This has no take on your intelligence - it’s a take on who you trust and what you believe.
Exactly. My friend profoundly distrusts pronouncements by various governments.
I'm wondering what he thinks of the fact that there are plenty of non-government "pronouncements"? Among these are very reputable scientists (geologists and geochemists) whose integrity and dedication to scholarship and scientific truth is unimpeachable. Just do a search sometime of the various geologic science journals that publish data on lunar sample analyses. These are people who would know fake samples if anyone were to try to pass them off. But they aren't fake. They can't be faked. You cannot gin up an ersatz lunar breccia with the kind of isotopic ratios we see in those samples.