Here's a Conspiracy Theory for You

 

A smiling face

Scott Adams has pointed out that, once you set up a secret service, it is only a matter of time before they take over the government. You are sending them large sums, with little democratic oversight, or oversight of any kind—because of the need for secrecy. They essentially do whatever they want. It is only a matter of time before these folks seize their opportunity to control government.

The KGB, or what was the KGB, has been in control of Russia for some time. Putin was their guy; before him, Andropov.

Assuming that the CIA, FBI, and/or associated agencies is already in control in the US explains a great deal. It explains why the Democratic field last time folded abruptly before Super Tuesday in favour of Biden. Something was obviously happening behind the scenes, something well-coordinated and with the ability to reward and punish--with greater ability to do that than the eventual nominee. It explains why the Democrats’ Iowa caucus was botched—it was producing the wrong result. It explains why the Democrats went for Biden and Harris, both incompetent party hacks; best to have compliant people, known good soldiers, with no fixed opinions of their own. It explains why they hated Tusi Gabbard, the Democrats’ most attractive candidate last race. She had principles, and so would not be easily controlled. Bernie Sanders was obviously controlled opposition, never meant to win, just to make it all look legit. The minute he was on the cusp of victory, twice, in two races, he folded. It explains who was able to get to Jeffrey Epstein, and how they had the means; it explains many unexplained and improbable suicides by Clinton aides and various political operatives. It explains the apparent rigging of the 2020 election in various ways; after rigging the media coverage, suppressing the Hunter laptop, and forging evidence of a Trump-Russia connection, Trump was still winning on election night. So they suspended the counting, started again next morning, and, miraculously, reported all kinds of extra ballots, all supporting Biden. It explains how determined they are to get Trump out of the race, by any means necessary: like Gabbard, he is not controllable. 

Occam’s Razor begins to argue in favour of such a conspiracy: it is the simplest explanation of many observed facts. Including the fact that “conspiracy theories” are now taboo.

RFK Jr. believes the CIA was involve in the assassination of his uncle JFK. He claims his father thought so too. He believes this is why the relevant documents have still not been released, sixty years later. 

That might have been the point at which they first seized control.

In Canada, there are signs of a similar conspiracy; growing signs. The ability of Andrew Scheer to overtake Maxime Bernier for the Conservative leadership looks possible, but surprising. Yes, there are always factions playing dirty tricks behind the scenes. But Bernier, as we have seen since, was a bit of a loose cannon; Scheer, a former House Speaker, was compliant and agreeable, a smiling face. The abrupt fall of Scheer looks equally odd, as did the sudden withdrawal from the race of all the top candidates except Peter MacKay, within a couple of weeks, very like the coalescing around Biden in the States. The more so since at least two of them eagerly ran in the next contest. O’Toole looks like he was controlled opposition. He unexpectedly won nevertheless; but then embraced the MacKay platform. He was a good soldier; he could be allowed to run because he could be counted on to do what he was told.

There seemed again a heavy-handed effort to prevent unwanted candidates from running to succeed O’Toole. This time the deck seemed stacked in favour of Poilievre. This is a bad sign.

Tom Mulcair’s loss of the NDP leadership also looked highly suspicious. He hadn’t won power, but the NDP cannot expect that; he seemed their best candidate, and deserving of another shot. It looked to many observers as though the vote that ousted him was rigged. 

And Jagmeet Singh’s dogged commitment to supporting the Trudeau government no matter what does not seem to make any electoral sense for the NDP--as though he is taking orders behind the scenes, and the voters and winning votes are not his main concern. Rather like those candidates in the US who now no longer even bother to get out and campaign. It’s all, as Stalin said, in who counts the votes, not in who votes.

Trudeau himself resembles Biden in being incompetent in the job, and obviously not qualified. He’s not interested in governing, just in acting the part. The very sort you want, if you are controlling things in the background.

Interestingly, though, the security services seem to have withdrawn their support for Trudeau. It was someone from the security services who blew the whistle recently on Chinese election interference. 

We may have two warring factions. Which would be relatively lucky for Canada.

The International Canadian Conspiracy Comes for Trump

 

Here’s a conspiracy theory based on unsubstantiated rumours. Deal with it.

A couple of weeks ago, some talking Tuber was spreading the story that the US Military had software that could rig foreign elections. And they had used it successfully. Specifically, the rumour held, they had used it in Canada.

I knew that one wasn’t true. I know the Canadian voting process. No piece of software could interfere with a Canadian election, which involves a paper trail and a public tallying observed by all parties, each of whom can keep their own independent records. I felt proud of the good old Canadian low-tech traditions. And scoffed at the foolish Americans who tinkered with things like voting machines.

Then in the current chaos, a couple of days ago, another rumour popped up online that one county in Michigan had wrongly given 6,000 Trump votes to Biden. And this was blamed on a software glitch.

Funny sort of software glitch. Sounds pretty boneheaded of the programmer who could allow such a basic coding error.

Then I hear that the same software is being used in over sixty Michigan counties. At this level, multiplied by sixty, the same software error could easily have flipped the entire state from Trump to Biden. That’s 360,000 votes. Biden leads Trump in the local count, at the moment, by about 130,000 votes.

Then I hear that the same software is being used in all the tightly-contested swing states, where the vote totals have, since election night, swung from Trump to Biden. It is used in 33 states.

Now I hear that the software is made by a private company called “Dominion Voting Systems.” A Canadian company, founded in 2002. The code is proprietary.

Could that rumour about election-fixing software having been used in Canada have been a case of “Chinese whispers”? Was it that the software was made in Canada, rather than used there?

Is Canada fixing US elections, instead of the other way around?

Or, more likely:

If the US Military, or the CIA, say, wanted to create a software program that they could use to control foreign elections, they would not have it made in the USA. That would raise suspicions. Everyone thinks of Canada as more benign; a stable democracy, and everyone’s buddy internationally. 

Then, of course, you would set up the company as private, so that nobody could see the code. Use a nice generic Canadian-sounding name. You want people to understand it is Canadian.

But Canada is tightly enough in the US orbit, close enough, interconnected enough, and dependent enough on the US, that the US government could still be confident of absolute control.

Why wouldn’t the CIA, say, do something like this, as a matter of course? They are pretty much not doing their job if they haven’t.

Perhaps as purely a fringe benefit, this means that the CIA has the ability, if they so choose, to fix any US election as well.

We know the “Deep State,” the permanent bureaucracy, is opposed to Trump. We know that the FBI tried to stage what was essentially a coup with the “Russia collusion” business. Prepared to go that far, even at the risk of exposure, why wouldn’t they go far enough to fix the next election, if they fairly easily could?

More generally, it seems inevitable that any state with an active covert activities arm will sooner or later see that covert organization organizing to control its own government. We saw it in the Soviet Union as early as Stalin’s death; Beria failed, but Yuri Andropov later succeeded, and old KGB hand Putin succeeded him. We saw it in Nazi Germany; Canaris and the Abwehr worked secretly against the Nazi government throughout the war. If we have not seen it in Britain, perhaps that is only because there was no need. The intelligence operation and the ruling class have always been indistinguishable and in charge. Didn’t we all know that? Brits simply trust their civil service and ruling elite to know best, and always have.

The footprints have, it seems to me, been visible for some time. Someone has been running things behind the scenes in the Democratic Party, this election and last, pre-determining the nominee regardless of the popular vote. Biden looks like a straw candidate, and it is bizarre how all the other candidacies suddenly conceded. … The Democratic Party being, like the Liberal Party in Canada, the party of the permanent bureaucracy.

Yes, it sounds like the perfect conspiracy theory, the kind tinfoil hats were invented for. 

If it is real, the truth will probably come out. Conspiracies are real; ask Julius Caesar. It is just that the big ones rarely succeed.

The Devil Makes Them Do It

Recent reports on CNN are astounding as examples of blatant lying. They illustrate what happens when someone commits to a vice. Not only do they lie: their lies tend to become the very opposite of the truth, and they become preoccupied with accusing others of exactly what they are doing.

The topic is this tweet by Donald Trump:

The tweet was never actually shown by CNN, but was introduced by Don Lemon as “this crazy conspiracy theory.” “Conspiracy theory” seems to have become the stock cliché by which it is referred to in the mainstream media.

But in what sense can it be so described? Antifa is a known conspiracy, not a theory. The question is only about the significance of the actions of one individual. By definition, one cannot have a conspiracy of one.

Stelter: “he takes in this BS and poisoned information.”

Stelter: “This all started from a right-wing blog called Conservative Treehouse, which traffics in hyperpartisan, often-times made-up information.”

The Conservative Treehouse piece is here.

No evidence is advanced that Conservative Treehouse has ever made up information. Even had they, this is a perfect example of the ad hominem fallacy. If it is true, it does not matter where the story originated.

Stelter: “there was a post, from SOMEONE, making up this claim anonymously…”

Stelter is perhaps being slippery in not being clear what “this claim” means. The only clear claim made in the Trump tweet is that the protester fell harder than he was pushed. Something anyone can judge for themselves by watching the video.

And the author of “this claim,” whatever else is being referred to, is “anonymous” only in the sense that the site’s editorials, like those of most newspapers, are anonymous. The post was by “Sundance,” who appears to be the site’s owner or editor. He writes the site’s mission statement. I expect any competent and honest journalist could track down his legal name, if they wanted to. They might also find that George Orwell was not a real name; nor Mark Twain.

And his claims are heavily documented, not “made up.” Including tweet threads from the man himself, showing a strong left-wing and anti-police bias, eyewitness testimony, and a statement by the mayor of Buffalo identifying him as a known provocateur.

Specific claims made in the Treehouse article, although not made by Trump: “professional activist, agitator and Antifa provocateur.”

The one item that might be questionable, given the evidence presented, is that he was a member of Antifa. Given the nature of that organization, any such claim can probably rarely be either proven or disproven. They are a loose association of other groups. Let’s rely on CNN’s own definition: “"[t]he term [antifa] is used to define a broad group of people whose political beliefs lean toward the left -- often the far left -- but do not conform with the Democratic Party platform.” By their own definition, then, it seems profoundly disingenuous of them to claim there is any serious doubt that calling Gugino a member of Antifa was a fair observation.

By contrast, CNN, Stelter, and Lemon do not document their claim that the Trump tweet was false in any way. They seem to have just made it up. They are blaming Trump for doing exactly what they are doing, while they are doing it.

“One America News repeated THE LIE from Conservative Treehouse…"

Here is the One America News coverage:

Stelter inadvertently admits that neither Trump nor OANN actually even said the man was a member of Antifa--only that he could be. “It’s always with a shroud of mystery,” he explains. He suggests they failed to make the claim only so that it could not be disproven. In other words, he is blaming them for NOT making a claim he says is false.

Their supposed motive is of course ridiculous. If Stelter can disprove the claim, he can disprove it equally well whether or not anyone has made it.

Stelter concludes “but this is clearly a kooky theory with no evidence to back it up.”

Lemon then says, “Some people are connecting this to Russian trolls. Now why is that?”

That’s remarkable: the idea that Gugino, the old protester, fell harder than he was pushed, they describe as a conspiracy theory without evidence. Even though it’s all on video, and everyone has seen it. Yet their only source for a claim that some unspecified “this” is all a Russian conspiracy is “some people.”

Stelter does give one additional piece of evidence: apparently the talking head who covered the story for OANN had worked for Sputnik News in the past—and Sputnik News is run by the Russian government.

This is again pure ad hominem, and doubly irrelevant since the OANN reporter was only reporting on the story in Conservative Treehouse, just as CNN is doing now. Interestingly, Stelter offers no evidence that Sputnik News has ever reported on the story—an obvious bit of journalism he ought to have done before claiming any special Russian interest in the matter.

Having worked for Sputnik probably says nothing about the ideological interests of any journalist in any case. RT, the Russian government TV/video service, hosts the widest conceivable range of ideological voices.

Stelter: “this is looney tunes stuff; this is crazy maddening stuff.” "It’s a form of poison…going straight to the president’s brain.”

“Maddening” instead of “mad” may be a Freudian slip here.

Lemon: “it’s really shameful.”

Interestingly, he looks down at this point. Run the video for yourself and see. Just as someone would do if they were themselves ashamed. This seems to me further evidence that he is projecting. He feels ashamed at the lies he is telling, so he expresses it as an accusation towards someone else.

He can’t look the viewer in the eye.

Lemon: “even when you present to them all the evidence, and the fact-check, they don’t care.”

Neither Lemon nor Stelter has offered much if any evidence or facts for their claims in the segment. Conservative Treehouse had offered a lot of evidence; they have just ignored it.

Lemon: “they don’t care, because they want to believe it.” This sounds like a bit of self-revelation; and it indeed expresses the common idea on the left. Everyone simply “chooses their narrative,” believes what they want to believe. He is projecting the same motive onto Trump and his supporters.

“… and then the president has this fixation on scary words and terms, right?”

Let’s look at the scary terms Lemon and Stelter have just used to prejudice viewers against Trump and his tweet: looney, crazy, poison, poisoned, BS, conspiracy, shameful, maddening, trolls, Russians, kooky, lie, made up.

What scary terms is Trump accused of using?

Lemon offers “unmasking.”

Significantly, there is nothing intrinsically scary about “unmasking.” Just the reverse: “masking” suggests something sinister, something to hide; “unmasking” is the opposite of that. Trump is simply using the accepted term. If it seems bad to the general public, it can only be because what it describes is that bad. If it is frightening to Lemon and Stelter, the reason would seem to be that they are aware of having something to hide.

And they are accusing Trump of exactly what Lemon and Stelter have been doing all through the interview: merely throwing out scary words and terms.

Then Lemon cites “defund the police.”

Perhaps Trump has used the term. But it comes from the left, not from Trump.

Stelter then says “Antifa,” perhaps to suggest that it too is a scary term Trump is promoting.

But that term is crafted to sound as unscary as possible: “anti-fascist.” Who isn’t against fascism?

If it has come to sound scary, like “unmasking,” this can only be because of the actual activities engaged in.

Stelter: “researchers say” Antifa is involved in the disturbances only in small numbers in large cities. He cites NPR.

Yet this is not a contradiction of anything said on the right, much less by Trump. It is spectacularly unlikely that you would find anyone on the right claiming Antifa has wide support. The assertion has been that small numbers of Antifa provocateurs have been trying to turn the protests towards violence.

And, of course, it is improbable that any researchers have accurate numbers. Mark Bray, an Antifa apologist, writes at their Wikipedia entry that “members hide their political activities from law enforcement and the far right." So if, as seems likely, researchers rely on either police reports or depositions from those arrested, their figures are worthless. What other sources might they have?

Lemon suggest the current alarm about Antifa resembles past hysterias on the right: a past obsession with “The New Black Panthers.” Odd; I follow the news pretty closely, and the organization name barely rings a bell. A Google search suggests they were active circa 2000-2013. I now remember charges of voter intimidation during elections.

But I do remember quite recent obsessions with “Russian collusion,” “The Proud Boys,” “white supremacists,” “the alt-right,” “the Koch brothers,” “Russian bots.” All, it seems, on the left. Continuing a longer and storied tradition that includes and included “rich capitalists,” “the Trilateral Commission,” “the Skull and Bones Society,” “Wall Street,” “Big Oil,” Blackwater,” “the Jews,” “the kulaks,” “the military-industrial complex,” and on and on.

Lemon ends with the sage advice that one must not seek simple solutions; that real people and real life are more complicated than that.

If anyone is listening, however, that looks like a Freudian admission that there might be more than one side to the claim of “police brutality” in Buffalo that has been the subject of this very segment.

Given that Lemon, Stelter, Anderson Cooper, and just about everyone in the old legacy media is in lockstep on this, all openly denying easily seen facts, all even using the same stock term “conspiracy theory” about the tweet, it might itself suggest a conspiracy: on the left.

I don’t think so. I think this is an example of how evil manifests an independent will and intelligence, once an individual commits to it. The way, in alcoholism, the bottle comes to command the man. The easiest way to think of it is to call it the Devil.

Conspiracy Theory and Practice

Francis Dashwood, a leader of the Hellfire Club, by Hogarth.

I hate to comment on the Jeffrey Epstein case, because anything about it is a conspiracy theory. Conspiracies are inherently rare, and it is easy to go off quarter-cocked.

But sometimes conspiracies are real. There really was a Bavarian Illuminati. There really was a Hellfire Club.

There is an alternate danger, too. That, faced with evidence of evil, we avert our eyes and walk away. It is the more comfortable thing to do. And Edmund Burke’s advice still holds: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

It is pretty definite that Epstein was murdered. The known circumstances put the claim of suicide beyond reasonable belief. We now also have the public testimony of a highly respected coroner who was at the autopsy; although couched in typical legal-medicalese. The results were “consistent” with homicide. They were not “consistent” with suicide.

And the murder of Epstein requires a conspiracy.

Moreover, the official autopsy report did not say homicide, and, according to the coroner who has now come forward, failed to include obvious things like a test for DNA. That too seems to require a conspiracy.

Now Project Veritas has come out with a “hot mic” video of an ABC news anchor lamenting that she had all the goods on Epstein and his Fantasy Island three years ago, and the story was spiked by the network. Fear of litigation by powerful people might explain it; but such fears did not stop the networks from reporting quite wild allegations against Brett Kavanaugh or Donald Trump, without much or any corroboration.

Owl of Minerva, crest of the Bavarian Illuminati

Three years ago—that would mean the story was spiked during the last presidential election, more or less. Might have been relevant. Again begins to look conspiratorial.

But then, we already know that the mainstream media is involved in a political conspiracy. That cover was blown years ago, by “Journolist.”

All of this in turn tends to prove the basic truth of the wild allegations regarding what was going on with Epstein’s pedophile ring. There obviously must be some very powerful people who risk some very grave consequences if the full truth comes out. Powerful enough to reach in and control the US Prison Service, ABC, or the NY coroner’s office, as needed. Consequences grave enough to prompt them to murder almost openly—to take such a risk.

Now we must also worry—is it possible to ever get this properly investigated? We no longer know who’s in on the fix, and who is clean. It seems to me too there are other troubling matters in recent years that have been more or less ignored—the matter of Hillary Clinton’s emails, for example. I find it hard to believe that mere incompetence can account for it. More likely, Clinton was deliberately feeding information to some foreign power. The matter of Hunter Biden, China, and the Ukraine looks pretty outrageous, now that Trump has raised it—yet the damning basic facts have been in public view for years. And when Trump calls for an investigation, the Democrats act as though he has done something wrong, not Biden. Then there are longstanding unanswered questions about Juanita Broderick’s rape charges and the “Clinton death list.”

Perhaps sordid things have been going on among the upper crust at all times. Perhaps what is different now is that we have the democratization of information flow thanks to the Internet. No doubt that is at least partly true. On the other hand, the democratization of information has recently been very drastically throttled in again by Silicon Valley overlords.

These sorts of revelations may explain why.

The malfeasance does seem to fall heavily on the left side of the political spectrum. I don’t think I am being partisan here; it’s pretty obvious. If there is the slightest charge, moreover, against a Republican, it is more than thoroughly aired.

This moral imbalance between the sides seems to me to stand to reason: it is the left that has embraced “moral relativism” and postmodernism, in which you get to say or do whatever you decide is in your interest, regardless of truth or morals. Leaving aside Trump, who is at best hard to read, many leading Republicans do tend to at least publicly commit to moral traditions: Pence, Romney, Ryan, Cruz, Huckabee, Perry, Jindal, and so on.

Or, in Canada, Scheer.

Sri Lanka Easter Bombings

The Temple of the Tooth, Kandy. As significant for Buddhists as Notre Dame for Christians.

I’m not usually one to go in for conspiracy theories. But the official account of the recent Easter bombings in Sri Lanka does not sound probable. The authorities say the carnage was done by a local Islamist terrorist organization.

Problems:

1. Neither the organization named, nor any other, has yet taken credit. The whole point of a terrorist bombing is to send a message. Where’s the message? Were it a “lone wolf” attack, the absence of a communique might be explicable, but not for something widespread and organized, like this was.

2. Believing the official explanation actually requires a conspiracy theory. This was a series of coordinated attacks across the width of the country. It could not have been managed without a lot of planning by a lot of people. The reason conspiracy theories are dubious is that it is improbable to expect a large number of people to all keep an important thing secret for a long time. Especially if it involves something illegal, and they could hope to escape the consequences with a word to the authorities in case it goes wrong. That applies here. How could the authorities not have uncovered it?

3. More mysteriously, the day after the attacks, the authorities knew who did it and had dozens—I’ve seen higher figures-- in custody. How could they have known so little before the bombing, and so much immediately after it?

4. Where’s the motive? If Islamists want to strike a blow against unbelievers, why target Christians? The Quran declares Christians fellow “people of the book,” supposedly well-disposed to Islam. Buddhists, by contrast, are kaffirs, unbelievers. Why attack your natural allies, a fellow minority, instead of the declared religious enemy? And if there is a threat of cultural assimilation for Sri Lankan Muslims, again, it has to come from the majority faith, not another minority.

5. If the motive was just to get publicity, as might well be the case in a terrorist bombing, why target Christian churches? Hotels make sense, but the local Sri Lankan press would care more about temples. And so would the foreign press. Some Sri Lankan temples are truly historic, comparable to Notre Dame in Paris. By comparison, the Western press consistently underreports any attacks on Christians. So much so that many reports of the present massacre use the awkward circumlocution “Easter worshippers” rather than call the victims Christians. Nobody in the West seems to want to admit that Christians are under threat anywhere. Possibly the attackers are too ignorant of Western attitudes to understand this, but this is unlikely. Those who go in for terrorism are almost invariably the most Westernized of Muslims. And Muslim extremists have recently seen this Western disregard for the fate of Christians play out in Iraq and Syria. How stupid are they really likely to be? 

Also in Sri Lanka: a tree grown from a shoot of the original Bodhi tree, under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment.

6. Any Muslim group blowing up churches gives the local authorities a gold-plated excuse for suppressing Muslims without facing international condemnation. They can claim they are nobly protecting another religious minority.

7. Note that unless they actually hold a geographical region under their control, Muslim terrorist organizations almost always do their dirty work in another country. Notice that there have not been a lot of terrorist attacks in the Persian Gulf countries, for example; although the al Qaeda leadership came from there. There is an obvious reason for this. Otherwise, the leaders and the organization are committing suicide; they are too vulnerable to being round up and executed. Especially when they are part of a small ethnic minority in the country attacked. Yet the Sri Lankan authorities are blaming a local organization.

8. Another body here has an obvious motive for either staging the bombings, or misassigning the blame: the state; the government. Which, interestingly, has just declared martial law and suspended civil rights.

Connect the dots, folks.