that's such a silly conclusion though, and really a perfect AP piece. It discredits people while saying nothing. It doesn't matter if the phrase existed before

that's such a silly conclusion though, and really a perfect AP piece. It discredits people while saying nothing. It doesn't matter if the phrase existed before hand, it very obviously blew-up during the JFK event.[0] It could entirely well be that the DoD didn't invent the phrase, but it's pretty obvious that it very quickly became a part of the public verbage during heavy interest in the JFK event -- that trend could have easily been the indicator of work towards the discrediting of both the term and those that had too much curiosity towards things they shouldn't question. [0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+theory&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=de-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+the...