Today I Learned

I watched it a few weeks back. It was pretty hard to follow, but I think thats kind of the point. I was really surprised it came out like over year ago but I don't remember ever hearing anyone talk about it when it was first released, and I only learned about it when a podcast I was listened to randomly and briefly mentioned Inslaw. I wanted to learn more about it and that's when I came across the Netflix documentary.

I find it really weird I had never even heard of Danny Casolaro or the Inslaw/PROMIS scandal before then, and especially weird nobody seems to ever make the connection between the PROMIS software and Palantir's pre-crime prediction claims.

There's also this other guy, Steve Kangas, who seemed to be on a similar investigative path regarding wealthy conservative men with CIA connections who he believed had a goal of concentrating wealth and creating an overclass. He seemed to have been unaware of Danny Casolaro or the similarities to his own investigative work.

Origins of the Overclass

Oddly (not really) he also ended up dead of a (/s)uicide under really odd circumstances in the late 90's. His computer was mysteriously wiped clean, and his long standing reputation seemed to be under attack in an attempt to discredit him as a conspiracy theorist who just went off the deepend.

A Vincent Foster for Usenet liberals?

One fact about Steve Kangas is indisputable: This proud veteran of years of political argument in Internet discussion forums, and creator of an award-winning Web site devoted to liberal issues, is dead. On Feb. 8, his body was discovered in a men’s room on the 39th floor of a building in Pittsburgh — just outside the offices of conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

I never heard of Kangas either before a few months ago, and there seems to be even less information about him on the internet than Casolaro. It's like he had nearly been lost and forgotten to time despite having a relatively popular place in early internet history with his website/blog and a somewhat high profile death.

I learned about Kangas because of the overlap with thing's I'm also interested in researching regarding the Heritage Foundation and conservative wealth and influence in the origins of the Christian right movement. Time may have forgotten him, but he certainly seems vindicated in his beliefs regarding a conservative conspiracy to concentrate wealth in the hands of an elite few and attack/discredit liberalism.

It's unclear what he had learned in the months leading up to his death, or what was wiped from his computer after he died. However, I did come across this WaPo article, (nearly 30 years after the fact), published just months after Kangas' death, that provided investigative evidence Scaife's philanthropy had quietly been enabling the success of the right's political operation for several decades.

There is however, no mention whatsoever of Steve Kangas, which seems really odd in an article about politics, conspiracies, and Scaife, the subject of what would be Kangas' final investigation, before his body was discovered in Scaife's office building just 3 months prior to the WaPo article being published. I don't want to sound like a "conspiracy theorist," but that's really odd.

How Scaife's Money Powered a Movement (WaPo 1999)

Scaife’s philanthropy has had a disproportionate impact on the rise of the right, perhaps the biggest story in American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century...When [Heritage] began to make a mark in the mid-1970s, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate, was commonly credited as its chief financial patron. Coors did put up the first $250,000. But within two years, according to Heritage officials, Scaife had given more than twice as much, and he has kept on giving ever since – more than $23 million in all, or about $34 million in inflation-adjusted, current dollars. At Heritage the joke was, “Coors gives six-packs; Scaife gives cases.”

To me, the weirdest/spookiest aspect of all of this, is that despite "America's" supposed love and obsession with conspiracy theories, it's the things that tend to be the most relevant to current events and supported by the most evidence, that are somehow the least widespread or discussed "conspiracies."

You have to wonder how much of a coincidence it is that often some of the least credible evidence will result in the most widespread, theories while other things that really should be discussed, are ignored and buried for decades. Certainly if there are the people like Danny Casolaro, Steve Kangas, and Gary Webb, there are also probably many more less high profile individuals who's work has become successfully discredited, buried, stolen, or just forgotten and is waiting to be re-discovered.

I've honestly wondered if the people who somehow wind up with a public platform like Whitney Webb, openly discussing "conspiracies," are something like willing or perhaps unwilling plants, meant to discredit the things they discuss by spreading bits of truth mixed in with a lot of bat shit lies that then harm the credibility of those truths. It reminds me of the reporter in the Casolaro Netflix documentary who mentioned being shown the doctored footage of the JFK assassination, and feeling like the guy who showed it to her was hoping she would believe it, and discredit herself by trying to spread it to other people.