I’ve always enjoyed solving historical puzzles and figuring out what really happened, but I’d never had the slightest interest in conspiracy theories, which I’d always dismissed as nonsense. As a consequence, I’d spent nearly my entire life never doubting nor questioning the broad sweep of our last century of world history, as had been so conveniently presented to me in all my academic courses, books, magazines, and newspapers.
But in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, I gradually became increasingly suspicious of the credibility of the mainstream media sources that I had always relied upon for my knowledge of the world.
This first became apparent to me during the anthrax mailings that followed so soon after the terrorist attacks themselves, a wave of envelopes filled with deadly spores that so terrified our entire country and stampeded Congress into passing the controversial Patriot Act curtailing our traditional liberties. For many weeks, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and our other most influential national newspapers always presented one version of those events, while very different and far more extensive information was regularly published by the perfectly respectable journalists who worked for much smaller outlets such as the Hartford Courant and Salon, publications much less under the total sway of top government officials. A year ago I recapitulated and analyzed that very strange history.
My growing doubts about our media soon became even more serious as the Neocon-dominated Bush Administration moved our country towards its disastrous Iraq War, successfully using its media allies to convince nearly 70% of the American public that Saddam Hussein had been a key figure behind that unprecedented terrorist attack on America.
About a decade later in 2013 I described my outrage that our leading media publications had so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated on a matter so important to our national security
The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.
Once again, the only contrary skepticism of Saddam’s non-existent WMDs came from much smaller media outlets such as the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers, less totally dependent upon the regular leaks and favors provided by senior administration officials. More than two decades after those events, I only recently discovered that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, longtime chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, had been the individual responsible for leaking the true facts to those journalists, presumably after having failed to attract any interest from reporters at the New York Times or our other leading newspapers.
Although I’d been very strongly opposed to the Iraq War, I’d never doubted that Saddam possessed at least some of the WMDs that had been used to justify our invasion, and the revelation that all that evidence had been fraudulent—and generally known to be fraudulent by so many insiders—completely punctured the propaganda-bubble in which I’d been living, forcing me to reassess my understanding of the world.
A few years later that shock was greatly magnified when I stumbled across the remarkable work of Sydney Schanberg.
During the 1980s I’d become vaguely aware of the POW/MIA movement absurdly claiming that large numbers of American POWs were still being held by the Vietnamese many years after the end of the war. Despite having been thoroughly debunked by the media, such ridiculous paranoia remained stubbornly popular in right-wing circles and eventually became the inspiration for Rambo and other action films in which daring American veterans successfully rescued those imprisoned POWs from their brutal captivity despite the opposition of our own corrupt U.S. government.
Schanberg was a Pulitzer Prize-winning former top-ranking editor at the New York Times, widely regarded as one of our greatest war correspondents, and I was astonished to discover that he’d spent years amassing a mountain of evidence demonstrating that those “POW conspiracy theories” were actually true. Many hundreds of our POWs had indeed been deliberately left behind in Vietnam, and one of the leading figures involved in the later cover-up was former POW turned U.S. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee during the 2008 presidential campaign. Yet despite Schanberg’s enormous journalistic stature, not a single mainstream media outlet was willing to report his expose of what certainly amounted to one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
If our entire mainstream media could flatly ignore a scandal of such gigantic proportions unearthed by one of its own most respected figures, I concluded that I simply couldn’t trust any information it provided on anything else.
The realization that the world is often quite different from what is presented in our leading newspapers and magazines is not an easy conclusion for most educated Americans to accept, or at least that was true in my own case. For decades, I have closely read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and one or two other major newspapers every morning, supplemented by a wide variety of weekly or monthly opinion magazines. Their biases in certain areas had always been apparent to me. But I felt confident that by comparing and contrasting the claims of these different publications and applying some common sense, I could obtain a reasonably accurate version of reality. I was mistaken.Aside from the evidence of our own senses, almost everything we know about the past or the news of today comes from bits of ink on paper or colored pixels on a screen, and fortunately over the last decade or two the growth of the Internet has vastly widened the range of information available to us in that latter category. Even if the overwhelming majority of the unorthodox claims provided by such non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least there now exists the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains of falsehood. Certainly the events of the past dozen years have forced me to completely recalibrate my own reality-detection apparatus.
Those above paragraphs came from my original American Pravda article published more than a decade ago, a piece that marked my public repudiation of those mainstream sources of information that I’d always regarded as reliable.
Having concluded that the standard media narratives of some important events were false, I began wondering about many others as well. During my subsequent explorations, I spent considerable time on fringe or conspiratorial websites that I had never previously taken seriously, but while doing so I always tried to retain the rigorous research standards that I had developed in the early academic phase of my career, during which I had published articles in leading scholarly journals of Theoretical Physics and Classical History. The skill-set I had developed for the latter subject proved particularly applicable, given that it required a researcher “to extract the true pattern of events from a collection of source material that was often fragmentary, unreliable, and contradictory.” I think I also benefitted from the thousand-odd books of science fiction I had digested in my younger years.
As most people are surely aware, the Internet is awash with a vast multitude of “conspiracy theories” of every possible type, nearly all of them mutually contradictory. Although I have always tried to remain open-minded, I’d say that around 90-95% of the ones I’ve examined seem to be false or at least unsubstantiated. But the residual 5-10% were sufficiently well-documented and plausible that they served as the basis for the very lengthy American Pravda series I eventually produced, mostly during the last half-dozen years, a series that now includes more than 100 articles totaling over 800,000 words, as well as many dozens of other articles of a generally similar nature.
In all these matters, my approach has always been an extremely cautious one, not publishing anything unless and until I was solidly convinced of its validity. Thus, there are large numbers of additional matters that have raised my suspicions, but for which the evidence has never seemed strong enough to warrant putting anything into print. However, due to such caution, I feel quite confident of what I’ve produced, so much so that I would still stand behind at least 99% of everything that I’ve published over the last thirty-odd years.
Unfortunately, many others seem to have taken a very different approach, allowing the vast profusion of exciting but incorrect theories on the Internet to easily lead them astray. Sometimes a conventionally-minded individual is so shocked to discover the reality of one or two major matters that he’d always dismissed as nonsense because they had been regularly ridiculed by the media that he loses his bearings and begins carelessly swallowing many other very doubtful theories as well, failing to properly separate the wheat from the chaff.
One of America’s foremost conspiracy-researchers of recent decades was the late Michael Collins Piper, who had spent his entire career as a journalist at The Spotlight and its eventual successor publication. The Spotlight was a DC-based populist weekly newspaper, willing to regularly cover the highly controversial events and political topics that almost all other publications fearfully avoided. At one point around 1980 its circulation swelled to more than 300,000 paid subscribers, a figure considerably greater than the combined total for National Review, The New Republic, and The Nation. But because of its controversial content, it was almost totally boycotted and ignored by the mainstream media, so that I barely even knew it existed during those years, let alone the enormous size of its readership. For those interested, a few hundred of the publication’s later articles are available in an online archive.
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The Spotlight was published by Liberty Lobby, an organization founded in 1958 by longtime right-wing activist Willis Carto. Although Liberty Lobby had originally been regarded as a regular element of the conservative movement, its continuing strong criticism of Jewish influence and Israel had eventually led to its ostracism, as indicated by the scathing attack it suffered in a 1971 National Review cover-story. This attitude was cemented in 1978 when Carto also co-founded the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), America’s leading Holocaust Denial organization, which obviously heightened the media blacklisting of all his other projects. Much of this interesting early history was told in The Liberty Lobby and the American Right, a 1985 academic monograph by Frank P. Mintz, an instructor at Ge0rge Mason University.
On very rare occasions, that media boycott sprung a leak, and a few years ago I happened to come across Piper’s forty minute 1987 appearance on C-SPAN. I thought he did an excellent job in the segment, and was surprised to see that one of the main topics of discussion back then had been the legitimacy of criticizing Israel. I also noticed that Brian Lamb, the main host, avoided any dangerous contamination by absenting himself, so that the interview was conducted by someone else.
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Small ideological organizations are notorious for their bitter feuds, often involving funding issues, and in 1993 a battle broke out for control of IHR between Carto and his local staff. This led to a lawsuit and an eventual 2001 legal judgment that bankrupted Liberty Lobby and forced the closure of The Spotlight, though Carto quickly reconstituted that latter publication as The American Free Press with most of the same staff and coverage.
Carto’s entire history and that of his organization was the subject of Willis Carto and the American Far Right, a 2008 work by Prof. George Michael of the University of Virginia, which also contained considerable discussion of Piper’s background and activities.
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Although Michael’s book rather suspiciously relegated the entire incendiary topic to merely a single long footnote, Piper was by far best known for having formulated the Piper Hypothesis of the JFK Assassination, in which he argued that the Israeli Mossad played the central role in the death of our president. He first proposed that theory in Final Judgment, a book originally published in 1994 which he considerably augmented over the years in its subsequent editions, and a convenient HTML copy is available on this website.
When I first came across Piper’s assassination framework a decade or so ago, it immediately struck me as very compelling, and I was hardly surprised to discover that his book spent many years as an underground bestseller. But his theory was so exceptionally explosive that for more than three decades it has been almost totally boycotted within the large JFK conspiracy-community, so that scarcely a sliver of the major books in that genre or their authors have even been willing to acknowledge its existence.
However, at very long last, there are indications that his theory may now finally be reaching wider public awareness. Anya Parampil is a young progressive journalist at the Grayzone, married to Max Blumenthal, the editor of that publication, and she has always seemed someone of very mainstream if left-leaning views, holding few if any conspiratorial beliefs. But in a remarkable recent interview on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube channel, she strongly hinted at her awareness of the Piper Hypothesis, and the very self-confident tone of her statements suggested that such ideas have now become widespread in her personal political circles.
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Over the last half-dozen years, I have repeatedly discussed and promoted this theory of JFK’s death, both within the context of other JFK Assassination theories and also with regard to the very long list of other deadly Mossad operations. But the author who has focused most heavily on this topic in recent years has been French researcher Laurent Guyenot, whose many articles are available on this website. The most succinct but comprehensive review of the evidence can be found in The Unspoken Kennedy Truth, his recent short book on that subject. It can easily be read in just a day or two, and I would strongly recommend it, along with his original 2018 article making the same case:
In 2020, he also released an excellent ninety minute documentary entitled “Israel and the Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers,” currently available on YouTube as well as on the Odysee and Rumble platforms:
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Although I was only slightly aware of Piper’s work prior to his untimely 2015 death at age 54, since then I’ve read nearly a dozen of his books and have generally been very impressed by his knowledge and reliability, with that latter trait sometimes sorely lacking within much of the conspiracy-community.
One of his last published works was False Flags, a 2013 compendium of the most important modern events that he believed involved hidden conspiracies, including the 1963 JFK Assassination, the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, and the 2001 9/11 Attacks. Despite a few blemishes, I’d highly recommend that book, which is also available on this website in HTML format:
- False Flags
Template for Terror
Michael Collins Piper • 2013 • 136,000 Words
The bulk of that book provided his analysis of those major historical events, but the last chapters focused on what he regarded as a new and particularly devious conspiratorial technique, one that had become a very effective means of confusing and frustrating most investigatory efforts by citizen-activists.
The growth of the Internet had made it increasingly difficult to suppress the distribution of information, so Piper suspected that a different approach was now being applied:
But the plan—as we shall see—was not just simply standing back and loudly and repeatedly denying the existence of conspiracies. Instead, the course of action was far more subtle—some might even say Talmudic (and, if truth be told, it was a stroke of genius).The intriguers effectively determined that “if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em” (as the old saying goes).
That is, rather than working to REFUTE conspiracy theories, the solution would be to INFECT them and MISDIRECT them and add utter confusion to the mix.
The consequence would be that conspiracy theories would look so ridiculous that no broad swath of people in the general public might one day actually begin to have any belief in their credibility.
I discussed Piper’s ideas in an article a couple of years ago, and I think it’s worth repeating my description of his shrewd analysis:
In Piper’s opinion, the Sandy Hook school shootings represented the first real-life test of this new strategy, which he believed had been masterminded by Cass Sunstein of the Obama Administration…Piper argued that a small group of establishment operatives successfully manipulated the conspiracy community on the Internet, promoting ideas that soon captured the imagination of these activists, many of whom were excitable and overly gullible…
Piper followed the events closely at the time, and he described how waves of Sandy Hook rumors and theories were deployed to swamp those websites following the story…
The penultimate chapter of Piper’s book focuses upon a particularly pernicious element of the Sandy Hook controversy, namely the widespread belief that the parents of the children killed were actually “crisis actors” hired to play that role, an idea that soon became endemic throughout the conspiracy community and was also applied to the victims of the Boston Marathon Bombing a few months later…
Piper noted how odd it was that nobody seemed to take personal credit for introducing the “crisis actors” theory, which suddenly seemed to blossom across numerous websites and email groups. This led him to suspect it was a deliberate attempt at organized manipulation, an attempt that succeeded brilliantly.
Our own website draws a wide range of alt-media columnists and commenters, and for years afterwards I would see most terrorist attacks both in America and overseas regularly denounced as hoaxes, with all the victims supposedly being “crisis actors.”
But the simplest application of common-sense showed the implausibility of these theories. Surely it was far easier and cheaper to hire a couple of paid killers to mount a deadly attack than to recruit a large group of actors, make-up artists, and special effects wizards to stage a faked incident, afterward having to hope that none of them would ever reveal their participation in the high-profile fraud.
Piper pointed out that the ultimate intended result was to severely damage the credibility of all “conspiracy theorists,” and I think his conclusions were very plausible:
But what a growing number of Americans do believe—as a consequence of propaganda from the Controlled Media—is that those people who are called “conspiracy theorists” by the media have some really crazy ideas and that they don’t believe that there was really a shooting in Sandy Hook that took the lives of 20 little children or that there wasn’t even really a bombing in Boston.And many Americans now believe that anything that reeks of a conspiracy theory—even relating to the JFK assassination or the Oklahoma bombing or 9-11—is the work of paranoid minds whose opinions are to be dismissed, along with (in particular) the idea that Israel had anything to do with those tragedies.
That was precisely the design of those who helped make the truth seekers look “crazy” by feeding them a diet of extraordinary claims about Sandy Hook and Boston that took hold on the Internet like wildfire, even as the Crisis Management Conspirators were monitoring the communication networks between patriots here in the United States (and around the world) who were disseminating these stories.
The bottom line is that what many came to believe about Crisis Actors at Sandy Hook and Boston (along with other similar nonsense) is just one big fat fraud—a lie—a distraction—deliberately perpetrated by the Crisis Management Conspirators to make truth seekers look silly.
In my article I sent on to explain:
The supposed villain of Piper’s narrative is former Obama official Cass Sunstein, whose name would mean nothing to most of the public but remains very well-known within conspiratorial and alternative media circles. He taught constitutional law for 27 years in Chicago then served as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012. But his enormous prominence had little connection to the three years he had spent running an obscure agency with a mind-numbingly bureaucratic title…Instead, his entire fame traces back to a single paper he co-authored in 2008 suggesting a strategy by which the government could disrupt and defeat the increasingly troublesome movement of “conspiracy theorists,” especially those who questioned the official story of the 9/11 attacks a few years earlier.
In the years following the 9/11 attacks, a vibrant movement of “conspiracy theorists” developed on the Internet, arguing that the true facts had been quite different than the official story, with most of them suggesting heavy American government involvement in those momentous events.Back then, the Internet was far less channeled and regulated than it eventually became, and few effective means existed for the political establishment to shut down such troubling discussions. Therefore Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, soon to become a top Obama aide, shrewdly suggested that the activities of those energetic individuals could best be undermined and disrupted by means of “cognitive infiltration.” Agents of the government or its close allies should join those online communities and promote a wide range of additional theories, often rather absurd ones, thereby stirring up internal conflicts, diverting the members into theoretical dead-ends, and heavily discrediting them with the broader American public…
During that period, I was paying little attention to the 9/11 issue and was barely aware of the existence of a 9/11 Truth movement. But individuals who were very actively involved at the time have told me that they believe much of their movement’s momentum was lost when certain prominent figures were diverted into various bizarre theories of what had happened.Some began to argue that no actual planes had hit the towers in New York City, and the images seen were merely holograms. Others claimed that nuclear explosions or mysterious energy-weapons had inflicted the destruction. And naturally enough, the more exciting and shocking the theory, the more it tended to capture the imagination and enthusiasm of the rank-and-file activists. Moreover, many of these different factions bitterly opposed each other, and the resulting infighting together with the sometimes outlandish nature of the claims soon cost the 9/11 Truth movement much of the little support it had gained in media circles and among the public.
Within a few years, the broader conspiracy movement was also swept by widespread beliefs that the Sandy Hook shooting, the Boston Bombing, and various other rampages or terrorist attacks were faked events, with the participants being paid “crisis actors.” It’s hardly surprising that Piper would regard this as an implementation of Sunstein’s strategy of “cognitive infiltration,” and even assume that Sunstein himself must have been personally involved.
Whether or not Sunstein actually had any role in the project, there seems considerable evidence that Piper was correct and that as the 9/11 Truth movement began to gain traction around 2008, elements of our political establishment began a quiet but concerted effort to use such techniques of “cognitive infiltration” to sabotage and disrupt it.
This strategy took advantage of the obvious psychological vulnerabilities of so many members of the “conspiracy community.”
Many, perhaps most individuals are quite reluctant to embrace any theory not blessed by their personal figures of authority, whether these be the editors of the New York Times or the pundits of FoxNews. Only a small minority of the population is willing to cross such ideological boundaries and risk the stinging epithet of being labeled “a conspiracy theorist.”Transgressive individuals who adhere to some heterodox beliefs are also usually willing to accept many others as well, and are often quite eager to do so, sometimes exhibiting the troubling lack of logical thinking and careful analytical judgment that may taint their entire community. This leaves them open to eagerly nibbling the poisoned bait of fraudulent but attractive theories, whether these are advanced by well-meaning advocates, self-serving charlatans, or covert agents of the establishment engaged in “cognitive infiltration.”
Modern ICBMs often release several decoy warheads during their reentry phase, with these intended to frustrate any missile defense system. And for very similar reasons, I think that just as Piper argued one of the most effective means of severely disrupting the investigation of a conspiracy has been to promote one or more closely-related but entirely fraudulent theories that are far more sweeping and “exciting,” and therefore draw enthusiasm from gullible conspiracy-activists. Serving as lightning-rods, such manufactured hoaxes also attract greater public attention and thereby discredit anyone seeking to challenge the official narrative of what had happened.
In Piper’s book, he pointed to the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing as a perfect example of how this pernicious technique was employed. He believed that there was considerable evidence that the bombing itself had been a false-flag operation, with the two dead terrorists probably being merely innocent patsies. But rather than focusing on those issues, most of the conspiracy community was instead diverted into the bizarre theory that no bombing had actually occurred, with all the hundreds of dead or injured victims merely being “crisis actors” recruited to play those roles and their alleged injuries being fake, the work of skilled Hollywood special effects artists. However, Piper noted that the Boston Marathon had drawn tens of thousands of participants from all across America along with hundreds of thousands of spectators, and most of those individuals were direct eyewitnesses to what had happened. So he viewed support for this bizarre theory as being particularly damaging to the credibility of the entire conspiracy community.
Although in recent years terrorist attacks in the West have greatly diminished and talk of “crisis actors” has faded away along with those, that peculiar idea still permeates the thoughts of the more extreme conspiracy-activists, notably those drawn to our very lightly moderated website.
Just recently, one of the more fanatic commenters argued that not only had no jetliners ever struck the WTC towers on 9/11 but that almost no New Yorkers had actually died that day, with thousands of imaginary victims having merely been invented by our dishonest media. Another commenter topped even that, claiming that entire last twelve months of the bloodshed in Gaza was entirely imaginary, with all the terrible images of dead or dying Palestinians seen on the world’s billions of smartphones merely the product of legions of “crisis actors” and Hollywood make-up artists.
Over the years I’d discovered that regardless of how extreme a particular conspiracy-crank might seem, an even more extreme one can almost always be found.
As another example, during the 2016 presidential campaign a trove of DNC emails was released by hackers and these raised strong suspicions that some of the most powerful figures in elite DC political circles were involved in a pedophilia ring, an accusation that was called the “Pizzagate Scandal.” Massive efforts were soon made to suppress this controversy, with YouTube suddenly breaking its long-standing tradition of non-censorship by purging the extremely popular videos produced by citizen-investigators that documented and analyzed the evidence while an award-winning CBS journalist who aired a story on the scandal was immediately fired. At the time, I considered much of the Pizzagate evidence reasonably credible, assuming that such pedophilia was obviously being used as a very effective means of blackmailing and controlling powerful political figures. A couple of years later I discussed that important story in the context of the emerging Jeffrey Epstein Scandal:
But although Pizzagate was quickly suppressed and soon largely forgotten, I found it quite suspicious that not long afterwards the political fringe was roiled by massively complex and wildly popular QAnon movement. Much of QAnon centered on the same charges of rampant pedophilia in elite political circles but larded with such a huge profusion of other implausible and even absurd elements that it was very widely ridiculed, and its final collapse largely discredited any other accusations along similar lines.
Laurent Guyénot recently published an important article lamenting how such similarly bizarre and unsubstantiated theories that the West was secretly controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles have now infected and severely damaged France’s own conspiracy-community, probably having been deliberately promoted for exactly that purpose.
I’ve also noticed another interesting parallel case in which extremely bizarre theories have been used to disrupt legitimate conspiratorial investigations in both the U.S. and France.
Although the story was totally ignored and suppressed by our entire mainstream media both at the time and afterward, during the 2008 presidential campaign highly credible allegations surfaced that Sen. Barack Obama was a deeply-closeted homosexual who enjoyed smoking crack cocaine with his various gay lovers. It even seemed quite likely that one or more murders had been committed around that the time to protect that terrible political secret, and I discussed all of this in a long article last year:
Obviously, such enormously explosive accusations might be expected to attract the permanent attention of numerous right-wing, Obama-hating conspiracy-activists, who would do their utmost to publicize those possible revelations during the years that followed. Therefore, Obama operatives would naturally seek a means of diverting their antagonists into less fruitful directions.
Given these facts, I consider it rather suspicious that such conspiracy activists eventually began to focus instead on the utterly bizarre and illogical belief that Michelle Obama—mother of two daughters—was actually a man, a vastly more “exciting” theory that attracted the enthusiastic belief of many such gullible individuals. Although I have absolutely no evidence that political operatives seeking to protect Obama’s reputation had any hand in quietly promoting that issue, it greatly suited their interests and so should be reckoned a reasonable possibility.
Something similar may have recently happened in France. In 2017, a relatively obscure political newcomer named Emmanuel Macron suddenly appeared from almost nowhere to win the French presidency at the age of 39, becoming by far the youngest such officeholder in his country’s modern history, with the vehicle for his remarkable victory being a new political party that he had only founded the previous year. His personal life seemed somewhat unusual, given that he had married his former teacher, a woman 25 years older, and he had no children. Although I don’t read French nor follow French media, I’ve seen regular claims on the Internet that Macron is widely suspected of being a deeply-closeted homosexual, who married his wife as a means of deflecting such suspicions and thereby enabling his meteoric political career.
Under normal circumstances one might expect the many activists who despise Macron and his policies to focus on these issues and attempt to find supporting evidence. But instead, their attention has been completely diverted into promoting and investigating the totally bizarre theory that Brigitte Macron, his wife and the mother of three children from her first marriage, is actually a man. Once again, French conspiracy-researcher Laurent Guyénot has been quite distressed that so many French activists have fallen for this transparent hoax, which he regards as total lunacy. While I can’t say whether Macron’s operatives somehow managed to quietly manipulate their opponents into following that dead end, the development does seem extremely beneficial for their purposes.
I discussed both of these strange conspiratorial beliefs in an article last month:
Sometimes the problem seems less due to covert agents of disruption than self-serving charlatans, who are willing to deliberately concoct or promote totally false stories in order to attract attention.
For example, Alex Jones has always seemed someone in this category to me. Prior to his recent legal troubles, he had successfully created a media empire with annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars by advocating every conspiratorial belief that could draw an audience regardless of whether it seemed likely to be true or false. Although I tend to doubt that he was ever a deliberate agent of disinformation, I’m sure that the hugely popular distribution channel he established was very regularly used for exactly that purpose, notably boosting the theory that Michelle Obama was man.
There are many other personalities and publications that I would put into the same category, although they obviously failed to achieve Jones’ huge success. For years, someone calling himself Gordon Duff ran the Veterans Today website, and although he was willing to publish some very controversial articles of great importance—notably those of Dr. Alan Sabrosky’s arguing that the Israeli Mossad was responsible for the 9/11 Attacks—the bulk of his material seemed so totally fraudulent that I never really paid any attention to his publication. In some of his interviews, Duff came across as an outrageous fabulist, even once publicly boasting that 30-40% of everything that he or his webzine published was knowingly false.
This pattern of behavior continued after Duff left to launch a new website, and his efforts there have had some serious consequences. For example, last year a claim got into circulation that a Russian hypersonic missile had destroyed a Ukrainian bunker, killing a couple of hundred NATO officers including several American generals. That remarkable story was soon accepted as true by many reputable individuals who should have known better, notably including Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, a Russian specialist who has been heavily focused on the Ukraine War. But as I demonstrated in an article, the incident was merely an obvious hoax concocted by Duff.
Although it’s unfortunate that so many normally sensible people completely fell for the NATO bunker hoax, it’s hardly surprising. Social media serves as dry tinder and “exciting” stories can quickly catch fire across the Internet with few questioning their veracity. According to Newsweek, the posts on Twitter and Telegram had already accumulated hundreds of thousands of views by the end of March. Individuals who encounter the same story from numerous different sources are likely to assume it’s correct without considering that these might all be ultimately traced back to the inventions of a single fabulist. The dishonesty of the anti-Russia mainstream media regarding the conflict naturally leads many critics to ignore the extreme dishonesty on the other side. I suspect that many tens or even hundreds of thousands of people around the world are now convinced that a Ukrainian bunker filled with NATO officers was incinerated by a Russian missile strike.
But although Gordon Duff and even Alex Jones merely seem dishonest conspiracy-mongers not really all that different from so many of their less prominent peers, there is one figure in that genre whose accumulated body of work stands absolutely alone, so voluminous that I’m quite skeptical it’s actually the work of a single individual.
As I began to silently browse the comment-threads of various alternative websites more than a dozen years ago, I occasionally noticed references here and there to some conspiracy-writer who had apparently produced a large number of especially shocking theories. Those commenters who mentioned him usually seemed to be the most stupid and gullible ones, and even they weren’t sure whether those ideas might be correct but they felt compelled to seek the opinion of the others.
After a year or so of sometimes seeing that name mentioned, I finally decided to take a look for myself, and that’s how I first encountered the remarkable ideas of a certain Miles Mathis, whose articles were hosted in simple, unadorned form on a website bearing his own name.
By the time I discovered his work I’d already had my existing set of historical beliefs overturned on so many different occasions that I’d certainly grown open-minded enough to accept that I might be wrong about many other events, but what I encountered on his website was something entirely different. Within ten or twenty minutes of looking over his articles, I concluded that they all seemed like total rubbish, but of a rather suspicious type.
His basic framework seemed to be that absolutely everything was a conspiracy—“fake” was his favorite word—and usually a bizarre one. So obviously if everything were a conspiracy then there would be little point in focusing on one of examples cases rather than another, rendering the work of diligent conspiracy-researchers who were studying the JFK Assassination or the 9/11 Attacks completely pointless.
I’ve already emphasized that one effective means of disrupting the efforts of conspiracy-researchers is to launch decoys, theories that are somewhat similar to those under investigation but larded with so many bizarre and shocking additional elements that they will attract far greater attention while also being so ridiculous that they would discredit anyone exploring related ideas.
But another parallel approach would be to put out such a massive volume of conspiracy-smoke that it overwhelmed and concealed any actual conspiracies that might exist in our society, and that seemed to be the approach taken by Mathis.
Perhaps he might be a lunatic or a charlatan, but it seemed far more likely that his website represented an organized disinformation operation aimed at the particular segment of the conspiracy-community most vulnerable to such outlandish ideas. So I went away and never visited it again.
In a possible parallel development, I’ve been told that roughly around the same time, a series of very professionally-produced videos began appearing on YouTube arguing that the Earth was flat, and given the power of slick videos to sway weak, under-educated minds, a certain number of those prone to conspiratorial thinking fell for such nonsense. Indeed, Candace Owens, a prominent conservative black podcaster with strong conspiratorial tendencies, declared a few months ago that since she rejected science, she wasn’t sure whether the Earth was round or flat, a statement that hardly enhanced her credibility on other matters.
Over the years, a couple of the occasional commenters on our own website had described themselves as Flat Earthers, something that greatly surprised me until I eventually heard about those very professional YouTube videos.
Although I doubted that Flat Earthism would ever attract much of a following, I was concerned that some of Mathis’ apparent disinformation might. In many respects a tendency towards conspiratorial thinking is a personal trait much like a tendency towards alcoholism, and the conspiracy-community is naturally overflowing with such vulnerable individuals, many of whom are attracted to our own website.
I suspected that the likely goal of Mathis and his website project was to deliberately distribute unlimited quantities of hundred-proof conspiracy-whiskey in those circles, with predictably devastating consequences. So six or seven years ago I established a firm rule that any comment mentioning, citing, or linking Miles Mathis or his work was automatically trashed, about the only such blanket prohibition I have ever imposed on our very lightly moderated website.
That issue recently came up again, both in our website comments and elsewhere, leading me to explain my rule to newcomers:
Miles Mathis is notorious for promoting total nonsense, so much so that I very strongly suspect he’s a disinfo operative.Effective military defense system normally contain a variety of types, targeting different sorts of attacking missiles and ranges. And I think the same is true for ideological defense systems maintained by the Establishment.
Mathis’ work seems aimed at particularly stupid, crazy, or gullible individuals, of whom the “conspiracy community” has more than its fair share. So in order to avoid disruption, all comments mentioning, citing, or linking him are automatically trashed.
However, since I’d last looked at the Mathis website about a dozen years ago, I finally decided that it was only fair I revisit his work and decide whether I might have misjudged him. But instead, I was shocked at what I actually found.
The first of my surprises was the sheer volume of his material. I try to be methodical and comprehensive, so I’d originally planned to read his entire corpus of work, but I immediately saw that this was totally impossible unless I was willing to invest many, many months in the project.
His main eponymous website MilesWMathis.com includes an “Update Page” containing links to well over 1,500 of his articles and their updates, of which nearly 1,000 were his new pieces on conspiratorial topics, stretching back to around 2011 or so, with only a small fraction of these being by guest contributors. Spot-checking the word-count on a few of them suggested that they are rarely shorter than 5,000 words and perhaps might average closer to 8,000 words or more. So the total of his conspiratorial writings certainly runs many, many millions of words, with most of those pieces also containing numerous images. He had probably published enough content to fill at least 60 or 70 non-fiction books, certainly an astonishing level of productivity for a single writer.
Indeed, the volume of conspiratorial material on this Mathis website was so enormous that I suspect his aggregate content is far greater than the combined total for every other conspiracy-website on the Internet. Given that huge quantity of writing he even provided a separate archive page listing the 160 conspiratorial articles that he considers his best.
Writing a 5,000 or 10,000 word essay of entirely original text often including copious images and doing that every couple of days or so seems a rather formidable undertaking for a single individual, especially since nearly all of these were apparently based upon extensive Internet research. These essays seem reasonably well written, though usually in his trademark meandering, obfuscating style, and I spotted very few typos, spelling errors, or grammatical mistakes, indicating that they had also been carefully proofed, certainly far more so than the output of a typical website writer.
Furthermore, I soon discovered that he also maintained an entirely separate website called MilesMathis.com, devoted to his mathematical and scientific writing, which includes nearly another 500 articles, supposedly totaling some 7,800 pages of text and perhaps 1.5 million words or more. A little spot-checking suggested that there was only slight overlap with those listed on his main website.
One very odd aspect of his work was that apparently all of the 1,500 or so individual articles on his main website were in the form of PDF files rather than as ordinary HTML pages, and I could think of no other writer nor blogger who followed that approach.
While I can’t say exactly why he did this, I have my suspicions. All his lengthy historical articles make numerous assertions allegedly based upon his extensive Internet research, and if they were provided as HTML pages, his readers would naturally expect to see links documenting those claims, but since all those articles are instead in PDF format, they contain almost no links and everyone must take his often wild claims entirely upon faith. My guess is that most of his assertions are correct or at least somewhat substantiated, but making six or seven true claims is an excellent means of then slipping in one that is completely false. In support of this hypothesis, almost none of his mathematical and scientific articles make any factual references, and therefore nearly all of them seem to be presented in the usual HTML format.
While I didn’t notice any explanation of why Mathis maintains two entirely separate websites cataloguing his work, once again I have my suspicions. Browsing around a little, Mathis claims to be an artist with an undergraduate degree in liberal arts from the University of Texas at Austin, and he was allegedly born in 1964. His main website is devoted to his unraveling of so many political and historical “conspiracies” that if his readers discovered he had also claimed to have overturned most of modern physics and mathematics, they might become overly suspicious of the pieces that they were reading.
Easily summarizing such a gigantic collection of conspiratorial content is obviously impossible, so I’ll just present a very brief overview based upon the couple of days I spent casually exploring this archive.
I doubt that any other twentieth century conspiratorial topic has attracted remotely as much interest and analysis as the 1963 JFK Assassination, and Mathis has certainly contributed his own lengthy efforts to that large volume of established work. His main article runs 88 PDF pages totaling some 38,000 words, and although I just lightly glanced at it, his thesis is that Kennedy faked his own death, and apparently went on to live the rest of his life as a private citizen or something like that. I also noticed at least a couple of other fairly lengthy articles on JFK, Jack Ruby, and other related matters.
JFK was hardly the only president to have faked his own assassination. Indeed, all of our other assassinated presidents had done much the same thing, including Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley.
The claim that famous assassinations or deaths were actually faked has been a major theme of his conspiratorial writings. Thus, according to Mathis, Rudolph Valentino faked his own death, as did Gen. George Patton, Natalie Wood, John Lennon, George Orwell, John Reed, Marilyn Monroe, River Phoenix, Anne Heche, Princess Diana, Grace Kelly, Kitty Genovese, John Dillinger, Amelia Earhart, Mozart, Dorothy Stratten, Karen Carpenter, Mata Hari, and probably a few others whom I’d somehow missed in my cursory examination.
Very high-profile racial deaths or killings have also generally been hoaxes, fake events that never actually occurred. For example, the OJ Simpson murders and subsequent trial were faked, as were the killings of Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery.
Many other notable historical events are equally fake. Several of his lengthy articles demonstrate that both our world wars were fought by mistake since there was no Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the same was true for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that had triggered the First World World. The Nuremberg Trials were faked, which was hardly surprising since all the leading Nazis were actually Jewish actors, and Dresden was never bombed. Nuclear weapons don’t exist, nor does nuclear power. Relatively minor historical incidents such as the Shootout at the OK Corral were equally fake as was the famous Mutiny on the Bounty, the Kent State Massacre, and the sinkings of both the Titanic and the Lusitania.
Most recently, Mathis seems to have published a series of articles claiming that the Hamas raid on Israel was faked along with the subsequent bloodshed in Gaza.
Aside from the very long list of faked assassinations or deaths, another favorite theme of Mathis has been that various prominent figures in Western history were secretly Jewish. I’d already mentioned that this was the case with Adolf Hitler and all the other top figures of Nazi Germany, but they were hardly alone among World War II leaders, with Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin also being Jewish.
Other world leaders who were secretly Jewish included Presidents Donald Trump, George H.W. and George W. Bush, and Abraham Lincoln, and the same had been true of Napoleon Bonaparte along with most of the recent top officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Most of the leaders of Post-war Europe were Jewish, including Konrad Adenauer and Kurt Waldheim.
The long roster of secret Jews extended far outside the political arena, including technology leaders Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, and Ingrid Bergman, author C.S. Lewis, composers Ludwig van Beethoven, and Wolfgang Mozart, director Ingmar Bergman, historian David Irving, and German general Erwin Rommel.
I certainly haven’t bothered trying to read most of these articles, but the titles and the descriptive summaries seem pretty indicative
Normally I would have consulted Wikipedia for the basic if sometimes highly-slanted information on someone like Mathis. But although most of the more prominent conspiracy-writers who come to mind have Wikipedia pages, including David Icke, Jeff Rense, Webster Tarpley, Hal Turner, and Andrew Anglin, Mathis does not, perhaps because he’s regarded as too insignificant or his actual existence is insufficiently documented, though I’m sure he himself would instead provide a conspiratorial explanation of that omission. I was therefore forced to turn to his 6,000 word page on the more fringe-oriented RationalWiki, which proved quite helpful.
However, I noticed that entry claimed “Mathis exhibits blatant anti-semitism in his writings,” which strikes me as a very odd characterization. Claiming that Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mozart, Beethoven, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ingrid Bergman, and President George H.W. Bush were all actually Jewish hardly seems antisemitic to me. Crazy yes, but anti-semitic no.
Our very lightly moderated website naturally attracts large numbers of unusual individuals and I’ve sometimes wondered where they got their crazy beliefs, vaguely assuming that Alex Jones might have been the source of those. But I now think that Mathis’ huge trove of nonsensical material is much more likely to have been responsible.
Anyone who has spent any time at all in fringe or conspiratorial circles knows perfectly well the damaging mindset often found among such enthusiastic activists. If an “exciting” idea of some sort seems possible—even just barely possible—they immediately jump upon it as conclusively proven, and then soon use it as the foundation for additional speculation, piling unlikelihood upon unlikelihood until they create castles in the sky having no real foundations. This precisely exemplifies the Mathis style of analysis, with this illogical process usually obfuscated by an enormous wave of meandering, confusing, and mostly irrelevant verbiage, much like the patter of a card-sharp distracting the mark in a game of Three-Card Monte. I’m not sure I’d ever come across anyone on the Internet whose writing better demonstrated this negative approach than Mathis.
Given the overwhelming quantity of conspiracy-prose on the Mathis websites, I’ll limit my detailed discussion to a small handful of the various articles that I carefully read.
An ardent fan of Mathis strongly urged that I read his article “Bill Gates: Jewish Aristocrat,” which ran a relatively short 4,500 words, so I did so. Over the years, I’ve sometimes seen claims floating around the Internet that Gates actually had substantial Jewish ancestry and I’d never had strong views about that possibility one way or the other. But after reading Mathis’ article claiming to document that fact, I’m firmly convinced that Gates has absolutely no known Jewish ancestry whatsoever.
The bulk of the article was just the usual mountain of convoluted verbiage having little if anything to do with Gates’ ancestry, but a very early paragraph focused on exactly that crucial genealogical question, so I’m quoting it here, retaining all the boldfacing from the original:
Large parts of Bill Gates’ genealogy are scrubbed, but we can still see through it. Gates is not only a Gates, he is a Gibbs, a Curtis, a Maxwell, a Reid, and an Oakley. One of Bill’s recent Oakley ancestors married a Judd. That’s clearly Jewish. In the Curtis line, we go back to Scituate, Plymouth County, where they were linked to Moores, Randalls, Perrys, Lowes, Fishes, Lincolns and Palmers. The Palmers are the most important there, but they are scrubbed. The Lincolns of Plymouth are very obviously Jewish, with given names like Caleb Mordecai, Ephraim, Ruth, Huldah, and Joshua. The Lincolns married the Hobarts, which takes us back to England and quickly links us to the surnames Fox and Crane. Through the Cranes, Gates is related to Sir Robert Crane, 1 st Baronet of Chilton. This links us immediately to the Careys and Walpoles—including Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford and Prime Minister, and his son Horace Walpole, the 4th Earl of Orford. Through him we link to the Churchills and everyone else we have been studying. The Fox in Gates’ line is scrubbed, but this probably links us to George Fox who founded the Quakers. We will have more indication of that when the Quakers come up again below.
Mathis is obviously aiming his arguments at total ignoramuses, readers who are completely unaware that the English Puritans and similar sects often gave their children Biblical, Old Testament names much like “Caleb Mordecai, Ephraim, Ruth, Huldah, and Joshua.” Moreover, the Pilgrims who came to Massachusetts named their settlement “Plymouth Colony” because they had departed from Plymouth, England, a local hotbed of such religious beliefs, and since Lincoln itself is a very Anglo-Saxon name, there’s not the slightest reason to suspect that those Gates’ ancestors named Lincoln were Jewish. Moreover, contrary to Mathis’ ridiculous claims, Judd is also a perfectly normal Anglo-Saxon name. Thus, Mathis’ genealogical investigation seems to have actually established that absolutely all of Gates’ ancestors had Anglo-Saxon names, with no indications that any of them were Jewish.
Another article that had been suggested to me was “Who is Arnold…Really?,” making very similar claims about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ethnic origins, and I found it is just as totally ridiculous.
According to Wikipedia, Schwarzenegger’s father Gustav had joined the Nazi SA in 1939 and then later served in the German army, rising to the rank of sergeant. Mathis doubts this, arguing on the basis of a photograph that he had instead probably been a junior officer, and that seems quite possible since Schwarzenegger might have sought to minimize his father’s rank in Hitler’s army.
But Mathis also argues that 1939 was implausibly late for him to have joined the SA, which had been around for many years, apparently assuming that his ignorant readers have never heard of the 1938 Anschluss. That was the year when Austria merged with Hitler’s Reich, and prior to that date Nazi organizations had been seriously repressed in the former country, so it makes perfect sense that someone would have waited until later to join the SA. Indeed, one of the conflicting claims reported by Wikipedia indicated that he might have applied for membership just prior to that event.
Meanwhile, Mathis also claims to have proven Schwarzenegger’s Jewish ancestry, but I saw no evidence whatsoever. The Weider brothers who dominated America’s body-building industry were Jewish as was the owner of Gold’s Gym, and after Schwarzenegger arrived in California, he associated with those individuals, later also working with various Jewish film directors. But arguing that this proves the famous action hero was himself Jewish would imply the same thing for every Gentile star in heavily Jewish Hollywood, suggesting once again that Mathis perhaps correctly assumes that his readers are idiots. Mathis then spends much of the rest of his article discussing convoluted and eye-glazing matters of genealogy, including his regular hobby-horse that all the leading Nazis were actually Jewish.
A third article worth examining was “Looks Like David Irving is Jewish,” which devotes some 7,200 words to supposedly demonstrating that conclusion, claiming that Irving’s mother was Jewish. That article had been the one that commenters most frequently attempted to cite on our website, finally prompted my decision to revisit Mathis and the body of his work.
Although I’m certainly open to the possibility claimed by Mathis, I’m also rather skeptical. In one of his public lectures, Irving mentioned that when he had finished his landmark Hitler biography, produced at the peak of his public success, his very nervous publisher asked him whether he might be Jewish, hoping for the positive answer that would minimize the feared backlash, but Irving replied that unfortunately he wasn’t. On several other occasions, Irving has explained that given his historical focus, his career would have been much less difficult if his name had been “Irving David” rather than the other way round. So considering Irving’s enormous professional travails over the decades, I can’t understand why he would have ever concealed the fact of his Jewish ancestry if it were true.
As far as I can tell, the only significant evidence that Mathis provides on the other side is a February 2005 article in a small right-wing newspaper quoting a German novelist friend of Irving, who stated that the latter’s mother was Jewish. By that date, Irving had already been driven into personal bankruptcy with his career totally destroyed, and the writer made that statement in his effort to defend him from accusations of antisemitism, an effort for which he soon apologized. I’m just not sure whether that single, offhand remark can outweigh the total silence from all other sources across more than a half-century of Irving’s very controversial and prominent career. Other than that, Mathis emphasizes the genealogy of Irving’s mother, but none of the names he mentioned were notably Jewish ones, so that evidence seems very thin.
As usual, Mathis then devotes the bulk of his article to his typically meandering conspiratorial accusations, including the claim that Irving had faked his trial and conviction in Austria, and had never suffered the year of imprisonment that followed. He also argued that the eminent historian’s entire half-century long career had been serving as an agent of British Intelligence, working on behalf of Jewish and Zionist interests. He found it particularly suspicious that Irving accepted the reality of Hitler’s death in 1945, thereby concealing the strong possibly that the Jewish dictator of Germany had actually escaped to Latin America.
But although the enormously long list of the historical discoveries that Mathis claims to have made is certainly quite impressive, I actually think that his revolutionary work claiming to have overturned most of modern mathematics and physics would be even more significant, at least if it happened to be correct. His body of scientific research findings is contained in nearly 500 individual articles catalogued and hosted on his other personal website, and he apparently achieved all these hundreds of stupendous breakthroughs using little more than high school algebra and geometry.
Among all of these, his most most famous and notable result was surely his proof that the mathematical constant Pi was actually equal to 4, something that had stuck in my memory during my original visit to his website a dozen years ago. This remarkable discovery was presented in one very long and extremely wordy article that summarized a series of previous pieces coming to that same important conclusion. Although my own background was in theoretical physics and I had done very well in some of Harvard University’s most challenging graduate courses in that subject and in mathematics, I’ll admit that I had a difficult time making heads or tails of his argument about Pi, perhaps demonstrating the revolutionary nature of his discovery. He seemed to be saying that the value of Pi changed with motion and referred people to a YouTube video that proved his point, which I certainly didn’t bother to watch.
Nearly all those visitors to our website who have attempted to cite Mathis’ work have always focused upon his historical discoveries, but I think they should probably begin with his math and physics papers, since those are obviously so much more fundamental to our understanding of the world. Indeed, whereas most academics in the sciences would certainly admit that a Flat Earth is at least theoretically possible, they would be very doubtful that Pi was equal to 4, thereby demonstrating that Mathis’ findings are far more dramatic.
By an odd coincidence, Mathis’ original proof that Pi = 4 was published right around the time that Cass Sunstein wrote his article suggesting that “cognitive infiltration” be used to disrupt the potentially dangerous work of conspiracy-researchers by promoting total nonsense, and I think that some of the earliest highly-professional Flat Earth videos may have also begun to appear on YouTube around then.
As I’ve already mentioned, I try my best to be extremely careful and cautious in the articles I publish on controversial topics, and hence would still stand behind at least 99% of everything I’ve written over the last three decades. Although it’s very possible that some of my claims may be eventually disproven, I do think that my ultimate batting-average will not be too far below that figure.
But after reading a smattering of Mathis’ enormous body of work, I would estimate that around 99% of all his major claims are either false or unsubstantiated, a remarkable result that would actually require a great deal of effort to achieve. It seems very unlikely that any crazy or scatterbrained conspiracy-monger could reach that percentage. And this may provide an important clue to the motives of his huge undertaking, now stretching across more than fifteen years.
I think that certain obvious possibilities can be easily ruled out.
If someone published two or three of these Mathis articles or even two or three each year, he might easily be a satirist, seeking to ridicule all world’s many conspiracy-cranks by beating them at their own game and producing greater absurdities than any of them could have possibly imagined. But his 1,500 or so lengthy articles, the equivalent of many dozens of thick non-fiction books, is obviously far too much work to have merely constituted some sort of practical joke, especially a joke that has now gone on since 2007 or 2008.
Mathis might also be a genuine lunatic, though his meticulous capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and grammar strongly argues against that, as does the careful tone of his writing.
The only remaining possibility that comes to mind is my original assumption that Mathis was simply a disinformation agent, seeking to disrupt the activities of sincere conspiracy-researchers by seeding their community with enormous quantities of discrediting nonsense.
If so, then it seems almost certain that Mathis is merely the front-man and figure-head for a team of professional disinformation specialists who have together produced the vast quantity of material published under his name over the last fifteen-odd years. A staff of perhaps 10-15 paid writers and researchers would certainly be a much more plausible source for the vast quantity of his output than merely the 24/7/365 efforts of a single eccentric former artist.
It is also interesting to note that nearly all of his earliest conspiracy-writings seem to have been mathematical and scientific articles, highlighted by his alleged proof that Pi=4. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911) had only just been founded a year or two earlier and that organization was beginning to gain considerable traction for its claims that the official 9/11 story was scientifically impossible from an engineering perspective, so perhaps a Cass Sunstein-type project of “cognitive infiltration” was launched in hopes of infecting that conspiracy-community with total scientific nonsense. Then the disinformation project was later expanded to include the dissemination of huge numbers of historical conspiracy theories.
Given the volume of disinformation produced and the number of years that the project has been in operation, I’d assume that the total expenditures would have now reached at least the $15 to $20 million range, and perhaps a great higher than that. So if this reconstruction is correct, obviously some major organization or very wealthy private individual must have been responsible. The CIA and the ADL stand out as among the strongest opponents of conspiracy theories, and either of them could have easily covered the costs, given that the former has an official budget in the billions while the latter has annual revenue of around $100 million. So these would probably be the leading suspects, along with some foreign intelligence agencies or very wealthy private individuals aligned with those same goals.
In examining the enormously long catalog of articles on the Mathis website, a possible clue jumped out at me. Almost all the individuals that are the main subjects of his articles tend to be very prominent figures such as American presidents, leading Hollywood stars, global celebrities, or billionaire industrialists. Yet I noticed one clear exception to that pattern.
Prof. Kevin MacDonald probably ranks as one of the American public figures regarded as most threatening and vilified by organized Jewish groups such as the ADL for his scholarly trilogy on Jewish activism and behavior, which probably established him in their minds as the world’s leading academic antisemite. When his books were purged from Amazon a few years ago, MacDonald claimed that they were the only works originally published by a mainstream academic press to suffer that fate. For around fifteen years, he has run The Occidental Observer webzine, whose articles are known for their very sharp criticism of Jewish influence and misbehavior, and as a consequence of all these factors his Wikipedia page is just as long and intensely hostile as one might expert.
Therefore, I found it intriguing that among the 2,000 or so articles listed on Mathis’ websites, the only one that I noticed singling a relatively non-famous individual for attack was the one published in 2016 entitled “Why I think Kevin MacDonald and the Occidental Observer are Controlled Opposition.” Mathis warned his readers that the academic was probably a nefarious agent of our secret rulers, merely faking his alleged antisemitism as part of a strategy of deception. And while the ADL probably regards MacDonald as its bête noire, I tend to doubt that the CIA knows or cares much about MacDonald nor his activities.
Some even more interesting evidence comes when we consider the well-known characteristics of the conspiracy-community.
In my experience, the two organizations most commonly blamed for their nefarious activities by conspiracy-activists are the CIA and the Israeli Mossad. If we go to the main Mathis archive page and do a simple CTRL-F, we find some 15 different references to the CIA, more than half of them in the actual titles of particular articles, each of which would obviously focus very heavily on that organization. Meanwhile, the word Mossad appears not a single time anywhere on that very long page.
Furthermore, if we then do a Google search for the word “Mossad” restricted to the contents of the Mathis website, we get only a single hit across his 8 or 10 million words of text. The only Mathis article that ever mentions Mossad was entitled “Yes, Margaret, the War in Israel is Fake,” claiming that the alleged Hamas attack on Israel was fraudulent. That piece was first published as a tiny stub item of a few short sentences on October 7, 2023, and then greatly augmented during the days, weeks, and months that followed, apparently arguing that the Hamas attack had been faked with the collusion of the Israeli government.
So across the last fifteen years and the thousands of lengthy articles that have been published under the name of Miles Mathis, a compendium probably constituting well over half of the published conspiracy content found anywhere on the Internet, the term “Mossad” has never otherwise once been mentioned.
ORDER IT NOW
In 2018 New York Times journalist Ronan Bergman published Rise and Kill First, a massive and very heavily documented history of the Mossad and its unmatched record of assassinations and other highly-conspiratorial activities over the last seven decades. Drawing upon Bergman’s magisterial work, in January 2020 I published American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations, a 27,000 word article documenting the activities of that powerful organization. But until last October Miles Mathis had seemingly never heard of either Mossad nor any of those incidents, an extremely curious omission for someone who is likely the most extreme and prolific conspiracy-writer the world has ever seen.
I think this silence of “the Dog That Did Not Bark” answers the question of who is actually running the Miles Mathis website and its likely purpose on the Internet. And I think the existence of that website also demonstrates the enormous threat that the work of legitimate conspiracy-researchers such as Michael Collins Piper have posed to certain particular groups and organizations.
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