CONSPIRACY GOING MAINSTREAM

"Something funny, sir?" Rice and Cheney on 9/11

Neither of the clips posted below hot-off-the-presses current, yet both are striking in what they represent about the present state of what we call "current affairs."

In each of these video clips, a mainstream figure goes on record taking a breathtakingly radical stance, calling the accepted explanation of a major event into question. Each time, one is left with the thought: "Did s/he really just say that???"

First, there is Naomi Wolf, former Washington insider, Democrat pundit, and campaign adviser to Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Ms. Wolf has apparently taken a sharp anti-establishment turn over the last few years, and lately has begun saying things that very much set her at odds with her former friends in high places. Here, speaking at a Liberty Forum event last year, she takes a question from an audience member concerning the 2013 Boston marathon bombing. In her answer, she urges "scrutiny" of such events, implying that the event might well have been staged or orchestrated in some manner:

Elsewhere, Wolf has expressed similar doubts about the veracity of reported Isis beheadings of American civilians in the Middle East.

In the second clip, from five years ago, longtime media muckracker Geraldo Rivera interviews a couple of 9/11 "truthers" concerning the strange bit of business that was the collapse of WTC Building 7 late in the afternoon on September 11, 2001. Given that the Rivera had previously felt inclined to express obstreperous contempt for the likes of those proclaiming that the attack was an "inside job," his demeanor during this interview is noticeably tolerant, even sympathetic. In the closing minutes, he even admits that his mind has begun to change concerning what really happened that day, particularly with regard to the mysterious destruction of Building 7.

The point here isn't to cite Wolf or Rivera as authoritative sources, nor is it to take any particular stand on the Boston bombing or 9/11 or ISIS. These clips are interesting, however, because they point up a trend of mainstream journalism, in which certain very entrenched celebrity reporters "go rogue" yet aren't booted from the party and cast into the outer darkness for their wayward beliefs. Is this a cunning method by which the mainstream absorbs certain "controlled opposition" outliers, or might it signify the first rumblings of a crumbling of the contemporary paradigm?