In fulfillment of a promise made to a friend to review a recent news link, I hereby present some remarks upon both the link and the underlying FBI document which engendered this news, “Anti-Government, Identity Based, and Fringe Political Conspiracy Theories Very Likely Motivate Some Domestic Extremists to Commit Criminal, Sometimes Violent Activity“.
- What the FBI Doc Says
- What the Yahoo! News Article Says
- What It Means
- The Message Is The Menace
- Why Conspiracy No Longer Matters
Summary of FBI Document
Though the FBI ‘Intelligence Bulletin’ which found its way to Scribd in a scrubbed, unclassified form has a lot of words, the document consists of five pages of (often repetitive) assertions, one (mostly blank) page of cryptic reference to ‘Intelligence Requirements’, five pages of appendices (of which three are hidden polemic definitions of conspiracy theory and two are boilerplate FBI verbiage about NPC Random Encounter tables—sorry, I meant confidence assessments), three pages of footnotes (which are fun and frustrating to read), and one page at the end which is a Customer Survey form. Sheesh.
Leaving aside the appendices, etc., as well as the examples given, the FBI doc presents the following argument:
- Conspiracy Theory makes people do crimes
- Conspiracy Theory gives people targets
- Conspiracy Theories will keep coming
CAVEAT: If crimes don’t happen, then never mind
On the other hand: Maybe it’s just extremist ideology makin’ people do crimes.
But … nah. Conspiracy Theories play a big part in, and amplify extremist ideology.
And … that’s it. That’s the entirety of the argument presented by this ‘Intelligence Bulletin’ which was apparently over four years in the making.
More below on the FBI document, but now let’s turn to the Yahoo! [ugh] News article….
Summary of News Article
Performing both exegesis and reportage, the Yahoo! News article by Jana Winter can be rendered thusly in Cliff Notes fashion:
- FBI says Conspiracy Theory is “domestic terrorist threat”
- FBI mentions QAnon, President Trump
- FBI says real conspiracies or cover-ups could increase threat
- (though the FBI doesn’t specify which cover-ups it refers to)
- FBI now splits Domestic Terrorism thusly:
- Race Motivated Violent Extremism
- Anti-Government/Anti-Authority Extremism
- Animal Rights/Environmental Extremism
- Abortion Extremism
- FBI sees Conspiracy Theory as part of Anti-Gov/Authority Extremism
- An Expert “raised doubts” about the memo, questioning FBI’s assumption that ideology rather than mental illness drives violence
- FBI identifying Conspiracy Theory as threat could be problematic, because Trump
- Another expert says no evidence Conspiracy Theories are more prevalent now
- Yet another expert classifies the FBI memo as continuing “radicalization analysis” it uses on ISIS, etc.
- And one more expert says the radicalization theory is “bogus”, just an excuse for mass surveillance, and that the FBI is paranoid
- Back to ‘yet another expert’ (from #10) who says none of this matters, since under the Trump administration the Department of Homeland Security got rid of all the analysts looking at domestic terrorism
So What Does All This Mean?
Not much.
This is just a tempest in a teapot. Or—since we no longer use teapots—a cyclone in a Keurig® K-Cup®. The verbiage of the FBI document is so deadening and repetitive as to be almost devoid of meaning, and it is very difficult to see how any of the information in the memo could be used to detect or foil any actual domestic terrorist threat. For this reason, the biggest news here was the list of examples the unknown FBI agent used to support his labored and meaningless contentions. So it is apparently news now that some nutjob was planning to drive to Illinois last December to blow up a satanic temple monument at that state’s capitol building in order to raise awareness of Pizzagate.
The reality is that the FBI has a difficult time defining domestic terrorism (there is no official law or definition), let alone swimming in the murky waters of conspiracy theory. And the author of the Intelligence Bulletin is no Fox Mulder. He (c’mon—you know this was written by a “he”) learned about conspiracy theories the way most people do, through Wikipedia, Snopes, and those books and white papers some professor gave us as assigned reading. Like most assigned reading, the agent skimmed lightly and grabbed the topic sentences from the introductions. The unfortunate fact is that domestic terrorism is defined after it happens, and this FBI memorandum is ‘leading from behind’, identifying this potential threat based on statements from people who committed or attempted to commit violent crimes, either in jailhouse interviews or in their manifestos or social media leading up to the event.
For this reason the FBI document presents its case that Conspiracy Theories “very likely motivate some domestic extremists … to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity” with the following huge caveat:
One key assumption driving these assessments is that certain conspiracy theory narratives tacitly support or legitimize violent action. The FBI also assumes some, but not all individuals or domestic extremists who hold such beliefs will act on them. The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts. Indicators that may lead to revised judgements or cause a change in the confidence level associated with this assessment include a lack of conspiracy theory-driven criminal or violent activity in the near to long term or significant efforts by major social media companies and websites to remove, regulate, or counter potentially harmful conspiratorial content.
The caveats at the end of this quote read like the ‘cover-your-ass’ statements in SEC filings. “If what we say will happen doesn’t happen, this changes what we said would happen.” Also of note is the slightly ominous shifting of blame for domestic terror to the social media companies who apparently could stop the madness if they would just stop the flow of these dangerous ideas. Good luck with that.
As the Yahoo! News article points out, the FBI has been having a tough time trying to categorize the potential threats from homegrown violent extremists, and this memo is likely just another attempt to get a handle on an obvious problem of which ‘none dare speak its name’. But again, not much smoke here, and even less fire.
The Message Is The Menace
But there is a huge problem here, hidden in plain sight (just like most conspiracy theories, once you know how to look). The FBI document and the news article based upon that memo are just two sides of the same debased coin. This little kerfuffle in a K-Cup® is perhaps emblematic of the effects of a sort of Gresham’s Law working in the marketplace of ideas. A deadening of thought and insight is visible in the moribund bureaucracy of the FBI as well as in the formulaic news generated from the mediocre memo.
The Secrecy is a Symptom of the Same Disease
Each paragraph, heading, and footnote of the FBI ‘Intelligence Bulletin’ is labeled with a classification marker, meaning that each of those items starts off with either (U), (U//LES), or (U//FOUO). The designation ‘(U)’ simply means ‘Unclassified’. The first paragraph of the document (after the title, which is marked ‘(U//LES)’ is marked as Unclassified, and defines the ‘(U//LES)’ designation thusly:
(U) LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE: The information marked (U//LES) in this document is the property of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and may be distributed within the federal government (and its contractors), U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, public safety or protection officials, and individuals with a need to know. Distribution beyond these entities without FBI authorization is prohibited. Precautions should be taken to ensure this information is stored and/or destroyed in a manner that precludes unauthorized access. Information bearing the LES caveat may not be used in legal proceedings without first receiving authorization from the originating agency. Recipients are prohibited from subsequently posting the information marked LES on a website on an unclassified network without obtaining FBI approval.
Sigh. So we have an implicit Intellectual Property claim being staked out here, just like that email you got from your cable company who claims each communication is copyrighted and cannot be copied or shared. Where does the madness end? The designation ‘(U//FOUO)’ is not defined in the document itself, but means ‘Unclassified – For Official Use Only’. This originated with the Department of Defense, who sought to use this designation to prevent such labeled material from being released under the Freedom of Information Act. Double sigh.
So, having established that I am prohibited from looking at most of the meat of the memorandum (since only a few items besides footnotes are marked with the simple ‘(U)’—a few headers and mention of Sandy Hook, Cosmic Pizza, and two other crimes), we find further secrecy-induced information necrosis when we peruse the footnotes. Almost all proper names are redacted from the information given therein, although in most cases anyone with halfway decent Web search skills can fill in most of the blanks. We’re not talking only ‘Names have been changed to protect the innocent’ here; a Tucson Police Department posting on Facebook is given as
https://www.[Name withheld].com/TucsonPoliceDepartment/posts/10155545208458531 where “[Name withheld]” is “Facebook”. Similarly, a Twitter tweet is referenced in the FBI footnotes as https://www.[Names withheld] status/1086090064323440640 where “[Names withheld]” elides “twitter.com/VopReal/” (also note there’s a bogus space between the redaction and the next word of the URL, ‘status’).*
The obvious question is who this information is being protected from, and the answer seems to be the people, the citizens of the United States. Contractors have access, and other police agencies. Doubtless one of these or somesuch made this document available to the reporter who broke the story, as is revealed by the Survey Form at the end of the document. We’ve all seen this form in one guise or another: the recipient is asked to rate on the ‘Very Satisfied-Very Dissatisfied’ scale the ‘Product’s overall usefulness’, the ‘Products relevance to your mission’, the ‘Product’s timeliness’, and the ‘Product’s responsiveness to your intelligence needs’. Check boxes are provided to show ‘How do you plan to use this product in support of your mission?’ and a couple of text boxes allow the recipient to describe how ‘the product’ adds ‘value to your mission’ and how the product could be improved. Naturally, each question is designated ‘(U//FOUO)’.
Thus any actual information in this or any similar report is hedged in with so many codicils, parenthetical statements, caveats, and mind-numbing feats of bureaucratic legerdemain as to be useless once it is promulgated, except to ‘add value to your mission’—whatever that crap may mean.
Then again, all the secrecy and attempts to hide what little information may exist here simply feeds the very desire to be among the cognoscenti that drives much of conspiracy narratives. Thus the opening pages of The Andromeda Strain are gripping not due to their deathless prose, but because they are portrayed as part of a Top Secret document in which ‘Courier should be notified immediately of any missing pages’, grabbing the reader by promising to show the hidden truth behind events. Similarly, the opening chapter from one of the old conspiracy theory canonical texts, Milton Willam Cooper’s Behold A Pale Horse, purports to be taken directly from a Top Secret document smuggled out to true patriots, detailing how Operations Research methods were being used to manipulate the populace into doing just what the power elites desired. (It’s B.S., by the way. But you already knew that.) Labeling a menu as “For Official Use Only” just feeds a mindset in which all knowledge is the secret property of a select few, the Geheimnisträger who carry the woeful burden of the truth in all its secrecy.
The Medium is The Mediocrity
The Yahoo! News article is mired in its own habitual performative tropes, from choosing a few choice nuggets of meat-like product from a document that is mostly gristle, to throwing experts at the problem. Along the way the particles of news atoms are stirred to high heat, hoping the the resultant Brownian motion will suffice to trigger trending in social media (which it did, and here we are).
To make the already-too-long a little shorter, I’ll note that the first expert consulted, David Garrow, is said to have “raised doubts” about the FBI document. The reporter goes on to say that Mr. Garrow was questioning the FBI’s assumption that ideology drives violence rather than mental illness, but the term “raised doubts” connotes something quite different when discussing conspiracy theories. To raise doubts “about the memo” implies that the memo is somehow counterfeit, suspicious, or a hoax. Why did not Jana Winter simply say that the expert ‘questioned the assessment’ of the document?
Indeed, the dichotomy between ideology and insanity exposes that all our base are belong to someone else. Certainly this past weekend makes many suspicious of one half of that contrast pair (take your pick). And the FBI’s insistence that something other than madness makes Americans commit seemingly mad acts points out both the difficult place that Bureau finds itself in as well as the bizarre word-salad we must consume every day now. For the reality is that concepts such as ‘mental illness’ or ‘extremism’ are simply placeholders for a society to label anything that doesn’t accord to societal norms; but nowadays norms have been thrown out with the baby, along with the idea that facts exist, that words have meaning, and that value is something beyond what a product adds to a corporate entity’s ‘mission’. In the midst of the apocalyptic devastation of truth, justice, and the American Way—along with any other ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’—the once respectable though minor place of Conspiracy Theories among the shrines of Wacko has been made null and void, and Conspiracy, like every-damn-thing else, no longer means anything anymore.
Why Conspiracy No Longer Matters
Though it is difficult to precisely define Conspiracy Theory (and it is really a fool’s game, as today’s sneered-at ‘Theory’ becomes tomorrow’s history when the CIA finally confirms that, yes, they did dose one of their scientists with LSD, just that one time), it is obvious from historical examples that yes, conspiracy ideas can drive some people to violent acts. Besides the obvious Cosmic Pizza instance referenced by the FBI memo, the couple responsible for the 2014 Las Vegas shootings that ended in Wal-Mart followed the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theory, along with the Bundys. (It’s sad we now have to specify which Las Vegas shooting we mean.) Both the Unabomber and the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik espoused conspiracy ideas in their respective manifestos (though parts of Breivik’s are plagiarized from Kaczynski). Do we include Blood Libel tales as a conspiracy theory? If so, there are numerous instances—as recently as the notorious Damascus case in 1840—of Jews being murdered for this idea. Certainly the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a Conspiracy Theory—perhaps even The Conspiracy Theory of the Modern Age—and though it is difficult to exactly ascribe this pogrom or that massacre specifically to the Protocols, that vicious forgery certainly played a large part.
Often, however, it is authority itself which has used Conspiracy Theory of one stripe or another to justify its own violence and murder. For every actual Gunpowder Plot (though even there you get into weeds of doubt) you will find a Titus Oates and the Popish Plot, which imaginary conspiracy against the king led to the executions of over a dozen innocents. Darius the Great posited a pretender on the Persian throne to justify his own rebellion against the rightful king he denigrated as the ‘false Smerdis’. During the French Revolution the changing parties in power used Conspiracy Theory ideas over and over again to justify eliminating each successive wave of rivals until, on a fateful day in Thermidor, the rivals were all used up and the Jacobins—Conspiracy Theorists par excellence—were themselves accused of being malicious plotters and were eliminated in their turn. And how many Romans were executed because the emperor feared falsely that they were plotting to kill him?
Belief in Conspiracy Theory does not inevitably lead to violent acts, of course. Its effects can range from mild dislocation from factual bases of understanding to the creation of political movements, such as Boss Weed’s Anti-Masonic party inspired by the supposed murder of Captain Morgan by Freemasons, or the Know Nothing movement founded on a belief in a Romanist conspiracy to undercut traditional American values. Many people believe some sort of conspiracy hides behind the murder of John F. Kennedy, yet few if any of these people commit any untoward acts.
How far such beliefs may move a person towards madness is itself a fraught question. Delia Bacon’s belief that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare turned into a monomania that led her to England where she eventually haunted the tomb of The Bard, seeking to dig up his grave for evidence she was convinced lay interred there. Philip K. Dick’s delightful Confessions Of A Crap Artist portrays the gentle insanity of a group of UFO True Believers in the 1950s. And can anything but some mental disarrangement explain why so many teenagers spent hours searching The Beatles’ pictures, albums, songs, and lyric sheets to uncover evidence of the ‘Paul Is Dead’ theory?
On the other hand, Conspiracy Theory beliefs have been manipulated from time immemorial by those with their own, sometimes hidden, agendas. Besides the use Darius made of a ludicrous replacement of King Cambyses by Smerdis, recent history shows so very many cases where the Plot is a tool to be used by another’s hands. We have learned that the Seth Rich murder plot alleged against Hillary Clinton has its own Russian origins, for example. The Russians themselves have been played, however, as when Reinhard Heydrich used one Soviet general’s query about becoming a spy for the Nazis to cast suspicion in Stalin’s mind against his entire general staff, leading to the Generals’ Purge and the destruction of Russia’s top military ranks in the years heading towards the Great Patriotic War. Though the origins of ‘Red Mercury’ are still in some doubt, the bogus material has been sold by conmen in the Middle East for fantastic sums, and there are surely more buyers for this fictional fissile shortcut. On a more prosaic note, how much money has been raised by declaiming fears that “They’re coming for your guns”—either in direct donations to the NRA and its ilk or in purchases of a few more dozen for your stockpile?
One should not believe that Conspiracy Theory is solely a madness of the Right; there is no evidence for that idea, as the case of the French Revolution clearly proves. Persons purporting to be most liberal are among the strongest supporters of Anti-Vaxxer ideas which clearly shade into Conspiracy Theory, especially when the idea of a cover-up is broached. Similarly, believers in the MJ-12 documents or the Thane Cesar theory tend to be anti-authoritarians of a leftist bent, when they espouse any aspect of that political dichotomy. And I daren’t look even glancingly at some of the conspiracy ideas surrounding the downfall of Bill Cosby or O.J. Simpson.
But, as I said, none of this matters. Because Conspiracy Theory doesn’t matter anymore. Once this was a field for monomaniacs and researchers manqués, but no more. The heyday of Conspiracy Theory is over, its febrile sun sunk with the other stars in the disappearing heavens of the Enlightenment and the Modern Age. There were giants in this field: Augustin Barruel, Mae Brussel, Jim Keith, Mark Lane, Bob Lazar. A single sentence in Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy And Hope could spawn a hundred articles and books. The works ranged from Fletcher Prouty’s The Secret Team and Carl Oglesby’s The Yankee and Cowboy War to Nesta Webster’s The French Revolution and A. Ralph Epperson’s The Unseen Hand. Self-appointed ‘researchers’ gathered every scrap of evidence they could find, read every book pro and con, and cross-referenced each mention of each person, place, or thing in obscenely detailed files. (Mae Brussel started out by ordering the full version of the Warren Commission’s report, creating an index for the whole thing (which the Report didn’t have), and ended with labyrinthine shelves and shelves of files all cross-referenced, when she was given cancer (according to some).) Studying secret societies were brilliant academics like J.M. Roberts and René Le Forestier as well as hacks like Akron Daraul (pseudonym of Idries Shah) and Michael Baigent.
But none of that matters. Because nothing matters anymore.
To call QAnon a Conspiracy Theory is like calling Dutch Schultz’s last words a Bible concordance. You can call it anything you like, but unless you are a genius junkie wife killer, you probably make of it nothing more than what you start with, which is gibberish.
Go ahead. Go and watch the lady with her ‘What Is Q?’ video from her car. There is a tangled mess around conspiracy, religion, magic, the mind, etc. But “Q” ain’t it. The … what word to use? … noodlers in Q could no more do real Conspiracy Theory than the idiots who steal Amazon packages containing epsom salts could pull off an Ocean’s Eleven ‘caper’. Even criminals are debased in our current age.
And yet it just doesn’t matter. Not because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk cause they’ve got all the money (though that’s still true), but because apparently people can now just say whatever they want and then say that those words mean the opposite, or mean something somehow orthogonal to that, or mean any ol’ damn thing they say they mean, and that’s where we’re at. Hell, at least the aptly named Holocaust denier Arthur Butz put in the effort to cherry-pick self-serving statements from a Nazi facing the noose to use as bullshit evidence in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Nowadays apparently “evidence” means “someone said so” or even “I say that someone said so” or “I saw it on TV, all those Muslims celebrating when the Twin Towers fell”. Ugh. And it does not matter. No matter how many times a young boy or whoever points out that the kings heinie is completely exposed along with everything else, nothing changes.
Thus the FBI memo (thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?) can lay out a Wiki-garnered list of Conspiracy Theories, mixing such apples and oranges as New World Order and False Flags, while the news can focus on the fact that “President Trump is mentioned by name briefly” (and then quotes the memo which makes the mention only in the context of the QAnon crap cribbed from Snopes in the FBI document). And at no time do either the FBI or the news make the obvious correspondence between The Donald and what passes for Conspiracy Theory now: stupidity and fact-free thinking are all the rage. Truth, as MC 900 Ft. Jesus warned us, is out of style.
So sure, the FBI can alert LEOs and contractors about the possible potential sometimes maybe danger that Conspiracy Theory may pose, and the media can plague the DOJ about its language when it talks about the terrorism which “must not be named” (or at least defined). But none of this will make a bit of difference until something fundamental changes. In the marketplace of ideas, the currency of truth has been completely withdrawn from circulation, and the debased counterfeit that is left is being passed from hand to hand like junk bonds being traded by overly talkative coke-fueled wheelers and dealers before the crash.
So we’re likely to have more nonsense like Jade Helm 15, where the Texas Governor and a U.S. Senator (aka The Zodiac Killer) publicly expressed concern about the supposed attempt by the United States military to invade Texas, using Walmart stores to stockpile guns for use by Chinese soldiers with orders to disarm Americans. And crumbs from “Q”, who is likely a crumb himself, if not a крошка.
Footnote
* Pro Tip: You can find any Twitter status given just the ID value at the end; just replace the unknown twitter handle with a known twitter name and it will automatically resolve to the correct handle. Thus, if you know a status ID of “1149818855537070080”, you can just use https://twitter.com/twitter/status/1149818855537070080 and the tweet will come up (unless it’s been deleted since).