Many Conspiracy Theories Have in Fact Been Proven True

notes on Reverse Edgelordism

The latest video from conservative Canadian YouTuber JJ McCullough displays many of the attributes that make his perspective unique - he’s genuinely a right-wing figure but an arch institutionalist, a gay Millennial with the kind of vague social libertinism common to a lot of libertarian-leaning conservatives but something of a scold, a Canadian patriot who relentlessly defends the United States from the kinds of criticism of Americanah that you might associate with Europe or, well, Canada - critiques of our provincialism, our consumerism, our boorish tendency to shove the rest of the world around. McCullough likes all of that stuff, more or less, while living a cosmopolitan and vaguely-arty lifestyle in groovy Vancouver. He’s perhaps best known for his war with Montreal, Francophone Canadians, and the entire province of Quebec, which fits his general esteem for a certain kind of capital-R Reasonable Anglophilia.

He reminds me, strangely, of a certain kind of secular anti-atheist, the type who still gets mad about the New Atheists despite the complete collapse of that subculture and whose own lack of belief doesn’t prevent them from waxing poetic about the glories of religion. I have a friend from grad school who grew up in an extremely repressive Christian community when she was young, and who describes leaving as an “escape.” (The kind of community where she and her sisters wore wrist-to-ankle dresses every day of their lives no matter the Oklahoma heat, weren’t allowed TV or radio, absorbed lots of corporal punishment, that sort of thing.) She has very, very little patience for people who are so annoyed by internet atheists that they become in effect advocates for religion; as she says, this kind of vague fondness for religion among the irreligious could only occur to someone who never had to live the way she did. I sort of see the same thing in McCullough - he idealizes certain aspects of America’s ethos because he has never had to live with the consequences of being surrounded by people who believe in it, who consciously or unconsciously demand that everyone else believe in it.

Anyhow, this new video is about conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are a good topic for understanding McCullough’s very particular ideological makeup. Conspiracy theories are famously a cross-ideological phenomenon, with both left conspiracy theories and right conspiracy theories but also conspiracy theories that don’t fit neatly into either, like 9/11 trutherism. As I said, McCullough is an institutionalist, a small-but-good government sort of guy (or so I take it) who places a great deal of value in official claims, institutions, and experts, and so he’s naturally distrustful of conspiracy theories. And he demonstrates that antipathy in this video through poking holes in a few clickbaity articles listing conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. This all amounts to feasting on a banquet of low-hanging fruit, but it’s not an illegitimate way to approach the question. I just don’t like his conclusions.

The key to McCullough’s bit here is that he doesn’t dispute that the named conspiracy theories (or “conspiracy theories”) that are asserted to be true are true. Rather, he operates by insisting that every identified conspiracy theory is in fact not a conspiracy theory according to his preferred definition. It’s not sufficient for a conspiracy theory to be broadly thought of as a conspiracy theory; it has to comport to specific rules he has devised for what a conspiracy theory entails. Effectively, that means that a conspiracy theory is only a conspiracy theory if it satisfies criteria endorsed by no one but JJ McCullough. I can’t decide if this is an isolated demand for rigor or a No True Scotsman, but either way, McCullough is here insisting on an unusually stringent definition of a conspiracy theory for the purpose of dismissing the idea that any conspiracy theories are true. And there’s a version of this that isn’t entirely wrong; there’s a tautological sense in which all conspiracy theories are false because being false is part of that definition of a conspiracy theory. But McCullough isn’t using that definition, just a particularly odd one that makes his task easier.

So the fact that cigarette manufacturers knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health but conspired to hide this fact from the public is not a conspiracy theory, according to McCullough, because other people of that era suspected that cigarettes caused lung cancer. (Actually proving that took a very long time, at least according to modern standards of causality.) I find this argument powerfully strange! You had a group of powerful people, they indisputably knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health, they indisputably conspired to suppress that information, they were fairly effective at that task. The fact that some early whistleblowers tried to raise the alarm is simply irrelevant. Check out my own proprietary formula.

Group of Powerful or Influential People + Nefarious Intent + Secrecy + Active Conspiring + Negative Consequences, Real or Potential = Conspiracy Theory

That’s a conspiracy, brother, and the tobacco company bad behavior fits. Long before information about their coverups became public knowledge, people were talking about the possibility that the tobacco companies were up to that exact bad behavior. Theorizing, you might say.

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For rhetorical purposes, let’s pull from an illustrative set of examples for which we have a great deal of evidence and a long history of official denial, the bloody hands of the American security state in the developing world. Here you have a number of powerful people (the CIA, the State department, the military) who conspired to commit immoral and frequently-illegal acts (coups, assassinations, support for dictators) and operated in secrecy (official denials, classifying records) while quietly working together (the Americans and right-wing governments) which led to awful outcomes (human rights violations, blowback). These actions in turn provoked public discussion of these acts (theories) that eventually were confirmed by declassified documentation or through outright government admission. And for clarity I’ll pick perhaps the archetypal such conspiracy, the CIA’s 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh.

If you’re unaware, Mossadegh was the Prime Minister and elected leader of Iran, a career politician, secularist, and social reformer who introduced unemployment payments, land reform, and tax reforms, among others, as well as freeing a class of laborers who were essentially slaves. In an effort to defend the the American and British actions that would follow, I’ve heard some attempt to undercut the legitimacy of Iranian elections at the time; while I’m sure they would appear imperfect to modern liberal democratic eyes, for a Middle Eastern country in the mid-20th century, they were pretty fucking good. As you can imagine, Mossadegh’s reforms pissed off a lot of powerful Iranians, but the real threat proved to be external. The Shah of Iran, an incredibly corrupt and brutal dynastic ruler, had helped facilitate a deal for oil with the British, a deal that was so lopsided in the UK’s favor that it amounted to plunder of a developing nation by a rich one. The Shah didn’t care, so long as he got his kickback. Mossadegh and his party moved to nationalize the country’s oil industry, as Iran was poor and oil was its most precious commodity. The British didn’t like that, so they called up their friends the Americans, and the CIA instigated a coup against Mossadegh. He was arrested and jailed for three years, then forced into house arrest until his death in 1967. In an effort to avoid any public commemoration of his death his body was buried under the floor of his living room.

This all had notoriously bad consequences. For the Iranian people, the coup cleared the way for the Shah to retake power. His rule was a period of antidemocratic “reforms,” almost impossible levels of corruption, and remarkably cruel oppression of the people. The Shah’s infamous secret police force, SAVAK, was fond of disappearing his political enemies, used torture to discipline the public, and surveilled whoever they wanted without any restraint or due process. The geopolitical consequences were massive; it’s historically indisputable that the Shah’s terrible rule directly laid the seeds for the Iranian revolution, which established one of the most rigidly theocratic governments in the world. Today, politics in the region are dominated by a cold war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite Iran, while Israel’s own slowly bubbling conflict with Iran frequently risks boiling over. American fretting over Iran’s nuclear program never ends. And, for the record, the Iranian revolution freaked out Saddam Hussein, leading to the Iran-Iraq war; deeply indebted from that conflict and eager to demonstrate strength, Iraq invaded Kuwait, leading to the Gulf War; the invasion of Kuwait panicked the American government, leading us to put troops in Saudi Arabia; stationing troops in Saudi Arabia enraged a wealthy extremist named Osama bin Laden, leading to al Qaeda and 9/11; for some reason, 9/11 led to the invasion of Iraq; the invasion of Iraq destabilized the region, particularly the western border with Syria, leading to an escalating Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS….

So, you know, cool!

I’ve been arguing politics since I was a teenager, in the mid 90s. One of the topics I’ve argued about the most has been American foreign policy, specifically our many, many sins in the developing world. And I have often talked about the 1953 coup in Iran. As I said, it’s archetypal - we did something flatly immoral and antidemocratic, we did it not for principle or self-defense but to help an ally satisfy its greed for resources, many thousands of innocent people were repressed and tortured and killed because of it, and the predictably-unpredictable consequences were ultimately disastrous for the United States itself. Perhaps because it’s so direct and damning an indictment of American conduct, many people have long dismissed this history as, yes, a conspiracy theory. I could not begin to estimate how many times I was told exactly that, in the 1990s and 2000s and even into the first several years of the 2010s: the notion that the CIA had anything to do with the coup at all was simply a conspiracy theory, an outlandish one. We don’t do that sort of thing. We’re the good guys. Look at your sources! It’s all crazy stuff like Counterpunch! Adults don’t talk about this stuff.

In 2013, the CIA finally came out and admitted it, sort of. Typically with these things there’s nothing as explicit as what was released; they just keep releasing formerly classified docs until it’s inarguable without acknowledging anything. But perhaps such an incredible stain on our history required an actual admission, though still one that required a FOIA request, and don’t even dream about an apology. The conspiracy theory - the theory, some of us had, that the American government had conspired in this shameful episode - was in fact true. (The people who had so long denied that it was true, for the record, simply switched from “that didn’t happen” to “yes it happened and it was good.”) There are of course many more examples of American malfeasance I could point to, even if I just restrict myself to those for which there is overwhelming documentary evidence. People still call those conspiracy theories now.

McCullough would likely dismiss the Mossadegh coup as an example of a correct conspiracy theory by saying that it wasn’t ever a conspiracy theory; everybody knew, perhaps he’d say, or it wasn’t the sort of thing that JFK assassination obsessives and Flat Earth crazies would fixate on, or some other point of minutia to deny the example. I would retort that conspiracy theory is as conspiracy theory does - that is, I know it was treated as a conspiracy theory because I was told hundreds of times that it was a conspiracy theory. How and why does the term “conspiracy theory” matter, anyway? It matters because the term is used as a rhetorical cudgel with which to beat anyone who questions any official narrative. What really matters here is how the concept of conspiracy theories operates rhetorically; McCullough as much as says so when he fixates on the negative consequences of taking conspiracy theories seriously. But if what matters is how this all functions in political argument, then lawyering away examples because they’re inconvenient for your narrative is unhelpful. As long as people keep trying to dismiss certain arguments as conspiracy theories, it’s fair to call them conspiracy theories proven right if in fact they are.

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And look, I fully acknowledge that conspiracy theories in the entirely negative sense exist and are pernicious. For whatever reason, I’m someone who a lot of anti-vaxxers try to convince. They insist that “the jab” has killed millions, unless they’ve ratcheted it up to billions now. When I ask for evidence, they either evade or they refer me to incredibly dubious sources. I’ve been sent a spreadsheet that lists supposed deaths from the Covid vaccines; on investigation, it simply listed people who had publicly been identified as having died of a cardiovascular disease, assuming that heart problem = vaccines. Heart disease has been the leading cause of death in this country for more than a half-century! On X.com, anyone who dies without being hit by a bus is immediately called a vaccine victim. Recently surveys, surveys, are being touted as epidemiological evidence. Meanwhile, the most important piece of evidence is just sitting there - excess deaths spiked tremendously immediately after the start of the pandemic, not after the release of the vaccines. Where did all of those pre-release deaths come from? And where are the bodies of these supposed millions of vaccine dead? All of this stuff sucks, and one reason it sucks is that it’s stolen so much attention from many important criticisms of our deeply-imperfect public health response, including questions about whether it was the best idea to pressure healthy 20-somethings to get the vaccine when their risk was so low. (Although the vaccines actually were effective at stopping transmission with the original strain, and maintained their effectiveness at preventing serious illness and death even with Delta and Omicron.)

The point is, yeah, conspiracy theories cause a lot of damage. But the solution can’t be just waving our hands and saying that all conspiracy theories are wrong. That’s not true, and it’s exactly the kind of willful denial of reality that powers conspiratorial thinking. Conspiracy theories spread because people conspire.

McCullough asks what the positive value of the type of article he critiques might be. Well, as stated, I have no interest in defending those particular stories in particular or any actually-existing examples in general. Instead, I would defend the value of talking about conspiracy theories that turned out to be true because they deliver an essential social message: official stories about the world are often wrong and promulgated by official voices to deceive and control the public. Someone like McCullough, in 2002, would have been the person haranguing you that of course Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, all the official types and institutions were saying so. Would Donald Rumsfeld lie??? I think the internal inconsistency for McCullough here is that he’s temperamentally inclined to support official narratives, but also possesses a natural skepticism about human beings to understand the truth and act on it wisely. (Indeed, he prefaces this very video by saying just that, that it’s hard to know facts about the world.) But this would seem to cut directly against his thesis here - we have competing theories about the world because we don’t all agree about what is true, and as someone who’s just a couple years older than McCullough, my entire adult life has revealed that the official theory of the truth is very often wrong. Remember when Bill Clinton told us he did not have sex with that woman Miss Lewinski, when Alan Greenspan told us the fundamentals of the economy were strong, when the CDC told us Covid wasn’t airborne? That’s my entire life, man.

I find McCullough to be, in general, an interesting figure, by turns producing a lot of insight and falling into extremely lazy mental habits. Consider this video about why consumerism is good. He makes arguments to that effect, some better, some worse, but finished up by insisting that anti-consumerists are to be dismissed because they still consume things. This is a positively undergraduate approach; there are certainly much better ways to advocate for consumerism. Anti-consumerists of the most stringent variety must consume in a consumerist economy and have no choice otherwise. To attempt not to would be to wander around naked and starve to death. Of course, actual anti-consumerists are not opposed to consumption of all kinds and in all cases, and in fact many anti-consumerists are also committed capitalists. They’re opposed to consumption, in the economic sense, as a lifestyle, as a conferrer of values, as a bringer of meaning. They’re opposed to mindless consumption, to the celebration of consumption for its own sake. Either way, though, they can’t opt out of consumption in our current system. This is a permanent reality of politics: people are forced to live within the systems they would change. I very much doubt that McCullough would mock a Chinese dissident for still living under communism! But that dissident is guilty of the exact same “failure” as the anti-consumerists he derides.

I think McCullough can be guilty of a not-uncommon bad habit, which I call the Reverse Edgelord. It’s exactly what it sounds like: just as there are many people motivated by a desire to offend and titillate, a much smaller group seems motivated to appear like the most sober person in the room all the time. That’s that capital-R Reasonableness I mentioned at the top. I think McCullough can be guilty of this, and I suspect it’s inspired in part because he’s a conservative in a world where conservatism has been taken over by some genuine whackadoos.

It’s a shame that he falls into these lazy tropes because I genuinely quite enjoy his channel. He has a slightly off-kilter perspective that makes well-trod territory feel fresh; his recent series on America’s post-war presidents and the two eras within them is quite perceptive and engages with their politics without falling into culture war dross. In general, what I appreciate in McCullough is what I’m always looking for more of: voices that seem to genuinely emerge from a distinct and unexpected point of view. I feel like the internet has been systematically purged of genuinely independent perspectives, as opposed to all the people claiming independence as branding while waging tired right-wing culture war shtick. But of course independence doesn’t ensure being correct, and when it comes to conspiracy theories, McCullough is flat wrong.