My secret profession: Am I actually a CIA agent?

When people ask me what I do, these days I usually answer that I’m a historian, teacher, author and YouTuber (usually in that order). When relevant—which isn’t that often—sometimes I’ll add that I used to be a lawyer, but do not practice law anymore. However, did you know that some people apparently believe I have another occupation? I’m often accused, on YouTube and various other parts of the internet, of being a CIA agent. Although the Central Intelligence Agency is overwhelmingly the most popular choice for the identity of my secret profession, at various other times people have also accused me of working for the FBI, the NSA, Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service), the American Federation of Teachers, or—I love this one—the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Some people haven’t decided who I secretly work for and confine themselves to asking, perhaps rhetorically, “Who’s paying you?” I find these accusations pretty much equal parts bizarre, hilarious, exasperating and pathetic. I also find myself thinking about the people who actually say this, whether they really believe it, and, if they do, wondering what kind of twisted paranoid hell they must live in and how they became so delusional and so firmly divorced from reality, sanity and reason.

All of these “secret profession” accusations, every single one of them, are reactions to my YouTube videos, and 90% of them are reactions to two particular ones, the series I did in 2022 on the John F. Kennedy assassination. (Here’s part one; here’s part two). I’ve learned from long experience that when you practice the discipline of history on a public-facing internet platform, and especially if you have the gall to assert that a particular conspiracy delusion is untrue, you will invariably and intractably assemble a rogues’ gallery of enemies, most of them paranoid conspiracy theorists. I’ve written before on this blog about how popular understanding of history, particularly in the United States, has been utterly poisoned from top to bottom by the toxic sludge of conspiracy theory. Nearly every high-profile event in history, from 9/11 to the Vietnam War to the sinking of the Titanic, has attached to it a small but vocal brigade of conspiracy theorists who insist that the so-called “official story” is untrue and that somebody else did it and covered it up. (Yes, the Titanic also. The most popular theory is that J.P. Morgan sank it to do something something the Federal Reserve, something something the Jews). If anyone, such as a historian, discusses these events without endorsing the conspiracy narratives, the theorists identify them as an enemy. And that triggers the “You’re a CIA agent!” or “Who’s paying you?” type of reactions.

Most of the time I simply delete the “You’re a CIA agent”/“Who’s paying you” type of comments out of the moderation queue, because they’re just worthless trolling and the people who post them are clearly not even worth paying attention to. But it happens often enough to make me question the whole phenomenon. If people really do believe I’m a CIA agent—and I suspect at least some genuinely do—it’s an astonishingly narcissistic belief. How could someone be so far and so firmly down the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking that they believe that literally no one could disagree with their conspiracy theory legitimately, and thus anyone who did so was being paid by the conspirators? It goes without saying that all, 100%, of the “you’re a CIA agent” accusations come from people who believe that the Central Intelligence Agency did the thing I’m talking about (usually the assassination of John F. Kennedy). Really? The fact that a historian states that Oswald acted alone, or that the September 11 attacks were committed by Osama bin Laden—which is what the historical facts clearly indicate—is, by itself, prima facie evidence that said historian must be getting money from a federal agency to say that? It’s utterly absurd, and insulting to the intelligence.

To be honest, though, I don’t always take these accusations at face value. I think at least some of them, perhaps most, aren’t sincere and literal, but a sort of public virtue signaling among conspiracy theorists themselves. Particularly since the QAnon cult took America (and other countries) by storm in the late 2010s and early 2020s, leading among other things to the fascist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, many people have come to take conspiratorial thinking as an identity, and fellow conspiracy theorists as compatriots “fighting the good fight” against the evildoers—like me, apparently—whom they think are screwing up the world. Professing such total belief in conspiracy such that anyone who publicly disagrees must, by definition, be a CIA agent is a way of saying to other conspiracy theorists, “Look how fervently I believe.” I think this is also true for the paranoids who profess to treat refutations of popular conspiracy theories as funny, charmingly naïve (“Aww, you believe the government can do no wrong, how adorable!”), as if the person disagreeing with them is engaging in satire (“I don’t know whether you’re serious!”), or as evidence of stupidity and incompetence as a historian (“You call yourself a historian?”) It’s all virtue-signaling. Conspiracism is a tribe driven by insensate rage, fiercely angry, hostile and nihilistic. Among denizens of this tribe, historians are the enemy and are immoral for disagreeing with conspiracy theories. A lot of people have made that perfectly clear to me, sometimes in messages more direct and more darkly threatening than hit-and-run YouTube comments. This is the world we live in.

For the record, of course I don’t work for the CIA, FBI, NSA, the Warren Commission (hardly likely, since it disbanded in 1964), the Israelis, the Illuminati, or the Reagan Library. Aside from the member/subscribers who signed up for the members section on my channel at $5 a month, to date two, and only two, entities have ever paid me directly for my YouTube work: YouTube itself, through Google AdSense, and Ground News, who sponsored a number of my videos. And neither of them paid me for any specific content or told me what I could or couldn’t cover in the videos they supported. I know this will never convince a single conspiracy theorist that I don’t work for the CIA. In fact, it’s likely to simply confirm their suspicions. (“That’s exactly what a CIA agent would say!”, as if the person asserting this knows a lot of CIA agents and has a lot of familiarity with how they talk). Trying to convince a conspiracy theorist that what they believe is not true is an existentially pointless task on par with Sisyphus pushing his famous rock up the hill. This is also, unfortunately, the world we live in. To quote W.B. Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The fact that I’ve written this article at all will be interpreted by conspiracy theorists as “proof” that I’m a CIA agent. “If he wasn’t a CIA agent, why would he write an almost 2,000 word article on his blog denying that he’s a CIA agent? Nobody does that! See, he’s a CIA agent!” Of course, nothing I could do or say—and everything I might choose not to do or say, for example, if I did not deny I was a CIA agent—will be taken, by them, as “proof” that I’m a CIA agent. “He never denied he was a CIA agent!” Someone somewhere who reads this paragraph, at some point, will cite it as slam-dunk proof that I’m a CIA agent. The game is rigged, of course. Nothing I could do or say, and everything I do not do or say, is evidently proof of my secret nefarious profession. That’s how conspiracy works: fevered delusions, existing in an entirely closed universe, where everything leads to more proof of conspiracy.

It doesn’t make a lick of sense that the CIA would even want to pay me, or anyone else, to make content on YouTube. I have, as of this writing, about 175,000 subscribers, which is a lot for a channel like mine but a pittance compared to the top mega-creators on the platform, or even some other historians like Mr. Beat, whose channel I highly recommend. If the CIA really whacked Kennedy back in 1963—which quite obviously they did not, because there’s no evidence of it—what would they stand to gain by paying a YouTuber to make videos analyzing the facts about how Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? Do the nutters really think I have such power to mold public opinion? Do they really think there’s some poor employee at CIA Headquarters in Quantico who trolls through YouTube channels and sends a memo to his or her boss, “Hey, look at this guy, we should hire him”? If you’re an American taxpayer, what share of your tax dollars do these people think the CIA spends to pay historians on YouTube? Is there a line-item for this in the CIA’s budget? Has the House of Representative Oversight Committee vetted it? Are payments made by the CIA to me known to the General Accounting Office? What about the IRS? Do you suppose the CIA is obligated to send me a W-9, assuming I’m an independent contractor, or a W-2, assuming I’m an employee? I hope the nutters don’t start hounding my accountant. Does the CIA care about my videos that have nothing to do with conspiracy topics, like my recent one on Mexico in World War II? (Easy answer there: the “You’re a CIA agent!” accusers do not know that I even make videos that aren’t conspiracy-related, so it would never enter their world).

Perhaps I’m giving this whole topic way more credit than it deserves, but for purposes of this article I researched whether there has ever been a single recorded instance of the CIA paying someone on YouTube to make content, on conspiracies or any other subject. I couldn’t find one. To my knowledge, every single accusation that has ever been made that the CIA pays YouTubers has been made by a conspiracy theorist, and is entirely unsupported by evidence. That is separate from the issue of whether the CIA itself has a YouTube channel. Actually they do; here it is. Like most government agencies, it’s mostly a recruiting tool. The ominous-looking videos on their front page in Chinese are solicitations, apparently to people in China, to contact them, the CIA, with any information they have on the Chinese Communist Party. Ironically, as of this writing, the official CIA channel has fewer subscribers, 101,000, than I do. I suppose that means that, at least as far as YouTube is concerned, I’m more powerful than the CIA itself? Does that mean I personally shot John F. Kennedy and did 9/11? I guess, to the kind of people who think I am a CIA agent, the answer must be unequivocally yes.

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