"No conspiracies please, we’re reality theorists" by Chris Rea

	Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims. Source: Real Left No conspiracies please, we’re reality theorists CHRIS REA JUN 6 ∙ GUEST POST   READ IN APP   I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not crazy about the Beatles. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the first record that I listened to as a young child and even today it reverberates with the sensibility of early consciousness. I became fascinated by the extraordinary story of the Beatles’ achievements and accepted without question the orthodox narrative about their uniqueness, which was the answer to any nagging doubts I might have had about how exactly they became so good so quickly and so enormously – they were unique. They were just … the Beatles. The Beatles were above all the other groups and solo artists of the 1960s, a decade which produced some outstanding pop and rock music. Everything flowed from them. Their best songs, and there were very few duds in their catalogue, were imperishable achievements of popular musical culture which warranted the exceptional praise they received from music establishment critics and the acclamation they received from the public. Fixing a rabbit hole I cleaved to this view until 2022 when I watched a presentation by the US researcher Mike Williams entitled Did the Beatles write all their own music? Williams argues that at least between 1962 and 1966 they did not, and that they may not have done so from 1967 to 1970 either. Williams’ thesis is built on an analysis of the recording of the 1965 Rubber Soul album. It’s a fascinating exposition and I won't attempt to describe it in detail. The four-and-a-half-hour presentation is worth investing your time in. In short, he argues that the official narrative about the production of Rubber Soul is not credible. The band went into the EMI studios on Abbey Road on 12th October 1965 with an almost empty musical locker, faced with the challenge of composing, writing, rehearsing, demoing and recording 14 original songs for the new album and two for a double A side single (‘Day Tripper’/ ‘We Can Work it Out’). They are supposed to have completed all this by 11th November – and they did not work every day between these dates – with the album mixed, pressed and ready for the Christmas market by 3rd December. Williams argues that it was simply not possible for the band to produce such a quantity of original music in so short a time. According to the mainstream story, Rubber Soul’s songs were recorded in an extraordinarily small number of takes. ‘Drive My Car’, for example, was knocked off in four takes, the fourth being the only complete one. For the conventional narrative to work, there had to be no failed attempts at songs and minimal reworking. Every song they wrote had to be nailed quickly and perfectly. This would be a tall order under any circumstances but it becomes gigantic when you think about the great leap forward in musical sophistication and complexity Rubber Soul represented compared to its predecessors. When they were signed by EMI in 1962, the Beatles were a hard-gigging covers band that showed no signs of the musical chops that would be required to write and perform songs like ‘Girl’, ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘In My Life’ and ‘If I Needed Someone’. If you’re not sure about this, listen to the Live! at the Star-Club album which was recorded in Hamburg in December 1962, less than three years before the recording of Rubber Soul. The sound quality is terrible but it is possible to hear the singing and playing beneath the murk and there is nothing, absolutely nothing on this record that indicates that this was a band destined for world-straddling greatness, not to mention high-grade studio proficiency. Williams also identifies problems with Rubber Soul’s production timeline, suggesting that for all the record’s components, including the sleeve and the disc’s label, to have been ready for manufacturing on 19th November, the running order of the songs must have been known before they had all been recorded – or written, since the mainstream version says that the band were composing throughout the time they spent in the studio. His conclusion is that the songs that appeared on Rubber Soul were already written and the instrumental parts already recorded by the time the Beatles arrived in the studio on 11th October. And not by the Beatles. Their job was to learn and lay down the vocal tracks. This task alone was more than enough to fill up the available recording time, Williams argues. Williams and other researchers have also examined the set lists for the Beatles’ live shows between 1962-1966 and questioned the absence of many of their ‘original’ compositions. Out of 91 songs allegedly written by the band (almost all of them by Lennon and McCartney) during their time as a touring outfit, just 25 were performed live at their concerts, less than 30% of the total. There are 26 songs on the aforementioned Star Club album and just two of them are Beatles ‘originals’. ‘Love Me Do’, which had been released as a single that October, wasn’t one of them. It’s extraordinary to think that they weren’t routinely playing their first big hit at this time. They didn’t play their next big hit single ‘Please Please Me’ either. Although it wouldn’t be released until January 1963, the song had already been recorded by the time the band played the December 1962 Hamburg shows. The Star Club recordings were made less than two months before the band recorded their debut album, Please Please Me. Just two of the eight Beatles ‘originals’ from that album feature in the set list. Surely by then they would have been road-testing the songs that they were shortly to lay down on their debut album? And just two songs from Rubber Soul were ever performed live. More extraordinarily still, the Beatles’ August 1966 tour of the United States that concluded with the band’s last ever public concert at Candlestick Park in San Franscisco featured not one song from the Revolver album that had been released on 5th August. In 1966, with nearly 100 original pop classics in their armoury, the Beatles were still including rock and roll cover songs in their sets, which typically lasted for no more than half an hour. The orthodoxy has it that by this time in the band’s career, their songs had become too complicated to replicate live. According to Wikipedia, ‘none of the tracks from Revolver were included due to the difficulty in reproducing their sophisticated studio sounds and arrangements in a concert setting.’ It is interesting how widely accepted this point of view is. I subscribed to it myself for many years. But it’s nonsense. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ admittedly would be hard to perform live in a way that sounded like the original. The brass parts from ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ would have to go. But as for ‘Taxman’, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, ‘Dr Robert’, ‘She Said She Said’ etc – Beatles tribute acts have easily mastered these songs. You can find many examples on YouTube. The Jam seemingly had no trouble picking up ‘Taxman’ and turning it into ‘Start!’ fifteen years later. The idea that the band that wrote and performed these songs to such a high standard in the studio couldn’t reproduce them live just weeks later is absurd. Returning to ‘Drive My Car’ – if it’s the case that they recorded just one complete take for the album, that will have been the only time the band ever played the song right through. Why would they have not wanted to include it in their live shows? Were Lennon and McCartney not proud of their composition? It’s a terrific pop song. You would think that they would be itching to play it, and all their other brilliant songs. ‘Drive My Car’ would have been great live. The band could have dropped out the vocals while the crowd all sang ‘beep-beep, beep-beep, yeah!’ That would have been amazing. But it never happened. Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth It makes no sense at all that the Beatles did not routinely perform their latest studio records at live concerts. With respect to Sherlock Holmes, these are the songs that weren’t played in the night. Williams believes that the most likely reason they performed such a small part of their own catalogue was because they hadn’t learned how to play most the songs that had been attributed to them. If it was the case that the Beatles’ job in the studio was to record the vocal tracks for songs that had already been written and instrumentalised, there would have been no need for them to learn to play the instrumental parts. The Beatles did of course perform some of their ‘original’ compositions live. It would not have been possible to maintain the ‘Lennon and McCartney genius songwriters’ persona otherwise. Therefore, they would have learned just enough of their ‘originals’ to uphold the artifice, with the balance filled out by covers. This explains why a) their shows were so short, b) why reasonably uncomplicated and straightforward ‘original’ songs like ‘She’s A Woman’ and ‘Baby’s in Black’ stayed in their set for so long, and c) why they had to include the rock and roll covers they had been performing for most of the decade. The Beatles had a limited palette and they stuck to it right up to the point where it would have been difficult for the biggest band in the world to explain away the absence of great swathes of their own catalogue from their live shows. I have come to the sad conclusion that John, Paul, George and Ringo were merely the dancing puppets in the shop window of a gigantic psychological operation called Beatlemania and that the Beatles were in fact the world’s first Beatles tribute band – and a tribute band that played fewer Beatles songs than their successors, and not as well. The Beatles were finished as a unit by 1970 but they have cast a vast shadow over popular culture ever since. It is impossible to treat them insignificantly, which is why what was intended to be a preamble to a larger article has already expended 1,700 words on them. Thank you for bearing with me while I exorcised my Beatles possession. It hasn’t been a pleasant experience but it has been less traumatic than the realisation in 2020 that most of the Left had sided with the ruling class in the covid war. I don’t think there are many more scales to fall from my eyes now. By the time we got to Tavistock If the Beatles were a construct created by powerful ruling class forces, most likely the combined efforts of the intelligence agencies, the Tavistock Institute, media interests, commercial/financial networks, elite families etc, then who knows how many other artists from that era and beyond were not the authentic articles we have been led to believe. The late US researcher Dave McGowan exposed the late 1960s Laurel Canyon scene and the wider psychedelic/west coast movement as a deep state operation in his book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. Many of the big names from that era were the children of military industrial/military intelligence operatives. The CIA had a station in Laurel Canyon. ­Much of the music associated with the scene was not written and performed by the bands and artists whose names appeared on the record sleeves. McGowan suggested that one of the objectives of the psychedelic/’flower power’ operation was to vitiate the anti-war movement of the late 1960s. Mark Devlin’s outstanding Musical Truth trilogy examines the dark and depraved forces that control the popular music industry. Devlin argues that many artists have been subjected to trauma-based mind control programming and have little or no personal agency despite their surface success and fame. How deep does it go? Were entire genres – glam, heavy metal, punk, hip hop, goth, disco – confected, scripted and controlled? Were they all social engineering projects? Yes, probably. It’s difficult to accept all this about music because it’s such a personal matter. One instinctively – naively, it’s true – thinks that music, and popular entertainment art generally, might have been permitted to evolve authentically and not be subject to the system programmes that one might expect to be operated in politics and other regions of high social consequence. But of course, the opposite is likely to be true. If the ruling class lies about important political events and creates theatrical diversions to mesmerise the public, why not in the fields of cinema, music and art which are where the masses mainline much of their experience of existence? What better way to control and direct behaviour than through mass popular culture? Moderna’s little helpers The multiple psychological operations across political, social and cultural spheres of action are interconnected. High profile music artists are system assets who will front up for system interests outside of their own spheres of activity when the system is ready to activate them. How else to explain why so many of them advocated so strenuously for the experimental covid injections? Unless Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Elton John had a long-standing interest in vaccinology and were speaking as concerned lay experts, they were clearly reading from a script. “The vaccine will get us out of this. I think we'll come through it, I know we'll come through, and it's great news about the vaccine,” said McCartney in August 2021. “Shooting the vaccine/Bill Gates is in my bloodstream/It’s mind control,” sang Jagger in ‘Eazy Sleazy’, an ‘ironic’ and ‘amusing’ song about lockdowns co-written with Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters. Jagger expressed both his approval for the injection programme and his disdain for ‘conspiracy theorists’ in interviews accompanying the song’s release. Grohl himself told fans that they would have to provide proof of vaccination to attend Foo Fighters shows. Elton John co-presented a video with Michael Caine which extolled the virtues of the covid injections. “It’s really important to know that the vaccines have all been through and met the necessary safety and quality standards,” the former Watford Football Club chairman said reassuringly. Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Elton John – all of them Sirs, all of them system assets who made their reputations in rock and roll, the ultimate culture of harmless and directed rebellion. The use of such witless stooges for frontline medtech propaganda purposes shows just how out of touch the ruling class is with popular opinion. These ageing rockers don't have the clout their handlers think they have. Surely not even the most loyal covidians were persuaded to roll up their sleeves just because the frontman of the Strolling Bones thought it a good idea? Such people needed little persuasion in the first place. But there was no way these assets were not going to be used in the grand system narrative about the plandemic and the experimental injection programme. It’s what they had been preparing for all their working lives; they are, in Mark Devlin’s words, ‘lifetime actors’. Although they are primarily identified with music, music is not the most important thing about them. Neither is their role in generating profits for the industry that supports them. Even the music isn’t really about music. The real point of McCartneys, Jaggers and Johns is to represent system interests. This is much more important than the rituals of record production and concert performances. Their job is to influence individual and collective behaviour in the pursuit of radical social transformation agendas, which seek to achieve one or all of the following outcomes: getting people to agree to changes to their way of life which they would normally resist or find disagreeable; directing people into behavioural modes that ensure their quiescence; distracting people from real issues and events taking place off stage. Popular music, notwithstanding the outrageous beauty of some of its artefacts (at least up to the 1990s) has helped promote all manner of stupid lifestyle behaviours, including emotional incontinence, dissolution, ‘coolness’, ‘attitude’ and nihilistic dopiness, amongst a large set of negative indicators. And what a distraction it has all been! All the time and energy that has been expended thinking about bands, talking about bands, reading about bands, wearing band t-shirts, even fighting about bands – time and energy that could have been expended on organising resistance to ruling class power, breaking free from the vice of the banking serpent and establishing the democratic commonwealth of peoples! But of course, that’s the point. Conspiracy theories are just conspiracy theories All of the foregoing belongs in the realm of what is popularly known as conspiracy theory. The term is usually wielded pejoratively but some ‘conspiracy theorists’ describe themselves as such by way of a defiant reclaiming of an ostensible insult. Such people might also describe themselves as a ‘proud tin foil hat-wearer’. Interestingly, the word ‘Methodist’ is believed to have arisen out of a similar context. It is said that the CIA was responsible for encouraging the use of the term as a way of tamping down the widespread scepticism that greeted the findings of the Warren Commission’s report into the murder of President Kennedy, although perhaps that is a conspiracy theory. I understand the impulse to describe oneself as a conspiracy theorist but I don't agree with it. This is not fundamentally out of squeamishness over using the enemy’s appellations in a knowing or ironic way. It’s because I am not sure what people actually mean when they call someone a conspiracy theorist, and I don't think they do either. For example, let’s take the argument that 9/11 was the result of a conspiracy hatched by deep state entities in the United States and elsewhere to stage a terrorist attack using hijacked aircraft. This is the classic conspiracy theory of our age. Depending on the company you keep, if you advance this theory, you will probably be called a conspiracy theorist. But in this context, ‘conspiracy’ is really a synonym for ‘plan’ since however and by whom 9/11 was carried out, its success rested on the development and execution of a complex project plan. This plan might have been drawn up by Osama Bin Laden and his confederates or by political and military agencies in the United States and their confederates. Whoever was responsible, the planning would have had to have taken place under conditions of great confidentiality if not outright secrecy. Conspiracies are certainly characterised by conditions of secrecy and confidentially but if each competing narrative about 9/11 – the deep state inside job versus the jihadi hijacking – could be described as such, the term loses its potency as a pejorative, or a defiant badge of pride. The conspiracies cancel themselves out. What we are left with is one possible plan versus another. The interested observer would then proceed to weigh up the evidence to decide which of the two plans is the real one. I’m not even sure that it is right to call someone a conspiracy theorist if they believe that world affairs are managed by a cabal of power interests that maintains its primacy through deception and manipulation – for example creating fake pandemics, climate emergencies or terror events. That’s the ruling class doing what the ruling class has always done. It has conspired, plotted and schemed for thousands of years. Believing this to be the case might constitute a theory about the conspiratorial nature of ruling class power but once that understanding has been reached, what then? Knowing that the ruling class conspires, plots and schemes does not constitute a programme of action capable of challenging and overthrowing ruling class power. In any case, the ruling class has never ruled in any other way so what is described as conspiratorial behaviour is just its normal modus operandi, not an aberrant condition. It is disrespectful to the ruling class to think that it wouldn’t behave like this! In this context, ‘cold-eyed analysis of the typical characteristics of the exercise of ruling class power’ is a much better description than ‘conspiracy theory’ although it is admittedly less elegant. ‘Conspiracy theory’, then, is an empty category of meaning. It is simply any narrative that goes against the big system narratives that are rammed down the public’s throat in the immediate aftermath of a marquee mind-control event; in other words, the attempt to obscure reality with fantasy. Its only value lies in its capacity to embolden unimaginative liberal ‘rationalists’ who believe in the inviolable sanctity of vaccinations, humanitarian interventions and NASA to howl down transgressors whose ideas threaten their handed-down world view. Typical examples of this can be found in replies on the sainted Matt Le Tissier’s X account – the saloon bar, arm-round-the-shoulder, fake bonhomie types who say things like, “Matt – loved you as a player but you’re out of your depth. Leave virology to the experts”, or “Mate [starting a sentence with ‘mate’ is a massive red flag – see also Sadiq Khan’s ‘Maate’ campaign] take your tin foil hat off, you’re embarrassing yourself.” These are the same people – assuming that they are not bots – who chuckle at Dom Joly’s conspiracy theory takedown programme and re-tweet Marianna Spring. Incidentally, If you ever need to be reminded that the world is a fundamentally beautiful place and not the technocratic hellhole the depraved Davos deviants want to force us into, watch these goals Matt Le Tissier scored for Southampton in the 1990s and early 2000s. Is nothing real? The big system narratives rest upon the collective suspension of disbelief. With the Beatles, we are expected to accept that something magical happened when they met George Martin and went into the studio. It cannot be explained other than by an appeal to alchemy; it was just the genius of the Beatles, the unique effect they had on each other and the happy chance that they were paired with a producer who recognised their latent talent. They weren’t like other groups. If the story was too good to be true, that was because they were … the Beatles. They were just exceptional. With 9/11, we are asked to accept that hijackers armed with box cutters boarded four aeroplanes, lured the crews from the cockpit, and, despite having no experience commanding passenger jets, took over the controls, turned off the transponders and steered the planes towards their targets, in the case of the Pentagon event performing a complicated manoeuvre and flying at ground level at 530mph into the building. Two other planes caused three steel-framed skyscrapers in Manhattan to collapse at near and actual freefall speed into their own footprints, and a fourth disappeared into the ground in rural Pennsylvania. A hijacker’s passport was found in the street near the rubble of the three towers in Manhattan and even as the chaos unrolled and before any investigations had taken place, Osama Bin Laden was identified as the mastermind. The story was too good to be true. It contained multiple absurdities and improbabilities, all of which were explained away as coincidences, extraordinary good/bad luck, systemic security failures, fog of war inevitabilities etc. It was unique. It was … 9/11. The only reason that the obviously nonsensical 9/11 narrative has acquired popular legitimacy is because it was hammered into the collective consciousness within minutes of the event and held up as the inviolable truth thereafter, sustained by the pseudo-imprimatur of a state-managed commission of inquiry. The dominant covid narrative is also arrant nonsense and it also owes its durability to impactful and sustained state/media repetition and a travesty of a public inquiry. An infected bat bit a pangolin, a man ate the pangolin and passed the infection on to the world; within weeks, country after country was shut down, economies collapsed and citizens were told to stay indoors until it was safe enough to come out and submit to an untested and dangerously novel medical intervention. None of it stood up to scrutiny at the time and just because the majority of the population knuckled under and did what the system told them to do didn’t mean that it wasn’t total bollocks. The sheer awe inspiring overwhelmingness of events like 9/11 and the covid operation obliterate reason and deny the evidence of one’s eyes. They are trauma-based mind control exercises on a global scale. It doesn’t matter that the state and media versions of these events make no sense. They are deliberately threaded with absurdities and improbabilities. This has the effect of obfuscating the analytical terrain and enabling multiple contradictory readings of the event(s). It also enables the development of bad faith schools of thought deliberately created to discredit good faith interpretations. Preposterous system narratives also provide the basis for humiliation rituals whereby the ruling class’s political and media assets must keep a straight face when they are relaying the narrative, and for the obedient citizens who uncritically digest such mendacious pablum. One can only imagine how much pleasure the ruling class derived from observing the dutiful behaviour of the masses during the covid operation and from the earnest promotion of the operation’s bizarre, cruel and irrational behavioural prescriptions and proscriptions by their state/media lackeys, many of whom were in on the joke. Now I’m a disbeliever The ruling class uses hoaxes and frauds to manipulate mass opinion and mould reality to advance their interests, the primary one of which is the maintenance of their historical perch at the apex of the social pyramid. The ruling class propagates its bizarre distortions down through the social strata through its vast network of influencing nodes, notably the mainstream and much ‘alternative’ media, global organisations and agencies, academic institutions and networks, think tanks, national and local governments etc, all of which mediate ruling class preoccupations, agendas and objectives, sometimes obliquely and indirectly. The covid operation revealed the workings of this process most nakedly but the process didn’t start with covid and it probably goes back much longer than we ever imagined, certainly pre-dating the establishment of capitalism which is but a phasic expression of ruling class power and which will be replaced by a new paradigm in time. The people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion What we have been told about the way that the world works in its most fundamentally important aspects is false. I think I have always sensed this but it took the blessing and curse of the covid operation to confirm it. How often do you find yourself thinking, how much of this is true? How much of this is real? It’s liberating to think like this. After covid, nothing is off the table.   Having moved from a condition of generalised scepticism, thanks to 2020 vision I am now a full-on disbeliever. I assume that everything the government and media says is a lie and work back from there. After listening to the Saturday football results on Sports Report, I phone the clubs to check the scores for accuracy. I’m not even confident then. Nothing is what it seems. In our own country, the political system is a shabby screen for rule by trans-national oligarchs – the ruling class – which constitutes the real power in the world. It does not make one jot of difference who you elect to local or national government. Political democracy is a fiction, its legitimacy sustained only by relentless reinforcement by a paid-for media and a residual belief held by a large enough portion of the population that the process is worth persevering with in the absence of a credible alternative. War is not what it seems either. The wars that the UK constantly wages on behalf of the ruling class are not conducted for their ostensible purposes such as ‘humanitarian intervention’, ‘extension of democracy’, ‘responsibility to protect’ or ‘freedom of the seas’, let alone for the defence of the people of this country. Yet these pretexts are always advanced in support of the latest armed conflict the UK has joined or initiated. But these pretexts are simply baseless. None of the wars fought by the UK in historical memory have been for any other purpose than to advance the interests and fill the coffers of the ruling class. Millions of people – in and out of uniform – have been murdered in the ruling class’s name. The inscriptions on cenotaphs that speak of ‘the ultimate sacrifice’ and ‘they gave their lives for their country’ should really read ‘murdered by the ruling class’. The actual reality of war is never expressed in mainstream public discourse. The opposite of the reality is accepted as true. The orthodox representations of all the big-ticket human enterprises – politics, health, economics, war etc – which are nothing but fantastical fictions, saturate our consciousness from the moment we are born. They are reiterated and amplified by the great institutions of mind manipulation – the media, government, the education system, popular entertainment – throughout our entire lives and the process is so effective that the great mass of humanity at any time is crushed beneath a massive weight of misinformation, falsification and delusion. The condition is so absolute that most people never free themselves from the manacle of ruling pseudo-reality because they are not aware that it is a gigantic con or that an alternative – a real – reality exists. This is why it is possible for staggeringly divergent experiences of reality to co-exist simultaneously. The covid operation brought about a traumatic transformation of the fabric of material reality. The changes included: acceleration of a cashless economy; enforced digitisation of work and the dismantling of traditional workplace culture; the installation of the 5G network and the preparation of the urban environment for ‘smart city’ infrastructure whilst most of the general public were confined to their homes; normalisation of bio-medical access protocols; intensified digitisation of the commons; imposition of health agency obedience; mass wearing of masks; the wholesale introduction of mRNA technologies into human bodies; overt, blatant and brazen suppression of dissident opinion. That’s for starters. As traumatic transformations go, the covid operation is up there with industrialisation and de-industrialisation, and for time compression it is out on its own. Yet millions of people in this country and countless more worldwide did not experience the covid operation as a declaration of war upon the masses by the ruling class. They had a completely different experience of covid to that undergone by, say, Real Left readers. This was not merely a case of different takes on the event. It was two utterly irreconcilable realities being experienced contiguously – often in the same house or workplace. Both realities cannot be right. During the covid operation, those of us in Real Left, in the freedom movement, in the anti-lockdown and anti-mandate campaigns, in the vast and diverse community of the awake – our reality was the correct reality. Our narrative was the correct narrative. Our analysis was the correct analysis. And in the end The time has passed for equivocation and equivalence, for seeing both sides of the argument. The people who shouted you down and called you a conspiracy theorist were on the wrong side of history. They are the ones who believed six impossible things before breakfast and then put on a face mask to drive to the local experimental injection centre. There is nothing in the worldview of these people that cannot be debunked, contradicted and refuted. But the very narratives that the ruling class propagates and millions of people uncritically accept – including most of the legacy Left – in fact correspond to what the ruling class and its acolytes criticise us for; if we are to cry conspiracy theory, then the following specious hobgoblin narratives that presently serve to distract and disorient the masses fit as snugly as a tin foil hat: the ‘climate emergency’; permanent pandemics; the imminent Russian invasion of western Europe; transgenderism; hate crime; toxic masculinity; jihadi terrorism. That’s also just for starters. And they accuse us of believing in far-fetched theories! I propose that self-styled conspiracy theorists and researchers replace the C word with ‘reality’. That is what we deal in – reality, not half-baked system narratives. We are reality theorists and reality researchers. And as for the rabbit hole trope – well, I don't think we’re going down the rabbit hole at all. We’re climbing out of it into the light.

"Dissent Into Madness: Crazy Conspiracy Theorists" by James Corbett

 

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Source: The Corbett Report

Dissent Into Madness: Crazy Conspiracy Theorists

THE CORBETT REPORT MAR 20

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by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
March 19, 2023

In "Dissent Into Madness: The Weaponization of Psychiatry," I told the long and sordid history of how the study of the mind has been used to suppress political opposition and subdue unruly segments of the population—not just in the "enemy states" of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany or communist Cuba, but in England and the US and the rest of the "free and democratic West" as well. I also looked at specific examples of how this was accomplished and named names of some of the figures who had a hand in forging this psychiatric weapon.

With that history in mind, this week I will explore how the public has been trained to accept the pathologization of those peskiest of dissenters, the conspiracy realists. I will also explain how the trigger has already been pulled on this psychiatric weapon and how it is impacting those who dare question the motives of our would-be rulers.

Are you ready? Let's begin . . .

Pathologizing Conspiracy

One of the most popular articles to be written in recent decades is titled "Why Do People Believe in Conspiracies?"

It starts by noting the worrying rise in the number of people who believe in wild, outlandish theories about how people in positions of power conspire to maintain their influence and expand their wealth.

The article's author then cites a psychologist, who explains that well-meaning but emotionally unstable people typically latch on to these fantastical conspiracy theories because they help these poor, deluded souls make sense of the world and offer them a feeling of control over an uncontrollable world.

Next, the report offers advice to those who are seeking to disabuse anyone who has fallen for this conspiracy claptrap of their delusional notions. That advice, it turns out, is the same admonition given to someone coming upon a wild animal in the jungle: don't confront the target directly or make them angry; speak to them in soothing tones and pretend to listen to what they're saying; and disengage if it seems they're preparing to attack.

But this article usually ends on a positive note: if this wild conspiracy theorist you're talking to hasn't yet lost touch with reality, then it may be possible to talk them down from the ledge. You can gently create some cognitive dissonance in their mind by pointing out that every conspiracy that has ever occurred in history has been exposed by whistleblowers and reported on by journalists, and therefore there is no such thing as a secret conspiracy. If they are of sound mind, this will be enough. Your confused friend will see the light and learn to trust government and authority once again.

Do you want to read this article? Would you like a link? Well, I don't have one link for you; I have dozens.

You see, the curious thing about this "Why Do People Believe in Conspiracies?" article is that it hasn't been written just once or twice. It's been written hundreds of times by hundreds of different journalists, and it's been published by the BBC and FiveThirtyEight and Vox and the American Psychological Association and The New York Times and PsychCentral and Addiction Center and LSU and Technology Review and National Geographic and verywellmind and Business Insider and Psychology Today and Harvard and LiveScience and Scientific [sic] American and NBC News and The Conversation and Intelligencer and Time and The Guardian and Popular Mechanics and even that most prestigious of journalistic institutions, goop. (Yes, goop!)

And it's not only in written form. It's also a video report that's been filed by the CBC and Channel 4 and CNBC and Channel 4 (again) and DNews and StarTalk and 60 Minutes and Time and DNews (again) and Big Think and Al Jazeera and the Weekly and Tech Insider and Inverse and Dr. Todd Grande and euronews and CBS News and The University of Chicago.

Oh, and did I mention it's also a podcast? Well, it is, and it's been produced by Ava Lassiter and NPR and Radio Times and NPR (again) and LSE and Bill Gates and NPR (again again) and The Anthill and Speaking of Psychology and NPR (again again again) and Big Brains and NPR (again again again again).

So, are you starting to formulate a hypothesis that there may be some grand scheme afoot here? Do you find yourself speculating that perhaps (just perhaps) there might be a coordinated effort to pathologize conspiracy theorists in order to justify locking them away in padded cells?

Do you find it interesting that the terms "conspiracy theory" and "mental disorder" were forever linked in the public imagination when Richard Hofstadter penned his infamous 1964 essay in Harper's Magazine, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"? Or that the best-remembered passage from that essay is the one in which he describes the "style of mind" behind the conspiracy-prone, populist political movement of his era as "the paranoid style" because "no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind"? Or that his caveats to that "diagnosis"—namely, that "I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes" and that "I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics"—are largely forgotten?

Then the dinosaur media pundits and their psychiatric "experts" have a message for you: "Shut Up, Conspiracy Theorist!, or we're going to put you in a straitjacket!"

Don't believe me? Well . . .

First They Came for the Truthers . . .

The idea that those who believe in conspiracy theories are mentally unsound is, of course, not a new one.

Witness how the subject was treated on Barney Miller, a popular American television sitcom from the late 1970s that centered on the exploits of a cast of detectives in a New York City Police Department station house. In one episode from 1981, a man is arrested for breaking into the offices of the Trilateral Commission because, as he explains in an impassioned speech that is bizarrely punctuated by canned laughter, "what they are really up to is a scheme to plant their own loyal members in positions of power in this country; to work to erase national boundaries and create an international community; and, in time, bring about a one world government, with David Rockefeller calling the shots!"

The man then presents his evidence of this conspiracy in the form of articles in periodicals like Conspiracy Review and Suppressed Truth Round-up. Barney Miller's sneering reaction (along with the ever-present laugh track) is enough for the viewer to understand that this burglar—and, by implication, anyone who harbours similar views about the Trilateral Commission or other globalist institutions—is a delusional criminal who deserves to be locked up for those beliefs.

Or take the "tin foil hat" conceit. As the crack journalists over at Vice helpfully explain, the concept of wearing a tin foil hat to protect one's brain from government mind control was introduced into popular culture via Julian Huxley's 1927 story, "The Tissue-Culture King." In Huxley's tale, "caps of metal foil" are used to mitigate the effects of a mad scientists' telepathic hypnosis experiment. Since then, the "tin foil hat-wearing madman" has gone on to become a ubiquitous pop culture trope, employed by lazy TV writers as an easy way to signal to the audience that someone is suffering from paranoid delusions about vast government conspiracies.

Or take President Lyndon Johnson's advisor, John P. Roche, who wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement that was picked up and reported on by Time in January of 1968. In the letter, Roche dismisses conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination as the gospel of "a priesthood of marginal paranoids" and declares such theories "an assault on the sanity of American society, and I believe in its fundamental sanity."

Or take the various examples of the pathologization of conspiracy theorizing pointed out by Lance deHaven-Smith in his modern-day classic, Conspiracy Theory in America:

Initially, conspiracy theories were not an object of ridicule and hostility. Today, however, the conspiracy-theory label is employed routinely to dismiss a wide range of antigovernment suspicions as symptoms of impaired thinking akin to superstition or mental illness. For example, in a massive book published in 2007 on the assassination of President Kennedy, former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says people who doubt the Warren Commission report are “as kooky as a three dollar bill in their beliefs and paranoia.” Similarly, in his recently published book Among the Truthers (Harper’s, 2011), Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay refers to 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “political paranoiacs” who have “lost their grip on the real world.” Making a similar point, if more colorfully, in his popular book Wingnuts, journalist John Avlon refers to conspiracy believers as "moonbats," "Hatriots," "wingnuts," and the "Fright Wing."

Certainly, there is no shortage of commentators perpetuating the idea that conspiracy theorizing is a form of mental illness. But it wasn't until the post-9/11 era of terrornoia panic accompanying the rise of the Homeland Security state that the trigger was pulled on the loaded gun that is the psychiatric weapon.

Of course, the post-9/11 decade was filled with academics, journalists and talking heads of various stripes conflating conspiracy theorizing with mental illness, exactly as the pre-9/11 era had been. Heeding Bush the Younger's injunction to "never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th," political commentators of all stripes began a campaign of vitriol directed against 9/11 truthers that began to ratchet the conspiracy/insanity rhetoric to new heights.

Bill Maher's "joke" that truthers should "stop asking me to raise this ridiculous topic on the show and start asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you" helped to ferilize the soil for the likes of Winnipeg Sun columnist Stephen Ripley, who then "diagnosed" 9/11 truthers as suffering from  "paranoid delusions." These pronouncements prepared the public for the fulminations of TV talking heads on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum that "necrotizing conspiracy theory radicalism" is a danger to society and that the crazy truthers perpetuating these delusions need to be treated as potential terrorists.

But the campaign to demonize 9/11 truthers as psychologically disturbed and potentially violent criminals who need to be taken off the streets has not stopped at harsh words and strong rhetoric. Institutions and authorities have now begun trying to literally declare truthers and other "conspiracy theorists" as insane as a way of silencing political dissent.

Corona Insanity

The general public has been conditioned by over half a century of propaganda to see conspiracy theorists as delusional and potentially dangerous paranoids. Many people would probably be glad if conspiracy theorists were committed to a psychiatric institution for their "wingnut" theories. Doubtless, too, those in positions of political power would be happy to be able to wield such power.

There's just one problem for those hoping for a conspiracy theorist round-up: many countries have adopted standards that—at least on paper—make it impossible to commit someone to psychiatric incarceration without their consent unless they pose a demonstrable and immediate risk of harm to themselves or to others. These countries aren't Soviet Russia, after all.

However, as readers of these pages will know only too well, these types of rules and safeguards are only as reliable as the integrity of those who are supposed to uphold and enforce them. And, unfortunately for us, the officials who uphold and enforce these rules instead often skirt them at the behest of the politically powerful.

Many examples of conspiracy theorists being held for psychiatric evaluation against their will could be cited here, but one case from The Corbett Report archives will serve to make the point. It's the case of Claire Swinney, a New Zealand journalist who in 2006 was—in her own words—"Held In A Psychiatric Ward & Called 'Delusional' For Saying 9/11 Was An Inside Job."

Swinney's story—which she recounted in an interview on The Corbett Report in 2009—is remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is her harrowing account of how quickly a series of seemingly disconnected problems and concerns—a series of threats that she had received for her fearless reporting on big pharma and her 9/11 truth advocacy in the New Zealand press, a bout of insomnia, an off-hand comment that was misinterpreted as a suicidal statement—escalated into full-on forced detention in a psychiatric ward.

Secondly, there is her revelation that those who were supposed to be acting in her interest—a police officer, various social workers, the chief psychiatrist in the psychiatric ward—would not even listen to her when she tried to present evidence for her belief that 9/11 was an inside job.

But for those who believe in the legal safeguards that exist to prevent the abuse of the psychiatric weapon, the most concerning fact of all is that Swinney's remarkable 11-day ordeal in forcible psychiatric confinement—a confinement that included forced medication—was that it occurred in direct contravention of the New Zealand government's own laws. In fact, not only does the country's Mental Health Act clearly state that forcible psychiatric detention is not permitted if it is based solely on a person's political beliefs, but, as Swinney notes, the medical personnel who authorized her confinement weren't even familiar with this provision.

The compulsory psychiatric confinement of someone with no history of mental illness solely for expressing a belief in 9/11 truth is shocking enough. That this detention took place not in the United States and not in the immediate aftermath of the events, but in New Zealand some five years later, defies justification.

Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. As we enter the biosecurity era, authorities around the world are working to set the precedent that people who resist the medical authorities' diktats can be diagnosed as mentally ill, stripped of their professional credentials and even arrested.

An example of this phenomenon that should be familiar to those in The Corbett Report audience is that of Dr. Meryl Nass. Dr. Nass is an internal medicine specialist with 42 years of medical experience who had her medical license suspended by the Board of Licensure in Medicine, Maine's state medical regulator, for refusing to toe the government-approved line on COVID-19 treatments. Incredibly, in addition to suspending her medical license, state regulators also ordered her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for the thoughtcrime of disbelieving the government's COVID narrative.

One of the most startling stories of psychiatric intimidation of a COVID skeptic, however, is that of Dr. Thomas Binder. Dr. Binder is a cardiologist who has had a private medical practice in Switzerland for 24 years. As Taylor Hudak reported for The Last American Vagabond late last year, Dr. Binder's life was turned upside down in 2020 when he found he could not sit idly by while the entire medical profession lost its collective mind.

In February 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Binder advocated for the return of ethics and science in the field of medicine. He spoke out against unscientific restrictions, mandates, the flawed PCR testing, etc., on his personal website and social media. Dr. Binder says it was his duty as a doctor to inform the public of the truth about COVID-19.

On Thursday April 9, 2020, Dr. Binder posted a blog to his website, which provided a thorough analysis of COVID-19 and the various unscientific measures implemented at that time. The blog post went viral, receiving 20,000 views, and Dr. Binder was hopeful his post may calm the public and initiate the end to the restrictions and mandates.

However, the post caught the attention of two colleagues, who alerted the Chief of State Police, claiming that Dr. Binder was a supposed threat to himself and the government. Two days later, on April 11, 2020, the day before Easter Sunday, Dr. Binder was brutally confronted by a total of 60 armed police officers including 20 officers with the Kantonspolizei Aargau’s anti-terrorism unit, ARGUS.

To those who remain ignorant of the history of psychiatry's use as a weapon of political oppression, this is incomprehensible enough. But what happened next almost defies belief, even among those of us already in the know.

After studying Binder's blog posts and emails, the police determined that there were no grounds for issuing an arrest warrant. Nonetheless, they did send Dr. Binder for a mental health evaluation. Incredibly, the doctor in charge of Binder's psychiatric evaluation invented a diagnosis of "corona insanity" and ordered him to be placed in a psychiatric unit. After a period of evaluation, Binder was offered an ultimatum: remain in the psychiatric hospital for six weeks or return home on condition that he take a neuroleptic medication.

Canaries in the Coal Mine

The incredible and flagrantly illegal actions taken in the forcible psychiatric detention of "conspiracy theorists" and political dissenters like Swinney and Binder serve more than one purpose. Beyond temporarily sidelining the person in question (both Swinney and Binder returned to their work critiquing government narratives after their release) and beyond throwing their public reputation into doubt by forever associating their names with a false psychiatric diagnosis, the wielders of the psychiatric weapon achieve something of even greater value when they engage in such tactics. That is, the stories of these psychiatric detentions serve as warnings to the general public: when you dissent on sensitive political issues, you risk being institutionalized for your beliefs.

Rationally speaking, it is utterly implausible to lock in a padded cell everyone who subscribes to a conspiracy theory. Even establishment sources readily admit that 50% of the public believe in some conspiracy or other, including the 49% of New Yorkers who, in 2004, claimed that the US government "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act," and including the whopping 81% of Americans who declared in 2001 that they believed there was a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.

But unfortunately for us, those who are brandishing this psychiatric weapon are not rational at all. In fact, as we shall see next week, those in political power who seek to diagnose their critics with mental illness are themselves suffering from one of the greatest psychopathologies of them all. . . .