Mr Unz publishes a long article purporting to demonstrate that the 1969 and later Manned Moon Landings were a hoax. It is one of the better such articles I've seen too, though I'm no expert on such.
Mr Unz himself then proceeds then posts the top comment debunking the article from several angles. Some of his debunkings (like why didn't the Soviets call the US out on this) I find rather weak. (The Soviets could have reasons of their own for not wanting to call out the US, such as issues with their own space programs.)
But the key one being emphasized is that there needs to be some evidence this conspiracy happened, and there is exactly none (according to Mr Unz, and which I don't dispute).
He doesn't say much more than that but indeed there is a huge difference compared to, say, the JFK assassination.
You'd have to be living in the vacuum of nothing other than mainstream news to believe the official story, the single bullet theory.
For most of my friends, their daily mainstream brainwashing comes from NPR (which I think I will start calling Nazi Propaganda Radio), which many simply keep running nearly all the time.
Anyway, wrt the JFK assassination, there is in fact a lot of evidence against the single bullet theory, it just gets ignored most, and if not ignored disparaged, in the official story.
Such as the deathbed confessions of E Howard Hunt, and several alleged mob hitmen. The very large number of disappeared people and vast troves of disappeared evidence. And so on.
This started from practically the first day. I remember seeing pictures of the grassy knoll on TV just after Oswald had been shot. It took awhile for even the mainstream narrative to be fully on board. The many reports of men and sounds and even smoke coming from the grassy knoll were not discounted entirely at first.
Back in those days, the 3 networks CBS, NBC, and ABC all tried to be competitive and centrist. If any one started telling better stories, they could grab market share from the others.
This is why a propaganda system best provides tailored propaganda channels. There is no competition. Fox News listeners are not going to tune into NPR and vice versa. They don't have to compete by telling deeper stories within the same "worldview."
I was for the longest time like many deceived into believing the Great Society promise of national broadcasting. I should have realized it came from the era of LBJ (chief assassin) and Allen Dulles (grand master Nazi assassin). It's a tailored propaganda service, to gather those who might be otherwise channeled into true alternative thinking, like sort of used to be a thing (I remember growing up with KPFK and KCRW in the 1960's).
And one of the reasons why people like NPR is that many of the alternatives suck too. Not only the new, but all the various news channels, and even most "music" channels are pretty sucky these days. I don't know that many people who "love" streaming music channels as such, though they may access streaming music in various ways.
Nobody it seems has what I've developed: an automated system from playing music albums randomly selected from my growing digitally stored collection. I have way of tailoring it to "backgroundable music" (no distracting words) which is best for music, and then music with words or that can be very distracting. And I (currently) insist on keeping entire albums together (which keeps music from becoming decontextualized.
I think it is by design that nobody else has an effective way of using their own music collection, and why the "collectable music industry" has basically failed. The "music industry" mainly wants to sell you more music, not give you a way to use the music you already have. People ultimately tired of that of buying and then discarding trendy stuff.
Using your own music is a royal pain. Even merely building up a playlist of songs to play each day, which is the ultimate reduced version.
So I made an automated way to make playlists from my personal collections, which in fact I highly value.
And so I can be free from all the mainstream propaganda systems which are wealthy enough to run channels.
But anyway, the ultimate far out idea for the Moon Landing Conspiracy is this...
Just as there is no one present (only probabilities) and future (only probabilities) the same is true of the past (only probabilities).
At some point, we may have to go and do a "test," like a second landing. When such a test becomes necessary, then both possibilities will exist until the test is done.
"When it becomes necessary" is a statement about the present and future, not the past.
Thus, the central tendency of the future determines the central tendency of the past.
The further the US degenerates, the more likely it is that the Moon Landing never happened.
I'm quite "serious" here. It surely looks like the future determines the past in general.
It is in the future that we do experiments which reveal the past.
I was always somewhat prejudiced about the moon landing because, even while it was happening, I believed the naysayers from 2 years prior (in Popular Science, IIRC) how basically it could not happen, given the state of the science, engineering, and manufacturing as exemplified by the failures in Apollo 1. I felt like a really smart kid for having read about those things (perhaps it was a magazine in a dentist's office). All my friends were just believing the fluff (obvious fluff) on TV.
I believed those naysayers so much, and I was out of the USA in Mexico during the first landing, and I was shocked to hear about it after the fact. I made a point of not missing the second moon landing live on the (crummy black and white tv set we had) in Mexico.
Later I hadn't liked that the program was "completed" then unceremoniously dumped, by Nixon, who had been an "enemy" of the program. If it had been impossible, why was it suddenly made possible under the very man who had opposed it? (Well, there's an obvious answer that's not out of line...because it had to or those people would have lost their jobs sooner.)
Now I'm pretty close to Mr Unz in believing that while it was a stroke of miraculous luck that it actually happened.
But I'm becoming less certain.
I would not at all be surprised if fake photos were made before the fact, in case the mission failed they would have backup.
But you'd still have to account for many other things. Given the state(s) of radio and automation, it's unlikely the mission could have been accomplished...even just in rough outlines for appearances sake...without humans. But then few people observed the landing first hand.
So only the astronauts and a few others, such as those in the filming, would really have to know if the videos were the real ones or the fake ones.
One thing that can't be denied at all was that the program was primarily distraction from two things: cover for the development of intercontinental missiles, and the Vietnam War. It really helped reinforce American Exceptionalism at a critical time, and help with the propaganda used against the Soviet Union--which had previously been extraordinarily successful with rocket development before the Apollo program, and so they claim today as well, despite having been vastly overspent by the USA on the bloated military contractors whose primary function is to create profits, as opposed to fearing their skin if the program fails as in Russia and elsewhere.
Why has the US often been a laggard? It's lack of free public education, and an economy run for creating good jobs. Instead, the economic levers are turned to create an excess of scam jobs, not jobs creating real technical and scientific accomplishments. Jobs in robocalling, health insurance, and above all, elite gambling (Wall Street).
Things had somewhat improved from the 1940's to the 1960's exactly in those regards. In some sense things like planes, automobiles and appliances designed and sold in that period were also scams (planned obsolescence) but they nevertheless did useful work and required sophisticated engineering and manufacturing. Governor Reagan started the hollowing out of free higher education in California. So 1969 was a peak moment, when a successful first moon landing might have happened relatively easily. Despite vast improvements in computers and other components, it's not even very easy today.
But despite their being a relatively high level of engineers and scientists by US standards, US manufacturing had become abysmally sloppy. 1950's cars were the one that, despite amazing simplicity compared, were hard to keep working longer than 3 years and the same continued on into the 1970's
It was competition from Japanese, starting in the late 1960's, which made US automakers shape up, which they actually did surprisingly well by 1976. I remember a 1976 Custom Cruiser as being one of the most solid cars ever, after our 1970 Vista Cruiser had been one of the most poorly made cars ever.
So that's the weak spot in my estimation: manufacturing quality control, which didn't seem to exist in the USA in 1969, and also exemplified by the catastrophic failure of Apollo 1, just two years before the Moon Landing.
What about Jet Fighters and such? A fortune was continually spent on maintenance and rework.
The US was good at doing sloppy things like including dioxin in Agent Orange.
