Conspiracy and the American Public
157: Damar Hamlin and the merit of historical theories
When I set out to write Arb Letter my intentions were two fold.
Get away from obvious META/Instagram censorship of my content
Write and commentate about the actual truth for my followers/subscribers
In this insane world we find ourselves living in my one goal is to drive meaningful discourse, commentary, and chiefly, ensure that we are talking about the facts as they are in reality and not as they are to the institutions, legacy media companies, and boomer run groups that have dominated news and media for so long.
One of the key problems in this hyper digital world we now live in, is that many people within the brainwashed masses completely lack the ability to critically think.
Pair that with an endless list of modern society cheap dopamine (booze, drugs, porn, onlyfans, fast food, video games, social media, etc.) and you get the perfect caricature of what every government in the entirety of existence wants out of a citizen.
A soft, unquestioning, blob of a human who is content living in the dark.
Maybe today I can at least open your eyes to more than you were willing to entertain before this week, maybe not. Either way, it’s critical to spread this type of awareness and critical thinking approach as governments and institutions get more and more powerful.
Unfortunately these large institutions and groups are incredibly influential and in instances where wrongdoings and conspiracies have actually occurred, they’ll employ any method possible to keep the truth from the public and confuse/demonize people who are screaming something is wrong.
Check out this response from ChatGPT on what a conspiracy theory is, notice anything about the bias of the answer?
A conspiracy theory is a belief or explanation that proposes that events or situations, particularly political or social ones, are the result of secret plots by powerful, shadowy groups or individuals. These theories often lack evidence and are not widely accepted by mainstream scholars or experts in the field.
Lol the “experts”. That’s rich after the last two years.
The latest “conspiracy theory” to hit the web in the last 48 hours is a claim that Damar Hamlin did not show up to the Bengals game this past weekend.
Some claim he’s dead, some think the NFL is using a body double, and some think there are elaborate efforts going into covering up what happened to the young Safety almost 21 days ago.
Today we’ll walk through our thoughts on this along with some big geopolitical updates and larger issues we are keeping an eye on.
It’s becoming more and more important for those of us with good sense to question everything we are seeing and hearing in this country.
Today we’ll walk through our approach to investigating conspiracies and determining if they are fake, true, or at least partially rooted in truth.
Some conspiracy theories that ended up being pretty much completely true in modern history - courtesy of Reader’s Digest.
The Dalai Lama was a CIA agent - According to recent declassified intelligence documents, the Dalai Llama earned $180,000 in connection with the CIA’s funding of the Tibetan Resistance to the tune of $1.7 million per year.
The FBI was spying on former Beatle John Lennon - In 1971, the FBI put Lennon under a surveillance regimen, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to deport him a year later.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2, 1964 was faked to provoke American support for the Vietnam War - By the time news reached American ears, the facts surrounding the North Vietnamese attack on the American Naval ship Maddox were already fuzzy. Declassified intelligence documents have since revealed that the Maddox had been providing support for South Vietnamese attacks by a nearby island and that the North Vietnamese were responding to in kind, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. Fishy.
The CIA was trying to control people’s minds - MK-Ultra was a top-secret CIA project that had begun in the early 1950s and continued until the late 1960s. The project aimed to investigate the use of mind control techniques, including the use of drugs such as LSD, for interrogation, torture, and espionage. The project was run by the CIA's infamous Scientific Intelligence Division and involved both government agencies and academic institutions.
The project was obviously highly controversial, as many of the subjects of the experiments were not even aware that they were participating in them and some of the methods used were unethical. In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-Ultra files destroyed, but some records were overlooked and later discovered by a Senate investigation in 1975. The investigation led to several reforms in the CIA and the way research is conducted.
These are merely a handful of examples but there’s one underlying point to these instances I want to drive home (and one we will expand on in today’s post).
All of these - would seem batshit insane if you told someone on the street. But, once you look under the hood and understand the nuance, implications, and motivations of those involved, suddenly it doesn’t seem like a conspiracy.
It seems like shady shit going on to move goals forward and achieve certain ends.
Today we’ll talk through some recent conspiracies like the current one surrounding Damar Hamlin and what we think is going on. We’ll touch on a whole list of historical conspiracy events and talk about the details surrounding them.
If you’re a conspiracy theory skeptic this will be great background to explain why some people believe in conspiracy theories. If you’re already a skeptical citizen that entertain some theories, this will be a good overview of our approach to vetting theories, and how we end up deciding whether or not one has any merit too it.
So buckle up, close your email for the day and strap in.
Let’s get started.
“For anybody who's tracking actual predictive power, The Fringe will surprisingly keep being the place where reality is spotted first.”
― Bret Weinstein - professor of evolutionary biology