/lit/ - Literature

>>16739361
"Conspiracy theory" is a population-mind-control term popularised and spread by New York Times Operation Mockingbird journalists/ agents in 1965 to deflect from the failings of the Warren Commission.

>>16739405
That's just a conspiracy theory!

>>16739405
This. CIA trying to cover up the Kennedy assassination. There are real conspiracies and crazy ones. To call something, anything, a conspiracy now, just seems crazy.

>>16739361
There have always been conspiracy theories. I'm pretty sure Plato believed the Cretans deliberately wrote mythology which encouraged boy-sex, and were psyopping Greece into becoming gay.

>>16739361
Depends on how you define conspiracy theory - there have always been suspicions about those in power that have developed into narratives capable of mobilizing masses of people. One could consider much of New Testament characterization of the Roman Empire as conspiratorial, especially Revelations. But, for popular conspiracies, there probably has been some kind of conspiracy ever since mass literacy. Pic related offers a fascinating history of the of the OGs of modern American conspiracy. You see this guy's thinking influencing everything from Qanon to contemporary Birchers. He definitely wasn't the first conspiratorial thinker in America, but he definitely popularized a myriad of previously unlinked paranoias and obsessions of American conspiracists. Cooper started out as a UFO truther I believe and somehow turned the popularity he got from that into a quasi-libertarian militia movement after Ruby Ridge and Waco

>>16739429
>We'll know our evil plan has succeeded when we've done [horrible thing]
>Mr. Unsourced Quote, 21st of Whenevbuary, 19(XX)
Damning.

>>16739361
>2000 : anybody mentioning mkultra is a tinfoil hat
>2015 : normie news channel make documentaries about it
>2020 : its a pop culture reference on netflix
a lot of things are called "conspiracy theories" until enough time has passed.

>>16739439
>CIA director (1981)
>unsourced quote.

the purpose is to create and spread many conspiracies, filled with both truth and outrageous lies, so that when mass media discards the conspiracy for its obvious bullshit, the masses discard the rest as false. throw the truth into what the masses are programmed to discard, and you buy yourself plenty of time.

>>16739498
>I'm a massive fucking retard
>Butterfly, 2020
Conclusive.

>>16739361
conspiracies go back to antiquity
see Caesar's assassination or any of the others in that time or Renaissance Italy.

>>16739954
>The CIA would never to me!
Are you actually with NSA?