Can we please, please put to rest the tired canard that conspiracies are rare and that their assured instant unraveling from witnesses or gossipers prevents people from trying or succeeding in them?
The truth is, snitches get stitches. Whistleblowing is difficult, thankless, and rarely successful. Conspiracies are common as dirt.
Eighty starlets didn’t run to the cops to bring down Harvey Weinstein for 30 years because they were afraid they’d lose out on a role. The one who got wired up was ignored while the prosecutor got paid. Thousands of kids didn’t report church pedophilia because they were afraid their parents wouldn’t believe them. But somehow we are to believe that an $18-an-hour prison guard is going to rush off and rat out the mob. Why? What’s being offered? No protection, no money, and a very slight chance he would be believed if the fix is in.
How many people in the IRS blew the whistle on the Tea Party scandal? How many insiders knew Robert Mueller was a senile old man running a sham investigation and said nothing? How many people within the nine agencies that signed off on Uranium One blew the whistle? How many people say with a straight face that the Obama Administration was “scandal-free”?
Do you think that running to the cops to turn in bad guys is everyone’s first pick? Go ask Frank Serpico. He was shot in the face by a thug and his fellow officers refused to call him an ambulance because he was ratting out cops on the mob’s payroll. He might have a different perspective on the dynamic. Ever wonder why pedophiles can molest 50 people before anyone reports them? They know that the old saw about conspiracies not working is nonsense. That’s why they aren’t afraid and that’s why they get away with it for decades. Whether it’s Jimmy Saville, or the “grooming gangs” in Rotherham whose victims number 1,400, criminals know that the idea they can’t get away with it is silly.
And let’s be honest—a witness to Jeffrey Epstein’s murder would have far more to fear than would witnesses to other things. No one who works at Google thinks Google is going to hire international hitmen to torture them if they rat out an algorithm. No one who heard Kitty Genovese scream thought the killer was a front for an unknown number of shadowy billionaires. Yet how many come forward? The Epstein prison guards have no idea the depth of the trouble they’d be buying into, but they can instantly imagine the worst.
The Myth of “Speaking Truth to Power”
You think the media will protect you? Come on. That’s a laugh. A witness who says something the media doesn’t like will be ignored, branded a nut, or worse. The media offers nothing.
Understand that the calculation to “speak truth to power” is highly one-sided. Look how impossible it has been to get justice in the Russia collusion coup. Even with the president of the United States, the Attorney General, the right-wing media, Judicial Watch, and hundreds of supporters on the case, the guilty walk free and the whistleblowers suffer more than the crooks. “Exposing the truth,” as George Papadopoulos has done, did not unravel the conspiracy. “Climategate” emails were ignored. Lois Lerner enjoys her pension.
The whole “conspiracies are impossible” meme is based on the wildly false premise that if someone revealed details of an event it would cause the unraveling of the plan, and the assured instant downfall of the conspirators. In crime shows, the truth comes to light and then we can fade to black, assured that justice will prevail.
We are having a crisis of credibility within our institutions. Our skepticism is more than justified.
In real life, it’s the opposite. The truth is a hard sell. We expose the truth on a dozen lies a day and the media, the public, and the bureaucrats all blissfully ignore it.
You know what most witnesses to the Epstein “suicide” would say? “I wasn’t really looking. I’m not sure what I saw. I have nothing to gain. I don’t know who these people are but they have billions of dollars and are scary and evil. I could be killed. Therefore I saw nothing and I don’t remember.” And if there were 1,000 witnesses, it’s likely all 1,000 would make the exact same calculation. In fact, psychological studies have shown that the more witnesses there are, the less likely it is that anyone is going to do anything. Why? Because as they all hesitate to ponder what to do, they can’t help but notice that no one else is stepping up, so why should they? Their fears must be justified and the responsibility shifts to all the others.
And when somebody does step up, the script is flipped: “How are you the only one to report this? You must be a nut.” As readers of Machiavelli know, in certain cases, the less criminals hide their tracks, the more likely they are to get away with their crimes. “If that hitman didn’t think twice to walk boldly past me, then he must really be dangerous and have rigged this whole situation. Therefore I’ll say nothing.”
Remember, a witness to any wrongdoing does not just have to tell his story. He has to sell the story to a prosecutor and convince that prosecutor to assume all the risks, too. Thus, the entire enterprise can be seen as lacking critical mass from day one, so no one launches it. Conspiracies are not hard to maintain; they are are hard to confront.
No Trust in Corrupt Institutions
All of these dynamics are obvious if you think about it. Corruption is rampant and all corruption is one form or another of conspiracy. Every king’s court has intrigue. Every bureaucracy has a hierarchy of control which is ascended by loyalty and complicity. The top ranks are always filled with people who’ve spent decades overlooking the indiscretions of their higher-ups. That’s why nine agencies can sign off on Uranium One which netted Hillary a cool $145 million. People looked the other way and figured they’d get paid via a trickle-down of promotions and they almost always do. The people at the top have risen only by playing this game, at first on a smaller scale, as these new witnesses will do. Ninety-six percent of Washington, D.C. votes for one party. Think about that.
Prior to the internet, the media managed to paint anyone who saw Communism’s influence in the universities and bureaucracies as a “conspiracy nut.” How many of us followed politics daily for decades, yet until the internet, most of us still didn’t understand the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism, because the media used the “conspiracy” label as a way to stigmatize those who could see the plain truth? The charge of “conspiracy nut” is a political tool to squelch close examination.
Conspiracies are common. Revolutions, murders, and thievery are common. Marxists are common. The notion that conspiracies are rare and overly risky to those involved is nonsense and keeps us from knowing the truth. Notice who pushes this idea the most. The Left. Even those on the Right who regurgitate it, often do so because it’s been drummed into them by the Left. We have complex institutions set up to know the truth: law enforcement, media, academia. They are all corrupted from the inside by now. That is also common, as there are more banana republics and monarchies than well-regulated republics in the world. Notice how rarely new evidence changes the mind of the institution’s first guess or reveals anything antithetical to their interests. Investigations are now ways to delay, destroy evidence, silence critics, gag witnesses, push agendas, threaten or bankrupt people and convince dupes to wait for justice.
We are having a crisis of credibility within our institutions. Our skepticism is more than justified.
I hear that Occam’s Razor says that Epstein had little to live for and offed himself. Yeah, no. Occam’s Razor says his murder was predicted by thousands and boldly executed just weeks later.
And little will come of the “investigation” to follow. We don’t know if he was killed or not. And we can never know because all evidence that comes to us passes through layers of corrupt institutions.