Lauren Boebert Giggles Her Way Through Faked Moon Landing And A Few Other Top Conspiracy Theories

Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert isn't going to turn down a chance to do the conspiracy thing, even if she probably thinks it's all an inside joke. Right-wing media love conspiracies because they tend to be a fairly fact-free preoccupation, where politics can easily be grafted onto a story without having to endure any real scrutiny. Boebert recently hit the airwaves to complete a trifecta of conspiracy mongering, touching on faked nuclear-weapons tests, the staged Moon landing in 1969, and a building collapse during the 9/11 attacks.

Boebert appeared on "Prime Time with Alex Stein," which, as MTN/Meidas News points out, is broadcast on Glenn Beck's right-friendly Blaze TV. Stein was rabble-rousing and teeing up the conspiracies like big old nutty softballs, and to her credit Boebert was giggling and messing with her hair the whole time, suggesting an ad hoc pact to spend the segment enthusiastically trolling the libs.

Still, the discussion was a masterclass in re-seeding conspiracy narratives in a way that serve the entertain-at-all-costs mandate of right-wing media while also reinforcing the familiar line that the government cannot be trusted.

In 2023, Joe Rogan and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen delved into a layered conspiracy theory about U.S. nuclear tests being faked. I say "layered" because Andreessen suggested that they were faked to intimidate the Russians – it was a clever psyop. Nothing was actually decimated by the blasts, and the survival of the footage is proof. How did the cameras keep running? How was the film not torched?

Boebert went with the flow on this one and then started babbling about submarines. Of course, it's not difficult to find out why the cameras survived – they were elaborately shielded. What was interesting about the exchange between Boebert and Stein was that while Stein was clearly just screwing around, Boebert had to play along with the conspiracy theory while simultaneously defending the Pentagon's decision to bomb Iran's totally, completely real nukes program. Awkward!

But why stop with debunked tales about phony nukes? Let's go for some bigger fish: next up, the bogus Moon landing!

The idea that the Moon landing was a hoax has been built from many pieces, and one that has some basis in fact is the allegation that the Van Allen radiation belts that surround Earth would have killed the Apollo 11 astronauts before they completed their journey. There were six "successful" crewed Moon landings, so they must all have been staged! But the Van Allen conspiracy angle isn't hard to dismiss – due to mission planning and spacecraft shielding, NASA ensured that the astronauts absorbed little more than a medical x-ray's worth of radiation.

Boebert and Stein topped it off with Tucker Carlson's bolstering of the theory that so-called "Building 7" at the World Trade Center must have collapsed as a result of a controlled demolition because it wasn't struck by a jet airliner on 9/11. It actually caught on fire and collapsed as a consequence of some thoroughly understandable structural failures.

Conspiracy theories put Boebert in a good mood, and why wouldn't they? The stories are always better than what really happened, and they are incredibly politically malleable. I can remember a time when the notion that the Moon landing was faked appealed more to radical leftists, post-Watergate, than hardcore right-wingers in the pre-Reagan years. Shockingly, Boebert and Stein failed to indulge in some comedy around the granddaddy of them all; somehow, the JFK assassination didn't come up.