(Editors’ note: this article is part three of a series. Read Part One and Part Two.)

“ … I lie. If I’m really cornered or something, I lie. I really try not to. I try never to lie on TV. … I don’t like lying. I certainly do it, you know, out of weakness or whatever, but to systematically lie like that without asking yourself, like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ So, if these people ask themselves, ‘Why am I doing this?’ They’ll say, ‘Well because I wanna protect the system, because I really believe in the system.’ Okay, who’s running the system?”

~Tucker Carlson, September 12, 2021

“ … Dishonest people always impute dishonest motives to other people. It’s like, philanderers always assume everyone else is cheating on his wife. That’s just the way they are. You know, I’ve got a lot of faults; I’m not that dishonest, actually. And, I just kinda say what I think. Why wouldn’t I? I’m 53: There’s no advantage in lying. I don’t if I can help it. I mean, I guess if you caught me doing something bad, I would lie about it, but in general, I try not to lie. My motives are super straightforward.”

~Tucker Carlson, October 7, 2022

“No one is punished for lying. People are only punished for telling the truth. … What are the crimes that are punished? Thought crimes. Thinking the wrong thing. Having the wrong beliefs. Saying unapproved words.”

~Tucker Carlson, July 15, 2023

“Once you say one true thing and stick with it, all kinds of other true things occur to you. The truth is contagious—lying is, but the truth is as well.”

~Tucker Carlson, April 21, 2023

“Many people claim to be seeking the truth, but in reality, all they do is become tools for the propaganda.”

~Simon Ateba, April 26th, 2023

“Question their lies and they’ll call you a liar. Ignore it and keep going.”

~Tucker Carlson, September 22, 2023

Introduction

This essay picks up on the initially intended subject that I took an interest in nearly two years before this publication, i.e., a mainstream, corporate news pundit drawing among the highest ratings for any news channel made claims that directly contradicted the official, authorized account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The editors of Propaganda in Focus have correctly tagged my series on Tucker Carlson under the category of The Conspiracy Label. Within that category, you’ll find an article in remembrance of the late Professor Lance deHave-Smith, who, shockingly to me, Tucker Carlson discussed in his segment on the CIA’s role in the JFK assassination. Part 1 of this series dealt with the surprise departure from Fox News, which led me down the rabbit holes of deplatforming and censorship of other prominent voices among those routinely labeled as “conspiracy theorists.” Part 2 picked up on the theme of analyzing Tucker Carlson’s role in dissident discourse, highlighting others’ impressions of why he was let go from Fox News and pointing out that Tucker Carlson likely played a role in replatforming Alex Jones to 𝕏. Since then, there’s been a sea shift in public discourse that involves Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson. Love them or hate them – there seems to be no middle ground – these men challenge Establishment power structures while simultaneously playing significant roles in what seem to be alternative power structures. Keep in mind the questions raised in the following paragraph while reading this installment, for what this series is really about is how and why individuals choose to swim against the tides of globalism, collectivism, postmodernism, and neo-Marxism.

Why is it that some questions are off-limits to ask? And why is it that notable figures who ask taboo questions are targeted with assassination, either or both of their ethos or existentially? Converting from understanding the world through conventional wisdom to what is called “conspiracism” often leads to the death of one’s worldview and to social death by stigmatization, ostracism, and silencing. How did this come to be, especially considering majorities distrust the official story of the JFK assassination, with many millions believing it was a conspiracy? In what ways do social insiders talk about the JFK assassination that do and do not cross the threshold of permissible public discourse? What makes some forms and sources of discourse more or less socially acceptable? How did Tucker Carlson and The New York Times approach discussing the JFK assassination and the release of files previously kept secret from the public? What has been Tucker Carlson’s trajectory and role in corporate and state-affiliated media outlets concerning 9/11 and the War on Terror? What factors and when did Tucker Carlson start converting from the conventional wisdom of bother or either? How can we understand the attempted assassination of former president and current presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in terms of Tucker Carlson’s public persona as a “conspiracy theorist,” insofar as that is what Establishment media and other insiders would have their audiences believe?

Ignorance is Strength, Curiosity Kills

If, as Ron Paul said in The Revolution: A Manifesto, “Truth is treason in the empire of lies,” then Tucker Carlson is either a fugitive at large working his way up the top-ten list of Public Enemies, or he’s one of the emperor’s top viziers and heralds. It depends on your point of view and where you stand. Here’s a clear example taken from Tucker Carlson’s response to Benny Johnson on an 𝕏 Space (2.7M views) hosted on December 12, 2023, seven months and a day before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Discerning the truth-value of or motivation behind the following statements will be a test of your standpoint:

JOHNSON: So, they’re obviously going to see 𝕏 as a platform they’re going to try and take offline and metaphorically assassinate 𝕏. You’ve spoken at length in multiple situations about how you think that we are speeding towards assassination, potentially, for Donald Trump in his candidacy because, equally, Donald Trump speaks hard truths that are uncomfortable for people, and also, Donald Trump is a threat to the existing system. Do you really believe that we are on our way to a physical assassination attempt?

CARLSON: Well, I don’t know what we’re on the way to, but we’re certainly on the way to something. I mean, one of—you know, the great lie that we tell ourselves is that our lives in the world are static. They’re not. They’re always progressing towards something; we don’t usually know what it is, but we’re always on the road to somewhere. And you just sort of have to ask yourself logically, like, what’s next? I mean, the amount of energy and money and time and public attention, all of which are precious commodities the Asshole Community has taken to destroy Donald Trump, is just astounding. I mean, it’s — it’s honestly, like, it’s like the moonshot. In fact, they’ve expended more resources on destroying Trump than they did on getting a man to the Moon, assuming you believe that actually happened, and I think it’s in question. … So that does raise the question, like, okay, what next? You indict him four times, you threaten him with life in prison; these are credible threats, by the way. His trial begins in the middle of the primary season in March, a few months from now, and the guy is still running and he still appears to be unbowed. So, you know, you’re kind of reaching to the bottom of your bag of tricks, and you find it empty, and it’s like, “We’re threatening you with life imprisonment! Call it off, drop out!” You know? “Pick a successor and leave, retire, and we’ll leave you alone!” He won’t. So, like, what else are they going to do? I don’t know. I mean, I’m just guessing here, but, like, why wouldn’t they kill him? Seriously!

Benny Johnson, who has recently been accused of being a Russian operative tasked with sowing discord in U.S. culture and politics, cut out the segment above in a standalone video titled, “Tucker: ‘The CIA Killed JFK and They’re Going To Assassinate Trump, Too’.” That video saved me some work because I would have made the same points relevant to the introduction to this essay that he raised after the exchange above. These include the following:

  • During an interview on his 𝕏 show on August 8, 2023 — 325 days before the course of history would have permanently changed had Trump been assassinated, Tucker Carlson asked Donald Trump directly about the possibility of an assassination attempt (go to 19:12): “So if you chart it out, it’s an escalation, is what I’m saying. So what’s next? You know, after trying to put you in prison for the rest of your life: That’s not working, so like, don’t they have to kill you now?” Was Tucker Carlson thinking logically or conspiratorially, and are the two mutually exclusive? The answer depends on your standpoint.
  • On December 15, 2022, Fox News published this piece, “Tucker Carlson: Here’s what a source said about the CIA and JFK’s assassination: Tucker Carlson questions whether the CIA had a role in JFK’s death.” This, in particular, serves as the entire impetus for my investigating and writing about Tucker Carlson and is discussed in more depth below.
  • On September 2, 2023, Forbes published this article: “Tucker Carlson’s Trump Assassination Conspiracy Theory Explained: Where It Started, Who Is Pushing It.” The article starts this way: “Former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has repeatedly pedalled a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump will be the target of an assassination plot, most recently saying in an interview the U.S. is ‘speeding toward’ the former president’s assassination — an unfounded claim amplified by other right-wing media personalities.”
  • On June 26, 2023, Newsweek published a non-Tucker-related article, but its title follows a pattern: “Trump Faces an Assassination Plot, Conspiracist Alex Jones Alleges.”
  • Business Insider did not label itself a conspiracy outlet when it published its November 25, 2023, article “Here’s what happens if Donald Trump dies while running in the 2024 presidential election.”

What would you make of a situation in which major purveyors of information use a pejorative label designed to delegitimize their targets whose concerns and predictions eventually bear out? One might say that a broken clock is right twice a day. Still, I wonder why it is considered a “conspiracy theory” when it comes to opposing the interests of Establishment organizations and institutions, yet it’s not considered a conspiracy theory when those entities pose the same or similar hypotheses. Social scientist Laura Jones analyzed why claims made by social insiders, like Donald Rumsfeld, and outsiders, like Luke Rudkowski, are defended against conspiracy theorists or labeled as conspiracy theorists, respectively, depending on their relative position in the social structure. I’m just asking questions here, like those Tucker Carlson asked to Donald Trump, the man who was almost murdered in what now is, as always, off-limits from asking, was it (possibly) a conspiracy? How can we distinguish fact from unfounded rumor, truth from myth?

“Myth lies at the basis of society,” starts one scholar of public myths. “The main reasons why myths arise are absence of knowledge and misunderstanding of facts, hiding truth, herd mentality, striving for unity and self deception,” says another. “Lies affect the distribution of power in society,” notes one scholar of propaganda: “Lies add to the power of the liar and reduce the power of those who have been deceived by altering their choices.” By my ear, Tucker Carlson, in his current incarnation, could have spoken those words earnestly. For a period of time, I believed Tucker Carlson was either a knowing liar or a true believer in the propaganda he spewed, a distinction without much of a difference. Just as some of my colleagues currently feel, I did not trust Tucker Carlson when in 2008 I first encountered his television personae, and up to about 2020, I had no use for him other than as a good example of an Establishment shill, a corporate cheerleader for political warmongers.

Regardless of whether you despise, loathe, or hate him, Tucker Carlson commands one of the largest audiences in the history of humanity. So, it might be worthwhile to investigate his draw, if not simply to better understand why seemingly radical discourse is appealing to his audiences and guests. And, maybe there’s something more to the man than headlines that label him a “dangerous misinformer.” Maybe not. Recently, Tucker Carlson achieved 34 million views on an episode of his show on 𝕏 in which he platformed “revisionist historianDaryl Cooper, “an actual dyed-in-the-wool Nazi sympathizer,” who “has openly endorsed fascism and tyranny.” Without detailed scrutiny of the facts, a deep dive into territory drawn on maps as murky, darkened, and out of bounds by the Empire’s mapmakers, maps religiously adhered to by laypersons who’ve never strayed off the beaten path, how can we know for sure what is true and not? And, once known, who do you talk to without the requisite reprisal of some Orwellian Two Minutes of Hate? These are relevant questions considering the “public presumption” of truth is routinely awarded like a participation trophy to Establishment insiders and their sycophants.

If Socrates is a signpost, no sane and honest person should raise socially disturbing questions, especially now, for Plato’s ancient wisdom warns truth sayers whose repayment for attempting to awaken people from their slumbering ignorance and waking denial is death. In keeping with this tradition, a great modern philosopher observed this:

Here’s an interesting form of murder we came up with: assassination. You know what’s interesting about assassination? Well, not only does it change those popularity polls in a big fucking hurry, but it’s also interesting to notice who it is we assassinate. Did you ever notice who it is? Stop to think who it is we kill. It’s always people who’ve told us to live together in harmony and try to love one another. Jesus, Gandhi, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, John Lennon, they all said, “Try to live together peacefully.” BAM! Right in the fucking head. Apparently, we’re not ready for that. ~From George Carlin: Life is Worth Losing (2005)

Tucker Carlson must be insane, a liar, or both. Among myriad heretical blasphemies he’s publicly declared are some that cross the most sacrosanct thresholds closely monitored by social agents who police thought in attempts to manipulate and ”nudge” public discourse. I.e., Tucker Carlson’s questioning of the official, authorized narratives of the JFK assassination and 9/11, and more recently, his “calling bullshit” on the initial developing stories of the Trump assassination attempt. But, Tucker Carlson was not always so openly curious. What catalyzed his metamorphosis?

In May 2023, I asked in response to a post on 𝕏 that included an image similar to this one one what year it represented Tucker Carlson, “and what was it that made him start paying attention?” In reply, I received a link to Tucker Carlson being interviewed on The Tulsi Gabbard Show in which Tulsi asked Tucker when he started questioning if “there was something bigger and deeper going on” with recent and historical events than what was reported in the mainstream. Carlson said, “Really, what changed me was watching Trump in 2015. What changed my view wasn’t Trump. It was the reaction to Trump among my neighbors.” Donald Trump’s questioning of NATO inspired Tucker to wonder why we still have a need for the organization decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Up to 2015, Tucker Carlson never thought to question the existence of NATO, and when he put the question to his neighbors, they apparently responded with “SHUT UP! HE MUST BE KILLED!” Perhaps he developed a condition of RBF – “Resting Baffled Face” – after metamorphizing into his current state of “coming at [topics] from a totally idiotic, I-don’t-know-anything, curious position, which is my normal posture on everything.”

Wake Up, Time to Die

What initially set me off on this now three-part investigation into Tucker Carlson’s function in contemporary social discourse was the December 15, 2022, segment on his Fox News show in which Tucker Carlson dared utter the following line, “the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president [JFK].” For a major news media figure, this was unheard of — send me an example of a primetime pundit doing the same; I’ll wait. A week later, Tucker Carlson lamented that “for 21 years now with the still somehow secret 9/11 files and for 60 years with the JFK assassination,” national security and public safety have been cited as the official reason for withholding from the public information about history-defining events. This is a long way to come for someone who derided both JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theories, ridiculing experts and dismissing their empirically-based questions as not just crazy but malicious. Who knows, Tucker Carlson might have been reading from the CIA playbook on how to handle conspiracy theorists, or maybe he’s engaging in “cognitive infiltration.” Who knows for sure? After all, he did want to join the CIA at one point in time.

According to Establishment media, Tucker Carlson’s “propaganda playbook” of “conspiracy theories wrapped in conspiracy theories” apparently consists of references to an often-nameless “they/them” and asking his audience rhetorical, open-ended questions about who is really in charge of apparently monolithic policies of governmental, corporate, media, and educational institutions. As Michael Shermer so eloquently put it, “This is called ‘jaqing off’… a classic tactic used by conspiracy theorists who don’t have explanations or evidence for their belief.” Shermer’s smear was about Tucker Carlson’s assessment of Russian society, but Shermer used it again concerning Carlson hosting pop/pseudo-historian Daryl Cooper, stating, “’just asking questions’ (JAQing off) is no cover. Questions in this vain are not neutral.” As intended with rhetorical tactics taught and used by anti-conspiracists (e.g., see pages 11-12 in David Aaronovitch’s 2010 book Voodoo Histories), many others have taken up that specific lude, crude, yet socially acceptable aspersion toward Tucker and others. When you question the contrivances and conjectures conjured by the curators of culture, the public relations professionals, and the strategic communications experts, expect slings and arrows, especially if you’re right on target. Sometimes, this comes as being canceled, socially or existentially; sometimes, it’s just name-calling in an attempt at character assassination.

Tucker Carlson has been called “your boss’s favorite” “cosplaying,” “bow-tied bard of populism.” While some say he presents a “BS everyman act,” Tucker Carlson denies that he is a populist, but if he were, it would make sense as to why he decided to discuss one of the most popular and appealing conspiracy theories, i.e., they killed Kennedy. Shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Gallup conducted a poll that found 52% of the public believed “some group or element was also responsible” alongside the accused lone gunman. In comparison, 19% reserved their conclusions about what happened. According to a 2004 ABC News poll, “Forty years after Kennedy was fatally shot on Nov. 22, 1963, more than 70 percent of Americans still believe there was a conspiracy to kill him and that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, did not act alone.” “As the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches,” reported Gallup in 2013, “a clear majority of Americans (61%) still believe others besides Lee Harvey Oswald were involved. But this percentage is the lowest found in nearly 50 years.”

Within days of the publication of Gallop’s 2013 findings, ABC News corroborated their report:

“Fifty years later, majorities of Americans still believe that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was part of a broader plot and that a government cover-up tried to keep the public from learning the truth. But both suspicions have subsided from their peaks. Sixty-two percent in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll believe the killing was the work of more than one person; as many also think the government has tried to conceal the facts. But underscoring that these are mainly suspicions, far fewer, 29 percent, feel sure that a conspiracy occurred. The rest call it just their hunch.”

Fifty years after the assassination, most of the U.S. American public remains unwavering in our suspicion that the official story of who killed Kennedy was anything but the end of the story. If ever there were a popular contrary notion, the JFK assassination would be it. So, maybe like the headlines say, Tucker Carlson exploited “populist rage” and “mainstreamed fringe conspiracy theories to mass audiences” by jumping on the bandwagon of promoting a purportedly pernicious form of popular knowledge (see Ch. 2). Yet, since JFK assassination “conspiracy theories” have always been proposed by majorities, maybe the reason so many people believe in and espouse them is that there’s something to it. Maybe they have carefully thought out, rational questions about empirically observable anomalies that contradict the authorized account produced by the Warren Commission. Maybe, for any number of reasons, the public’s skepticism is justified.

Apparently, these suspicions should have been dispelled by the government’s investigation of what is widely believed to have been, at least in part, an assassination carried out and/or covered up by U.S. government actors. For example, here’s how one writer for ABC News put the matter: “Despite the Warren Commission Report’s conclusion that the gunman acted alone, the event is shrouded in conspiracy theories.” According to the logic of those media outlets that contravene the beliefs and positions shared by majorities of poll respondents over decades, the Warren Commission reached the definitive conclusion about the JFK assassination and there are no significant or legitimate questions that can or should be raised. Therefore, those of us who suspect members of the Warren Commission and other insiders of having been involved in a cover-up of the assassination, at the very least, should concede that the case is closed and has been for decades (never mind competing conclusions reached by other government insiders).

Ever since the official version of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was codified, the corporate news media has promoted the Warren Commission’s findings despite the existence of prevailing skepticism and reasonable suspicions presented by hundreds of researchers in dozens of books, documentaries, and other forms. However, the trick hand dealt to those who dare contradict the official story is to designate those countervailing conclusions as mere conspiracy theories, thereby positioning those claims as untrustworthy due to the presumption of truth being freely awarded to government agencies, corporate media, and other legitimating institutions. The CIA suggested this practice be adopted in Dispatch 1035-960, i.e., that when contradictions to the official account are preferred, they are to be systematically refuted. This beguiling document has led many to make specious claims like this: “This document was a C.I.A. Dispatch labeled ‘psych’ for ‘psychological operations’ that was distributed in 1967, indicating they coined the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ to attack anyone who challenged the official narrative from the Warren Commission [emphasis mine].” I address that issue in Part I of an article series on the conspiracy label for Propaganda in Focus. The CIA did not coin or invent the conspiracy label. However, as I demonstrate in Part III of that series, Dispatch 1035-960 is the origin of popularizing the conspiracy label as a propaganda tool for cultural hegemony.

The idea is encapsulated in the title of a 2019 book, The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theory Since the 1950s: “A Plot to Make Us Look Foolish.” Viewpoints or beliefs labeled “conspiracy theories” are to be treated in the first instance as untrustworthy, possibly as malicious lies. If one were to become suspicious that there is a concocted and concerted agenda to keep people from asking disturbing questions about officialdom, then that person could and should be labeled a “conspiracy theorist” for such suspicions. It’s a game called “heads I win, tails you lose.” This is somewhat like the (neo)Marxist concept of “false consciousness” and the Freudian concept of “denial.” In both cases, if you disagree with an accusation that you suffer from either, your disagreement can and will be cited as a symptom of some psychological aberration. As I discuss in my article, “The CIA and Reification of the Psychologism of Conspiracy Theories,” reducing claims of conspiracy to psychological abnormalities is a convenient social control device as it refocuses attention on the claimant’s alleged character defects rather than on the truth-value of their claims. If their claims are addressed, the strongest empirical evidence is typically ignored, and the official narrative is given precedent to override all competing evidence. I demonstrated that in my PhD dissertation.

In Part II of my article series on the conspiracy label, I discussed the multi-institutional politics of anti-conspiracy discourse, which refers to a mutually reinforcing network of organizations and institutions that stigmatize conspiracy theories, however factual they might be. CIA Dispatch 1035-960 spawned the self-reinforcing material and ideological network of anti-conspiracists producing anti-conspiracy discourse detailed in that essay series. For example, click on this link to a documentary called Evidence of Revision, which relies almost exclusively on primary sources of news footage and witness testimony, and you’ll notice that the host, YouTube, has posted a context box citing the official record of the JFK assassination as described by Britannica or Wikipedia, depending on your IP or VPN. Despite widespread and popular doubt in the public, the presumption is given to the government’s version of events, and it’s promoted and defended by powerful and influential organizations manifestly engaged in shaping cultural knowledge and beliefs. This is where my interest in Tucker Carlson comes into play: For the first time in history, a mainstream, primetime figurehead promoted an alternative version to the official story of JFK’s assassination, and this was done in all seriousness. It was an attempt to rewrite history, to re-craft the narrative. If the winners write history, then we should wonder why protagonists and antagonists are framed the way they are in the stories we are told. Thankfully, the good guys always win, though, right?

Morning Headlines, Dead on Arrival

In late December of 2022, a colleague in one of my professional groups shared a segment from Tucker Carlson Tonight’s December 15, 2022 episode, titled “Source says yes, the CIA was involved in JFK’s assassination.” At first, our collective attention was drawn to the simple fact that such a prominent public figure had mentioned our recently deceased colleague Professor Lance deHaven-Smith (1951-2022), who informally advised me on my PhD dissertation. Secondarily, group members began to discuss and debate why such a prominent media figure had deviated from the official, authorized account of the JFK assassination but, more importantly, why he was allowed to do so on an Establishment-controlled platform, Fox News. Was it some type of a hoax, put-on, or ruse? Was Tucker Carlson being sincere, or could he ever be? About half of the group seemed hopeful simply concerning the issue being discussed by one of cable news’s most popular hosts, but the other half were credulous toward Carlson, personally, and skeptical that this was a healthy contribution to otherwise serious investigatory work on the JFK assassination.

For many years, due to my educational background and personal biases, I shared popular sentiments that Tucker Carlson was repugnant and had been “hurting America” with his rhetoric on his television programs. Then, in the fall of 2020, YouTube randomly recommended a clip in which Tucker Carlson hosted a Chinese whistleblower discussing the possible origins of COVID-19 as other than natural. By then, I was among the “radical right” consuming “right-wing media” that was raising socially disturbing questions about the COVID-19 narrative — YouTube’s algorithm had caught on to my media consumption patterns. From the time I entered my undergraduate studies in 2002 up to today, Fox News was/is generally reviled among my college professors, classmates, friends, and acquaintances, and eventually my colleagues in academia and adjacent occupations. For well over a decade, their influence had a hold on me. For those people, who, if they do not eagerly read The New York Times or similar news media, certainly tune in to NPR’s programming, Tucker Carlson’s opinion segment on “whether the CIA had a role in JFK’s death” is likely further evidence that, as depicted in the image directly above, he is just a right-wing conspiracy theorist who used his platform on Fox News and uses his platform on 𝕏 to disseminate dangerous propaganda. But these are just opinions, mine and (probably) theirs. Let’s look past that and try to see things objectively, if not just analytically. But can that be accomplished?

That President John F. Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, TX, is an indisputable, objectively true fact. Everybody agrees on that … well, except for some QAnon believers, apparently. The trajectory of the fatal shot, which caused then-president Kennedy’s head to move back and to the left, was also an objective event in reality, with some experts concluding that motion to have been caused by a rearward bullet trajectory. Though the fatal bullet’s trajectory was caused by human agency, it nonetheless obeyed the laws of physics. Like everything else in the universe, it had to. If the trajectory of the fatal shot came from the front, it automatically implies a conspiracy because the official story is that it came from the upper right and the rear, causing Kennedy’s head to move back and to the left; if you believe that, for some believe it can be explained. If one looks at the best available evidence, contentious as it might be, and concludes that at least one bullet entered Kennedy from the front, a conspiracy would have to be the case. That is unless you believe conjectures like those proposed in a 1979 article in The Washington Post that possibly “some other malcontent” or “as many as three or four societal outcasts” coincidentally took their shots at the same time in the same location yet for wholly unconnected motives, thus no conspiracy. Incidentally, that article was published when the conspiracy label was first institutionally established.

If one refuses to speculate who might have taken the shot or how many people were involved, the grammatically appropriate pronoun to discuss the culprit or conspirators would be “they” or “them.” Of course, if you believe you know exactly who the assassin was, you use their full government name. The New York Times, which has published 1,845 articles on Tucker Carlson since September 13, 1998, takes such issue with Tucker Carlson’s references to the anonymous “they/them” Establishment elites that they produced a montage with nefarious-sounding mood music showcasing his use of the pronouns. Apparently, in order to be taken seriously, if you are going to call attention to systemic corruption or make allegations of large-scale conspiracies, you must name specific names involved in complex schemes in which the alleged perpetrators attempt to remain hidden or undetected, and in which multiple institutions and organizations come to defend the official, authorized narrative. This line of reasoning can be seen in USA Today in an evaluation of the usage of “they” when referring to who was involved in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. These rhetorical mechanics are part of the “dangerous machinery” that allows Establishment news producers and subscribers to sidestep rigorous investigation of the most relevant empirically-based questions troubling to official narratives. A go-to play in the anti-conspiracists’ playbook says instead of interrogating the evidence, refocus attention on discursive minutia. Nitpick and deny. Always deny.

Moving past speculation about forensics and suspicions of who Oswald might have conspired with — if he conspired at all, Tucker Carlson draws from his apparently well-established propaganda playbook to espouse unequivocally the following purported facts about the murder of JFK:

“Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president. Now, some people will not be surprised to hear that. They suspected it all along. But no matter how you feel about it or what you thought about the Kennedy assassination, pause to consider what this means. It means that within the US government, there are forces wholly beyond democratic control. These forces are more powerful than the elected officials that supposedly oversee them. These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president. In other words, they can do pretty much anything they want. They constitute a government within a government mocking, by their very existence, the idea of democracy.”

Consider that, in this case, Carlson chose to name an organization rather than postulate an anonymous “they/them” conspirator or conspiracy network. The CIA-did-it theories, to some at least, are the most plausible, if simply not debunkable. But maybe conspiracy theories are a natural byproduct of the existence of powerful organizations whose methods and interests rely on well-kept secrets and deception.

But can you believe what Tucker Carlson said to one of the largest audiences in the history of news? When I heard it, I was stunned. Doesn’t that sound like something straight from the script of the prebunked Oliver Stone film-length “conspiracy theory,” JFK? Of the director, Tucker Carlson once quipped, “Oliver Stone’s movie World Trade Center opened today, and for once, Stone doesn’t suggest some vast conspiracy …. ” As famously depicted in the film, Donald Sutherland portrays X, a mysterious whistleblower who delivers conspiracy-laden exposition on a park bench to the main protagonist, Jim Garrison, as played by Kevin Costner. Maybe you haven’t watched it, or it might have been too long since. Doesn’t matter. More important than the script and its production is that the film, JFK, was so provocative that it not only elicited critical movie reviews from left-leaning deniers of JFK assassination conspiracy theories before its 1991 release, but it contributed to pressure for the U.S. federal government to release files related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Carpe Diem, Shoot Your Shot

One of the issues under contention is what We, the People, are allowed to know and research about the JFK assassination or any other historically significant event. In Tucker Carlson’s extended quote just above, he was relying on “someone who had access to…still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained.” Carlson continued in his monologue with a question posed to his anonymous expert:

“Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President? And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”

In December of 2021, the Biden administration released nearly 1,500 confidential documents related to the JFK assassination, and a year later they authorized 12,879 documents of a similar sort to be unsealed and released to the public through the National Archives, which again in April and June of 2023 released more than 2,000 more documents. Carlson pointed out that former CIA director Mike Pompeo pressured the Trump administration to withhold JFK documents slated to be released in 2017, but there was no mention in that interview of why that might be. In an interview with John Stossel, Pompeo said the reason is that there are factors of that particular case from 60 years ago still affecting U.S. policy, as well as documents related to the case created in the meantime that are sensitive in nature. Donald Trump offered to release all files related to the JFK assassination as part of his bid for the presidency in 2024, again pledging as recently as September 3rd, 2024, to release them along with still-secret information about the Jeffrey Epstein case. In any case, isn’t it newsworthy in and of itself that one of the most popular primetime propagandists directed their audience to start asking questions about the possible role of the CIA in the assassination of a sitting U.S. president?

Maybe not because, after all, most of the public already held suspicions about the validity of the Warren Commission Report; however, that fact is not an indictment of one of the most secretive, powerful, and possibly dangerous organizations on the planet. And it’s not just Tucker Carlson or Fox News who implicated the CIA in the murder of John F. Kennedy. According to the decidedly trustworthy news outlet CNN, who relied on one of the top JFK assassination conspiracy theory experts, Dave Perry, the “The CIA did it” conspiracy theory is the one that stands out among all other theories, including those that accuse then vice president, Lyndon Johnson, the mob/mafia, and the ephemeral military-industrial complex, because it can’t be debunked.

So, with the release of the JFK documents, maybe Fox News’s chief conspiracy theorist saw an opportunity to exploit an already popular conspiracy theory to gain ratings, and maybe in doing so, he prompted and prodded people who might not otherwise to research for themselves the possible role of the CIA in the assassination of JFK. This is possibly why Fox News put the quietus on Tucker Carlson. It’s just a hunch, but it doesn’t answer the question of why Tucker Carlson chose to frame his segment in the manner he did. For this, we must look at a lengthy passage at the beginning of the segment.

Referencing Professor Lance deHaven-Smith, Tucker Carlson said this during the first part of his December 15, 2022, segment:

…less than a year after the JFK assassination, the Johnson White House released something called the Warren Commission Report. And the report concluded that while their motives remained unclear, both Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby had acted alone. No one helped them. There was no conspiracy of any kind. Case closed. Time to move on.

And many Americans did move on. At the time, they had no idea how shoddy and corrupt the Warren Commission was. It would be nearly 50 years before the CIA admitted under duress that in fact, it had withheld information from investigators about its relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald.

But even then, at the time, before that was known, the government’s explanation didn’t seem entirely plausible. And some people started asking obvious questions about it. It was at that point, as Americans started to doubt the official story, that the term “conspiracy theory” entered our lexicon. As Professor Lance DeHaven-Smith points out in his book on the subject, “The term conspiracy theory did not exist as a phrase in everyday American conversation before 1964. In 1964, the year the Warren Commission issued its report, the New York Times published five stories in which ‘conspiracy theory’ appeared.”

Now, today, of course, the term “conspiracy theory” appears in pretty much every New York Times story about American politics. It’s wielded, now as then, as a weapon against anyone who asks questions the government doesn’t feel like answering. But despite 60 years of name-calling, those questions have not disappeared. In fact, they have multiplied with time.

I’ve been sensitive to the discursive function of the conspiracy label since 2008, and I started studying its origins and functions in earnest around 2010. Perhaps due to Professor deHaven-Smith’s personal insights that he shared with me starting in July 2013, I believe it’s important to understand that the CIA helped popularize the conspiracy label. As I show in Part III of my conspiracy label series, CIA Dispatch 1035-960 is the seed from which a Mirkwood forest of anti-conspiracy discourse has sprouted. Among the many pitfalls and predators in that dark thicket are rhetorical packages people use to dismiss or diminish “conspiracy theorists” or rebuff “conspiracy theories” once identified. For example, one might be accused of “just asking questions” as a matter of a discursive rebuttal. As if asking questions is somehow off-limits or imprudent when it comes to matters as serious as State Crimes Against Democracy. Or, the standard of proof might be set to the effect that unless all the names, networks, motives, and mechanisms are systemically detailed, that every fact purportedly necessary for a successful large-scale conspiracy is documented by official, legitimate sources, you’re simply employing a basic psychological heuristic that meets the need for cognitive closure.

Yet, when legitimate sources of official, authorized information, such as The New York Times, report on the same subject discussed by “conspiracy theorists,” they resort to and are allowed to use the most basic rhetorical fallacies of appeals to authority, circular reasoning, and ad hominem, among other acts of sophistry. For an example, we can look to the very first paragraph of The New York Times December 15, 2022, article, “Thousands of Documents Relating to John F. Kennedy’s Assassination Are Released:”

The federal government on Thursday released a fresh trove of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a turning point in American history and the subject of persistent conspiracy theories, despite the official government conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot him to death.

So the logic goes like this: the federal government is correct because it says so, and if you question their story, you are engaging with conspiracy theories; thus, you are suspect of not just one or more psychological disorders but constitute varying degrees and kinds of threats to the social order. So says The New York Times, the source of its own authority. That is the internal logic of official rhetoric and anti-conspiracy discourse. Their standards are set low, while those for conspiracy discourse are set impossibly high; moreover, a double standard is nearly always at work, allowing social insiders to get away with what social outsiders are accused of doing.

Ray Dumas, CC BY-SA2.0: “24/365 Is that Forest Gump ???”

Stop the Presses, Siesta Eterna

After six years spent studying in the Arts & Sciences, I came to regard Fox News, conservatism, right-wing politics, the Republican Party, and anything associated (e.g., neoconservatism and neoliberalism) as the sources of most, if not all, social problems. Before going off to college in the fall of 2002, I was never politically minded. I didn’t even know the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties until it was explained to me during my second year of college, in the Spring of 2004, that I, as a college student, was a Democrat, needed to register as a Democrat and vote for John Kerry, which I unthinkingly did. Considering my current interpretive lens, I have to constantly keep in mind that I now consider highly questionable what I previously considered reliable and valid sources of news and information. I can’t believe what I used to believe.

I say this all to make the point that my experience in college trained me to see the world from a point of view, one which not only led me to lean left but also to eschew conspiracy theories as if they were disgusting, low-level layperson folklore. Documentaries like Outfoxed were presented in multiple courses as if Fox News was the only propaganda outlet masquerading as an evenhanded source of information. In 2004, the same year Outfoxed was released, Jon Stewart appeared as a guest on CNN’s Crossfire, which Tucker Carlson co-hosted at the time. When I watched the segment sometime in late 2008 (when I first had the Internet in my home, and when I first actually started questioning received reality), I would for years after use the “infamous moment in cable news history” as an example of how the virtuous Jon Stewart, ostensibly just a comedian, was holding pundits like Tucker Carlson accountable for their role in diminishing democratic discourse; years later, I wrote and presented on how Jon Stewart acted as a left-leaning cognitive gatekeeper to “conspiracy theories” about NSA spying, a multi-institutional conspiracy against the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

As another example of the type of propaganda I was exposed to in the university system when I was an undergraduate and Master’s student (2002-2008), MEF documentaries were routinely shown with no indication that they represent only left-leaning, progressive politics and cultural values. I used many of their films and clips in my own courses for years. Michael Moore documentaries were used in several courses I took to supplement our textbooks as reliable and valid sources of knowledge in several classes. Many of Michael Moore’s films ae extremely biased documentaries. After I realized this around 2010 or so, from time to time up to about 2014 in courses I taught, I followed a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 with Dick Morris’s feature-length rebuttal in Fahrenhype 9/11. This is the closest I tend to get to leading my students to question the origins or prosecution of the War on Terror; the main point is to show claims and counterclaims and discuss propaganda. Frankly, students hardly ever bring up either topic, and the September 11 attacks and the War on Terror make up relatively negligible parts of the contemporary textbooks I use. It’s old news; why bother?

Or, perhaps my real concern is that I’d rather not go the ways of Steven Jones, Kevin Barrett, James Tracey, Anthony Hall, and Piers Robinson, university professors who all, one way and for one reason or another, have been sacrificed at the altar of deception by the Ministry of Truth. As just one example, one might wonder if Kevin Barrett was asked to appear on Hannity & Colmes (1996-2009), Fox News’s answer to CNN’s Crossfire (1982-2005), to bring national attention to a heretical professor, for not even Alan Colmes, the progressive foil to Hannity’s stock conservativism, was sympathetic. Years later, the eye of Sauron turned its gaze to one 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson, who

was a guest on Truth Jihad, a radio show hosted by conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett. Barrett has peddled claims that Israelis were involved in orchestrating 9/11 and that Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally could not have been shot by the same bullet, as a US government commission concluded. Barrett has said in interviews on Iranian government-funded television that 9/11 was an “inside job,” a “Zionist coup d’état,” and “another Hollywood film.”

Demonization works best if allegedly guilty associates can be linked to the violation of a taboo, but it takes people to observe, report, and police permissible boundaries of behavior and discourse. Take, for instance, that Ward Churchill’s infamy arose from people who, years after the fact, uncovered literature he authored that “argued that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were a response to a long history of U.S. abuses,” but he was ultimately fired from his university position for unrelated academic offenses.

During the Bush era (2001-2009) in the USA, social liberals like Rosie O’Donnell and Jesse Ventura, both featured in a 9/11 Truth documentary, Truth Rising, publicly raised questions about the official accounts of the events of September 11 and were expectedly met with backlash. Ventura went so far as to float the LIHOP—Let it Happen on Purpose —theory of 9/11. Conservatives like Ann Coulter consider Michael Moore to have been promoting “ludicrous conspiracy theories in his movie Fahrenheit 911 [sic]” (p. 82), but neither she nor then-conservative pundit and ex-Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough’s accusations of Moore and his film included references to LIHOP theories, let alone any serious questions about what happened on September 11, 2001. Even if Michael Moore secretly harbors 9/11 “conspiracy theories,” his film was about how the Bush administration exploited the September 11 attacks to instigate the subsequently mismanaged War on Terror, and at the time, that was enough to be labeled a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

On the subject, specifically in reference to Rosie O’Donnell raising questions about the origins and prosecution of the War on Terror on The View, conservative Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly said, “There’s a line you can walk up to in America, but you cannot cross that line and hope to prosper.” In my doctoral research, I demonstrated that very fact, specifically concerning claims about World Trade Center Building 7, but I showed that the “lines” are fluid depending on a number of factors, including time, social context, and who the targets and accusers are, personally and socially. For four years, Tucker Carlson played his part as the bombastically conservative counterpoint to the resident “liberals” on CNN’s Crossfire, the “original premise [being] that two intelligent people from opposite sides of the spectrum could shed some fascinating light on the issues of the day.” Somewhat like how “liberals” and “conservatives” naturally keep each other in check, the synthesized social function of these shows is to set and maintain the parameters of permissible public debate.

While performing his role as conservative co-host on CNN’s Crossfire, Tucker Carlson also co-hosted the single 2004-2005 season of PBS’s Unfiltered. In episodes two and three, Carlson covered Fahrenheit 9/11 and the 9/11 Commission Report, respectively. Due to lack of access to that show, I can only imagine the hostility he had for Moore’s film and probable support of the official, authorized narrative of how and why the September 11 attacks happened, but it’s difficult to say for sure without being able to view them. Interestingly, Michael Moore used in Fahrenheit 9/11 a clip from Tucker Carlson’s September 2003 interview with Brittany Spears. Here is that exchange:

CARLSON: You’re going to be on the National Mall [in Washington, D.C.] soon performing for Pepsi and the NFL and also to support our troops. A lot of entertainers have come out against the war in Iraq. Have you?

SPEARS: Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens.

CARLSON: Do you trust this president?

SPEARS: Yes, I do.

CARLSON: Excellent. Do you think he’s going to win again?

SPEARS: I don’t know. I don’t know that.

Carlson went on to ask Spears what her favorite flavor of Pepsi was (it was Pepsi’s Pepsi, of course). Perhaps Tucker did the interview for any clout he could collect through Spears’s celebrity, or possibly he just wanted to collect a check (or both). Whatever his personal motive was, the latent function of that segment served to promote the legitimacy of the War on Terror, as Moore pointed out in Fahrenheit 9/11. About a month and a week before he was fired from Fox News, Tucker Carlson admitted during an interview on somebody else’s show that one of his biggest regrets in his 20+year career was “defending the Iraq War” and “[c]alling people names when I should have listened to what they were saying.” So, maybe he should be cut some slack for laying down, selling out, sucking up to the man, as the lyrics go.

Tucker Carlson used to be a corporate shill for the Establishment media, a cheerleader for the war machine who verbally abused those who questioned the origins and motivations for the War on Terror. Now, he’s been cast down among those he used to ridicule and stigmatize, yet he’s arguably more influential than ever. Among the many voices in the news media on March 19, 2003, counting down to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as part of the Global War on Terror, was a very young-looking, bowtie-wearing Tucker Carlson on CNN’s Crossfire. During one CNN segment on April 2, 2003, Tucker Carlson was treated as the moral authority on whether or not, what type of, and by whom questions about the invasion of Iraq could be asked, answering in part that criticism is welcome but critical inquiries need to be publicly spotlighted and rebuffed.

There are more examples of Tucker Carlson engaging in cognitive gatekeeping concerning the War on Terror. During a March 10, 2003, interview with comedian, actress, and antiwar activist Janeane Garofalo, Tucker set up his line of questions this way:

I absolutely respect the opinion of many people who disagree with the idea of a war in Iraq. I guess what I don’t respect, and I’m a little bit offended by, are the constant descriptions of motives that President Bush must have. This is all for the oil companies. It’s to avenge his father. This sort of stupid kind of psychobabble, psychoanalysis. The president says in the end he’s doing this because he thinks Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States.

Carlson’s credulity toward and defense of the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign to link 9/11 to Iraq in justification of the War on Terror is part of the reason the U.S. public was able to be lied into the unnecessary wars of aggression. Millions of people’s lives were destroyed physically, financially, socially, and spiritually because of what Tucker Carlson and people like him said and did.

Nearly 17 years later, a heavier, older, wiser, necktie-sporting Tucker Carlson at Fox News supported yet another U.S. president’s vision for Iraq, this time 180 degrees the opposite of Bush-Cheney’s vision. In that segment, Tucker Carlson critiqued the media-think tank consensus about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, possibly referencing his own 2007 conversation on his MSNBC show, Tucker, with Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), Dr. Lawrence Korb. Experiencing the situation in Iraq firsthand in 2003, Tucker Carlson began to change his views, going so far as to apologize for supporting the war efforts, and though Carlson credits Donald Trump’s statements during the 2016 presidential debates about the costliness of the invasion of Iraq, he has insisted that his antiwar stance has nothing to do with supporting Trump’s policies but rather policies that align with his sensibilities.

In 2007, Carlson and Korb discussed CAP’s Strategic Reset plan for Iraq and the Middle East. The interview seemed to indicate a certain concern by Carlson for the Iraqi people, or at the very least, a push to start withdrawing from Iraq for other reasons, i.e., to protect U.S. personnel, since just the year before, Carlson reportedly disparaged the Iraqi people with bigoted remarks. It’s not likely that at the time Tucker Carlson was remotely close to questioning the official, authorized accounts of what started the War on Terror in the first place, i.e., the events of September 11, 2001. In 2006, a wavy-haired, tie-less Tucker Carlson lambasted the “Dean of the 9/11 Truth movement,” Professor David Ray Griffin (1939-2022). Though skeptical of the efficacy of the U.S. military efforts in the Middle East, Carlson disrespectfully started his discussion with Professor Griffin, who held a PhD, “Mr. Griffin, thanks for coming on: You have no evidence that the government’s behind 9/11, and I frankly think it’s an awful thing to allege considering it’s not true and you haven’t proved that it is.”

While his gut feelings might have begun experiencing the hunger pains for truth and justice, it was still unthinkable or undesirable to question the events of September 11, 2001; as such, Tucker Carlson’s function had for a long while been to help bookend public discussion of 9/11 and the War on Terror. For an example of the types of discursive demarcations that defined the parameters of permissible discourse on 9/11 relatively soon after the event occurred, we can look to a sister set of two academic books published in September 2002, a full two months before the 9/11 Commission was even established. These represent the naïve, conventional view à la Understanding September 11 and the still-naïve*, nominally* critical view via Critical Views of September 11. Michael Moore made millions of dollars off Fahrenheit 9/11, which was critical to the extent that it represented a common view held among opponents of the Bush administration, but none of this allowed for any serious questions about, for example, how and why the third skyscraper collapsed in Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

Allowable opinion about 9/11 was that it was either a surprise attack on an innocent nation or the consequence of security failures; radical public opinions moved little beyond those boundaries. Even Ron Paul’s transgression in the May 2007 Republican primary debate that spurned former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and Fox News’s Sean Hannity into jingoistic defensive posturing was barely more than a cursory or superficial critical analysis of the September 11 attacks. Reminiscent of his personae during his 2016-2023 tenure at Fox News, on his MSNBC show Tucker in October of 2007, Tucker Carlson proclaimed Ron Paul the winner of the then most recent primary debate, and he praised in agreement Ron Paul’s statement that the Republican base should be

talked into restoring the values of limited government, the foreign policy that George Bush even talked about in the year 2000, a humble foreign policy and no nation-building. There’s no reason why Republicans can’t be antiwar and be fiscally conservative and believe in the Constitution, believe in personal liberties. There’s no reason conservatives can’t be Civil Libertarians.

To that, Carlson answered, “Amen, I agree.”

By December of 2007, Carlson had penned a lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek gonzo-style piece for The New Republic about Ron Paul’s “merry band of misfits and his hooker fan club.” “If you know Ron Paul primarily from watching the Republican debates,” Carlson said, “you probably assume he spends most of his time ranting about September 11 and the Iraq invasion.” But that’s not the case, which is why Ron Paul attracted a motley crew of “self-described anarcho-capitalists, 9/11-deniers, antiwar lefties, objectivists, paleocons, hemp activists, and geeky high school kids, along with tax resisters, conspiracy nuts, and acolytes of Murray Rothbard.” Having been a lifelong Deadhead who dabbled in drug use, not to mention his capacity to grow from a conventional corporate-state propagandist to just about the opposite today, Tucker Carlson fit right into Ron Paul’s camp.

In 2008, Tucker Carlson was the MC for Congressman (R) Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty event, “Rally for the Republic,” stating that he appreciated the Republican candidate because, as he put it,

Ron Paul has zero interest in telling other people what to do. He’s just not interested in having command over other human beings. He sincerely wants other people to make their own decisions. I don’t agree with everything Ron Paul thinks. I don’t agree with everything I think! But, I don’t think I’ve met 10 people in my entire life who can, who really can turn down the opportunity to control other people.

Ron Paul was snubbed in 2008 by Fox News and by the Republican National Committee, particularly for policy proposals that opposed the warfare state. Tucker Carlson’s support for Ron Paul during that time was a precursor to his current non-interventionist position. In 2023, Ron Paul continued promoting his vision for a peaceful world in a speech at the anti-war “Rage Against the War Machine” rally, which Tucker Carlson promoted on his show. In doing so, Tucker Carlson “interviewed Tara Reid, one of the speakers at the rally, who spoke about the war in Ukraine and the jailing of Julian Assange,” and who was also a guest on *Tucker Carlson Today, during which time she discussed the (alleged) sexual of her committed by current U.S. President Joseph R. Biden, a U.S. Senator at the time.

Due to Ron Paul’s statements on stage at the 2008 debates, along with the ensuing controversies raised by right-wing pundits, I began looking into him, eventually becoming a state delegate for him in 2012. During that period in 2008, I was just beginning to reassess what I thought I knew about the events of September 11, 2001. Due to my newly acquired access to the Internet in my home and a growing fascination with C-SPAN, which I gained due to also having cable in my home for the first time, I was just learning about people like Alex Jones, Steven Jones, Richard Gage, and David Ray Griffin. Up to that point, I was upset with Michael Moore’s documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, because it seemed to imply that former president George W. Bush might have welcomed the terrorist attacks of September 11 in order to pursue a war agenda in the Middle East. I was literally disgusted with the thought. I’d never heard of World Trade Center Building 7, let alone its universal collapse at free-fall acceleration. Up to 2008, I disregarded such notions as repugnant and unpatriotic; “conspiracy theory” wasn’t even in my lexicon.

After listening to and reading what people like the four men named above had to say, I became deeply skeptical of Michael Moore because he had not even hinted at problematic aspects of the official, authorized accounts of September 11, 2001, such as the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. Therefore, when I later heard from a 2006 interview on MSNBC’s short-run show, Tucker, Tucker Carlson “merely saying that it is wrong, blasphemous, and sinful for you [David Ray Griffin] to suggest, imply, or help other people come to the conclusion that the U.S. government killed three thousand of its own citizens, because it didn’t,” I felt I could safely assume in perpetuity that Tucker Carlson was not to be trusted or taken seriously. Recently, Tucker Carlson has publicly condoned on multiple occasions asking questions like, “What actually happened with Building 7?”

With that question uttered publicly, we observed a new man. Still the outspoken iconoclast, Tucker Carlson had broken the death grip of conventional wisdom. “What actually happened with Building 7?” is a question and issue I took so seriously that I specifically and extensively addressed in my 300-page doctoral dissertation. Suffice it to say, people who ask and are sincerely interested in an honest answer are not aligned with Establishment politics or dominant, mass culture. It was likely that Tucker Carlson began questioning his received reality after visiting Iraq, then gravitated toward Ron Paul while still adhering to the acceptable, commonsense narrative of 9/11, but then, after much thought and many conversations, he converted into the “conspiracy theorist” that Establishment media loves to hate today.

9/11 Satyagraha, Fair Use: Facebook Post, July 27th, 2023 (attributed to Gene Laratonda)

Nighttime News, The Wrap-Up

After interviewing dozens of 9/11 Truth activists during their demonstrations from 2011 to 2021 in New York City, Washington D.C., and in their online groups, I found that for many, just that one question alone — What actually happened with Building 7, is enough to propel people down the proverbial one-way rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. This is why in 2013, for example, various activists and organizations within the 9/11 Truth movement bought ad space across from The New York Times building with a 54’x48’ billboard reading, “Did you know a 3rd tower fell on 9/11?” Compare Establishment news vs. independent reporting on that story, and ask yourself which uses the conspiracy label, how, and why. “What happened to building 7?” is the title of a 2008 Financial Times article that makes standard use of the conspiracy label, ultimately takes the side of officialdom (even though the fraudulent official NIST report didn’t come out until months later), but also gives enough information that should pique one’s curiosity about The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, as David Ray Griffin titled his 2012 book.

It’s the type of curiosity that has led some YouTubers to title their videos “What about Building 7?” while other YouTubers use the question for different purposes, such as in “Debunking 9/11 Conspiracies #2 | What About Building 7?” Even academics have used the question in titles of their work, such as in “’What about building 7?’ A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories,” which is authored by a team of social psychologists led by Karen Douglas, who is responsible for a profusion of peer-reviewed anti-conspiracy discourse. I actually agree with some of the results and conclusions of the “What about building 7?” article. For example, save for use of “conspiracists,” which contradicts their findings that people labeled as such recognize its stigmatizing function, an abridgment of IRB ethics, I believe the last sentence in their conclusion is true: “For many conspiracists, there are two worlds: one real and (mostly) unseen, the other a sinister illusion meant to cover up the truth; and evidence against the latter is evidence for the former.”

For much of his career, Tucker Carlson helped craft, shape, and support an illusion used to garner support for the War on Terror and ridicule, stigmatize, and silence critics of it and its origins. A video montage posted on 𝕏 by a particularly dedicated 9/11 Truth activist, Gene Laratonda, shows Tucker Carlson’s gradual paradigm shift from 2005 to 2023. Tucker starts out harpooning prominent academic researchers, skewering and fileting the acclaimed thought leaders of the 9/11 Truth movement; then he simply laughs off in dismissal questions about WTC Building 7 before admitting he had never watched a single video of its collapse; and finally, Carlson raised the question publicly, which was then used by others as fodder in their culture-jamming programs on 𝕏, YouTube, Rumble, and elsewhere.

Maybe after he or I interview the other, I’ll ask Tucker Carlson what it was specifically that led him into the subaltern realm where conspiracy theorists roam. In an interview with Joe Rogan in April of 2024, Carlson said that he started seriously asking questions in 2017 when Donald Trump revealed that the FBI was spying on his presidential campaign. I haven’t systematically counted all the different inflection points Tucker Carlson has stated publicly that led him to asking questions about fluoride, UFOs, and 9/11, as he indicated in his interview. Here is a key moment in that interview corroborated by evidence I’ve collected and many anecdotal experiences that, in my estimate, are becoming more and more common due to Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Elon Musk, and others who have been routinely targeted by Establishment media for what they say in public:

I was like “Fluoride? Come on!” You know? “9/11? Shut up! “UFOs? You’re fucking crazy!” You know what I mean? I just, like, I had this reflex—I’m ashamed of it, I’m not bragging about it. But it was 2017, and really it was the Trump campaign. It wasn’t that I was, like, so in love with Trump, though I’ve always liked Trump because, you know, he’s like hilarious and charming and all that, but I wasn’t like a Trumper or anything. But it was watching that campaign and particularly his claim that they were spying on him, and I was like, really? The Intel services and federal law enforcement, FBI, do not spy on presidential campaigns. Like, that’s so out of the realm. That’s so crazy! Like, that could never happen because, of course, there’s no democracy in a system like that. And fundamentally, we’re a democracy—an imperfect one, it kind of lumbers along, you know? But, like, it’s not fake, and then that turned out to be true, and I knew it was true. And that just blew my mind! So I began a process— still ongoing—of reassessing a lot of other things. Like, okay well, if that was not true, what else is not true, and what else that they told me was a conspiracy theory might actually have some basis in fact?

To quote myself my my October 2022 article, “The Multi-institutional Politics of the Santa Claus Conspiracy and 911 Truth”:

This is the social problem raised by the spread of conspiracy theories: People start to ask themselves, “If we were lied to about that, what else have they been lying about?” The alleged danger is not that an individual will continue to question their own reality but that these patterns of questioning might become endemic, shattering the public’s faith in society’s central institutions.

Many social systems, institutions, organizations, and relationships depend on legitimacy, trust, faith, belief, and ideology for their continued existence, and there are many people’s interests tied to the longevity of those systems. Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and others asking questions are leading others to ask questions, like handing out stones and showing people where to aim them at the Establishment’s glass house of cards.

For three or four decades, the conspiracy label served its function well in dissuading people from looking closer at the cracks in the Empire’s façade. In his public revelations on the possible role of the CIA in the JFK assassination, Tucker Carlson chose to cite the work and name of Lance deHaven-Smith, who informally advised me on my doctoral work. So, consider my biases in that regard. In doing so, Tucker Carlson offered his viewers breadcrumbs leading further down the road of conspiracy theories, possibly toward studying the peer-reviewed research on SCADsState Crimes Against Democracy. If one looks further into Professor deHaven-Smith’s line of research, one will also find that he was skeptical, to say the least, about the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections. On that common ground, Tucker Carlson sewed seeds of doubt that the 2020 election was entirely fair and free of irregularities, claiming “Big Tech” and the corporate press colluded with the Democratic nominees and the Democratic Party to “rig the election.” For such efforts, Tucker Carlson takes some serious flak.

Tucker Carlson is routinely labeled a “conspiracy theorist” by individuals, groups, and organizations desperate to defend the Established power structure from suffering the stings and cuts of penetrating questions. Or, perhaps like pre-2017 Tucker Carlson, they are still true believers just following routine orders in defense of systems they trust to work, if not just working to provide them a paycheck, prestige, and (access to) power. According to Barron’s, Raw Story, France24, Japan Today, and a host of other media outlets parroting Media Matters’ talking point, Tucker Carlson is a “dangerous misinformer.” The question is, dangerous for or to whom or what, and how so? Apparently, “Tucker Carlson Weaponized Asking Questions,” and though apparentlyCarlson’s motivations are unknown to those outside his circle,” “Tucker Carlson isn’t ‘just asking questions’.” No, “Tucker Carlson sells ‘just asking questions’ [as] antisemitism,” and apparently, one of the court jesters in the Empire of Lies nailed “Tucker Carlson’s ‘Just Asking Questions’ Nonsense.” But, as a scientist, educator, and lifelong student, asking questions is a virtue. “What’s really going on here” is a hallmark question for humanity to thrive. Authority that cannot or will not be questioned is illegitimate; it’s a power structure imposing its will in demand of consent.

We come into this world naturally curious but also incredibly credulous. As any parent knows, the Socratic method can lead to an endless, insufferable, even recursive set of questions that are sometimes unanswerable, sometimes humiliating, and sometimes paradigm-shifting if answered truthfully, but that’s the whole point. Investigators from all walks of life, whether in medical, legal, law enforcement, scientific, educational, entrepreneurial, entertainment, or other occupational areas, ask questions. Humans naturally ask questions, some with more or less propensity to pursue perplexity. So why is it dangerous to ask questions? Researchers will say that there are dangerous consequences for asking questions about the possibilities of conspiracy, and they’ll say that “just asking questions” is a cover for hidden motivations and intentions rooted in bigotry, antipathy, and other antisocial dispositions. To this, I’ll add another statement made by Tucker Carlson in his interview on The Joe Rogan Experience:

At the core of science is asking questions, including unlikely questions. That’s what science is. If you don’t allow that, then, you know, you may be doing something, but what you’re not doing is science. We can say that conclusively. So, for people to wrap themselves in the mantle of science and attack you for asking a question, you know they’re frauds, and I don’t know how they have the moral High Ground.

You can read Chapter 4 in my doctoral dissertation for my thoughts and analysis of the “just asking questions” supposition that anti-conspiracists say is a rhetorical tactic used by those they label “conspiracists” or “conspiracy theorists.” In particular, see pages 213-218, in which I discuss a clear example of how the anti-scientific propaganda produced by one author who is cited by many as an authoritative source simultaneously highlights specific questions posed by David Ray Griffin in his 2008 book, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press, hides other questions, and leaves his readers clueless as to how and to what extent the questions are answered.

Having written 70 pages on the very subject of the use of the “just asking questions” rhetorical trope when it comes to the collapse of WTC 7, I find it sadly satisfying to see predictive validity of my thesis 10 years later in the The Daily Beast’s and Media Matters’ headlines, respectively, like “Tucker Carlson Now Just Asking Questions About WTC 7’s 9/11 Collapse” and “Fox’s Tucker Carlson questions 9/11 attacks, complains you’d ‘lose your job’ on TV for bringing it up.” Five weeks later, Tucker Carlson did lose his job at Fox News. The victory celebration for his antagonists was short-lived. Starting June 6th, 2023, Tucker took his show to 𝕏, and there he has continued fueling his enemies’ fires. Hence, the popular anti-conspiracist trope of “JAQing off” has been routinely used to dismiss Tucker Carlson as nothing more than a propagandist.

Sadly, Tucker Carlson turned out to be a modern Cassandra, which is somewhat of an inversion of the ‘boy who cried wolf’ in terms of the Independent’s August 30, 2023 headline, “Tucker Carlson claims Trump is going to be assassinated: Former Fox News host first floated his assassination theory during his inter with with the ex-president,“ and NBC’s September 1, 2023, headline, “Tucker Carlson stokes conspiracies, claims U.S. is ‘speeding towards’ assassination of Trump: The comments, presented without evidence, have been picked up by other media personalities on the far-right, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former Fox News host Dan Bongino.” Dan Bongino, as it turns out, was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s live speaking tour stop in Tulsa, OK, on September 11, 2024. Bongino raised a series of disturbing questions about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, similar to questions he was asked by a panel of Republican Congressman, which he indicated had a cover-up element protecting parties responsible for what is allegedly a security failure, kinda like 9/11 amounted to a security failure in which nobody was fired. When asked in an interview on July 15, 2024, Tucker Carlson had this to say about the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt of Donald Trump:

At some point, we may find out what happened on Saturday. A guy with a rifle wound up on a building that close with a ladder, and all these people saw it. And the Secret Service, what is that? It’s not crazy to think that there was something there. It was an effort to kill Trump, and it wasn’t just a lone gunman who was killed, that it was something else.

Even thought Tucker Carlson’s prediction came true, at least insofar as they tried to kill Trump, Establishment media persists in carrying out their main function, delimiting the discourse that threatens to hasten the Empire of Lies toward its inevitable demise.

(Featured Image: “Interview with Vladimir Putin to Tucker Carlson (2024-02-06) 14” by Администраия президента России is licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

Author

  • Richard Ellefritz

    Richard G. Ellefritz is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of The Bahamas. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Oklahoma State University after successfully defending his dissertation on how the conspiracy label is used to avoid offering direct and rigorous rebuttals to empirical claims made by so-called conspiracy theorists. His research interests range from conspiracy discourse to pedagogical techniques, and his main occupational focus is on teaching a variety of courses in the social and behavioral sciences.

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