Hey folks, it’s Friday. If you want to hear me chatting with Julia Galef on her excellent “Rationally Speaking” podcast, our conversation is up now. I’m getting more interested in rationalism, and I thought it was a really great show.
I remember being rather peeved at Dara and Jane in the Epstein episode. Prison conditions ARE bad, and suicide is a problem, but systemic answers aren't always great at explaining specific cases. In the specific case of Epstein, considering his ties and the potential explosiveness of his testimony, I think it's insane levels of delusion to literally immediately after his death conclude "see, told y'all prisons were really bad - this has nothing to do with the specifics of this case though."
I think it had to do with the specifics of his case, in that unlike most people in MDC he was facing a lifetime in federal prison for child sex crimes, (child rapists are not popular in prison) and he had little experience or background in prison life. His motivations were much higher than the typical MDC inmate, who is looking at 30 months for a weapons or narcotics charge and has spent time in state or federal lockup previously.
There are other factors that make it seem like a conspiracy. When he died, Epstein was already on a suicide watch, so you'd think that would mean increased scrutiny. Yet, at the time when he killed himself, both of his guards accidentally fell asleep [1], and the camera footage just happened to unfortunately disappear because of an inexplicable glitch [2]. That's a whole lot of coincidences.
I suppose, but in another sense that makes his death even more of failure. Like even if you don't weigh his potential to rat out some extremely powerful people (and thus their incentive to not let him get a trial), the fact that he was a suicide risk means he should be watched like a hawk.
I mean I guess that is the argument from the prison reform crowd, but it's incredibly unsatisfying and I'm even going to say negligent to ignore who he was, what he was accused of, and who his ties were.
Shall we put a number on the Epstein thing? I think there's a 15% chance Epstein was murdered. That's well into the territory of things I consider "reasonable speculation"; my mental category of "conspiracy theories" is reserved for "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" stuff where I'm something like 99% sure they're wrong.
So far, my favorite part of today's essay is this:
"...consumers of less legitimate media (blogs and grocery store tabloids).”
Yup. Every morning, I shuffle down to bodega, pick up my cigs and a few powerball numbers if I'm feeling flush, and grab my copies of the "National Enquirer" and "Slow Boring."
(It also makes sense today -- we all know anything published on a Substack will be considered in The Right Circles as less legitimate than if it came from a major publication)
I noted that as well, and saw that it was a quote from something in 2006. It's an interesting time capsule to think of a moment when everything that is now in a social media site of some sort was also a blog. (And interesting that I recall the Times of London switching from "broadsheet" to "tabloid" format, which has changed some of the association of the paper size - but it turns out that this switch occurred in 2004.)
So I guess this is why I subscribed. When you're not talking about the impacts of systemic racism, your contrarian views are helpful. And dryly funny. I agree on almost all counts, especially since I spent some time yesterday trying to figure out whether/how to respond to a cousin who claimed that 'food provided by the good Lord" would protect her against Covid, and that therefore she did not need to be vaccinated. After thinking about the conspiracies embedded in that, I responded by posting something on FB that compared the number of deaths from anaphylaxis from both Pfizer and Moderna (71) to the 450,000 deaths from Covid-19. I had to leave it at that, hoping my cousin would see it, but knowing it wouldn't convince her. I hope I reached some of our shared "friends' who haven't progressed as far down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole.
But then again, as a mentor of mine once said: Even paranoids have real enemies. Humility is called for.
The far more wide-spread conspiracy that concerns me is that something like 75% of Republicans think the Democrats committed massive, organized election fraud in 2020. TBH I'd been associating it strongly with Q but I didn't realize only 7% of people copped to being Q-urious. Obviously conspiracy theories are far more disturbing when they're fed by the sitting president and a major "news" network. Interestingly it seems more convincing to argue the causality in the opposite direction--people convinced of the bigger conspiracy are more inclined to get sucked into cults like QAnon as a respite/way to "fight back."
I mean I know people who will "joke" about it being true, but I'd buy that it's mostly an artifact of partisanship. I also buy that most Republicans who say Democrats stole 2020 do so out of partisanship.
I don't think Russia managed to change any actual votes in 2016 but it wasn't for a lack trying. Their penetration of voter registration data bases was disturbingly deep. And Republicans are inexplicably opposed to measures which would genuinely strengthen election security rather than running around ranting about non-existent fraud.
If you're like me and live in a blue state with a bunch of vaguely Democrat neighbors who have Biden and BLM lawn signs and it's hard to find someone who will publicly admit to voting for Trump then I think you can also get a feel for the gradients of wrong belief.
No one in my social circle is hard core "the Russians hacked into this computer and paid off this guy" insert elaborate hoax here.
But everyone I know is _really really sloppy_ about thinking about Russia. Most of them are not very political, and if you ask them how Russia interfered with the election they'll say something like "I bet they have a pee tape." And it's not meant to be a well thought out falsifiable thing we can fact check, it's meant to be a gut level statement about how much they despise Trump.
When talking with conservatives, I hear "why don't you police your own side", which is of coarse exactly what I want to say to them.
I think the dynamic is that if an irrational belief _seems_ harmless (viewed through the partisan lens of the community that holds onto it), people who say those things aren't going to get very much push-back. If you're a progressive and mad at Trump, how much time do you burn going "yeah there's no evidence for that.")
With Conservatives you can sometimes get a vague "Hillary's got to be crooked - there's so much smoke there has to be a fire."
There's all sorts of intermediate levels with voting too - if you're Conservative but not delusional, maybe your take is that the crazy stuff Trump and Giuliani alleged is false, but there is a real voter fraud problem and something bad probably happened in Philadelphia and while it doesn't mean that mathematically Trump should be president, there's definitely a Real Problem™ here that needs to be fixed in the future (and Democrats are wrong to say that the system actually works fine).
I haven't seen actual evidence for this belief, but if you've been listening to conservative media talk about voter fraud for years now, it's much easier to believe this than to believe that you voted for someone so delusional that he spent his lame duck period blatantly lying about the election and it so terrorized the whole party that everyone either shut their mouth and let him do it or gave oxygen to the wing nuts.
The "conspiracy theory" form of Russiagate is that Trump was a Manchurian Candidate who spent 4 years doing whatever Putin wanted him to do, and I know at least a dozen people aged 50+ who would volunteer this belief at every opportunity.
I mean, ok, but then you have to explain the reluctance of the Trump administration to impose sanctions required by statutory law, or the deletion of any plank regarding Ukraine from the GOP platform in 2016 once Trump was the nominee. Or the sharing with Putin of confidential Israeli intelligence.
Right, but "he's a Manchurian candidate" was always the dumbest form of theorizing about the Trump + Russia connection.
There's clearly a single piece of empirical hard evidence we have to face (and that any good conspiracy theory needs to anchor to) - Trump is _way_ less of a Russia hawk than anyone else comparable to him - other presidents, the GOP, foreign policy hands. He sticks out!
But we don't have to assume a conspiracy when stupidity will explain it. Trump's a guy who talks about national security issues in the dining room at Maralago in front of guests. He told Bob Woodward about the reports he was getting on COVID a year ago. He publicly fawns over Kim Jung Un. He hired Steve Bannon. His election campaign team was family members and the B team because he values loyalty over competence and a bunch of the A-team GOPers were on his shit list for saying mean things about him in the primary.
In this light, his behavior seems pretty understandable? Sharing intel with Putin is in line with a series of other incompetent foreign policy screw-ups he had - ask the Kurds. He seems to have some kind of weird personal fan-boy thing with Putin, but had that over Kim and generally seems to be a poor judge of people - Rudy Giuliani is his lawyer!
You only need to explain Trump's behavior WRT Russia as weird if your baseline is a normal President.
Full disclosure: I theorized for a very long time that he had Russian financing of his Real Estate projects based on the idea that (1) Russians do launder money via NYC Real Estate and (2) Trump knows a bunch of Russians and (3) Trump was somehow getting financing despite a bunch of bankruptcies.
I have dropped that believe when it came out that Deutsche Bank loaned him a bunch of money...of coarse it was DB...
My favorite part of the Russiagate panic was the left-of-center turning Deutsche Bank into a bogeyman because.... they've always been terrible at making money and bad banks issue loans to bad debtors. I wish they could be as mad at Wells Fargo for their scandal, but there's no R involved.
No the baseline is Trump's behavior WRT "things that are not Russia." If Trump acted like a normal president for all things except Russia _and_ had his Russian behavior, I'd be more suspicious. But if the rest of his presidency has been what it has been, the Russian behavior doesn't stick out as weird enough to require special explanation.
I am not arguing that Trump's relationship with Russia is good. He did a bunch of stuff that is well documented and bad.
I am not arguing that he had the same relationship with Russia as any other one country.
But I am arguing that you don't need to posit a conspiracy theory to explain Trump's behavior - it's mostly out in the open and consistent with his overall behavior.
But then his withdrawal from the INF treaty and failure to extend the START, which by all accounts really pissed off Russia, don't make sense. But that stuff doesn't get reported much. Frankly, until Russiagate made me realize how broken my information ecosystem was, I had no idea that these things even happened.
Right - Trump's Russia policy is a chaotic mess and full of this kind of contradiction.
Trump's administration sometimes did "hawkish" things WRT Russia - usually Trump's direct fingerprints were not on them, but, particularly earlier in his administration, his staff went against his specific wishes on a regular basis. You'd see these kinds of "tough on Russia" things get picked up by the NR all fo the time.
Saying he's corruptly pressured by Russia doesn't mean that he's their slave, or that he's not pressured on some other axis, too. Trump pretty regularly throws his friends under the bus.
Democratic Party leaders never stopped calling Trump "putin's puppet" and if you believe that nobody watching that took it literally (and not seriously) I've got a bridge to sell you.
It's a strawman argument. By pointing out that Trump wasn't under the total control of Putin it does not mean that Putin did not have a suspiciously undo influence over him. Maybe the small tantrums of retaliation were out of awareness that there would NEVER be a Trump Moscow.
Every conspiracy theory has some nuggets of truth to them that "you have to explain," and every conspiracy theory adherent finds alternative explanations unconvincing. That's what separates adherents from non-believers.
Is there a thing that you suspect is true about Trump's Russia involvement that hasn't been exposed yet (as true or false) that would categorize his treatment of Russia as worse than we think?
Or are you just saying "the stuff he's already done that is now in the public record is really bad and we should impeach him" or something in that line?
Trump was NOT not a Russian asset. The best dupes never know who they are working for in reality. There has been a lot of new reporting about how long Russia was grooming him for decades. He was a million to one long shot that paid off.
Trump models himself as a mob boss so there is no clue how much he actively promotes Putin's interests versus acting out of self-interest which just happens to align with Russian goals.
And stunts like eating his translator's notes don't exactly quash Manchurian Candidate style speculations.
Some people think you can move people's personal "overton window" by crafting a evidence supported theory that is reasonable, and possibly very close to what their position is already.
Another approach is the polemica approach, for back of a better term -- you get better delta[beliefs]/delta[time] if you them hard with an exaggerated sometimes emotional statement that is far away from what they believe already.
I did not know what Sophistry means, so I looked it up: Sophistry: "the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving"
kind of -- but I mean more like "the use of extreme arguments, with the intention of convincing" -- the arguer believes (in that direction at least) and is trying to convince other people to change their minds in that direction. Hyperbole, polemica.
This is where we will disagree (and I know MY disagrees). I believe reality is simply reality and truth does not lie a one-dimensional political spectrum. It is complex and developing our understanding requires continuous effort to navigate that complexity. I do not believe persuading somebody to accept an extreme falsehood somehow brings them closer to understanding reality - if anything, I believe it deters them from pursuing a deeper understanding.
If your goal is power, have at it, good luck, just don't expect me to believe that you're doing something more than hustling for votes.
I guess I hang out in lower-rent progressive circles that Matthew, but I saw lots of progressives pushing "Epstein didn't kill himself" memes. I don't know who they were insinuating was behind it, though. Did they just get caught up in spreading a right-wing meme targeting the Clintons?
Now it makes sense to me why an Ivy League liberal friend of mine seemed so disgusted when I asked him if he thought there could be anything to the Epstein theory.
I'm a lifelong anti-conspiracist but even I don't want to go 100% against the Epstein-was-killed theory. The official story is the most likely but I don't see the evidence as airtight. I don't want to dismiss it simply because I hate most other conspiracy theories.
That said, the more time that goes by the more I raise my personal estimate of the validity of suicide, given that it's hard to keep plots secret if they involve more than 1 or 2 people
What are the priors? (I honestly don't know, I know nothing about prison conditions?)
The strongest case I can think of to dismiss a conspiracy theory is Occam's razor - some less outlandish, more plausible explanation. How likely is it Epstein committed suicide? How likely is it he was killed for non-conspiracy reasons?
Totally agree that's the right way. The first prior is easier: how many people kill themselves in similar circumstances. The next is much harder to size: how often are people, who may implicate other powerful people in crimes, murdered in prison on orders of other powerful people? Finally how strong is the evidence (guy attacked him a few weeks before, camera broke down, all involved have kept the secret and not attracted attention with their payoff money, etc...)
I'm too lazy / busy / unmotivated to try to rigorously size these 3 pieces of the puzzle. But I think that's the right way to look at it. My gut feeling is the conspiracy version wouldn't be easily dismissed if one were to put in the work of figuring that stuff out
To believe Epstein killed himself you have to believe that something maybe contrary-to-your-other beliefs happened -- that the correctional facilities were negligent enough in their suicide prevention practices to fail to prevent it from happening. Even though the people doing the suicide prevention work obviously probably knew that for this person there would be adverse career consequences and a lot of visibility if they made a mistake...
To believe someone else killed Epstein you believe that that happened sure, but maybe that something motivated those people to increase the probability of them doing something contrary to their expected interests.
I do find the "it's hard to keep a conspiracy secret" train of thought compelling...
I personally have no idea what actually happened... just exploring probabilistically why some people might find it more likely (and therefore believe) that something weird happened.
I don’t think “Epstein was murdered” is solely a right-wing meme. Maybe it’s more salient on the right. But, man, that guy had friends on both sides of the aisle. He gores everyone’s ox. To me, it’s more important as a “fuck the elites” meme, and there’s plenty of that sentiment on the right and the progressive left.
I saw polling during the primary that indicated a pretty stark split between Warren/Bernie supporters RE:Epstein killing himself, which seems right to me. As someone who does think he killed himself, I do get annoyed by the rhetoric. He was a powerful dude who was going to spend life in prison, reviled by all! Now, rather than talking about his crimes, people debate which shadowy figure killed him. I’d argue that it’s unsurprising that he killed himself, and that it actually worked out for him reputation-wise
Completely without any idea of who might have done it, I think it totally likely that Epstein did not kill himself, and a lot of my friends, many of whom are progressive, think the same thing. Nobody's spreading memes, but if it comes up in conversation, everyone will say something to the effect "yeah, someone with a lot of power really didn't want Epstein testifying."
Also, remember that a judge assigned to the case had her family assassinated. There's more than just a little circumstantial evidence that the Epstein thing is fishy.
wasn't that judge assigned to a financial scheme case between his estate and Deutsche Bank? And the guy who shot her son had a personal axe to grind with her.
That connection just seems far-fetched to me - it's hard to see what a hidden "powerful person" what would really stand to gain from setting that up. Meanwhile, if the plot to kill the judges was revealed, they'd stand to lose everything. Murdering a judge is about as serious as a crime gets
Totally a plausible explanation. The guy who did the shooting killed himself shortly afterwards, so it's not like we have any paper trail.
And to be clear, this is the only thing remotely similar to a conspiracy theory I have ever believed it, usually I'm hard anti-conspiracy. It feels weird just defending something people consider a conspiracy. But the fact remains that a man about to give testimony that would possibly incriminate some very powerful people committed suicide despite being on suicide watch, while both of his guards were asleep and the camera footage mysteriously malfunctioned.
And, without committing myself to any statement of what happened specifically, someone who knows they will be incriminated by something about to go to trial has a lot of incentive to intimidate anyone who might make that testimony. Attacking a judge and getting away with it is a very very intimidating show of power to anyone who might consider speaking up. That doesn't mean someone orchestrated it, but it is a counterargument to that statement that no one had anything to gain by doing so.
The judge thing had nothing to do with Epstein. The circumstances are well-documented in legal media. Unfortunately crackpots killing judges happens occasionally, it’s a (small) hazard of the job.
Also, let’s be real, a professional operation would’ve managed to kill the judge. Federal judges lead pretty public lives and aren’t hard to find, just check places wealthy older people like to eat dinner and you’ll find them.
I looked into it and all that was able to find, aside from his 2019 case, was that he whole lot of crazy MRA screeds. So yeah, sure, I totally buy that this was just a coincidence.
But there's still the whole "killed himself while on suicide watch, just as both guards fell asleep and the camera glitched out" thing.
One of the hallmarks of most conspiracy theories is that they can basically be explained by drawing signals from noise. You ask a million and a half questions, eventually you get answers that seem interesting for your pet theory, then you ignore everything else. The reason we think conspiracy theorists are crazy is because they ignore all of the much stronger evidence against them, and because they almost always require extremely un-parsimonious logical leaps. For instance, 9/11 "truthers" believe that the government landed a bunch of planes, destroyed them, killed everyone on board, and then blew up the building with a bomb instead. Why would the government do that instead of just, you know, crashing a plane?*
On the flip-side, the belief Epstein was murdered has none of those flaws, and in fact it is the official story that makes a lot of very un-parsimonious leaps, specifically that the prison guards just happened to fall asleep exactly as the cameras malfunctioned exactly as a high-profile prisoner killed himself. And these problems are qualitatively different from "steel melts at blah blah degrees Fahrenheit." These aren't flaws you'd have to fish for, or which rely on esoteric questions that the average person can't answer off the top of their heads. "Where were the guards?" and "where is the camera footage?" are probably the very first questions almost anyone would ask upon finding out that someone had killed themselves in prison. It's certainly the first question I would ask if I were a lawyer or investigator about to take Epstein to court.
I saw this a lot in more dirtbaggy circles, but it was generally used to aim at Clinton rather than Trump! Basically it had legs where people were either still fighting the 2016 primary or celebrating the 2016 election
Oh yeah for sure. I wasn’t following the mainstream coverage as much at the time but the comments section of r/politics, for example, was largely totally convinced that Epstein didn’t kill himself (and lots of people suggested Trump or Prince Andrew had him killed to silence him).
FWIW, "Epstein didn't kill himself" was a very prominent view on my left-leaning Facebook timeline. Bernie supporters and leftists in general REALLY liked it for the connection between Trump (who they hate) and Clinton (who they hate almost as much), and gave some extra emotional credibility to their view that democrats and republicans are two sides of the same coin (not a view that I personally hold, but very widespread, at least within my social circles).
The whole premise of a popular Leftist podcast (TrueAnon) is centered around Epstein and how they feel they "really have to hand it to" QAnon on at least this one point
A lot of people are saying Greene disavowed her 9/11 truther conspiracy. Not so.
Saying that 9/11 DID happen is not as key as saying HOW it happened. Someone needs to ask her about that. The answers will probably be revealing unless she has been successfully coached on how to hide her nutball beliefs.
Her claim that she was "allowed to believe" absurd conspiracies is an unwitting confession that she is trapped in a information bubble and her selection of sources was suspect. Piercing that bubble is nearly impossible and in her case I doubt it has been burst yet.
If you don't think progressives and leftists buy into conspiracy theories, try to find a prominent progressive politician, activist or pundit that can provide you with a truthful and coherent account of the riots that occurred in Minneapolis.
Based on a handful of arrests of people with ties to white supremacist or far-right organizations out of thousands of rioters, it has become accepted fact that the primary driver behind the riots were far-right groups operating a false-flag campaign to discredit BLM.
Neverminded the dozens of other rioters who have been arrested who have been shown to have leftist or anarchist political leanings. We are supposed to believe they would have been 100% peaceful if it wasn't for the right wing instigators. And for some reason the media has almost no interest in investigating this conspiracy.
I gotta tell you--I know it's an ancillary point, but I'm having a real eye-opener about sex trafficking over here. After reading that whole thread, here's my conspiracy theory: Cops are inflating the sex-traffic stats so that they have cover to do "Operation Asian Touch"-style stings where they get HJs on the job. Sickos! Also, I'm going to have to fight hard against the urge to make sex-traffic-skeptic my whole personality, but I also feel like this is news we've got to share.
The conflation of child trafficking, sex trafficking, and consensual prostitution is a clear strategy to create a "think of the children" crisis to justify actions that would be unpopular otherwise. And the centrality of sexual abuse of minors in the QAnon mythos is fed by the revelations of Epstein's trafficking ring, even if with seemingly counterintuitive conclusions about the role of Trump.
This is also an important way that the Q folks evangelize. People care about children and want to make them safe. Instagram influencers and celebrities care about being seen caring about children, so they repeat and amplify the claims. So we end up with Q stuff leading to thousands of moms stuck at home all summer calling into sexual abuse hotlines about children being trafficked inside of expensive furniture. Along the way, some of the people look deeper and buy into the “evidence”.
Long before Q existed it was possible to get attention and money with very flimsy allegations about sex trafficking, just because of the stigma attached to any skepticism about those claims. Remember Somaly Mam?
Yes, and likewise the modern-day American conflation of the terms "child" and "minor" is arguably not helpful in understanding the scale or nature of these issues.
Not trying to downplay it or anything. Obviously it is bad if a 17 yr old girl goes off and gets involved in / is pushed into prostitution, but some people seem to want to elide the difference between that, and like, a 4 yr old girl being snatched off the streets by a child rapist.
I don't think this is a "conspiracy" in the sense of there being any centralized planning involved; it's more of a moral panic, where various decentralized actors have incentives to inflate sex-trafficking statistics to get funding and public support.
Google and Facebook actually scan all messages for child pornography (without actually reading them, mind you, they just have algorithms that cross check hashed attachments against known hashes CP images / videos with a database and flag likely matches). It's not going to catch *new* content, but it catches existing...Tucker Carlson recently had a bit about Google not stopping him from sending child pornography through his Gmail, and it reminded me of this...
As for what else could be done, I'm sure much, but they are at least not actionless...
I don't believe 9/11 was an "inside job," but I do believe Bush responded to the briefing that warned of Al Qaeda airplane attacks by saying "okay, you've covered your ass," and doing nothing about it.
In which case, I think he is guilty of culpable negligence and dereliction of duty.
I don't think that counts as my believing a conspiracy theory, or as my merely saying that I don't like Bush.
30 years of Wolfowitz, Chaney, and Rumsfeld advocating for American military intervention in the Middle East and especially Iraq isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just a foreign policy view that got into power. But you talk about that and some people still look at you like you’re a crazy person because you’re suggesting a small and influential cadre of political appointees railroaded the entire country into an expensive and unnecessary war.
I deeply hate Bush, but I think it's easy to focus, in hindsight, on one speculative point in one PDB out of dozens and dozens. These plots were being investigated already. What exactly could Bush have done about it additionally? -- scrambled jets faster, sure, but that still would have meant shooting down four commercial airliners.
"What exactly could Bush have done about it additionally?"
Oh, lots -- beginning with putting the airports on high alert. There were airline workers who interacted with the hijackers before the flight and thought there was something suspicious about them, but did not want to make a fuss. They needed only a little permission to make a fuss, and more publicity would have sufficed.
As I recall, one of the airline counter employees committed suicide later, apparently due to regrets.
But like, you don't need the president's permission to have the FBI reach out to airlines and tell them to be extra on the lookout for terrorists. And without an actual policy change, I'm not sure how effective a solution that would be. Note, if they implemented training like El Al does, that's a different story.
But the polling question that got 25% agreement from Democrats was "did Bush intentionally let the attacks happen because he wanted war in the Middle East."
I’d highly recommend Dan Olson’s “In Search of a Flat Earth”, which starts out talking about the Flat Earth movement but then moves on to Q (as most Flat Earthers moved on to Q themselves over the last couple of years). It was made 4 months ago, but was very prescient about things like the movement pushing for something like the capitol riots.
Some folks are asking why it matters if Q is a cult or a conspiracy theory. I think the reason it matters is that this is one of the side effects of our increasingly-secular society. Religion was often able to take the reigns of people’s desire for there to be more order in the universe, but as more people fall away from religion you end up with things like QAnon ready to jump in.
I remember being rather peeved at Dara and Jane in the Epstein episode. Prison conditions ARE bad, and suicide is a problem, but systemic answers aren't always great at explaining specific cases. In the specific case of Epstein, considering his ties and the potential explosiveness of his testimony, I think it's insane levels of delusion to literally immediately after his death conclude "see, told y'all prisons were really bad - this has nothing to do with the specifics of this case though."
I agree!
I think it had to do with the specifics of his case, in that unlike most people in MDC he was facing a lifetime in federal prison for child sex crimes, (child rapists are not popular in prison) and he had little experience or background in prison life. His motivations were much higher than the typical MDC inmate, who is looking at 30 months for a weapons or narcotics charge and has spent time in state or federal lockup previously.
There are other factors that make it seem like a conspiracy. When he died, Epstein was already on a suicide watch, so you'd think that would mean increased scrutiny. Yet, at the time when he killed himself, both of his guards accidentally fell asleep [1], and the camera footage just happened to unfortunately disappear because of an inexplicable glitch [2]. That's a whole lot of coincidences.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-jail-officers.html
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205
I suppose, but in another sense that makes his death even more of failure. Like even if you don't weigh his potential to rat out some extremely powerful people (and thus their incentive to not let him get a trial), the fact that he was a suicide risk means he should be watched like a hawk.
I mean I guess that is the argument from the prison reform crowd, but it's incredibly unsatisfying and I'm even going to say negligent to ignore who he was, what he was accused of, and who his ties were.
Shall we put a number on the Epstein thing? I think there's a 15% chance Epstein was murdered. That's well into the territory of things I consider "reasonable speculation"; my mental category of "conspiracy theories" is reserved for "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" stuff where I'm something like 99% sure they're wrong.
So far, my favorite part of today's essay is this:
"...consumers of less legitimate media (blogs and grocery store tabloids).”
Yup. Every morning, I shuffle down to bodega, pick up my cigs and a few powerball numbers if I'm feeling flush, and grab my copies of the "National Enquirer" and "Slow Boring."
It made sense in 2006!
(It also makes sense today -- we all know anything published on a Substack will be considered in The Right Circles as less legitimate than if it came from a major publication)
I noted that as well, and saw that it was a quote from something in 2006. It's an interesting time capsule to think of a moment when everything that is now in a social media site of some sort was also a blog. (And interesting that I recall the Times of London switching from "broadsheet" to "tabloid" format, which has changed some of the association of the paper size - but it turns out that this switch occurred in 2004.)
So I guess this is why I subscribed. When you're not talking about the impacts of systemic racism, your contrarian views are helpful. And dryly funny. I agree on almost all counts, especially since I spent some time yesterday trying to figure out whether/how to respond to a cousin who claimed that 'food provided by the good Lord" would protect her against Covid, and that therefore she did not need to be vaccinated. After thinking about the conspiracies embedded in that, I responded by posting something on FB that compared the number of deaths from anaphylaxis from both Pfizer and Moderna (71) to the 450,000 deaths from Covid-19. I had to leave it at that, hoping my cousin would see it, but knowing it wouldn't convince her. I hope I reached some of our shared "friends' who haven't progressed as far down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole.
But then again, as a mentor of mine once said: Even paranoids have real enemies. Humility is called for.
The far more wide-spread conspiracy that concerns me is that something like 75% of Republicans think the Democrats committed massive, organized election fraud in 2020. TBH I'd been associating it strongly with Q but I didn't realize only 7% of people copped to being Q-urious. Obviously conspiracy theories are far more disturbing when they're fed by the sitting president and a major "news" network. Interestingly it seems more convincing to argue the causality in the opposite direction--people convinced of the bigger conspiracy are more inclined to get sucked into cults like QAnon as a respite/way to "fight back."
In 2018, 66% of Democrats thought Russia *changed vote tallies* to get DJT his win: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsWEDJLWMAgUNUK?format=jpg
That was a survey-belief.
I mean I know people who will "joke" about it being true, but I'd buy that it's mostly an artifact of partisanship. I also buy that most Republicans who say Democrats stole 2020 do so out of partisanship.
I don't think Russia managed to change any actual votes in 2016 but it wasn't for a lack trying. Their penetration of voter registration data bases was disturbingly deep. And Republicans are inexplicably opposed to measures which would genuinely strengthen election security rather than running around ranting about non-existent fraud.
That's disturbing too.
If you're like me and live in a blue state with a bunch of vaguely Democrat neighbors who have Biden and BLM lawn signs and it's hard to find someone who will publicly admit to voting for Trump then I think you can also get a feel for the gradients of wrong belief.
No one in my social circle is hard core "the Russians hacked into this computer and paid off this guy" insert elaborate hoax here.
But everyone I know is _really really sloppy_ about thinking about Russia. Most of them are not very political, and if you ask them how Russia interfered with the election they'll say something like "I bet they have a pee tape." And it's not meant to be a well thought out falsifiable thing we can fact check, it's meant to be a gut level statement about how much they despise Trump.
When talking with conservatives, I hear "why don't you police your own side", which is of coarse exactly what I want to say to them.
I think the dynamic is that if an irrational belief _seems_ harmless (viewed through the partisan lens of the community that holds onto it), people who say those things aren't going to get very much push-back. If you're a progressive and mad at Trump, how much time do you burn going "yeah there's no evidence for that.")
With Conservatives you can sometimes get a vague "Hillary's got to be crooked - there's so much smoke there has to be a fire."
There's all sorts of intermediate levels with voting too - if you're Conservative but not delusional, maybe your take is that the crazy stuff Trump and Giuliani alleged is false, but there is a real voter fraud problem and something bad probably happened in Philadelphia and while it doesn't mean that mathematically Trump should be president, there's definitely a Real Problem™ here that needs to be fixed in the future (and Democrats are wrong to say that the system actually works fine).
I haven't seen actual evidence for this belief, but if you've been listening to conservative media talk about voter fraud for years now, it's much easier to believe this than to believe that you voted for someone so delusional that he spent his lame duck period blatantly lying about the election and it so terrorized the whole party that everyone either shut their mouth and let him do it or gave oxygen to the wing nuts.
Came here to mention this. The Steele dosier was an embarrassing moment for the media that was indefensible at the time and has become worse since.
The "conspiracy theory" form of Russiagate is that Trump was a Manchurian Candidate who spent 4 years doing whatever Putin wanted him to do, and I know at least a dozen people aged 50+ who would volunteer this belief at every opportunity.
It's not a conspiracy theory if Nancy Pelosi believes the idea. :-)
I mean, ok, but then you have to explain the reluctance of the Trump administration to impose sanctions required by statutory law, or the deletion of any plank regarding Ukraine from the GOP platform in 2016 once Trump was the nominee. Or the sharing with Putin of confidential Israeli intelligence.
Right, but "he's a Manchurian candidate" was always the dumbest form of theorizing about the Trump + Russia connection.
There's clearly a single piece of empirical hard evidence we have to face (and that any good conspiracy theory needs to anchor to) - Trump is _way_ less of a Russia hawk than anyone else comparable to him - other presidents, the GOP, foreign policy hands. He sticks out!
But we don't have to assume a conspiracy when stupidity will explain it. Trump's a guy who talks about national security issues in the dining room at Maralago in front of guests. He told Bob Woodward about the reports he was getting on COVID a year ago. He publicly fawns over Kim Jung Un. He hired Steve Bannon. His election campaign team was family members and the B team because he values loyalty over competence and a bunch of the A-team GOPers were on his shit list for saying mean things about him in the primary.
In this light, his behavior seems pretty understandable? Sharing intel with Putin is in line with a series of other incompetent foreign policy screw-ups he had - ask the Kurds. He seems to have some kind of weird personal fan-boy thing with Putin, but had that over Kim and generally seems to be a poor judge of people - Rudy Giuliani is his lawyer!
You only need to explain Trump's behavior WRT Russia as weird if your baseline is a normal President.
Full disclosure: I theorized for a very long time that he had Russian financing of his Real Estate projects based on the idea that (1) Russians do launder money via NYC Real Estate and (2) Trump knows a bunch of Russians and (3) Trump was somehow getting financing despite a bunch of bankruptcies.
I have dropped that believe when it came out that Deutsche Bank loaned him a bunch of money...of coarse it was DB...
My favorite part of the Russiagate panic was the left-of-center turning Deutsche Bank into a bogeyman because.... they've always been terrible at making money and bad banks issue loans to bad debtors. I wish they could be as mad at Wells Fargo for their scandal, but there's no R involved.
Exactly. If you told me "it's going to turn out that _one_ Wallstreet bank loaned trump the money", surely DB goes to the top of the list. :-)
"You only need to explain Trump's behavior WRT Russia as weird if your baseline is a normal President."
I don't get it. Surely the baseline is a normal President?
No the baseline is Trump's behavior WRT "things that are not Russia." If Trump acted like a normal president for all things except Russia _and_ had his Russian behavior, I'd be more suspicious. But if the rest of his presidency has been what it has been, the Russian behavior doesn't stick out as weird enough to require special explanation.
Which other despotic authoritarian did his campaign transmit internal polling data to, and share classified secrets with?
As much as I agree with your position, Trump tweeted classified secrets. Thus he shared classified information with every leader despotic or not.
Let's go back to the beginning of the thread.
I am not arguing that Trump's relationship with Russia is good. He did a bunch of stuff that is well documented and bad.
I am not arguing that he had the same relationship with Russia as any other one country.
But I am arguing that you don't need to posit a conspiracy theory to explain Trump's behavior - it's mostly out in the open and consistent with his overall behavior.
But then his withdrawal from the INF treaty and failure to extend the START, which by all accounts really pissed off Russia, don't make sense. But that stuff doesn't get reported much. Frankly, until Russiagate made me realize how broken my information ecosystem was, I had no idea that these things even happened.
Right - Trump's Russia policy is a chaotic mess and full of this kind of contradiction.
Trump's administration sometimes did "hawkish" things WRT Russia - usually Trump's direct fingerprints were not on them, but, particularly earlier in his administration, his staff went against his specific wishes on a regular basis. You'd see these kinds of "tough on Russia" things get picked up by the NR all fo the time.
Saying he's corruptly pressured by Russia doesn't mean that he's their slave, or that he's not pressured on some other axis, too. Trump pretty regularly throws his friends under the bus.
> Saying he's corruptly pressured by Russia doesn't mean that he's their slave
That's literally the conspiracy theory of "the manchurian candidate" though people would use "puppet" instead of "slave"
Nobody actually asserts Trump was The Manchurian Candidate except people making fun of concerns about Russian kompromat on the US President, though.
Democratic Party leaders never stopped calling Trump "putin's puppet" and if you believe that nobody watching that took it literally (and not seriously) I've got a bridge to sell you.
It's a strawman argument. By pointing out that Trump wasn't under the total control of Putin it does not mean that Putin did not have a suspiciously undo influence over him. Maybe the small tantrums of retaliation were out of awareness that there would NEVER be a Trump Moscow.
Thank you for doing the listing of the details of the conspiracy theory so I didn't have to! I was feeling lazy.
Right, but those things aren't theoretical, they're true.
Every conspiracy theory has some nuggets of truth to them that "you have to explain," and every conspiracy theory adherent finds alternative explanations unconvincing. That's what separates adherents from non-believers.
Every conspiracy theory, perhaps, but also every criminal conviction of a defendant beyond a reasonable doubt, too.
Is there a thing that you suspect is true about Trump's Russia involvement that hasn't been exposed yet (as true or false) that would categorize his treatment of Russia as worse than we think?
Or are you just saying "the stuff he's already done that is now in the public record is really bad and we should impeach him" or something in that line?
Trump was NOT not a Russian asset. The best dupes never know who they are working for in reality. There has been a lot of new reporting about how long Russia was grooming him for decades. He was a million to one long shot that paid off.
Trump models himself as a mob boss so there is no clue how much he actively promotes Putin's interests versus acting out of self-interest which just happens to align with Russian goals.
And stunts like eating his translator's notes don't exactly quash Manchurian Candidate style speculations.
My understanding is that being an "intelligence asset" doesn't necessarily entail knowing you are one.
Poor Martha... (from the Americans if you don't know the reference.)
Some people think you can move people's personal "overton window" by crafting a evidence supported theory that is reasonable, and possibly very close to what their position is already.
Another approach is the polemica approach, for back of a better term -- you get better delta[beliefs]/delta[time] if you them hard with an exaggerated sometimes emotional statement that is far away from what they believe already.
Sophistry is I believe the word you're looking for.
I did not know what Sophistry means, so I looked it up: Sophistry: "the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving"
kind of -- but I mean more like "the use of extreme arguments, with the intention of convincing" -- the arguer believes (in that direction at least) and is trying to convince other people to change their minds in that direction. Hyperbole, polemica.
This is where we will disagree (and I know MY disagrees). I believe reality is simply reality and truth does not lie a one-dimensional political spectrum. It is complex and developing our understanding requires continuous effort to navigate that complexity. I do not believe persuading somebody to accept an extreme falsehood somehow brings them closer to understanding reality - if anything, I believe it deters them from pursuing a deeper understanding.
If your goal is power, have at it, good luck, just don't expect me to believe that you're doing something more than hustling for votes.
I guess I hang out in lower-rent progressive circles that Matthew, but I saw lots of progressives pushing "Epstein didn't kill himself" memes. I don't know who they were insinuating was behind it, though. Did they just get caught up in spreading a right-wing meme targeting the Clintons?
I was going to say this as well. I don't think the don't-say-Epstein-didn't-kill-himself taboo filtered down to regular progressives.
Yes, I was surprised to read that in the article. My middle-class progressive friends have no such taboo.
I like your friends!
Now it makes sense to me why an Ivy League liberal friend of mine seemed so disgusted when I asked him if he thought there could be anything to the Epstein theory.
I'm a lifelong anti-conspiracist but even I don't want to go 100% against the Epstein-was-killed theory. The official story is the most likely but I don't see the evidence as airtight. I don't want to dismiss it simply because I hate most other conspiracy theories.
That said, the more time that goes by the more I raise my personal estimate of the validity of suicide, given that it's hard to keep plots secret if they involve more than 1 or 2 people
What are the priors? (I honestly don't know, I know nothing about prison conditions?)
The strongest case I can think of to dismiss a conspiracy theory is Occam's razor - some less outlandish, more plausible explanation. How likely is it Epstein committed suicide? How likely is it he was killed for non-conspiracy reasons?
Totally agree that's the right way. The first prior is easier: how many people kill themselves in similar circumstances. The next is much harder to size: how often are people, who may implicate other powerful people in crimes, murdered in prison on orders of other powerful people? Finally how strong is the evidence (guy attacked him a few weeks before, camera broke down, all involved have kept the secret and not attracted attention with their payoff money, etc...)
I'm too lazy / busy / unmotivated to try to rigorously size these 3 pieces of the puzzle. But I think that's the right way to look at it. My gut feeling is the conspiracy version wouldn't be easily dismissed if one were to put in the work of figuring that stuff out
To believe Epstein killed himself you have to believe that something maybe contrary-to-your-other beliefs happened -- that the correctional facilities were negligent enough in their suicide prevention practices to fail to prevent it from happening. Even though the people doing the suicide prevention work obviously probably knew that for this person there would be adverse career consequences and a lot of visibility if they made a mistake...
To believe someone else killed Epstein you believe that that happened sure, but maybe that something motivated those people to increase the probability of them doing something contrary to their expected interests.
I do find the "it's hard to keep a conspiracy secret" train of thought compelling...
I personally have no idea what actually happened... just exploring probabilistically why some people might find it more likely (and therefore believe) that something weird happened.
Same and I, as a middle-class progressive, sit on that fence at times.
I don’t think “Epstein was murdered” is solely a right-wing meme. Maybe it’s more salient on the right. But, man, that guy had friends on both sides of the aisle. He gores everyone’s ox. To me, it’s more important as a “fuck the elites” meme, and there’s plenty of that sentiment on the right and the progressive left.
I saw polling during the primary that indicated a pretty stark split between Warren/Bernie supporters RE:Epstein killing himself, which seems right to me. As someone who does think he killed himself, I do get annoyed by the rhetoric. He was a powerful dude who was going to spend life in prison, reviled by all! Now, rather than talking about his crimes, people debate which shadowy figure killed him. I’d argue that it’s unsurprising that he killed himself, and that it actually worked out for him reputation-wise
Completely without any idea of who might have done it, I think it totally likely that Epstein did not kill himself, and a lot of my friends, many of whom are progressive, think the same thing. Nobody's spreading memes, but if it comes up in conversation, everyone will say something to the effect "yeah, someone with a lot of power really didn't want Epstein testifying."
Also, remember that a judge assigned to the case had her family assassinated. There's more than just a little circumstantial evidence that the Epstein thing is fishy.
wasn't that judge assigned to a financial scheme case between his estate and Deutsche Bank? And the guy who shot her son had a personal axe to grind with her.
That connection just seems far-fetched to me - it's hard to see what a hidden "powerful person" what would really stand to gain from setting that up. Meanwhile, if the plot to kill the judges was revealed, they'd stand to lose everything. Murdering a judge is about as serious as a crime gets
Totally a plausible explanation. The guy who did the shooting killed himself shortly afterwards, so it's not like we have any paper trail.
And to be clear, this is the only thing remotely similar to a conspiracy theory I have ever believed it, usually I'm hard anti-conspiracy. It feels weird just defending something people consider a conspiracy. But the fact remains that a man about to give testimony that would possibly incriminate some very powerful people committed suicide despite being on suicide watch, while both of his guards were asleep and the camera footage mysteriously malfunctioned.
And, without committing myself to any statement of what happened specifically, someone who knows they will be incriminated by something about to go to trial has a lot of incentive to intimidate anyone who might make that testimony. Attacking a judge and getting away with it is a very very intimidating show of power to anyone who might consider speaking up. That doesn't mean someone orchestrated it, but it is a counterargument to that statement that no one had anything to gain by doing so.
The judge thing had nothing to do with Epstein. The circumstances are well-documented in legal media. Unfortunately crackpots killing judges happens occasionally, it’s a (small) hazard of the job.
Also, let’s be real, a professional operation would’ve managed to kill the judge. Federal judges lead pretty public lives and aren’t hard to find, just check places wealthy older people like to eat dinner and you’ll find them.
I looked into it and all that was able to find, aside from his 2019 case, was that he whole lot of crazy MRA screeds. So yeah, sure, I totally buy that this was just a coincidence.
But there's still the whole "killed himself while on suicide watch, just as both guards fell asleep and the camera glitched out" thing.
One of the hallmarks of most conspiracy theories is that they can basically be explained by drawing signals from noise. You ask a million and a half questions, eventually you get answers that seem interesting for your pet theory, then you ignore everything else. The reason we think conspiracy theorists are crazy is because they ignore all of the much stronger evidence against them, and because they almost always require extremely un-parsimonious logical leaps. For instance, 9/11 "truthers" believe that the government landed a bunch of planes, destroyed them, killed everyone on board, and then blew up the building with a bomb instead. Why would the government do that instead of just, you know, crashing a plane?*
On the flip-side, the belief Epstein was murdered has none of those flaws, and in fact it is the official story that makes a lot of very un-parsimonious leaps, specifically that the prison guards just happened to fall asleep exactly as the cameras malfunctioned exactly as a high-profile prisoner killed himself. And these problems are qualitatively different from "steel melts at blah blah degrees Fahrenheit." These aren't flaws you'd have to fish for, or which rely on esoteric questions that the average person can't answer off the top of their heads. "Where were the guards?" and "where is the camera footage?" are probably the very first questions almost anyone would ask upon finding out that someone had killed themselves in prison. It's certainly the first question I would ask if I were a lawyer or investigator about to take Epstein to court.
* Scott Alexander has a great blog post about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/
I saw this a lot in more dirtbaggy circles, but it was generally used to aim at Clinton rather than Trump! Basically it had legs where people were either still fighting the 2016 primary or celebrating the 2016 election
Oh yeah for sure. I wasn’t following the mainstream coverage as much at the time but the comments section of r/politics, for example, was largely totally convinced that Epstein didn’t kill himself (and lots of people suggested Trump or Prince Andrew had him killed to silence him).
FWIW, "Epstein didn't kill himself" was a very prominent view on my left-leaning Facebook timeline. Bernie supporters and leftists in general REALLY liked it for the connection between Trump (who they hate) and Clinton (who they hate almost as much), and gave some extra emotional credibility to their view that democrats and republicans are two sides of the same coin (not a view that I personally hold, but very widespread, at least within my social circles).
The whole premise of a popular Leftist podcast (TrueAnon) is centered around Epstein and how they feel they "really have to hand it to" QAnon on at least this one point
I just have say : the inclusion of RATM lyrics in the essay justified my decision to subscribe.
Me and Paul Ryan, listening to RATM
Jeez, way to ruin everything. Now I don’t even want to “wake up.”
A lot of people are saying Greene disavowed her 9/11 truther conspiracy. Not so.
Saying that 9/11 DID happen is not as key as saying HOW it happened. Someone needs to ask her about that. The answers will probably be revealing unless she has been successfully coached on how to hide her nutball beliefs.
Her claim that she was "allowed to believe" absurd conspiracies is an unwitting confession that she is trapped in a information bubble and her selection of sources was suspect. Piercing that bubble is nearly impossible and in her case I doubt it has been burst yet.
On a thread about conspiracy theories, I think all posts should begin with "A lot of people are saying...."
Alternatively, "What they're trying to hide from us is...."
If you don't think progressives and leftists buy into conspiracy theories, try to find a prominent progressive politician, activist or pundit that can provide you with a truthful and coherent account of the riots that occurred in Minneapolis.
Based on a handful of arrests of people with ties to white supremacist or far-right organizations out of thousands of rioters, it has become accepted fact that the primary driver behind the riots were far-right groups operating a false-flag campaign to discredit BLM.
Neverminded the dozens of other rioters who have been arrested who have been shown to have leftist or anarchist political leanings. We are supposed to believe they would have been 100% peaceful if it wasn't for the right wing instigators. And for some reason the media has almost no interest in investigating this conspiracy.
I gotta tell you--I know it's an ancillary point, but I'm having a real eye-opener about sex trafficking over here. After reading that whole thread, here's my conspiracy theory: Cops are inflating the sex-traffic stats so that they have cover to do "Operation Asian Touch"-style stings where they get HJs on the job. Sickos! Also, I'm going to have to fight hard against the urge to make sex-traffic-skeptic my whole personality, but I also feel like this is news we've got to share.
The conflation of child trafficking, sex trafficking, and consensual prostitution is a clear strategy to create a "think of the children" crisis to justify actions that would be unpopular otherwise. And the centrality of sexual abuse of minors in the QAnon mythos is fed by the revelations of Epstein's trafficking ring, even if with seemingly counterintuitive conclusions about the role of Trump.
This is also an important way that the Q folks evangelize. People care about children and want to make them safe. Instagram influencers and celebrities care about being seen caring about children, so they repeat and amplify the claims. So we end up with Q stuff leading to thousands of moms stuck at home all summer calling into sexual abuse hotlines about children being trafficked inside of expensive furniture. Along the way, some of the people look deeper and buy into the “evidence”.
Long before Q existed it was possible to get attention and money with very flimsy allegations about sex trafficking, just because of the stigma attached to any skepticism about those claims. Remember Somaly Mam?
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/somaly-mam-scandal-victims-can-lie/372188/
I don't and this is very interesting, thanks!
Yes, and likewise the modern-day American conflation of the terms "child" and "minor" is arguably not helpful in understanding the scale or nature of these issues.
Not trying to downplay it or anything. Obviously it is bad if a 17 yr old girl goes off and gets involved in / is pushed into prostitution, but some people seem to want to elide the difference between that, and like, a 4 yr old girl being snatched off the streets by a child rapist.
I don't think this is a "conspiracy" in the sense of there being any centralized planning involved; it's more of a moral panic, where various decentralized actors have incentives to inflate sex-trafficking statistics to get funding and public support.
Google and Facebook actually scan all messages for child pornography (without actually reading them, mind you, they just have algorithms that cross check hashed attachments against known hashes CP images / videos with a database and flag likely matches). It's not going to catch *new* content, but it catches existing...Tucker Carlson recently had a bit about Google not stopping him from sending child pornography through his Gmail, and it reminded me of this...
As for what else could be done, I'm sure much, but they are at least not actionless...
https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/5/5970141/how-google-scans-your-gmail-for-child-porn
SlateStarCodex’s post on “survey-belief” is a good one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/. I don’t think that a quarter of Democrats really believed 9/11 was an inside job, for instance; that was a way to signal “I don’t like Bush.”
I don't believe 9/11 was an "inside job," but I do believe Bush responded to the briefing that warned of Al Qaeda airplane attacks by saying "okay, you've covered your ass," and doing nothing about it.
In which case, I think he is guilty of culpable negligence and dereliction of duty.
I don't think that counts as my believing a conspiracy theory, or as my merely saying that I don't like Bush.
I can empathize.
30 years of Wolfowitz, Chaney, and Rumsfeld advocating for American military intervention in the Middle East and especially Iraq isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just a foreign policy view that got into power. But you talk about that and some people still look at you like you’re a crazy person because you’re suggesting a small and influential cadre of political appointees railroaded the entire country into an expensive and unnecessary war.
Excellent point. One person's conspiracy is another person's group of committed advocates.
I deeply hate Bush, but I think it's easy to focus, in hindsight, on one speculative point in one PDB out of dozens and dozens. These plots were being investigated already. What exactly could Bush have done about it additionally? -- scrambled jets faster, sure, but that still would have meant shooting down four commercial airliners.
"What exactly could Bush have done about it additionally?"
Oh, lots -- beginning with putting the airports on high alert. There were airline workers who interacted with the hijackers before the flight and thought there was something suspicious about them, but did not want to make a fuss. They needed only a little permission to make a fuss, and more publicity would have sufficed.
As I recall, one of the airline counter employees committed suicide later, apparently due to regrets.
But like, you don't need the president's permission to have the FBI reach out to airlines and tell them to be extra on the lookout for terrorists. And without an actual policy change, I'm not sure how effective a solution that would be. Note, if they implemented training like El Al does, that's a different story.
But the polling question that got 25% agreement from Democrats was "did Bush intentionally let the attacks happen because he wanted war in the Middle East."
Yeah, I'm not one of that 25%. I don't find that plausible at all.
Cool! I'm just saying, my comment wasn't aimed at you.
I’d highly recommend Dan Olson’s “In Search of a Flat Earth”, which starts out talking about the Flat Earth movement but then moves on to Q (as most Flat Earthers moved on to Q themselves over the last couple of years). It was made 4 months ago, but was very prescient about things like the movement pushing for something like the capitol riots.
https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44
Some folks are asking why it matters if Q is a cult or a conspiracy theory. I think the reason it matters is that this is one of the side effects of our increasingly-secular society. Religion was often able to take the reigns of people’s desire for there to be more order in the universe, but as more people fall away from religion you end up with things like QAnon ready to jump in.