Sports Are Fixed

There have long been such conspiracies and comparisons to entities like professional wrestling, but this year it's become a MAGA staple to believe the CIA has directed the NFL to use Taylor Swift as a way to suppress Donald Trump.

JFK Assassination

The standard narrative is the one from the Warren Commission: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and shot three bullets from the Book Depository in Dallas, missing, wounding, and finally killing JFK.

Probably ought to narrow down on one of the specific conspiracy angles:

1. The mob?

2. The Cubans?

3. American CIA/internal?

Jeffrey Epstein

There is evidence of a cover-up, for sure. I dunno that I believe he was assassinated so much as I believe the prison system is so broken that a man on suicide watch was able to hang himself simply because of how poorly prisons are run.

Q-Anon

Surprisingly no one brought it up in time for last week, but Q is an anonymous source (there are some allegations and links to real names) that seems to be making up a lot of info that doesn't pan out.

Waco/David Koresh

The ensuing anti-government sentiments of far-right conspiracy-theorists can forge a direct path between Waco and the January 6th attempts to overthrow the US government

Vaccine Skepticism

Former doctor Andrew Wakefield did a now-debunked and completely retracted study linking MMR to Autism. That study was later found faulty for a number of reasons, including fraudulent math and reports of abuse by test subjects. Wakefield then lost his license to practice medicine.

Current presidential candidate, and long-time anti-science crusader Robert Kennedy Jr has risen to fame recently because of his insistence that the original study was correct and that all the science showing safety for MMR is actually a conspiracy to cover up the link.

COVID-19

Was it naturally occurring or did it leak out of a "gain of function" lab?

The Titanic Swap

We talked a little about this last week, but it was a new theory to me. I know people are greedy, but I dunno if they're so greedy as to kill thousands of people just for an insurance claim, especially since I've now learned that the insurance was only for $5 million when the ship itself cost more than $7.5 million just to build, let alone staff and run.

Moon-landing skepticism

One area where my bias will be clear - people who believe the moon landing was fake are wrong. Just flat wrong.

NXIVM Sex Cult

Cult leader Keith Raniere led "workshops" that were supposed to empower women, and he convinced some famous billionaire women and actresses to join him

The reality is he forced many of them into what amounts as sex slavery, mostly through blackmail. He took incriminating photos and videos and threatened, essentially, revenge porn if any women tried to out him as a sex abuser.

Jonestown

Until recently, this was the cult with the highest death total from a mass suicide

Order of the Solar Temple

Canadian mass suicide cult with pseudo-Christian beliefs

Like a number of smaller cults, it started with personal magnetism of a charismatic leader who then began to systematically abuse his followers.

Providence/JMS/

Christian Gospel Mission

Jung Myung-seok in South Korea preaches the divinity of Jung as the second coming of the Messiah.

Jung is a convicted rapist, and appears to be using his supposed divinity to have sex with young girls.

Children of God

This cult is famous mostly because some children who were raised in the cult are now Hollywood celebrities.

This started as a "youth group" by its founder David Berg, who seems to have used it, like Jung Myung-seok, to sexually assault children and get away with it.

Chemtrails

Airplanes leave behind something called a contrail, which is condensed water in the air that is forced into long clouds by the air pressure flowing over the wings of a plane.

This is now corrupted and people think jets are effectively crop-dusting all of humanity with chemicals to force compliance or otherwise poison humanity.

Area 51 / UFO / UAP

David Grusch is not a credible source by any reasonable measure, and the organization he worked for was created by, staffed by, and paid by conspiracy theory people with an agenda. Despite claims to being open and honest, that particular group of people does not conduct actual science and relies entirely on eye-witness accounts, which are the single worst pieces of evidence in existence. Eye-witnesses are unreliable at best.

I recommend coming at this from a completely different direction.

MK-Ultra

The CIA's secret program to work on mind control, one of several secret CIA-sponsored programs conducting unscientific and technically illegal research on American subjects

There was a story called The Manchurian Candidate that involves brainwashing and mind control, and the CIA was worried that Communists were doing just that. This program was intended to counter Soviet "mind control."

Sarah Lawrence college

And other coverups of decades of sexual abuse

This is how conspiracies actually operate most of the time. Something is discovered by the people in power about a person or group that is well-liked, not believed by those people, and then evidence for that thing is ignored or denied. Over time this cover-up grows and morphs. This is how the Catholic Church was able to cover for priests, how the USA Olympics allowed a doctor to sexually assault gymnasts, and how local high school football teams can get away with assaulting their teammates.

Heaven's Gate

We talked about this last week a bit, but the cult leader believed that salvation came only when human bodies were willfully abandoned so they could join the lifeforms on a spaceship that was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp.

Christian Apocalyptic Fundamentalism meets UFOlogy and merges the two.

This is not the first, nor last, to suggest the connection. In fact, Scientology was created by mostly failed sci-fi writer whose stories of alien cultures formed the basis of his "religious" texts. Most Western countries have banned Scientology and refuse to recognize it as a religion.

AI Conspiracy Theories

Terminator and other IPs like it have created intense fears of robots run amok. This fear of automation goes back much further. Even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein sort of falls into this line of fear.

Deciphering truths from lies is already hard where humanity is concerned. Adding non-human intelligence into the mix only makes it worse.

Cult of Mother God

Very recent case that has its own documentary already out. The woman, Mother God, died and her body was carted around by believers, who used her as a venerated decoration.

They believe she is billions of years old and that she has been reincarnated throughout history. This is the same kind of messianic beliefs common to most cults.

The Beatles Conspiracy

Otherwise known as Paul Is Dead.

A very long-running conspiracy that believes the original Paul McCartney died and was replaced by a look-alike.

Backmasking was used on records as a joke, and then people latched on and thought it was real.

Illuminati

This one might just be too big.

Manson Family

Ultimately a cult of personality. 

STD Studies

Tuskegee Experiment in the US got a lot of press, but the bigger study was conducted on Guatemalan citizens forcibly given STD bacterial strains

Radium Girls

Radium luminesces and holds light when "charged." Older watches would use radium on the hands to allow night reading of the time. The painters, often young women, developed cancers from the radioactivity, which was covered up for decades by the Radium Dial Company.

Aum Shinrikyo

Japanese death cult that actually spread sarin gas in terror attacks on Japanese subways. Prosecutors are unsure about the motives, floating ideas like distraction or attempted assassination of police and judges.

As with a few of the other cults, the leader fancies himself a reincarnation of a savior/messiah.

David Koresh in Waco made similar claims, as have dozens if not hundreds of other cult leaders.