by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
I’d recently mentioned that although I’ve encountered a multitude of so-called “conspiracy theories” on the Internet over the years, I’ve concluded that around 90-95% of them were false or at least unsubstantiated. However, the residual 5-10% were sufficiently well-documented and important that they had served as the basis for the lengthy American Pravda series I’d produced over the last decade, now numbering many dozens of articles and totaling well over a half-million words.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Unfortunately, the vast profusion of exciting but incorrect theories can often lead people astray. Sometimes a mainstream individual is so shocked to discover the reality of one or two stories he’d always seen dismissed by the media that he loses his bearings and begins carelessly swallowing many others as well, failing to properly separate the wheat from the chaff.
Consider the case of Tucker Carlson, who for many years had been host of the most popular news show on television. A few months before he was purged from FoxNews, he declared to his national audience that JFK had probably been killed in a conspiracy that very likely involved elements of the CIA, a segment that attracted millions of viewers on his regular live broadcast and additional millions on Youtube.
This led Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a scion of the Kennedy family and the slain President’s own nephew, to praise Carlson for the most courageous television broadcast in the last sixty years.
The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered. @TuckerCarlson https://t.co/qJ1sUdhe4t
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) December 17, 2022
So far, so good. Although people might still hotly dispute many of the details, the “JFK Conspiracy” has been massively documented over the decades, including by scholars and journalists of the highest reputation. But generations of a near-total media blockade meant that Carlson’s show probably reached more Americans with those important facts than anything since Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film was playing in the theaters more than thirty years ago.
Unfortunately, Carlson later followed up that bold triumph by doing several segments on alleged space-aliens, endorsing the claims that UFOs had been captured and secretly hidden for many years by the American government, which then used the advanced alien technology to develop some of our leading military weaponry. Or at least that’s what I think he said, since I never watched any of that ridiculous nonsense, which was also widely promoted by other FoxNews hosts and apparently turned out to be based upon the revelations of a single government “whistleblower” with a history of psychiatric problems. The story provoked a flurry of media headlines, then quickly disappeared.
Decades of massive, detailed research by top experts should not be put in the same category as Alex Jones-type conspiracy-nonsense, and the former stories can be discredited by their association with the latter. Perhaps this might even be the nefarious purpose of promoting such disreputable leaks.
