Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't MeanThey Aren't Out To Get You

One factor in the current environment that hasn't had much notice is the expansion of the Overton window, the range of ideas politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. These include notions that only a short time ago would have been considered "paranoid" or "conspiracy theories".

The most prominent example is how the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy Jr has advanced interpretations of events that only a year or two ago would have been deemed dangerously heterodox, and he's gaining an audience. For instance, Bill Ackman, "one of the most influential investors on Wall Street", has begun to endorse Kennedy's views on COVID vaccines:

Bill Ackman said in 2021 that delaying Covid vaccinations for older Americans “seems like genocide.”

Today, the influential hedge fund chief and investor is amplifying the debunked anti-vaccine views of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Ackman is not denying his change. In fact, he said Kennedy is asking “important questions” about vaccines, raising issues he is interested in learning more about.

Or take Seymour Hersh, whose reporting since the My Lai massacre has always pushed the envelope, but his more recent stories, especially his allegation that

US Navy divers, acting under the direct orders of US President Joe Biden, planted C4 explosives on the [Nordstream] pipelines during routine NATO exercises in June last year, before remotely activating the bombs three months later

have been met with intense skepticism. More recently, he's said this about dissent within the US intelligence community over the Ukraine war:

Let’s take a look at recent events in the Ukraine war from the point of view of those in the American intelligence community who don’t feel they have the ear of President Joe Biden but should.

. . . The Biden administration’s role in both [of the Ukrainian] attacks [on the Kerch bridge] was vital. “Of course it was our technology,” one American official told me. “The drone was remotely guided and half submerged—like a torpedo.” I asked if there was any thought before the bridge attack about the possibility of retaliation. “What will Putin do? We don’t think that far,” the official said. “Our national strategy is that Zelensky can do whatever he wants to do. There’s no adult supervision.”

. . . At this point, with the Ukraine counteroffensive against Russia thwarted, the official said, “Zelensky has no plan, except to hang on. It’s as if he’s an orphan—a poor waif in his underwear—and we have no real idea of what Zelensky and his crowd are thinking. Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria, and Biden’s support of Zelensky can only come from Zelensky’s knowledge of Biden, and not just because he was taking care of Biden’s son.”

In other words, what does Zelensky have on Biden? Even a couple of months ago, this would have been well outside the range of acceptable questions, but with the steady stream of revelations from Sen Grassley and the Comer committee involving millions in under-the-table payments from Ukrainians and others, it isn't that far off base. As Mr Ackman said about Kennedy Jr, we're interested in learning more.

Or take Oliver Stone, not long ago denounced for "loony JFK conspiracies", who more recently has expanded on his views about US involvement in Ukraine:

Stone spoke on a recent episode of commentator Russell Brand’s talk show "Stay Free" on Rumble. Stone won international fame for his documentaries, one of which was "Ukraine on Fire." This documentary is described on IMDb as one that details the ousting of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in a "coup d'état" aided by the United States government in 2014.

. . . He then slammed the "Neoconservative movement who started the war in Iraq" who yet remain "deep inside our government," citing prominent figures like Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He went on to add that "Biden is an old Cold Warrior, and he really hates the old Soviet Union which he confounds again with the Russian Federation, which is not communist."

. . . "If we don’t stop this, what Biden is doing, this guy is – I voted for him – I made a mistake, I was thinking he was an old man now that he would calm down, that he would be more mellow and so-forth, I didn’t see that at all," he said. "I see a man who maybe is not in charge of his own administration. Who knows?"

The problem we're looking at in all these cases is that there are new data points that we've begun to recognize can't be explained within our existing cognitive models, so we're forced to go outside them. What happened in the 1960s was that we had not a single, isolated political assassination out of the blue -- like, say, President McKinley's in 1901 or James Garfield's in 1881 -- but a sequence of three over five years, accompanied by an increasingly problematic war.

Thus we saw the rise, and in fact the persistence, of conspiracy theories. I don't think it's coincidental thar Robert Kennedy Jr has endorsed at least one of them:

Robert Kennedy Jr., the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate, has backed a conspiracy theory that the CIA was involved in the killing of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, arguing the evidence is “overwhelming.”

“There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder,” Kennedy said in a Sunday interview with John Catsimatidis on New York City radio station WABC 770. “I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”

Well, when it looks like the Democrats may have rigged the 2020 election, in part by alleging that the loser was a Russian agent and using the organs of state security to discredit damning evidence on Hunter's laptop, and then engineered political prosecutions of the loser, what are we supposed to think? This is what happens when the consensus narrative becomes unsustainable.