Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

My take on the enduring seductive power of conspiracies This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media [https://www.justthefacts.media?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Many people think I am a conspiracy debunker since I concluded in Case Closed [https://www.posner.com/case-closed], my 1993 reexamination of the JFK assassination, that Oswald alone had killed the president. Not quite. Not all conspiracy theories are equal. Although they have been around for millennia, just in my lifetime I have witnessed the unraveling of consequential conspiracies that exposed government lies about Vietnam, the power grab of Watergate, the Iran Contra arms scandal, and the deceits that led to the Iraq war. Government officials are not the only ones who scheme against the common good. The business world is littered with plots that have enriched executives at public expense. Big Tobacco, for instance, denied for decades that cigarettes caused cancer while simultaneously funding studies to obfuscate the lethal truth under a deluge of disinformation. The handful of real conspiracies, however, pales in insignificance to the flood of theories in a world exponentially enamored with the idea that the simple explanations merely hide far more byzantine and nefarious truths. That the world is run by secret societies is one of the oldest and most persistent beliefs, although those thought to be in charge has changed over time from the Illuminati, Freemasons, the Jews, to today’s globalist elites (the ‘global elites’ overlaps sometimes with ‘the Jews are to blame’.) One in four Americans believe there are dark plots “behind many things in the world [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/].” As a U.C. Berkeley Political Science major, I am a natural skeptic. I don’t put a lot of faith in institutions. Even when the government tries to do something good, it often does so inefficiently. It cannot build a homeless shelter or a freeway extension on budget or on time. When it conspires to lie and work against the public interest, the truth might be slow to emerge, but it always does. Leaked files, whistleblowers, hacked email accounts, credible bits of evidence of what was supposed to stay secret, find their way into the public domain. Massive document dumps like the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks, the Panama Files, and the Snowden leaks, highlight a lot of government and corporate wrongdoing. But there is not a single mention in those millions of documents about hiding space aliens, faking the moon landing, killing JFK, blowing up the World Trade Center, or stealing a presidential election. Researchers who study [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/] the psychology of conspiracy theories conclude that their spiraling popularity is the result of record levels of anxiety in contemporary society, coupled with widespread disenfranchisement and alienation. Conspiracy theories make a chaotic world seem more ordered and controllable. Ideas that years ago might have been the province of the tin foil hat fringe today make their way into the digital zeitgeist at warp speed. As innuendos, rumors, fake information, and a dose of AI, go viral, what used to percolate for years now takes only hours to gain momentum. That is especially true when it comes to history changing and unexpected events. Proportionality bias is the inclination to believe that big events must have big causes. People have no problem understanding that tens of thousands die annually in car wrecks. But when that person was Princess Diana in 1997, there was instant speculation about foul play. Instead of AIDS being a centuries-long natural evolution of a retrovirus from Africa it must have been the CIA deploying a bioweapon designed to kill inner city Blacks and gay men. No way that nineteen hijackers armed with box cutters pulled off 9/11. COVID could not have naturally jumped species from animals to humans in a wet market in China. It must have been a laboratory creation designed by governments and billionaires as a beta test run for controlling the population while censoring dissent under the guise of public health. Historian William Manchester wrote [https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/12/IHT-american-topics.html] about proportionality psychology as it related to the JFK assassination: “If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime . . . you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals. "But if you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn't balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president's death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.” Manchester’s last line highlights one of my basic rules: show me the evidence (it’s not an accident that my Substack is titled Just the Facts [https://www.justthefacts.media/]). Evidence is often in short supply. A lot of otherwise intelligent people find ways to rationalize their beliefs. They search for something, anything, that confirms their bias. Many suffer from what is called hindsight bias [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649066/]; knowing what happened lets people interpret evidence to fit their theory of how it happened. Trump supporters, for instance, think the Secret Service’s negligence on the day of the attempted Butler assassination was a convenient cover to hide a secret plot to kill the former president. Meanwhile, those who can’t stand Trump, refuse to believe there was a near death shot that only nicked his ear and were convinced the event was staged. Conspiracy theories seem like simple answers to difficult problems because most people do not understand the difference between correlation and causation. For instance, my last book, Pharma [https://www.posner.com/pharma/], was a history of the American pharmaceutical industry. I uncovered no shortage of drug company conspiracies that put profits ahead of patients. But some readers were disappointed that I did not conclude that vaccines caused autism. Many children diagnosed with autism received childhood vaccines. That is a correlation. But it does not provide the proof that one causes the other. The proof might be there one day, but it is not yet available. The proof cited frequently to support a conspiracy theory turns out to be something totally discredited, as with the falsified data in the medical journal relied on for the autism-vaccine connection, or is something that has been repeated so often it is widely accepted as true. I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every time someone unequivocally told me that the world’s greatest marksmen tried and failed to pull off the shooting sequence as Oswald did when he killed President Kennedy. The timing and accuracy of Oswald’s shots have been repeatedly reproduced. Still, the misinformation thrives. The absence of proof does not deter some theorists from speculating that the evidence of a conspiracy must exist somewhere, they just don’t know where. One Berkeley English professor invented the “negative template [https://kenrahn.com/JFK/The_critics/Scott/Debate_Scott_Posner.html]” to explain away a lack of proof. He posited that if someone is expecting to find information in a classified file, and it is not there when the file is released, that alone is “evidence” it was removed or destroyed by the conspirators. Investigative journalists operate with a different standard. A credible lead will sometimes have us hunting for even a shred of evidence. Last year, for instance, I spent a few frustrating months chasing a tip from a retired law enforcement officer about possible foul play in the death of Jeffrey Epstein. That Epstein was murdered to keep a lid on the sordid sexual secrets involving some of the world’s most powerful people is a certifiable conspiracy theory. It is something I thought unlikely but possible. The retired officer had been a reliable source for some of my past reporting. Ultimately, despite dozens of interviews and lots of hunting for documents, every promising avenue of inquiry proved fruitless. While I was left with concerns about what some of the prison staff did on the day Epstein died, I was convinced that he had killed himself. No media outlet was interested in publishing my dog bites a man story; they all wanted man bites a dog. In a rational world, no conspiracy theory, no matter how enticing, would survive without some credible evidence. But that does not matter in an era in which a lot of people get their news from Tik Tok. Chasing meritless conspiracy theories, I am often told, is harmless. That ignores that they sometimes produce dangerous consequences. After reading online [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet-ping-pong-pizza-shooting-fake-news-consequences.html] in 2016, for instance, about a Washington, D.C.–area pizzeria that harbored young children as sex slaves as part of a Hillary Clinton-run child abuse ring, a 28-year-old father of two drove six hours with his AR-15 to rescue the children. No one was injured when he opened fire inside the restaurant. Not so lucky were the eleven killed and six injured at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. The gunman believed that a migrant caravan on its way to the U.S. was part of a Jewish plot [https://www.vox.com/2018/10/29/18037580/pittsburgh-shooter-anti-semitism-racist-jewish-caravan] to flood America with illegal immigrants. There is no clear marker for when healthy skepticism crosses over to conspiracy ideation. Often an underlying element of truth is perverted and expanded into a convoluted theory. It does not always take a lot for someone to leave the world of sanity to enter the province of Oliver Stone and Candace Owens. In the wake of October 7, for instance, there was plenty to criticize about Israel’s unprecedented intelligence failure to pick up advance notice of Hamas’s terror attack. Conspiracy theorists, however, followed the template of 9/11 truthers to go far beyond that. They turned the negligence and shortcomings of Israeli intelligence into a cunning plan designed to allow Hamas to pull off the attack to justify a military invasion of Gaza. Some florid anti-Israel zealots went a step further, contending it was the IDF who killed most Israelis on October 7 and denying Hamas targeted any civilians for murder and rape. I have written about October 7 denialism [https://www.justthefacts.media/p/denying-october-7]. It is as odious as Holocaust denial or the early twentieth-century Tzarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that posited a secret cabal of Jews controlled the world. Reason, logic and facts, however, cannot extinguish those or other theories. They thrive precisely because they fit an often-paranoid view of the world. Record levels of distrust of government and institutions reinforce them. The pervasive loss of faith feeds a sinister hypothesis that dark forces are constantly plotting to crush our freedoms. And a reflexive government response to major events that keeps important information secret and away from the public only feeds the sense that top officials have something to hide. Widespread public cynicism is exacerbated by a parallel sense of powerlessness. Analytical thinking and a demand for proof seems so yesterday. Many social media influencers claim to know the truth by intuition alone. The inferences and deductions and reliance on logic is their grandparent’s way of dissecting a problem. The most ambitious conspiracy theory only requires good instincts. And a common flaw is a tendency to interpret evidence against a theory as evidence for it. When JFK’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, turned out to be a self-declared communist, many on the left thought that was evidence the plot must have been hatched by right wingers looking to frame the left. The fact that Biden won the presidential election was all the evidence election denialists needed to charge there had been massive voter fraud. Even hunches, however, need to stand up to common sense scrutiny. Many grand theories fail because of sheer impracticability. Dozens of events would have had to come together in a perfect patchwork or everything would unravel. Imagine how many conspirators would have been involved in planting explosive charges in the World Trade Center towers and remotely controlling the hijacked planes. What about stealing JFK’s corpse while it was being flown to an autopsy to do covert postmortem surgery that would frame Oswald as the shooter? Hundreds of conspirators would have had to keep the secret. No leak, no family discussion, no stray note or email, never once a guilty conscious or a death bed confession. That happens only in the movies. Disproving conspiracies is mostly a fool’s errand. It is impossible to convince a true believer out of even the craziest theory. It is analogous to convincing someone they joined a cult. People join groups they believe are good and somehow are blind to the truth that is abundantly clear to others. The “backfire effect” is what happens when refuting a conspiracy theory makes its proponents double down. I have learned that the hard way, over many heated discussions. My best arguments seldom ended with someone changing their minds. Instead, it often ends with me being accused of being part of the conspiracy. If a reasoned approach fails with most individuals, imagine the folly of winding back the clock once a society starts embracing a conspiratorial mindset. When social media influencers cash in on promoting conspiracies everywhere, the line between what is real and what is conspiratorial ideation is harder to judge than ever. Because I am a skeptic, I hear from a lot of people hoping to convince me they have the evidence of the next great conspiracy. Some of my best reporting about misdeeds and public corruption have come from those tips. However, I am still waiting for the ‘next Watergate.’ So are a lot of my readers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media [https://www.justthefacts.media?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

My latest WSJ OpEd went live this evening online and will be in the print edition tomorrow. Here it is in full for Just the Facts subscribers (note: The VoiceOver for this article is an AI automated voice) Protecting women’s sports should be at the top of the Trump administration’s to-do list. The issue gained national attention in 2022, when male swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been ranked 65th among men in the nation for the 500-yard freestyle, won an NCAA swimming championship while competing as a woman. A United Nations report last month revealed that men identifying as women have won 890 medals in 29 female-only sports worldwide. The Education Department in April proposed a regulation adding “gender identity” as a protected category to Title IX rules. Title IX, enacted in 1972, bans sex discrimination by federally funded educational institutions. The new rule, which went into effect Aug. 1, allows males unfettered access to female locker rooms and bathrooms. It also signals approval of men participating in and dominating women’s athletics. Republicans tried unsuccessfully to pre-empt the Title IX changes. In 2023 the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which defined sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” When it got to the Senate, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville—who began his career as a high-school girls’ basketball coach—asked for unanimous consent. Hawaii’s Sen. Mazie Hirono objected, saying it would bar people from playing sports “consistent with their gender.” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stymied the bill. In July Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R., Miss.) and Rep. Mary Miller (R., Ill.), introduced a resolution under the Congressional Review Act to reverse the Biden regulation. It passed the House along party lines, 210-205. Mr. Schumer again made certain it died in the Senate. Federal courts blocked the Biden administration rule in 26 states. The Supreme Court upheld these injunctions and may eventually take up the new rule itself. The new Republican-controlled Congress could settle the matter quickly by passing a bill to reverse the Biden Title IX modifications. It would sail through the House, maybe even winning some support from Democratic representatives who saw the potency of the issue in the November election. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton has said that his party is “out of touch” and that he doesn’t want his daughters playing in sports against males. New Senate Majority Leader John Thune could force Democrats to vote on the issue. It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republicans will have 53, and the new Senate will have 10 members from states Donald Trump [https://www.wsj.com/topics/person/donald-trump] carried. Should the effort to restore Title IX stall in the Senate, Mr. Trump can issue an executive order barring institutions that receive federal funding from allowing male athletes to participate in athletic programs designed for girls and women. It will get tied up in litigation, but at least the federal government will be on the right side of the issue. The Trump administration should be at the forefront to restore fairness and demonstrate quickly that elections have real consequences for protecting women’s rights. Mr. Posner is author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies and the Poisoning of America.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media [https://www.justthefacts.media?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The brutal murder of UnitedHealth Group CEO, Brian Thompson, in the streets of Manhattan, has elicited widespread condemnation but also unleashed an online tsunami of celebratory memes and praise for the killer. The polarizing reaction has put a spotlight on the deep-seated animosity that many Americans harbor toward health insurance companies that often deny critical medical claims to protect profits. As they reject essential medical treatments, a corporate whistleblower recently provided me an internal health insurance policy that revealed they are also green-lighting expansive “gender affirming care” benefits for employees and their dependent children. Under Thompson's leadership, UnitedHealth had one of the industry’s highest rates of claim denials. A Senate subcommittee report [https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024.10.17-PSI-Majority-Staff-Report-on-Medicare-Advantage.pdf] from October found that the company denied requests for costly post-acute care at triple the rate of less expensive treatments. Worse, the insurer used an artificial intelligence-driven claims process with a 90% error rate [https://www.startribune.com/lawsuit-accuses-unitedhealth-group-of-using-faulty-ai-to-deny-medicare-patient-claims/600319883]in determining medical necessity. The industry-leading denial rate was good for shareholders but created a legion of angry patients who felt subordinated to the company’s bottom line profits. The backlash has prompted some insurers to reconsider controversial policies. Last week, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the country’s biggest insurers, announced [https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shield-time-limits-anesthesia-surgery-rcna183035] it would halt a policy change that limited reimbursement for anesthesia during surgeries. Yes, you read that correctly. Anthem BCBS had quietly rolled out a policy in three states in which it set an “appropriate number of minutes” for surgical procedures and refused to pay for anesthesia that exceeded the limits. Complications that extended surgery times made patients responsible for the costs. The Anthem policy had survived nearly a year despite vociferous industry opposition from the American Society of Anesthesiologists. However, Anthem only backtracked following Thompson’s murder. I was acutely aware of the extent of the hypocrisy of Anthem’s ‘let’s limit reimbursement for surgical anesthesia’ since I had recently received from a whistleblower a copy of a corporate “LGBT+ Benefits Guide” from the same insurer. In the Anthem healthcare policy offered by Edward Jones, a Fortune 500 firm that is the largest U.S. financial services company in the number of financial advisors, it has a section titled “Transgender-inclusive health benefits.” “Our medical plan provides gender-affirming health benefits to associates and dependents who have a diagnosis of and meet Anthem’s clinical requirements for gender dysphoria.” The plan then lists what “gender-affirming care includes” * Hormone-replacement therapy including puberty blockers for youths (where allowed by law) * Reconstructive chest, breast and genital surgery. * Other services, such as facial feminization surgery, voice modification surgery, tracheal shave/thyroid reduction surgery, etc.” Edward Jones employees can qualify for “family-oriented and surgical recovery leave” for themselves, or “a loved one [who] receives gender-affirming surgery.” If an Edward Jones employee, or dependent, “must travel more than 50-miles from your home to receive in-network gender-affirming surgery because it’s not available in your area, our medical plan covers up to $50 per day for one person and $100 per day for up to two companions in travel and lodging expenses.” Who does Anthem list as “eligible dependents? * Legal spouse. * Edward Jones-recognized domestic partner * Children born to you, adopted by you or waiting to be adopted by you; stepchildren; children for whom you are the legal guardian; foster children; and children and stepchildren of your domestic partner.” Requests for comments from Anthem or Edward Jones went unanswered. As someone who has extensively covered corporate abuses in the healthcare industry, including in my 2020 book PHARMA: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America [https://www.posner.com/pharma/], I’ve documented countless ways in which profits are prioritized over patients. But the murder of UnitedHealth’s CEO has brought fresh attention to the role of private insurers in perpetuating public mistrust. With healthcare decisions, as in the case of Anthem, to prioritize gender-affirming care while dialing back on such basic needs as anesthesia for the full length of a surgery, it is little wonder that so many Americans feel abandoned by a system that seems increasingly designed to work against them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media [https://www.justthefacts.media?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Meta has kept secret a disturbing flaw in its systems by which cybercriminals exploit Instagram accounts for illegal activities, including running up charges on stolen credit cards and selling nonexistent products. The criminals exploit a weakness in Meta security by creating and linking fraudulent Instagram accounts to randomly selected legitimate Facebook profiles. This enables the hackers to mostly bypass Meta’s commerce eligibility criteria, the supposed safeguard before verifying an account for sales activities. The hackers then abuse their new accounts until Meta detects the fraud and shuts them down. However, by that time, the legitimate Facebook profiles linked to these hacked Instagram accounts are suspended or deleted in error. The result is that tens of thousands of Facebook users have unjustly had their accounts permanently deleted. What has been Meta’s response to this security issue? It has refused to address it. How do I know all this? I came to this story by a bit of personal serendipity. My wife, Trisha Posner [https://substack.com/profile/34621501-trisha-posner], had thousands of friends and colleagues on her Facebook profile [https://www.facebook.com/trishaposner/] that she created in July 2007. This past June 13, Trisha got the notice (in the image at the top of this article) that her Facebook account was suspended “because your Instagram account lijaaketer533 doesn’t follow our rules. You have 180 days left to appeal. Log into your linked Instagram account to appeal our decision. Log into your Instagram account.” That was the first time Trisha had ever heard of an Instagram account with the username lijaakter533. She has her own Instagram accounts, a personal one under her own name [https://www.instagram.com/trishaposner/], and another for our nonprofit, Antisemitism Watch [https://www.instagram.com/antisemitismwatch/]. Both of those accounts were still operating. It was only when Trisha tried correcting her Facebook suspension that she immediately discovered that Meta had created a classic “Catch 22” that made it impossible to fix. Meta’s online help sends users in an endless circle of dead ends. And in this case, it only allowed an appeal to be made by the Instagram account that had violated its rules. However, since that Instagram account was created by some unknown cybercriminal, it was impossible for Trisha to access it to appeal her account suspension. Only the hacker knew that account's username and password. No matter what Trisha tried, Meta showed no interest in even acknowledging the problem, much less correcting it. Meta ignored every entreaty for a workaround. After signing up for Meta Verified on her personal Instagram account, chat representatives promised to investigate, but Trisha never heard back. She paid for Meta Pro Team support which also proved to be useless. Frustrated at Meta’s total stonewalling and unresponsiveness, Trisha filed a formal consumer complaint to the California Attorney General’s office. By this point, I got involved to determine whether Trisha’s experience was an isolated incident or part of a larger Meta problem. What I discovered was startling. I first came across FBDisabledMe [https://www.reddit.com/r/facebookdisabledme/], a subreddit with nearly 20,000 members many of whom had experienced the same problem: their Facebook accounts were first suspended and then ultimately deleted after hackers linked fraudulent Instagram accounts to their profiles. As with Trisha, those users had no way to appeal because only the hacker knew how to access the compromised Instagram account. After discovering FBDisabledMe, I reached out to others who would have more information. It included litigators who had fought Meta on other matters and had masses of discovery from the company, as well whistleblowers who had testified publicly about problems inside the company. Eventually, I was put in touch with a veteran software engineer who had personal knowledge of the problem that Trisha had stumbled into. According to that engineer, the 20,000 users on FBDisabledMe represented just a fraction of those affected. The real number of Facebook users who had fallen victim to the scam could be as high as 250,000. Meta’s security logs indicated that many of the affected Instagram accounts were linked to IP addresses from countries like Romania, Latvia, Belarus, and Moldova. Has Meta shared this information with Interpol or other law enforcement agencies? It is unclear since Meta refuses any public comment. Over the past week, I reached out several times to Meta’s press office for an official statement but received no response. Meta faces daily cybersecurity challenges. While it spends a lot of money on security, digital crooks are constantly probing to find weaknesses. It is troubling that Facebook will not acknowledge that this easily exploited vulnerability is leaving a trail of innocent victims who lose forever their accounts. In 2019, the FTC imposed a historic $5 billion penalty on Facebook (now Meta) and ordered the company to implement sweeping privacy requirements designed to boost transparency and accountability. What makes this issue even more egregious is Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent indifference. With over three billion users, he likely views the loss of 250,000 accounts as a minor inconvenience. Users who lose their accounts might simply create new ones, while others vent their frustrations on a subreddit that gets little attention from the tech or business press. There’s also the matter of Meta’s dismal approach to customer service. Last month, a woman named Tova Ridgway in Northern California, was so desperate to regain access to her hacked Facebook account that she drove to Meta’s headquarters. "They're like, 'I'm sorry, I can't do anything about this,” she told a local ABC affiliate [https://abc7news.com/post/facebook-wouldnt-remove-hacker-bay-area-womans-account-paid-meta-help/15456227/]. “Are you telling me you don't have anyone working for hacked pages?” “This happens every day,” a Facebook representative told her. “No, I'm sorry, there isn't.’” Ridgway found a solution through Meta Verified, a $15 a month subscription, something that did not work for Trisha. While that might work for some, it is an unjustified cost for users whose accounts were compromised due to Meta’s security flaws. Zuckerberg himself said [https://abc7news.com/post/facebook-wouldnt-remove-hacker-bay-area-womans-account-paid-meta-help/15456227/]in a blog post it would be too expensive for the company to recover and restore all hacked accounts. For a company that reported $39 billion in net profit last year, that justification rings hollow. Meta could and should be doing more to protect its users. The simplest solution for Trisha is restoring her Facebook account before it’s permanently deleted. But this goes far beyond her case. Tens of thousands of users like her—some of whom have lost years of business contacts, personal photos, and memories—are suffering because of Meta’s failure to address a critical security flaw. The most important step is for Meta to patch the security vulnerability that allows cybercriminals to manipulate Instagram accounts and cause collateral damage to Facebook users. Until that happens, it’s clear that Meta’s dismissive response to the growing problem of hacked accounts is not only inadequate but arrogant. That is never good for business in the long run. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.justthefacts.media [https://www.justthefacts.media?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]