"The likely intended effect of "you are a conspiracy theorist" type of smearing is to clean the table of players who play for..."

... truth. Independent of whether said truth serves vested interests or not. The outcome is largely the same as what you said, except that not everyone who cares about freedom cares about truth, and vice versa.

"Those who would like to play for freedom have next to nothing to study."

I don't know. If you look outside the northwest European canon, there are plenty of texts to study. Just to give you a handful of examples...

The Chinese canon has texts about freedom going back at least as far as Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi. The Mediterranean canon has Socrates, Diogenes and Aristophanes from Greece, Rumi and other Sufi sages, the Egyptian mystery schools, and a number of hard case Rabbinical texts. The Indian classics are full of stories about freedom, its nature and its obstacles.

From northwest Europe there are people like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin (perhaps the first anti-Marxist). As well as Nestor Machno and other anti-Bolsheviks like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and George Orwell and Aldous Huxley (particularly Island), and Wilhelm Reich, eg 
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and
The Sexual Revolution. More recently, Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigm, and some of the others in the SI, Hunter S. Thompson, and more recently still, Hakim Bey, Bob Black, and some of the authors published by outfits like CrimeThinc. and C4SS.