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Two episodes of Jesse Ventura’s preposterous but surprisingly entertaining new TV show, Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, have now aired on TruTV, the channel…

Two episodes of Jesse Ventura’s preposterous but
surprisingly entertaining new TV show, Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura,
have now aired on TruTV, the channel responsible for
such thought-provoking programs as Bait Car (carjackers caught on tape!),
Inside American Jail (real criminals stabbing each other!), and Party Heat, a
show that follows cops around as they arrest drunk/stoned/tripping college
students on spring break.   

As TruTV fare goes, Conspiracy Theory actually ranks as one of the channel’s better, more credibly produced shows. In
it, our former governor aims his legendary B.S. detector in the direction of
America’s most enduring conspiracies, from 9/11 and 2012 to global warming, Big
Brother, brainwashing, mind control, secret societies, and eventually-in season
2, he promises, if the show gets that far-the big-kahuna conspiracy of them
all, JFK.

For this show, Ventura has re-invented himself as
something that might be called “The Truthinator,” a relentless force
of candor and skepticism whose secret weapon is that he was a Navy Seal and
once had a legitimate government job. “I’ve been exposed to government
information,” Jesse growls, as if the Minnesota state budget oozed evil
and altered his consciousness, making him an even more bizarre and paranoid
person than he was before. But Jesse is proud of his record: “No other
governor can match what I’ve done,” he snarls in the show’s teaser, a
statement as open to interpretation as the supposed conspiracies he is
“investigating.”

Still, Jesse Ventura was always an entertainer first, and
Conspiracy Theory is nothing if not entertaining. There’s a B-movie, amateur
gumshoe quality to it that’s hard to resist. In fact, the show’s tabloid
cheesiness is part of its charm, and the pretense that Jesse is ferreting out
The Truth on behalf of the common man, protecting our “right to
know,” is as endearing as it is silly. None of these
“conspiracies” can be taken very seriously, but Jesse and his
investigative team (who look more like a motley crew of graduate students)
uncover just enough information to make you think, “Hmm, there might be
something to this.” And when it comes to unmasking the dangerous shadow
people who organize and execute vast institutional conspiracies on a global
scale, that’s about as good as it gets.   

Episode 1 has our former governor and his rag-tag team of
agents asking hard questions about HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral
Research Program), an array of antennas in the Alaskan wilderness that zaps
concentrated electro-magnetic waves into the ionosphere for research. The
government “says” HAARP is used to study ways of improving satellite
communication and monitor changes in the ozone layer, but Jesse isn’t
convinced. He and his team suspect that it may be a secret
“superweapon” being used to manipulate the weather and control
people’s minds. Jesse’s narrator goes even further, rasping that HAARP
“may be THE DEADLIEST WEAPON IN THE WORLD.” Or worse, as Jesse warns
. . . a “death ray!” Of course, it also MIGHT BE a quonset hut full
of jelly beans, but sadly, that possibility is left unexplored.

As our inquisitive governor hovers over the facility in
his black helicopter, the narrator informs us that Jesse can’t help wondering
if the tsunamis in Indonesia MIGHT HAVE been caused by the sinister grid of
doom below. (How do we know they weren’t, eh?). Jesse uses his famously
piercing intellect to articulate the menacing scope of what he is witnessing.
“There it is. Wow,” Jesse whispers. The chopper lands outside the
facility’s front gate, and Jesse wonders why, if nothing sinister is going on,
the government needs to erect a fence to keep a former Minnesota governor
out?  “Hey man, I’m a Navy
seal,” Jesse informs the nice man at the gate, who isn’t impressed and
tells him to come back during visiting hours—when, Jesse knows, all the
facility’s “secrets” will be safely hidden away.

What’s commendable about Jesse’s show is that it’s not
all about Jesse. If it were, not much investigating would get done—because, as
Jesse admits on camera, two weeks before the show taped he hadn’t even heard of
HAARP. Luckily, his research team is eager to do the legwork for him, and they
actually do interview some plausible sources, who confirm that weather
manipulation is at least theoretically possible, and ultra-sonic waves can be
used to generate anxiety and make people “hear” things without their
ears-no doubt a comforting thought for all you paranoid schizophrenics out
there. The show also knows it’s a little hokey. When Jesse is standing outside
the HAARP gates, trying to talk his way in, the camera equipment starts
fritzing out for “unexplained reasons,” and the picture starts
jumping around like an outtake from the Blair Witch Project. Leaving us to
wonder: Did the government blast Jesse’s team with bolt of electro-magnetic
payback, or did the camera guy step on a cord? Like so many of life’s great
mysteries, we’ll never really know.

Episode 2 involves the popular theory among a certain
class of wingnuts that 9/11 was masterminded by none other than the White House
itself, in order to justify attacking Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq.  (As if W could ever manage an operation
that complicated.) Nevertheless, Jesse and his team of sleuths dig through the
rubble of 9/11 to expose several “unexplained” anomalies in the
physical evidence—that the black-box flight recorders were supposedly never
found, although some people claim they saw FBI agents removing them, as well as
evidence of explosive residue in the dust—and beg the question why these
details were never mentioned in the official 9/11 commission report.

The most entertaining part of the episode is when Jesse
goes into “combat mode” and mounts an “assault” on Hangar
17 at JFK, where some of the 9/11 debris is still being stored. Every time
Jesse encounters a locked door, it makes him suspicious. (”Why is it
locked? What are they hiding?”) It makes you wonder what he locks behind
closed doors. And when Jesse finally finds a door with a small window in it, he
peers inside and exclaims, “THIS is what they don’t want me to see!”
Exactly what “this” is isn’t entirely clear, because you can’t really
see anything, but it makes for some hilarious, compulsively watchable
television. 

Conspiracy theorists are a wildly entertaining bunch
because they can spin out the most fantastical theories based on the flimsiest of
evidence—and for that I have to give them credit. In the show, the theory is
proposed that 9/11 was a so-called “false flag” operation, which, as
Jesse explains, is a covert action perpetrated by our own government but
designed to look like someone else did it. The supposed justification is that
bankers and oil companies needed a war to boost business, George W. Bush needed
an excuse to attack Saddam Hussein, and Dick Cheney needed an excuse to enact
the Patriot Act.

Conveniently, conspiracy theorists never think to ask questions
about the holes raised by their own theories. For instance, why, if the goal
was to attack Iraq, did the CIA cast Saudi Arabians in the role of terrorist
hijackers? Why blame it on Osama bin Laden if you’re really after Saddam? Why
invent such an elaborate plot if the goal of war could have been accomplished
more simply with less loss of life—by, say, blowing up a symbolic target like
the Golden Gate Bridge, which would have the added benefit of killing a few
hundred annoying liberals? And how, if it was a conspiracy, could the
government keep it a secret and still ensure that some very important people
wouldn’t be inside those buildings at the time of the attack—people they didn’t
really want to kill?

Alas, it is only a one-hour show.

Still, TruTV’s producers do a credible job of laying out
the evidence for their conspiracy claims, and they even engage in a bit of
actual journalism by interviewing retired government personnel, aviation
experts, FBI representatives and the usual assortment of oddballs and regular
citizens with an axe to grind (er, “questions” for which they want
“answers”.) In both episodes so far, the team has also staged small
scientific experiments to test certain theories, such as the idea that
electromagnetic charges could be used to move clouds or how an explosive
material called thermite might have helped melt the steel beams in the World
Trade Center. (The words “may,” “might,” “could,”
and “possibly” do a lot of heavy lifting in this show.)

“You won’t believe what you don’t know,” is
Conspiracy Theory’s provocative tag-line, but that’s also an awkward
double-negative way of saying, “You will believe what you do know,”
which doesn’t sound quite as scary. Either way, I hope this show gains some
traction, because it’s definitely the best role Jesse has played since he
became a rogue independent governor. Somewhere beneath all that bluster and
bravado, I believe Jesse does want us to know The Truth, whatever that is-and
if he can make me laugh and think a little while he’s doing it, more power to
him.

Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura airs Wednesday
nights at 9:00 p.m. on TruTV.

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