The FBI’s Alleged Conspiracy Theorist-Terrorist Connection Is Anti-American

Andrew Korybko 
Global Research 

The Mainstream Media reported earlier this month on an intelligence bulletin released by the FBI’s Phoenix office back in May alleging that a connection exists between so-called “conspiracy theories” and domestic terrorism, and while there have veritably been some people who hold such controversially defined beliefs and then ended up killing others, it’s anti-American to suspect that people who don’t believe the official narrative about various events automatically qualify as potential terrorists.

***

The de-facto criminalization of free speech is an ongoing trend in American society that’s already pressured a lot of people to self-censor their beliefs in public in order to avoid official scrutiny from the authorities or harassment by their political opponents, but an intelligence bulletin released by the FBI’s Phoenix office back in May and only reported on by the Mainstream Media earlier this month might spread the dragnet even further by de-facto criminalizing the online pursuit of additional information that contradicts the official narrative about various events.

The “secret police” (as they’d be described by the Mainstream Media if any other country’s version of the FBI was being reported on) believe that a connection exists between so-called “conspiracy theories” and domestic terrorism, and while there have veritably been some people who hold such controversially defined beliefs and ended up killing others, it’s anti-American to suspect that anyone engaged in seeking out all sides of every story (no matter how possibly implausible) automatically qualifies as a potential terrorist.

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FBI document warns conspiracy theories are a new domestic terrorism threat

Comment: We knew it was coming.... 

--------------- 
Yahoo.com

The FBI for the first time has identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat, according to a previously unpublicized document obtained by Yahoo News. (Read the document below.)

The FBI intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s Phoenix field office, dated May 30, 2019, describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” as a growing threat, and notes that it is the first such report to do so. It lists a number of arrests, including some that haven’t been publicized, related to violent incidents motivated by fringe beliefs.

The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which didn’t actually have a basement).

“The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document states. It also goes on to say the FBI believes conspiracy theory-driven extremists are likely to increase during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

The FBI said another factor driving the intensity of this threat is “the uncovering of real conspiracies or cover-ups involving illegal, harmful, or unconstitutional activities by government officials or leading political figures.” The FBI does not specify which political leaders or which cover-ups it was referring to.

President Trump is mentioned by name briefly in the latest FBI document, which notes that the origins of QAnon is the conspiratorial belief that “Q,” allegedly a government official, “posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring.”

This recent intelligence bulletin comes as the FBI is facing pressure to explain who it considers an extremist, and how the government prosecutes domestic terrorists. In recent weeks the FBI director has addressed domestic terrorism multiple times but did not publicly mention this new conspiracy theorist threat.

The FBI is already under fire for its approach to domestic extremism. In a contentious hearing last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray faced criticism from Democrats who said the bureau was not focusing enough on white supremacist violence. “The term ‘white supremacist,’ ‘white nationalist’ is not included in your statement to the committee when you talk about threats to America,” Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said. “There is a reference to racism, which I think probably was meant to include that, but nothing more specific.”

FBI Conspiracy Theory Redacted by Kelli R. Grant on Scribd

Top 5 "Conspiracy Theories" That Turned Out To Be True

Corbett Report

We all know the old trope of the tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist who believes crazy things like "the government is spying on us" and "the military is spraying things in the sky" and "the CIA ships in the drugs." Except those things aren't so crazy after all. Here are five examples of things that were once derided as zany conspiracy paranoia and are now accepted as mundane historical fact.

The Problem with Wikipedia and the Digital Revolution

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts 
Global Research

esterday (April 10, 2019) a reader alerted me to the fact that I am being smeared on Wikipedia as a “vocal supporter of the current Russian government and its policies.” The reader also reports that an article in the Daily Beast calls me a “Putin worshiper.” The reader says that he tried to edit the Wikipedia entry without success, and he urged me to give it my attention.
 
I do not know whether the person who wrote my Wikipedia entry intended to smear me or is merely uninformed. However, dissenting voices do get smeared on Wikipedia. It is an ongoing problem for many of us. For years readers and people who know me would make corrections to my Wikipedia biography, but as soon as the corrections were made, they would be erased and the smears reinstalled.

The problem with Wikipedia is that it is an idealistic approach based on the belief that truth is more likely to emerge when everyone has a voice than when explanations are provided by a select group of experts or peers. This idealistic approach is not without merit. Moreover, it might work very well with subjects and people who do not have ideological opponents or are of no threat to those intent on controlling explanations.

The problem arises when a subject or a person is controversial and is especially the case if the person’s arguments disprove or dissent from official explanations. In The Matrix in which we live, truth-tellers are unwelcome to those who control the explanations in order to advance their agendas. Until truth-tellers can be silenced or completely censured, the practice is to discredit them with smears. Thus, I and many others have been described as “conspiracy theorists” for reporting factual information that contradicts the official and unproven explanation of 9/11, anti-semites for criticizing Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians and influence over U.S. foreign policy, and as “Russian agents” or “Putin stooges” for keeping the record straight about Ukraine, Syria, and Putin’s effort to avoid military conflict with the West.

In the pre-Internet age it was difficult to smear people. Newspaper editors would allow letters to the editor to correct factual mistakes or to provide a different interpretation of a collection of facts, but shied away from smears. This doesn’t mean that smears never happened, but not with the abandon of the Internet era.

Open works in process like Wikipedia, Internet comment sections and social media are ideally suited for smearing people and broadcasting the smears worldwide prior to any correction of them. Thus, the digital revolution has been a godsend to government agencies such as the CIA, State Department, Mossad, the Israel Lobby, corporations and other private interest groups, ideological movements such as neoconservatism and Identity Politics, and politicians, all of whom have agendas that are furthered by controlling the explanations.

As money is the highest value for many people, there is an unlimited supply of people who can be hired to smear those who challenge official explanations. A smear can start in a comment section, move to social media, and from there to a website and on to Wikipedia.

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Why the 'Intelligence Community' aggressively pushed RussiaGate conspiracy theories

Debra Heine
PJ Media

James Clapper behind John Brennan and Robert Muller

Why did anonymous members of the intelligence community and top Obama administration officials like James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan so aggressively push the Russia collusion narrative for over two years in the midst of ongoing investigations? Who does that? Why have these Obama alumni been so conspicuously loud in their protestations against the president?

"They doth protest too much," Monica Crowley explained in her Washington Times piece this week, as she fleshed out what many of us have been thinking from the beginning.

The best defense, the saying goes, is a good offense.

The key orchestrators of the Big Trump-Russia Collusion Lie seem to have hewed tightly to that tactical advice.

Over the past two years, one of their biggest "tells" has been their hyper-aggressive and gratuitous attacks on the president. Given that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation found no collusion or obstruction of justice, their constant broadsides now look, in retrospect, like calculated pre-emptive strikes to deflect attention and culpability away from themselves.

By accusing Mr. Trump of what they themselves were guilty of, they created a masterful distraction through projection.

We now know that former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, are hip-deep in the conspiracy. Both wrote supposed "tell-all" books and carpet-bombed the media with interviews in which they regularly flung criminal accusations against the president. Whenever asked about their own roles, they reverted to denouncing Mr. Trump.

With Mr. Mueller's findings, Mr. Comey's and Mr. McCabe's media benders look increasingly suspicious.

As do those of their comrades in the Obama national security apparatus, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and his partner in possible crime, former CIA Director John Brennan, who, apart from former President Barack Obama himself, may be the biggest player of them all.

Every clip of Brennan fulminating against the president on MSNBC, every insufferable tweet from James Comey, and every pearl clutch from James Clapper on CNN should be seen with this in mind.

Because there is so much corruption and malfeasance to cover up.

For instance, The Daily Caller investigative reporter Luke Rosiak recently discovered a provision in a 2012 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court motion that expanded the FBI's ability to share information with foreign officials, laying the groundwork for the 2016 abuses against U.S. citizens. To put it bluntly, "the UK and Australia would be able to trade information back and forth with the U.S. about campaign workers who are American citizens." Like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, for instance.

Ace of Spades explained how it works:

Remember the US intelligence trick? They can't spy on US citizens without a warrant sufficient to clear the probable cause evidentiary hurdle. But if they tell foreign intelligence services to do the spying and slip the results back to the US intelligence community, they get their spying done by proxy, avoiding a judge's scrutiny and any intersection with the US Constitution at all.

Former prosecutor Sidney Powell told The Daily Caller that the language in the 2012 FISA provision was "very concerning." 

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Russiagaters Ramp Up Narrative Management as Mueller Report Nears

Caitlin Johnstone
Strategic Culture

Both CNN and the Washington Post are reporting that Robert Mueller’s investigation into a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government will be wrapping up as soon as next week. This report comes without a single American having been charged with any such conspiracy during the investigation up to this point, and we’re seeing a very revealing uptick in narrative management from the people who have been making a name for themselves promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

A Washington Post article titled “Mueller’s ‘winding down’ may be less than it appears” by Jennifer Rubin (a member of WaPo’s large lineup of neoconservative empire loyalists) argues that while it is very possible there won’t necessarily be anything earth-shattering in the report itself, “the host of other investigations will continue while the focus moves to Congress.” A New York Times article titled “The Mueller Report Is Coming. Here’s What to Expect.” argues much the same thing. Both articles effectively tell the reader that they should brace themselves for disappointment, but definitely still keep their tinfoil pussyhats on.

“I’VE EXPRESSED SKEPTICISM ON #MUELLER FROM DAY ONE,” tweeted the totally calm and unbothered former Hillary Clinton advisor Peter Daou. “Trump obstructed justice in plain sight and bragged about it to Russian operatives in the Oval Office. THAT’S UNQUESTIONABLY AN INDICTABLE/IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE. If he remains in office, it is an abject failure of our system.” 

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CENSORSHIP Wins This Round As YouTube Now Deems Conspiracy Videos “BORDERLINE CONTENT”

Press For Truth

See also: 1984: YouTube Will Demote Conspiracy Videos In Its Recommendation Algorithm — A Scary Prospect For Freedom Of Thought

Society is not a science problem (but science's problems are social)

Martin Geddes

"Scientists are the easiest to fool. ... They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors—they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident."

 
— James P. Hogan, Code of the Lifemaker

I semi-jokingly describe my job as being a "humanistic technophilosopher". It sounds a bit grandiose, but it's really an attempt to capture a simple idea: in our technological society, the most interesting stuff happens at the boundary of the humanities and the sciences.

Whilst it is common for scientists to lament the innumeracy of their artistic counterparts, it is my observation that scientists can be equally naive about the social. In fact, they can be even more profoundly ignorant, since the artists know they are mathematical weaklings, but the numerate are conceited that their reductionist rationalism is the right tool for political problems.

Understanding why this widespread arrogance exists may prove illuminating, and this is best shown via an example. Several people have pointed me at a published scientific paper by an Oxford University researcher about the scaling properties of "conspiracies". (Defining one is problematic, as we shall see, hence the scare quotes.) Can we take its conclusion — conspiracies don't scale well — at face value?

The paper's fatal flaw is easy to spot in its abstract and abstraction (my emphasis): "In this work, we establish a simple mathematical model for conspiracies involving multiple actors with time, which yields failure probability for any given conspiracy." Anyone who thinks complex historical narratives collapse to binary probabilities is already in deep trouble! Indeed, the idea that there is a single truth in the social is extremely contentious.

What this paper attempts is to produce a universal model of all phenomena whereby an intentional deception is jointly maintained over time by a closed group. It assumes there is a single and well-defined class of narrative called a "conspiracy", and furthermore presumes that the author has the superior wisdom and raw data to personally discriminate between truth and lies. The scientist, you see, is not so easily duped! These are also perfectly "true or false" phenomena in their totality, both in their construction (is it a conspiracy or not?) and their extinction (they either fail totally, or don't at all).

Having been a childhood victim of a Masonic conspiracy — the Jehovah's Witnesses cult — that operates persistently in the open, I feel in a somewhat privileged position to comment on Dr Grimes's epistemological endeavour. In short, it is demonstrably foolish, and illustrates why physics journals, for the sake of their credibility and integrity, should stay well away from commenting on sociological matters. 

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Conspiracy Theory? Politicians and Corporations Admit to Paying Actors to Show Fake Support

John Vibes
Activist Post

In an age where most politicians have very little support for their campaigns and causes, they have been known to resort to desperate measures to improve their public image. While this practice is disregarded by some as a “conspiracy theory,” many politicians have been caught hiring actors to fill the crowds of their campaign speeches—corporations, too.

In fact, just this week in Ontario, Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford’s campaign was forced to admit that they hired actors for at least one of their events. Ford’s staff acted like this was not authorized by them, but instead blamed a local candidate for arranging their actors. Campaign officials for Toronto Centre Tory candidate Meredith Cartwright reportedly hired the actors to support Ford at a rally in Dundas Square.

“We were very confused by this situation because we are getting record numbers of supporters to every event across Ontario. This was done by a local candidate and it won’t be continuing,” Ford’s spokeswoman, Melissa Lantsman, said in an email to the Toronto Star.

A number of these actors reached out to the press about the event to blow the whistle, including artist and performer Devanshu Narang.

Narang told The Star that he was offered $75 to appear at the rally between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. wearing the candidate’s t-shirt, but he turned down the gig.

“I was shocked to see this happen in Canada, in Toronto. I find it offensive even to the Canadian democracy. The main thing was that you know, the moment I saw that I kind of felt odd about it. You know, politicians hiring actors to play supporters is like the way it works in the Third World,” Narang said.

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YouTube Will Fight “Conspiracy” Videos Using Wikipedia

Vigilant Citizen

After demonetizing thousands of channels (many of which were “truther” and “conspiracy”-related), YouTube is now taking further steps to fight undesirable videos. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced this week that the video platform will soon begin displaying links to “fact-based” sites alongside conspiracy videos. Called “information cues”, these snippets of information will link to “reputable” articles in order to combat “hoaxes” and “fake news” stories (gotta use lots of quotation marks to highlight mass media’s biased vocabulary).

Here’s how it will work: If you search and click on a conspiracy theory video about, say, chemtrails, YouTube will now link to a Wikipedia page that debunks the hoax alongside the video. A video calling into question whether humans have ever landed on the moon might be accompanied by the official Wikipedia page about the Apollo Moon landing in 1969. Wojcicki says the feature will only include conspiracy theories right now that have “significant debate” on the platform. “Our goal is to start with a list of internet conspiracies listed on the internet where there is a lot of active discussion on YouTube,” Wojcicki said at SXSW.

– Wired, YouTube Will Link Directly to Wikipedia to Fight Conspiracy Theories

The announcement comes shortly after YouTube was blamed for the distribution of “conspiracy theory” videos concerning the Florida shooting. In the wake of the event, the top trending video on YouTube was about crisis actors (notably David Hogg) appearing on camera. The video was quickly removed from the platform.

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Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, John Pilger, and Noam Chomsky are considered ‘Far-Right conspiracists’ in the sycophantic new school of journalism

Comment: More spineless left-liberal nonsense from Monbiot who believes that good journalism is right-wing conspiracy theorizing...

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Leak of Nations

Manadel al-Jamadi hung from the rusty rungs of a barred window, his hands behind his back in a style known as a Palestinian hanging. American troops beat him and demanded the unconscious prisoner reveal the whereabouts of a non-existent weapons cache. His face was hidden under a green bag and hanging down over his droopy shoulders, displacing from their sockets from gravity’s force, pushing his limp body down to the cold ground of his cell.

Half an hour passed, and the exuberant Americans soldiers started to think that the sorry Iraqi man was cheating them by playing dead ‘like a possum’, and released him from his stress position. They then realised that the prisoner had no pulse.

Such harrowing scenes from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq would forever remain unknown to the American public who pay the soldiers in question if it weren’t for the relentless muck-raking of the world’s most accomplished investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh. Hersh won the Orwell award for his exposé, to add to his collection alongside his Pulitzer he gained in 1970 for his work on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

However, for the ‘fake news’- conscious crop of journalists in 2017, Hersh is a ‘far-right conspiracist’ and ‘unhinged’ for his willingness to confront power rather than parrot its claims ad nauseam.

In his Guardian column, George Monbiot argues that Hersh, alongside journalist and documentary maker John Pilger, and – even more strangely – the left-wing academic Noam Chomsky are all guilty of spreading ‘far-right conspiracy theories’ surrounding the sarin attack on the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun.

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No-Brainers and "Conspiracy Theories": Seth Rich, Craig Murray and the Narratives of the National Security State

Mike Whitney
Counterpunch

 Why is it a "conspiracy theory" to think that a disgruntled Democratic National Committee staffer gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails, but not a conspiracy theory to think the emails were provided by Russia?

Why?

Which is the more likely scenario: That a frustrated employee leaked damaging emails to embarrass his bosses or a that foreign government hacked DNC computers for some still-unknown reason?

That's a no-brainer, isn't it?

Former-DNC employee, Seth Rich, not only had access to the emails, but also a motive. He was pissed about the way the Clinton crowd was "sandbagging" Bernie Sanders. In contrast, there's neither evidence nor motive connecting Russia to the emails. On top of that, WikiLeaks founder, Julien Assange (a man of impeccable integrity) has repeatedly denied that Russia gave him the emails which suggests the government investigation is completely misdirected. The logical course of action, would be to pursue the leads that are most likely to bear fruit, not those that originate from one's own political bias. But, of course, logic has nothing to do with the current investigation, it's all about politics and geopolitics.

We don't know who killed Seth Rich and we're not going to speculate on the matter here. But we find it very strange that neither the media nor the FBI have pursued leads in the case that challenge the prevailing narrative on the Russia hacking issue. Why is that? Why is the media so eager to blame Russia when Rich looks like the much more probable suspect?

And why have the mainstream news organizations put so much energy into discrediting the latest Fox News report, when - for the last 10 months - they've showed absolutely zero interest in Rich's death at all? 

According to Fox News:

"The Democratic National Committee staffer who was gunned down on July 10 on a Washington, D.C., street just steps from his home had leaked thousands of internal emails to WikiLeaks, law enforcement sources told Fox News.

A federal investigator who reviewed an FBI forensic report detailing the contents of DNC staffer Seth Rich's computer generated within 96 hours after his murder, said Rich made contact with WikiLeaks through Gavin MacFadyen, a now-deceased American investigative reporter, documentary filmmaker, and director of WikiLeaks who was living in London at the time....

Rod Wheeler, a retired Washington homicide detective and Fox News contributor investigating the case on behalf of the Rich family, made the WikiLeaks claim, which was corroborated by a federal investigator who spoke to Fox News....

"I have seen and read the emails between Seth Rich and Wikileaks," the federal investigator told Fox News, confirming the MacFadyen connection. He said the emails are in possession of the FBI, while the stalled case is in the hands of the Washington Police Department." ("Family of slain DNC staffer Seth Rich blasts detective over report of WikiLeaks link", Fox News)

Okay, so where's the computer? Who's got Rich's computer? Let's do the forensic work and get on with it.

But the Washington Post and the other bogus news organizations aren't interested in such matters because it doesn't fit with their political agenda. They'd rather take pot-shots at Fox for running an article that doesn't square with their goofy Russia hacking story. This is a statement on the abysmal condition of journalism today. Headline news has become the province of perception mandarins who use the venue to shape information to their own malign specifications, and any facts that conflict with their dubious storyline, are savagely attacked and discredited. Journalists are no longer investigators that keep the public informed, but paid assassins who liquidate views that veer from the party-line. 

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The American left and the reality of 911: Beyond their wildest dreams

 Noam Chomsky: Bastion of the intellectual left in the US - and hopelessly ignorant of 911

Graeme MacQueen
Truth and Shadows

On November 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy's assassination, Fidel Castro gave a talk on Cuban radio and television.[1] He pulled together, as well as he could in the amount of time available to him, the evidence he had gathered from news media and other sources, and he reflected on this evidence.

The questions he posed were well chosen: they could serve as a template for those confronting complex acts of political violence. Were there contradictions and absurdities in the story being promoted in the U.S. media? Who benefitted from the assassination? Were intelligence agencies claiming to know more than they could legitimately know? Was there evidence of foreknowledge of the murder? What was the main ideological clash in powerful U.S. circles and how did Kennedy fit in? Was there a faction that had the capacity and willingness to carry out such an act? And so on. But beneath the questions lay a central, unspoken fact: Castro was able to imagine—as a real possibility and not as mere fantasy—that the story being promoted by the U.S. government and media was radically false. He was able to conceive of the possibility that the killing had not been carried out by a lone gunman on the left sympathetic to Cuba and the Soviet Union, but by powerful, ultra-right forces, including forces internal to the state, in the United States. Because his conceptual framework did not exclude this hypothesis he was able to examine the evidence that favored it. He was able to recognize the links between those wishing to overthrow the Cuban government and take more aggressive action toward the Soviet Union and those wishing to get Kennedy out of the way.

In the immediate wake of the assassination, and after the Warren Commission's report appeared in 1964, few among the elite left leadership in the U.S. shared Castro's imagination. Vincent Salandria, one of key researchers and dissidents, said: "I have experienced from the beginning that the left was most unreceptive to my conception of the assassination."[2]

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad challenged the official narrative at the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2012.

I.F. Stone, a pillar of the American left leadership, praised the Warren Commission and consigned critics who accused the Commission of a cover-up to "the booby hatch."[3] The contrast with Castro is sharp. Speaking well before the Warren Commission's emergence, Castro mocked the narrative it would later endorse. Several other prominent left intellectuals agreed with I. F. Stone, and declined to criticize the Warren Commission's report.[4]

Noam Chomsky, resisting serious efforts to get him to look at the evidence, said at various times that he knew little about the affair, had little interest in it, did not regard it as important, and found the idea of a "high-level conspiracy with policy significance" to be "implausible to a quite extraordinary degree."[5] He would later say almost exactly the same thing about the 9/11 attacks, finding the thesis that the U.S. administration was involved in the crime "close to inconceivable,"[6] and expressing his disinterest in the entire issue.

Not everyone on the American left accepted the FBI and Warren Commission reports uncritically. Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd, for example, encouraged dissident researchers.[7] In fact, several of the leading dissident investigators, such as Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, were themselves, at least by today's standards, on the left of the political spectrum. But they were not among the elite left leadership in the country and they were, to a great extent, unsupported by that leadership during the most crucial period. 

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With DNC Leaks, Former ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Is Now True––and No Big Deal

Adam Johnson
FAIR

For months, Bernie Sanders supporters and surrogates have complained about unfair treatment from the Democratic National Committee—only to have these concerns dismissed by media observers as petulance and conspiracy-mongering:

• Mediaite: Bernie Sanders Fans’ DNC ‘Collusion’ Conspiracy Theory Is Embarrassing Garbage
• LA Times: ‘Hillary Clinton Is Not Winning Because of a Conspiracy’
• Daily Kos: ‘There Was the General Conspiracy Theory That Everyone at the DNC Was Out to Get Him’

This weekend, Wikileaks revealed thousands of hacked emails from within the DNC that showed what the New York Times described as “hostility” and “derision” towards the Sanders campaign from top party officials.

While it’s impossible to know whether systemic pro-Hillary Clinton bias at the DNC was decisive in the 2016 Democratic primary race, we now know beyond any doubt that such a bias not only existed, but was endemic and widespread. DNC officials worked to plant pro-Clinton stories, floated the idea of using Sanders’ secular Judaism against him in the South, and  routinely ran PR spin for Clinton, even as the DNC claimed over and over it was neutral in the primary. The evidence in the leaks was so clear that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned her role as DNC chair—after her speaking role at the Democratic National Convention this week was scrapped—while DNC co-chair Donna Brazile, who is replacing Wasserman Schultz in the top role, has apologized to the Sanders camp.

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What is a Conspiracy Theory? What is the Truth?

Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research

Obama is on a hot war footing. Western civilization is allegedly “threatened by the Islamic State”.  

The “Global War on Terrorism” is  heralded as a humanitarian endeavor.

We have a “Responsibility to Protect”. Humanitarian warfare is the solution. 

Evil folks are lurking. ‘Take ‘em out”, said George W. Bush.

The Western media is beating the drums of war. Obama’s military agenda is supported by a vast propaganda apparatus. 

One of the main objectives of war propaganda is to “fabricate an enemy”. As the political legitimacy of the Obama Administration falters, doubts regarding the existence of this “outside enemy”, namely Al Qaeda and its network of (CIA sponsored) affiliates  must be dispelled.

The purpose is to tacitly instil, through repeated media reports, ad nauseam, within people’s inner consciousness, the notion that Muslims constitute a threat to the security of the Western World.  

Humanitarian warfare is waged on several fronts: Russia,  China and the Middle East are currently the main targets.

Xenophobia and the Military Agenda

The wave of xenophobia directed against Muslims which has swept across Western Europe is tied into geopolitics. It is part of a military agenda. It consists in demonizing the enemy.

Muslim countries possess more than 60 percent of total oil reserves.  In contrast, the United States of America has barely 2 percent of total oil reserves. Iraq has five times more oil than the United States. (See Michel Chossudovsky, The “Demonization” of Muslims and the Battle for Oil, Global Research, Jannuary 4, 2007).

A large share of the World’s oil lies in Muslim lands. The objective of the US led war is to steal and appropriate those oil reserves. And to achieve this objective, these countries  are targeted: war, covert ops, economic destabilization, regime change.

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What lies behind the anti "conspiracy theorist" discourse - The State Against The Republic

Comment: In the wake of the Paris Attacks this article by geopolitical analyst Thierry Meyssan is well worth revisiting.

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Thierry Meyssan

Voltairenet.org

 

At the request of President François Hollande, the French Socialist Party has published a note on the international “conspiracy theorist" movement. His goal: to prepare new legislation prohibiting it to express itself. In the US, the September 11, 2001 coup established a "permanent state of emergency" (Patriot Act), launching a series of imperial wars. Gradually, the European elites have aligned with their counterparts across the Atlantic. Everywhere, people are worried about being abandoned by their States and they question their institutions. Seeking to retain power, the elites are now ready to use force to gag their opposition.

The President of the French Republic, François Hollande, has assimilated what he calls "conspiracy theories" to Nazism and called to prevent their dissemination on the Internet and social networks.

Thus he declared, on January 27, 2015 at the Shoah Memorial:

"[Anti-Semitism] maintains conspiracy theories that spread without limits. Conspiracy theories that have, in the past, led to the worst "(...)" [The] answer is to realize that conspiracy theories are disseminated through the Internet and social networks. Moreover, we must remember that it is words that have in the past prepared extermination. We need to act at the European level, and even internationally, so that a legal framework can be defined, and so that Internet platforms that manage social networks are held to account and that sanctions be imposed for failure to enforce" [1].

Several ministers also decried what they called conspiracy theorists as so many "fermenters of hate and disintegrators of society."

Knowing that President Hollande calls "conspiracy theory" the idea that States, whatever their regimes - including democracies - have a spontaneous tendency to act in their own interests and not in that of their constituents, we can conclude that he presented this confused amalgam to justify a possible censure of his opponents.

This interpretation is confirmed by the publication of a note entitled "Conspiracy theories, current status" by the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a Socialist Party think tank of which Mr. Holland was the first secretary. [2]

Let’s leave aside the political relations of François Hollande, the Socialist Party, the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, its political radicalism Observatory and the author of the note and let’s focus on its message and its ideological content.

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U.S. support of terrorists like al-Nusra is no conspiracy theory

Robert Fisk
The Independent

No apologies for returning today to the strange case of the "moderate" Jabhat al-Nusra rebels, the throat-cutters and executioners who are playing the anti-Isis card to woo the US.

Their leader, you may recall, told Qatar's Al Jazeera channel that his al-Qaeda affiliated warriors will oppose both Isis and Bashar al-Assad - and even protect Syria's Christian and Alawite minorities. The usual American nomenklatura are telling the world this is tosh. It's the "conspiracy theorists" who are to blame, they say, for suggesting that the US might send barrel-loads of new weapons to such men. No. The US would never deal with those who are on its infamous, though pointless, "terrorist list". Besides, Qatar would never promote these killers as moderates - would they?

Well, first, let's take another look at all these conspiracy theorists. By chance, that inestimable French journal Le Monde Diplomatique this month carries a wodge of articles under the title "Did you say conspiracy?", painfully dissecting how many false-flag stories turned out to be true. There's the Mukden incident, for example, a 1931 Chinese attack on imperial Japan which turned out to be a Japanese attack on China and led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Rape of Nanking, et al.

Then there's the 1933 burning of the Reichstag which might have been started by the Nazis rather than the communists; the successful - and real - CIA-MI5 plot to overthrow Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, in which bombs were supposedly planted by (yet again) communists; Israel's 1954 "Operation Susannah" in which Israeli-organised attacks on UK and US buildings in Cairo were blamed on Egyptian nationalists; and the 1964 Tonkin incident, when America reported totally imaginary North Vietnamese attacks on a US warship, which led to the very real launching of the Vietnam War. Interestingly, Latin America provides even more proof of real US plots: Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Cuba, you name it.

The French monthly also carries a very fair critique of those who believe George W and his chums engineered the 9/11 attacks - as if a US president who screwed up everything he ever did in the Middle East was capable of bringing down the World Trade Centre - and of the Arab world's obsession with Western conspiracies that allow dictators and nations to duck their own responsibility for terrible events.

Thus, the lie that a female Israeli official had sex with Arab leaders to blackmail them into supporting pro-Israeli policies; the perpetrator of this nonsense, the Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm, later apologised - but, courtesy of the internet, the lie is still repeated.

Western powers, Arabs are told, conspired to create the 2011 Middle East revolutions to produce instability and civil war in the Arab world. The Americans planned the insurgency against Assad and the coup against Mubarak - the former to rid Israel of its most powerful neighbour, the latter intended to bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power and "diminish the greatness of Egypt". Egyptian activists protesting the brutality of the coup's winners - the army - are accused of taking money from Western intelligence agencies to further their cause. Even Brigadier-General-President al-Sisi believes this stuff. Algerians still claim that the French Deuxième Bureau (an institution that ceased to exist in 1940) is today the puppeteer behind all Algerian political movements.

So I join, I think, the average reader of The Independent in responding to this tomfoolery with a great English expression: what a load of old cobblers! But wait.

When I was in Syria a few days ago, I heard several times that the Iranians, who have lost their own men defending the Assad regime, are stingy when it comes to economic assistance. One source in Damascus told me that they demand guarantees of real estate on any expenditure for the Syrian military. I don't know if this is true, but just take a look at the latest estimates of the extremely undistinguished UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura who now announces that Iran spends, as much as £4bn a year on the Syrian regime - excluding, by the way, the cost of Iranian military personnel, the Hezbollah and Iraqi Shias fighting for Syria - a figure only outdone by a gentleman at the "US Institute of Peace" who puts the amount close to £13bn.

And all this money supposedly comes from a country whose economy has been broken by sanctions? It doesn't take a pea-brain to work out that if Iran still intends to manufacture nuclear weapons - the Israeli line - and has so much money to splurge on its allies, then it remains a far greater threat to Israel and Sunni states than al-Nusra or Isis or any other crackpot Islamists in the region. And thus the Qataris are today officially joining the campaign to "clean" the al-Qaeda killers of al-Nusra. A conspiracy theory, of course.

Think again. Read the words of the Qatari Foreign Minister, Khaled al-Attiyah, in an interview with Le Monde last month. "We are clearly against all extremism," he stated, "but, apart from Daesh [Isis], all [sic] these groups are fighting to overthrow the [Assad] regime. The moderates cannot say to the Nusra Front ... 'We won't work with you'. You have to look at the situation and be realistic."

In other words, al-Nusra's sole aim is to destroy the Assad regime and, ergo, it is on the same side as the "moderates" and worthy of the same military assistance. If the "moderates" can't say to al-Nusra, "We won't work with you", then how could the US?

Intelligence reports to the French government have been recording US air strikes against Isis that have avoided endangering positions held by al-Nusra. When Isis arrived in its thousands to assault Palmyra last month - for the most part, in broad daylight - not one US plane appeared in Syrian skies. And all this when US pilots have been returning from almost 75 per cent of their missions against Isis with bombs still on board because they couldn't find targets.

You don't have to be a reporter, let alone a conspiracy theorist, to see the warning lights around the "war on terror" story in Syria. Because some of the terrorists are soon going to be our terrorists - as long as they fight the even more horrible terrorists and the Assad terrorists at the same time. All they need is more cash and more weapons. And I bet you they'll get them, courtesy of the ol' US of A. Just don't mention the word conspiracy.

France Moves to Make ‘Conspiracy Theories’ Illegal by Government Decree

21st Century Wire

Political elites and super-bureaucrats are worried. It's becoming harder to control consensus reality.

A history stitched together by lies and cover-ups, political assassinations, slight-of-hand false flag deceptions, secret societies, dual loyalties and stolen fortunes - this have been the privilege of ruling elites for centuries.

Putting aside history's 'big ticket' items though, the real reason for this authoritarian trend is much more fundamental. By knocking out their intellectual competition, political elites and their media moguls hope to minimalize, and thus eliminate any alternative analysis and opinion by applying the completely open-ended and arbitrary label of "extremist" to speech. They want to wind back the clock, where a pre-internet, monolithic corporate media cartel held a monopoly on ideas.

Although France has taken the lead in this inter-governmental effort (see below), the preliminary assault began this past fall with British Prime Minster David Cameron publicly announcing on two separate occasions, that all of these so-called 'conspiracy theories' (anything which challenges the official orthodoxy) should be deemed as "extremist" and equivalent to "terrorist" and should be purged from society on the grounds of 'national security'. The first came with Cameron's warped speech at the UN, and afterwards, a similar charge was made by the UK leader against anyone who dares press the issue of institutional paedophilia and child abuse.  

Read more

In 1967, the CIA Created the Label "Conspiracy Theorists" ... to Attack Anyone Who Challenges the "Official" Narrative

washingtonsblog.com/ 

 

Conspiracy Theorists USED TO Be Accepted As Normal

 

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

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

The CIA Coined the Term Conspiracy Theorist In 1967

 

That all changed in the 1960s.

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

The dispatch was produced in responses to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times in 1976.

The dispatch states:

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization.

***

The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the [conspiracy] question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors) , pointing out that the [official investigation of the relevant event] made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by …  propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories.

***

4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:

a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider.

***

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent–and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) …

***

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc.

***

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other.

***

f. As to charges that the Commission’s report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.

g. Such vague accusations as that “more than ten people have died mysteriously” can always be explained in some natural way ….

5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission’s Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

Here are screenshots of part of the memo:

 

Summarizing the tactics which the CIA dispatch recommended:

• Claim that it would be impossible for so many people would keep quiet about such a big conspiracy

• Have people friendly to the CIA attack the claims, and point back to “official” reports

• Claim that eyewitness testimony is unreliable

• Claim that this is all old news, as “no significant new evidence has emerged”

• Ignore conspiracy claims unless discussion about them is already too active

• Claim that it’s irresponsible to speculate

• Accuse theorists of being wedded to and infatuated with their theories

• Accuse theorists of being politically motivated

• Accuse theorists of having financial interests in promoting conspiracy theories

In other words, the CIA’s clandestine services unit created the arguments for attacking conspiracy theories as unreliable in the 1960s as part of its psychological warfare operations.

But Aren’t Conspiracy Theories – In Fact – Nuts?

 

Forget Western history and CIA dispatches … aren’t conspiracy theorists nutty?
In fact, conspiracies are so common that judges are trained to look at conspiracy allegations as just another legal claim to be disproven or proven based on the specific evidence:

Federal and all 50 state’s codes include specific statutes addressing conspiracy, and providing the punishment for people who commit conspiracies.

But let’s examine what the people trained to weigh evidence and reach conclusions think about “conspiracies”. Let’s look at what American judges think.

Searching Westlaw, one of the 2 primary legal research networks which attorneys and judges use to research the law, I searched for court decisions including the word “Conspiracy”. This is such a common term in lawsuits that it overwhelmed Westlaw.

Specifically, I got the following message:

“Your query has been intercepted because it may retrieve a large number of documents.”

From experience, I know that this means that there were potentially millions or many hundreds of thousands of cases which use the term. There were so many cases, that Westlaw could not even start processing the request.

So I searched again, using the phrase “Guilty of Conspiracy”. I hoped that this would not only narrow my search sufficiently that Westlaw could handle it, but would give me cases where the judge actually found the defendant guilty of a conspiracy. This pulled up exactly 10,000 cases — which is the maximum number of results which Westlaw can give at one time. In other words, there were more than 10,000 cases using the phrase “Guilty of Conspiracy” (maybe there’s a way to change my settings to get more than 10,000 results, but I haven’t found it yet).

Moreover, as any attorney can confirm, usually only appeal court decisions are published in the Westlaw database. In other words, trial court decisions are rarely published; the only decisions normally published are those of the courts which hear appeals of the trial. Because only a very small fraction of the cases which go to trial are appealed, this logically means that the number of guilty verdicts in conspiracy cases at trial must be much, much larger than 10,000.

Moreover, “Guilty of Conspiracy” is only one of many possible search phrases to use to find cases where the defendant was found guilty of a lawsuit for conspiracy. Searching on Google, I got 3,170,000 results (as of yesterday) under the term “Guilty of Conspiracy”, 669,000 results for the search term “Convictions for Conspiracy”, and 743,000 results for “Convicted for Conspiracy”.

Of course, many types of conspiracies are called other things altogether. For example, a long-accepted legal doctrine makes it illegal for two or more companies to conspire to fix prices, which is called “Price Fixing” (1,180,000 results).

Given the above, I would extrapolate that there have been hundreds of thousands of convictions for criminal or civil conspiracy in the United States.

Finally, many crimes go unreported or unsolved, and the perpetrators are never caught. Therefore, the actual number of conspiracies committed in the U.S. must be even higher.

In other words, conspiracies are committed all the time in the U.S., and many of the conspirators are caught and found guilty by American courts. Remember, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was a conspiracy theory.

Indeed, conspiracy is a very well-recognized crime in American law, taught to every first-year law school student as part of their basic curriculum. Telling a judge that someone has a “conspiracy theory” would be like telling him that someone is claiming that he trespassed on their property, or committed assault, or stole his car. It is a fundamental legal concept.

Obviously, many conspiracy allegations are false (if you see a judge at a dinner party, ask him to tell you some of the crazy conspiracy allegations which were made in his court). Obviously, people will either win or lose in court depending on whether or not they can prove their claim with the available evidence. But not all allegations of trespass, assault, or theft are true, either.

Proving a claim of conspiracy is no different from proving any other legal claim, and the mere label “conspiracy” is taken no less seriously by judges.

It’s not only Madoff. The heads of Enron were found guilty of conspiracy, as was the head of Adelphia. Numerous lower-level government officials have been found guilty of conspiracy. 

See this, this, this, this and this.

Time Magazine’s financial columnist Justin Fox writes:

Some financial market conspiracies are real …

Most good investigative reporters are conspiracy theorists, by the way.

And what about the NSA and the tech companies that have cooperated with them?

But Our Leaders Wouldn’t Do That

 

While people might admit that corporate executives and low-level government officials might have engaged in conspiracies – they may be strongly opposed to considering that the wealthiest or most powerful might possibly have done so.

But powerful insiders have long admitted to conspiracies. For example, Obama’s Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, wrote:

Of course some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true. The Watergate hotel room used by Democratic National Committee was, in fact, bugged by Republican officials, operating at the behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency did, in fact, administer LSD and related drugs under Project MKULTRA, in an effort to investigate the possibility of “mind control.” Operation Northwoods, a rumored plan by the Department of Defense to simulate acts of terrorism and to blame them on Cuba, really was proposed by high-level officials ….

But Someone Would Have Spilled the Beans

 

A common defense to people trying sidetrack investigations into potential conspiracies is to say that “someone would have spilled the beans” if there were really a conspiracy.
But famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg explains:

It is a commonplace that “you can’t keep secrets in Washington” or “in a democracy, no matter how sensitive the secret, you’re likely to read it the next day in the New York Times.” These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn’t in a fully totalitarian society. But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.

History proves Ellsberg right. For example:

• One hundred and thirty thousand (130,000) people from the U.S., UK and Canada worked on the Manhattan Project. But it was kept secret for years

• A BBC documentary shows that:

There was “a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen . . . . The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression”

Moreover, “the tycoons told General Butler the American people would accept the new government because they controlled all the newspapers.” Have you ever heard of this conspiracy before? It was certainly a very large one. And if the conspirators controlled the newspapers then, how much worse is it today with media consolidation?

• 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980′s during the “Latin American Crisis”, and the government’s response was to cover up their insolvency. That’s a cover up lasting several decades

• Banks have been involved in systematic criminal behavior, and have manipulated every single market

• Governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for fifty years to protect the nuclear industry. Governments have colluded to cover up the severity of numerous other environmental accidents. For many years, Texas officials intentionally under-reported the amount of radiation in drinking water to avoid having to report violations

• The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this.) But the public didn’t learn about it until many years later. Indeed, the the New York Times delayed the story so that it would not affect the outcome of the 2004 presidential election

• The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office. Dick Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11. And it has now been shown that a handful of people were responsible for willfully ignoring the evidence that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction. These facts have only been publicly disclosed recently. Indeed, Tom Brokaw said, “All wars are based on propaganda.” A concerted effort to produce propaganda is a conspiracy

Moreover, high-level government officials and insiders have admitted to dramatic conspiracies after the fact, including:

• Supporting terrorists to promote geopolitical goals

• Supporting false flag terror

The admissions did not occur until many decades after the events.

These examples show that it is possible to keep conspiracies secret for a long time, without anyone “spilling the beans”.

In addition, to anyone who knows how covert military operations work, it is obvious that segmentation on a “need-to-know basis”, along with deference to command hierarchy, means that a couple of top dogs can call the shots and most people helping won’t even know the big picture at the time they are participating.

Moreover, those who think that co-conspirators will brag about their deeds forget that people in the military or intelligence or who have huge sums of money on the line can be very disciplined. They are not likely to go to the bar and spill the beans like a down-on-their-luck, second-rate alcoholic robber might do.

Finally, people who carry out covert operations may do so for ideological reasons — believing that the “ends justify the means”. Never underestimate the conviction of an ideologue.

Conclusion

 

The bottom line is that some conspiracy claims are nutty and some are true. Each has to be judged on its own facts.

Humans have a tendency to try to explain random events through seeing patterns … that’s how our brains our wired. Therefore, we have to test our theories of connection and causality against the cold, hard facts.

On the other hand, the old saying by Lord Acton is true:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

Those who operate without checks and balances – and without the disinfectant sunlight of public scrutiny and accountability – tend to act in their own best interests … and the little guy gets hurt.

The early Greeks knew it, as did those who forced the king to sign the Magna Carta, the Founding Fathers and the father of modern economics. We should remember this important tradition of Western civilization.

Postscript: The ridicule of all conspiracy theories is really just an attempt to diffuse criticism of the powerful.

The wealthy are not worse than other people … but they are not necessarily better either. Powerful leaders may not be bad people … or they could be sociopaths.
We must judge each by his or her actions, and not by preconceived stereotypes that they are all saints acting in our best interest or all scheming criminals.
And see ...

The Troll’s Guide to Internet Disruption