Not All Conspiracies Are True. Apparently
Whenever I do a podcast which strays too far into the realms of ‘conspiracy theory’, the purple pilled come crawling out of the woodwork.
Purple pilled is what I call red pilled people who want to keep one foot in the mainstream. So, for old times’ sake, they keep taking the occasional blue pill.
This is a tendency I can well understand. Going down the rabbit hole is a terrifying and lonely experience. You miss the company and validation of all your old Normie friends. They think - if you dare raise the subject - that you have gone mad. So (albeit subconsciously) you’ll do almost anything to reassure them, and yourself, that you still have your critical faculties intact and that you’re still firmly grounded in reality.
One way of doing this is to focus on a ‘conspiracy theory’ that you personally find beyond the pale. “Sure I get that They are trying to poison us with unnecessary pharmaceutical interventions for rebranded flu. Sure I get that the presidential election was stolen, that Kennedy wasn’t assassinated by a lone gunman and that 9/11 wasn’t plotted by a man in an Afghan cave. But c’mon, people! The idea that the moon landings were faked is something only the tin-foil hat crazies would be believe…”
Which brings us to my latest podcast with Bart Sibrel, who since the 90s has made it his life’s work to demonstrate that the moon landings never happened. At his website, which he doesn’t like to mention - it’s bartsibrel.com - he has amassed lots of documentary evidence detailing the main points of contention.
These include the unnaturalness of the shadows in the moon landing photographs (which look as if they have been illuminated by more than one light source, such as might happen in a studio but not on the moon); the flimsy nature of the craft which we are asked to believe were capable of making this epic journey when computer technology was a fraction of what is available today, even on your iPhone); the Van Allen Belt of radiation which a human could only survive if encased in thick layers of lead; claims of death bed confessions from the head of security on the set where the fake moon landings were allegedly filmed; and so on.
But this is a message which makes lots of people very uncomfortable. The moon landings are part of the fabric of our life and comprise some of our earliest memories. For example, when I was about four I won a fancy dress competition on a cruise ship. Obviously I had no choice in the outfit - you don’t at that age - nor did I recognise the name of the character I was dressed as. But clearly the judges did: it was Buzz Aldrin!
A bit later, I used to insist that my Dad got his petrol from the local Shell garage in order that I might collect the ‘free’ commemorative coins issued to celebrate the latest Apollo mission. And I definitely remember watching at least one of the launches live on TV.
Later in life, after some very rigorous vetting to check I wasn’t one of the pesky moon deniers, I even got sent on a journalistic assignment to NASA in Houston to hear for myself about some of the marvellous missions the space agency was planning next…
It’s understandable, then, that when you try to debunk the moon landings some people take It personally. Not only are you tacitly accusing them of having fallen for maybe the biggest con trick in history but you are also treading on their dreams. The moon landings have long been sold to us as mankind’s greatest achievement. We did it! We got there! We got so good at it we even sent a moon buggy and hit golf shots there! No kid likes being told that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. Few grown ups can deal with its equivalent - the notion that the most amazing thing man ever did was just a cheap (or rather, very expensive) trick.
This is what I detect when I read some of the disbelieving comments on podcasts like my one with Bart Sibrel. I see the various stages of anger, grief and denial, couched as rational and reasonable scepticism.
Here are some of the classic responses:
“Not everything is a conspiracy, you know” they’ll declare sagely. Or they’ll ignore the most compelling evidence presented and instead focus on the weakest point mentioned in order to reject the entire argument. Or they’ll express doubts about the credibility of the witness, usually by picking holes in his character or delivery. Or they’ll declare that this is a silly subject to be focusing on when there are so many more important battles to be fought. Or they’ll say that we shouldn’t be talking about this stuff at all because it just gives us a bad name.
Some of these are perfectly valid complaints. I can see, for example, why some people might find Sibrel’s rapidfire delivery offputting, even redolent of someone trying to pull the wool over his audience’s eyes. Also, I agree that some of his more extravagant assertions - such as the one that the original Apollo crew, led by Gus Grissom were murdered b the CIA- depend too much on hearsay and are probably unprovable.
But a few cherry picked flaws do not a convincing rebuttal make. This is where I DO take issue with the fake moon landing deniers. If you’re going to find the odd hole in the argument or presentation, fine. Just don’t try to extrapolate from your quibbles a logical leap far bigger than anything Neil Armstrong ever took - that you have thereby debunked the debunkers.
You just haven’t.
How can I be so sure of my ground? Well up to a point, I can’t. All ‘conspiracy theories’ are, by definition, counter-narrative and subject to well-funded, well-embedded official cover up. So inevitably, the evidence in their favour is going to be more sketchy and heavily contested than a printed statement signed in triplicate from a ‘trusted’ official source saying: “This is what really happened…”
But I still think it’s more than possible in almost all these cases to discern - a la Occam’s Razor - where the truth lies.
One way is simply by sifting the accumulated evidence. Fake moon landing theory wouldn’t be half so credible if it depended merely on the researches of Bart Sibrel. But it doesn’t. If you don’t find Sibrel’s style to your tastes then just ignore him and watch the host of other compelling material out there. American Moon, for example, which presents the case in painstaking detail.
American Moon is particularly good at debunking the debunkers. Which is an important thing to bear in mind before you come back at me with your killer points you’ve found on the internet about how “No actually, the astronauts took a clever route which SKIRTED the Van Allen Belt” or “Duh! The astronauts left actual REFLECTIVE DEVICES on the moon’s surface, which you can still see using a laser.” Do you think if they were going to go to the trouble of faking the moon landings they wouldn’t also have a budget - or, if you prefer, a coterie of useful idiots - ready to shoot down any pesky sceptics?
As I often say, different people have different routes into conspiracy theories according to temperament. That is, one person’s killer fact is another person’s ‘meh’. So it was for me in the case of the moon landings. What swung it for me initially was none of the points that Bart makes on his website (perhaps because they didn’t appeal to my non-technical mind). Rather, what first persuaded me that ‘it was faked’ was listening to a specialist in court witness testimony analysing recordings of the astronauts describing their lunar experiences. His conclusion: these were most definitely not the personal testimonies of people who had been anywhere near the moon.
I agree it can be hard in this crazy world of ours trying to penetrate the hall of mirrors and to work out what is and isn’t a true reflection of reality.
But what you can do is make intelligent, informed inferences based on what you definitely DO know.
Before I went down the rabbit hole, in what you might call my Normie days, I used to tell myself that possibly one of the myriad conspiracy theories out there was true and that the rest were probably rubbish. All I had to do at some stage, if and when I could be bothered to engage in such a pointless activity, would be to pinpoint the real one and then discard all the imposters.
Once you start burrowing, though, you realise it doesn’t work like that. Sure you’d like lots of the ‘conspiracy theories’ not to be true because then you could publicly distance yourself from them and maintain your status as a sensible, rational person. But instead what you find as you hop from one topic to another - from JFK to 9/11 to the Beatles, say - is that they all have similar hallmarks, like a poker player’s ‘tell’ or a serial killer’s signature.
After a time, the techniques - all essentially based on mass deception - become so wearisomely familiar that you scarcely need to look into the details of conspiracies you haven’t yet investigated properly. Your default assumption becomes: Yup, there’s another one.
This might sound reductive, cynical, even paranoid but it’s none of those things. Rather it represents a mature, informed acceptance of the way things are.
The greatest bar to believing in any conspiracy theory is our natural (or, you might argue, thoroughly programmed and imprinted) unwillingness to believe that there are people out there capable of doing such a horrible thing.
We have been brought up to be trusting, both of essential human goodness and of authority. This is quite a mental hurdle to get over - and some of us never do, preferring to go on living in the illusory world of the blue pilled than the harsher reality of the red pilled. But once you have leapt that hurdle, you are - or ought to be - changed forever because it is impossible to unknow what you know, to unaccept the terrifying truth that you have with great reluctance come to accept.
The default position of the blue-pilled is: But why would they do this?
The default position of the red-pilled is: But why wouldn’t they do this?
Both make logical sense in their way. But the purple-pilled position just doesn’t. It requires believing in two things simultaneously - a) that there are forces out there of unimaginable power and wealth, capable of the most monstrous evil, which they frequently engage in in order to deceive and thereby exploit and control mankind but b) that when it comes to certain things - WWII, say, or the Moon Landings or the Death of Diana - they decide “Nah! Not for us. We’re keeping out of this one. We’re keeping it perfectly legit and we’re going to allow events just to take their natural course.”
“Not all conspiracies are true,” you say?
If you believe that, I’ve got a nice chunk of moon rock I’d like to sell you. 100 percent guaranteed genuine.