There really are conspiracies. Democrats weaponized the CIA and FBI to spy on and entrap Trump advisors to delegitimize the 2016 election by falsely accusing the president of being a secret agent for Russia. “Former” military and Intelligence Community (IC) officials created a censorship-by-NGO scheme, designed specifically to circumvent the First Amendment, that censored, and still censors, millions of people in the US and Europe for disfavored, legal speech. And senior FBI officials, retired IC leaders, and IC intermediaries ran a sophisticated information operation to persuade journalists, social media executives, and millions of voters that Russians had obtained and manipulated the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
But not everything is a conspiracy. There is no evidence that NASA faked the moon landing, and abundant evidence that it happened. There is no evidence that the condensation trails (contrails) left by jets in the sky contain chemicals intentionally sprayed by the government to control the population or weather, and abundant evidence to the contrary. And there is no evidence that low levels of radiation from nuclear power plants, electromagnetic fields, or cell phone towers cause measurable harm.
It’s true that suspicious things have happened and are happening. The FBI didn’t let Joe Kent, the director of the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), investigate Charlie Kirk’s death, and Israel has influenced US foreign policy. Jeffrey Epstein hid cameras in Kleenex boxes, sent himself an email suggesting a scheme to blackmail Bill Gates, and worked for the arms dealer at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal. President Trump confirmed that the US government knows more about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) than it has revealed, and high-level current and former IC officials say they exhibit characteristics that US technologies lack and may indicate non-human intelligence (NHI). The CIA experimented with mind control, its director visited Jack Ruby in prison shortly before he became psychotic, and high-level scientists and officials are dying and disappearing.
But those facts do not prove many of the theories currently circulating. The FBI was right to deny Kent and the CTC new powers to go on a fishing expedition, since doing so would be precisely the abuse of IC power the US Constitution protects us against. Trump has wanted to attack Iran for decades and is solely responsible for the US military action. The email Epstein sent himself was in the voice of a Gates advisor trying to get more compensation, and there is no good evidence of a domestic or foreign intelligence agency working with him to run a sex blackmail operation. There is still no hard proof of NHI or recovered craft. And there is no good evidence of any connection between, or pattern of, high-level scientists dying.
And many of those theories undermine the search for truth. Kent’s claim that Israel may have been involved in Kirk’s murder could support the defense of Kirk’s shooter, Tyler Robinson, against whom the evidence is overwhelming. Falsely claiming that Israel controls Trump undermines public trust in democracy, just as did the false conspiracy theory that Russia controlled him. Smearing and scapegoating everyone who associated with Epstein as complicit in his crimes has undermined our justice system and legitimized mob rule. False claims about UAP have been used for decades to maintain government secrecy. And irresponsible claims about the government murdering its scientists worsen delusions about mind control, directed energy weapons, and gangstalking.
And so the question now is: how do we distinguish between real conspiracies and unproven theories? What can we learn from proven conspiracies and disproven ones? And how should we think about conspiracies and conspiracy theories moving forward?
The Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley recently invited me to give a talk on the subject, and I addressed Russiagate, censorship, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Epstein, the JFK assassination, MK-Ultra, and UAPs. An edited version of that talk follows.
Which Conspiracies Are Real?
The Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley, April 14, 2026
