How to Get Our Hopes Up
2021: The Year in Conspiracies
I was hoping 2021 would bring greater government transparency and disclosure on many fronts, but it was not to be. Our passion for truth requires us to hone our skills for finding credible sources of information and following facts to a corroborated reality.
Thanks for caring about this dogged pursuit of truth – I asked for help and there you are! I just need to know if I should continue. Is there any place for journalists like myself, Dan Christensen, Glenn Greenwald, Jeff Morley, Matt Taibbi and others in championing media neutrality?
As a free 2022 subscriber, you will continue to receive neutral, journalistic analysis of controversial subjects. Click the Subscribe button. For paid subscribers, I’m throwing in deep discounts on online Conspiracy Studies and Bigfoot Studies classes. (For every class you sign up for, we’ll send you a free link to another Eventbrite class.) Hit Subscribe if you want me to continue next year!
January: 2021 Was a Riot
Less than a month after Q stopped posting (yes, it’s been one year, two weeks, five days, 22 hours and 54 minutes since Q last posted) there was a riot at the Capitol to protest Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. We suspected that would be the end of QAnon, but apparently not.
“Q is not a single person, but a team of high-ranking persons with ‘Q’ level security clearance, executing operations that have been planned for many years (the plan),” states the webmaster of QAlerts.app. “In short, the Q operation is the greatest criminal sting and anti-treason/sedition event in world history.”
Filmmaker Cullen Hogback set out to determine the identity of Q and released a six-part documentary series, “Q: Into The Storm,” in March. Hoback is liking Ron Watkins, the junior half of the father-son team that took over 8chan (Q’s online outlet of choice) in 2016. Watkins denies he is Q.
What I think is important is QAnon is another rendering of the centuries-old Illuminati/New World Order conspiracy theory. In my lifetime, it harkens back to J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon LaRouche and Dallas Theological Seminary. Not going away any time soon… the “Restore America” roadshow might be bringing the likes of Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne to a megachurch near you in 2022.
The FBI Plot to Kill Dr. King
Sam Pollard released “MLK/FBI”in January, raising some old questions about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The big news from recent declassification was the FBI conducting massive surveillance on King everywhere he traveled, especially his hotel rooms. It all begs the question: why couldn't they stop his murder in Memphis?
Were Hoover's men incompetent or complicit? What was the FBI’s plan when King did not kill himself as demanded by Hoover’s #2, William Sullivan? Why do all of King's closest associates - and his family - still believe James Earl Ray was a patsy? Join us at 6 p.m. Jan. 18 for a new look at that fateful day.
March: COVID cover-ups hotly debated
From the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been competing theories about its origin. The generally accepted narrative is the coronavirus developed in animals and first infected humans at a fish market in Wuhan, China.
Meanwhile, skeptics promoted Donald Trump’s “China Virus” theory (China purposely developed COVID as a bioweapon) and the Globalist theory (elite Americans – Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci – developed COVID to advance the New World Order and profit from the vaccine). This theory includes a globalist plot to inject medical-records microchips into everyone.
In March, former CDC head Robert Redfield told CNN the coronavirus is naturally occurring but might have escaped by accident from a virology lab in Wuhan where scientists were studying it. This “Lab Leak” theory gained traction in August, when Biden’s Intelligence Community investigation ruled out the Chinese bioweapon theory, but indicated some investigators were leaning towards a laboratory accident.
Within weeks, news reports surfaced that government grant money had been used at the Wuhan Institute for Virology for “gain-of-function research,” in which viruses are made more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them. The race is still on to answer the question: Was the outbreak of the coronavirus at a market nine miles from the Wuhan lab just a coincidence?
We’ll be examining the evidence in an online “Covid Cover-ups” class, 6-7:30 p.m. Jan. 25. Join us!
June: The Pentagon UFO Report
The government had another huge opportunity to come clean this year – about its long-term interest in UFOs. On June 25, the Pentagon issued a nine-page unclassified report, required by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Intelligence Authorization Act for FY2021. Momentum had been building since the New York Times reported on the Navy’s almost-secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programin 2017.
The skinny little report was anti-climactic, given the foreplay of Navy pilots talking about a mysterious Tic-Tac-looking object outmaneuvering their F/A-18Fs on 60 Minutes. The government says it doesn’t have a conclusion, mostly due to haphazard reporting procedures, but the pattern we observe is the government telling the public UFOs are a bunch of hooey and then continuing to study reports and develop experimental aircraft in secret.
Some members of Congress are so concerned that UFO issues will be buried at the Pentagon, they’re proposing a civilian Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office that would include input from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, FAA, academia and the scientific community.
August: The Other Kennedy
In August, presumed assassin Sirhan Sirhan was recommended for parole after his 16th appeal before a parole board. He was convicted of killing Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and has served 53 years in jail. Two of Kennedy's surviving sons, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Douglas Kennedy, supported Sirhan's bid for parole.
Bobby Jr. believes his father was shot by Thane Cesar, a rent-a-cop hired at the Ambassador Hotel that fateful summer. Paul Schrade, the campaign aide standing next to RFK in the hotel pantry, favored the parole and insists that Sirhan did not act alone. Sirhan will be free to live with his brother in Los Angeles if California Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn’t reverse or modify the decision in early 2022.
September: On the Bright Side
On Sept. 11, President Biden bowed to pressure from the 9/11Families and Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism – comprising some 1,800 plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit in 2017 – and released previously classified documents regarding possible Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks.
According to former Miami Herald reporter Dan Christensen, the newly declassified FBI records about an FBI investigation called Operation Encore yielded significant new information about a trio of Saudi officials operating inside the U.S. to support al Qaeda and advance the 9/11 plot.
The 9/11 Families group is now demanding that Saudi Arabia produce its internal documents about the trio. The FBI has until Jan. 2 to declassify all interview reports, documents reporting investigative findings or other substantive records (phone and banking records) from the FBI’s initial investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
October: The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories
We started 2021 with the prospect of newly elected President Joe Biden going where Donald Trump feared to tread: releasing thousands of classified documents as required by 1992’s John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. All documents related to the shooting were to be made public 25 years later – Oct. 26, 2017.
That didn't happen, when Trump bowed to CIA concerns about national-security issues and kicked the can four years down the road. On Oct. 26 of this year, Biden followed suit and gave the CIA and FBI another year to look them over.
What are they concerned about releasing after almost 60 years? Jeff Morley, former Washington Post reporter and current editor of JFK Facts.com, is looking for previously withheld information on Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis (Bay of Pigs veterans who later turned up breaking into the Watergate), James Walton Moore (Dallas FBI field office, 1963) and George Joannides (chief of CIA covert action operations in Miami, 1963).
We will drill down on the files in an online class, “Conspiracy Studies: The Last JFK Files,” from 6-7:30 p.m. Feb. 8.
November: Court clears Malcolm X suspects, blames FBI
In November, two of the three men convicted of the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X were exonerated. Muhammad Aziz (Norman 3X Butler) and the late Khalil Islam (Thomas 15X Johnson) had been paroled in the 1980s but never cleared of the charges – until now.
The third suspect, Mujahid Abdul Halim (known as Talmadge Hayer and Thomas Hagan), admitted his guilt but also testified the other two had been falsely accused. A nearly two-year investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's office, triggered by the Netflix documentary Who Killed Malcolm X?, found that the FBI and the New York Police Department withheld key evidence that might have led to their acquittal – the FBI had nine informants in the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was killed and the real assassin might have been one of them.
Up Close and Personal
Also in November, right-wing InfoWars host Alex Jones lost a defamation suit brought by eight families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. A superior court judge found Jones liable by default after he refused to turn over documents (including financial records) ordered by the courts.
Jones, a popular champion of New World Order conspiracy theories, claimed the attack was a "giant hoax" perpetrated to promote gun control. Parents of Sandy Hook victims say they have been harassed ever since, a complaint echoed by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who filed a defamation suit this month against Rudy Giuliani for claiming they engaged in ballot fraud during the 2020 election.
Journalist-turned-journalism professor Amanda Crawford says Sandy Hook was the first major conspiracy theory of the modern social media age. “Before Sandy Hook, popular American conspiracy theories generally villainized shadowy elites or forces within the government,” she wrote for The Conversation. “Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists accused family members of those killed, survivors of the shooting, religious leaders, neighbors and first responders of being part of a government plot.”
So, shall I continue in 2022. Let me know – subscribe to Truthsmack. Sign up for classes on journalistic methods– check out Bigfoot Fridays! Happy New Year!!
