Isaiah Jackson, photo: Twitter
Crypto champion Isaiah Jackson doesn’t seem to like to take things at face value. He recently tweeted a list of conspiracy theories that he said he has not seen refuted.
Jackson is the author of “Bitcoin & Black America” and was a contributor to bitcoin and digital currencies media platform CoinDesk until Nov. 11, when he said he was fired “on his day off” for a sarcastic quip he made in a Twitter thread about the FTX collapse. The quip said, “Kanye was right.”
Jackson published “Bitcoin & Black America” in 2019. He also has a podcast, “The Gentlemen Of Crypto,” and his company, KRBE Digital Assets Group, through which he educates Black people on how to invest wisely in bitcoin.
Here are 10 conspiracy theories Jackson says haven’t been disproven.
1. We never went to the moon
This is a favorite conspiracy theory, one that has been debunked several times.
According to conspiracy theorists, the moon landing in 1969 was actually a hoax staged by the U.S. government to win the space race with the Soviets. The faked Apollo 11 mission theory gained momentum in the mid-1970s when Americans were losing trust n the government following Watergate, but it persists to this day.
The Watergate scandal involved the administration of President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974, which led to Nixon’s resignation.
“About 400,000 scientists, engineers, technologists, machinists, electricians, worked on the Apollo program,” Rick Fienberg, the press officer for the American Astronomical Society, told History.com. “If, in fact, the main motivation for believing in the moon hoax that is you don’t trust the government, you don’t trust our leaders, you don’t trust authority, how can you feel that 400,000 people would keep their mouths shut for 50 years? It’s just implausible.” Fienberg, who holds a Ph.D. in astronomy, debated one of the first prominent moon landing deniers, Bill Kaysing, on TV nearly 40 years ago.
There are several reasons people think the moon landing was faked. One was that the American flag in the landing photos looks like it is flapping in the wind, something that would be impossible in space.
It was a special flag designed by NASA to stand erect.
2. Nazi scientists went to Argentina and were hired by the U.S.
It is true that in 1945, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a subcommittee established by the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, set out to recruit German scientists, doctors and engineers who were identified as intellectually important to the Third Reich.
“Fall of 1944, right after the Normandy landings, scattered among the Allies’ troops are these little units of scientific intelligence officers and they’re working to find out Hitler’s biological weapons, his chemical weapons and his atomic weapons,” Annie Jacobsen, author of the book “Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America,” said in a 2014 interview.
By the fall of 1945, German scientists started arriving on U.S. soil.
Britain, France and the Soviet Union also tried to enlist these German scientific experts as well, USA Today reported.
3. Feminism was a psyop to double the tax base
The women’s suffrage movement started more than 100 years and paved the path for modern-day feminism. The contemporary discussion about feminism and tax didn’t really start until an article written in 1971 by Grace Ganz Blumberg, now a professor emerita at UCLA Law School, broached the issue. She authored an article in the Buffalo Law Review entitled “Sexism in the Code: A Comparative Study of Income Taxation of Working Wives and Mothers.” The article examined how women’s participation in the marketplace for labor historically has been disadvantaged and a disincentive to work.
The conspiracy theory that feminism was a psyop to double the tax base has not been dubbed “critical tax theory.”
According to law professor Anthony C. Infanti delved into the theory. “The thing with critical tax theory — which is the broad umbrella that we think of covering feminist perspectives on tax, critical race perspectives on tax, queer theory perspectives on tax — hasn’t had as much of an impact on the direct tax code as any of us I think would like. It’s just now really starting to kind of seep more into the conversation,” Infanti told Forbes.
Infanti is Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, teaching courses in the tax area.
“I think when we talk about joint filing versus individual filing, that’s one that hopefully should cross the lines,” he explained. “The way that our joint filing unit is set up, historically there have typically been marriage penalties for women. It’s the secondary earner, but historically the woman has been the secondary earner in different-sex married couples, for participating in the labor force because their wages would be stacked on top of their husband’s, in essence. They would be taxed at the highest marginal rates of the couple. That creates a disincentive for them to go out to work.”
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced this somewhat.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced statutory tax rates at almost all levels of taxable income and shifted the thresholds for several income tax brackets.
“But married with those tax disincentives has always been tax bonuses for married couples that just had a single breadwinner, which is historically that 1950s Ozzie and Harriet view of the married couple, where the husband goes out to work and the wife stays at home.”
4. 1964 Civil Rights Act was a net negative for Black people
This conspiracy theory seems to be more of a matter of opinion.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the U.S. that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
There is some thought that prior to the act, Black communities were thriving in their own, although Black people were restricted in their movements in society. On the other hand, there is thought that the act opened up the opportunities of America to Black Americans, especially economically. Still, there has been evidence that the act was more of a benefit to a broader scope of people than just Black people.
5. Hollow Earth
The Hollow Earth theory is that the Earth is a hollow sphere.
Scientists have long studied the Earth and actually explored the Hollow Earth theory. But they have concluded that the Earth is not hollow, partly because its interior is denser than its surface.
Scientists looked into the conspiracy theory after English astronomer Edmond Halley proposed to the Royal Society of London in the 1690s that the Earth consisted of nested, spherical shells and that life could be supported between the levels, Politifact reported.
Scientists found this to be untrue since the interior of the Earth is denser and if the planet were hollow, its density would be lower, not greater, than the density of its crust. Otherwise, the Earth would collapse.
6. WTC7 was a controlled demolition
7 World Trade Center refers to two buildings that have existed at the same location within the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, New York City. It was the site if the 911 terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But conspiracy theories have claimed there was no attack and that the buildings were brought down by controlled demolition.
American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines 175 flew into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center. And, just over an hour and 40 minutes later, both towers had collapsed. In Washington DC, American Airlines Flight 77 was flown into the side of the Pentagon. In Pennsylvania, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field near the town of Shanksville, Penn., after passengers overpowered hijackers. In all, 2,996 died that day.
The official National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) investigation into the towers’ collapse found that the planes had caused considerable damage to both buildings’ utility shaft systems, allowing jet fuel to pour down elevator shafts. The fuel ignited.
According to experts, there are two problems with the controlled demolition conspiracy theory.
“Firstly, no credible report has ever emerged of demolition teams being spotted drilling holes in the columns of a busy office complex in the weeks prior to 9/11,” History reported.
“Secondly, the Twin Towers contained enormous quantities of air. As each floor gave way and collapsed down on the one below, that air was instantaneously compressed and had to go somewhere. While it may look like a series of small explosions occurred as the buildings collapsed, what was actually happening was the air – mixed with tonnes of instantly-pulverized concrete – was expelled outwards as each floor collapsed, thus giving the impression of detonation,” reported History.
7. Planned Parenthood kept the Black population stagnant
It is true that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger believed in eugenics.
Eugenics was a discipline that was once championed by prominent scientists but is now widely debunked, that promoted “good” breeding and aimed to prevent “poor” breeding. Developed mainly by statistician and sociologist Sir Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, eugenics was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century. Eugenics was adopted by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups.
In the 1920s, Sanger reportedly spoke at eugenics conferences and also gave speeches about birth control being used to facilitate “the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives.”
Sanger’s birth control movement actually found support in the Black community, and she worked with NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois on a “Negro Project,” which she thought of as a way to get contraception to African-Americans.
In 1946, Sanger wrote about giving “Negro” parents w way to plan their families, NPR reported.
“The Negro race has reached a place in its history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America,” she wrote. “Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness; from health, not from despair.”
8. All voting machines using software are tainted
Former President Donald Trump complained of “voting machine ‘glitches’ all over the place (meaning they got caught cheating!).” According to his former lawyer Sidney Powell, computer algorithms shifted votes from Trump to Biden.
It was found that electronic voting machines from a leading vendor used in at least 16 states have software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to hacking, Fortune reported in May 2022. While the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, or CISA, said there is no evidence the flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment have been exploited to alter election results, it did find the software vulnerable.
9. Titanic crash ushered in the Federal Reserve
There is a conspiracy theory that the sinking of the Titanic on April 14, 1912 was somehow orchestrated by its owner, American financier J.P. Morgan, in order to kill three prominent businessmen aboard the ship. These three men opposed the formation of the Federal Reserve. The ship struck an iceberg and within hours, more than 1,500 people died when the ship sank.
The Federal Reserve was launched on Dec. 23, 1913, as the central banking system of the United States of America.
It’s true that businessman Benjamin Guggenheim, Macy’s co-owner Isidor Straus, and fur magnate and real estate developer John Jacob Astor all died on Titanic.
However, experts say there was no plot involved, Snopes reported.
In March 2021, Reuters published a thorough report that debunked the rumor, especially since there is no known evidence that showed Guggenheim, Straus, or Astor opposed the formation of the Federal Reserve. In 1911, The New York Times reported that Astor was actually in favor of the idea.
10. Modern technology was brought from extraterrestrials
This conspiracy theory has actually been explored.
The Galileo Project was announced a month after the Pentagon released a report about unidentified aerial phenomena, Phys.org reported. Launched in July 2021, the Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts involves an international team of scientists led by a prominent Harvard astronomer. It has been funded so far by private donors.
The project includes researchers from Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Caltech and the University of Stockholm.
Isaiah Jackson, photo: Twitter
