QUOTE : JONES IS BOTH symptom and cause of how knee-jerk, florid conspiracism has become rampant and normalized in America, a fixture of the way people now think and talk, eclipsing simpler Occam’s razor understandings. Let me repeat once again: I’m not saying that large secret plots haven’t existed in the past and don’t exist now. For decades, people in the U.S. government, especially those whose work involves high-stakes secrecy, did a lot to make Americans start imagining conspiracies everywhere. The Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy assassination was full of bungles and became a growth medium in the conspiracists’ petri dishes for an infinity of bacterial theories—even though its essential conclusion was almost certainly correct. The government did lie about UFO sightings over the years—in order to cover up air force surveillance aircraft experiments. The Watergate burglary and cover-up were conspiracies—and promptly exposed, investigated, and punished. Among the most significant recent conspiracies, the cover-up by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and elite of its sexually predatory clergy was finally exposed—after we’d wasted vast resources and ruined hundreds of lives exposing and prosecuting a satanic sexual abuse conspiracy that didn’t exist.