Grand conspiracy theories/claims/ideology

Post Reply New Topic

This is one conspiracy theory I still believe in; of the 3 people who were assassinated in the 60s (JFK, Bobby Kennedy & MLK) JFK was very anti-communist but was against escalation of the vietnam war, Bobby Kennedy and MLK were openly anti vietnam war. The theory was that there was a group comprised of people and companies that advocated a direct conflict with communist insurgency and stood to gain monetarily by supplying a military engaged in a war (hence the old adage that war is good for business) that had them killed.

By "grand conspiracy theories" or "grand conspiracy ideology," I mean the idea that some centuries-old or even millenia-old shadowy organized elite group has more-or-less complete control over world events and is able to plan them out, in detail, decades or even centuries in advance.

In real life, organized elite groups do exist, and they often do steer government policies in their preferred directions, e.g. via lobbying. But the kinds of control that are commonly alleged in grand conspiracy theories, e.g. control of the timing and outcomes of major wars, and of a wide variety of longterm demographic and cultural trends, all planned decades or even centuries in advance, all toward some unified nefarious goal, are probably not humanly possible.

Grand conspiracy theories are a subset of "conspiracy theories." Real-life conspiracies do exist, and a theory about a conspiracy is not necessarily false. Some such theories are more credible than others. But grand conspiracy theories are highly unlikely to be true.

Not only are they highly unlikely to be true, but they have a very bad history of being used to scapegoat innocent -- and often non-elite -- people.

Perhaps the most notorious example is the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which scapegoated an alleged world-ruling conspiracy of Jews. It also scapegoated the democratic movements in Czarist Russia, by alleging that those movements were part of an evil Jewish plot to weaken Russia.

Another example is the many conspiracy theories about "the Illuminati."

Back in the late 1700's, in Bavaria, there really was a secretive group of atheists and anarchists who called themselves "the Illuminati," and who had to be secretive because they didn't have freedom of speech back then. But they were soon suppressed by the Bavarian government. And, as far as I am aware, there is no historical evidence that the organization survived. Yet there were folks who alleged that the Illuminati not only survived but were the evil secret masterminds behind the French Revolution.

Fear of "the Illuminati" spread across the Atlantic, where, in the newly-formed U.S.A., under the presidency of John Adams, fear of "the Illuminati" inspired the Alien and Sedition Acts. See the following pages about this:

- Illuminating Conspiracy: Demonology is a long-established if little known political tradition in the United States by S. Jonathon O’Donnell, published in History Today Volume 70, Issue 12, December 2020.
- Chapter 9, Jefferson's New Revolution, in American History told by Contemporaries by Dan Allosso

If you read these articles, notice how the late-1700's fears of "the Illuminati" are strikingly similar to today's right wing moral panics.

Around 1960 or so, fear of "the Illuminati" was revived by the John Birch Society.

In the 1970's, fear of "Satanic cults" became a big thing among both Protestant evangelicals/fundamentalists and conservative Catholics, especially among charismatics. Much of this fear was inspired by books that were eventually, much later, exposed as hoaxes/frauds, such as The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke, 1972, and Michelle Remembers by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder, 1980.

A full-blown "Satanic ritual abuse" scare emerged in the 1980's, resulting in lots of probably-innocent child care center workers being sent to prison, and also resulting in lots of families being torn apart by alleged "recovered memories." For more about this, see the following threads:

- "Satanic ritual abuse" grand conspiracy claims
- QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic

The "Satanic ritual abuse" scare died down in 1995 or so, but fringe "conspiracy theorists" have been trying to revive it ever since. Alas, it has gradually become more and more popular again. The most popular recent variant is QAnon.

In what ways do you believe the DoD was involved, besides what is discussed on the following page?

- Department of Defense Contributions to the U.S. Covid-19 Response, at Home and Abroad by Thomas Cullison and J. Stephen Morrison, Center for Strategic & International Studies, December 16, 2021.

Epidemiology and immunology are among the most-mature and best-organized branches of medical science. I'm inclined to believe that epidemiologists and immunologists know what they are doing.

Anyhow, some of the issues mentioned in some of those papers are discussed on the following page of the CDC site: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccine Safety.

Two specific rare but scary side-effects, myocarditis and pericarditis, are also discussed on the CDC site here: Clinical Considerations: Myocarditis and Pericarditis after Receipt of COVID-19 Vaccines Among Adolescents and Young Adults. But it should also be noted that myocarditis is much more likely to be a symptom of COVID-19 itself and can even be a (rare) symptom of the common cold.

By "grand conspiracy theories" or "grand conspiracy ideology," I mean the idea that some centuries-old or even millenia-old shadowy organized elite group has more-or-less complete control over world events and is able to plan them out, in detail, decades or even centuries in advance.

The evidence I’ve seen indicates that the US DoD were basically running the pandemic response (in the US and quite likely in allied countries too), not merely giving logistical support,

The US military has a long and highly distinguished record of developing effective vaccines against pathogens that threaten the armed forces. Many of these vaccines have also been of significant benefit to civilian populations around the world. The current requirements for force protection include vaccines against endemic disease threats as well as against biological warfare or bioterrorism agents, to include novel or genetically engineered threats.

and that it was the DoD’s idea to use mRNA vaccines,

and that Pfizer and Moderna were just acting as fronts.

The world-renowned cardiologist Peter McCullough gave a talk in which he explained that DARPA had drawn up plans back in 2011 that when the next ‘global pandemic’ occurred, they’d combat it using mRNA vaccines. DARPA explained this in a booklet that is still available online here: https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/ADEPT ... eFINAL.pdf

More recently, the Dutch Health Minister Fleur Agema revealed that during the pandemic response in her country, they were basically taking orders from NATO. By the way, this might help explain why the pandemic response in Sweden (not a NATO country at the time) was so different to other countries in Western Europe.

Also recently, there has been a huge leak of internal emails and documents from the RKI (Robert Koch Institute) in Germany. This leak has recently been admitted as evidence in a court case, and it has also caused Health Minister Lauterbach to reverse his previous position and admit that covid experts in Germany were politically influenced. See https://rumble.com/v5nwqzt-the-rki-leak ... -scam.html

One interesting quote from the leak from September 2020 said that “an approval of the mRNA vaccine by the FDA before US elections is not desirable. The same holds true for European authorities”.

So, basically, the ‘powers that be’ decided very early on in the pandemic that they were going to embark on a mass vaccination campaign, and they weren’t going to let anything stand in their way (after which they would no doubt pump out propaganda about how the vaccines had saved us all). Yet at the same time, they were prepared to delay the vaccine rollout until after the US elections,

which is just further evidence that the ‘pandemic response’ was about politics and not about health.

There are loads of medical scientists and doctors who have been trying to inform people during the past 3 or 4 years that almost everything about the official covid narrative was nonsense (this includes people who initially believed ‘the narrative’ until the evidence against it became too much or ignore). Although these people are still in the minority, I am actually more inclined to believe these people since firstly, there ARE a lot of them, and secondly, these people have risked media vilification, censorship, and harm to their careers and livelihoods for speaking out. In addition, some of what these people have been saying chimes with my own personal observations.

Of course, if you haven’t properly looked into any of this, you might think that all ‘covid narrative scepticism’ originates with the so-called ’12 covid misinformation superspreaders’ (including RFK Jr) plus a few anonymous people on Bitchute talking about ‘nanobots’.

Most of the below applies both to the UK and to the US.

1. In the UK, as in the US, in March 2020, the pandemic preparation plans that had been in place for years were scrapped in favour of total lockdowns.

The Great Barrington Declaration (in which several medical professionals advised against lockdowns) was ignore. Ss the first lockdown was starting, the public was told that it would only last a few weeks – which soon turned out to be rubbish.

2. Then there were claims made my coroners, nurses and concerned relatives that some of the recently deceased were being counted as ‘covid deaths’ when they clearly were not. I actually observed this happen with someone I knew.

3. Then there were claims made by whistleblowers that large numbers of covid deaths in hospitals and care homes were actually being caused by hospital protocols (midazolam plus morphine in the UK, remdesivir in the US, and ventilators in both countries).

CLAIM: A new study found that ventilators were responsible for nearly all COVID-19 patient deaths.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: Misleading. The study being referenced found that a secondary pneumonia associated with mechanical ventilation contributes to a patient’s death when it doesn’t respond to treatment. But a study author said that the patients placed on a ventilator would have died without that intervention, and that COVID-19 is still the primary cause of death.

[...]

Ventilator-associated pneumonia, as it’s called, is a known issue in the field, and not COVID-19 specific: A patient’s lungs aren’t operating normally, Singer said, and a tube in the windpipe presents an opening for bacteria.

But it’s a mischaracterization to say that the ventilators are responsible for the deaths, Singer said, likening the circumstances to a patient in a severe car crash who dies despite surgery attempts; it’s the car crash that’s ultimately the cause of death.

The misrepresentation appears to stem from a lack of understanding about the clinical decision-making when it comes to ventilators, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who was not involved with the study.

“We don’t put people on mechanical ventilators lightly,” Adalja said, adding that ventilators are used as a life-saving measure for patients in respiratory failure.

Singer agreed.

“These are all patients who would have died if they had not been put up on a mechanical ventilator,” Singer said. “You can’t be at risk for a ventilator secondary pneumonia if you’re dead.”

4. Then, after the initial spike in covid deaths (that had been over-inflated as explained above), the PCR test for covid was introduced, and the public was kept fearful with daily updates about the number of ‘covid cases’ nationwide. This is despite the fact that the tests were (in an unprecedented move) being routinely given to people without any symptoms, and that a positive PCR test in itself says nothing about whether or not a person is ill (as Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR technique, himself once explained).

5. Meanwhile, early treatments were being suppressed for people who actually did get ill with covid. Yes, this included ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. No, ivermectin is not just a ‘horse dewormer’. It’s a Nobel Prize winning multi-purpose drug with a proven safety record that had been approved for use for humans years earlier.

Usually, doctors in the US would be allowed to try using such a provably safe drug to treat a condition in the absence of any alternatives. But no, ivermectin had to be attacked and discredited as a treatment so that Emergency Use Authorisation for the vaccines could be rushed through.

6. So, in late 2020 / early 2021, we were told that vaccines were “our only way out of the pandemic”, and that everyone had to get vaccinated. This was despite the fact that the majority of people had probably already been infected and gained natural immunity (at least against the strain the vaccine supposedly protected against). But this concept that was just ignored.

7. Then, soon after the vaccines were administered, it became clear to people they didn’t stop people catching covid.

The authorities even admitted they likely didn’t stop people spreading it either. Over time, reports in the media about the Pfizer vaccine went from claiming it was about 95% effective until eventually the estimate dropped down to about 30%.

8. Also, following the introduction of the vaccines, insurance companies report a large uptick in death and disability in 2021 and 2022 among working age people (not even talking about elderly people now).

Meanwhile, the media pump out loads of articles about all the ridiculous things that can supposedly cause heart attacks (like taking paracetamol, drinking sports drinks, and shoveling snow – anything but the covid vaccines).



Yes, I am aware that myocarditis can be a symptom of covid and of the common cold.

But when you say that myocarditis is “much more likely to be a symptom of COVID-19 itself” than a side-effect of the vaccine, you are just assuming that the theory of vaccines matches the reality without looking beyond CDC propaganda.

Even a layperson who looks into how covid mRNA vaccines work can see that what they do is so far removed from mimicking a viral respiratory infection that it’s ridiculous.

And even a layperson who looks into all this can see that using mRNA technology for any sort of vaccine is dangerous.

Here is a quote from leading British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra (from a podcast interview). By the way, he is someone who initially supported mass covid vaccination until the evidence of vaccine harms became too strong to ignore.

The reality is this in my whole career looking at all of the drugs and knowing about many different drugs that are prescribed I've never seen something when you look at the data which has such poor effectiveness and such unprecedented harms … just one bit of data alone should be enough to people to to stop and think oh my God this is just unbelievable … the journal vaccine peer review… published a reanalysis of Pfizer and MNA original double blinded randomized control trials … done by independent researchers Joseph Fraiman from Louisiana (he's an ER doctor) clinical data scientist associate … Peter Doshi, Robert Kaplan from Stanford … and what they found was this … around the world you are more likely to suffer a serious adverse event from taking the vaccine hospitalization disability life-changing event then you were to be hospitalized with covid so what that means is it's highly likely this vaccine mRNA vaccine should never have been approved for a single human in the first place … and that rate of serious Adverse Events is one in 800 … so the question now [is] what is your individual benefit in absolute terms … so there's a table … so the UK government, they released information looking at per million people vaccinated versus per million people unvaccinated by age group okay during the Omicron strain right so this is UK government data so table for it says numbers needed to vaccinate for prevention of severe hospitalization okay from two of Pfiser so if you look at the First Column Joe if you're 70 you have to vaccinate 2,500 people to prevent one person being hospitalized with severe covid if you're 60 5,700 you start getting lower age groups 30 87,00 for example if you're 20 to 29 over 100 well over 100,000 people. I mean this efficacy level Effectiveness level … if it wasn't so serious it would be laughable.

Is it the Jews?

A lot of these conspiracy theories are antisemitic. They might not outright name the Jews but they'll implicate the Jews via dog whistling. They might use terms such as "international banking".

I think it's fear of the outsider. The thought that if they're not loyal to our group they must put their own group ahead of our group and that makes them traitors, or so people think.

Some people think that Jews will put their Judaism ahead of the country they live in and that makes them traitors. Some people think that Catholics will put the Pope ahead of the country they live in and that makes them traitors.

These same people who think other religious groups are traitors will also say they are loyal to God, family and country, in that order. They give themselves a free pass to put their own God ahead of country because they are in the majority religion. But any other religious groups saying they put their allegiance to God ahead of their allegiance to their country are viewed as traitors.

The Republican Jewish Coalition’s 40th Anniversary Leadership Summit at the Venetian in Las Vegas last weekend should have been a confident celebration. As Donald Trump, the most pro-Israel president in the nation’s history, addressed the attendees by video from the White House, his administration wages legal and regulatory war on colleges and universities that failed to protect Jewish students and faculty from antisemitic mobs on campuses. In Israel, Hamas’ living hostages have been returned to their families, and the IDF and Mossad have either neutralized or substantially degraded enemies in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen. A 12-day war over the skies of Iran saw the first real joint American-Israel mission, and an unprecedented level of military cooperation. Despite all that, however, the event—and the whole organization—seemed unsuited for this unique and uncomfortable moment for American Jews.

For four decades, the RJC has served as the GOP’s institutional bridge to Jewish donors and pro-Israel voters. It was built in the last years of the Cold War to push back against “Blame America” Democrats of 1984 and the external threats they exacerbated or ignored. About 500 attendees, mostly Boomers and dedicated Fox News loyalists filled the ballroom. They cheered every mention of Donald Trump, and booed for Zohran Mamdani.

But nearly every speaker this year—politicians, media figures, and social media influencers—mentioned the growing antisemitism on the Right. Some in the audience seemed to understand who was being discussed, likely from group chats or social media. Others didn’t. For most, their favorite cable news channel still defined the boundaries of political awareness. By the weekend’s end, though, the speeches began to blur. Every speaker condemned “hate” and promised vigilance against the rising antisemitism within their own political coalition, and the audience applauded. Rep. David Kustoff of Tennessee warned about “hateful people,” urging Republicans to “castigate and condemn hate.” Florida’s Rick Scott echoed him: “Our side cannot tolerate antisemitism. We cannot—and will not—put up with it in our party.” Even as these comments were well intentioned and sincere, their repetitive and declarative content indicated that, beyond a forceful condemnation, the speaker didn’t know what else to say about antisemitism at all.

One notable exception was Senator Ted Cruz, who issued the most direct warning of the weekend. “I am very concerned by what I see as antisemitism rising on the Right at a level that I don’t recognize,” he told the audience, describing it as “a poison” and “an existential crisis in our party and in our country.” Cruz spoke with the urgency of someone who has watched it spread in real time, especially among young conservatives seduced by conspiratorial online media. “Too many people are scared to confront it,” he said. “How many elected Republicans do you see standing up and calling this out? … I am committed to calling out this garbage. I am committed to fighting this garbage. And I am committed to going to young people and saying, ‘These are poisonous lies.’”

Cruz’s speech was unusually direct for a sitting Republican politician, most of whom preferred polite euphemism. He named the problem plainly and called for courage in confronting it. Radio host Mark Levin, too, delivered a sharp warning against the mainstreaming of antisemitism, praising Trump’s record while urging conservatives not to excuse hatred inside their own ranks. Together, they set a tone of urgency that many in the room seemed unprepared to meet.

The confusion on display wasn’t unique to the RJC; it reflects a broader failure of imagination across Jewish institutional life. For decades, antisemitism was something safely external: a pathology of the far left, the campus fringe, or hostile regimes abroad. What’s emerging now is different. The new antisemitism speaks the language of patriotism, faith, and anti-elitism; it arrives disguised as cultural critique. It’s a theory of how the world works. To an audience conditioned by cable news, it sounds insightful rather than bigoted. Inside the ballroom, there was no framework for understanding this shift. Politicians could condemn hate, but they couldn’t recognize it when it wore their party’s colors.

The reason this was bubbling up, of course, was Tucker Carlson. Not content with turning his media ventures into a parade of cranks, conspiracy theorists, and the self-radicalized, the former Fox host had just hosted the infamous 27-year-old, pro-Nazi streamer Nick Fuentes. “It was only a matter of time,” wrote Tablet’s Park MacDougald in The Scroll, describing Carlson’s show as “a parade of various Chinese intelligence assets, Code Pink activists, Obama operatives, pro-Trump-impeachment comedians, weepy Nazis, foreign priests, and ‘Jews-have-bugged-my-breakfast-cereal’ lunatic.

Carlson has long preferred to launder his most controversial opinions through friendly interviews with guests who rarely reveal the extent of their own radicalism. The line Carlson crossed this time was to promote a guest who espouses explicit antisemitism; this was something new, even for him. Fuentes is blunt about his beliefs and has, over years, made tens of thousands of hours of content. He speaks openly of “organized Jewry” as a hostile force working to advance Jewish ethnic interests at America’s expense. He borrows from Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, alternating between racial determinism and evolutionary sociology. Unlike Carlson—who so far has refrained from naming the culprits behind his recurring obsessions with finance, media, and foreign policy—Fuentes simply “names the Jew.”

Carlson, on the other hand, denies that his fixation with the supposed villainy of the Jewish State and its American defenders qualifies as anything like antisemitism, but could be described more accurately as “criticism.” His anger at the accusation is palpable, as if he’s been unfairly slandered. He insists he has no particular animus toward Jews or Israel, pointing to many Jewish friends or fond family vacations to the Holy Land. It’s possible Carlson is even sincere; he might listen to RJC speeches about condemning “hate” and nod along, certain his heart is pure of malice.

Antisemitism, however, isn’t a state of being; it’s a pattern of behavior or speech. Abstract hatred (or love, for that matter) of anything without expression is irrelevant. And any definition of antisemitism that doesn’t capture Carlson’s conspiratorial worldview—his obsession with the machinations of Jews, his automatic belief in every story that casts them as corrupt, his fixation on Israel as the center of a global system of deceit—misses everything about antisemitism. It disarms Jews and others from understanding the ugliness they are clearly seeing and hearing, and it erases the historical context that makes this moment in America so perilous.

Carlson, on the other hand, denies that his fixation with the supposed villainy of the Jewish State and its American defenders qualifies as anything like antisemitism, but could be described more accurately as “criticism.” His anger at the accusation is palpable, as if he’s been unfairly slandered. He insists he has no particular animus toward Jews or Israel, pointing to many Jewish friends or fond family vacations to the Holy Land. It’s possible Carlson is even sincere; he might listen to RJC speeches about condemning “hate” and nod along, certain his heart is pure of malice.

Antisemitism, however, isn’t a state of being; it’s a pattern of behavior or speech. Abstract hatred (or love, for that matter) of anything without expression is irrelevant. And any definition of antisemitism that doesn’t capture Carlson’s conspiratorial worldview—his obsession with the machinations of Jews, his automatic belief in every story that casts them as corrupt, his fixation on Israel as the center of a global system of deceit—misses everything about antisemitism. It disarms Jews and others from understanding the ugliness they are clearly seeing and hearing, and it erases the historical context that makes this moment in America so perilous.

Carlson and Fuentes differ in tone and method. Carlson was the first prominent media figure to mainstream conspiracy material once confined to fringe broadcasters; today, he proliferates and mainstreams the latest accusations about Israel from the bowels of the internet. Fuentes rarely gets into those kinds of weeds, preferring humor and declarative statements for shock value. And, though openly antisemitic, Fuentes is far less contemptuous of Israel than the former cable host, often admiring its battlefield prowess and clowning on its enemies’ failures. In Carlson’s podcast universe, however, the guests he presents always wishcast the Jewish State on the verge of collapse and destruction.

For all their tonal differences, both Carlson and Fuentes converge on substance. Both describe a world secretly ruled by conniving Israeli puppet-masters who, through disloyal American Jews and their heretical Christian Zionist allies, control U.S. foreign policy for their own ends through sexual blackmail, AIPAC payoffs, false-flag operations, and assassinations. Something of a pre-social-media meme, this worldview was once known in extremist shorthand as “ZOG,” or Zionist Occupied Government. The phrase surfaced in the 1970s and became a kind of dark joke among the paranoid, updating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was the same story of omnipotent Jewish control, recast in contemporary America of the post-War era. While it has since incorporated thousands of new data points—the latest less plausible than the last—the conspiracy theory architecture hasn’t changed in a century.

By hosting Fuentes, Carlson offered his audience two flavors of antisemitism: explicit and denied. Fuentes names the Jew; Carlson insists he has nothing against Jews at all. But the coordinates are identical, and preferring one or the other is simply a matter of taste. They coexist comfortably because both point to the same destination. Antisemitism is not dangerous because it’s mean or offensive to the feelings or sensibilities of Jews; it is dangerous because it creates and circulates lethal fictions. It produces a weaponized alternate reality, one that leads inexorably to Jews being harmed or killed.

Carlson—not to mention Fuentes and countless others—argues nightly that this country is being controlled by nefarious Israelis. If that “hummus-eating” enemy is willing to commit a genocide in Gaza; deliberately manipulate American leaders into wars; assassinate critics; destroy churches; and oppress and slaughter Christians with impunity, then the problem is no longer political but civilizational. It becomes, in their telling, a battle against a uniquely devious and implacable foe—one that cannot be resolved by elections or arguments, but only by confrontation. The logic points beyond persuasion to elimination.

Fuentes is open about this. In declaring his admiration for Hitler, he merely follows his critique of “organized Jewry” to its natural conclusion. Carlson is far more careful and coy, but the trajectory is the same. His foray last year into World War II revisionism—an extended conversation with podcaster and revisionist historian of National Socialism Darryl Cooper—was not an eccentric detour but an attempt to rehabilitate Nazi Germany and its leader, largely by discrediting Churchill and the Allied cause. Even if these gestures are performative, the tens of millions who watch and listen are not in on the act.

What unites these audiences isn’t ideology so much as a way of seeing. In this world, nothing happens by accident; every war, election, or scandal confirms the existence of an unseen hand. The more elaborate the theory, the more convincing it feels. Carlson and Fuentes didn’t invent this pattern; they inherited and updated it into a modern vernacular of globalist plots, unipolar elites, and “foreign lobbies.” The content changes, but the structure never does.

What Carlson and Fuentes broadcast isn’t “hate”; it’s a cognitive map built entirely on lies. Yet most people, including many Jews, still describe antisemitism as “anti-Jewish racism.” That mistake is fatal. Racism begins with emotion; antisemitism begins with explanation. Its logic is counterfeit, but it poses as reason all the same.

This confusion has deep roots. After the civil-rights era, “hate” became the moral grammar through which all prejudice was understood. Jewish institutions, eager to speak that language, adopted it wholesale. Once antisemitism was redefined as an emotional or linguistic offense, its conspiracy core was buried under “tropes.” In that bucket, the falsehoods that launched pogroms and genocides—blood libel, world-Jewish control—were lumped together with trivial stereotypes.

The result was a flattening of meaning. Even the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s official definition, adopted by governments and many Jewish groups, reflects this collapse. Its warning against “mendacious, dehumanizing, or demonizing allegations about Jews” treats antisemitism as a moral failure rather than an epistemic one.

The problem isn’t cruelty; it’s falsity, and the fact that for two millennia, people have acted on those lies.

I distrust all conspiracy theories.

They invariably someone picking and choosing his facts to come to some revolutionary conclusion.