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**A quick poll.. do we have a poll mechanism ? ** We should.
**Were you aware **that Woodward of Watergate fame was, before his journalistic career an officer in the Navy, one trusted enough to handle nuclear codes?
Were you aware 'Deep Throat' of Watergate was deputy director of FBI, someone who had many reasons to hate Nixon ?
I was aware of the latter, but not of the former. I thought he was just a young journalist, not a young journalist fresh off from fed-land with a top secret clearance.
There's this incredible segment by Tucker Carlson that basically lays out a theory Nixon was not as big a crook as we think, and that he was set up because he tried to keep the government subordinate to its notional head.
To sum it up, the claim is that Watergate was a palace coup, where the secret services overthrew the US government, and have kept it under control ever since through influence operations.
It does look persuasive to me. Too persuasive, if you were pulling a coup of this sort, would you make one of the protagonists a retired naval officer with that kind of background ? Ok, I'm done expressing my confusion and astonishment with what I've learned today. If this isn't content fit for themotte, please let me know!
Supplementary viewing: Interview with 'Kay Griggs' , talking about deep state influence ops and what the military gets up to in secret. Was allegedly filmed during her divorce as a 'dead man' measure. Her husband was involved with it and drank / talked too much to her.
It's eight hours, I mean, anyone wants a rabbit hole to fall down through. I feel like I should watch it at some point, though there's probably an analysis somewhere.
It seems to be fairly tame conspiracy stuff: some classic secret societies, homosexuals, political murder, drug running, saudis, etc. However, the nice lady talking about is, if she says who she is, in a position where she may have actually learned something. If she made it up, it's a great performance, if she hasn't, it's not very surprising.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4fdS5cdtPOA
Why yes, I did know that Watergate was a partisan hitjob and Nixon did nothing wrong.
It was a coup, the second within a decade, and I have to hand it to the deep state, at least this time they didn't murder him in broad daylight.
While we're bringing up conspiracies, I'll just remind everyone that Allen Dulles conspired to assassinate JFK, and conspired with Lyndon Johnson and John Hoover to cover it up. Johnson got to be president, and Dulles and Hoover got to continue running their respective spook spaces.
Are there any books or videos you would recommend to learn more about this stuff?
I’d be very skeptical of any of these claims.
Same here, but I find it fascinating regardless of the veracity. Things don't have to be true to provide insight, and I often find that conspiracy theories, because they are based around one big outlandish claim, often put a lot of effort into getting other more mundane details correct - because it implies the big claim is correct too. You still have to verify the facts you've learned, but I find I get a lot of leads on interesting topics through conspiracies, if not the actual conspiracies themselves.
That said, and maybe it's just because I have seen some very seriously crazy conspiracy theories or maybe it's because I lean right, but I don't find those claims particularly outlandish. The public presentation of Nixon has always had an air of the 2 minute hate to me, even when I was left wing I didn't really understand it. Even with all the movies about Watergate and him, a lot of people seem to have no idea what he did wrong, only that he was bad. And while the idea that he was innocent is ludicrous, the idea that he was operating on a standard level of corruption for the environment isn't. Which is a roundabout way of saying I don't care about Nixon, but I do care about unelected and unaccountable officials meddling in the affairs of state to promote their own agendas.
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