His first argument was that it's incredibly unlikely that 400,000 people would have been complicit in such a fraud with none of him breaking ranks.

His second argument was all of the scientific experts from other countries who all agree it actually happened.

He didn't make any claims about how "the US government would never try and defraud its citizen".

But i bet Soviet Union was on the conspiracy too xD

Of course the Soviets were in on it. They didn't publicly humiliate the US because they feared Mad Man Nixon would start WW3 over it. IT ALL MAKES PERFECT SENSE.

What’s important is the “gigantic fraud involving 400,000 people” part -- clearly establishing that it would have had to be a pretty extreme effort. And rather than just saying “trust us”, he explicitly suggests asking people outside that group, such as scientists from other countries, who would be able to verify whether the moon landing was real.

You can create that kind of group think were many do believe in what they are doing.

No one outside of the people shilling those oils, and the fools buying them, think they're real.

The fact that you can point to it as an example implies that most people know it's hokum.

Three of us (when I last looked) pointed out, independently, that he has two main arguments, and “trust the government” isn’t one of them.

...so it's nothing at all like faking a moon landing.

Maybe we have a different understanding of "failed" or "immediately", but it worked well enough to get the media on board to build a case for war and carry it for long enough until the actual war started. It was solid enough that even all the doubt coming from NATO partners (and the flat out refusal to be part of it with Chirac's utterance that "France is not a pacifist country" and it's not about war itself but that war and those reasons in particular that they wouldn't be a part of it) did not stop the war. So, to me at least, it didn't fail at all, it succeeded.

There was a considerable body of evidence against the WMD story right from the start. Senior CIA personnel were crying foul at how their intelligence was being manipulated for political ends from an early stage, it's just that evidence wasn't enough to stop the war.

Nothing remotely like that ever happened with the Apollo program. There has never been any substantial evidence or testimony against it from within government or NASA, or as Neil pointed out from any foreign specialists or experts, even the Russians. Conversely the WMD story was being challenged internationally from it's conception, as you pointed out yourself.

In terms of challenges, counter evidence and controversy at the time the two cases could not possibly be more starkly utterly different, and that's why they are useful comparisons because the WMD thing shows clearly how government deceptions actually work out.

I agree, but I do believe it's mostly because of many small scale lies. If there was only one example of government lies in history, but it was a big one, I don't think we'd see the same level of conspiracy theory acceptance.

The fact that there is a constant stream of lies of all shapes and sizes from the government, the media, companies etc is what contributes to it the most. Once you make people lose their trust in those institutions, they will pay more attention to anyone presenting "alternative" explanations ("this explains that thing as well, but it's not peddled by the liars, so maybe it's true"). If those explanations then also line up with their world view, it's hard to convince them otherwise.

I see that in a friend who still reads the news. He no longer trusts anything he reads, so it's a constant state of "they are probably lying, but why are they lying about this" and he's more susceptible to conspiratorial theories imho. He's not "there" yet, because he'll also research those theories and often come back to me and say "yeah that was bullshit" and share what he found, but the threshold for looking into and considering it an actual possibility is much lower.

Colin Powell stood up at the UN to present the world his Power Point of lies:

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin...

The yellowcake removed from Iraq in 2008 was material that had long since been identified, documented, and stored in sealed containers under the supervision of U.N. inspectors. It was not a “secret” cache that was recently “discovered” by the U.S, nor had the yellowcake been purchased by Iraq in the years immediately preceding the 2003 invasion. The uranium was the remnants of decades-old nuclear reactor projects that had put out of commission many years earlier: One reactor at Al Tuwaitha was bombed by Israel in 1981, and another was bombed and disabled during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Moreover, the fact that the yellowcake had been in Iraq since before the 1991 Gulf War was plainly stated in the Associated Press article cited in the example above:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/have-your-yellowcake/

No. Uranium recently shipped from Iraq to Canada was left over from Saddam Hussein’s defunct nuclear weapons program and had been in sealed containers, under guard, since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Claims that this material is "vindication" for President Bush’s WMD claims in 2003 are completely false.

https://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/uranium-in-iraq/#:~:text=%...

> IIRC the claim was that Saddam Hussein had ceased reporting the location of stockpiles of nuclear material that the UN used to keep track of.

And

> The sin of the bush administration was that they sold it to the public that this was a national security threat even though they knew it was very lightly enriched and counted on the public not knowing or caring (remember the Chapelle skit about yellowcake).

I'll refresh your memory on the yellowcake skit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DLuALBnolM&t=1m36s

In any case, the WMD thing was not a coverup/fabrication. It was stretching the truth and stretching reasonable definitions of things, but I think that sort of lie is not in the same category.

So it's really nothing like a fake moon landing.

That is why the United Nations Security Council never past a resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion and instead the US had to settle for the "coalition of the willing" as the their base of support.

Expect Hans Blix exposed that lie very shortly those words where uttered:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq1

If the moon landing is also a fraud where is the Hans Blix of the moon landing program?

Nobody believes the WMD lie any more. Even the Republicans are now admitting that. Many knew it was a lie back then.

I remember as it was happening getting the impression that nobody believed it, that it was universally understood to be a straw man placeholder for the real reason for the Iraq invasion.

Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why?

The only even marginally plausible speculation I have is that some sizable contingent really believed the catastrophic collapse peak oil scenario that was popular back in the 2000s and that the invasion was rammed through damn-the-torpedoes to get exclusive access to that oil so America could weather the impending apocalypse.

* 9/11 and the shock/bloodlust that stemmed from it * Powerful lobby groups, like the military-industrial complex and oil companies * the Saudis (local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and old friends of the Bush family) * the Israelis (also local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and capable exerting heavy influence on the W Bush administration) * Probably the Iranians (who bankrolled Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group, also not fans of Saddam)

None of this should be new or surprising -- the interests of most/all of these groups were known at the time.

Not many believed it at the time:

https://www.theregister.com/2003/07/03/google_bombed_by_miss...

NOTE: Check the date off that page.

Yes, and not even twenty years since it happened we know a lot of details. Compare that to Moon landing, where conspiracy theorists can at best switch to another accusation after they've got the first one explained.

> It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them.

People should maintain healthy distrust of institutions and governments - after all, as you say, it's not the first time when such mistrust was justified. Too much distrust is however a problem. Similarly one can hardly expect to solve all origins of conspiracy theorists - some people are just bored and want to believe in unicorns, and even if you'd create a more interesting life to them - a big "if" - they could choose to believe what they want.

History teaches that our understanding of history is lacking, sometimes sorely.

> And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.

Selected quotes from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

I think you're missing the point that Armstrong tries to make. While he indeed starts with your selective quote, he then goes on to say that it is rather unlikely that the government would get away with a fraud of that scale. If nothing else, then simply because of the amount of people involved in the moon landing, and third parties that then and still to this day are able to confirm that the moon landing actually happened.

My experience is also that people who trust the tales of a conspiracy over a wide array of substantial counter arguments are simply not open to actual counterfacts from others. It's like fake news, the conspiracy supports their believe system, and rational arguments to the contrary simply isn't effective.

Still I agree that conspiracy nuts need to be confronted. Perhaps though, not so much in an attempt to convert the believer as to stop them from spreading the conspiracy to others.

A massive lie, with no holes nor whistleblowers for decades, is even less likely. This is exactly Armstrong's main point: go and actually do real research and cross-reference

The lie was specifically about nuclear weapons and the stockpiles of uranium Iraq supposedly was hiding (they weren't.)

Saying they didn't have WMDs completely wipes out the history of Iraq using tons of chemical weapons against Iranians in the Iran Iraq war.

Stop being contrarian for the sake of it .

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7ahqn/

In short, it’s less about the actual conspiracy and more about the individual needing something more in life.

A suspicious attitude institutions has always existed: from the government down to the grocer, who pushes the scales down while weighing. The more the attention is drawn towards it, the greater the suspicion gets, and I feel that especially divisive attention feeds suspicion. When behavior of an institution, such as the Trump administration, is not beyond reproach, it feeds the attention cycle.

I attribute the rise of conspiracy theories to an overabundance of information; doing the research on each individual topic is just overwhelming to the average person and subsequently a simplistic conspiracy theory has appeal.

Perhaps I should have made clearer that it was in particular the word "direct" that I was responding too, not the fact that unethical or shady behavior from a government can trigger long-lasting distrust.

That would eliminate the need for this website almost entirely.