I Am A Conspiracy Theorist
Strange is no stranger to me
The death of Jeffrey Epstein again, perhaps more than ever, cements my belief that men and women blessed with enormous (obscene?) wealth and power conspire.
Conspire- “To join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement.”
There are conspiracy theories and there are conspiracy theories. The former applies to the unanswered questions about Epstein’s death. The term may also apply to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that 9/11 was staged by the U.S. Government with assistance from the Israeli government, and that J. Edgar Hoover was “blackmailing important people in the U.S. Government to keep his job as head of the FBI.”
And then there are those conspiracy theories which, though proven to be false again and again, continue to linger in the public sphere. The most infamous one today is the QAnon far-right theory (known as The Great Awakening) that Donald Trump is secretly working with Robert Mueller to expose an international child sex trafficking ring.
Wait a minute! Jeffrey Epstein was accused of exactly that!
Deep breath…
Ever see one of those Russian nesting dolls? Perhaps you have one on your mantle. You screw the head off and there’s a smaller doll inside. And one inside that one. And another one inside that one. Until you finally reach the tiniest one at the center. Layer after layer. Secrets within secrets.
These dolls, like the onion whose layers surround the core, pinpoint the difficulty we have discerning truth from fiction. It’s a jungle out there. If we are to navigate our way to what is true, we must be prepared to hack away what is demonstrably false.
Hey, it’ s complicated. Here’s Richard Hofstadter from his essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse…
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.
The FBI recently warned that conspiracy theories are a new domestic terrorism threat. I can accept that, and yet, the FBI’s pronouncement sends a shiver down my spine. Consider the Epstein case. Mass media is liberally tarring people and groups with the words “conspiracy theorist” because they are asking questions about suspicious events like Jeffrey Epstein’s death. If we’re not careful, people like me (and you?) may someday be subject to arrest for violating some as yet-to-be-enacted domestic terrorism laws.
Finally, I have my own conspiracy theory involving Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Trump, you remember, retweeted last week a conspiracy theory video “claiming Bill and Hillary Clinton had a hand in the death of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.”
I believe, although no proof exists, that Trump deliberately threw that out there to deflect scrutiny of his past relationships with Epstein. I mean, there are pictures!
Okay, now I’m sounding like a real conspiracy theorist! I blame those Russian nesting dolls.
