Why Hostile Spies Call You a "Conspiracy Theorist"

Because hostile intelligence services engage in conspiracies, and they don't like it when you notice

The Missouri Mob Democrats just stripped Rep. Sarah Unsicker, a candidate for Attorney General, of her committees in the Legislature for “promoting conspiracy theories” on the Internet. Of course, the flunkies who disenfranchised Unsicker’s constituents didn’t bother to elaborate what constituted a “conspiracy theory,” or why it mattered to them. Nor did they have any hearings. Nor did they keep a record of proceedings. Nor did they allow evidence in the form of witnesses or documents. Nor did they admit that they are very uncomfortable with her investigations of child trafficking and organized crime in Missouri. The Mob Democrats just punished the citizens of Missouri’s 83rd District, threatened the free speech of all Missourians, and then breezily headed to some Christmas parties.

So, what is a conspiracy theory? Surely it can’t simply be a discussion of conspiracies, because 100% of espionage and organized crime is a conspiracy, and surely that can’t be off limits.

You would think that if this kind of thing is so bad that your constituents will lose representation in their democracy if their elected official comes too close to one, that there would be a firm definition. But that’s not how this game works—by design.

As a national security professional who has been called a conspiracy theorist on a systematic basis for years, I have considerable experience in this area! A conspiracy theory is what Bad Guys label any public expression of curiosity about the complex, illegal operations of spies and Mobsters.

It’s time for the term “conspiracy theory” to lose its power so we can actually unpack the many conspiracies of democracy’s enemies and move forward.

Why “Game Theory” = Conspiracy Theory

Until Trump’s election, I was an intelligence analyst with twenty years experience, and had a pretty great public reputation. I was at the top of my chosen field. People paid for my public and private analysis of world events. I became an author for The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review. My books were available in multiple languages. Nobody called me names. They hired me for speaking engagements.

Then, on December 11, 2016, I went mega-viral on Twitter just after Trump’s election and explained how hostile propaganda operations are targeted at Americans in the Left-, Center-, and Right-wing of politics, and how this has been going on for decades.

Since Israeli military intelligence had been cooking up an elaborate propaganda operation around the so-called “Steele Dossier” which it was about to launch at Americans, they did not appreciate me explaining how those operations actually work. As a result, within hours of my Twitter thread, the IDF networks in the U.S. media sprung into action to call me a “conspiracy theorist,” which they did for years to come through their various proxies.

Take for example The New Republic, which in June 2017 used Colin Dickey, a non-fiction writer who specializes in haunted houses—of all things!—to call me a conspiracy theorist for exposing the foreign influence on the election.

Robert Mueller had just started investigating that very subject, and The New Republic apparently wanted to color Mueller’s findings, so they threw out the term “conspiracy theory” at me and anybody who would dare show interest in my writing. That’s pretty rich coming from an author whose Amazon page has the following for his book Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places:

“Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination.”

Just so we’re clear, if intelligence professionals dare to talk publicly about the easily-Googleable fact that various militaries engage in psychological operations against their enemies, the The New Republic hires people who literally believe in ghosts to opine negatively about the counterintelligence assessments of those professionals. The Washington Post hires comparative religion majors to engage in the same slander campaign. Slate hires British “socialists” with the same axe to grind and gives them 2000 words of space for libel. GQ and CNN launch the same talking points as Russia Today on the same day. The way these IDF PsyOps work is that they engage a network of disposable assets to push their message simultaneously so their libel takes on an air of legitimacy.

Of course, if possible, they take it further, into the pseudo-medical or even medical realm if they can.

Conspiracy theory, a pseudo-psychiatric slur

The reason to label someone a “conspiracy theorist” is to discredit their opinions in public as completely as possible. This is why hostile spy services are so systematic about deploying the term against their enemies—especially against people working to protect democracies. The libelous coordination conflates curiosity about actual conspiracies with symptoms of severe mental illness, thereby characterizing all of that person’s opinions as crazy rather than as a point of view worth discussing. It simultaneously cheapens actual mental illness, and debases the discourse of citizens in a democracy. It’s no wonder totalitarians love this technique.

This is a clever gambit because conspiratorial thinking is, in fact, a symptom of certain types of Axis I mental disorders. I have subject expertise in this area, as it so happens, because I ran intelligence operations in the psychiatric medication division of a major pharmaceutical company. So let me give you a quick tour.

Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnus Kraepelin was a German psychiatrist who introduced the modern concept of “paranoia” to the medical profession. The Greek roots of “para” and “noia” suggest that someone who is paranoid or paranoic is obsessed with information at the periphery of their understanding. In practical terms, they connect patterns which the vast majority of human beings would not see as connected, and assign meanings that the vast majority of human beings would not see as logical. Kraepelin defined paranoia, among other ways, as:

“the furtive development, resulting from inner causes, of a lasting, immovable delusional system that is accompanied by the complete retention of clearness and order in thinking, willing and acting."

This basic description amounted to “you act normal, but you think crazy.” Kraepelin’s theories of psychiatry were also rich with Nazi themes such as eugenics, racial purity, and antisemitism. We should probably examine how he remained so popular despite these problems.

Nevertheless, conspiratorial thinking is, in fact, a feature of psychosis and delusional disorders generally. Kraepelin defined paranoia as lasting, logically assimilated delusions, the result of slow-progressing disease in which every event the sufferer perceived in society was supposedly the result of hostile action where the sufferer was the target.

French psychiatrist J. Rouges de Fursac expanded on Kraepelin’s theories, positing that the delusions had to be wrong, and the logical explanation for the great number of hostile actions was created by the sufferer after creating the set of delusions. de Fursac stressed that the sufferer was not necessarily mentally feeble; in fact the delusional aspect of the disease worsened while other cognitive abilities did not diminish. Thus, de Fursac distinguished paranoia from senility associated with old age, or other medical disease.

In the United States, Albert C. Buckley highlighted how generally normal—even brilliant—the sufferer of paranoia might seem to most people, but that ultimately they took everything personally, and that this was delusional. For Buckley, the paranoic was a person who saw every street sign as hung for them, every cough by a stranger a personal insult. Thus the sufferer would be functional in daily life, but their persecution fantasies would agitate them, a behavior that would indicate their paranoia.

For Kraepelin, de Fursac, and Buckley, paranoia was markedly different from florid psychosis, which involved visual or auditory hallucinations that were easily rejected by everyone else. If the patient claimed to be attacked by demon space bats, other people would not see any demon space bats, so the patient would not be paranoid; they’d be hallucinating. Moreover, there is a marked difference between persistent non-bizarre delusional beliefs of paranoia and the rapid-fire, “flight of ideas,” “tangentiality,” and “loose association” that is seen in patients suffering from untreated schizophrenia or mania.

But the average person doesn’t really know what either of those things look like, do they? Regular civilians without knowledge of the DSM-V usually cannot distinguish between complicated national security analysis, persistent non-bizarre delusions, and full-blown psychotic hallucinations. So if you call somebody a “conspiracy theorist” over their professional beliefs about counterintelligence, you insinuate that a professional would conclude that they are either clinically delusional or floridly psychotic without actually challenging any of their beliefs. Nor do you hold open the possibility that the person’s conclusions might be rare and unusual because they are in a niche field, not because they are mentally ill.

Again, the practice of labeling political critics as paranoid is both terrible psychiatry as well as the dirtiest of rhetorical tactics—which is why spy services associated with dictatorships use this technique so often. Those spies didn’t just stop with maligning their enemies in public, they also loved to use the term “conspiracy theorist” to justify filling them full of psychiatric drugs as well. The Soviet Union regularly threw its citizens into “psychiatric hospitals” and loaded them up with antipsychotics for exhibiting the symptoms of noticing how the dictatorship manipulated and abused people.

Aggressive political pseudo-psychiatry thus has a rich history, and unfortunately a toolkit that is used to this day.

Owning all sides of the political debate

So when did the term “conspiracy theory” enter the political lexicon?

Originally, the term was used for people who did not find the conclusions of the Warren Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to be credible. Most people these days would say that the standard narrative of a disgruntled Lee Harvey Oswald shooting JFK alone in Dallas with no other co-conspirators was a little too clean—but back then, it was considered risqué to challenge that narrative. Still, books were published to highlight details around the assassination and, yes, posit some theories. Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald and Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth were both published in 1966. Citizens began to wonder openly about the role of Fidel Castro and the Mob and other potential malefactors. But there was a backlash to this intellectual curiosity, and the term “conspiracy theorist” came to mean anyone without a relevant professional background advancing a complicated narrative about any subject of political importance. The epithet was used to shame people who might challenge the authoritative narrative, whether they were right, wrong, or totally off base.

Of course, hostile foreign intelligence officers, especially the Israelis, love to support their own pet conspiracy theorists, such as Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. Then, when anyone with professional standing goes against the grain of their propaganda operations, they can compare them to their pet nutjobs, as the very Israeli Buzzfeed did after publishing the Steele Dossier for IDF. Buzzfeed both published Steele’s garbage Dossier and then attacked real professionals for daring to write in public. This is how hostile spy services such as IDF’s PsyOps brigade control as many sides of a debate as possible. They support conspiracy theories of their own on one hand, and then punish intelligence professionals or curious citizens of actual democracies on the other. The Russians have been doing this for years, too.

So, dear reader, when media and political flunkies start calling someone a “conspiracy theorist,” maybe there’s something interesting going on. Full-blown maniacs and untreated schizophrenics rarely run for statewide office, and if they do, the public usually doesn’t pay them much mind. So if you hear libelous assertions based in pseudo-psychiatry, perhaps you should pay attention to the target—and to the fascists potentially playing one of their favorite old games.