FBI Designates Belief in Conspiracy Theories as a Motivator for Domestic Terror

8/2/2019

The FBI has officially designated belief in conspiracy theories as a domestic terror threat, according to a previously unreported document discovered and publicized by Yahoo! News this week. The FBI intelligence bulletin was published in May and specifically identifies fringe conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon as potential terror threats for the first time in the Bureau’s history. “The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document states. The document lists conspiracy theories regularly featured on cable television and social media, such as the New World Order and HAARP mind control beams, as potential threats.

FBI Conspiracy Theory Redacted by Kelli R. Grant on Scribd

While experts may disagree on the degree to which conspiracy theories are a driver of domestic extremism rather than a justification for it, the FBI’s identification of conspiracy theories as a risk factor for domestic terrorism should give pause to those in the media who treat these beliefs as “fun” entertainment. The FBI document basically treats conspiracy theories as a method of radicalization, seducing the vulnerable and enflaming their passions, either through their use by domestic terror groups or through self-radicalization via internet exposure.

Weirdly enough, this was a point that I raised when I spoke with a producer for a company that had just sold a show described as an Ancient Aliens knockoff revolving around high tech archaeology tools to a major cable channel this week. Out of respect, I won’t name the channel so as not to identify the producer, but you can certainly guess which one. It’s one of the channels I regularly criticize, so I had no illusions that the network would ever let me on their air. The production company, weirdly enough, produced a wretched special about the Knights Templar and a terrible pseudoarchaeology series, both of which I savaged in these pages.

I used the time to impress upon the producer the social responsibility that media producers have to consider the consequences of the conspiracy theories they spin. More than a few lead to radicalization by driving viewers to other purveyors of similar conspiracies, with their more extreme versions and racist and radical agendas.

The producer admitted to me that he had no interest in the program as it was being developed. It had begun, he said, as a show about advances in the technologies and tools used in archaeology, but the network issued an ultimatum that they would not purchase any show about historical subjects unless it featured a radical conspiracy theory such as aliens, Atlantis, or Templars. The production company chose cash over integrity and altered the program to speculate wildly about how satellites and various scanners can uncover evidence of aliens and Atlantis.

I found it terribly depressing—but not at all surprising—that conspiracy theories are actually mandated as a condition of selling to certain cable channels. That kind of short-sighted thinking closes off creativity and virtually guarantees that every show is tightly tied to a small range of potential topics that viewers supposedly respond to—aliens, Atlantis, Templars, etc. But you aren’t going to grow your audience by feeding them recycled leftovers, and it seems counterproductive to assume that viewers only want to watch the same narrow group of topics (actually, narrowing—the range of topics used to be vaster before niche programming was so hyper-specific) over and over again.

22 Comments

A C

8/2/2019 09:15:43 am

Not to get conspiratorial myself but one does have to be suspicious. Is it actually true that more fringe = more profit or is that just the bias of individuals in the supply chain.

There are good reasons why a media mogul would indulge a Fortean 'no one is really an expert perspective over letting the underpaid and over-educated let their expertise dictate broader narratives.

Joe Scales

8/2/2019 11:54:49 am

As if it's just cable television channels. NBC News has pushed conspiracy theories rivaling History Channel; and continues to do so.

Accumulated wisdom

8/2/2019 02:04:45 pm

Yeah, isn’t it wonderful that there’s been a 30+ year effort by the corporate conservative machine to brainwash rubes into believing in a mythical “liberal media bias” to the extent that some of them repeat the mantra in blog comment sections with a religious fervor?

J. Jonah Jameson

8/2/2019 06:42:09 pm

Too be fair, here's an example of liberal media bias:

"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
--New York Times, August 23, 1933

"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
--New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6

"There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."
--New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13

Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. ("An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934," University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP's Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:

"Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated."

And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.

Don't get me started on the the NYT soft-pedalled the Holocaust.

Machala

8/2/2019 12:15:15 pm

"I used the time to impress upon the producer the social responsibility that media producers have to consider the consequences of the conspiracy theories they spin..."

Jason, considering the mentality of the wahoos who produce this drivil-for-dollars asininity for Hysterical Channel and it's ilk, I would say that it was time and breath well wasted.

Non Lon Horiuchi

8/2/2019 04:46:36 pm

A step in the right direction would be for the FBI to stop shooting Vicky Weaver. Oh, wait, they did stop.

Kent

8/2/2019 06:47:09 pm

A nice gesture would be to de-incinerate the children burned to death in Waco.

kensy the ruinstone

8/3/2019 08:42:50 am

So does this mean that Scott Wolter will finally make the FBI's list?

Brian

8/3/2019 10:01:45 am

About time.

"Modern information marketplace." What a damned depressing phrase.

Martin Stower

8/3/2019 01:20:37 pm

“J. Jonah Jameson”: “Don’t get me started on the the [sic] NYT soft-pedalled the Holocaust”

But you have, as we see, started on it, without assistance. This would be more informative:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buried_by_the_Times

As for Walter Duranty and “liberal media bias”: when Karl E. Meyer, in the NYT in 1990, called this “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper”, was this also “liberal media bias”?

Accumulated Wisdom

8/3/2019 05:31:12 pm

I didn’t reply because the response proved my point on several levels:

1. The cherry picked quotations are copied and pasted from far right (sometimes unapologetically anti-Semitic) sources and have been blindly and uncritically reposted hundreds of times by mindless, brainwashed followers.

2. The best example of liberal media bias comes from the Herbert Hoover era and predates the New Deal.

3. The argument seems to be that the New York Times in 1932 was a political organ for the Soviet regime. If that were true, it was the most spectacular failure of political propaganda in world history.

4. The bizarre idea that one of the biggest newspaper in the USA was a propaganda arm of the Stalinist Soviet Union exactly represents the type of conspiratorial thinking that forms the basis for wackos to commit extreme acts.

5. Ironically, this kind of unquestioning acceptance of politically motivated horsesh*t is exactly what Stalinism thrived upon. The difference is that the morons of today voluntarily swallow the crap fed to them by their masters — no gulags required for this crowd.

Tony

8/4/2019 02:54:47 pm

Several agencies, both Goverment and NGO tend to PUSH different Narratives for various reasons. I really wish that the younger impressionable kids of today would research more and do less social media "parroting."

I like is website for obtaining additional information prior to forming my own opinion on something, but I've also noted a lot of Bias by Jason on several issues were he really seems to have made up his mind and no way in Hell would he open it to objective thought,

Here is one. I'm a 25 year retired highly decorated Naval veteran who HAS seen unidentified craft!!! I'll leave it to that definition. While on the Nimitz, then as a goverment contractor on the 13 MEU from Freemantle Australia on the USS Bonhomme Richard, then at Miramar Air station in CA. I'm neither a UFO geek, nor a gullible Confirmation Biased believing person. My last position was as an Analyst. I taught at 5 Universities and hold a Ph.D. Like I said, they are for Real.

If I read this and didn't believe, I would have also thought, "another minion" needing to get a life. But in closing, I just ask for you to really, be objective and understand that that people base their information from their OWN knowledge and Beliefs of what They know and understand to be fact! There is a Hell of a lot more information that we just don't know!

J.J. Jameson

8/3/2019 09:41:37 pm

Martin: I have it on good authority that by 1990 the NYT was also strongly anti-slavery.

Accumulated:
1: You're calling the NYT anti-Semitic? Have it your way.
2: So you admit I presented the best example. Wonderful. The point was that it's not a new thing.
3, 4, and 5 are basically saying the same thing and going nowhere.

8/4/2019 02:54:13 am

“Martin: I have it on good authority that by 1990 the NYT was also strongly anti-slavery.”

This doesn’t answer my question, which Is as follows:

When Karl E. Meyer, in the NYT in 1990, called these reports of Walter Duranty “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper”, was this also “liberal media bias”?

Will Matthews link

8/4/2019 11:16:31 am

It's rarely (never) mentioned that the Conspiracy Movement (as that's what it is) is acting as an anti-establishment protest campaign, so it's no surprise that the authorities see it as a threat to our society.

Look at who it attacks - Governments, banks, oil industry, medical industry, politicians, our political system, our dominant religious institution, Royal families, Police force, the media ..... on and on and on to every one of our current established institutions.

It's probably the most wide-ranging anti-establishment campaign ever, and most people don't even know it exists as such.

8/4/2019 01:44:18 pm

If I were an agent of the Dark Lords Who Run the World, I would vigorously promote conspiracy theory, to dissipate and discredit opposition.

Charles Reeves link

8/4/2019 02:23:54 pm

In my opinion the FBI needs To have "bad guys" to justify their existence. Having said that I a sure we have mentally disturbed people that will do bad things to other people and that may or may not include "Conspiracy Theories".
The FBI wants a paycheck just like we all do.

8/4/2019 06:03:01 pm

Bad guys there are, but Hoover established a tradition of focussing on the wrong ones. Let us hope that this has been transcended.

LYN

8/4/2019 03:44:57 pm

Both one of your recent tweets and the recent post by a 25 year naval veteran coincide in my opinion to show that people see things, but what they see is not necessarily the conclusion at which they arrive. By genetic extraction I am one eight native Fijian, and 50% Welsh. I am slightly taller than average for a female, colourless skin that barely tans, with black hair and brown eyes. In my lifetime I have been taken for anything from Jewish to Greek.
And back in 1963 while walking home along a coastal headland I saw an odd item in the air. It appeared to be a large greenish oval light that looked from my perspective to be several hundred feet up, turning from one side to the other and silently following the coastline. I watched it for some ten minutes until it was out of sight. Did I assume it was aliens? No. I filed it mentally (and literally) as an unidentified flying object and went home. So far as I knew it could have been a weather balloon, some strange reflection against clouds, or any of a number of items that would produce that effect. Why? Because, at the time I was 17, knew nothing of alien speculation, and didn't leap to any conclusions. Nowadays there is so much talk and so many TV programmes, that it seems to be the first thing that leaps to the mind of many who see something like this. I know the appearance of what I saw, I still have no idea what it was. But frankly I really doubt that it was aliens out cruising the coastline for a pleasant Sunday outing.

8/4/2019 06:03:49 pm

The first time I mentioned, as well as the second on the Bohomme Richard, the object was close, maybe 80-120 yards away. It would surface and submerge off the bow of the ship. The difference between reality and illusion is the amount of detail that you observe and any extraneous variable; such as water vapors; steam; clouds; planets; etc... The object wasn't small and could be confused to fit or fill a belief that I wish or wanted to have. I'm not saying there is an Alien theme, just very out of any physical norm from what I have any knowledge of or what I believe could be of military advanced technology. I appreciate your response, and I to can relate to stereotypical labels. I'm a tall 6'2 Italian from green eyed 5'5 parents. Maybe the "milk man." :)

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8/12/2019 09:33:35 am

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8/12/2019 10:30:59 am

Wow! Amazing how short-sighted people within organizations create a narrative to "Sum Up," and attempt to "Label," people that questions authorities; agencies; (and NGO), to "explain" the reason why people may tend to disbelieve the Goverment or News?? I worked as a Senior Neuro-Psychiatric Tech in the Navy, then retired and went on to get my Masters and doctorate in Psychology (Ph.D). Two points I'd like to make:

1.) First Hand, the goverment practices and believes in re-direction and misinformation as a Defense Strategy for survival.
2.) People that question the BS narratives that get thrown to the public or "sheep" as one VP of the US once told me, doesn't contribute to the makings or Psychopathy of a Terrorist or a killer! Apples and oranges. Too many variables contribute to a persons' personality profile, NOT choosing certain traits, or a specific behavioral pattern. Lumping the "SUM" into the "ALL" category greatly myopically prejudices the true results of any true finding!
Example: ALL fathers are Men, ALL fathers have children/child, therefore: ALL men have children??? Logically true, but incorrect. Logic and Validity do not necessarily lead to a strong supportive associations in individual behaviors!
In finishing this tangent, I believe that this latest stereotyping is NOT a True/Valid conclusion, but another narrative to "steer" the focus. But Why? What purpose? I wont make any assumptions for now.