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Slack.com slash DHQ. So here's a tidbit of information you may not know about the origin

of the phrase conspiracy theory. According to investigative journalist Cheryl Ackerson,

you remember her, she's the journalist who had to leave CBS because they wouldn't let

her run stories that reflected badly on President Barack Obama, even though she'd run plenty

of stories that reflected badly on George W. Bush. But anyway, in Ackerson's book,

Smear, she talks about the fact that the phrase conspiracy theory was invented by the CIA

in 1967 as a way to discredit people who suspected the CIA of conspiracies. The spy agency was

apparently responsible for promoting the phrase conspiracy theory for uses a powerful

device in the lexicon of the Smear artist, Ackerson writes. Before the covert CIA effort,

which we can pinpoint to a secret memo in 1967, there was nothing controversial about discussing

or exposing conspiracies. After all, a conspiracy is simply an agreement by two or more people

to commit a bad act. Ackerson goes on, yet after the CIA secret memo, the public and media

were brainwashed into dismissing out of hand those labeled as conspiracy theorists, as if

only the mentally unbalanced would believe in the existence of conspiracies. Conspiracy

theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, reads the internal CIA

memo. The aim of this memo is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims

of the conspiracy theorists. The CIA memo goes on to advise station chiefs to employ propaganda

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