Another "Conspiracy Theory" Turns Out To Be True (False Flag Weekly News with John Carter)
John Carter of the Postcards from Barsoom Substack just posted about his appearance on this week’s FFWN:
Yesterday Kevin Barrett invited me to co-host his weekly podcast, False Flag Weekly News, on an episode he titled Another “Conspiracy Theory” Turns Out to be True.
The format involves Kevin collecting a large number of notable headlines from the previous week, which we then blasted through at breakneck speed, offering our individual hot takes on the important stories of the week. The episode title comes from the recent admission that the October Surprise that dethroned Jimmy Carter was indeed a case of surreptitiously treasonous foreign policy manipulation. We also talked about RFK Jr’s recently announced presidential bid, Trump’s remarks about a truth and reconciliation commission to go after the deep state, the rising Eurasian multipolar world order, Robert Malone’s call for a Butlerian jihad against human-computer brain interfaces, the recent revival in France of their favourite national sport, and Arktos publishing getting deplatformed and what this says about how secure the regime feels its hold on power to be.
Finally, Kevin is gearing up to move to Morocco, partly so that his operation can become self-sustaining, and partly so that he can get out from under Ozymandias’ collapsing colossus. To ease that transition, he’s trying to raise a bit of money to keep going. If you’re so inclined, you can help him out here.
Kevin’s a fascinating and engaging guy to talk to - gracious, calm, erudite, and discerning. It was a great conversation and I encourage you to give it a listen.
The theme of the show—true conspiracy theories—raises the question: to what extent are people’s views of controversial events distorted by their desires? In other words, do people believe in particular conspiracy theories and other non-mainstream interpretations because they want those things to be true?
I became a believer in October Surprise back in the early 1980s. Based on evidence then available, I concluded that the Reagan-Bush team had probably stolen the 1980 election by treasonously cutting a deal with Iran to keep the US hostages locked up long enough to ensure Carter’s defeat.
A truism of lamestream debunking is the claim that “conspiracy theorists” can’t handle the randomness of events: They feel a desperate need to impose order, any order, on the chaos. So according to that theory, I couldn’t handle the randomness of US presidential elections, so I sought to make history more orderly by imagining that George W. Bush and William Casey mobilized a bunch of spooks to convince Iran to keep the hostages locked up.
The debunkers’ theory, of course, is insane. The conspiracy reality of October Surprise is at least as disturbingly chaotic as the mainstream denial that anything untoward happened. If anything, the conspiracy theory is more disturbingly chaotic. Once we recognize that presidents can be inserted into office through treasonous conspiracies, assassinations, and what-not, we realize the political world is not the orderly, mostly-law-abiding place the mainstream media claim it is. That is obviously not a comforting realization.
It seems the lamestream debunkers are projecting their own feelings onto those they demonize as “conspiracy theorists.” It is they, not us, who can’t handle the chaos inherent in actual reality, where criminals usually get away with their crimes, especially if they are rich and powerful. So they flee from harsh reality to a comforting fantasy-land in which such things never happen, except maybe in banana republics and regimes we don’t like. Those who recognize reality, in all its hideousness and chaos, they demonize as “conspiracy theorists.”
So I obviously didn’t buy into the October Surprise because it was comforting. But maybe I was open to it because I didn’t like Reagan and Bush? Certainly most of the October Surprise proponents were on the left. At the time, I was vaguely left-anarchist, but no fan of the Carter Administration, which I thought was just as bad as the Reaganites. In fact, I viewed Carter’s election in 1976 as a sort of coup d’état by the Trilateral Commission. (And no, that wasn’t a comforting thought.)
But sometimes we non-mainstream types probably do buy into interpretations in part because we want to believe them. That’s what Rolo Slavskiy thinks has happened to those of us who follow people like Douglas MacGregor, Scott Ritter, Larry Johnson, Andrei Martyanov, and others who argue that Russia is winning its Ukraine war according to plan.
John Carter brought Slavskiy up during our conversation on False Flag Weekly News, then sent out Slavskiy’s latest piece “A Chronicle of the Slavic Civil War So Far.” And while it’s obvious that Zelensky’s Ukraine isn’t winning the war as Western media constantly claim, it is also possible that Slavskiy is right in arguing that Russia isn’t doing nearly as well as the “Putin has it all under control” crowd keeps insisting. In other words, reality may be much messier and more chaotic than the most popular narratives have it. That stands to reason, since those narratives owe their popularity to their being tailored to please partisans of one side or another.
Slavskiy’s work makes me reconsider what I thought I knew. It helps me see things from a new angle I hadn’t considered before. I like that, even if I don’t buy into his perspective wholeheartedly.
I wish the regurgitators of mainstream orthodoxy shared that attitude. But if they did—if they harbored any intellectual curiosity and openness to new ideas—they wouldn’t be regurgitators of mainstream orthodoxy, now, would they?