What If the “Crazy” Ones Are Right? - Conspiracy Theories

TL;DR

The "conspiracy theorist" label was invented by the CIA in 1967 to silence critics of the Warren Commission's JFK findings.

Key Points

• 1.CIA Dispatch 1035-960 (1967): Distributed to global CIA field offices, this document instructed agents to contact journalists and opinion leaders to discredit Warren Commission critics by labeling them Communist sympathizers, attention-seekers, and profiteers.
• 2.The label spread broadly: The "conspiracy theorist" smear was deliberately vague enough to be applied far beyond JFK, branding anyone questioning official narratives as paranoid, mentally unwell, or extremist.
• 3.Obama-era cognitive infiltration: Legal scholar Cass Sunstein (Obama's regulatory czar) co-authored a 2008 paper proposing government agents secretly infiltrate conspiracy groups to plant doubts and fracture their unity — echoing the FBI's illegal COINTELPRO program of the 1950s–70s.
• 4.Proven conspiracies show it's real: Watergate (Nixon rigging the 1972 election), Iran-Contra (Reagan officials illegally selling arms), and the Iraq WMD deception prove ruling-class conspiracies occur and are kept secret — sometimes for years.
• 5.Secrets can be kept at scale: The Manhattan Project involved thousands of people across multiple agencies and remained secret until the bomb dropped on Japan, disproving the claim that large conspiracies always get exposed.
• 6.The American founders were "conspiracy theorists": The Declaration of Independence explicitly accused King George of conspiring toward "absolute tyranny," meaning openness to elite conspiracies is historically what motivated the founding of the United States itself.