Let's just say you were running FUD in this direction and this piece of FUD has reached its EOL, credibility cannot be sustained. If it goes down too obviously

Let's just say you were running FUD in this direction and this piece of FUD has reached its EOL, credibility cannot be sustained. If it goes down too obviously as ridiculous it may well take some still active FUD with it. If you were running FUD you'd have to play a little D even if it was your first month on the job. So this kind of thing being consistent with that FUD rearguard action as it fails doesn't make it true (or false). How plausible is it? Getting those who published their deep "thought leadership" while being taken in by the FUD will happily happily go along with it (was serious, not so much anymore) rather than say "yup, I got taken in here, garbage on roller-skates" [1] [1] I absolutely got taken by the WMD lies. Totally suckered. Believed them all. Occams razor ruled out the big conspiracy for me. The total lack of accountability for the lies I believed after it became completely clear, adjusted my prior to be rather more skeptical and the probability of actual, targeted lies being pushed as being much more plausible. I can overcome both with good evidence but "the NYT/WaPo/WSJ/CNN/CBS/Fox/Harvard/Stanford/etc says X and they wouldn't be in on a conspiracy nor be suckered readily, all of them so..." counts for not much anymore as evidence.