The New York Times just published six short op-eds collectively entitled “Are Conspiracy Theories All Bad?” Amazingly, they’re not ALL bad. (The articles, not the theories.) Amidst the claptrap from figures like 9/11 cover-up criminal Cass Sunstein and airhead “social psychologist” Karen Douglas, the Times features decent short essays by Annie Jacobsen, Timothy Melley and Harriet Washington.

But the whole exercise begs the million dollar question: Are the best-known “conspiracy theories” – starting with the alternative narratives of the JFK and 9/11 coups – true? In those two cases, only an ignoramus could possibly fail to answer with an unqualified “yes.”  (Or maybe “duh!” would be more appropriate.)

Given that the USA has suffered at least two obvious murderous coups d’état by psychopaths who are still in power, yet its citizens largely keep their heads firmly planted up their – er, in the sand – it’s pretty obvious that the nation as a whole, and its anti-conspiracy contingent in particular, is suffering from some kind of collective psychosis.

I recently published an article on this subject at Press TV, which unfortunately changed the headline. Here it is, with the original headline restored.

Are People Who Hate Conspiracy Theories Crazy?

By Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor, for Press TV

Government propagandists want you to hate “conspiracy theories.” But according to a growing body of evidence, you’d have to be crazy to obey.

Two American professors, Lance DeHaven-Smith and James Tracy, have pointed out that the CIA has weaponized the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” to conceal government misdeeds. CIA document 1035-960, revealed by the New York Times in 1976, is the smoking gun.

That secret document was distributed by the CIA in response to widespread skepticism surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It ordered the CIA’s thousands of Operation Mockingbird media assets to begin squawking insults. Those targeted included historians, journalists and researchers who had discovered that the JFK assassination was a coup d’état.

Today, the mainstream media has grown even more controlled. And the weaponized “conspiracy theory” meme has been deployed more massively than ever before… especially since the coup d’état of September 11, 2001.

During the past 13 years, thousands, then millions, now billions of people have awakened to the 9/11 inside job. (Polls show that more than one billion Muslims, nearly one billion Chinese, as well as one third of Americans and large proportions of Europeans all view 9/11 as a likely false-flag operation.)

As a new global majority calls the 9/11 myth into question, panicking propagandists have attempted to “stop the contagion” by medicalizing the search for truth. According to government-sponsored mind-control operatives like John A. Banas and Gregory Miller – the University of Oklahoma’s third-rate epigones of Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels – the “truth epidemic” must be stopped through “inoculation” of the public. In “Inducing Resistance to Conspiracy Theory Propaganda: Testing Inoculation and Metainoculation Strategies,” Banas and Miller brandish a medical metaphor to disguise the fact that they are advocating mass mind-control in service to high treason and crimes against humanity.

Banas and Miller spin their anti-conspiracy-theory inoculation program as a public health measure. But evidence cited by mental health professionals, including Frances Shure, M.A., L.P.C., suggests the opposite is the case. By trying to inject the public with an unconscious emotional block to impede rational consideration of the evidence surrounding 9/11, Banas and Miller are in fact undermining public health.

Frances Shure is the author of a series of articles published by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth under the collective title “Why Do Good People Become Silent – or Worse – About 9/11?” (Listen to my interviews with her here and here.)

In her articles, Shure points out that emotional resistance to “conspiracy theories” is a pathological, fear-based reaction that impedes healthy engagement with reality. While refraining from diagnosing people who resist conspiracy theories as mentally ill, Shure does observe that they often exhibit a troubling inability to come to grips with plain and obvious facts:

“How, for example, can some people watch World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC7) implode and collapse into its own footprint and not see what is right in front of them – even when they know about its free fall acceleration and the other characteristics of controlled demolition? These people may feel compelled to intensify their resistance with intellectually contorted measures to convince themselves and others that this was not controlled demolition. Others will content themselves with shaming anyone who wants to investigate the 9/11 evidence that contradicts the official sacred myth.”

For a dramatization of what might be called “Building 7 denial syndrome,” please watch Anthony Lawson’s brilliant youtube video “WTC 7: This Is An Orange”: