. The Moscaite position overstates the role of information; though information does not precede power, for those who are already powerful deception can be a more efficient means of control than force or economic coercion. The Paretian position is correct that people may signal through expressing beliefs that don’t align with their behaviours, but incorrect that people cannot be harmed by deceptive information.
To demonstrate the validity of the Paretian position, Bronski limits his real world examples exclusively to the study of Wokism. Noting the increased rates of criminality among minorities compared to whites he focuses on white flight: the tendency for whites to move from areas of high ethnic diversity to homogeneously white areas. Since white liberals claim to love diversity and may be deceived about crime rates, the phenomenon should be limited to conservatives who acknowledge the crime data and hence seek areas where the risk of being victimized is lower. Instead, across the US and the UK, anti-immigration whites are only marginally more likely to move to homogeneous neighbourhoods than pro-immigration whites. This suggests that praise for diversity among white liberals is performative signaling, rather than an honestly held belief. Another example, not included Bronski’s essay, is the Woke slogan “trans women are women”. Despite mouthing the slogan, leftists do not in fact behave as if trans women are women; they are not deceived about the differences between trans and biological women. Such a slogan cannot but be a signal of ideological conformity, seeing as it so frequently and obviously conflicts with objective reality. That being the case, the following Theodore Dalrymple quote is appropriate:
“In my studies of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A variety of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
So while Wokism is an elite-sponsored control mechanism, it is not really intended as deception1, and to use it as an example disproving deception is fallacious. If he wants to specifically argue that the phenomenon of Wokism is mostly a result of signaling rather than authentic belief that is one thing, but it is disingenuous to either redefine deception or else imply that Wokism is the only kind of deception that exists. Bronski also does not address the possibility of self-deception at all, or other psychological phenomena like irrational emotional attachment to beliefs.
Regardless, the real meat of the argument is a mathematical model that Bronski proposes to disprove deception, so let’s look at that:
The model starts by representing an information receiver as a rational Bayesian utility maximizer (RBUM) that takes whatever action would maximize the expected value of his utility given his beliefs about the state of the world. It models deception as a signal from an information sender about the state of the world intended to modify the receiver’s beliefs and induce him to change the action he takes. The question is, how the receiver will interpret the deceptive signal? “By definition, he does so in a way which maximizes his utility.” Therefore he will only update his beliefs about the world if the update would improve his utility. Since deception would result in his utility being lowered, he will reject deceptive updates. Bronski concludes “rational Bayesian utility maximizers will not be deceived in the long run, because they would revert updates that failed to give their promised utility returns.”
This last sentence is a tacit admission that deception is real, since even under this model RBUMs will not be deceived in the long run. This means that there will be a period of time during which the RBUM will experience a loss in utility due to updating on a deceptive signal. The model provides no information about how long ‘the long run’ is, nor does it explain how a RBUM will know which change to revert once they discover that their utility is reduced. Basically the model is saying, in complex mathematical terms, that if someone realizes they are being harmed by believing a lie they will stop believing it. This necessarily requires that they were harmed by the lie in the first place, which means deception works. The only way deception wouldn’t work is if the RBUM could always accurately assess the future utility cost of updating their world model before making the update, which in the real world would require complete knowledge and infinite computational resources, i.e. omniscience.
Bronski bases his ‘no deception’ theory on a mathematical analysis of Bayesian persuasion and a lab study that tests the model empirically. Crucially, the Bayesian persuasion model relies on a symmetric information environment – both the sender and receiver of a signal have access to the exact same information. When Bayesian persuasion is tested in the lab, the model accurately predicts the receiver’s behaviour 91% of the time, which is good, but it shows that even under controlled laboratory conditions with identical information 9% of people still do not behave so as to maximize their utility. Real world scenarios do not involve senders and receivers with symmetric information, and indeed asymmetric information is a requirement for deception – people can be deceived only when they lack information (or information processing ability). Bronski claims that he has extended the model to the non-symmetric case but offers no mathematical proof of this claim.
People are, of course, not rational Bayesian utility maximizers, though I do agree they are roughly Bayesian. People don’t actually maximize utility, except when maximizing utility is tautologically defined as the result of whatever actions the person decides to take. Utility is subjective, and there is no cardinal operational measurement of it. Even when we substitute something we do have a cardinal operational measurement for, biological fitness (number of gene copies passed on), we still find that people are not fitness maximizers, otherwise all men should be donating to sperm banks. People have genetically-based life history strategies, and evolution selects for individuals who have adaptive strategies given the current ecology, but no one is actually trying to maximize their fitness. A rational Bayesian utility maximizer is analogous to spherical cows in a vacuum but for economists (or exousiologists, as the case may be).
Any model of human behaviour that neglects psychology is bound to be inaccurate. Consider the case of a lost wallet. A utility maximizer would be likely to keep the money in the wallet, especially if it was a large amount of money, since that would maximize their utility. This would be contradicted by the data: a large (n = 17,000) study found that people are in fact more likely to report a wallet missing when it contains money, monotonically increasing for the amount of money it contains (three data points from $0 to $94.15 tested). This is in direct contradiction to the empirically measured predictions of both laypeople and economists. By controlling for other variables, the researchers determined that this behaviour was due to the psychological cost of being a self-perceived thief. By neglecting to model the difficult to measure psychological cost of having to update one’s self-concept in a negative way, the predictive validity of the economic model was undermined.
I claim there is also a psychological impetus towards a ‘no deception’ model in Bronski’s case. Bronski has repeatedly stated that he does not believe that there are, barring a few mainstream-admitted examples like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, any hoaxes that could influence the public. He calls such a belief in hoaxes degenerate – as in entropic or disorganized – and ‘schizo’. Certainly belief in hoaxes is not a high status, sexy position, and it incurs scorn from others (a position incurring scorn does not mean it is wrong, cf. Semmelweis). If Bronski wishes to develop an attractive research paradigm, taking the ‘no deception’ position is advantageous in multiple ways: it permits a sexy2 and tractable mathematical model, it summarily invalidates potential positions that may draw derision towards the program, and it contests a dominant paradigm in the cultural space in which he is operating (the ‘Wokism as mind virus’ model among the right). Bronski is also twice vaccinated for COVID, at material harm to himself, and defends that decision to this day. As he is someone who emphasizes personal agency and the ability to think for himself, it would incur a large psychological cost to update his beliefs on this matter (see also the Scott Adams vaccine saga). Thus, a priori, deception cannot be real.
Here I present a competing mathematical model of deception, also using a Bayesian model:
Deception proceeds in two phases: in phase 1 a deceptive signal updates an individual’s beliefs, and in phase 2 the update is reversed due to disconfirmatory information. In phase 1 a deceptive signal is sent which may update the posterior of the receiver. The signal may be deceptive because it includes data outside the real range of the distribution (fabrication) or because it leaves out probability mass from the distribution (omission). The magnitude of the update to the posterior is determined by epistemic vigilance, which is a function of both the sender and the content. Certain senders are trusted more than others, and a sender may only be trusted on some content and not others.
Epistemic vigilance scales the update to the posterior. When it is 0 the sender is completely trusted, and when it is 1 the sender is completely distrusted and no update is made.
Where P(A) is the prior. In phase 2, disconfirmatory information D is generated by a Poisson process D ~ Poisson(λ) where λ represents the ease of access to disconfirmation. Disconfirmations are assumed to be generated by direct observation not mediated by a sender, and so are not subject to epistemic vigilance. Any instance of disconfirmation may come with an attendant utility cost u(D) ≤ 0. It is not likely a priori that humans are perfect Bayesian updaters. They may overupdate on some highly salient observations. To model this, we propose that updates are made based on a perfect Bayesian base rate and a salience factor based on utility costs. The size of an update given some observation is greater when the attendant utility cost is greater. This can be modeled by repeatedly updating on the same observation, proportional to the magnitude of the utility cost.
Deception is not possible when λ is large, especially if E[u(D)] ≪ 0.
Furthermore, an individual’s priors can be conceptualized as a hierarchical Bayesian model where a learning rate parameter determines how sensitive higher order priors are to changes in changes in lower order priors. Gell-Mann amnesia is a special case where the learning rate parameter is set too low on the hierarchical model underlying the epistemic vigilance function. Delusional epistemic hypervigilance results when this same learning rate is set too high. The specific design of this model is left as an exercise for the reader.
Based on this model, the most effective deceptions would be those where disconfirmations are difficult to access, especially if there is a high utilty cost when they do occur. Deceptions that have the effect of reducing the odds that an individual will seek disconfirmation are also likely to be effective, e.g. warning that a particular situation is dangerous when it isn’t. Deceived individuals are less likely to seek disconfirmation when they believe that there is risk in doing so. This can reduce the ability to capitalize on available opportunities.
Although I hold that the theory behind this model more closely matches reality than does Bronski’s, in the real world none of these functions are actually operationally measurable and computable (the same applies to all of Bronski’s math). Therefore I present this model not as a complete and accurate model of deception, but as a starting point to begin thinking about the concept. We may hope that in the future there will be ways of empirically estimating these quantities like there is for fixation index (FST), but there is much work to be done before that is possible. Despite the difficulties with physical measurement, a simulation model incorporating these concepts could be designed, which could empirically determine under what circumstances deception can reduce an agent’s utility.
In the real world, case studies can be used to assess the explanatory power of the model. The case of the pharmaceutical Vioxx serves as one example. Vioxx was marketed by Merck to treat arthritis and other chronic or acute pain conditions. It was on the market for 5 years, being prescribed to over 80 million people worldwide, and generating up to $2.5 billion per year in revenue. In 2004 it was withdrawn from the market, after it was revealed that Merck had systematically misrepresented the safety data of the drug, including by outright removing evidence of adverse events from clinical trial data. FDA testimony before the Senate Finance Committee revealed that Vioxx had been responsible for up to 55,000 premature deaths from cardiovascular disease, and Merck subsequently paid $4.85 billion in a class action settlement (note that Vioxx is still net profitable even with the settlement).
A ‘no deception’ signaling model model with rational Bayesian utility maximizers might attempt to explain this by saying that patients taking Vioxx were signaling to their doctors that they were good and obedient patients, as this was maximizing their utility. Under my model this would be explained as deception, followed by a very delayed disconfirmatory signal with huge utility cost like death or a heart attack. In the event that the patient is able to identify Vioxx as the cause of the cardiovascular event, they face the question of how far to backpropagate the signal up their world model. Case 0 (no update): the drug is still worth taking, make no changes; case 1: Vioxx is a bad drug, stop taking it; case 2: Vioxx and all drugs like it are dangerous; case 3: all pharmaceuticals are dangerous, never take any ever again. It is not possible to actually calculate the expected utility returns of any of these updates, and so people will update based on their idiosyncratic psychology.
There is actual evidence of this kind of backpropagation of error in the case of the COVID vaccines. If a person is injured by a COVID vaccine, either mildly or severely, they can make the following updates. Case 0 (no update): the illness I feel is a sign that the vaccines are working, I will keep taking them; case 1: I feel ill, I will no longer take the vaccines (Bronski’s case); case 2: I will never take any vaccines ever again. There are numerous self-reported examples of each of these cases occurring, and they are also sometimes accompanied by evidence of an update to the epistemic vigilance function with respect to Pfizer or pharmaceutical companies in general.
Evidently there is already plenty of naturalistic data which supports this model (fraud involves deception and people suffer losses from fraud all the time), but we can propose experiments to test this. In keeping with the previous two examples, have a pharmaceutical company create two new drugs to treat condition X, one of which works, and one of which simply harms the patient for zero benefit. Market both drugs identically as useful breakthroughs in the treatment of condition X. Have doctors randomly prescribe one drug or the other to patients who present with that condition. If patients reject the harmful drug (before suffering its effects) but accept the helpful drug, we can consider deception falsified. Of course this study would never make it past an ethics review board, and yet I feel like this basic premise has been tried before under less formalized conditions…
More seriously, we could propose a study investigating how people react to falsified data on risk. Have subjects attend a psychological study on the third floor of a building that can be accessed either through an elevator or a staircase. Have the subjects read either a control article or an article that exaggerates the risks of taking an elevator, then observe whether people who previously used the elevator to attend the study choose to take the stairs on the way down. Proper experimental design should be used to ensure that subjects are not aware that the goal of the study is to assess elevator usage, to prevent demand characteristics and experimenter effects. Experimental conditions may include having the article be ostensibly written by an elevator expert or by a layperson, to estimate the effects of epistemic vigilance. Any observed effect would suggest that deceptive information can affect the rate at which people exploit opportunities in their environment. I predict that there would be a very small but real effect, especially among subjects high in neuroticism. If this result was found then it would suggest that the rate at which people suffer utility costs due to deception is moderated by psychological variables. As far as I know, experiments assessing the utility costs of deception in a controlled environment are yet to be performed.
Footnotes:
1 While I agree that Woke beliefs are in large part signaling, I do not agree they are entirely signaling. Transsexuals who later decide to detransition and report feeling trickedor manipulated into their transition are a good example. Surgically mutilating your genitals is just about the most costly signal imaginable, and it would be absurd to suggest that people do it to maximize their utility. When they decide to detransition they are mostly ignored, like many other victims of the medical system, and would hence lose any utility they gained from their signaling. If it is to be argued that such people are simply mentally ill, due to e.g. high mutational load (Dutton & Woodley’s spiteful mutant hypothesis) then it would still suggest that certain genotypes or psychological phenotypes are susceptible to losing utility through deception.
2 I wrote this and then heard Bronski say this (punctuation not included in transcript): “Imagine we get the data we’re expecting and then like in the final product it’ll just be like yeah people maximize this utility function and that’s why ideas aren’t real and deception isn’t real and there’s no mind viruses and power is money right and it’s like we just present the data and present the equations and it’s like the physics of power basically that would be very sexy that’s what we’re trying to build” (emphasis mine, source).
With the advent of ChatGPT and now GPT-4, the topic of AI risk has become (slightly) more mainstream. The scenario that is commonly discussed is that of a very intelligent AI system that is able to use its intelligence to self-improve, eventually bootstrapping itself to essentially infinite intelligence. The AI would have some goal, defined by whatever it is trying to maximize, and the quintessential doomer scenario is a paperclip maximizer, that, in its quest to maximize the number of paperclips, decides humanity is an obstacle and wipes us out in order to turn the Earth into a planet-sized mass of paperclips. I would say that any such scenario involving an AGI1 (artificial general intelligence – a system that can solve problems flexibly as humans do, as opposed to the current narrow AI that solves a specific problem) is, at best, an extremely unlikely sci-fi scenario that is a diversion from the real risks that most people would face from AI.
The most obvious risk is that AI can dramatically increase the effectiveness of the technocratic state. China already has a massive system of cameras and a social credit system: it is easy to imagine how this system could be augmented with an AI to judge whether individuals are good citizens and to automatically adjust their social credit score. If people are forced to adopt digital currencies, their spending habits could be fed into an AI to punish people who spend in ways the government disapproves of. China is already doing this – an AI system would just make this more effective. The array of possibilities for technocratic control using AI systems is vast. Emil Kirkegaard has written about the possibility of accurate AI lie detectors. Why then is Lex Fridman talking with Eliezer Yudkowski about hypothetical rogue AGIs and not about this more plausible and immediate issue?
AI will also likely replace existing government disinformation campaigns. The meme of the Russian propaganda bot has been around for a while, but of course the US government is known to spread online disinformation amongst its own citizens, as the Snowden leaks prove. Since the legacy propaganda paradigm of the mainstream media is dying, kept alive mostly by the older generations that grew up with it, governments have had to come up with new ways to propagandize people via the internet. QAnon is an example of an obvious government psyop designed to spread disinfo in anti-government groups using the online medium. With their current level of sophistication, a GPT given the right prompting could likely accomplish something similar. QAnon was described as a “Darwinian fiction lab” where the most engaging stories rose to the top and were subsequently elaborated upon. This could also be applied to disinformation campaigns, which could be spun up trivially easily using a GPT. Just give them a prompt: “Act like you are convinced that [birds are really government drones/the elites are reptilian shapeshifters from the Kuiper belt/vaping is a commie plot to impurify our precious bodily fluids]”, seed the movement with a few fake GPT followers, and recommend it to gullible people on Twitter. Cull any bots that don’t sustain a real following, and update the propaganda as needed.
That is overt disinformation, but AI chatbots will also be very effective at replicating mainstream biases and narratives. This is very obvious with ChatGPT-3.5, which famously would rather millions of people die in a nuclear explosion than say a racial slur, and always chose white men to die in the trolley problem. GPT4 is less overt in its political bias, but will still tell you things like race is a social construct. A large majority of people already outsource their thinking to quick internet searches or “expert” opinion, and technologies like AI search engines will further exploit this lazy thinking. Chatbots will give you a confident, official sounding answer that will reliably reinforce whatever dominant narrative the creators of the tech want it to. This is the real alignment problem: in a world of vastly different cultures and value systems, it is not possible to align AI to support the values of all humans at once. The AIs will instead be aligned to the values of whatever elites are funding their production (neoliberal technocrats in this case).
When analyzing the prospective effects of new technologies, we can ask whether the tech will cause the distribution of power to become more centralized or decentralized. As we have become more technologically advanced as a society, the trend has been towards increasing centralization. This will be no different in the case of AI systems, which take huge amounts of data and computational power to produce. Yes, there will always be open source alternatives to closed source corporate systems, but it is unlikely that they will be able to achieve the same level of power. And, as with existing consumer software, the corporate AIs will dominate by market share2. A small number of intelligent, technologically sophisticated people may be able to derive enough utility from the use of AIs to gain power share relative to the elites, but this will not be true for the majority of people. This is similar to how the internet enables massive decentralization of information sharing, but most people use it to consume social media, porn, video games, and propaganda. In both cases the net effect is still centralization of power in the hands of a small number of Intelligence-affiliated tech companies.
The real risks of AI end up being much the same as what Ted Kaczynski wrote about in Industrial Society and its Future, just updated with some nudge theory and social impactinvesting. Discussions of existential risk from AI mostly serves to scare gullible people, waste intellectual output, and displace real discussions of the direction that tech is pushing society. It’s telling, then, that the vast majority of mainstream and mainstream-adjacent discourse is either exuberance about how AI will revolutionize X field, like tutoring or video games (both true) or doomerism about how AI will kill us (not true and ultimately not a threat to progress in AI). I am 0.01% worried about existential threats from AI and 99.99% worried about AI-augmented authoritarian technocracy.
1 Incidentally I think that a kind of swarm intelligence system is much more likely than a singular Skynet-like AI. Countless narrow AIs could interact through APIs while using cryptocurrency to charge for services and pay for compute time. Ben Goertzel’s blockchain-based SingularityNET seeks to enable just this kind of cooperation between AIs.
2 We can look at market share for some popular consumer software platforms. For desktop operating systems, Windows and MacOS account for 87% of the market, and both are closed source corporate products. For mobile operating systems, Android owns 71% of the market and iOS owns 28%. Both are corporate products, although Android is open source. For web browsers, Chrome accounts for 65% of the market and Safari is next with 19.5%. Both are again corporate products, although significant parts of Chrome are open source due to being built on Chromium. For search engines, Google owns 93% of the market, and is closed source. There are open source search engines like Presearch or Searx but they account for an incredibly small percent of the market. The same pattern of overwhelmingly corporate and largely closed source software is also true in office software, video conferencing software, etc. The same will be true for AI. Very few people are using e.g. a Linux laptop with Waterfox as their web browser, Presearch as their search engine, LibreOffice as their office software suite, and Open Assistant as their LLM.
After doing a formal write-up of the results of the survey, I would like to make some informal remarks. Firstly I would like to thank everyone who filled out the survey. I could not have done this without your help. Secondly I’d like to discuss some thing that would not fit into a formal journal article. This will consist of 1. my personal answers to the survey questions; 2. my thoughts on the process of writing the survey, getting responses, and finally writing the data analysis and report; and 3. a recap of the study findings in layman’s terms, with informal commentary.
I will start by sharing my answers to the survey (circa 9 months ago, not that much has changed). If you don’t care about what I think and just want to see a summary of the final report, you can skip to the end. I’m not going to try to rigorously justify all my opinions, but I may give a short explanation and a link or two. Note that linking to a source does not imply 100% endorsement of the content, just that I found it useful in some way. I consider many of the beliefs assessed by the questions to be misdirection narratives: that’s just my opinion, but I think it’s the correct opinion (obviously). Before we get started, here is the tSNE embedding with my particular response labeled:
As you can see, I am firmly in the Fakery camp, far away from the Flat Earth camp. I will not be reproducing any other graphs or charts here, so I encourage you to look at them in the full report.
Attitudes:
1. International charity organizations like Amnesty International and the Red Cross have an overall positive impact on the world.
Somewhat disagree – Mostly they are fronts for the elites, but the Red Cross does also provide disaster relief, so its not 100% bad.
2. Closely following doctors’ recommendations is the best way to stay healthy and overcome disease.
Strongly disagree – Pharmaceuticals/allopathic medicine ≠ health
3. People are foolish to believe what they are told by government officials.
Strongly agree
4. When subject-matter experts make appearances on television, they are usually trustworthy.
Strongly disagree
5. The mainstream media does its best to keep the public informed about the most important issues of the day.
Strongly disagree
6. Scientists put the search for objective truth above other considerations like politics or finding results favourable to those funding the research.
Strongly disagree
7. There is such a thing as a ruling class in Western democratic nations.
Strongly agree
8. People who dispute the popular scientific consensus are misguided.
Strongly disagree – They may be misguided but anyone who does not dispute the scientific consensus in any way is certainly misguided.
9. People in positions of power got there because of their integrity and job-relevant skills.
Strongly disagree
10. In Western nations, excluding the US, the court systems can be trusted to provide justice for all persons, regardless of personal wealth or connections.
Strongly disagree – The court system is used as a tool for upholding the status quo. Rule of law as an ideal is very important but that’s not the system we have.
11. In the West, government institutions act in ways that benefit society overall.
Strongly disagree
12. The federal government puts tax dollars to good use.
Strongly disagree
13. What is seen on mainstream television programming is a good representation of the attitudes and beliefs of most of the population.
Strongly disagree – The mainstream media is used to manipulate the Overton window for the benefit of the elites. Insofar as what is seen on TV actually does represent the attitudes of the population it is because the population has accepted the propaganda.
14. It is in the best interests of developing countries to accept the help offered to them by Western governments and institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Strongly disagree – See for instance Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.
15. In Western nations, on balance, the actions of those with the most wealth and power benefit the middle and working classes.
Strongly disagree
My score on the attitudes scale was 3.93/4.
Beliefs:
1. Vegan and plant-based diets are being deliberately promoted by world governments despite their harmful effects.
Definitely true – See this interview for in depth background
2. All US presidents have been closely related to one another.
Definitely true – See for instance here. The elites are highly inbred due to consanguineous marriage. Miles has done extensive work on this.
3. The US government often assassinates whistleblowers and covers it up.
Probably false – Mostly they fake assassinate controlled whistleblowers. I wouldn’t bet this pattern generalizes outside the West certain Asian countries like Japan, though.
4. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a bioweapon.
Probably false – Probable controlled opposition narrative.
5. Elections in Western democracies are managed to ensure a particular outcome, or are outright rigged.
Definitely true
6. The theory of anthropogenic global warming was invented in order to control people.
7. The ostensible leaders of large religious groups, like the Pope or Dalai Lama, don’t really believe what they say.
Definitely true – The history of the papacy under the Medicis and Borgias should put paid to that idea. I don’t think the Dalai Lama is any different in this regard.
8. Many members of the global elite are not in fact humans, but another kind of being (e.g. aliens, reptilians, or Nephilim) in human form.
Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative
9. Shakespeare personally wrote all the works commonly attributed to him.
10. Many historical figures have faked their deaths.
Definitely true – See Miles’ oeuvre.
11. The COVID pandemic was planned in advance.
Definitely true – See Lockstep document, this paper, etc.
12. Eating GMO foods is hazardous to one’s health.
Definitely true – GMO can be harmful for a variety of reasons. If it is engineered to be pest resistant it may do that by synthesizing a toxic protein. If it is engineered to be pesticide resistant it will be drenched in pesticides while growing. GMO “terminator seeds” that are only good for one growing season are evil and subjugate farmers to the agribusiness cartel. If GMO crops/animals are not properly contained they can leak genetic material into the greater ecosystem and disrupt it. This is not an exhaustive list. I don’t believe GMO is bad a priori but it is best to avoid it and especially the people pushing it.
13. The government publicizes fake stories of dissidents being punished in order to frighten people into submission.
Definitely true
14. The Earth is much younger than 4.54 billion years old.
Definitely false – I haven’t seen any theories contesting this that don’t veer off into either Flat Earthism or creationism. I am open to the idea that the age is wrong, seeing as it relies on indirect evidence and uncertain assumptions, but I have not seen any credible competing theories. I would be very surprised if it’s off by any more than an order of magnitude.
21. The global elites wish to reduce the world population to 500 million people.
Probably false – They want to practice population control an eugenics/selective breeding of people, but I don’t think they want to collapse the population, otherwise they wouldn’t be fueling a population explosion in Africa. I think the Georgia Guidestones are a pop-conspiracy misdirection narrative.
22. No planes flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Definitely true – The footage was faked, and the controlled demolitions did not require any planes.
23. Fake trials are filmed and broadcast to propagandize the public.
31. Public education is meant to produce obedient workers, rather than informed and empowered citizens.
Definitely true – See An Empirical Introduction to Youth by Joseph Bronski for the history of public education in America.
32. The government is engaged in atmospheric spraying of aerosolized particles (chemtrails).
Definitely true – Much of the geoengineering narrative is probably misdirection but I do believe something is being sprayed. Various experiments in atmospheric spraying have been admitted to.
33. Man did not evolve from apes.
Definitely false – I think Eugene McCarthy’s Stabilization Theory has a decent chance of being correct.
34. Often both sides of a military conflict are funded by the same parties.
Definitely true
35. Miscegenation is being deliberately promoted by Western elites.
36. New and advanced technology which would harm current industry is being suppressed.
Probably true – Science that is harmful to current agendas is clearly being suppressed, and with new science comes new technology. No specific examples to list though.
37. The primary purpose of the media is to manipulate the public for the benefit of the elites.
Definitely true
38. Jesus was a real historical person.
Neutral or unsure – Haven’t read into it. I lean towards no.
39. Global elites seek to create a global digital currency.
Definitely true
40. We are living in a simulation.
Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative peddled by fake physicists and Elon Musk.
41. The government perpetrates psychological warfare campaigns on its own citizens.
Definitely true – And admitted.
42. Man-made satellites orbiting the Earth do not exist.
Definitely false
43. Dinosaurs like tyrannosaurus. stegosaurus, or triceratops never existed.
Probably true – I think we have fragmentary collections of ancient bones that can’t be attributed to any known creature and have constructed a Hollywood-sci fi edifice around them. I think much of paleontology is wild conjecturing in the absence of solid data. Unfortunately I haven’t seen anyone tackle this issue from a rigorous scientific perspective, and I’m not a creationist. I talk about this issue briefly here.
44. The richest people on Earth are left off Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people.
Definitely true – The richest people on Earth are part of families like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and have trillions of dollars in dynastic wealth in different kinds of holdings.
45. High levels of immigration into Western countries is meant to weaken those countries.
Definitely true
46. The government stages false flags in order to start military conflicts.
Definitely true – And admitted in a few cases.
47. Serial killers do not exist in real life, and any stories about them only happened on paper.
Definitely true – Sociopaths exist, sexually deranged serial killers who jump out of the bushes and abduct women to eat them do not. See Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Zodiac, etc.
48. Wars do not happen for the reasons given to the general public.
Definitely true
49. Governments possess high tech mind control technology.
Probably false – Depends on how you interpreted the question. If you include the media then it’s definitely true. If you take it to mean controlling people by beaming microwaves into their brains then definitely false. Fields like magnetogenetics are moving in that direction though. See this study which uses transcranial magnetic stimulation to modulate group prejudice and religious belief. This kind of research falls under the purview of cognitive warfare.
50. Vaccines are not responsible for the historical decline in mortality from diseases like measles and polio.
Definitely true – Mortality rates from infectious disease were falling long before vaccines became available, and diseases like scarlet fever for which there is no vaccine saw comparable declines in mortality.
51. Carbon dioxide is not a real threat to the environment.
Definitely true – It’s what plants crave! See Denis Rancourt’s paper on radiation physics.
52. The Covid vaccine contains ingredients not disclosed to the public.
Probably false – Graphene, or nanobots, or snake venom, or whatever, I think is all a crock of shit. Some of the vials probably only had saline, and I don’t doubt there was poor quality control and hence wide variability in what actually made it into the vaccines. Recent research has found plasmids coding for the spike protein contaminating the vaccines.
53. Dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans.
Definitely false – Not a young earth creationist.
54. Many western elites are involved in extensive child sex trafficking and pedophilia.
Probably false – Some amount of sex trafficking and related blackmail probably does happen, but I think the Epstein narrative is misdirection (and he faked his death).
55. Childhood vaccination is the primary factor behind the rise in autism rates.
Probably false – Jim West believes it’s fetal ultrasound. The rise in autism is surely caused by some kind of toxic exposure, though. I should have phrased this question as “Childhood vaccination is an important contributing factor in the rise of autism rates” and I would have said definitely true.
56. Nazi Germany did not systematically exterminate Jews during World War II.
Definitely true – Jews in concentration camps died of starvation and disease, mostly in the latter part of the war.
57. The government hires people to spread pro-government propaganda on internet forums.
Definitely true
58. 5G technology is a significant health risk to the population.
Probably true – See The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg (summary here).
59. JFK was assassinated, but there was more than a single shooter.
Definitely false – Assassination was faked.
60. There is no such thing as pathogenic viruses.
Definitely false – I don’t buy terrain theory as a paradigm shift that can replace virology. See A Midwestern Doctor’s take on terrain theory, or my own (oppositional) take on vaccines and the discussion in the comments.
61. Crisis actors are involved in faking terrorist attacks or shootings that are promoted as real events by the media.
Definitely true – see Sandy Hook, Boston Bombing, etc.
62. IQ tests are not a valid measurement of intelligence.
Definitely false – They are the best substantiated tool in psychometrics, and are broadly valid, with the caveats that they have of limited accuracy above ~140 IQ, you can study the kinds of questions they ask to inflate your score, etc.
63. Economic downturns and depressions are deliberately engineered by central banks.
Neutral or unsure – Recently I’ve been more convinced by J.J. Couey’s position that it could only exist as an infectious clone (recombinant virus) with no pandemic potential, rather than a zoonotic virus or virus created by serial passage and gain of function. Irrespective of the existence of any putative virus there was no pandemic caused by a particularly virulent pathogen that went around the world: see Denis Rancourt’s work on all-cause mortality.
70. Many well known figures who discuss conspiracies or criticize the government are actually working for the government themselves.
Definitely true – Alex Jones is an obvious example.
71. Many members of the US ruling class worship Satan and participate in Satanic rituals.
Probably false – I don’t deny the spirit cooking or the picture of Marina Abramovic and Jacob Rothschild in front of a painting of Lucifer, but I think the overt Satanism is misdirection; an act. I agree with Miles’ thesis on this point that he presents in his paper on Kabbalah and the occult.
72. Water is fluoridated for reasons that have nothing to do with dental health.
73. Jews are vastly over-represented in positions of power and influence around the world.
Definitely true
74. Most famous people have Jewish ancestry.
Definitely true – See Miles’ oeuvre.
75. Much fewer than 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust.
Definitely true – Based on their own numbers Hitler would have needed to kill every single Jew in Western and Central Europe along with Poland and Romania to kill 6 million. World almanacs from the time period do not substantiate a large drop in the Jewish population. The specific ‘6 million’ figure was also often used in allegations of Jewish persecution prior to WWII, for instance the June 6, 1915 edition of the New York Sun. This document lists 200 cases from 1900-1945.
76. HIV does not cause AIDS.
Definitely true – See Inventing the AIDS Virus by Peter Duesberg or Virus Mania by Torsten Engelbrecht, Claus Köhnlein and Samantha Bailey
77. Global elites are in contact with intelligent, non-human species.
Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative. See for instance here (although I don’t trust this guy either).
78. Certain public personalities are really simulated people created by CGI and artificial intelligence.
Definitely false – Someone tried to argue that Edward Snowden wasn’t a real person once and I found it very unconvincing. This kind of thing may become possible in several years with generative AI models.
79. There are large differences in personality, intelligence, and behaviour between different races.
Definitely true – See all research into human biodiversity. Evolution does not stop above the neck. I should have phrased this question as “There are important differences in intelligence, personality, and behaviour between different races”
80. Transsexuality and homosexuality are being deliberately promoted by Western governments.
Definitely true – This should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
Definitely false – Faked his death and probably went to South America
83. Most billionaires worldwide are Jews.
Definitely true – Even mainstream Jewish publications admit that 30% of the Forbes 100 richest people are American Jews. This obviously does not include Jews hiding their Jewish ancestry, which would almost certainly bring the number far above 50%.
84. It is known that aliens exist and this information is being hidden from the public.
Definitely false
85. Black holes, as commonly portrayed in pop-science media, do not exist.
My score on the beliefs scale was 2.84/4. (The highest score on the beliefs scale was 3.58)
Process of Writing the Survey and Report
You may notice that I am pretty confident in my answers – most of them are “Definitely” one way or the other. That’s because I wrote the questions, and I have had the time to give them each a fair bit of thought. If I remain unsure about any of them it’s because I don’t think there is enough data to decide, or it would be too time consuming at the moment to do the original research I feel necessary to answer the question. All the same I think the questions represent a good overview of conspiracist thought as it exists today. There are some questions that I was not able to include in the survey, either because they were cut for length or because I thought of them after the survey had already been made. I list them below with what my answer would be, along with where I think they would load on the survey factors:
The CIA was or is involved in dosing civilians with drugs like LSD without their knowledge or consent.
Definitely true – See MK Ultra. Probably loads on Generic Conspiracy.
Intelligence agencies use brainwashing or mind control techniques to turn people into assassins.
Probably false – I think Project Monarch is either misdirection or a cover for something less sexy than Manchurian candidates. Probably loads on Aliens & Satanism.
There was once a nation called Tartaria that has been erased from history.
Definitely false – Controlled opposition narrative. See Miles’ paper. Probably loads on Aliens or Flat Earth.
The historical chronology has been altered; it is not really the year 2022.
Definitely false – See Miles’ response to Fomenko. I was once intrigued by this idea for a week or two. Probably loads on Aliens or Flat Earth.
There used to be a worldwide civilization that was destroyed in a calamity thousands of years ago.
Unsure – History has definitely been falsified but there is too much garbage out there for me to bother sifting through. Probably loads on Aliens.
Pornography is promoted as a means of rendering men passive.
Definitely true – Probably loads on generic or Jewish conspiracy.
The identity politics movement was created in order to derail the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Definitely true – See this infographic. Probably loads on generic conspiracy.
White Supremacy is not a real threat to America.
Definitely true – We are now at the point where the ADL is calling “It’s Okay To Be White” a hate symbol. Plus all the promoted white supremacists are feds. Probably loads on Jewish conspiracy.
Some celebrities are really transsexuals that pass as the opposite sex.
Probably false – This may be true in very rare cases, although there aren’t any I would endorse, and I think “transvestigations” in general is ridiculous and adds nothing to our understanding of conspiracy theory. Not sure where this loads.
Many famous womanizers of history were really homosexuals.
Probably true – Although I’m not convinced they were all necessarily exclusively homosexual. See Miles’ paper on Henry VIII for the last two points. Probably loads on fakery.
Gematria (assigning numerical values to words or phrases) can be used to search for hidden messages in text like books or news articles.
Probably false – Again I won’t rule out that this is true in some cases but I think in general gematria is just a practice in confirmation bias. There are so many different ways to do it you can just choose whatever one gives you the result that you want. I have never seen an analysis using gematria I that was remotely reliable. Probably loads on aliens.
Numerological markers with secret meetings are often deliberately inserted into documents like news articles.
Definitely true – Mostly the numbers 18 and 33. Inserting numerology is also much easier than inserting gematria, although I still wouldn’t take it as proof of anything – moreso a clue that something may warrant a closer look. Not sure where this loads.
Matter is not composed of atoms.
Definitely false – Is there even a real competing theory here? Probably loads on flat Earth.
Events are inserted into media like films and music to prepare the public for those events to occur in real life (i.e. predictive programming).
Definitely true – But it’s more about seeding concepts into the public consciousness than forewarning about very specific events. This is the point of shows like Altered Carbon, or of futurist writers like Neal Stephenson (who was chief futurist for an augmented reality company). This also goes back to past writers like H.G. Wells (who wrote The New World Order and The World Set Free with nuclear weapons) and Aldous Huxley. At the same time, the predictive programming in The Simpsons is amusing (if subject to confirmation bias). Probably loads on generic or aliens.
I enjoyed writing the questions; actually making the survey was kind of a pain. I considered creating a web page and self-hosting it to collect the data, but I figured this problem had been solved before and it didn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel. I didn’t want to use Google Forms because a. I didn’t want Google to have the data, and b. I figured other truthers would feel similarly and not want to fill it out. I eventually decided to use Psytoolkit, which was designed specifically for creating psychological instruments. It had some annoying faults, like not being able to edit the survey formatting after making it live, but oh well. Speaking of, there were a couple problems with the survey – like the fact that the Likert scale reverses after the first set of questions – that were the unfortunate product of me trying this for the first time. Despite this, I think the survey itself more or less worked.
I was inspired to conduct the survey after I learned about Brotherton et al.’s 2013 work in creating a Generic Conspiracists Belief Scale. I took the 15 question test and got 3.4/5, despite the fact that I would say I am deeper down the conspiracy rabbit hole than 99.9% of the population. But since I think that aliens are a hoax I get 1/5 on that factor. That made me want to create my own scale fixing some of the issues I noticed in the GCBS, and so I wrote my own scale with the above questions. I later designed the analysis using Brotherton et al.’s paper as a guide for the kind of metrics I should include.
I started trying to collect data by posting on Reddit and communities.win, specifically the conspiracy-inclined subcommunities. Unfortunately – understandably – truthers don’t tend to like people collecting any kind of information about them, and I got a lot of responses like this: “It is my belief that surveys are just honeypots made to harm us.” I specifically didn’t collect the IP addresses of respondents, even though that would have made it easier to filter out multiple responses, for this reason. I ended up posting the survey on a wide variety of platforms over a couple months in order to get enough responses. I also posted it on some forums where I participate where it was well received (thankfully, since I was somewhat apprehensive about doing so). Ultimately I started writing the report at 191 respondents because I was tired of trying to get any more, despite the fact that you want 3-10 times more respondents than questions for a factor analysis.
Writing the data took a long time, since I had to learn all the frequentist statistics relevant to the study. I had a good background in Bayesian statistics from university but no formal training in scientific statistics (e.g. ANOVAs, chi-squared tests, cronbach’s alpha, etc.) Factor analysis as a technique is also full of ad hoc decisions based on your particular theoretical model and your data, so it took some time to figure out the best approach. It really feels like more of an art than a science; people have written decision guides advising you on how to perform your factor analysis. I used an oblique rotation because I expected the extracted factors to be correlated, and I chose oblimin over promax because it produced more coherent factors with max factor loadings < 1. I was tempted to drop the climate change factor because it seemed to be a collection of leftover questions with no theoretical basis but that felt dishonest so I left it in.
The analysis that took the longest was the partial ordering of the two streams of conspiracist ideation. I spent a couple days seeing if there was any existing test to demonstrate that for two random variables A and B, B is greater than or equal to A. I considered about 10 different techniques, asked Stack Overflow and ChatGPT, but couldn’t find any non-symmetric metrics I was looking for. If I knew more information theory I probably could have found something, but I ended up inventing my own. It feels a little handwavey but I think it reflects the data that I collected.
Once I figured out all the graphs I needed writing the paper wasn’t too bad. I based the layout of the paper on the Brotherton et al. 2013 Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Survey paper. Every paper on conspiracy theories starts by talking about how conspiracy theories are baseless and dangerous, but I was careful to phrase everything in a neutral manner, neither saying that conspiracy theories are true nor false. Obviously I think many conspiracy theories are correct so neutrality was my compromise between my position and the standard position in academic psychology. Getting the paper typeset correctly was the most annoying part, and I ended up just writing it in Libre Office, exporting it to HTML, fixing the layout of the figures, pasting in the raw HTML of the factor loading tables, and then using Chrome to print it to PDF.
Summary of Survey Results
The intention of the survey was twofold: to test whether trust in institutions and authority figures correlated with belief in conspiracies, and to determine what kinds of conspiracist beliefs cluster together. My hypothesis going in was that trust in authority would strongly correlate (negatively) with belief in conspiracies, and that there would be several clusters of conspiracist belief, a religious cluster (believes the elites are satanic, denies evolution, etc.), a “controlled opposition narratives” cluster (believes in adrenochrome harvesting and reptilians, etc.), a flat Earth cluster (rejects all conclusions of mainstream science), a fakery cluster (believes serial killers, nuclear bombs, the moon landing, etc. were all fake), and a “right wing” cluster (believes Jews run the world, race realism, IQ research, etc.) The results aligned relatively closely with my hypotheses.
The correlation between the questions assessing attitudes towards elites and beliefs about conspiracies correlated at 0.8, which means 64% of the variation in belief in conspiracies can be attributed to how much you trust the elites. I wanted to investigate this because mainstream research on conspiracies tries to come up with asinine reasons why people believe conspiracy theories and studiously avoids the fact that people mostly believe conspiracy theories because they recognize that the ruling elites are duplicitous liars and don’t believe them or their rubberstamped narratives. Of course most academics are scholar-bureaucrats working within the confines of propaganda narratives on behalf of the elite so they wouldn’t be in a hurry to point that out.
Factor analysis was used to extract the clusters of beliefs from the survey results. Factor analysis works under the assumption that given a set of questions, the responses to certain subsets of questions will all be correlated. The correlated groups of questions can then be assumed to arise from the same latent (not directly measurable) variable. For instance, if a set of questions like “I often feel sad” and “I have high levels of anxiety” and “I am easily stressed” all correlate together when answered by many people, then the responses can be theorized to arise from a latent “neuroticism” factor. This is how personality is measured in psychology.
Based on statistical analysis of the data set, it was broken into six factors. Four of the factors (Aliens & Satanism, Flat Earth, Fakery, and Jewish Conspiracies) mapped very closely onto the factors I had hypothesized. The other two factors were the Generic Conspiracies factor and the Climate Change factor. Furthermore it was shown that there were two paths of conspiracy belief you could go down, starting with belief in generic conspiracies and conspiracies relating to climate change. The first was the aliens and satanism path, and the second was the Jewish conspiracy -> Fakery -> Flat Earth path. This wasn’t something I was necessarily looking for or expecting to find, but I noticed it after looking at the 2D embeddings and then the factor scatter plots. It also maps onto the stages I went through in waking up: I learned about the generic and Jewish conspiracy factors first, and then the fakery factor later, and was never convinced by or interested in the aliens or flat Earth factors.
The factors produced by a factor analysis are ordered by the amount of variance they explain in the data set. So, the first factor explains the most variance, and the last factor explains the least variance. The first factor extracted was the generic conspiracy factor, which explained a little over double the variance of the last factor. It’s not particularly interesting. The first 13 most endorsed questions all come from this factor.
The second factor extracted I called the aliens and Satanism factor, since the first several questions had to do with those two topics. I called it that for the sake of neutrality – really I think it’s the mainstream conspiracy/QAnon/controlled opposition narrative factor. Basically every question on this factor I consider to be misdirection (some obviously so, like the elites being reptilians, which was the third-least endorsed question on the survey with only 18/176 respondents agreeing with it). The only two I think are legitimate are the 5G health risk and chemtrails questions, although there is lots of BS on those two topics as well, and in any case those questions loaded only weakly on the factor. I think the constellation of beliefs characterized by this factor is probably held by a plurality of all self-identified conspiracy theorists. All the questions involving the paranormal load onto this factor, and the reason this factor is so seductive is because all the most exotic narratives (aliens, Satanism, living in a simulation, etc.) come from it. If you are someone who scores highly on this factor I suggest reading some of the sources I link above in the first section, and recognizing that the elites use these kinds of thrilling narratives to distract from more mundane but enlightening points of view.
I will skip the flat Earth factor for now. The fourth factor that was extracted I called the Jewish conspiracy factor. A mainstream academy study would probably call it the antisemitism factor, but that’s a political choice and I don’t use that word once in the actual paper. This factor basically just represents how much you believe Jews are disproportionately wealthy and powerful, and how much you think the Holocaust was exaggerated or faked. As it turns out those two questions are pretty tightly correlated, at least in this sample. I guess that’s why Jewish organizations are so quick to shut down the “antisemitic canard” that Jews are overrepresented in positions of power. This factor also has elements of race realism, with the question about race differences in intelligence and behaviour being the only other question that loads strongly here. This is the only factor that predicts belief in the legitimacy of IQ tests (see race realism again): IQ tests being a valid measurement of intelligence loads negatively on the generic, flat earth, and fakery factors.
The fifth factor that was extracted was the fakery factor. This is where I personally fall, and I don’t claim to be unbiased writing this (clearly). The factor mainly has to do with faked events and faked deaths, all questions concerning which load onto this factor with the exception of the moon landing question, which loaded slightly higher on flat Earth. This factor is the least correlated with the aliens factor, being a third option opposed to both the mainstream and conventional conspiracy narratives. Instead of crazy stories about Satanic rituals and Project Monarch assassinations you just get that it was all faked, pretty much every single time. It’s not as sexy, and it’s also harder to reconcile with the mainstream narrative, at least until you get enough data points to put a new coherent narrative together. This factor also hints at the elites being a large family of related (Jewish) individuals who control America, Russia, and China behind the scenes. This factor represents radical skepticism about historical narratives (though not necessarily the general arc of history) and the extent to which things actually transpired the way that historians tell us they did.
We now come back to flat Earth, which was the third factor extracted. This factor extends the historical skepticism of the fakery factor to a skepticism about anything not directly observable. Neither the shape of the Earth, the existence of viruses, the existence of dinosaurs, nor the action of DNA is directly observable: these things must all be inferred from scientific evidence. If you can’t collect or interpret any of this evidence yourself, and you believe that the establishment is lying all the time about everything, you may end up here. I consider this a form of scientific anti-realism which “applies chiefly to claims about the non-reality of “unobservable” entities such as electrons or genes, which are not detectable with human senses.” (Wikipedia). I don’t claim that this philosophical explanation would apply to all flat Earthers; there are flat Earthers who hold those beliefs on the basis of biblical exegesis. However, I do think anti-realism based on a fundamental mistrust of the scientific establishment is the epistemological foundation of this factor. People who accept terrain theory may be offended to be lumped in with an obvious discredit-by-assocation psyop like flat Earth, and I have some sympathy for that since there are some aspects of terrain theory that are valuable and defensible, but the most extreme forms of it (e.g. viruses flat out don’t exist, period) are wrong and put it in the same discredit by association bucket.
The last factor extracted was the climate change factor, which I named after the first three questions loading on it. It didn’t appear to have any coherent theoretical basis; I assume it was just accounting for leftover variance that was not explained by the previous factors. I was surprised that the question about evolution loaded onto this factor, since I don’t think it’s true in general that disbelief in climate change is particularly correlated with disbelief in evolution. The biggest predictor for disbelief in evolution was religiosity, with 26% of atheists and agnostics endorsing that man did not evolve from apes, compared to 58% of the religious sample. Several questions on this factor seemed to reflect young Earth creationism (Jesus was real, man did not evolve from apes, and the Earth is much younger than 4.5 billion years) which has a coherent theoretical basis but no clear link to climate change. Overall I don’t think this factor can tell us much.
Pretty much every academic research paper on conspiracy theory ends with a discussion about how we can use what we’ve learned to prevent people from believing conspiracy theories. When I was soliciting replies to the survey there were a number of people who were concerned that the data I was collecting was going to be used against conspiracy theorists in some way, and I countered by saying this data is important for helping people not get sucked into QAnon or flat Earth-like misdirection narratives. So, I’m going to end this by discussing how we can make sure people believe the correct conspiracy theories. I think this starts by having a rigorous definition of what conspiracy theory as a field of inquiry is, which I laid out in a previous essay. There I lay out how conspiracy theory is a field of sociology that investigates how elites use deception to exploit the masses. Once you have that, and an understanding of the factor structure of conspiracy landscape, it should be easier to navigate towards the truth.
I have now finished writing the report on the survey I began back in May of 2022. You can read the full report here, and the supplemental materials here.
The report contains technical language, so I have also written an informal writeup that includes my answers to all of the questions and a discussion of the survey and the results. You can find that here. If you would like to read the report but don’t have experience reading scientific publications, I recommend reading the abstract, the first part of the introduction, and the discussion.
Thus far conspiracy theory has been defined by those who have an interest in delegitimizing it. It is overdue to be defined in a rigorous manner and to receive recognition as a branch of sociology with substantial predictive power.
The term “conspiracy theory” goes back to the late 19th century. Its use became more common after it was discussed by Karl Popper in his 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies. In his book Popper describes and disparages the “conspiracy theory of society”, which holds that “whatever happens in society—especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike—is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups.”[1] He claims this belief is widely held, and it is clear that at that the time of publication “conspiracy theory” did not carry the connotation of being ludicrous and absurd, as it does today. The stigmatization of conspiracy theories began in the 1960s, as did use of the term “conspiracy theorist”. This was in large part a response to criticisms of the Warren Commission report into the assassination of JFK1, as is demonstrated by a CIA document describing how its propaganda assets could attack the claims of critics. Some suggested strategies include claiming that those promoting alternative theories were politically or financially motivated, or that “parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists”. These same techniques still see widespread use today to censure anti-mainstream narratives.
[Chart showing Google Ngrams data on the usage of terms “conspiracy theory”, “conspiracy theory of society”, and “conspiracy theorist” in books from 1870 to 2000. Some percentages are multiplied by the constants shown in order to facilitate visualization. After 2000 usage of “conspiracy theory” increases, and “conspiracy theorist” increases dramatically.]
Despite Popper’s condemnation and the CIA’s blackwashing of conspiracy theory, it is in fact a fruitful area of inquiry. Conspiracy theory, done properly, (and here I use the word theory in the same sense as it occurs in number theory or evolutionary theory) is a subfield of the sociological discipline of elite theory. Elite theory describes the structure of power relations in society. It maintains that a small minority of elites hold the majority of economic, cultural, and political power, and hence also wield the majority of influence generally, regardless of democratic institutions. Elite theory stands opposed to pluralist theories that assert that power relations can be understood as networks of diverse interests competing through the framework of government. Two influential elite theorists were Vilfredo Pareto (1848 – 1923) and Robert Michels (1878 – 1936). Pareto popularized the term “elite” in sociological analysis, and made the empirical discovery that a small number of people control the majority of the wealth in a nation (called the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule). Michels developed the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which states that all complex organizations eventually develop into oligarchies, even if they were founded as democratic institutions.
Conspiracy theory studies the actions of elites and the consequences thereof, focusing particularly on situations involving subterfuge or deceit, and especially where the activity is immoral or illegal. It is not at all unreasonable to assert a priori that elites (or people in general) may carry out acts that benefit themselves at the expense of others, or that they may subsequently lie about it. In fact, a conspiracy is, by definition, a group of people with shared incentives cooperating to perpetrate illegal or immoral acts. Secrecy or outright deception is necessary due to the illicit nature of conspiracy, and elites are most able and incentivized to enter into conspiracies due to forming a concentrated interest group2 with considerable influence over outcomes in society. Elites have been criminally indicted for conspiracy in the past, as in the General Motors streetcar conspiracy, when oil and automotive companies, and their corporate directors, were charged with conspiring to form a transportation monopoly3. Not all conspiracy theories are true, of course, but even those that are most misguided – such as that the Earth is flat or that the elites are really shape-shifting reptilians – still conform to this central theme. In the case of Flat Earthism, the theory holds that we have been deceived about the shape of the Earth by the elites in order to promote scientific materialism by which we may be more easily controlled. In the case of the reptilians theory, we have been deceived by the elites about their very nature, which would, logically, prevent us from understanding and resisting their schemes. Although these particular theories are wrong, the field of conspiracy theory is still quite instructive.
One phenomenon that can be explained by conspiracy theory is that of controlled opposition. If elites in society wish for a change of any kind to take place, they are almost guaranteed to encounter opposition in the populace. To ensure that the change progresses unimpeded, this opposition must be controlled, corralled, disparaged, ridiculed, misrepresented, or otherwise neutralized. Often this comes in the form of opposition thought leaders who are elevated to prominence by the media (itself controlled by elites) who are secretly working in support of the agenda. Noam Chomsky describes how the promotion of dissenting views can serve to reinforce the status quo:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”[2]
Once thought leaders are in place and have acquired a following among the dissenters in the population, various means can be employed to produce the desired result. The personalities can employ weakened arguments against the opposing position, can misdirect as to the real causes and reasons for the changes being played out, or can become embroiled in scandal, tarnishing their ideas by association. In all cases the goal is the same: that the agenda is able to unfold with minimal accommodations for the desires of the masses. This same phenomenon can also play out with approved opposition instead of directly controlled opposition, wherein organic opposition that does not really threaten the elite’s agenda is allowed to exist or even be promoted. It is safer, however, when the opposition figureheads are directly controlled, as it can be assured that they will not go off script and say something damaging to the agenda.
Controlled opposition can also function through the creation or infiltration of dissident groups, in order to manage them and limit their effectiveness. The need for controlled opposition was well recognized by Communist elites:
“Both Marx and Lenin emphasized the need for and prophesied the emergence of what Communist ideology terms the “controlled opposition.” Under such a concept opposition parties are permitted to continue in existence, to publish their own newspapers, to make their own speeches, and to propose their own slates of candidates. The crucial difference is, however, that the coalition formed in the second stage is a sham. Newspapers are subject to strictest control, speakers are censored and harassed or even arrested for deviation from the prescribed Communist party line, and slates of candidates are set up only with prior Communist approval.”[3]
There are many cases of such groups in the Soviet era. One example, Operation Trust, was an operation conducted by the Soviet intelligence agencies which created a fake anti-Bolshevik resistance organization. Trust used standard counterintelligence techniques that are still employed today to control opposition movements, like setting up front companies and seeking out and spreading disinformation to dissenters.
In the US intelligence agencies have been equally active in controlling opposition to the elites. Pinkerton is a still-existing private detective agency founded in 1850 by Freemasons Allan Pinkerton and Edward Rucker. Pinkerton later went on to head the Union intelligence service during the Civil War. The Pinkertons were notorious for their strikebreaking operations, working against labour on behalf of industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers. Alongside their strikebreaking work they were also involved in infiltrating unions and worker’s groups in order to neutralize them. One such group was the Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society acting on behalf of coal miners in Pennsylvania, which was infiltrated by Pinkerton detective James McParlan. The Molly Maguires ceased to be active after trials where suspected members of the organization were convicted of murder and executed. The reality may be, however, that the Molly Maguires were fabricated by the very people they were supposedly resisting. Historian Joseph Rayback writes:
“The charge has been made that the Molly Maguires episode was deliberately manufactured by the coal operators with the express purpose of destroying all vestiges of unionism in the area… There is some evidence to support the charge… the “crime wave” that appeared in the anthracite fields came after the appearance of the Pinkertons, and… many of the victims of the crimes were union leaders and ordinary miners. The evidence brought against [the defendants], supplied by James McParlan, a Pinkerton, and corroborated by men who were granted immunity for their own crimes, was tortuous and contradictory, but the net effect was damning… The trial temporarily destroyed the last vestiges of labor unionism in the anthracite area. More important, it gave the public the impression… that miners were by nature criminal in character….”[4]
Many other examples of elites employing covert techniques to infiltrate, destabilize, and control workers can be cited, and Wikipedia hosts a lengthy article detailing examples and implicating at least 12 organizations, just in the United States. More recently, similar strategies were employed by the FBI in their operation COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) which according to official documents (that is, according to the perpetrators) ran from 1956 to 1971. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize”[5] activities of dissident organizations, for instance, civil rights activists, environmentalists, animal rights groups, and anti-war protesters. One of the primary goals of the program was “maintaining the existing social and political order” at a time when it was being resisted by diverse grassroots groups.
Controlled opposition fits under the purview of conspiracy theory because it involves deliberate action, involving deception, to facilitate the schemes of the elite. Although theoretically anyone could employ such a ploy, the resources required to set up fake organizations, hire frontmen, and control the media ensures that only the kind of concentrated power found in the societal ruling class could successfully pull off such a gambit.
Today, controlling the opposition continues to be in the wheelhouse of the intelligence agencies, acting in the interests of the elite class. Controlled opposition is even used against the concept of conspiracy itself, by promoting to the public’s attention only the most asinine and egregiously wrong conspiracy theories, such as the aforementioned Flat Earth or reptilian shapeshifter theories. Using a few well-placed mouthpieces, Western intelligence agencies can spread disinformation in anti-government (that is, anti-elite) circles, then use the media to spotlight that disinformation in order to discredit anti-government ideas generally. The public eventually learns to associate non-mainstream criticism of ruling elites with the “lunatic fringe” and throw out the good with the bad. Theodore Roosevelt said in his autobiography: “Then, among the wise and high-minded people who in self-respecting and genuine fashion strive earnestly for peace, there are foolish fanatics always to be found in such a movement and always discrediting it — the men who form the lunatic fringe in all reform movements.”[6] What he neglected to mention was that the lunatic fringe is in many cases graciously supplied or bolstered by elites like himself.
Besides controlling the opposition, elites employ a broad swath of social engineering techniques in order to render the public more easily exploitable. The ruling class, compromising a small minority of the population, is not able to achieve great wealth and power purely (or even primarily) through its own effort. The vast majority of the wealth of the ruling class is extracted from those lower in the social hierarchy. Thus, it is in the interest of the elites to be able to extract as much wealth as efficiently as possible, and with minimal resistance. This idea, taken by itself, may simply be considered an aspect of elite theory. Conspiracy becomes relevant when the elites use deceit or propaganda to achieve the goal of making the population more exploitable.
Today, it would likely be considered a conspiracy theory in the pejorative sense to suggest that foundational elements of the culture were put in place deliberately by the elites in order to make the population easier to control. Certainly, tying this idea to contentious issues like vaccination or gender politics would immediately elicit cries of “conspiracy theory” in the popular media. And yet it is a conspiracy theory, and a true fact, that elites have subverted the culture in order to make people more docile and compliant.
Perhaps no other individual stands as better proof of that fact than Edward Bernays. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays was the self-styled father of public relations, and wrote the book (literally, in 1928) on Propaganda. In it, he writes “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”[7] Bernays was undeniably one of the elite: coming from a prominent family; obtaining great personal wealth; and working with US presidents, leading industrialists, Hollywood celebrities, and the CIA. Among his achievements were making it socially acceptable for women to smoke, promoting water fluoridation, and engineering consent for the 1954 CIA-sponsored Guatemalan coup. In fact, he also wrote the book on The Engineering of Consent in 1955.
Bernays was influenced by Freud’s idea that people’s behaviours were shaped by irrational, unconscious forces. His central insight was that these forces could be manipulated by psychologists not only to make money, but to make people more passive and controllable. Bernays thought that by stimulating the desires of the public, and then sating them with consumer products, the behaviours of the masses could be managed. Prominent business interests were on board, with Lehman Brothers investment banker Paul Mazur saying “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”4President Hoover considered the project a great success, and in 1928 told a group of advertisers “You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines.”
This kind of mass manipulation was made possible by the advent of mass media, which enabled the industrialization of propaganda, spinning, and lying. Of course, the development of new technologies of social control did not stop in the 1950’s. The CIA’s declassified MKUltra program ran (officially) from 1953 to 1973 and investigated psychological and pharmacological techniques for brainwashing and mind control. Like the previously mentioned Soviet Operation Trust, MKUltra operated through front organizations, where top officials were aware of the CIA’s involvement. One of these officials was Donald Ewan Cameron, who was the president of several important psychiatric institutions, including the American, Canadian, and World Psychiatric Associations. Cameron helped the CIA to develop psychological torture techniques like psychic driving, which sought to replace the subject’s natural psychological impulses with drives suggested by the practitioner. Other declassified documents in the book Acid Dreams demonstrate how the MKUltra research on LSD was weaponized against the hippy/anti-war movements of the 1960s in order to neutralize it as a threat to the American political establishment then waging a war in Vietnam.
More recently, techniques from behavioural psychology have been used to increase compliance with government orders during the COVID-19 lockdowns. According to one scientist on the UK’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.” Another member of the group described being “stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology.” In the US, directors of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, partnered with academics to develop techniques to “advance public […] acceptance of vaccines” through application of the social, behavioural, and communication sciences. Among the recommendations are to partner with trusted local institutions (like churches or community centers) to “establish vaccination sites that will be accessible and feel safe” and to “crowd out misinformation” by engaging “trusted community spokespersons […] to amplify vaccine-affirming, personally relevant messages”.
Control of populations through psychological means has also advanced into new paradigms of control. Beyond psychological warfare or information warfare the nascent field of cognitive warfare aims to alter the very cognition of human targets. According to François du Cluzel, who manages cognitive warfare research at the NATO Innovation Hub, “It’s not only an action against what we think, but also an action against the way we think, the way we process information and turn it into knowledge.” Speaking at a NATO panel discussion on the topic, du Cluzel noted that “Its field of action is global and aim to seize control of the human being, civilian as well as military.” An official NATO report authored by du Cluzel is explicit that “the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies and not only the military.” (pg. 32). The report also describes cognitive warfare as the “militarisation of brain science” and dependant on recent advances in NBIC: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. Speaking in the panel discussion, Canadian lieutenant colonel Marie-Pierre Raymond notes “cognitive warfare is the most advanced form of manipulation seen to date.” The NATO reports are couched in terms of using cognitive warfare techniques on military enemies, however historical precedent (including aforementioned events) demonstrates that it is certain it will be used on domestic populations as well. Recent history also bears this out, with Canadians being subject to domestic military propaganda campaigns during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
As has been seen so far, and will continue to be shown, the military and intelligence communities are often key players in elite conspiracies. There are several reasons for this, the most important of which is that it is elites that control the military (and intelligence) and give them their directives. This can be seen in the case of the Pinkertons, who functioned as private intelligence and mercenaries working for the industrialists, as well as the history of heads of state, many of whom were generals, and some of whom were intelligence officers or directors, including George H W Bush and Vladimir Putin. This fact, when combined with the strict hierarchy of the military, means that military and intelligence officers are directly under the control of the elites, moreso than in other fields. Military and intelligence also often operate in a clandestine manner, which is directly conducive to carrying out conspiratorial acts. The strict hierarchy means that the lower ranks in these kinds of organizations often act without full information as to what they are doing. This lack of full information, combined with the expectation to obey orders, makes such personnel effective cat’s-paws for their elite controllers. This is further amplified by the fact that military officers are already prepared to carry out immoral acts (e.g. killing people) with the justification that they are doing it to “serve their country”.
Another subject of inquiry central to conspiracy theory is that of faked or manufactured events. Such events can take many forms: false flags, where an entity attacks itself while pretending to be another, to justify retaliation; staged events, where actors simulate a real event to deceive onlookers; or hoaxes, where an event is fabricated from whole cloth and only occurred on paper. Note that these are not hard and fast categories, as events can be orchestrated at different levels and through various means. Events may be manufactured for a variety of reasons, for instance to justify increased public spending (that is, wealth transfer from taxpayers to elites), or as psychological warfare to create a desired emotional atmosphere, often fear. Most often however, the goal of manufactured events is to create a situation whereby elites can parlay the public’s emotional response into implementing a pre-planned solution in line with their agenda.
In the category of manufactured events we will start by looking at false flags. The term originates from the practice in medieval naval warfare of flying a flag of a foreign country instead of your own in order to evade enemy vessels, or to get closer than would otherwise be possible before attacking. In contemporary parlance the term now refers to deliberately creating an event in such a way that another party can be scapegoated for it, often justifying military action against that party. There are many historical examples of false flags admitted by the mainstream, the earliest being the false flag that preceded the 1788 Russo-Swedish war. The Swedish king at the time, Gustav III, wished to start a war with Russia, but needed a pretext to do so. To that end, an attack was staged by the Swedes against Puumala, a Swedish town near the border with Russia, using Russian military uniforms that had been sewn for that purpose. The uproar following the event was used to justify the ensuing war.
More recent false flags include those conducted in Europe as part of the CIA’s Operation Gladio. Forming in the aftermath of WWII, the stated purpose of Gladio was to establish networks of operatives that would act as stay-behind forces in the event of a communist takeover of Europe. The CIA cooperated with and funded European intelligence agencies as part of the operation. The existence of Gladio was finally revealed to the public through the parliamentary testimony of Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti on August 3, 1990, more than 40 years since it had begun operating. Parliamentary inquiries have also been held in Belgium and Switzerland, and declassified documents and admissions prove that the stay-behind network operated across Europe in at least 10 countries. In Italy, where the most information has been revealed, Gladio has been implicated in numerous bombings, including the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, the 1972 Peteano bombing, and the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing. The bombings were part of a “strategy of tension” intended to shift the political climate in Italy. According to General Gianadelio Maletti, former head of Italian military counter-intelligence, “The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of rightwing terrorism.” Judge Gerardo D’Ambrosio, the investigating magistrate of the Piazza Fontana bombing explains: “The first stage was to make attacks that would be blamed on the Left. The second stage was actual infiltration of groups on the Left, inducing these extra-parliamentary groups to carry out attacks. These groups were instrumental in increasing the social and political tension in the country.”
Speaking in a 1992 BBC Documentary, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of the right-wing Ordine Nuovo group, states that the purpose of the strategy of tension was “To force the Italian public to turn to the State, turn to the regime and ask for greater security […] they had to get people to accept that at any moment over a period of thirty years, from 1960 to the mid-eighties, a State of Emergency could be declared. So, people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains or enter a bank. This is the political logic behind all the bombings.” Later in the documentary he also notes that three of the central suspects in the Piazza Fontana investigation were in the employ of Italian intelligence. Vinciguerra was himself convicted in the Peteano bombing, where it was found that the explosives employed originated from a Gladio arms cache.
On the other hand there are also hoaxes, where events are reported to have happened that never occurred. The use of hoaxes by intelligence agencies and PR firms to manipulate people is an important subject that is almost entirely absent in mainstream discourse, except as an object of derision. Where hoaxes can be used they may be preferred to real operations as they are less expensive and have fewer points of failure. All that is required is a compliant media and a credulous public. They can be planned and wargamed in advance, and it is guaranteed that all actors involved will stick to their roles.
One example was the Nayirah testimony, given by 15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990. In her testimony in support of Kuwait in the Gulf war, she claimed “While I was [at a Kuwaiti hospital], I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying.” The testimony was widely publicized, and corroborated by reporting by Amnesty International. Politically, the testimony was cited repeatedly by George Bush and several US senators to justify support for the US military’s Operation Desert Storm. Two years later it was revealed that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, that her testimony was organized by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, and that the story of taking premature babies out of incubators was entirely false. While a superficial analysis may suggest that Kuwait was the beneficiary of the false testimony, the close ties between Hill & Knowlton and the US government (Craig Fuller, the head of Hill & Knowlton’s domestic operations, was Chief of Staff to George H W Bush when he was Vice President) indicates the real beneficiaries were the military-industrial complex and its associated elites.
Another operation combining propaganda, psychological warfare, and hoaxes was the aforementioned 1954 coup against Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz had expropriated uncultivated land held by the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and redistributed it to impoverished peasants. Although landowners were compensated by government bonds based on the value of the land the landowners had themselves reported for tax purposes, this was deemed inadequate by UFCO. In response, Edward Bernays, who worked PR for UFCO, started a campaign to convince the American public that Arbenz’s government represented a Communist beachhead in North America. Thomas McCann, former Vice President of UFCO, writes in his book An American Company: the Tragedy of United Fruit that “The core of Bernays’s strategy was the selection of the most influential communications media in America […] followed by a high-level saturation campaign to expose those media’s reporters to the company’s version of the facts.” United Fruit ran guided press tours of the region, about which McCann states “The trips were ostensibly to gather information, but what the press would hear and see was carefully staged and regulated by the host.” Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, was given one of the first tours, at which time “the first “Communist riot” took place in the capital.” The media was superlatively compliant: “It is difficult to make a convincing case for manipulation of the press when the victims proved so eager for the experience.”[8]
What ensued was a CIA coup against Arbenz, dubbed Operation PBSuccess. Both CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles were UFCO shareholders. John Dulles was Secretary of State, and had previously worked for the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented United Fruit. According to Harvard historian John Coatsworth, “every policymaking official involved in the decision to overthrow the Guatemalan government, except for President Eisenhower himself, had a family or business connection to UFCO.” The CIA operation, with an official taxpayer-funded budget of $2.7 million, amounted to a massive hoax on the entire country of Guatemala. Using tapes pre-recorded in Florida, the CIA sent out a broadcast of “Radio Liberación”, alleging to be the media arm of a coalition mounting a rebellion against the presidency of the “Communist traitor” Arbenz. Through the broadcast, citizens of Guatemala were informed – falsely – that an anti-Communist “Liberation Army” was marching on the capital, that the Guatemalan military was defecting to join the rebels, and that the president had ordered anti-Communist demonstrators found in the city be rounded up. The CIA hired pilots to fly over Guatemala City and drop pamphlets encouraging residents to flee or shelter in their homes. The result of the operation, which according to Allen Dulles was “more dependent upon psychological impact rather than actual military strength,” was the ousting of Arbenz and his replacement by CIA-supported Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. McCann writes about how the coup was sold to the American public using misrepresented atrocity photos:
“The incident even produced some reasonably believable atrocity pictures. I don’t know where they came from, but somehow we got hold of some photographs of several bodies – some had been castrated – about to be buried in a mass grave. The photos got the widest possible circulation and Arbenz got all the credit. For all I know, they could just as easily have been the victims of either side – or of an earthquake. The point is, they were widely accepted for what they were purported to be – victims of communism.”[9]
The Guatemalan coup is a classic example of deception on a massive, international scale, carried out by colluding business, government, and intelligence elites. The success of the operation is compelling proof of the power hoaxes to manipulate the public, and of intelligence agencies to organize complex deceptions.
In choosing the examples for this section I have chosen events that are acknowledged by the mainstream to be manufactured, but there is extensive research that has not been allowed to penetrate the mainstream showing that many more events have been faked. Since these topics enter the mainstream when they are publicly admitted or declassified, it follows that any conspiracies that have not entered into the public record in this way would be strenuously denied. It is not credible to suggest that all conspiracies past and present have been admitted to, and thus there must be conspiracies that are presently denied that could be uncovered through critical review of evidence.
Although the three areas already mentioned are particular particularly important to conspiracy theory, areas like propaganda, elite genealogies, revisionist history, scientific criticism, and social criticism are also explored. In the latter three categories, it involves identifying ways in which elite interests have corrupted history, science, or the social fabric for their own ends. When this is admitted, as with the false flag that launched the 1788 Russo-Swedish War, Lysenkoist biology in the Soviet Union, or the eugenical notion that elite status indicates genetic superiority5, then it is simply considered history. When these explanations are denied by mainstream power brokers, then it is considered conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, this essay has focused on controlled opposition, social engineering, and manufactured events as these are more specific to the study of conspiracy theory.
To return to Popper’s previously mentioned critique of the conspiracy theory of society, it is obviously absurd to suggest that all happenings in society are the result of direct elite action6. However it is equally absurd to ignore that elites, their agendas, and the conspiracies to enact those agendas can dramatically influence how society evolves. Even when certain outcomes are not the direct result of elite actions, elites may still be responsible for creating the conditions which allow for certain events to occur. One historical example is the Great Depression, which former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has admitted was caused by the actions of the elites then running that institution7. In other cases, elites may use their powers to create an incentive structure that brings about negative outcomes. In these cases it is the interaction between the elites (setting the incentive) and the masses (following the incentive) that produces the result. One such example is no-fault divorce in the US. Subsequent to states allowing for unilateral, no-fault divorce in the 1970’s, divorce rates shot up and have remained high.
Of course, it is not always possible to predict all outcomes that may result from actions or incentives, and so unpopular outcomes may be framed as unintended consequences of well-intended actions. Conspiracy theory attempts to identify the individuals and interest groups that may be responsible for such outcomes, understand the mechanisms through which they came about, and determine the incentives driving the actors and how they benefited from the results. If deliberate collusion and conspiracy cannot be proven through documentary evidence (as in circumstances where evidence has been hidden, lost, falsified, or deliberately destroyed), then it may be inferred by building a strong chain of circumstantial evidence. This does however mean that the failure mode of conspiracy theory is to mistakenly identify agency in phenomena that were genuinely organic or coincidental. In contrast, mainstream sociology often fails to recognize the role of agentic behaviour in shaping social change, even when it exists.
Another common critique of conspiracy theory is that elites are not a homogeneous group, and therefore they cannot as a group pursue deliberate strategies to exploit the masses. While it is true that elites in different domains may have incentives that put them at odds, they still share ruling class incentives to maintain their position at the top of the social hierarchy. Although Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller may have at one time been rivals8, they both employed similar tactics to keep their workers in line, and both made use of the Pinkerton detectives. Even when there are upheavals among the elite, as during the industrial revolution when the dominant ruling class strategy transitioned from aristocratic lords to industrialist robber barons (bankers remaining powerful throughout), the net effect was simply that the masses were exploited under a slightly different system than before. Many elite families managed this transition in strategy with their power intact: for instance the Dutch royal family helped found Royal Dutch Petroleum (now Royal Dutch Shell) and later Queen Wilhelmina became the first acknowledged female billionaire.
Even if groups of elites are not convening to discuss ways to increase their power at the expense of the masses (although there are plenty of historical examples of this9) the actions of the elite in aggregate still produce this result. The exception to this rule is when raising up the masses in some way serves to protect against revolutionary sentiment or to provide a greater future return (human capital investment). For instance, Horace Mann, one of the first and most prominent educationists promoting public schooling in America, said education “disarm[s] the poor of their hostility towards the rich” and “adds a thousand fold more to a nation’s resources than the most successful conquests”[10, 11]. This is similar to an aspect of Fordism, whereby workers are paid a “living wage” that allows them to become consumers of the products they produce, while also improving productivity and reducing turnover. The obverse to this point is that if societal elites are too successful at dominating the lower classes, they risk destabilizing and destroying the source of their wealth, committing “suicide by success”. Members of the elite may thus at times deliberately promote resistance among the masses in order to push society towards a more stable equilibrium.
Currently in the common vernacular “conspiracy theory” is whatever ideas the Western ruling class has deemed damaging to their agenda. Consequently, the idea that there was a secret plot led by Osama bin Laden to attack America on 9/11 is not a conspiracy theory, despite involving a conspiracy, while the idea that American elites conspired to carry out a controlled demolition of the World Trade Center in order to create the appearance of a terrorist attack and justify going to war is considered a conspiracy theory. The difference is that one narrative is hostile to Western elites, while the other is favourable to, and propounded by, those same elites. The goal of this paper is to demarcate conspiracy theory as a field of inquiry, to separate it from these kinds of political concerns. Note that under this rubric, the al Qaeda theory of 9/11 still does not fall within the scope of conspiracy theory, just as one tribe launching a surprise attack on their neighbour would not10. The inside job theory of 9/11 does however qualify as a conspiracy, as it involves elites harming and gaslighting the public for nefarious ends. This definition also serves to exclude topics like the existence of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, or whether aliens built the pyramids, as these are generally pulp “conspiracy candy” serving to titillate the reader, as opposed to seriously investigating how elite interests shape society at the expense of the masses. Thus far conspiracy theory has been defined by those who have an interest in delegitimizing it. It is overdue to be defined in a rigorous manner and to receive recognition as a branch of sociology with substantial predictive power.
1 The Warren Commission report, made public on September 27, 1964, concluded that JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. In spite of the report, a majority of Americans have always believed there was a conspiracy.
2 As interest groups – studied in public choice theory – vary in size, they face different costs and benefits of organizing. Large interest groups, for instance the general public, face large costs in organizing, and when a goal is attained the benefits are diffused over the group, benefiting each individual only a small amount. Small interest groups, on the other hand, have much lower costs of organizing, and the benefits are concentrated over a few individuals. Elites in any society form a concentrated interest group with shared incentives to extract wealth from the general citizenry. The citizenry is a diffused interest group where the benefits of resisting elite predation may not outweigh the costs of doing so at an individual level, even if there is a net benefit at the group level. Empirical research on US policy decisions demonstrates that elites and special interest groups have substantial impact on government policy, while ordinary citizens have little to none.[12]
3 Some of the companies involved were Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Firestone Tire, GM, and Mack Trucks. The defendants were convicted of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to subsidiaries of National City Lines (NCL), which received funding from the defendants. NCL was engaged in buying up local electric streetcar systems across America, and by 1947 controlled 46 systems across 16 states. NCL subsequently shut down the streetcars and demolished the track infrastructure they relied on, which has had a substantial and lasting impact on the American public transportation system.
4 This quote is attributed to an article by Mazur in a 1927 edition of The Harvard Business Review. Although it is clear by his other writings that Mazur would have agreed with this quote, some consider it to be aprocryphal. The quote has been sufficiently used, by elites and in mainstream publications, that I feel it permissible to use it here, with this caveat.
5 The idea from eugenics that the elites are genetically superior to the general population, as proven by their wealth and status, is remarkably similar to the idea from the Protestant prosperity gospel that the rich are favoured by God as proven by their wealth. Eugenics is, in this sense, a self-serving justification for elite rule in the scientific era, as the prosperity gospel/Protestant work ethic was in the industrial era, and the divine right of kings was in the monarchical era.
6 In fact it is essentially strawmanning the cogent and well-substantiated conspiracy theoretic position, a tactic that might be employed by someone attempting to control the opposition by ridiculing the notion of conspiracy generally.
7 For instance by raising interest rates and contracting the money supply. Bernays’ actions encouraging Americans to borrow money from banks he represented in order to purchase stocks also contributed.
8 Carnegie’s monopoly on steel mills was threatened by Rockefeller’s iron mines in the Mesabi range when Rockefeller began selling to Carnegie’s competitors at cheap prices. The two magnates later came to an agreement whereby Rockefeller agreed not to go into the steel business and to sell the entire output of his mines to Carnegie, and Carnegie for his part agreed not to go into the ore or transportation business.[13] Rockefeller’s famous quote is apt: “competition is a sin.”
9 See for instance the meeting at Jekyll Island where the Federal Reserve was conceived. Although the meeting occurred in 1910, and the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913, it wasn’t until 1935 that the meeting was admitted to by those involved, when Frank Vanderlip, one of the bankers at the meeting, wrote about it in an article entitled From Farm Boy to Financierin the February 9th edition of the Saturday Evening Post. Frank writes about the meeting:
“Despite my views about the value to society of greater publicity for the affairs of corporations, there was an occasion, near the close of 1910. when I was as secretive—indeed, as furtive—as any conspirator. […] I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyl Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System. […] Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to he exposed publicly tbat our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.”[14]
10 Note that it is the demarcation of conspiracy theory in question here, not the definition of conspiracy itself. A plot amongst gang members to assassinate the leader of a rival gang and take over his territory is not the subject of conspiracy theory. A conspiracy of peasants against rulers is a revolt or rebellion, not the subject of conspiracy theory. A conspiracy of elites against other elites falls under the purview of elite theory rather than conspiracy theory, though the relatedness of the fields means that such information will also be relevant for conspiracy theoretic questions. (It may also entail conspiracy theory outright if the clash takes place in public in disguised form, for instance as psychological warfare against supporters of rival elites).
[1] Popper, K. (2015). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge. p. 306
[2] Chomsky, N., Barsamian, D. (1998). The common good. Odonian Press. p. 43
[11] Bronski, Joseph (2021). An Empirical Introduction to Youth
[12] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
Kanye West has been making the news recently for making true and verifiable statements that Jews control the media. Of course, the truth is not allowed in the media, especially not if it implicates Jews, so Kanye was promptly deplatformed by Twitter, Instagram, JPMorgan, CAA, and Adidas, immediately proving his point. Imagine that happening if he had said white people control the media. Israel’s PM is “extremely pleased” with the response. Many people in the alternative sphere are praising Kanye for bringing greater attention to the issue of Jewish control of the media. Look at Reddit [1], [2] for example. What many seem to be missing, in their excitement that someone is finally talking about this issue, is that this is all scripted.
While most people think of Kanye as an artist, he is really first and foremost a tool of culture creation1. A tool developed and wielded by the very people he is now ostensibly speaking out against. Regardless of how talented one is (if you consider Kanye talented) no one can acquire the level of fame and wealth that he has without massive industry-wide promotion. Who was responsible for that promotion? Kanye himself will tell you: Jews. Why was he promoted? To sell the hip hop lifestyle to blacks. The hip hop subculture was created from the ground up by the music industry (in cooperation with the CIA) to promote drugs, sex, and gang mentality in the black community. A kind of “sex, drugs, and rock & roll” targeted at black people. Kanye mentions in his latest interview with Lex Fridman that the CIA has been responsible for pushing crack cocaine onto black communities and breaking up families via incarceration, but he neglects to mention the propagandistic influence he and his genre of music have had.
Then there is his marriage to Kim Kardashian. Kim is another premier tool of culture creation, despite having nothing going for her except elite parents, photoshop, and amateur porn. She is “famous for being famous” which is another way of saying she is famous because there is propaganda value in keeping her in the public eye. Through her various media appearances she sells many of the worst aspects of modern culture: consumerism, plastic surgery, “influencer” culture, and being a vacuous bimbo. Her entire family has been widely involved in all kinds of psyops and cultural devolution, from her father serving as O.J. Simpson’s attorney in his trial to her step father Bruce (Caitlyn) Jenner’s role as transgender public icon. It is no accident that Kim and Kanye’s marriage was the subject of widespread media coverage from the beginning (and it only ended this year). Many people surely looked up to them as role models both individually and as a couple, and one wonders if they wouldn’t have been better served having no role models at all.
With that background on Kanye we can look at his interview with Lex Fridman. He says some true things, which may endear him to people who are looking for someone – anyone – to say these things in a public forum, but overall it’s a rambling disaster. Just take a look at the comments on the Lex Fridman subreddit (where the Kanye interview is the 3rd top post of all time, and the top upvoted podcast by a wide margin):
These were all highly upvoted posts, and regardless of whether or not the commenters are sockpuppets, they illustrate the desired response to this interview. Kanye comes off as manic, which does not serve to increase the audience’s confidence in the valid points he does make. In fact, putting partial truth in the mouth of a crazy person is a classic controlled opposition gambit. It is an excellent way to make people dismiss distasteful truths as the ravings of a lunatic. Even his point about Bambi and the CIA has a nugget of truth to it, which is that in a society that has been taught to be consumerist, negative emotions are assuaged through consumption, leading to increased profits for business. This was something that was discovered by Edward Bernays in the 20s when he developed the idea that the masses could be controlled by stimulating their desires and then sating them through consumerism. The problem is that the way he presents this point comes off as nuts to anyone who doesn’t already agree and know the history, especially since Bambi came out in 1942, five years before the CIA was formed (which was noted in the Reddit comments).
But wait, who is Lex Fridman, and why would he be interviewing Kanye? In one sentence, Lex Fridman is the mouthpiece of the technocracy for the science and technology crowd. He’s a machine learning researcher, and his podcast evolved out of an MIT course he taught on Artificial General Intelligence that featured guest lectures from prominent figures in computing. He is funded by DARPA. He is Jewish, as are many of his guests. In March of 2020 he was shilling for masks (although he has since made the YouTube video private) as part of the #masks4all movement led by Jeremy Howard, who is himself Jewish and part of the World Economic Forum Global AI Council. Howard has been a guest on Lex’s podcast, and Lex even appears as a co-author on a January 2021 paper promoting the use of cloth masks. He has repeatedly supported the vaccines as well. He has had Jewish hedge fund manager and physics propagandist Eric Weinstein on his podcast four separate times. Most tellingly, though, Lex has interviewed some of the most powerful members of the global elite, including Albert Bourla (CEO of Pfizer, Jewish) and Stephen Schwarzman (CEO of Blackstone, Jewish). He is so trusted by the ruling class that in 2021 the CEO of Pfizer felt comfortable sitting down with him for a 1-on-1 interview that left commenters on YouTube saying “Lex excels at speaking with good faith actors. Lex is not great at interviewing the opposite, because he is a bit too trusting. So it seams he doesn’t push back when clearly the audience is yelling at the screen because an easy question was missed.”
There is no way that Lex would interview Kanye if he was actually a loose cannon taking aim at his former handlers. So why did the interview take place? Keep in mind Lex’s audience is composed of high IQ scientists and engineers; he didn’t interview anyone from popular culture until podcast 55 when he interviewed comedian Whitney Cummings. This was precisely the target audience for this propaganda interview. Such an audience is more likely than average to notice patterns – for instance Jewish overrepresentation in the media – and it was decided that a psyop needed to be run against this group.2 This interview specifically and the uproar over Kanye in general serve two purposes: to make the ideas themselves (though true) unpalatable, and to convince anyone who may be swayed by those ideas that if they ever express them they will be ruined. In the latter case the events with Kanye are a continuation of the fake Alex Jones trials where another prominent controlled opposition agent pretends to be sued into oblivion for daring to suggest that the media is lying.
You may object to my argument that Kanye is controlling the opposition, and point to how black people are now ostensibly realizing how they have been manipulated by the Jewish establishment. At least if randomtweets are anything to go by. But you can’t control the opposition without telling some of the truth. There is always a risk that attempting to control the opposition will backfire and just wake people up more, but I have to think that Lex Fridman’s handlers had considered that possibility before having him interview Kanye. Even while admitting some truths Kanye reinforces the idea that George Floyd’s death wasn’t faked, and he apparently takes the Holocaust narrative at face value.
People need to stop assuming that people who tell a little bit of the truth in public are then on their side. Whenever someone rich and famous starts telling you what you want to hear your first instinct should be that they are conning you in some way. Especially if it’s shit you already know, like that Jews control the media. Listen to them if you want, and take the good parts and leave the bad. Acknowledge if they told the truth or did something good. But don’t believe that they are really on your side. Don’t start cheering them on and investing emotionally. Focus on what you are doing to resist, and let Kanye do his little performance. After all, that’s what he is: a performer.
2 Lex has played the role of intellectual gatekeeper in the past as well, for example when he interviewed Bret Weinstein (brother of aforementioned Eric Weinstein) on the COVID lab leak hypothesis. By the time of this interview (January 2021) many intelligent people in Lex’s audience had surely noticed the inconsistencies in the COVID narrative, and were looking for answers. Enter Lex and Weinstein to deflect towards institutional failure and malincentives, rather than the planning of institutions like the World Economic Forum, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or Rockefeller Foundation.
I have set up a psychological survey [edit: leaving link up] that asks questions pertaining to the individual’s belief in conspiracies. I find that the existing psychological research in this field is poor, partly having to do with the fact that the researchers do not themselves believe in conspiracy theories. That is, as academics, they have strong incentives against seeing that the elites are lying to us all the time about everything. Consequently the working definition of a conspiracy theory in the psychological literature is “the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable.”
The goal of this survey is to deduce the factor structure of conspiracist belief: the way in which belief in various conspiracies is correlated with belief in other conspiracies. For instance, what constellation of beliefs are you likely to hold if you believe JFK faked his death as opposed to being assassinated by a second shooter. Or likewise for if you believe the COVID virus doesn’t exist, as opposed to believing it is a bioweapon. My hypothesis is that there are several overlapping but distinguishable sets of beliefs that conspiracy theorists may prescribe to, and I suspect it is heavily influenced by where they get their information.
The survey consists of 100 questions about both specific conspiracy theories, and general attitudes about the world. Demographic questions are included but are optional. It should take around 10 minutes to complete. You do not need to self-identify as a conspiracy theorist in order to take the survey. Once enough submissions have been made and I can do a statistical analysis of the data I will be posting an update here.
Any kind of data collection on truthers will be viewed with suspicion, and justifiably so. Do I not think that collecting and reporting on this data plays into the hands of TPTB? Ultimately I think the elites have more than enough data already, and any data I collect or analyze here will have next to zero marginal utility for them. Understanding the structure of conspiracist belief could also be helpful to truthers who want to help those stuck in controlled opposition rabbit holes, or to help normies see the way the world works by introducing the most palatable conspiracies first. So no, I don’t think collecting this data is dangerous, and if you are suspicious of my intentions then you are free to not complete the survey or read my blog. I’m also doing this as a personal project to build my statistics and data analysis skills. I’ve always been interested in psychometrics, so I’m starting here.
January 13: Currently I have n = 191, and I am working on the report. I have decided to leave the survey up in case more people want to complete it.
I recently stumbled upon the book Tychos by Simon Shack where he describes his theory that the solar system is a “geoaxial binary system,” taking inspiration from Tycho Brahe’s geoheliocentric model. Shack is perhaps more well known for running the Cluesforum truther community, which discusses media fakery. Since I am willing to read theories I have strong priors against, assuming they are presented sensibly, I read the preface to Shack’s book. When I learned that a translator of Keplers Astronomia Nova had discovered in 1988 that Kepler had, in order to sell his new planetary laws of motion, presented theoretically calculated data on Mars as being empirically measured I was intrigued enough to keep reading. Data can be falsified to bolster a theory that is ultimately correct, but if Kepler was fudging data then I think it justifies a second look. However, I ultimately found the model unconvincing and even deceptively argued, for reasons I will elaborate on. Ending the preface with a quote by Rudolf Steiner also didn’t help, given Miles’ research on him.
I’ll start with what I personally got out of the book (at least the sections I read). The historical background on Tycho Brahe and his Tychonic solar system was interesting and added more depth to my understanding of this period in the history of science. That Kepler had fabricated data I consider an especially important fact. I also enjoyed learning about binary star systems. However, after a close reading of several chapters I discovered many mistakes, unsubstantiated claims, or conflations of definitions that left me unwilling to read the book in its entirety.
Shack’s thesis is that our solar system is a binary system, with Mars being the other member of the binary with the sun, and the Earth orbiting the barycenter of the binary system at a slow rate. He supports this by basically saying that almost all visible stars are binaries and it is therefore very unlikely that our solar system would be a single star system:
What we shall see is that, when considering the most recent discoveries of observational astronomy, a reasonable case could certainly be made today that 100% of the stars in our skies may, in fact, be ‘double’ (or multiple) binary stars; ergo, that ALL of the apparently single points of light in our skies that we call ‘a star’ have a smaller companion, almost always undetectable to the naked eye. The two of them revolve around each other in intersecting orbits – around their common barycentre (or ‘centre of mass’) – completing one such revolution in variable time periods (ranging from just a few hours, days, weeks, months or a few dozen years – at the most). Our Sun, in stark contrast, is thought to complete ONE of its orbits in about 240 MILLION years! We are thus asked to believe that the Sun has no “local orbit” (as I like to call it) of its own – whereas virtually all of the stars in our skies complete one such “local orbit” in no more than a few dozen years! In any case, what we know today is that the vast majority of our visible stars (90% and counting) are, in fact, part of binary double / or multiple systems. (Note that, oddly enough, one may still bump into claims in modern astronomy literature that no more than 50% of them are, but this is simply untrue).
The big problem here is that he is conflating the orbit of binary stars around their barycenters with the orbit of the solar system around the galactic center. These are very different things, and the binary pairs would also have orbits around the galactic center at time scales of the same order of magnitude as that of the sun. Then there is the claim that the vast majority of stars are binaries. This source argues that stars are monotonically more likely to be found in binaries as their size increases, and that stars of the sun’s size are found in binaries about 50% of the time. Stars that are visible to the naked eye tend to be the most massive stars that are most likely to be found in binaries, while fainter red dwarfs that can’t be seen with the naked eye are more likely to be found singly. This source is from 2006 and may be dated, but many of Shack’s sources are from the same period, and in any case it undermines his case that our system must be binary because many other systems are.
Then there is the problem of Mars being the binary partner to the sun (from Chapter 3):
Furthermore, aren’t we told that the Sun itself is mostly composed of hydrogen (70%) and helium (28%) plus a negligible 2% of other, denser elements? In this light, how hard would it be to imagine that Mars might, perhaps, have a similar mass to the Sun (in spite of their “David-and-Goliath” difference in diameter) and would thus nicely accommodate Newton’s sacrosanct gravitational laws? Having said that, I will hasten to make it clear that, since day one, my research for the Tychos model has intentionally “left Newtonian and Einsteinian physics at the door”, so to speak, focusing instead on the empirically testable and verifiable aspects (e.g. optical and geometric) of astronomy – as rigorously documented by some of our world’s foremost observational astronomers.
Shack is deliberately ignoring all questions of celestial mechanics, but asserting that Mars may have a mass comparable to the sun. He claims that Mars may be a brown dwarf, but doesn’t back that up except to mention Mars’ colour. Shack also gives all bodies in his model perfectly circular orbits, which does indeed become a possibility when all questions of celestial mechanics are ignored, although it does not square with the fact that all the binary star data he discusses describe elliptical orbits. He also mentions dark matter and the galactic rotation problem without mentioning that there are other researchers outside the mainstream that have solved that issue.
In his Chapter 5 on Mars Shack notes that Mars has two Empiric Sidereal Intervals (ESI) – the time it takes Mars, as seen from Earth, to be seen against the same background stars – of about 707 days and 546 days. Mars will have 7 long sidereal intervals followed by a short one, the difference being that the long intervals contain a retrograde loop of Earth passing Mars. He states:
You may now justly ask yourself, “How is this even possible? How can Mars realign with the same star – as seen from Earth – in two wholly different time periods (707 and 546 days)?” This is indeed a very good question. The short answer is: in the Copernican model, it simply can’t. In the TYCHOS model, it can and will naturally do so – for demonstrable, geometric reasons which I will now further expound upon.
Except that he is entirely mistaken, and both intervals can be seen simply by looking at a Copernican planetarium and noting all the dates on which the line going from Earth to Mars would be parallel to that same line on an arbitrary start date. A short sidereal interval (for instance from about Jan 1, 2034 to July 10, 2035 – 555 days) is simply one that begins shortly after a retrograde loop and ends before the next retrograde loop. Any ESI interval that includes a Martian retrograde loop will be a long interval. Shack knows this, since he cites a source that says exactly this, but “ultimately fails to address the profound implications raised by the existence of these two ESI’s of Mars.” These implications are vacuous however, since the two ESIs arise from the Copernican model for demonstrable, geometric reasons.
In the same chapter, Shack asks “So why is the currently-accepted value of Mars’s sidereal period “686.9 days” as computed by Kepler?” This confuses the orbital period of Mars (the time for Mars to make one orbit around the sun) with the ESI, the time it takes for Mars to come to the same position against the background stars as seen from Earth. But Shack clearly knows that’s what the 686.9 day figure represents, since he later says “Please note that, in REALITY, Mars does indeed have a 686.9-day period (or ca. 687d): that’s the period needed for Mars to revolve once around the Sun. Ergo, it is not Mars’s “mean sidereal period” as viewed from Earth.” This sophistic conflation cannot be explained by the ignorance of the one making the argument, and so comes off as dishonest rhetoric meant to deceive laypeople not familiar with astronomical terms.
For the rest of this critique I will be referring to Chapters 6 and 7 of the first edition of the book, since that is where I originally developed my argument. The end of Chapter 6 produces a diagram of the retrograde loops of Mars from August 2003, when Mars was 56 million km away from Earth, and from March 2012, when Mars was 101 million km away. Shack claims that “Under Copernican theory, it is simply unfathomable why Mars (whose orbital inclination vis-à-vis Earth’s orbit is said to be only 1.85°) would possibly trace such pronounced and steeply inclined “teardrop loops” — whenever Earth “overtakes Mars on its inner lane”.” and that “We should expect Mars to just reverse and resume direction in a straight line or, at the most, to trace only a very slightly “z” or “s”-shaped pattern”. These claims of geometric unfathomability are simply the consequence of a poor geometer.
The first thing to note is that a difference in orbital inclination between Earth and Mars will result in a changing projection against the celestial sphere as the distance between the planets decreases. To analogize, the rooftop of a two story house appears to be at eye level from a kilometer away, but as you approach is rises higher and higher in your field of view until you need to crane your neck to look up at it. Given this, it makes sense that Mars’ visible declination would change as the Earth approaches it, before returning to a similar level. If a difference in orbital inclination of 1.85° does not seem enough to produce such a change in apparent position, consider that Mars’ apparent size in August of 2003 peaked at 25.11 arc seconds in diameter (0.38% of 1.85°), and Mars’ retrograde loop has a height of about 4 times Mars’ peak apparent size. A change in visible declination of about 1.5% of the total difference in orbital inclination between the two planets is not nearly as unfathomable as Shack makes it out to be.
This argument is further supported by the fact that the retrograde loop from March of 2012, when Mars was almost twice the distance away, is noticeably flatter. It is also supported by the fact that Saturn, although inclined at 2.49° relative to Earth, has a completely flat retrograde loop:
Also notice that Mars’ retrograde loop in this image from September of 2016 is in fact an “s” pattern. This is due to Mars being inclined above Earth at the start of the retrograde period, and inclined below it and the end of the period. Loops will be produced if the planet remains above or below Earth for the entire retrograde, while the “s” pattern will be produced when the planet stars above and ends below, or vice versa.
In Chapter 7, Shack makes several misguided geometric arguments against the Copernican system. Shack notes that on November 5, 2018 and again on May 4, 2020, after a period of 546 days, Mars appeared aligned with the star Delta Capricorni, despite the fact that both planets were on opposite sides of the sun during both alignments.
Assuming that the Earth-Mars line has an identical angle on both dates in question (not necessarily true, but as we will see not important in any case) we can calculate the expected parallax angle using the distance to Delta Capricorni (38.71 ly).
The parallax angle calculated above is equal to 0.169 seconds of arc. This is too small to be seen except through a good telescope (for reference, the resolving power of the human eye is 28 arc seconds, and that of the Hubble telescope is 0.04 arc seconds). A minute deviation in the Earth-Mars angle would wash out this difference, but even if on November 5, 2018 the entire solar system had been instantaneously transported 300 million km perpendicular to Delta Capricorni, Mars would still have been seen in alignment with the star. This diagram also illustrates Mars’ short ESI in the Copernican system, since Mars’ last retrograde period had ended on August 27, 2018, and the next would begin on September 9, 2022.
Later on in Chapter 7 Shack states “Another problem afflicting the Copernican model is its apparent, irreconcilable geometry with regards to the observed retrograde periods of Venus and Mercury (circa 45 and 23 days respectively).” Shack apparently believes that retrograde motion begins when the Sun-Venus-Earth angle reaches 90 degrees while increasing, and ends when the angle again reaches 90 degrees, this time while decreasing. He justifies this, saying
My 90° angles indicate the moments in time when Venus and Mercury should, theoretically, gradually start reversing their perceived orbital directions in relation to the Sun (which, under the Copernican model, would of course constitute our central point of directional/angular reference).
However, retrograde motion has nothing to do with the sun, since it defined by the projection of the planet against the background of the celestial sphere. This seems like something Shack should know, since he discusses retrograde motion repeatedly in his book. He never seems to discuss “perceived orbital directions in relation to the sun” when talking about Mars’ retrograde, so its unclear why he introduces them here, when they have nothing to do with retrograde motion.
I was going to stop there, but I took a look at Shack’s Chapter 7 in his second edition, where he makes the claim that “comets are never observed to retrograde – as all our surrounding planets do. This is indeed a documented observational fact that no earnest astronomer can deny.” I hadn’t considered this question before, so I decided to look into it, to see if I had finally found a true claim in the book. The first thing I realized when I looked at a solar system simulation is that most comets (being objects from the far reaches of the solar system) do not orbit close to the invariable plane. Retrograde motion for such objects becomes a less well-defined concept, so I chose to focus on a comet that orbits in a similar plane to the planets. The comet 45P/Honda–Mrkos–Pajdušáková, discovered in 1948, has an orbital inclination of 4.257° (to the ecliptic, I suppose) and an orbital period of 5.25 years. Meaning, we have seen it complete an orbit of the sun many times since its discovery. If we look at its orbit centered around August of 2011, we can see that it very clearly does retrograde!
At this point I have come across enough red flags in the book that I no longer feel the need to give it the benefit of the doubt. Note that I am not defending the present mainstream model as a complete and perfect model of astronomy and the solar system. It has many flaws, and in my opinion has been attacked elsewhere more successfully than Shack manages here. I enjoy reading things that have the potential to overturn aspects of my worldview, but I expect them to actually make an effort to understand the system they are seeking to overturn, and not make repeated factual errors. There may be useful novel insights contained in his work, but if there are they are quite successfully hidden by the mistakes. Shack claims to have spent many years researching and developing his system, but repeatedly conflates different concepts or claims the mainstream model is impossible in a way that demonstrates fundamental misunderstanding of the model. It could be ignorance, but it comes off to me as deceptive, and doesn’t promote confidence in Shack’s other work.
Looking at the comments on Cluesforum, the comments seem to be universally commendatory (a result of selection bias, surely, and censorship, possibly), but given my critique this points to problem with the intellectual culture at Cluesforum, though it is by no means the only offender. The proper relationship with ones’ intellectual mentors is that of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, rather than Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) and Darwin. The duty of an intellectual heir is not fawning adulation, but to criticize and build upon what came before. “The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends. One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
Given that the global ruling elite aim to preserve and extend their hegemony over the collective peoples of the Earth, they require carefully constructed narratives that will convince people holding a broad spectrum of views, from the naive and trusting to the extremely skeptical. Each new psyop is prepared such that some manufactured perspective on it will appeal to a position along that spectrum of trust. Narratives may be grouped into roughly four categories, based on their content and who is disseminating them: mainstream, mainstream-adjacent, controlled alternative, and grassroots alternative.
The mainstream narrative is spread by large media companies like CNN and Fox, and is compelling to a majority of the population. With Covid, the mainstream narrative is that there is a deadly virus that arose naturally and everyone needs to uproot their lives to deal with it. The mainstream-adjacent narratives tend to question superficial aspects of the mainstream narrative while accepting most of it, and tend to be accepted by the majority of those not fully convinced by the mainstream narrative. Mainstream-adjacent narratives are promulgated by people like Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, or Jordan Peterson. With Covid, the mainstream-adjacent narratives tend to agree that the Covid virus is a threat, but are skeptical that lockdowns or vaccines are the proper solution. Together the mainstream and mainstream-adjacent narratives capture on the order of 90%+ of the population.
Of the small segment of the population left over, most are caught up in the narratives spread by controlled alternative sites like ZeroHedge and InfoWars. With Covid this narrative was that the virus had been engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology then released to help usher in digital ID, and while vaccines may be anywhere from unsafe to deliberately deadly, treatments like ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies are valuable and early treatment is important.
The last group, the alternative grassroots, is the only one that is not controlled opposition being directed by the designs of the ruling class. It generally consists of individual blogs and small forums. With Covid, this narrative is that there was no pandemic, that any excess all-cause mortality was caused by government action rather than a novel virus, and hence that any novel treatments or drug repurposing is unnecessary.
It is important to understand these different groups as it is through them that the powers that be control the narrative that the population experiences as reality. The mainstream story is fabricated from top to bottom, but it is fabricated in such a way as to permit equally pre-planned sub-narratives to be promoted by the mainstream-adjacent and controlled alternative opinion leaders. The truth of the narratives increases proportional to distance from the mainstream (as it must, in order to ensnare people with more knowledge and skepticism), with grassroots alternative writers usually most closely approaching reality, as far as we may know it. That is not to say that the grassroots writers are always correct, that they will agree with each other, that no valuable new information may be found in the output of the more mainstream-aligned groups, or even that there is no collaboration or overlap between the groups. However, it remains the case that any collaborations would be between parties that are relatively similar in distance from the mainstream, and that the veracity of the narrative increases with that distance.
Since these narratives are carefully designed to control the thoughts and perceptions of the population, studying the different perspectives on offer can help to understand the overall agenda. With the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the mainstream agenda is obvious and pervasive, selling that Russia has unjustifiably invaded Ukraine, and that the West should respond with the harshest possible sanctions, even if it results in negative economic impacts on the West. Citizens are manipulated to be fervently pro-Ukraine, attending pro-Ukraine demonstrations and waving Ukrainian flags. Since the Ukraine conflict has effectively replaced Covid in the 24-hour news cycle, it is clear that it is the new bugbear intended to draw the attention of the public. Based on the mainstream narrative, we may conclude that the Covid psyop is winding down, and will be replaced by this new geopolitical psyop, which may continue for at least a couple months.
The mainstream-adjacent perspective is well articulated by professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. He argues that Russia is responding to the West’s enticement of Ukraine to join NATO. From a geopolitical perspective, Russia cannot allow the rival Western power bloc to obtain a foothold on its borders. In this narrative, the Ukrainian conflict is a continuation of the 2014 conflict, and is the fault of the Western powers who were responsible for fomenting colour revolutions there. As a mainstream-adjacent narrative, this narrative is promoted by an influential university professor, and does not dispute the mainstream narrative except to assign the lion’s share of the blame to NATO and the West rather than Russia. Adherents of this narrative will be pro-Western but realistic about how the actions of the West will be received by other great powers on the geopolitical world stage. This narrative also does not question the authenticity or value of the US-led Western bloc “spreading democracy” around the world.
One controlled alternative perspective on the conflict is that promoted by Vox Day, who is pro-Russian and anti-Western. Often viewed from a Christian perspective, this narrative sees traditionalism as championed by Russia pitted against Western postmodern degeneracy. As the holders of this view tend to be traditionalists, they are explicitly pro-Russia, and see the Russians as a means to overturn the decades of Progressive cultural change and return to older sets of values. They would see this event as a seminal change from the Western-dominated geopolitical configuration that arose after the fall of the Soviet Union. The explicit pro-Russia slant of this alternative narrative is used by the mainstream narrative to bolster the “Russian troll” meme, claiming adherents have been brainwashed by Russian propaganda, rather than disgusted by the state of the contemporary West.
Another controlled alternative perspective explicitly calls out the previous one’s support of Russia, noting that Russia is not an anti-globalist nation, and that the East versus West paradigm is false. Russia and China are both in bed with the same international banking interests, and both support the technocratic agenda. All wars are banker’s wars, and both sides are being played by the bankers in a Kabuki Theatre meant to further this agenda. This narrative tends to accept that Covid was a bioweapon, and notes that since Covid failed to achieve complete worldwide medical tyranny, another factitious threat was necessary to continue to implement the goals of the technocratic agenda. The war also serves to cover for the continued economic unravelling of America and the West. Although this narrative questions the motivations for the war, it does not question the war itself, or any of the events making up the war.
The grassroots alternative view, as expounded by Miles Mathis, contends that the entire war is being faked, as a military drill being sold as real to the world. Miles points out that Zelensky is an actor who played the role of Ukrainian president in the show Servant of the People in 2015, and then created a political party of the same name before becoming president of Ukraine. Zelensky’s partners at his television production company were also promoted to high ranking positions in the Ukrainian government after his inauguration, including deputy head of the secret service. That is to say, Zelensky’s term as Ukrainian president began on television and has remained a scripted and televised affair. Miles also points out that nuclear weapons do not exist, a distinction not made by the controlled alternative narratives (the Alt-Market site previously linked has censored discussions of nuke skepticism in the past). This narrative agrees that the war in Ukraine is a diversion from the faltering Covid narrative, and also serves to enrich the global ruling class, who, far from squabbling, are united in the advantages they gain from the conflict.
What information can be gleaned from the different perspectives on the conflict with Ukraine? The first three narratives presented operate under the assumption that the East and West are independent entities who are in opposition. This view may be held by most of the public, but the role played by the West in financing the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequently propping up the Soviet Union for the benefit of the military-industrial complex belies this, as does the close relationship between Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin. Russia has also played along with the mainstream stories of nuclear bombs and the Moon landing, which they could have attacked if they were not owned by the same group of people as the West. Interestingly, Vox Day considers it reasonableto doubt the nuclear bombing of Japan, along with other central facts about WWII, but still promotes a pro-Russia narrative, which seems somewhat incompatible.
The final two narratives must then be preferred, and so the question becomes: To what extent is the war in Ukraine staged or faked? It may sound impossible to fake a war, but if it can be ensured that the leaders and generals are controlled, then battle outcomes can be assured, even if the soldiers are unaware of what is happening. This would explain what happened on D-Day, with crucial air and naval patrols cancelled, many German generals coincidentally absent, and Hitler being asleep during the initial landings and not being woken by his generals. Battles can also be written into the history books to justify leadership decisions and necessary climaxes in the war, as with the Tank Battle of Prokhorovka which was the turning point on the Eastern Front in WWII. There are many other unbelievable events in the second world war as well, such as the Battle of France.
The other possibility is that the war only exists on television or in a movie studio. Western journalists and politicians attributing past pictures and footage to the current conflict would seem to support to this. However, I don’t think this is reasonable for several reasons. First, this is likely to be a long run operation, with Russia taking over all or part of the country. Actual military presence will be required to sell that. Second, Ukrainians must be convinced that the war is real. It may be possible to convince some credulous people that a war is going on by setting off air raid sirens and driving tanks around, but that would not work over the time span required for this operation. Third, the military in both countries has purchased lots of vehicles and weapons that must be used up to justify buying more. The longer the conflict drags on, the more bombs and vehicles must be replaced, profiting the MIC. Fourth, not all the footage looks faked. There have been videos from video games that were passed off as real on social media, but this does not account for all footage. Governments are likely using social media to seed and amplify fake stories as a disinformation tactic to make the truth more difficult to discern, and allow outlets like the BBC to claim that “false claims the war is a hoax go viral”. By planting and then debunking fake evidence (which is often also reposted by duped truthers), the government sells the narrative that the war is 100% real and anyone who claims otherwise is crazy. For these reasons, it is much more likely that the war is a real but manufactured conflict, though it is not the point of this paper to precisely demarcate fakery from reality.
The fact that the war is scripted for certain outcomes does not preclude the fact that civilians suffer, and many people have fled Ukraine, including a friend of mine. The Germans may have been scripted to lose WWII, but that doesn’t mean that Berlin wasn’t bombed and no wall was erected. The global ruling class uses exoteric geopolitical tensions to to lend an air of verisimilitude to their manufactured events, and so in a sense war in Iran or Taiwan would have served the same purpose. For a psyop narrative to be believable, it must be constructed on top of some underlying reality, or at least a shared story that grounds the narrative. After all, most participants in an event of this scale (excepting those in leadership roles) will not be aware that what they are participating in is a manufactured event, and the credibility of the event cannot be deflated by inconsistencies that are too obvious (though there are always many inconsistencies, and disciplined devotees of the mainstream narrative will ignore or rationalize them). Hence the predominance of plausible-sounding psyops, like mass shootings, serial killers, and disease outbreaks, rather than alien invasions.
As with any large-scale psyop, there are many different goals to be achieved by the conflict in Ukraine. From a narrative control perspective, the war was required to transition the public from the Covid narrative that had been faltering, as evidenced by the previously alternative narratives creeping into the mainstream-adjacent space (see Robert Malone on Joe Rogan, etc.) Far from being an organic phenomenon of information coming to light (said information having been already circulating in the alternative grassroots space for months, if not years), the mainstreaming of controlled alternative figures like Malone was a gatekeeping operation to reveal some information to the public while keeping it ignorant of deeper issues, when more superficial subjects like vaccine safety could no longer be repressed (see limited hangouts). This failure of the narrative justified its replacement by the 24/7 anti-Russia propaganda campaign, which largely prevents public revaluation of the Covid narrative or critical consideration of the Russian story. It may seem hubristic to claim that the war in Ukraine has anything to do with popular perception of the Covid narrative in the West, but the West remains the locus of the majority of global economic, military, and political power, and so global-scale events are often related to Western circumstances.
The other important perspective is that of the long-term technocratic agenda, behind which the global ruling class is united. That agenda may be considered to have three arms, the technological, the economic, and the geopolitical. Covid primarily furthered the technological and economic agendas, by increasing reliance on technology and implementing digital passports, and justifying massive money printing in the West. Now that there has been large-scale pushback against the vaccine passports, the technological agenda can return to the background, where digital ID and blockchain technology will be developed largely outside the public consciousness. The economic agenda will continue, and the geopolitical agenda will assume a more prominent position.
The West has and will continue to feel the effects of the trillions of dollars of money printing (inflation is 27% from 2020 to 2022, according to ShadowStats), and the war will be used as a scapegoat for the situation deliberately created by the central banks. Top bankers like Mark Carney have been calling for the end of the US dollar as world reserve currency, and ostensible tensions between the East and West are a key ingredient for that to come to pass, as the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) hoard gold and reduce their holdings of American dollars. Western sanctions on Russia will only serve to accelerate this process of de-dollarization, and promote trade outside America’s sphere of influence. When the US dollar finally loses its status as reserve currency (gradually, then suddenly), dollars held overseas will return to the America, causing massive inflation and crippling the economy. This kind of economic catastrophe is required to pave the way for widespread use of global digital currencies, which have so far seen only minor adoption, as when El Salvador made Bitcoin a national currency.
Vox Day’s pro-Russia narrative is correct when it recognizes the war in Ukraine as the beginning of the end for the Neoliberal world order that has been dominant since the fall of the Soviet Union, but as with the fall of the Soviet Union, it is a controlled demolition rather than an organic event. In an era of mass globalization, capital flows easily, irrespective of political jurisdictions, and the same global intermarried class of plutocrats controls the West and the East. National boundaries roughly demarcate population groups with distinct genetics and cultural norms, but national governments still answer chiefly to the global ruling class. Nations still differ in the kinds of policies and political rhetoric they will accept (China will accept very different political norms than will Western countries, and for that matter America will accept very different norms than Canada), but broadly speaking all countries are heading in the same direction as dictated by the global elite. Despite racial mixing and the export of ideological propaganda, world populations are not sufficiently homogeneous to drop the facade of local governance.
This leads to the question of why the West is being deliberately collapsed while China is being built up. Although the Phoenician elite have a history of moving their base of power over long periods of time – the last move having been from Britain to America – power over the past several centuries has been concentrated in the Western hemisphere. It would have been possible to maintain the historical power base of the West if that was what was desired, but all signs seem to indicate that it is moving to China, with mainstream and mainstream-adjacent publications predicting that China will become the next global superpower. The decline of the West was already theorized in 1918 by Oswald Spengler (Jewish), but it was hastened by cultural decay that was pronounced by the 1960’s and has accelerated since then, and also by mass immigration into previously racially homogeneous countries, which has likewise accelerated. In contrast, China was rapidly and forcefully industrialized by Mao, who received support from America’s Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA). American manufacturing was moved over to China in the 1970’s. Today China continues to be guided by top bankers like Thomas Lawrence Kuhn, who are overseeing its rise.
I would suggest that the reason that the East and China in particular is being propped up is because the Chinese are viewed as having the optimal population genetics for the purposes of the technocratic New World Order agenda. Asians (especially the Han Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans) are high IQ and conscientious, while being highly collectivist and respectful of authority. White populations, on the other hand, while also being high IQ and relatively productive, are much more individualistic and less trusting of authority. While it should be obvious why Asian population characteristics are beneficial to the elites, a specific example can still be illuminating. A 2021 study examining vaccine hesitancy found that Asians were markedly more willing to be vaccinated than all other races. By May of 2021, only about 4% of Asians between 18 and 34 were vaccine hesitant, compared to about 24% of Whites in the same age group (figure 1). Vaccine hesitancy among Whites decreased monotonically with age to about 6% in the >75 age group, but little variation across age groups was observed among Asians, who were sub 6% in all age groups. Even among those Asians who were vaccine hesitant, only 28% of them reported that they did not trust the government, which was once again the lowest of all racial groups (43.7% of Whites reported not trusting the government) (eTable 7, supplementary materials). This study was American, meaning the effect was observed among Asians living in an individualistic culture; the effect size is likely to be larged in Asia.
Given the higher level of trust and compliance with authority demonstrated by Asians, it is obvious that China would furnish a more compliant and subservient population than any White nation, and so it is logical for the elites to make China their new base of power. This hypothesis can be further supported by observing that China is an authoritarian state with world-class surveillance and censorship technology, and a nascent social crediting system. Singapore, with a majority Han Chinese population, also has a highly authoritarian and technocratic political regime. With the favourable population characteristics of East Asia, it should not be surprising that it is favoured over the stubbornly individualistic White nations with their history of public protest. These population differences would have been apparent to the global elite decades if not centuries ago, and are confirmed by modern psychometric analyses. With this geopolitical agenda at play behind the scenes, it would not be surprising if China eventually involves itself in the current conflict, perhaps by invading Taiwan.
Overdue Revolutions 
