https://youtu.be/qojnA5OoQeY

I recently damaged a bottle of Walking Stick with a conspiracy theorist. Nice guy. Smart. Well-armed. Well-provisioned. And well out of his mind – even before the bourbon kicked-in. He would have me believe that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged. And yet we agreed on the unseen forces behind ATF Operation Fast & Furious . . .

I don’t believe in the Illuminati theory of world domination. But the feds are giving me the heebie-jeebies, what with secret FISA courts, a data capture facility in Utah that has its own nuclear power plant and billions in hidden “domestic security” budgets. What’s your take? Is there a hidden, highly-orchestrated conspiracy to disarm and enslave Americans?

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141 COMMENTS

  1. I suspect that it is not possible to keep elaborate conspiracies a secret and I also do not imagine there are very many people competent enough to run even simple ones.

    • …and therein lies the inherent problem with conspiracy theories. The more people who are in on a conspiracy, the greater the chance of it’s inner workings being exposed. Trying to keep a secret between two people is hard enough, let alone hundreds or thousands.

      • It’s true that security is compromised by the number of individuals involved. However, this principle can be somewhat misleading. If there is one big conspiracy requiring broad knowledge of all the details across most members then maintaining security is really tough. So, conspirators don’t operate that way. They operate on a need-to-know basis. Each small operating group has only about as much information as it really needs to carry out it’s portion of the conspiracy.

        By way of illustration, suppose the conspiracy were to impose a police state by means of SWAT teams. Then, establish one or a few SWAT teams in every Federal department; right down to the Department of Education. Carry on armoring up SWAT teams in each State police force and many municipal police forces. Each member of these teams would understand that what he is doing is perfectly “normal” preparing to serve arrest warrants on dangerous criminals, hostage situations, etc. It wouldn’t be easy counting noses or .50 cal machine guns. By no means am I suggesting that the prevalence of SWAT teams suggests a conspiracy to pave the way for a police state; this is merely an illustration.

        How long did it take for Fast & Furious to become disclosed? Before someone blew the whistle?
        How long did it take for Snowdon to blow the whistle on the NSA’s spying? With all the NSA employees, why have no more leaks been exposed?
        How long has it taken for Congress to get any traction – let alone publish the nasty details – on any of the scandals of the past several years?

        Governments get very good at compartmentalizing information. I’m not suggesting that there MUST be a conspiracy merely because compartmentalizing might facilitate keeping evidence of the conspiracy from being publicized. Rather, I’m saying only that we can’t be confident that no large conspiracy could exist without someone leaking enough info to make it’s scope apparent.

        • Efforts at “framing” an event such as the Bengahzi attack, are evidence of conspiracies. The first conspiracy involved the President, Secretary of State and others to illegally arm terrorists. The second conspiracy was to blame the attack on reaction to an internet video.

      • Correct sir! I don’t buy into the grand conspiracy theories. Keep in mind that doesn’t mean an agency or policy cannot run afoul, or that there are no conspiracies. The more grand and complex a theory becomes in scope in order to explain an event, the less likely the theory is to be applicable. These grand theories are embraced primarily because they bring a sense of order to a chaotic system.

        +1000 to Occam’s Razor!

      • I would argue that what you described is actually an inherent problem with conspiracies themselves. The underlying problem with conspiracy theories, on the other hand, is that they’re often not real.

      • “The more people who are in on a conspiracy, the greater the chance of it’s inner workings being exposed. Trying to keep a secret between two people is hard enough, let alone hundreds or thousands.”

        That has to be the most asinine fallacy ever. What’s ..”secret”.. about it?

        Investigative journalists, and defecting members, have been essentially yelling from the rooftops about key elements since before our parents were born: General Butler testifying before Congress in 1933, President Eisenhower’s retirement speech in 1961, I could do this all day and it’s not even my bag, over the last 20 years so many whistleblowers have come out with revelatory information that the last two ‘Presidential’ administrations have enacted a series of policy directives .. not for investigating and jailing the various culprits in each matter involving federal felonies and often treason .. but rather to gag and imprison the whistleblowers. Wow. Many of the middle-level conspirators openly write books blatantly stating what they’re doing, these go back over forty years. If anyone turns on any media source that’s not a paid establishment filter, the details about past conspiracy elements which have -already- become forced into political and economic policy, what’s going on at the moment, and what the conspirator’s own writings and speeches say will soon also occur .. blasts out like a firehose.

        But .. ‘the conspiracies can’t exist’ .. ‘because’ .. ‘no large group could keep such a secret’.

        You’re an i d i o t.

        But don’t feel singled out, because indeed you are legion.

    • One of my favorite lines from the X-Files:

      “These people [the federal government] came up with the Susan B. Anthony dollar and Amtrak. You think they could actually run a conspiracy of this size?”

      • Thanks for that trip down memory lane. I needed it. Funny thing, I was just at the DMV today…thinking of the analogy of it to obamacare made for a pretty solemn picture on my license.

    • Why does it have to be secret to be a conspiracy? It seems to me that all levels of Govt. participate at some level, in plain view, in a conspiracy to limit our rights, almost daily. Speech, firearms, property rights, taxes and more. There is not secret in what they do….

      • That’s it in a nutshell. There’s no need for a vast underground cabal of lizard people and reverse vampires when the real conspiracy is a slow, inexorable grinding of our rights to dust using public and “legal” means. The public is complicit, as we (“we” in the largest sense) have allowed it to carry on, and at times (such as the aftermath of 9/11) have cheered for it.

        • “The public is complicit, as we (“we” in the largest sense) have allowed it to carry on”

          Thank you for being honest and looking past your own little sphere of comfort, that is the definition of a being a decent human.

          Uncomfortable truths are still the truth, unless it is a truth about America’s history, because that can be revised by mob rules as WE are experiencing.

    • It is absolutely possible to run large scale secret operations and keep them out of the public eye, and the label “conspiracy theory” is just one tool to discredit whistle blowers and individuals that have real concerns out of circulation.

      The label “conspiracy theory” itself is a tool to discredit opposition to official narratives, as was revealed in a 1976 freedom of information act request from the New York Times where a CIA document was released that discusses policy in suppressing opposition. It should be self evident that the term is a incredibly useful to slander opposition, it is right up there with labeling opposition “racist” to shut them up and shut them out.

      http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-23/1967-he-cia-created-phrase-conspiracy-theorists-and-ways-attack-anyone-who-challenge

      Certainly there are many “conspiracy theories” that are actually false, but today’s trend seems to encourage the idea that anything labelled “conspiracy theory” be ignored and rejected based on that official label. If anything the Snowden leaks should have educated the public that the term “conspiracy theory” is meaningless.

      Conspiracy theories are just theories. A real problem we have today is lack of government honesty and openness. We need the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from government, and it is sadly in short supply. Obama lied his way into office with many promises. One big one was government transparency, he has been one of the most obstructive presidents of openness and honesty of government we have ever had. If we had an open and honest government that we could actually see what was going on with rather than having a government that runs to a public relations firm or “creative” manipulator like Johnathan Gruber to create a strategy of talking points and essentially lies to achieve their goals we might have a chance to winnow through the theories and get the crooked and corrupt out of government and make real positive change in our country. As it is, the corrupt have a big advantage, and knowing everything about us to exploit gives them a dangerous long term advantage.

  3. Yes. Shannon is one snow bunny that does double duty as Black Man Kryptonite. or at least that is my theory.

  4. I don’t think it’s accurate to call it a conspiracy, since the globalist authoritarians are pretty open about what they want to do. UN agenda 21, for instance, has been discussed at numerous conferences open to the public. The only way anyone could be ignorant is if they self-filter their info stream by keeping entirely with ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/NYT.

    But, unfortunately, many people do filter their own info. In general, secrets are hard to keep. But if people are willfully ignorant, they don’t have to keep secrets.

    • Along the same lines … the more horrific an initiative, the harder it is for people to believe that such an initiative really exists.

    • You don’t have to be in a conspiracy to act conspiratorily. Progressives and other members of the hard left are quite open about their intentions.

      As was said in the ‘Nam long ago: “Being paranoid, doesn’t mean there’s not someone out their trying to kill you.” Just sayin’.

  5. There is no secret conspiracy to disarm Americans. The disarmers are quite open about it. But they do like to encourage the conspiracy talk about jack booted storm troopers because it diverts attention from their real objective of outsourcing the means of social control to street gangs. They even have clowns like Radley Balko and Jacob Sullum to help them meet their objectives

  6. Sandy Hook was a hoax. Only 2 scenarios that happened.

    1. It was a drill that they were doing , media got there and reported it as a live event and the government ran with it.

    2. It was flat out a hoax to come after guns.

    There’s a documentary on YouTube called “we need to talk about Sandy hook”.

    If anybody who watches this and still believes it really happened .. I’d wonder what planet you’re from.

    • Anyone with a firm grasp on reality can see through this nonsense. It’s breathtakingly stupid.

      This kind of whackery is precisely the type of thing from which the pro-2A movement needs to distance itself, and the sooner the better. It provides our opposition with “evidence” that we’re all crazy and dumb. By the shovelful.

      • I’ll believe you when Wolfgang Halbig’s questions get answered satisfactorily.

        There have been several deaths surrounding the aftermath of Sandy Hook.

        Also, there were the vestiges of the scene in-place in that area the day before the event.

    • Anyone who watches that video and is convinced of anything lacks critical thinking and the ability to google.

      • So why is the crime scene report buried so deep it’s probably sharing shelf space with the arc of the covenant?

        • For the same reason the police in Tasmania got a court there to rule that there couldn’t be further investigations in to the Port Arthur massacre for 30 years after the first police report, because if the truth of how horribly the police handled it were to come out, the blame would be on their hands.

    • So are the grieving families all paid actors? Or did the government kill all their kids (in the same studio they faked the moon landing in, I suppose) to complete the hoax?

      The problem with the crazy conspiracy theories is they don’t stand up to some basic critical thinking.

    • For every 100 insane conspiracy videos on YouTube, there will be one to point out the fallacies in that video. The simple reason that we don’t see everything from Sandy Hook is because there are some decent people left in this country that respect the victims. Unlike the ass-hats putting out garbage of conspiracies on YouTube. What planet am I from? The one that has gravity to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground.

      • I don’t buy into this theory, but since when is crime info essentially destroyed because it’s “icky”?

        Serial killers who torture and eat their victims are publicly released buy because children died its info never to be seen by mankind because it’s just too heinous?

        Really?

      • “What planet am I from? The one that has gravity to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground.”

        Gravity? Everyone knows so-called ‘Gravity’ is just a false flag for the Illuminati…

        🙂

  7. Yes, I believe that a psycho committed the atrocities in Sandy Hook. However, the appalling lack of transparency by the State of Connecticut regarding the massacre can lead people down the conspiracy road…

      • A paint-huffing session would likely provide a comparable level of intellectual benefit.

      • A friend of one of the most righteous friends I’ve ever had died in Sandy Hook. Also, his best friend back home is a social worker who routinely worked with Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of the school prior to her murder.

        Sandy Hook happened. Yes, there were and still are some really odd things surrounding the massacre, but I put that blame on the various arms of the MSM’s shoddy reporting, in effort to air the biggest developments before the others, and the civilian disarmament industrial complex (fancy phrase, huh?) jumping on the event like flies on you-know-what. I truly believe that it was perpetrated as the official narrative, as of now, states it was. All the conspiratorial stuff was brought on by outside entities tripping over themselves in order to get their various agendas accomplished.

        This is coming from an unashamed “9/11 truther” and disbeliever of a number of things that are considered to be “historical fact”. With that said, not everything bad that happens in the world has some dark, shadowy group pulling the strings. Crazy people occasionally do crazy things, and there is such thing as a coincidence. Keep that in mind.

        • The “Everyone Must Check In” electronic sign was up at I-84 Exit 11 Eastbound THE DAY BEFORE the alleged Sandy Hook “Massacre”

          I know, because I SAW IT.

          Your hasabara tactics will not work. Your crisis actors have been seen used in other places. Halbig’s questions have not been answered.

          Now, go collect your $0.50 like a good little camper.

  8. Conspiracy theories are good thinking practice. I tend to find there is often some truth and or bits and pieces I would not have picked up on had I not applied the critical thinking. But buying into anything, no matter how the information is labeled or presented should always be taken with a grain of salt. Our world of information has become unreliable to facts, the worst offenders are the MSM. I read between the lines and try to ascertain the reality between the bias. It is no simple task.

  9. Every year, the richest private citizens and the most powerful corporate and government employees in the world meet in secret as a part of the Bilderberg Conference.

    Absent a “terrorist attack” I cannot think of a more newsworthy event give the “stars” in attendance as well as the elaborate planning that goes into it. Yet this meeting was never reported on by the government media until about 2-3 years ago, and only after some cross-over types, RT, Ben Swann, etc. started making it news that the “news” was literally ignoring this conference. N.B. The attendees are also *never* questioned about their attendance in subsequent interviews.

    Respectfully, if you can giggle about the powers that be meeting each year, in secret, and by coincidence the government media ignores it, I’d say you are “out of your mind.”

  10. no one knows about my secret society.
    oops.
    now i have to break out the karo syrup, some kaiser broiler foil and a pair of blunt scissors. and let the flies into the phone booth.
    “you have found the scarab of ra. this item has no use.”

    • Lord I haven’t heard a scarab of ra reference in ages. Good times for sure.

      As to conspiracy theories, I tend to think that the huge conspiracies are ridiculous for already covered reasons. I mean, the whole demon worshipping illuminati thing is just stupid. And like others have said,our illustrious leaders have made no secret of their intentions in regards to gun rights, or freedom of speech, or lovely little tidbits like invoking the 5th amendment can be taken as an implication of guilt…. Powerful institutions and powerful people seek power and never let go. This is normal, not conspiracy. I find what is done openly to be more abhorrent than cockamamie theories about baby eating politicians. It detracts from real abuses of power that often aren’t even kept secret. People just don’t talk about it.

  11. Sandy Hook was a .gov conspiracy. 9/11 was a false flag attack. Obama was born in a Kenyan outhouse. The moon landing was a hoax. Aliens from Area 51 and the CIA killed Kennedy. Cars can run on dirty water but the oil companies suppressed the technology. Michelle Obama is a tranny. Eisenhower was a communist. AIDS was created in a lab by white people to kill black people. Paul McCartney is dead. The Holocaust never happened.

    Which nutball theories did I miss?

    • Barack Obama was born in an outhouse, just not in Kenya. And Michelle is a wookie, not a tranny. Many of these conspiracy theories have a grain of truth to them.

      • The fluoride one always had me scratching my head. No one is denying it’s In the water or that it’s put there on purpose, just the question of why. When you think about it, the fact that nearly every community spends the money to ‘fight cavities’, it does sound pretty silly. Not that local bureaucrats aren’t usually pretty silly people.

  12. Here’s one for you…when did gov control become “regulation”? We know that when 2A was written, “well regulated” meant “well kept”, not ” well controlled”. Yet somewhere along the line “regulation” because synonymous with gov control. And now every anti-2A mouthpiece touts “well-regulated” as proof the founders wanted gov limits on civilian arms (“shall not be infringed”, be dammed). It’s enough to make one wonder if the “common usage” of the word was purposely co-opted. It’s not like progressives haven’t used language as a weapon in other cases.

  13. I think conspiracy theories are a sort of defense mechanism for people. When a large scale human-caused disaster occurs, perhaps it’s somehow more comforting to believe that there is secret evil machinery behind the scenes than just good luck on the perpetrators’ part and bad luck/incompetence on the part of those whose function is to detect and stop them. The bad guys, sadly, always have the initiative…
    It’s also a way for “little” people to feel important. I can see how someone who becomes obsessed with the Kennedy Assassination, the September 11th attacks, etc deluding themselves into thinking that if they just spool up enough microfilms, and do enough Duck Duck Go searches, they can somehow unearth the clues and make the connections that *everyone else has missed*. It’s a sentiment that loops back to my first paragraph: that if enough dogged digging by the “little guy” unmasks the people who are *really* pulling the levers, then perhaps they can be… deposed? Arrested? (conspiracy theory buffs rarely seem to tell us what could or should happen to the shadowy people in charge, once they’re exposed). In any event, such a series of discoveries would not only propel an anonymous schlub into the spotlight, but serve justice for the atrocities that society has suffered through.
    I don’t think there is an “illuminati conspiracy to take our guns away.” There are simply overlapping efforts to impose “common sense gun laws” upon us, with a semi-opaque goal on their part to disarm all of us. It’s easy to mistake the combined efforts of disparate people and groups with goals that are roughly in alignment with an actual “conspiracy.” We already know what they’re up to, they’re not even very good at hiding their endgame from us.
    If anything, we’re the ones that seem to lack an “endgame” or an articulated set of victory condition. There are a lot of well meaning “2A Advocates” that happily endorse things like strict carry permits, universal background checks, etc and think that NFA items shouldn’t be allowed any more. There are those who feel the exact opposite – no restrictions on the ownership and carry of anything that goes bang and shoots a projectile.

    • There are those who feel the exact opposite – no restrictions on the ownership and carry of anything that goes bang and shoots a projectile.

      FIFY. I am one of those people.

      Probably even more accurate:
      There are those who feel the exact opposite – no restrictions on the ownership and carry of anything.

  14. Two years ago if you said the gov’t was reading your emails and listening to your phone calls, you’d be called a kook. Then Snowden happened and we found out that it was true. Given that the NSA has the ability to peer into every private nook and cranny of every member of Congress and every judge, is it any wonder why people are voting and ruling the way the are? How many of them fear their perversions and skeletons being made public? Anyone want to bet what Rand Paul secrets will be exposed if he rises in the polls? We’ve created a monster that can’t be stopped until it destroys and ruins everything in its path. Watch how many allies jump ship and line up with Putin. You can only spy on your friends as long as they don’t know you’re doing it.

    • And why were those programs instituted? Because we are all pantywaists who want to be perfectly secure from the scariest, yet most insignificant risks, and our gutless politicians are unwilling to say no, there are just some things that we cannot completely guard against. Whether we know it or not, we got what we asked for.

      • In general, I agree with you. However, not all of us are. I, and many that I know, would prefer to be completely left alone, responsible for our own selves. We are undoubtedly a very small minority.

    • People were talking of similar in the 1990s, even named one permutation “CARNIVORE” in discussions, and were labeled kooks, conspiracy theorists. I don’t put much stock to overall conspiracy theories but I do pay attention to the grains of truth that are often revealed in the details. The difficulty is in deciding what is fact and what is fiction. I imagine that the people living in North Korea have that problem a thousand fold worse.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_%28software%29

      Carnivore, later renamed DCS1000, was a system implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that was designed to monitor email and electronic communications. It used a customizable packet sniffer that can monitor all of a target user’s Internet traffic. Carnivore was implemented in October 1997. By 2005 it had been replaced with improved commercial software such as NarusInsight.

      Carnivore grew out of an earlier FBI project called “Omnivore”, which itself replaced an older surveillance tool migrated from the US Navy by FBI Director of Integrity and Compliance, Patrick W. Kelley, which had a still undisclosed name. In September 1998, the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU) in Quantico, Virginia, launched a project to migrate Omnivore from Sun’s Solaris operating system to a Windows NT platform. This was done to facilitate the miniaturization of the system and support a wider range of personal computer (PC) equipment. The migration project was called “Phiple Troenix” and the resulting system was named “Carnivore.

      • Yes, those forerunner programs were 15 years ago. Fast forward to today, and what we have now that we didn’t have in 1998. Nearly everyone is connected all the time. We have GPS in our phones beaming location data. In 1998 more than half the population still didn’t have internet and most who did didn’t have an always on cable/FIOS/DSL connection. Our cars weren’t connected with bluetooth or wifi and OnStar was only available in select Caddies.

        The programs in existing today make those first gen programs looks like a junior high science fair project.

        • Yep. We discussed this future even back then. It’s sad to see it all come to pass. Wait for what becomes of what was known as “Digital Angel” and ReadID coupled with this surveillance state. It will make Orwell’s Big Brother jealous.

        • For those that don’t know, Digital Angel had a product that was the size of about a grain of rice. It was an implantable RFID device. The next generation, I presume to be larger than a grain of rice, was to have basic vital signs and GPS tracking with realtime satellite or cellular data streams. It was to be marketed for use on the very old, very young, infirm, prisoners, and high value targets. The power source was to be a lithium battery charged by the host body. They had alot of information about the upgraded realtime device on their old website. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have information about that particular next generation device.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Angel

          It’s easy to conceive of a time when all prisoners and probationers are required to get such a device implanted. With vital signs, much can be inferred about activities and if the person is being deceptive.

    • Look up the term “Echelon .” You will find out that it has been going on for longer than Post 9-11.

      • Yep, Echelon. I’ve forgotten far more than I remember these days. Thanks for the memory jog! 🙂

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

        It was created in the early 1960s to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War, and was formally established in the year of 1971.

      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

        By the end of the 20th century, the system referred to as “ECHELON” had evolved beyond its military/diplomatic origins, to also become “… a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications.”

        The system has been reported in a number of public sources. One of the earliest reports to describe the program, code-named “ECHELON”, was Duncan Campbell’s 1988 article, “Somebody’s listening”, published in the New Statesman. The program’s capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001, and by author James Bamford in his books on the National Security Agency of the United States. The European Parliament stated in its report that the term ECHELON is used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicates that it was the name for a signals intelligence collection system. The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic) and microwave links.

  15. Yes, there is a conspiracy. No, it’s not a secret but rather a poorly run campaign based on blatant lies, made-up statistics and dependence on the well-meaning, but totally gullible public.
    It’s bigger than government. It’s an entire philosophy of ‘somebody in power must know what they are doing, else they wouldn’t be there’
    No need to enslave Americans when most volunteer their time, data and tax money and don’t ask any questions other than ‘who won on dancing with the thrones last night?’

    • It is a natural thing for governments to grow in power. It is part of the underlying notion of governance and a failing in individuals as they become dependent. As individuals are natural beings and government bodies artificial ones, it is the duty of every individual to resist loss of autonomy. Being basic self preservation, this duty is both individual and collective. Government has no duty except to abide by the restraints placed upon it by those governed in the furtherance of its enumerated functions. However, people must always understand and caution be taken because governments move towards tyranny like water flows downhill… always.

    • We live under tyranny? You set a mighty low threshold for using that highly charged word. Why don’t you throw in communism, fascism, and totalitarianism while you are at it?

      • Our government is a tyrannical one. It overflowed the banks of the Constitution a long time before any of us were even born. Yes, this is tyranny; right here, right now.

      • Since the dictionary definition of “tyranny” is “oppressive power exerted by government”, I’d say it’s a pretty accurate word to use. A quietly abusive government is no less tyrannical than a Stalinist police state.

        • I just have to laugh at clowns like you. The only counties where government interferes less in their citizens’ daily lives are places you wouldn’t want to live in. Besides, our government is a republic, which means it is made up of people we elect. If the government is doing things you don’t like, then that probably means that there are more people who prefer it that way. So, if you don’t like things the way that they are, change some of your fellow citizens’ minds, or find your libertarian Xanadu, and move there.

        • If the government is doing things you don’t like, then that probably means that there are more people who prefer it that way.

          Ask yourself, are you describing constitutional governance or mob rule?

        • I’m describing a democratic republic. The things done in the name of the majority in that republic may, or may not be constitutional. And, sometimes, the constitution may have provisions that are ambiguous enough to be interpreted differently by different people. By some people’s lights, the tenth amendment means that the Federal government has little power, but the sovereign states can do pretty much what they want. So, for example, if the people of California wanted to strip all gun rights from its citizens, they could do that. However, the Supreme Court in Heller saw things differently. That doesn’t sound much like tyranny to me.

        • @Vee: Nice attempt at deflection but I only referred to the federal government and the Constitution. I didn’t delve into states rights in this exchange. You are doing alot of cherry picking of my words but not really addressing what I’ve been commenting about.

          You’ve got a slight case of the “living, breathing document” syndrome together with a few other collectivist maladies. You don’t see tyranny because you don’t know what tyranny is. This country is so far removed from what it was founded upon that it’s laughable to read your words trying to deny that basic, common sense fact. May your chains rest lightly upon you, Vee. Have a pleasant slumber.

        • “The only countries where government interferes less in their citizens’ daily lives are places you wouldn’t want to live in.”

          By that logic, if your husband only beats you once a month, you should be thankful, because other women are getting beaten every day.

  18. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool “conspiracy theorist” and proud of it. The thing is, as someone once said, a lie is halfway around the world by the time the truth has its boots pulled on. So us “hidden history” buffs are stuck piling up evidence and information — regrettably, trying to convince someone to question their programming is difficult to do since they invariable glaze over in about two seconds. YOU ARE QUESTIONING MY PROGRAMMING. THAT IS NOT DOUBLEPLUSGOOD.

    Why was there zero Internet traffic from SHES in the years preceding the event? No Internet traffic? Really? No school lunch menus, school schedules, et cetera? How likely does that seem to you? You’re glazing over, aren’t you?

    No Medi-Vac helicopters were summoned, but someone had the foresight to order porta-potties, the better to restrict access to the supposed scene. Does that seem likely to you?

    The perp supposedly shot out a large window near the SHES office to gain access — and ALL LEOs the rest of that day accessed and egressed through that window, without using a baton to remove the rest of the glass? That’s absurd.

    I could go on, but my point is that once people have been programmed, and I do mean programmed, it’s very difficult to get them to question what they’ve been told. Aviation fuel melts steel beams in just an hour or so, leading to the WTC collapse? What about (here we go) the Madrid skyscraper fire, that Shanghai skyscraper fire, the Moscow skyscraper fire, the Dubai skyscraper fire — all of which burned FAR longer than the WTC, yet somehow didn’t collapse? Getting it yet?

    It’s Monday, and I don’t want to add to anyone’s burden. But how is it, for instance, that the 9/11 Commission didn’t have SUBPOENA power? Does that not suggest (NO IT MOST CERTAINLY DOES NOT) that they didn’t particularly want to discover anything?

    JFK? Gulf of Tonkin? The “SLA” and Patty Hearst? On and on and on. People tend to believe whatever they hear on television or read in the mainstream media. Wait, consider the BBC reporting that the WTC7 tower had collapse — and in the background of the shot stands WTC7!!! I guess that reporter was handed the script a bit too early, the BBC faded her out pretty quickly. I could go on and on. Someone stop me.

    ALWAYS look at the situation on your own, trust nothing the media tells you.

    • So you know more than structural engineers regarding how buildings an steel acts after getting hit by a plane?

      Or do you not understand if the cops had no reason to knock the glass out they wouldn’t. You can’t use a fallacy like your either a conspiracy theorist or a programmed, glazed over sheep.

      You are giving way too much credit to the .gov, you know a government that can’t make a website work correctly. The government doesn’t need a conspiracy or reason to take rights, they do it out in the open aplenty.

    • I’m with you brother.

      Thing that’s most interesting about the recent stuff is they don’t even really try to hide / cover up much of it anymore. Like you said, most aren’t paying attention and/or don’t care.

  19. As someone who worked for the Federal government for a time, there is no way in hell they could ever effectively pull off anything massive. Especially in this day and age of the internet, and the amount of unhappy Federal employees. Our Gov doesn’t promote the best and the brightest, they promote the brownest noses and who follows the right politics of the day.

  20. It’s not “hidden”. It’s in plain sight. There are so many elephants in the room that your question is not even rhetorical, its comical.

  21. Is there an open, highly-orchestrated conspiracy to disarm and enslave Americans? Yes.

    I fixed it for you.

  22. “to disarm and enslave Americans” is inaccurate, and a conspiracy. “to disarm and enslave people in general, in every nation”, is closer to accurate. The notion that men seek power, and two parts include disarming populations, and controlling populations is not conspiracy. It is history. I’m quite sure while the Chinese emperors were plotting with the advisers to disarm and control the masses, the Sword Hunts in Japan had a similar room full of similarly motivated people. I am quite certain over in Europe, castles and palaces had rooms full of Barons and Dukes and wealthy merchant families arguing about how best to keep the peasants from revolting and increase productivity.
    The only thing that is a conspiracy theory is the notion that these are always the same group of people. Only when the existence of these same disparate rulers and advisers collectively meeting and agreeing behind closed doors, is the conspiracy true.Clearly,
    http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/conferences.html
    such meetings do not take place…

  23. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, AKA ObamaTrade, was written by people whose names, voices, and faces are unknown to the public and their legislators; it’s to be voted on by legislators who are not allowed to read it, make copies of it to read, or take notes on it to facilitate understanding and discussion of it among themselves; and they may not discuss or explain it to the people who elected them.

    If this single example does not convince, then nothing will, and any further discussion of this is pointless.

    Yes, conspiracies exist in this country.

    The Bill of Rights has been reduced to a set of non-binding resolutions.

  24. No I don’t conspiracy theory much, however I stopped making jokes about tinfoil hats right around the time I heard the words “we have to pass this legislation to find out whats in it”. They aren’t even trying to hide the agenda at this point, but as said above, you don’t have to hide something from people who want to be willfully ignorant.

    • If you mean a “hat tip”, RF is usually good about that. The others, not so much. At one point a while ago I decided to send no more tips in because there wasn’t even an occasional acknowledgment. About that time, RF started sending thank you emails and I noticed him doing “hat tips”. I’m appreciative of RF for observing the basic courtesies. It means a lot to those who send in tips. (Did the rest of you TTAG writers read that? Don’t be impolite bastards and still expect people to send in story tips.)

      If El Mac deserves a “hat tip”, please edit and give him one.

      • (Edit window messed up.)

        If you meant acknowledgment in another way, please disregard the comment. However, I was happy to get that off of my chest and send the message across to other TTAG writers.

  26. Eric Snowden helped enlighten many. The IRS has targeted conservatives. UN Agenda 21 is well underway. Illegals are coming to the U.S. in droves. And voting. Fast and Furious. Benggazi. Hillary’s campaign donations. Bad SWAT raids. The Democrat party. Inner-city politics in Chicago. Climate panic. Is there any gold in Fort Knox? Gun control bolstered by a dirty narrative and false stats.

    Most of our conspiracies are out in the open for any independent thinker to see. Stock up on food and supplies. We’re an earthquake / drought / hurricane / tsunami / power outage / tornado / riot away from The Lord of The Flies.

    • Snowden was a Russian agent. Most of the material he compromised was foreign intelligence. The domestic stuff was a diversion to distract attention from his real mission. I have been to facility in Hawaii where he got the bulk of his material. They don’t much CT there.

      If you want a conspiracy than Snowden is a US double agent whose mission was to pass disinformation to Russia and China. PRISM was just a throw away program to fool the Russians into thinking they had the real deal. All the sound and fury you hear is just to give cred to the legend. Well except for Rand Paul. He isn’t in on the joke.

      I go with the first option but I will not entirely discount the second. It is a wilderness of mirrors out there.

      • If Snowden wasn’t a Russian agent to begin with, he certainly became one. Otherwise, we have to assume that Russia gave him a safe haven out of the goodness of Putin’s heart. That’s an assumption that I simply cannot accept.

  27. I truly believe that conspiracy theory people (i.e., those who believe them) are mentally ignorant. Like, truly weak minded and prone to believing a lot of stuff. Some of them are also at least mildly mentally unstable, if not plainly sick.

    • I believed The same as you until a few years ago.

      Now I believe what you describe are people like you.

      • Well, your reply and the way you worded it gives you away rather easily. You always believed everything that was told you, especially when younger (you have probably been scolded many times as a child; this bears consequences). So you went to the opposites quite easily. Must have been hard for you all along, maybe even now.
        See, we’re not all easily startled by the first occurrence of BS we read. Not all of us. But I’m sure you’ll think it’s all a conspiracy against you.

        • Where ever you got your psychology degree from, you had better ask for your money back. Lol

          I’m far from anything you described in either of your ridiculous statements.

  28. I suggest that everyone who cares about their 2A rights should look closely at these events. There is a ton of evidence suggesting Sandy Hook was staged.

    There is also evidence suggesting the Charleston church shooting was staged. The story doesn’t add up too well. The unemployed young white man entered the church wearing expensive body armor, and they invited him to join their bible study group? He supposedly sat quietly for an hour before opening fire, and reloaded 5 times while nobody raised a hand to stop him? FEMA had an active shooter drill running in Charleston that day. And Rev. Pinkney, one of those killed, met with Hillary Clinton that morning. Did anyone notice the surprising lack of anger and grief, and the almost unnatural outpouring of forgiveness and even joy expressed by the victims’ families? It might have something to do with the Justice Department “freeing up” $29 million to provide “services” for the victims’ families.

    Do not be chumps. Do not let yourself be controlled by the “conspiracy theory” label. An adult looks into things himself, makes up his own mind, and doesn’t care what others think. Do not get sold a story by professional liars in the media and government.

    • FEMA doesn’t do community active shooter drills. They aren’t LEOs. If there is a FEMA facility in Charleston doing a drill it was for their own security.

  29. We should not overlook two other facets to initiatives:
    (1) A power broker could be orchestrating a “conspiracy” with segmented assets which have no idea what the power broker is really setting them up to accomplish. This is akin to the “need to know” concept which other people have mentioned above.
    (2) A power broker could simply see an opportunity and take control of existing assets to accomplish his/her objective. In that scenario the assets themselves have no idea that their actions support a power broker’s conspiracy.

    In both cases the “little people” who are carrying out the conspiracy quite literally have no idea that they are participants. They are basically the “useful idiots” of which Stalin refers — except that they receive a paycheck for being “useful idiots”.

  30. Call it a conspiracy, everyone is interested, call it a theory and everyone is at least understanding, call it a conspiracy theory and everyone flips their shit. What is a conspiracy theory other than the precursor of conspiracy fact? Just because you think everyone is out to get you doesn’t mean they aren’t.

    • “What is a conspiracy theory other than the precursor of conspiracy fact?”

      Good point.

      I get the theme presented here that the idea of a big conspiracy staying a secret seems implausible. More people ≈ more leak sources.

      Also, as noted above, when such projects are organized, every person involved doesn’t know every detail.

      A very cool book on music and your brain observed that when you play a familiar piece of music to a subject with some notes digitally removed, the subject’s brain fills in the missing parts.

      And so, when the Official Government theory doesn’t fit the observable facts, our peon brains try to fill in the missing details / rationale.

      The pristine “magic bullet” officially caused all the damage to Kennedy & Connolly. And yet, people who know of bullets and ballistics said, “No way”. Also, people with common sense had to say “How did that bullet find its way to a gurney in the hallway.

      A video covering the inconsistencies at Sandy Hook showed helicopter news footage of the road (driveway?) to the school blocked off by assorted vehicles which kept the ambulances [what looked like] several hundred yards away from the victims.

      The Texas Rangers had possession of the front door from the Branch Davidian compound building. When the idea was expressed that the holes would [hopefully] prove who shot first, the door disappeared from the evidence locker.

      You don’t need a tin-foil hat to suspect almost ANY “official” government explanation about an event that could later be used to trample rights. (And you can’t have MY hat as I’m wearing it.)

  31. It’s not the conspiracy theories that I hear about that bother me.. it’s the idea of conspiracies that happen that I am completely unaware of that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Had a buddy that worked under an agency… well, let’s just say the impression he left me with was something along the lines of.. “If you hear about it, they wanted you to hear about it. Why? Simple. The same reason you leave a foreign governments bug in place. So long as they think they are listening to secrets, they are smug in their belief that they know what’s going on. You enforce the idea by denying it. Remember, no one really believes a story until the Government denies it.”

  32. All of our “news” sources are nothing more than propaganda factories, working day and night to form public opinion. Any alleged differences, ie conservative or liberal, are fantasy, and exist only to give the non-critical thinking herd the illusion of choice and credibility.

  33. having spent two thirds of my life working for the government, I find that the most foolish people I meet are the ones who say “our government wouldn’t do a thing like that”. to me. yeah, right, buddy. you work “down to the feed store” and you know all about it.

  35. We wrestle not against flesh and blood-from the preponderance of Masonic founding fathers to the Federal Reserve to the recent massive spying on Americans yeah I would say there is at least some conspiracy. Organized? Beats me…tell that to the fabian socialists or NSA. The evil shite who murdered 9 was just an evil psychopath…and Barry Soetoro WAS “chosen”…

  36. There is without a doubt a conspiratorial effort to limit Americans’ 2nd Amendment Rights.

    It’s funded by Bloomberg, carried out by Shannon Watts and her PR ilk, and trumpeted by Obama and Holder.

    That’s a fact, it’s being carried out in the open, and it’s well publicized!

  37. On the one hand you can look at 2 documented and very secret societies which in their way are the equivalent of conspiracies, the Italian Mafia and the KGB. They really DO exist and if their reactions to episodes such as Donny Brasco and the Bulgarian defector in the UK are any example they really, really don’t like big mouths. So how is that virtually every country mother’s son of them has a book, screen play, tv interviews etc? Conspiracies are pretty hard to strong arm forever and usually the shortest road to debunking them is to simply reply, ‘ok, let’s just go with what you’re saying 100 % and look at what that means because every human endeavor creates multiple and unimagined rippling consequences’ That ordinarily infuriates the theorist.

    On the proverbial other hand, we live in a time when a global ruling class has formed, a class of professional pol’s and time servers. Most of them live in a bubble that would embarrass Marie Antoinette. It is an echo chamber of critically unconsidered dogma endlessly repeated. One of their key tenets is contempt for outsiders, or people who have regular lives and prefer to make something of themselves rather than living off govt largesse. This certainly creates a palpable sense of conspiracy in that the political class almost uniformly believes the ‘common people’ cannot be exposed to the truth and that they need to manage our lives since we are too bovine for the job.

    That said, I am not sure they trust one another enough to actually conspire. The 2 most critical issues, I think, are the push for gun control and the push for a cashless society. We all understand what an absence of firearms means. As for the cashless society Keith Ellison said perhaps best. When queried about America’s debt problem he replied that America didn’t one and was in fact awash with money, why in 401 K’s alone there were trillions of dollars. Currently there is that annoying obstacle that all those little people actually believe it’s their money, but…Just keep in mind, in a cashless society it isn’t your money any more and what happened to the Cypriots and now the Greeks will become the standard solution for every problem this gang of imbeciles creates.

  38. Just a reminder to those who say the government couldn’t possibly keep a secret of any size…
    Didn’t Regan collapse the USSR with the conspiracy that the “star wars” program actually worked?
    Quite a few people was involved, they not only fooled the Russians, but even had the American public buying it..

  39. Is there a hidden, highly-orchestrated conspiracy to disarm and enslave Americans? Patrick Henry thought it would turn into a collusion and he is right.

  40. “Is there a hidden, highly-orchestrated conspiracy to disarm and enslave Americans?”

    Yes, it’s called the progressive movement.

  41. What if, it was extraterrestrial beings? Could it, be that the nazca lines reveal the alien gun control illuminati agenda? Could we decode Stonehenge to reveal reptilian Obama agenda to disarm America? Does the Mayan calendar reveal the truth about the secret pyramid code to use crystal skulls to take over the UN to dominate the world for the Greys? What if….

  42. “Fooling people is easy, what’s difficult is convincing them they’ve been fooled” ~ Mark Twain

  43. Colin Powell in front of the security council presenting WMD evidence, the man is just not convinced of what he’s saying,

    Kerry in briefing where he get’s up and calls Snowden a traitor going for that soundbite. The calculation of it is so apparent when you watch it. Add to the intimidation factor of downing the President’s of Boliva’s plane – they didn’t just do it to catch Snowden but send a message to other whistle blowers we will get you.

    The corruption of main stream media outlets like the WP and NYT and Hollywood. Fact check their numbers for yourself it’s scary how much they lie, Watch all the movies about Julian Assange you’ll see they’re subtly designed to discredit him. Read story after story about how the republican party is diminishing (I’m not republican by the wa).

    Look at what the war on drugs has done to 80% of the African American community over the last 40 years.

    Electronic voting machines – nothing more needs to be said.

    No accountability for anyone in power – banks, the director of the CIA after he lied to congress, Civil forfeiture, brush up on the Supreme court of Kelo v. City of New London.

    Personally I don’t believe in conspiracies, I believe in greed. Jimmy Stewart went to washington as Mr. Smith 76 years ago and it’s only gotten worse. Basically, conspiracy or not we’ve lost our free press (Jeff Bezos owns the WP making him their largest subscriber and its true for every other media outlet and some other billionaire). Our civil rights are slowly being fretted away.

    Our fore fathers wrote the Constitution with an understanding of history knowing the way every Democracy throughout history eventually led the way to an oligarchy then dictatorship or empire. It’s human nature. What sets us apart as Americans is that many of believe in the constitution deeply and passionately. However, you’re a member of the Patriot Movement if you stand by the constitution making you a dangerous anti-government nut. When did believing in the document that is the foundation of our democracy become unAmerican. Someone please tell me.

  44. Printed on a pillar at the IRS Headquarters:

    “The Bill of Rights was not ordained by Nature or God. It’s very human, very fragile.”

    That’s the IRS building, people. Let us not forget that no government in history of ever has voluntarily reduced it’s own power. In fact, the converse is true. All governments left to operate unchecked consume and expand until we’re busting up parking lots to grow potatoes…

  45. “Is there a hidden, highly-orchestrated conspiracy to disarm and enslave Americans?”

    No. There IS a highly orchestrated MOVEMENT to do so. It’s international in scale, and promotes centralized political power in all situations that ends up requiring the disarmament of anyone that might want to say “no”, which means the disarmament of EVERYONE of the planet. They aren’t hiding(anymore), they are now out in the open. The public documents make it clear that governments consider their own people enemies, and the number one criteria for how high up on the threat list you land is how dangerous you are to government and it’s pet corporations/banks.

    So no, there is no threat to the US that isn’t also a threat to the whole world.

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