Ben Bowlin - Stuff They Dont Want You to Know

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The belief in an orchestrated strategy, involving three or more parties working in secret toward some defined goalusually nefarious, always evident through the correct recognition of certain events connected via a larger, obsessively curated narrative.

The observation that some, but not all, conspiracy theories have a partial basis in proven eventsthe realization that, through the use of critical thinking, it is possible to differentiate between fiction and fact.

GATHER ROUND. Lets trade spooky stories. Heres one you may have heard:

Your government is lying to you.

Its true. Its happening right now. As you encounter these words, some part of your livelihood is supporting a war started by powerful people youll never meet, somewhere you will never go, extracting some resource you will never use, calling dibs on some land you will never see.

What can we do?

Its an age-old question in an age-old conflict: the people versus the powerful. The faceless many versus the shadowy few. No matter a governments size or structure, power inevitably becomes concentrated in the hands of a few decision-makers. Throughout history this fact has given rise to storiessome true, many falseof secretive, unaccountable factions that manipulate the levers of power to their own advantage.

As the world has grown smaller and more connected, the imagined reach of these shadowy cabals has grown. Today they guide global politics and media. They steer the economy both domestically and abroad. Their minions, groomed in exclusive, elite institutions all over the world, ply their trade in cloakrooms and country clubs and hunting lodges and private jets at 51,000 feet. They assume any number of names and labelsthe Zoroastrians, the Knickerbockers, the Kabbalists, the Bilderbergs, the Globalists, the Illuminati, or, simply, Old Money. And it doesnt stop there. According to countless stories shared on social media platforms, these elites also worship Satan. They traffic in children. They even cannibalize their victims, so that they can harvest adrenochrome from their blood, a chemical purported to have life-extending properties. Why? So that they might live foreverpresumably as our immortal overlords.

In 2015, one story goes, rogue patriots within the American military leadership recruited a New York businessman named Donald Trump for his second shot at the presidency. Trump was the only guy who could drain the swamp that is the US government of its corruption. He would root out, unmask, and punish these sinister elites, purifying the political world in advance of a reckoning called The Storm. After Trumps surprising election in 2016, the sinister elites fought back. Pulling the puppet strings of society from their privileged positions within journalism, academia, Big Tech, and the Deep State, they formed a conspiracy of their own, with the goal of stealing the 2020 election from President Trump. So desperate were they to eliminate the single greatest threat to their safety, anonymity, and quest for control, they took extraordinary measures. Their Trojan horse: the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the core claim of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

If it doesnt ring a bell, congratulations. You have avoided the worst corners of the internet, talk radio, and cable news since 2017, when the initial details of the most recent elite plan for world domination came to light. This conspiracy theory took wing on internet forums like 4chan, where an anonymous poster (or posters) writing under the moniker Q looked out on the informational landscape and saw something that defied a commonsense explanation. All these mainstream, primarily liberal, factions of society were angrily and universally arrayed in opposition to Donald Trumps administration. It was, Q thought, too coordinated. Something else had to be going on. Something nefarious.

When we consider the bigger picture, its no surprise a conspiracy theory like this would arise in the United States. The country itself is, after all, a child of conspiracya nation founded thanks to a successful conspiracy against British rule. Today residents of the US call those original lawmakers the Founding Fathers, but the European monarchies of their day called them conspirators and traitors.

All of which is to say that the United States is no stranger to the language of conspiracy. And it has become increasingly fluent over the last one hundred years as its government has shown itself, again and again, to be worthy of skepticism and mistrust. This is what has made QAnon and countless other conspiracy theories, a number of which we will cover in this book, so believable to so many. Their central claims of government malfeasance can often be traced back to some sort of true historical antecedent.

The highest levels of American government have been filled with people from elite institutions who were sometimes also members of secret societies. Government agencies have performed unethical experiments on people without their consent and surreptitiously exposed people to biowarfare tests. Uncle Sam has waged war under false pretenses. The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted covert surveillance campaigns. Multiple administrations have hidden informationabout UFOs, advanced weapons systems, imminent threats, and conflicting financial interests that may impact policy decisions. The governments of the world do operate clandestine programs from secret locations. They have spread propaganda at home and abroad. Government officials across the planet have engaged in unethical lobbying practices and backroom horse-trading in pursuit of personal agendas that didnt necessarily align with the interests of their constituencies. The United States of America has overthrown sovereign governments. They have inserted themselves into the global narcotics trade to launder the money and traffic the weapons needed to achieve those aims.

These disturbing facts provide fertile soil for increasingly bizarre speculation, complicated by the current confusion surrounding the term conspiracy theory. In casual conversation, people often use the word theory as a way of articulating a hunch based on previous experiences or beliefs. This falls far short of the more rigorous, scientific definition of a theory. In the world of science, a theory is a carefully reasoned explanation for observations in the natural world, and this explanation is constructed using the scientific method, bringing to bear multiple facts and hypotheses. Scientific theories play a fundamental role in how we regard and understand the world around us. Evolution, relativity, and heliocentricity are all examples of scientific theory and nowhere as easy to dismiss as, say, the conspiracy theory that half-human reptilian aliens rule human civilization. While the vast majority of the worlds population agrees scientific theories are largely sound, people often dismiss a conspiracy theory out of hand, simply because of the term applied to what it describes.