The Usefulness of the ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Charge
by John D. O’Connor
The following is an article originally published on American Thinker. Read it HERE.
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You may think climate alarmism is a great overhype, that the 2020 election had unusually significant voting irregularities, or that “Russiagate” was a hoax perpetrated by the Clinton campaign and our national intelligence agencies. If so, according to the Progressive left and its media, you are a “right-wing” perpetrator of “conspiracy theory,” born of your emotionalism, credulity, and paranoia. Therefore, there is no need to refute your ideas with evidence and argument, as John Stuart Mill would deem the essence of our democratic project.
On the other hand, if you believe that Trump was secretly communicating with Russia when he asked Russia during a televised speech to find Hillary Clinton’s missing 30,000 emails, you are, in the eyes of Progressives, a discerning observer. If you pooh-pooh any suggestion that Watergate was about spying on men calling a CIA-sponsored bordello, you are qualified to converse in a Manhattan parlor. Your climate sophistication is shown if, in response to any criticism of the U.N.’s 1995 IPCC Report on the climate, you laugh off this “climate denialism,” of course a conspiracy theory not requiring debate.
By the label “conspiracy theory,” the Progressive left, supported by a complicit media establishment, concocts false narratives while suppressing opposition based on fact. Our society is worse off for this cloture of debate.
The left and its media handmaidens are thereby stanching important, principled, and fact-based arguments in the service of enshrining ideological doctrine, best termed propaganda, since it is decreed to be unassailable truth without any need for intellectual vetting. The issues presented here as examples would need hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of explication to treat them fully. But a few notes serve the thesis presented here.
Doubling of atmospheric CO2 will not be, as Al Gore famously claimed, associated with 5.4 degrees of warming, a true catastrophe. Closer to 1 to 1.7 degrees is more in line with the current state of evidence, still developing with the aid of geostationary satellites and subject to refinement. More importantly, over the eons, CO2 increases have always lagged heating and are, for the most part, caused by heating, as warming of oceans and tundra, along with rotting biomass, releases CO2 as heat increases. The alarmist computer models overpredict warming by three times on average, and evidence suggests that the narrow CO2 absorption band is becoming saturated. So the extent and effect of man-made CO2 are at the least debatable.
Indeed, the first and most comprehensive scientific examination of the causes of global warming, the 1995 Report of IPCC scientists, found no “clear evidence that we can attribute the observed change to ... increase in greenhouse gases.” Of course, the IPCC’s political arm, in its 1995 Summary for Policymakers, issued to the public, said just the opposite: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.”
But has any reader encountered in the mainstream media these evidence-based arguments? The very essence of science is debate, and as the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman observed, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” But the “conspiracy theory” charge suppresses scientific debate under the theory that putative expert opinion cannot be subject to challenge.
Please recall that as Watergate was exploding in May 1973, the special counsel, prominent Democrat and Kennedy associate Archibald Cox, was appointed, followed by Leon Jaworski. Evidence that the Watergate wiretaps were aimed at calls between out-of-town Democrats and a CIA-protected bordello was swept under the rug, along with strong evidence that the burglary was not a campaign operation. The books Secret Agenda (1984) and Postgate (2019) show solid proof that this is so.
Did our Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post, which knew the burglary’s actual target, and CIA involvement, print what it knew? Of course not. Fifty years after the arrests, star reporter Bob Woodward still attributes the burglaries, falsely, to Richard Nixon’s irrational desire to win the 1974 election, wiretapping a site all cognoscenti have admitted had no current campaign value. As Nixon wryly observed, he could understand someone thinking he was criminal but was insulted that someone would think him this stupid. But no matter how irrational, the Post and Woodward, supported by an almost unanimous media establishment, persist in a narrative that has been debunked to a fare-thee-well.
Jumping to 2019, very little of the Mueller Report was written by its eponymous special counsel sponsor. This publication contained outright doozies, which do likely qualify for the unenlightening tag of conspiracy theories. It continually referred to Professor Joseph Mifsud as a “Russian-connected” operative who supposedly tried to connect inexperienced young Trump campaign associate George Papodopolous with Vladimir Putin. This fable ignored the strong evidence that Mifsud was a British “5 Eyes” operative working with American intelligence agencies trying to entrap the Trump campaign.
This jejune, biased report implied that Trump was not joking when he publicly asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing 30,000 emails. After all, the report “proved” that Kremlin operatives responded to Trump’s statements by ... working late that night! We wish we were making up this tripe, printed at government expense, but we are not.
It would be easy, but facile, to mirror the left and simply term each stupidity a “conspiracy theory.” But, as we show here, that term does not produce principled discussion. It is more accurate that the left and the media simply ignore inconvenient truths that conflict with Progressive orthodoxy, using the accusation “conspiracy theory” to suppress contrary evidence. Any trial lawyer knows that the most common form of fraud is concealment of material facts. Thus, the best summary of the matter is that when the left yells “conspiracy theory!,” it is likely engaging in fraud.
At the same time the J6 protests were ongoing, unexploded pipe bombs were found near the RNC and DNC headquarters in Washington, D.C. The FBI had the suspect on video — a short, a young-looking black man wearing Nike Air Max Speed Turf shoes. Yet for four years, the FBI failed to find the suspect. This is at the same time the Bureau was locating, mainly through cell phone data, just about every one of the many thousands of Americans who were near the Capitol on January 6, not just those who entered the Capitol building. But skilled FBI agents couldn’t locate this photographed pipe bomb suspect during the four-year Biden term?
Conservatives, one of whom was podcaster Dan Bongino, saw this evidence as indicating an FBI “setup” designed to blame Trump. After all, would the FBI allow a true crime to go unsolved?
Once Bongino and Kash Patel were sworn in to the FBI around March 2025, the case was solved after several months of hard sleuthing, which could have happened in 2021, four years earlier. Clearly, this fact pattern supports Bongino’s hypothesis of the FBI’s deliberate inaction. We now know that the crime was real, which is worse than the fabricated one Bongino rationally hypothesized.
But why would the FBI, perhaps urged by the White House, fail to investigate? If this were a young black man living in Washington, D.C., demographics would suggest a 90% chance that the culprit was an anti-Trump Bidenite and unlikely MAGA. This would directly conflict with the political narrative being constructed by Democrats and the media of January 6 Trumpian evil.
Now, with the J6 pipe bomb crime solved, how did the New York Times report this story? As a criticism of Bongino for, yes, having spouted a “conspiracy theory,” now forced to “a tire-shredding U-turn.” This was not a U-turn at all, but a slight course correction aided by information in the file. By accusing Bongino, the story became about a crazy conservative conspiratorialist and not a biased FBI that sat on its hands for four years for clear political reasons.
The Times even swallowed without pushback the FBI’s explanation that it couldn’t figure out how to search the cell phone data within the pipe bomb areas, after the FBI used cell phone data to find everyone breathing near the Capitol on J6. But this weak explanation was needed to avoid the real story of a politically compromised FBI, supported by a credulous media establishment, avoiding the solving of a crime for political purposes.
It therefore should surprise no one that as the Minnesota Somali fraud scandal deepens, left-leaning media are more vociferously attributing the uproar to MAGA conspiracy theorists. And as Governor Tim Walz abandons his re-election campaign because of his implication in the fraud, he is blaming, yes, “conspiracy theories.”
Thus the ineluctable verdict to be reached by anyone with common sense: In each of these matters of great importance to the public, the left and its media acolytes prefer to avoid democratic discussion and debate by using the mindless taunt of “conspiracy theory,” often in the service of a fraudulent Progressive narrative.
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John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened and Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism.