Hmm almost like people like David Icke are surprisingly well funded and support for a crank who believes the royal family is lizard people.

Of course that's absolute nonsense there's a absolutely no organization out there that would benefit from elevating the most prominent and clearly nuts conspiracy theories in order to discredit other conspiracy theories by association.

Alex Jones really just sells a whole lot of brain pills! Whether Icke or Jones are real examples of the phenomenon, I believe it has actually been documented e.g. with the "Mirage Men" revelations that this "flooding the zone with bullshit" tactic has been used from time to time.

One day around 2015 or 2016, I remember seeing a ton of "FLAT EARTH!" graffiti that appeared out of nowhere all over Emeryville. That's another one that's always struck me as weird and maybe astroturfed.

Lol, this is a funny one to me--a meta-conspiracy theory, that the more outlandish conspiracy theories are plants by an unnamed organization to serve as a smokescreen

Then let me be clear the CIA at least and probably other intelligence apparatuses are specifically pushing known obviously nonsense theories to discredit more believable ones. For example Icke, and Flat Earth pretty clearly nonsense, the Pentagon using SF forces to run drugs out of Ft. Bragg to get black ops money lot more believable.

The CIA has no need to fund Icke

There are certainly specific cases where this tactic has been used, but yeah, this is the blanket version. "Blanket" assertions and generalizations (often sentences that start with "the elite") are one of the common red flags that indicate you might be dealing with the classical "nutty conspiracy theory".

I personally prefer the power of foresight :)

But yea, if you actually critically review them, some are more plausible than others.

It's very weird that a theory that involves a conspiracy is automatically (linguistically) linked to falsehoods imagined by crazy people. It seems to me that somebodies conspired to make all conspiracy theories look bad so that they can participate in even more conspiracies without people credibly calling them out :D

There's another comment in this thread saying that the CIA popularized the term or sth. I have no power of foresight to determine whether that's true or not. But it would definitely have been to their benefit.