Tucker Carlson is starting his own network. And in service of that new venture, he has been everywhere in Conservative, Inc. promoting it. As a result, I have heard him give several interviews and tell some familiar stories. Not familiar in the sense that he has recounted them before, but familiar in that it sounds a lot like my own story. And I suspect it also sounds a lot like the stories of others.

The basic story is this: I have changed a lot in the past five years. I used to, generally, trust institutions - probably even long after I should have - and now I am questioning many of them. Part of this process is that I am dabbling in what are commonly called “conspiracy theories,” but are often just investigations of historical events. Indeed, to be called a “conspiracy theorist” is not really the stigma it used to be. True, many conspiracy theories are not true and you have to know where to draw the line. But, looking at the bigger picture has meant my outlook is getting less partisan, less defined as “left” or “right,” and more concerned with institutional power vs. individual liberties.

Carlson summarizes it this way in an interview with Charlie Kirk: “I never questioned the basic honesty of a lot of institutions in my life…And now I’m learning in the space of like five years that a lot of it was a lie…in some ways it feels like all of it was a lie.” Yes, this is the journey a lot of us are on, realizing we have probably been lied to more than told the truth. I am willing to bet that he is voicing the frustrations and angst that many millions of Americans feel.

And though it was current events that broke the dam of trust, he isn’t stopping there. Before he lost his show on Fox News, he directly implicated the CIA’s role in the assassination of JFK. In several interviews, he has indicated there are some aspects to 9/11 that don’t quite add up. Sure there are institutional answers to those questions, produced by the finest commissions possible. But if “they” have lied about some things, whose to say they haven’t lied about other things? If the commissions themselves were created to whitewash history, who can we trust? And are we really crazy for losing trust? Jesus says, after all, that we should be trustworthy in the small things if we seek responsibilities in the larger things.

For many, the dam broke in 2020. The shifting narratives surrounding Covid and later the vaccine, the race riots that were practically championed by the government and media, and a presidential election fraught with irregularities left me wondering if I could trust much of anything the government said. Who I am today and who I was then bears some resemblance; but I have most definitely changed. At that time, I was already a cranky conservative, having little trust in my government, not understanding why we insisted on becoming a debtor nation, was concerned about our moral direction, but still trusting that I would be told the truth and that the government desired my well-being.

When Covid proved to be a flop, my eyes started to open. Surrounded by hysteria, Covid was only a bad flu, if that. And yet, we had the shutdowns, the constant death counts, the mask mandates for kids at school, and on and on. Then came the changing narrative on the vaccine. Everything about it was fake. It really isn’t a traditional vaccine at all. (Maybe it is a gene therapy?) It didn’t prevent you from getting or spreading Covid. Meanwhile, it had no long-term studies and some believe it has proven to be dangerous.

That led me to Robert F. Kennedy’s book on Anthony Fauci. That led me to the Kennedy assassinations which, combined with MLK and Malcolm X were earth-shattering even then. And then, the floodgates opened. See if you are familiar with the following stories, historical events, or institutions, and ask yourself if you feel differently about them today than you did, say five years ago. These are presented in no particular order…and please do not assume I believe the most “out there” theories around each one…only that I have second thoughts about some of them and have studied most of them to some degree.

*Watergate

*The Federal Reserve

*UFOs

*Pearl Harbor

*The World Economic Forum (and their desire for you to eat bugs)

*Charles Manson

*Digital Currencies

*Indoctrination/Quarantine Camps

*How George Floyd died and why his death became a cause celebre

*CRT/DEI/LGBTQ Activism

*The college/university system as a whole

*Hollywood as propaganda

*Hollywood as a locus of pedophilia

*Social media censorship, throttling, shadow banning, etc.

*9/11

*Artificial intelligence replacing humans

*Depopulation

*Immigration as a tool to replace existing populations

*Honesty in news media…or any media

*Vaccinations (not just Covid, but all vaccines)

*In fact, all pharmaceuticals

*Public Schooling/Homeschooling

*JFK assassination

*Other presidential assassinations

*The Oklahoma City bombing

*Jeffery Epstein (as an intelligence asset, not just a creep)

*The Bush family

*The 2020 election

*The FBI/CIA

Again, I don’t believe every possible theory thrown out about these topics. But these are all topics I paid virtually no attention to 2020. And now I do. And I suspect I’m not alone. Indeed, I suspect investigating some or all of these issues - in addition to filtering current news events differently - is the defining mindset of many who care about politics.

And by the way, much caution is needed when investigating these matters. One day you’re pretty certain Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t even on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository and the next day the earth is flat. Or more insidious, you start denying the Holocaust because it gives the Jews too much leverage in modern day affairs. So, yes, the Holocaust happened, the earth is round, and school shootings happened, too. Some concerns did appear to be overblown. Just because the government has lied to you about some things, they haven’t lied about everything.

Another caution: conspiracy researchers often use double standards even as they accuse the government of doing the same. For example, they will use one proven lie to justify speculation in other areas. That is, since “they” lied about one fact, they may also be wrong here. With those leaps of logic, one small issue because a grand conspiracy. But if we apply that standard to many researchers, they wouldn’t survive scrutiny, either. They are often wrong in some areas and right in others.

Finally, if you put the magnifying glass to just about anything, you’ll learn something unexpected. If you really dig deep into your family history, you’ll find some strange coincidences. Or if you study any significant event (a school shooting, the Hindenburg explosion, the Titanic sinking, a particular battle in a war) deeply enough, you’ll find some twists and turns. That’s how you get so many theories about, say, JFK. It has been studied so deeply that so many theories can be possible.

The bottom line is that I think the trust in institutions is seeing an epic collapse. That is a good thing, for many institutions just cannot be trusted. With a little sunlight, hopefully we’ll start to get some disinfectant.

Photo Credit- Scientific American