1848 painting has uncanny insight into American conspiracy thinking

Conspiracy theories coming true are going gangbusters as of late. Maybe they should be re-labeled "narratives that while they are true might disrupt the current power structures so we will paint anyone who believes them as a loon.". For every "we didn't land on the moon" there are several fairly devastating theories that turned out to be very true:

"the CIA is infiltrating the news agencies to spread propaganda and label things conspiracy theories"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird)

"the government is planning to kill citizen on US soil to start a war" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods)

"we should start a war because the people just don't like war enough!" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident)

"we should start another war because people just don't like war enough!" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant))

"the government is spying on all citizen by collecting all communications in mass" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM)

"The virus didn't come from a lab - we totally weren't making bioweapons!" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_SARS-CoV-2)

Ahhh yes, the current conspiracy theory that is about to crack. Watch the propaganda at full power. Better than the wiki article do a web search for "covid 19 origin" and watch as "Eco Health Alliance" pops their sponsored ad at the top of the search results, for those not studying the topic ecohealth is the the group that created the virus project (https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...) DARPA said it was too dangerous so they rejected it, so they went to the NIH who gave us COVID19. The NIH has already been caught dead to rights paying specifically for "gain of function research on bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab" from which the virus escaped. And if you read that wiki article, it still a "conspiracy theory". (https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/nih-letter-conflicts-...).

I wonder if the wikipedia editors will allow you to update the page with this "new" information. Something tells me this page is locked. So with this one we can watch the "conspiracy theory" slowly turn into just a plain old boring "conspiracy" and everyone can say "See! We all knew the whole time! It was super obvious!" like the rest of the list.

Crazy how these very true super evil transgressions by our own government get balled in with "the earth is flat" huh. Almost like it was intentional. Oh right operation mockingbird, duh!

> Put another way: Read the room, reconsider and don’t be that guy.

Thank you washington post, this was very insightful