On Conspiracies, Epstein, and the Streisand Effect
Why I am not a conspiracy guy, but also wonder why he is shouting about the whole thing.
I am not a conspiracy theory guy. My operative theory about conspiracies is as follows. Once upon a time, only two people knew about the dalliance between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Not long thereafter, the whole world knew. While I am not going to say that secrets are never kept, I am highly dubious of the notion that most secrets of mass interest are kept very long. And the more interest there is in something and the more people who have access to those secrets, the more likely it is that the secrets will come out.
I don’t think there are aliens at Area 51, and I also think that if there were a truly better explanation for the JFK assassination than that Lee Harvey Oswald shot him, we would know by now. I do believe that we landed on the moon.
As such, I have been and continue to be skeptical that there is an “Epstein list” as in some simple document that with PROVE! some fabulous cover-up. Do I think that there is salacious information that might be damaging to someone somewhere that has yet to be released and that sits in some file? That seems reasonable. But One List to Damn to Damn Them All? This seems unlikely.
In regards to his death in prison, I am pretty Occam’s Razor about it all. I figure that the notion that a very wealthy man who had finally found himself facing prison, perhaps for the rest of his life, is that kind of person who would kill themselves.
As with all things, I am always open to actual evidence to change my mind. asd
I will note that if there was a list, it seems to me that it might have come out in Ghislaine Maxwell’s prosecution, or as a bargaining chip for Epstein.
But, I will say this. The only reason I give any of this any thought is because Trump is doing things like this. The Streisand Effect of it all is just ridiculous.
So, which is it? Are there no files to release, or are there files written by Obama, Hillary, Comey, et al?
BTW, the Hunter Biden laptop is a great illustration of my view of conspiracy theories from the top of this post, especially as it pertains to information having a tendency to be free. At one time, the nude photos of Hunter Biden were personal, and their existence was known only to a few. But then Marjorie Taylor Greene printed them on posters and showed the world.
But even more than the screed above, there is this.
This screams Streisand Effect so loudly that it hurts my ears.
For a guy who actually has some preternatural skills when it comes to dealing with public opinion, this is all quite amazing. And while it doesn’t make me believe in the conspiracy theories, it does make me pause and wonder. And I figure it makes a naturally skeptical person like me pause, I think that means it will be firing a lot of neurons across the public.
BTW, it may be a coincidence, but this morning I could not view Trump’s Truth Social feed without signing up (which I refuse to do because I have to give my phone number).
At any rate, I still think that if there was some real bombshell in these documents, it would have been officially released or simply leaked at this point, but we shall see, I guess.
By the way, I don’t need Trump’s name on a list to know that he was a friend of Epstein’s, nor do I need much convincing, based on a slew of evidence,* that it is likely Trump has engaged in any number of sexually depraved behaviors, to include things that Epstein is known for.
Side note: this is my first, and perhaps only, post on Jeffrey Epstein. I searched the OTB database the other day and found that I have barely made any references to him (I think his name has come up on some tab-clearing posts).
*I mean…
- Video via The New Yorker: Gross Things Donald Trump Has Said About His Daughters
- Via CNN: Donald Trump to Howard Stern: It’s okay to call my daughter a ‘piece of ass’.
- Via USAT: Did Donald Trump rape E. Jean Carroll? Here’s what a jury and judge said.
- Video via CNN: Trump’s uncensored lewd comments about women from 2005 (the Access Hollywood tape).
- Stormy Daniels.
- Karen McDougal.
- Via Business Insider: A timeline of Donald Trump’s three marriages, numerous rumored affairs, and sexual misconduct allegations.
I could go on, but I think the point is more than made.
Also not a conspiracy theorist. In fact, conspiracy theories have done immeasurable damage to the United States and the world.
But, the handling of the Epstein files has been peculiar, to put it mildly. Something’s up, but I won’t speculate about what it is.
I suspect there isn’t anything beyond the dog finally having caught the car.
Also, there is a lot Trump could safely lie about without his supporters caring too much.
Draining the swamp isn’t one of these things. It’s too tied up with how MAGA likes to see itself.
I’ll play conspiracy.
Reason why ‘the list’ would not have been released already: Qui malo? If it malos in a bipartisan way, there’s no profit in releasing it.
Is there a single list? Maybe not. But there are mountains of Epstein docs. A list could be derived from same. If there’s no list equivalent, why is Trump publicly soiling his diaper?
This is so perfectly succinct. And it fits my experience in the intelligence world. Absent traitors working for a foreign government, or dumbasses like Snowden and that kid posting stuff on Discord, most intelligence secrets are banal and not of “mass interest” and so are never leaked. The ones that are of mass interest tend to leak pretty consistently.
The mass interest is the key. a lot of secrets get kept for a long, long, long time, because few people, if any, outside those who know the secrets have reason to even suspect these exist.
Take the Moon landings (six of them!). There’s so much interest in that, if it were really a hoax, NASA receipts for renting studios, buying cinematic cameras, hiring of personnel, film editors, visual effects technicians, caterers, teamsters, etc., would have leaked by now.
In her book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Rosa Brooks mentions that in her time at the State Department, a lot of routine, innocuous stuff was classified, because a lot of people higher up the chain would ignore memos, letters, emails and such if they were not classified. Such things don’t leak because no one cares.
@Michael Reynolds: It just isn’t that hard to leak selectively for me to believe this is some MAD situation.
The obvious reason is that Trump is neck deep into Epstein, and that they don’t believe that there is a way to sanitize things.
Creepy, no?
When I was a kid in the 1970s, jokes about Priests molesting altar boys were incredibly common, and there were made for TV movies about the true story of a family’s struggle to get anyone to listen to their story about a molester priest.
And then around 2001 or so, the Boston Globe ran their series of articles about child molesting clergy and everyone was shocked to “learn” the thing they had known for decades.
Let’s consider Bill Clinton. There have been so many crazy lies about him that if there was credible evidence that he raped someone, it wouldn’t have any impact. Most people either think that the right wing has lied like crazy about him, so this would just be more of that, or they believe he is the devil incarnate.
The secret of Trump raping underage girls provided by Epstein is already out. It’s just hidden among piles of shit.
Marcy Wheeler wrote a very nice post about this covering themes you’ve touched on.
Trump is used to being able to command attention. Of the entire country, and especially MAGA. And now he can’t, it would seem. This would add to the freak-out on his part. Perhaps a lot. Fears of “I’m losing it!” would pile on top of any feared revelation in Epstein-related documents. (I mean with Bondi running interference, he has little to fear from revelations, right?)
@Steven L. Taylor:
Bill Gates in in the phone logs. If you had something more specific about Gates, would you sell it to the Daily Mail? Or would you call Gates’ lawyer and talk about the cost of a DND.
Conspiracies exist. Businesses collude. Individuals take secrets to the grave. To think that we have or will find out about every secret arrangement with a large footprint strikes me as unlikely.
But the logical response to that possibility is to accept that we don’t know, and that in most cases significant evidence is likely non-existent or lost to history.
The absolute worst response—the illogical process—is to assume that there must be evidence somewhere, hidden. That quickly leads one past the boundary, into meta-narrative conspiracism.
Whatever the psychological reasons for their allure, meta-conspiracies provide an avenue for exploitation by would be autocrats. And as @Kingdaddy reminds us, these sorts of myths (or as Oliver Stone claimed, counter-myths) are destructive. They have real cost. And much of the damage is collateral.
Worse, assholes have learned how to craft them, and use them to create moral panics. With the ‘democratization’ of media, the tide that once took the moral panic out to sea no longer exists. The waterline during low tide is beyond the highest of previous high tides. Welcome to the era of permapanic.
The thing that can get lost in these discussions is that it is not always about whether the public finds out about something, but whether it can be spun as justified or downplayed, whether doubt can be sewn in enough people, or whether many think it is a price worth paying to achieve some other goal.
I preferred the Onion back when it was a satire. Their just straight up news at this point.
Trump Urges Supporters To Move On From Societal Disdain For Pedophilia
The lady certainly doth protesteth a wee bit too much, methinks. There is something to this, but what?
Best guess is Trump and/or some of his contributors is on that list, which doesn’t seem to be so much as a pimp-list as a list of contacts. Bondi tried to dodge this by adding the word “incriminating” but now there’s no reason not to release it, is there? Oopsies.
Trump will discover the hard way that loyalty does not equate to competence and incompetent people cause trouble, it’s just a matter of time. Heggie is routinely causing unnecessary trouble as well.
“Three men can keep a secret. If two of them are dead.”
The problem of most “secrecy” based conspiracy theories are that there are generally too many people in the information chain to maintain secrecy.
Mostly.
Not always.
The British managed to keep a lid on many of the realities of ULTRA and Bletchley Park operations for quite a long time; largely because the people concerned took their oaths of secrecy rather seriously.
But I doubt it would have applied if it had been something as squalid as covering up sex crimes, or as important as, for instance, fore-knowledge of Pearl Harbor.
My personal opinion re “Epstein files” are that there are no such, as such, but there are various records of attendances or flights that entail no proof of wrong-doing, but do include a lot of names.
Because Epstein, in addition to his sex-mongering unpleasantness, was also a prolific “networker” working around charity groups, science, academia, culture, and their intersections with finance and politics etc.
So, you likely have lots of “files” that iclude lots of people who may very likely be both entirely innocent of any wrongdoings re Epstein/sex, and also liable to sue if they are wrongfully accused.
You also have the rather large factor the Pam Bondi is an idiot, and a lot of the MAGA online base are frothing lunatics who still think the entire QANON legendarium is reality.
Thus, Trump gets bit in the arse by the very toxic culture he has connived at.
Most amusing.
A bit off the main topic, but the execrable New York Post published assorted salacious Hunter Biden pictures virtually every day after Joe took office, tastefully pixelated where appropriate of course. It was their ‘laptop from Hell’ story and they were going to exploit it for all it was worth.