Conspiracy Theory/Conspiracy Fact IV - The Final Cut

to the tune of When the Saints Go Marching In

From my recent discussion of the film Chinatown:

One of the problems we encounter when talking about conspiracies is that they are, by definition, carried out in secret and in most cases all we can really catch is the shadows they cast or worse, their penumbras. We generally only get a few tantalizing factoids we can attempt to string together to form a loose narrative. One that can easily be brushed off as coincidence or, as the CIA calls them, “conspiracy theories”. As if theory never bears anything more than a tenuous relation to fact.

Most of us are unaware of the sophisticated techniques used to successfully engage in and coverup a vast conspiracy. I myself am no expert on the subject but I have enough knowledge to lay out the fundamental principles and techniques that are utilized. The sophistication of a conspiracy complex — and thinking of it as a complex may be helpful here — engages psychological manipulation and confusion in fascinating ways — some of which I will try to elucidate here.

Edward Snowden has written a substack post discussing a taxonomy of conspiracy which is well worth reading and provides links to other analyses of taxonomy. He also points out something very important which is that most conspiracies happen out in the open as banal events: the passage of a law that is promoted as “banking reform” that allows certain banks to engage in corrupt practices under cover of reform. The Dodd-Frank Act was one such massive law passed under the rubric of reform while enabling the banksters who caused the crash to continue their dangerous derivatives trading practices. I won’t get into those details here but that was a classic example of a banal, public conspiracy. Even the behind-the-scenes discussions we know about have a way of sounding anodyne and public-minded. The disenguous nature of these ways of thinking and speaking come naturally to many who attain great power. The sad truth is Dulles and his cabal likely “believed” they were operating for the good of the republic when they killed JFK. True patriots to the end.

However, for all these discussions, they don’t delve into the actual mechanics of how large, public conspiracies like the JFK and RFK assassinations, or the 9/11 multi-layered (conspiracy-layered-within-real-event-within-conspiracy) are effectively carried out. Herein I will try to layout some of the basic techniques and psychological insights that are utilized in these grand conspiracies.

The complex that forms a conspiracy’s execution, as distinct from the coverup mechanics, are: compartmentalization, hierachical spheres of knowledge and institutional cover. Most people dismiss these kinds of conspiracies because they think if "the government" commits a conspiracy it means the entire government is in on it. The prerogatives of power, which few of us are really familiar with, allow for a nudge here, a well placed “engineer” or “editor” there, to shape and conform narratives and actions.

A good definition of compartmentalization is:

The process of separating a large system into smaller, independent parts, or compartments. This is done to limit the amount of information a single part of the system has access to and reduce the potential for unauthorized access and data leakage.

Each compartment in a conspiracy knows only and exactly what they need to know in order to carry out their orders. And remember these are normally employees or contractors who get paid to perform the acts they are assigned. Asking questions, it is understood, is healthy only insofar as the question pertains to the actual carrying out of the task and no further. The clever actor — the one who understands hierarchy and their place within it — in such a scheme does not want to know anything more than they require. Fear of knowledge is a psychological reality of working within secret bureaucracies and societies.

In other cases the actors are identified and psychologically massaged and manipulated into performing an action based on some triggering event. They are identified via their psychological profile which includes instability, weakeness of mind and consistent failure or lack of attainment in life. It’s quite likely Jack Ruby was genuinely enraged at the assassination of Kennedy and killed Oswald in revenge. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t ordered or encourged to do it by his mafia masters… and whoever it was they were working with. Depending on the task at hand the most effective agent or actor in a conspiracy is sometimes the weak-minded true-believer.

Hierachical spheres of knowledge is a related concept to compartmentalization and is possibly the most ancient technique of conspiracy management and execution. The Freemasons are a secret society that used (uses?) this technique and they base it on far more ancient¹ systems of knowledge going back to the Oracle at Delphi and perhaps even further. It’s no mistake that J. Edgar Hoover was a 33rd degree Mason. The 33rd is the highest level and suggests there are 33 degrees, or spheres. Each lower degree is told a story, or narrative, that will best motivate them toward the acts they are required to perform. This runs alongside of compartmentalization but contains stronger narrative manipulation since the actors or agents involved at this level are micro-conspirators themselves and require a stronger narrative to weave and pull the strings of those they instruct.

Institutional cover is used both during the execution of conspiracies and in the coverup. Head-boys like Alan Dulles and James Jesus Angleton had sprawling apparatuses they perched atop where they could execute all sorts of threads of conspiracy without anyone thinking they were doing anything other than their regular dayjobs.

These three are the primary and necessary structures required to carry out ambitious conspiracies and they were all readily available and known to the prime-movers in the conspiracies I discuss.

---

Now I’d like to discuss the psychological principles and general techniques that underly the coverups of these massive conspiracies. As a jumping off point, I’m quoting from a response to a comment of mine regarding the 9/11 conspiracy. I am leaving it unattributed since I don’t want to unmask the writer without his or her permission:

My point is the “cover” narratives they propagate are so absurd in that they ask us to disbelieve literally what we see with our own eyes

Just look at the twin towers imploding

It’s text book engineered controlled demolition

JFK murdered in broad daylight

His “alleged” assassin is picked up in minutes and murdered on TV two days later

Then a commission of “wisemen” produce an explanation requiring one to believe one “magic” bullet defies every know law of physics going through multiple bones in multiple directions and “falls” onto a cot in pristine condition

It’s like the proverbial story of a man being confronted with a naked woman next to him in bed asking his wife: “who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?

There’s no woman in this bed with me!”

That’s how preposterous the “cover” narratives are

I republish this excerpt because it raises many of the questions and confusions behind seemingly preposterous elements of these coverups. And to be clear, I’m not saying the perpetrators of these anti-democratic acts of bestial violence are all-knowing svengalis that can do all this in broad daylight and simply “get away with it”.

To the contrary, many of the most preposterous and bizarre aspects of these coverups exist because they were not able to doctor the evidence sufficiently. The “magic bullet theory” is a case in point. The cabal that killed JFK were able to, at the time, conceal the accurate autopsy report (that showed he was shot in the front of his head) and substitute their own. They also flipped specific images in the Zapruder film to make the front head shot look ambiguous as to where it came from. You can see the original today on youtube. What they could not do was doctor the ballistics evidence inside the limo carrying Kennedy. Thus they doctor the evidence after the fact as best they can, and yes, it is ridiculous.

And so was the fact that all three towers that came crashing down on 9/11 fell almost completely within their own footprints. This will only happen by controlled demolition. It’s impossible otherwise. Demolitions experts — the guys who bring down buildings in their own footprints for a living — have stated this many times since 9/11.

So why were the towers collapsed in this way? First off, most people don’t know the above so we have to rely on experts to tell us and there are always competing narratives that can be fudged in this regard. NIST, the National Institution for Standards and Technology, specifically limited their analysis of the collapses in order to justify what happened without saying it was controlled demolition. Why did they do this? Once again, questions of institutional cover, funding, and job-security all come into play. If NIST engineers, like “climate scientists”, start going against the prevailing narratives they can lose their funding and careers. Perhaps more importantly, they want to believe it could have actually happened without nefarious intent. Why? What does it say about the “free democracy” we live under if we go down that other path?

Secondly, if the towers had fallen sideways much of the Wall Street area would have been demolished and there are powerful real estate interests that would have started asking questions which Larry Silverstein (owner of the lease on the towers and one of the conspirators in the 9/11 attacks) might have encountered some difficulty explaining. After all, why did the towers even fall in the first place given fires have never before taken down a steel tower. They are specifically designed to avoid just this eventuality. A B-25 bomber flew directly into the Empire State Building in 1945 and “[d]espite the damage and deaths, the building was open for business on many floors on the next Monday morning, less than 48 hours later.” How strange.

On 9/11/23 twitter was alight with many of these questions and Ryan Grim, in true weasel fashion, was right there to concern troll by avoiding all the damning evidence and focus solely on what possible reason there could have been to intentionally collapse building 7. Well, there was a lot of gold stored under building seven. How much we will never know but we do know there were attempts to remove some of it on that very day. Not to mention Silverstein had plans to build a new structure on that lot a year before 9/11. I’ve been to the buildings they constructed where tower 7 stood. It’s a huge new complex with office towers, a mall and massive underground complexes. Nice money if you can get it. Was all the gold really there on 9/11 or was much of it removed prior to the collapse?² Silverstein made massive bank on the collapse thanks to the huge terror insurance policies he had taken out on the buildings just months prior to the attacks. He made money coming and going as they say. Just like the fraudsters that caused the financial collapse in 2008. Fantastic luck!

There are many more ridiculous curiosities surrounding these events that are better explored elsewhere but one thing I want to use to illustrate how these odd stories function (aside from the simple clumsiness and complexity of covering up such grandiose schemes) is the infamous woman in the polkadot dress who was present when RFK was assassinated. She and an accomplice were seen and heard running out of the building after RFK was shot yelling “we did it! We killed Kennedy!” They were both found dead two days later.

So why a polkadot dress? Why so conspicuous? There is a theory that she was the “trigger” for Sirhan Sirhan to start firing and the dress needed to be conspicous for his drug-addled, hypnotized mind to even see it. That could be true. But I wish to focus on the concept of spectacle here. Psychological spectacle and misdirection.

Getting away with conspiracies like the JFK and RFK assassinations are mind-bogglingly complex. RFK was simpler because he wasn’t the president at the time of his assassination, but the concept of spectacle is relevant to both. At the core of the fabricated narratives surrounding all these events is a very simple story. The more misdirection and confusion of the spectacle surrounding this simple story, the more people shrug and resign themselves to the simple story. But there’s a deeper psychological response at play.

Oswald, a “lone-gunman”, killed Kennedy because Oswald was a misbegotten loser and a “Marxist”. Sirhan-Sirhan, a lone gunman and another sad loser, killed RFK for his support of Israel. 9/11 was executed by crazy jihadis from the other side of the world who hate America. Simple stories that play on natural xenophobia (all three were either foreign or “communist”) and are easy to understand and absorb. But surrounding those simple stories are an impossible to grasp series of preposterous events and coincidences. When danger threatens there is a powerful human psychological tendency to maintain focus on the simple and tangible. It’s an instinctual survival mechanism that works in most cases. This survival instinct can be hijacked, misdirected, and in all these cases it very much was. The more outrageous and strange everything surrounding the simple idea becomes — the more spectacle there is — the stronger is the impulse to toss it all away and hold onto the only seemingly solid idea we have. We’ve all felt it when these kinds of experiences present. I know I have. And after all, it’s the authorities that are telling you that simple story. Authority is comforting as well. If you’ve ever been the victim of a violent crime you will know that when the police or a hero/protector arrives you want to throw your arms around them and cry into their shoulder.

The hall of mirrors — where the evidence leads to all sorts of cul de sacs and ridiculous narratives that loop back on themselves cause increasing levels of confusion and cognitive dissonance. So paraodoxically, the more ridiculous the spectacle, the more energy is directed to the simple narrative. The ridiculous stories serve to underpin the fundamental story that is always very simple: a "lone-gunman" must've done it. And all of these — the strange woman with the polka-dot dress, the magic-bullet theory, Ruby killing Oswald two days after, the towers’ dramatic collapse — help turn everything into a clown show -- a spectacle. A spectacle that counter-intuitively delivers us into the arms of the central story. Misdirection is the first trick of the magician. Angleton was a genius of sorts — a magician — and this was his milieu. He had many reasons for engaging in the assassination conspiracies which you can read elsewhere. Ron Unz, who I linked to in other parts of this series, examines many of them. As does Laurent Guyenot, who has some great videos on youtube and also publishes at Unz’s site.

---

Finally we come to institutional cover as it functions in the coverup. After all, it is not just the public that needs to be manipulated. The functionaries within the suspect institutions themselves must also be convinced of the simple narrative and they know a lot of the tricks already because they often use them in their own work.

There are many levels to this kind of deception. For those involved in the conspiracy, and depending on how far from the epicenter they are, they could be easily led to believe the core story of the “lone-gunman” was true while still maintaining cognizance of their pre-assigned tangential fairy tales. An “engineer” that no one can identify appeared at ground zero on 9/11 to tell everyone he could that building 7 was going to colapse 2-5 hours before it happened. Did this “engineer” know much more than that he was supposed to talk to as many firefighters and reporters as he could to spread this information? Probably not. He was sent to do a singular job and he did it. He had every reason to believe he was just there to protect people and many reasons not to ask why someone sent him there and why they knew this fact.

Institutional players outside of the conspiracy provide cover for the actual perps within unknowingly -- from an instinct for institutional preservation and national security. In the case of Oswald they had two stories fed to them:

• Oswald was a communist infiltrator who perpetrated this as an act of war against the United States

• Oswald was a CIA asset and this might cast aspersions on the agency if this fact were discovered even though the CIA is obviously innocent

In the first case, the threat of nuclear war might terrify agency insiders into going along with the lone-gunman story to avoid such an unimaginable calamity. In the latter, accusations of institutional involvement further strengthen the institutional-protective impulse.

This is all very dark stuff indeed. We know that, beginning in the early 1950’s, the CIA engaged in massive psychological research and experimentation operations — much of it under the MKUltra program — to study the effects of stress and mental breakdown on human beings and how to “brainwash” and manipulate human reactions to various kinds of stressor incidents. They dosed countless subjects, unknowingly, with LSD to examine and prod them in their weakened states. They practiced hypnosis techniques and learned how to profile for mental weakness and pliability. They began to understand the ways we handle trauma, testing and retesting hypotheses and techniques for more than a decade prior to the JFK assassination, and continuing long after. There is a question whether they ever stopped.

---

In the end what are we hoi polloi to do? They have the power, they have the institutional prerogatives, so even if we know about all the lies there is shit little we can do about it. Or isn’t there? I believe that we are on the cusp of a new awakening. The fierce reactions we are seeing today — the instant labeling of anything outside “the narrative” as conspiracy theory — are signs of weakness, not strength. When Tucker Carlson did a long piece on the JFK assassination last year it broke a spell cast over tens of millions of right-wing Americans — the same people who in the past would have been most loathe to admit such a thing is possible because they are were the greatest believers in hierarchy and authority. Many liberals pretends to believe all the bullshit being flung about these days but they can be weak-minded and inherently lacking in solid cultural foundations so if we dug into their already pliable minds a bit more enough of them might just crack open wide.

I recently watched an old Firing Line episode with William F. Buckley where he bumped up against these kinds of questions and the pained look on his face was readily apparent. He said something like “if these things are true what does it say about our republic?” I think we are finally at a point where we can actually reach the end zone on all these questions so that the American people finally wake up and demand truth and some form of accountability and reconciliation. The authoritarian rulers of contemporary America are weak and dying. Now is the time to force the issue.

When the Saints Go Marching In

or if you prefer a more traditional rendering:

When the Saints Go Marching In

1. I am not suggesting the lineage of the Freemasons goes back to ancient times. It is well established that the Masons were an 18th century invention whose members worked feverishly, and often comically, to establish linkages going back to Alexander the Great and further to the time of Plato and the early Greek city-states.

2. This actually points out an even larger oddity which is that we don’t really know how much of the gold under the New York Federal Reserve building on Liberty Street is really there. Germany has been trying to repatriate their large gold stores from that location for over a decade and they can’t seem to get it back. How odd. One theory holds that much of the gold in the Fed building has been loaned out and rehypothecated so many times no one can actually identify who owns what anymore. If you’re ever thinking of buying gold only do so with physical delivery. You’ve been warned.