I am not prone to hyperbole, and I don't get pissed off easily, but the Daily Beast has driven me to indulge both of these today. They ran an article by Matt Lewis, ostensibly a journalist, entitled "Meet the Woman Who Was the Nixon Era's Alex Jones."

This is one of the most staggeringly inane articles I have ever had the displeasure to read, and certainly one of the worst caricatures of journalistic integrity to ever appear in a semi-legitimate publication. The subject of the piece is Mae Brussell, and as you can see from the title he compares her to Alex Jones.

This is already an insult, but Matt's just getting started.

Now Mae Brussell is a legendary figure in the counter-culture and in conspiracy circles, and her work is meticulous, complex, and possessed of an insight into both historical veracity and human nature. She sometimes gets labeled as a "conspiracy queen," but this term is mostly used to demean her, as is the frequent observation that she was a housewife. As if there is anything inherently wrong with that.

Brussell's intelligence is on display on any of her radio shows or her articles (which found an audience in Paul Krassner's magazine The Realist. Krassner was so impressed with her that he helped put out her Conspiracy Newsletter.) Her intelligence - and singular power of analysis - is readily apparent, whether or not one agrees with her assessments. Although, frankly, if you're disagreeing with her assessments you are probably wrong. For just one example, the Watergate burglars were arrested in June of 1972. Before Woodward and Bernstein started their series in the Washington Post, two weeks after it had happened, Brussell had written her article "Why Was Martha Mitchell Kidnapped?" in which she had figured out most of the structure involved. That article appeared in The Realist in August 1972.

Seriously, read the article. It's amazing. She has the players down cold. Instantly.

And do you know why that article is amazing? Because Mae had this habit of reading - a habit that Matt Lewis seems to be unacquainted with. She knew who the people were, and knew their backgrounds. Jesus Christ, she already mentions the slush fund tied to Richard Nixon. Woodstein, the intrepid pair, wouldn't get there for another year and needed Hal Holbrook in a parking garage to feed them breadcrumbs, if you believe that story.

The point is, what I am saying is that Matt Lewis comparing Mae Brussell to an assclown like Alex Jones is beyond the pale. Only someone who either (1) has an agenda or (2) is bereft of cognition could make the comparison. I used to live in Austin, and I'm a political activist, so I'd see Alex around at events. I saw him interact with his staff, and somewhere there may be tape of me refusing to be on his public access show. When we were in Dallas for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, John Judge was talking to a small group who had braved the ice storm to participate in the memorial. John's speech was interrupted by Alex, of course, blaring nonsense from his bullhorn and accompanied by his usual gang of idiots. 

To say that Mae and Jones are comparable because they were both "conspiracy theorists" is like saying Matt here is like Stephen Glass because they're both journalists. If you aren't able to draw distinctions as obvious as these, then you are in the wrong profession.

But it gets worse. Because next, he compares Mae Brussell to Father Coughlin. Father Coughlin may not be a familiar figure to many, but he was a believer in the "Jewish conspiracy," and promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - much like Henry Ford did, among many others in America both in the years leading up to World War II and, unfortunately, now.

Equating these two people is…the word I want to use is "demonic," and I am not religious.

Perhaps that's an overstatement; I don't have a good word for this comparison. Trumpian. 

Mae Brussell was the most anti-fascist personality that one could possibly imagine. She spent her life's work rooting out Nazi influences on the American government and found a great many. Her work was continued to a large degree by John Judge and also Alex Constantine, continuing the research into the fascist operatives lurking in sheep's clothing of a democratic republic.

Saying Mae Brussell is like Father Coughlin is like saying Matt Lewis is Joseph Goebbels. So hence my hyperbole. By the way, Mae Brussell was Jewish. So yeah, you just did that.

Matt writes:

Likewise, the iconoclastic Brussell defied ideological labels, though she was probably more left-wing than right-wing. Crazy knows no bounds.

He's writing this about a woman who is deceased and can neither respond nor sue.

Fuck you, Matt. And fuck the Daily Beast for allowing this insane article to be published. If this idiot had read one sentence about Mae Brussell, he would not have been able to write that she was "probably more left-wing…" It's unbelievable. Except unfortunately it isn't, because welcome to our America, I guess.

If you would to read some of Mae Brussell's work, or listen to her shows, I can suggest the following websites:

Worldwatchers.info (the best Brussell site of them all, built by my late friend Rob Falotico)

Ratical.org (run by Dave Ratcliffe)

You can also find some of her work collected in this book, published by Feral House and edited by Alex Constantine:

I strongly urge you to look at her material. I think you might come to realize that maybe Mae has a point. Considering who the President is and what the hell's going on in this country, I would suggest that perhaps she has a little more insight into our situation than Matt Lewis, who has failed to do his homework like a fucking child.

I don't expect much from the Daily Beast, but I do expect better than this.

 Here is what I know.  Wnat do you make of it?

        1.  Sibert and O’Neil, two FBI agents who attended the JFK autopsy, filed a report with the FBI that the bullet which impacted on Kennedy’s back never exited.  That tended to create a possible small problem for the Warren Report.

       2.  Robert A. Frazier, the FBI ballistics expert, testified before the Warren Commission that Commission Exhibit 399, because it had shed many fragments and weighed what a normal bullet would have weighed, could not have been the bullet which paved its way through Kennedy and Connally.  So, Frazier proved that the Warren Commission was dead wrong and that the law of the conservation of mass prevailed over my  friend Arlen Specter’s myth.  I dedicated one of my articles in “Liberation Magazine” to Mr. Frazier.

       3.  The FBI Report which was signed by J. Edgar Hoover, that was supposed to guide the Warren Commission, but which Report was not printed by the Commission and was found in the National Archives by me, confirmed that the bullet that hit Kennedy in the back never exited.  That Report never was amended and never got lost, unlike the transcript of the Pentagon’s radio report to Air Force One and the Cabinet Plane did announcing that Oswald had killed Kennedy, and that there was no conspiracy, a conclusion which was announced in the afternoon of 11/22/1963, before there was any evidence against Oswald.  Mr. Hoover’s Report was perhaps a bit damaging to the sole assassination myth. Don’t you agree?  (italics mine)

       4.  Henry Wade, the Dallas District Attorney at the time of the assassination, immediately leaked Oswald’s FBI number and pay.  There has not yet been an admission that Oswald, the fake Soviet defector, was CIA, nor do we know what his CIA number and pay was.

         5.  The biggest effort to destroy my credibility was undertaken by Lulu Belle Holmes, a/k/a Rita Rollins, a famous FBI agent. I concluded that she was trying to destroy my credibility by trying to get me to go to Canada on a search for the "real" Kennedy killers, promising $12,000.00 for my efforts,  and a "New York Times" interview. She returned to my home about six months after the effort to discredit me had failed.  In her later trip she offered to get me the proof that Hoover and LBJ had arranged for the killing of Kennedy.  I suggested that I had no interest in this proof and instead strongly suggested that she return to the real killers and to her real employers, the CIA.  

        6.  When I first asked for, under the Freedom of Information Act, my FBI and CIA files, I got the both of them.  The CIA reported truthfully that I attributed to them the killing of Kennedy.  The FBI reported that I had signed a petition against the rearming of West Germany. The FBI also made mention of my first article on the assassination published in the “Legal Intelligencer.”  Several years later, when I again sought those same files, the CIA had a file which imputed to me the same truth telling about that agency having executed President Kennedy. The FBI reported that I had no file.

       7.  The FBI was responsible for reporting Communist activities of certain School District of Philadelphia teachers, which resulted in their firing. The Monday following Kennedy’s assassination, I reported to my classes that the Kennedy killing had the earmarks of a CIA killing.  I continued to teach this to my high school students until my promotion to the District’s labor department in 1967. I litigated on behalf of the District all of the strikes.  The FBI never interfered with my career.  

        What do you make of the above?
 
​       Love,
        Vince

SHELDON RAMPTON: Actually, we've all witnessed conspiracies. Most crimes involve a conspiracy of some kind, so if you've ever watched episodes of NYPD Blue or Law & Order, you've witnessed dramatizations of conspiracies. For that matter, Iran/Contra was a real conspiracy by people like Oliver North and others within the Reagan administration to subvert the will of Congress by covertly selling weapons to Iran and funneling the money from those sales to the contras in Nicaragua. There was a left-leaning organization called the Christic Institute back in the 1980s that wove facts from Iran/Contra into an elaborate conspiracy theory that they claimed connected Iran/Contra to various covert actors involved in a wide range of prior criminal acts including the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, etc. People at the time (myself included) found the Christic Institute's claims credible because they fit the pattern of what we already believed about the Reagan administration and the contra war.
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The Bush administration sold the war in Iraq in part by promoting a false conspiracy theory connecting Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. I remember reading a news story at the time where someone interviewed a "man on the street" who supported the war. The interviewer asked if the man believed that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks. He replied, "Yes. It sort of fits the pattern of what I know about the guy." At around that same time, there were people on the left who believed that Bush was behind 9/11 somehow because it fit *their* pattern of what they believed about Bush. (ITALICS MINE)
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JOSEPH GREEN: ​I’ve noticed that many people are obsessed with anti-conspiracy thinking, to the point where they will overlook obvious evidence in favor of a reality that makes them feel better. They will dismiss details as “trivial,” when the details are in contrast to their deeply held anti-conspiratorial notions. Many people, for example, continue to hold the preposterous notion that Oswald killed JFK - or worse, that Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK - even when the slightest understanding of physics would deny their conclusions. They will go so far as to project mental illness on people who disagree with them, despite having no expertise in the subject beyond reading a few articles in their newspaper of choice. It’s troubling.

SHELDON RAMPTON: Joseph Green Actually, I *do* believe that Oswald killed JFK and Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK. I used to think otherwise about the JFK assassination, but I've changed my opinion, although I appreciate that reasonable people might think otherwise. However, it's obvious that *all* of the conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination cannot be true. Some people think Castro was behind it. Others think it's the CIA. Others think it's the Mafia. The Christic Institute, which I mentioned previously, wove the JFK assassination into its narrative about Iran/Contra. Even if you think one of those scenarios is what happened, you can't possibly believe that they're all true.

...I don't claim to know everything about how this works, but often when there is a traumatic event in the news you see conspiracy theories circulate about it. For example, conspiracy theories emerged following the mass shootings a few months ago in Las Vegas by Stephen Paddock. As is often the case, people circulated "unanswered questions" about the shooting, such as these:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-04/16-unanswered-questions-about-las-vegas-shooting-mainstream-media-doesnt-want-talk-a

I think events like this attract conspiracy theories because (1) they're dramatic; (2) information about events of this nature usually comes in pieces, and the early information is often fragmentary, incomplete and contradictory. People puzzle over those inconsistencies and try to fit them into the pattern of their expectations about the world. In the case of the Las Vegas shootings, I think a lot of the people who circulated conspiracy theories were opponents of gun control who wanted to believe that it was a "false flag" incident engineered to pass legislation that would enable the government to take away everyone's guns. Similar "false flag" theories have emerged after Sandy Hook and other mass shootings.

JOSEPH GREEN: Sheldon M Rampton, multiple theories exist for virtually every fact in the known world. There are physicists who believe the universe is a computer simulation. Most physicists seem to believe in dark matter, for which no evidence exists whatsoever. Turbulence is not perfectly understood. Not every aspect of Newtonian mechanics is perfectly understood. 

“Conspiracy theories” aren’t a special category. Presumably you believe in the Woodstein version of Watergate. Does that make you a conspiracy theorist? Why or why not?

I would say that theories asserting that the world is run by lizards etc. have a low probability of being correct, so low that it’s not worth taking seriously. But it is pure confusion to lump that sort of theory with (for example) the evidence that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill RFK. That thesis has a zero probability of being correct. If you don’t understand why, you haven’t read the coroners report.

SHELDON RAMPTON: I've already explained that I believe conspiracies exist. Please learn to read.

JOSEPH GREEN: Sorry if I wasn’t clear; however, you said that you believe Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK and that is a belief every bit as absurd as anything Alex Jones says. This isn’t something one can have differing opinions about - either you are familiar with and understand the evidence, or not. There is no scenario in this universe in which Sirhan could have killed Bobby Kennedy.

In light of this, my questions are: what is your program for determining which conspiracies are acceptable and which are not? And who gets the pejorative “conspiracy theorist” and who doesn’t?

SHELDON RAMPTON: Joseph Green I look at the evidence and reach a conclusion. Maybe I'm not always correct, but I do my best. I tend to distrust people like you who insist that they are absolutely certain about their theories, because that level of claimed certainty is usually a marker of emotional investment more than a marker of actual knowledge. We could go back and forth if you like about the evidence connecting Sirhan Sirhan to RFK's murder, but I doubt that either of us will find our views changed at the end of that exchange.

As for "my program for determining which conspiracies are acceptable and which were not," I don't have "a program." I have some opinions, which I've already outlined above. Just read what I've already written if you want to understand my views. As for which conspiracy theories are valid and which are not, I just do my best to follow the evidence. Perhaps you'd care to share your opinion about which of the following conspiracy theories you believe to be true:

(1) The Bavarian Illuminati has been working behind the scenes to orchestrate world events including the French Revolution, the Battle of Waterloo, the assassination of JFK, and infiltrating Hollywood.

(2) The Rothschild banking family is the secret force behind history beginning with the Napoleonic Wars and continuing through to the present day.

(3) The a United Nations has black helicopters with which tye plan to bring the U.S. under UN military control.

(4) Chemtrails are a conspiracy to poison the air.

(5) JFK's assassination was the work of Fidel Castro.

(6) JFK's assassination was the work of the CIA.

(7) JFK's assassination was the work of the FBI.

(8) JFK's assassination was the work of Lyndon Johnson.

(9) JFK's assassination was the work of the Mafia.

(10) JFK's assassination was the work of the KGB.

(11) RFK was killed by someone other than Sirhan Sirhan.

(12) Sirhan Sirhan was a Manchurian candidate who was hypnotized into killing RFK.

(13) The Pill and abortion are a conspiracy to eliminate black people.

(14) Political elites are conspiring to eliminate the white race.

(15) Haile Selassie never died in Ethiopia.

(16) The Apollo moon landing was faked with help from filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

(17) he Bush family, Margaret Thatcher, Bob Hope, and the British Royal Family are shape-shifting alien reptiles.

(18) 9/11 was planned by the Bush administration to create a pretext for the war in Iraq.

(19) The Clintons murdered Vince Foster and 50 other people.

(20) The mass shootings at Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, the Parkland School and elsewhere were "false flag" operations in which "crisis actors" pretended to be victims so the government can take away everyone's guns.

(21) Barack Obama's birth certificate was faked, and he is a secret Muslim.

(22) The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency is building of concentration camps in preparation to impose martial law and genocide.

(23) The AIDS virus is a conspiracy to kill blacks and gays.

(24) Water fluoridation is a Communist conspiracy to weaken the U.S. population.

(25) The earth is flat, and the government is covering up the truth.

(26) Vaccines are a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry.

(27) The auto industry has been covering up the availability of technology to build cars powered cheaply by water, hemp and cold fusion.

(28) The pharmaceutical industry has suppressed knowledge of cures for cancer.

JOSEPH GREEN:

OK, I’ll play.

1. No, although George Washington was apparently concerned about it.

2. No.

3. No.

4. Don’t know.

5 through 10. No, although the CIA comes closest. Domestic assassinations, like foreign assassinations, come from the Pentagon.

11. Definitely.

12. No. He killed no one.

13. No, but eugenics was a huge influence on Margaret Sanger. Go and read her letters to H G Wells in particular. Edwin Black also has an excellent book on the eugenics movement called WAR AGAINST THE WEAK.

14. Yes, they’re called Republicans. Do you follow the news? (Sorry I thought you typed “white” by mistake rather than “Black.” If you really meant white, then no.)

15. No.

16. No.

17. No.

18. Possibly, although it isn’t clear.

19. Definitely not.

20. No, but the Las Vegas shootings in particular had many anomalous elements. The “take away guns” theory is stupid, but I haven’t done enough work on these cases to really state a position. 

21. No.

22. No, but if you’ve noticed we have our immigrant children in concentration camps.

23. Not sure, but the WHO records are quite strange. The Boyd Graves lawsuit also turned up some amazing documents. Something is odd about it.

24. Communist, no. Fluoridation was a byproduct of industrial engineering and certain companies like Alcoa got the government to agree to dump it in our water. This was a terrible idea. I thought I read about this in your books, but perhaps not.

25. No.

26. Definitely. The pharmaceutical industry has shown again and again that it doesn’t give a shit about anything but profits. This is not a “conspiracy” except in the sense of the nicotine conspiracy, cigarette companies covering up the dangers of their own products. Fifty or a hundred years from now I am quite sure that people will shake their heads in amazement at what we allowed to be injected into infants. Note: I don’t think that vaccines are bad in of themselves, but only the extra material put into them as stabilizers. See FEAR OF THE INVISIBLE by Janine Roberts.

27. Of course they have. They also did their best to put mass transit out of business. See INTERNAL COMBUSTION by Edwin Black. This is not conspiracy except in terms of profits, however - like various banks conspiring with Enron to ignore the obvious flags in their accounting principles. Everybody was making too much money.

28. I don’t know, but trusting pharmaceutical companies about anything is stupid.

Also, my certainty in the RFK case isn’t a result of an innate stubbornness, but from the fact that a person can’t shoot another person in the back of the head at point blank range if they are three feet away and facing the front.

There is a new report from the UK newspaper The Independent which states that the Pentagon paid a public relations firm $500 million to produce anti-Al Qaeda propaganda films. Half a billion dollars. These films were aimed at insurgents.

In case you were unaware, the United States government created, trained, and funded Al-Qaeda ("The Base"), including alleged 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. 
​
www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/17/yemen.islam

This was confirmed by Zbigniew Brzezinski himself, who boasted about it in 1998:

The United States government created and funded a terrorist group. That terrorist group was then blamed for attacking us on 9/11, although their attacks also had the benefit of bringing down two buildings which were full of asbestos and one building which was full of records related to the CIA and several SEC investigations. It also had the benefit of making everyone forget about Donald Rumsfeld's remark that the Pentagon had misplaced $2 trillion the day before, and of course funded any number of domestic military projects, thus pouring money into the coffers of Halliburton, Raytheon, etc. 

Then they took $500 million over a four year period to finance videos opposing the terrorists they created.

What good could half a billion dollars have done in our own country, applied to something useful, like say infrastructure or food? I know, it doesn't work like that, I'm a crazy leftist. But doesn't it at least seem slightly odd?

Not really. After all, Israel created both Hamas and Hezbollah. So this is just business as usual: create your enemies, then fight the enemies you created, then #winning. Ok.