'Discrediting Our Cause'
On the Useful Idiots who think it's their job to decide which conspiracy theories we're allowed to indulge and which ones are a step too far
“I was all ready to believe that 9/11 was an inside job but then someone mentioned Flat Earth”, said no one ever.
Actually, that’s probably not true. I’m quite prepared to concede that somewhere out there might be at least one person so intellectually spavined, so crippled with insecurity, so prey to groupthink as to have fallen for the logical fallacy that if a person thinks A then they must perforce be wrong about B.
But I don’t believe that’s the way most of us think. Not even dyed-in-wool Normies.
Try this analogy. I call it the Hitler/dogs fallacy.
It’s 1937 and for some unfathomable reason, you’ve been invited for the weekend at the Fuhrer’s lovely mountain retreat in Berchtesgarten. Hitler, you notice, is very attached to his German Shepherd whom he has taught to do all sorts of charming tricks: right paw, left paw, lie down, roll over and pretend you’re dead, etc.
Now, as it so happens, you’ve been thinking of getting a dog yourself. “Would you recommend a German Shepherd?”, you ask your host, in your immaculate German. “Oh yes,” replies Hitler. “Stimmt! They make excellent guard dogs; they are very loyal; but as you can see, despite their reputation for fierceness they can also be very gentle.”
Over this same weekend you’ve chatted to the Fuhrer about all manner of other topics besides dogs: motorways, VWs, vegetarianism, Jews, Bolsheviks, the Stab in the Back betrayal after the First World War, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, degenerate art, etc. Some of this stuff you agreed with him on. Some of his opinions you found a bit iffy.
But I ask you this: did the fact that you disagreed with Hitler on certain issues prevent you from taking him seriously on certain other ones?
My suspicion is not. Few of us - none of us, I would even dare say - is quite that basic. When making a decision about this or that issue any number of factors come into play. Sure, prejudice towards a person’s apparent belief system or their character may play a part in that decision making process. But it’s not necessarily the deciding factor. If it were, none of us would ever have said the thing which we have all said at one time or another: “I never thought I’d hear myself agreeing with Piers Morgan but…”
Anyway, I haven’t quite finished with my tasteless Hitler analogy, much as some of you might wish it. I’ve made the main point, which is that just because Hitler is Hitler doesn’t mean he’s wrong about dogs. But there’s another subsidiary point I wish to make which I believe will cast further useful light on the topic in hand.
So, you get home from Berchtesgarten, and announce to your wife/girlfriend: “We’re getting a German Shepherd.”
Almost inevitably, wife/girlfriend - or husband if you’re a woman or gay, the analogy works just as well, but I like to keep things old-school sexist - will be furious with you. Especially when you explain your reasons.
“Oh so we’re taking advice from Hitler now are we? Literally advice from Adolf Hitler? Are you mad??”
But you know - as indeed does your partner, if he/she were being strictly honest - that this is just a ploy.
Maybe they’re pissed off that you were invited to Berchtesgarten and they weren’t. Or they’re simply not into the idea of a getting a dog. The Hitler thing is merely a handy excuse that enables them to sidestep the real issue.
And so it is that well-worn line that one hears so often these days from fairweather Awake types - I call them the ‘purple-pilled’ because though they’ve taken the red pill more or less they still want to keep one foot in the blue-pilled camp for old times’ sake - that there are some conspiracy theories out there which are simply beyond the pale. They are so silly, these more outre conspiracy theories, that even to talk about them just discredits ‘our’ cause.
“Oh they do, do they?” I like to ask these purple-pilled arbiters of truth. “And who exactly gave you the authority to declare, Ex Cathedra, which conspiracy theories are legitimate subjects for open-minded consideration and which ones are so self-evidently ridiculous that one can safely dismiss them without so much as a cursory glance?”
Never once have I found any of these purple-pilled types able to give me a satisfactory answer. That’s because there isn’t one.
If you accept - as all the red-pilled must because it is the foundation of Awake awareness - that the world as it has been sold to us is a tissue of lies, half-truths and deceptions, then it naturally follows that everything we think we know about the world is potentially fallacious.
Note that qualifier ‘potentially.’ I’m certainly not suggesting that everything is a lie - because that would mean that there is no such thing as truth. Of course I believe in truth, for it is an expression of the divine, and seeking out that truth is one of our holiest missions. But you’re never going to attain that truth unless you first adopt a position of humility. This means acknowledging that you don’t know everything and being prepared to reassess all the things you thought you knew to be true.
I am now in my late fifties and for most of my life there were various things I believed with absolute certainty: that man had landed (several times) on the moon; that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman called Lee Harvey Oswald; that the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg; and so on.
More recently, I have to come to realise that the official narrative on all these events has holes in it even bigger than an iceberg through a reinforced steel hull.
I achieved this new understanding by the simple process of looking at the evidence. It was hard won knowledge, as knowledge which contradicts the official version of events invariably is. You’re up against a vast, intricate, well-funded system of organised deception. You are not, for example, just going to be able to type into Google ‘Did man really land on the moon?’ because the algorithms are going to be weighted in favour of telling you that man did. So is the publishing industry. So is the entertainment industry - ‘Giant steps are what you take…walking on the moon’, etc. So are all the ‘respectable’ academics and other ‘expert’ talking heads. Yet, put in the hours and you’ll get there in the end because, as the Earl of Oxford and his scriptorium once so famously put it, the truth will out.
No matter how great the obstacles which have been erected, by conspiratorial design, to prevent you attaining that truth, there’s really only one guaranteed to prevent you from succeeding. That obstacle is the little voice in your head that says: “No, I’m not going to go there. I already know what I know. I don’t need any pesky new evidence which might shake my belief system to its foundations. I’m happy where I am, thank you very much.”
This is how Normies think. They are unwilling to take the first step on to what Neil Kramer calls the ‘Staircase of Disbelief’ because they understand, if even only on a subconscious level, that once they have done so they can never turn back. It’s not outlandish conspiracy theories they fear. It’s ALL conspiracies - for they understand instinctively that this is a zero sum game.
But for anyone of even slightly of a red-pilled persuasion that way of thinking is no longer intellectually tenable. If you have accepted the truth of even one conspiracy theory, no matter what it is, moon landings, JFK, whatever, then you have abnegated the right to declare any other conspiracy off limits.
The reason for this is simple. You have already acknowledged that there are forces out there so corrupt, powerful, devious, entrenched and malign that they have happily and gleefully lied to you about something really big. And if they happily and gleefully lied to you about one really big thing, who are you to say that they haven’t happily and gleefully lied to you about lots of other really big things (and small things) too?
Yes, sure, you can be agnostic about this or that other ‘conspiracy theory’. But what you can no longer do is be dogmatic about its falsehood - at least not until you’ve put in the necessary research, and perhaps not even then.
What usually happens to the purple-pilled when this logical sloppiness has been pointed out to them is that they retreat to their second line of defence.
“Well even if no viruses/flat earth/Paul is dead happen to be true we just shouldn’t go there because it just frightens off the Normies and we need to focus on the issues that matter.”
But this line of defence is at least as weak as the first.
It presupposes that there are commonly agreed ‘issues that matter.’ But there is no such common agreement - as we saw, inter alia, during the ‘Pandemic.’
In the name of pragmatism and unity - ‘Let’s not frighten the horses’, ‘We need to build a broad coalition’, etc - the resistance movement was hijacked by a claque of suspiciously well-organised activist groups like Together which declared that certain areas of discussion should be off limits.
Apparently, it was OK to campaign on issues like ‘vaccine mandates’ and the importance of bodily autonomy. But questioning the safety or efficacy of these ‘vaccines’, or the malign nature of the corrupted institutions pushing them, or the agenda behind the ‘vaccines’, was deemed a step too far because such ‘unproven conspiracy theories’ might alienate potential allies.
So much for the theory behind the strategy. Let’s examine what happened in practice. Here we are, two or three years on, and despite copious evidence - excess deaths, for example - that those purveyors of ‘unproven conspiracy theories’ were right in every detail, still they cannot get a hearing anywhere in the mainstream media. Nor can they get a hearing in what you might call the Officially Designated Alternative Mainstream Media: gatekeepers like GB News, Triggernometry, Spiked, Unherd, the Daily Sceptic, Talk Radio, Together, anyone connected with Nigel Farage etc which continue to make lots of faux-principled protestations about the iniquity of lockdowns, the importance of bodily autonomy and freedom of choice but still, even now, remain at best squeamish and evasive on more ‘contentious’ subjects like vaccine injury.
In other words, far from uniting the resistance, the broad front ‘pragmatism and unity’ strategy has divided and neutralised that resistance by luring a significant portion of it into containment pens. All those people out there who have sensed that something is wrong and are now eager for guidance on what it is are being led into a trap by the abovementioned Judas Goats. That trap, essentially, is a state of controlled ignorance: “Yes, you are quite right to worry your pretty little heads about immigration, government incompetence and not having to wear a mask or have a jab if you don’t want to. But don’t be bothering yourself about kill shots, 15 minute cities or CBDCs. If any of these were a problem we’d tell you about it. Meanwhile, here’s a piece we’ve just commissioned from an anonymous ‘expert’, explaining why the threat posed by CBDCs is totally overrated…”
All this, I believe, was by design and not by accident. They faked the Moon Landings, assassinated various presidents, and initiated any number of wars. You’d need to be suffering severe cognitive dissonance to imagine that these same diabolical, sadistic, perma-lying control freaks are too flaky to take precautions against all those dissidents who threaten to expose their schemes. Controlled opposition, Judas Goats, gatekeepers: these are all tried and tested methods of capturing resistance movements and leading them astray. So too are handy phrases like “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” and - the subject of this article - that oft-repeated line about how we shouldn’t engage with this or that conspiracy theory because it ‘discredits our cause.’
Now obviously I’m not suggesting that all the people who wheel out that hackneyed ‘discredits our cause’ phrase are working for the enemy. Many of them, I’m quite sure, do so in the belief that they are imposing a measure of discipline, common sense and pragmatism on the resistance movement. But however good their intentions may be, what they are actually achieving when they parrot that phrase is doing the enemy’s work for him. I suppose if I wanted to be rude I could characterise the people who betray their own cause in this way as ‘useful idiots.’ But instead, on this occasion, let me be uncharacteristically tactful. The people who, in good faith, trot out the ‘discredits our cause’ line are not bad people or stupid people. They’re just people who haven’t quite thought things through properly. But maybe, now that they’ve read this, they will…
James, I love this article. It’s just like your podcast, brilliant and quite entertaining. I know several people who were violently pro mask and pro jab because I was so adamantly against them. I’ve called out the moon landing and 911, JFK and TWA 800. Because of my questioning of those narratives, they ran in the opposite direction from my take on Covid scam.
I’m not against flat earth or hollow earth or any other question that I cannot personally verify. My national lab chemical engineering friends tell me man made global warming was a joke back in the early nineties and I have known doctors and pathologists that told me the best way to not die from cancer is to avoid being diagnosed with cancer at all costs. Once you are diagnosed, there are literally hundreds of ways they can kill you, with surgery, radiation treatments, and chemotherapy being the top 3.
Agree wholeheartedly although I don't like the term 'conspiracy theory' because it's shorthand for bonkers. There are theories, and there are facts, and an intelligent person will always keep an open mind about theories and not pronounce something as fact or fiction on the say so of someone else however 'expert'. Consequently, most of us are unlikely to know the truth about many theories because most of us cannot ever have access to both the raw data/information and the knowledge or skill to critically assess that information. We should therefore simply refer to 'theories' : that encourages debate, which is the route to truth.