Is America Facing Another Sputnik Moment?

I think the error that a lot of conspiracy theorists make isn't so much the idea that conspiracies exist, but that they have some sort of additional metaphysical super-reality that makes them supremely powerful and omniscient. I can process the possibility that 9/11 was at least permitted to happen by somebody who happened to work for the government. But I bet it didn't go as they expected (doubt anyone planned on one of the planes crashing before arriving at the Pentagon), and I would also lay money down the after effects were not precisely what they wanted or expected either. Just as it the effects were not precisely what the terrorists themselves probably expected or desired, either. (And in only the craziest levels of the conspiracy theory would the motives of the actual people and the conspirators actually line up.)

A lot of conspiracies probably exist. Mostly they fight with each other (knowingly or otherwise), work at cross purposes, and don't have exactly the predicted effects any more than any of the rest of us can predict the future precisely either. And people underestimate what people can do. At the risk of being excessively topical, as an example, at the moment I see nothing in particular about the Las Vegas shooting incident that requires a conspiracy to have occurred. That doesn't prove there wasn't one, and I reserve the right to change my mind as evidence comes in, but at the moment, I don't see anything that requires that as an explanation. In a world of 7 billion people, a non-trivial number of which are crazy, a non-trivial number of those of which recently went crazy due to environmental factors such as drugs (prescription and otherwise) or brain tumors, I don't think the baseline of such incidents will ever be zero.

(And I'm not necessarily all that hard pressed to more-or-less believe the official account of 9-11 either, honestly.)

In summation, I think that certainly some conspiracies exist, but they are less powerful and omniscient that people ascribe to them, that there are things that "just happen" without a conspiracy, and that sometimes they do succeed and remain secret.

I'd also observe that just like there's a rush every time a new product comes out to be the first to denounce it and declare it's utter failure, there's a rush to be the first person to declare that you can see the workings of a conspiracy or how something is a false flag operation. In our social media age, this is what I would call "the expected result", not some sort of surprise or meaningful signal.