The guy was on suicide watch, then a phony autopsy indicated that he "committed suicide", and the video for the event went missing. The guy also had tons of dirt on important people.
Next time you attack a "conspiracy theory", look back at how many years passed from first mention of Epstein to a final admission...all the while, people who spoke out were derided as cranks.
The issue is the noise. There are literally thousands of conspiracy theories out there and the legit ones are impossible to sift out without the power of hindsight
Hmm almost like people like David Icke are surprisingly well funded and support for a crank who believes the royal family is lizard people.
Of course that's absolute nonsense there's a absolutely no organization out there that would benefit from elevating the most prominent and clearly nuts conspiracy theories in order to discredit other conspiracy theories by association.
Alex Jones really just sells a whole lot of brain pills! Whether Icke or Jones are real examples of the phenomenon, I believe it has actually been documented e.g. with the "Mirage Men" revelations that this "flooding the zone with bullshit" tactic has been used from time to time.
One day around 2015 or 2016, I remember seeing a ton of "FLAT EARTH!" graffiti that appeared out of nowhere all over Emeryville. That's another one that's always struck me as weird and maybe astroturfed.
Lol, this is a funny one to me--a meta-conspiracy theory, that the more outlandish conspiracy theories are plants by an unnamed organization to serve as a smokescreen
Then let me be clear the CIA at least and probably other intelligence apparatuses are specifically pushing known obviously nonsense theories to discredit more believable ones. For example Icke, and Flat Earth pretty clearly nonsense, the Pentagon using SF forces to run drugs out of Ft. Bragg to get black ops money lot more believable.
There are certainly specific cases where this tactic has been used, but yeah, this is the blanket version. "Blanket" assertions and generalizations (often sentences that start with "the elite") are one of the common red flags that indicate you might be dealing with the classical "nutty conspiracy theory".
But yea, if you actually critically review them, some are more plausible than others.
It's very weird that a theory that involves a conspiracy is automatically (linguistically) linked to falsehoods imagined by crazy people. It seems to me that somebodies conspired to make all conspiracy theories look bad so that they can participate in even more conspiracies without people credibly calling them out :D
There's another comment in this thread saying that the CIA popularized the term or sth. I have no power of foresight to determine whether that's true or not. But it would definitely have been to their benefit.
>the elite and powerful were involved in pedophilia and raping small children
This isn't a useful generalization (I assume there is a reason you are generalizing this dramatically). E.g. Pizzagate seems more of the "I just hate my political/social enemies" variety, whereas "A wealthy guy has sex with minors" is very believable. The Epstein case is a particularly exaggerated/dramatic version of the latter, but still way more believable than the former.
Let's be clear the Epstein case is a rich and powerful guy is pimping out minors to wealthy and politically influential individuals and then filming them to leverage for black mail.
As I pointed out in an earlier comment often times the outlandish conspiracy theories have a kernel of Truth at the center, e.g. pizzgate was an outgrowth of the fact if Epstein.
It sounds like you’re describing pizzagate, which alleged not nearly the same thing as what Epstein did. Nor did the pizzagate allegations involve the same people or groups.
First thing I'd do, if I was Mr. Rich and thought I had whistleblower type material that could represent a risk to my freedom or safety, would be to call my mom and tell her all about it.
> False claim 6: Dotcom claimed that he worked with Seth Rich.
> Truth: Seth Rich contacted me and offered information about the DNC. I rejected receiving the data personally and forwarded him to someone close to Wikileaks. That’s how Wikileaks got the DNC and Hillary Clinton leaks.
"Conspiracy theory" is a uselessly broad word. I will continue to consider the available information and use my own intuition in all cases. The linking of all "conspiracy theories" into a single gigantic "us vs them" is one of the most ridiculous fallacies of our time.
It's also unclear in this case what specific claims you are saying were widely derided. I saw a lot of claims based on observation that were not widely derided, and a few unreasonable claims that relied on unavailable specificity and were mostly just a political attack (X political figure knowingly committed Y specific crime). Again, your criticism appears to be predicated on a worldview where there are two immutable teams: People who completely believe all theories that involves conspiracy, and people who completely disbelieve all theories that involve conspiracy.
However, history does seem to show a continual tension between the rulers/land-owners and workers. There have been many documented instances of the wealthy colluding to increase their wealth and modifying laws to increase their power.
If you actually looked at the link, you could wonder what happened in the 1910s that popularized the word? Or wonder what caused that spike around 1960 and not just assume people are illiterate and in need your "gentle corrections".
I was pointing out the purposeful use of the word "popularized" over "invented" or "created" or "made up", as it's written in poor reproductions of this conspiracy theory, because the verbiage a popular way to discredit the entire point.
"Epstein was a serial pedophile, therefore the Moon landing was faked" is just impeccable logic, I don't see why you've got a problem with that line of thinking. If you prove one thing true, you've proved them all.
Conspiracies happen. They are just really hard to maintain. Conspiracies that require all of the rich and powerful or the entire government to maintain secrecy, are probably bullshit.
Epstein is likely a real conspiracy. However I do believe most people he engaged with didn’t know what was going on. My best guess is that he was a CIA operative who was useful due to his reach.
> the entire government to maintain secrecy, are probably bullshit.
No, for these things to be true is not necessary that everyone keep quit. They can just be discredited or labeled as "conspiracy theorists", or not heard and reproduced by the media. The ones with proof can be labeled as hackers and leakers and persecuted like Assange and Snowden. We see this happening all the time.
Oh, they're cranks. Being wrong does not make one a crank; it's the constant repetition of the crank theory as if the crank has some special knowledge that makes the crank aggravating, not the truth or falsity of the crank's belief.
It's perfectly possible to be a "Tom Brady is the most amazing quarterback" crank. Hey, maybe you're right. But no one wants to hear about it and the vast majority of everyone is happy to live with a little bit of ambiguity, or they don't care.
Put concisely, "speaking out" without any knowledge is among the most annoying things a person can do.
A little review of the incredible coincidences that led to Epstein's death by suicide
- When Epstein was placed in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), the jail informed the Justice Department that he would have a cellmate and that a guard would look into the cell every 30 minutes. These procedures were not followed on the night he died.
- On August 9, Epstein's cellmate was transferred, and no replacement was brought in.
- The evening of his death, Epstein met with his lawyers, who described him as "upbeat".
- CCTV footage shows that the two guards failed to perform the required institutional count at 10:00 p.m. and recorded Noel briefly walking by Epstein's cell at 10:30 p.m., the last time the guards entered the tier where his cell was located.
- Through the night, in violation of the jail's normal procedure, Epstein was not checked every 30 minutes.
- The two guards assigned to check his cell overnight, Noel and Michael Thomas, BOTH fell asleep at their desk for about three hours and later falsified related records.
- Two cameras in front of Epstein's cell also malfunctioned THAT night.
I legitimately cannot comprehend that anyone believes that the guy committed suicide.
The closest I can come is believing staff were paid off to let him do so, but I can only imagine the sorts of heads that would have rolled on his open and honest testimony. Yeah.
Because incompetance is often more probable than malice. Without knowing baselines, like how often these procedures were broken in general, these don't mean much. What if this happened literally every day?
Yuuuuuuup. Good eye. It's pointless without knowing the trend, which is how conspiracy theories work.
Which sucks, because there are very real conspiracies out there, and the others are very often employed for cover. See also MiB / LSD experiments, where you dress up as Hasidic diamond merchants and visit whistleblowers with gargantuan amounts of experimental psychedelics. "Ha ha this guy thinks aliens are probing everyone"
Epstein, for his part, yeah, I agree, probably was actually part of a conspiracy, a fall guy for an entirely government run honeypot. However, I don't have any reason to think this is all true.
>>>It's pointless without knowing the trend, which is how conspiracy theories work.
What?
Conspiracy theories work specifically for seeing the trend over time.
For example, I have no memory for what I ate yesterday, but I can recall news stories from as far back as the 80s which corroborate malfeasance decades later.
Did you know that John McCain was a filthy grifting criminal who was involved in the savings and loan scandal, was a complete coverer for the Iran Contra debacle, and the CIAs BCCI money laundering scheme for their importing of drugs through Mena Arkansas, which was shielded by Bill Clinton, and for being a CIA minion was awarded the next POTUS position...
Look into BCCI and a name you might be familiar with, Khoshoggi not the dismembered journalist by MBS, but his relative who was the arms dealer that sold his yacht to... donald trump. Who bragged about the purchase on nightly entertainment TV.
"It's a big club, and you aint in it" -- George Carlin.
The CIA runs the USA, and the drug trafficking and child trafficking industry, and Israel runs the CIA... Guess who was handling Epstein ;; Maxwell (AKA mossad)
>>> Look into BCCI and a name you might be familiar with, Khoshoggi not the dismembered journalist by MBS, but his relative who was the arms dealer that sold his yacht to... donald trump. Who bragged about the purchase on nightly entertainment TV.
Damn, this is actually true. I just visited Wikipedia, and I did not expect what I learned there. I thought Jamal Kashoggi was just some journalist. I never looked into him.
Turns out:
-He worked at the Saudi equivalent of the CIA
-He's the cousin of Dodi Al Fayed (the billionnaire who died in the car crash with Princess Diana)
-He's the nephew of billionnaire arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi, who sold Donald Trump a $200M yacht
-His grandfather was the personal doctor of the king of Saudi Arabia
-Considering the amount of noise the US made about him, I also expected him to be a US citizen. But no, he wasn't even a US citizen. I've never in my whole life seen the US govt care this much about a foreigner dying abroad, even if they work for a US company.
-George Soros' Open Society Foundation sued the Saudi government over his death
I know HN is the sort of place where you get flagged for voicing your suspicions without linking some establishment-approved source that gives its blessing on a particular narrative. So I'll just say this: it feels to me me that this is a very surprising background for a mere journalist.
Good. Now go to wikipedia again and learn about Felix Sater, and you'll see that Trump was also collaborating with the CIA to make connections and business with the Russian oligarchs. The web goes deeper than you can imagine.
can you be a bit more specific, please. the story is he got killed because he was human rights activist and that's also why the US cared about him (which is of course not the full story)
> Did you know that John McCain was a filthy grifting criminal who was involved in the savings and loan scandal,
no, I'm neither from US nor overly informed about politics there but I would have expected to have heard about it from Trump's allies when the two where butting heads
They had already washed the story by the time trump was in play, so there was no need and McCain was heralded as a hero, and while he did some brave shit in vietnam, he was still a criminal puppet...
And dont get me started on the group that GHWB ran in vietnam... whats that guys name from the massacre? oh yeah, the head of DHS after it was created.
However, incompetence can be allowed to go unpunished if it helps the people with malicious intent. If it happened every day, then it's still a failure of the system and to my mind is indicative of a widespread problem of getting rid of inconvenient people.
Let's say you're Epstein, and on this night of all nights, you don't have a cellmate and the guards have stopped checking in on you every 30 minutes. If you were suicidal wouldn't you take the opportunity?
The only remarkable coincidence here was that the cameras were malfunctioning. It's highly improbable that a jail camera system would be designed in a way that it can be switched off by frontline guards with no evidence of tamper.
Highlights the focus being on the wrong part of the story (his death), when the events of his life are what need most scrutiny and tireless investigation.
The problem is that telling people that you didn’t attempt suicide and that you are not currently suicidal is also consistent with someone who is, in fact, currently suicidal and wants another opportunity. that is to say, what he told his lawyers is not at all inconsistent with what supposedly happened later.
It’s also worth noting that it was the cellmate’s lawyer who asked that the camera footage of their cell be preserved.
Lastly, Epstein trying and failing to kill himself seems more likely than that particular cellmate trying and failing to kill Epstein.
I don’t think what really happened will ever be clearer than mud, unfortunately.
Even hardened common-law criminals find pedophiles beyond the pale and will often get violent with them, finding the guilt-by-association of being imprisoned in the same facility unbearable.
I don't see the relevance of that question. If that site was known to have guards that didn't follow procedure, then maybe that was the reason that it was selected.
The clear implication of the sentence “These procedures were not followed on the night he died.” is that the procedures were generally followed at all other times. But it is only implied, not explicitly stated, which is the kind of weaselly language used when someone is trying to convince others of something when they don’t have enough facts to present.
> If that site was known to have guards that didn't follow procedure, then maybe that was the reason that it was selected.
Yes, that’t true. Was that site known for that? Also, that’s not the argument originally presented, as I explained above; you’re jumping from argument to argument.
> The clear implication of the sentence “These procedures were not followed on the night he died.” is that the procedures were generally followed at all other times.
I'd agree that it is one reading of it, but it can also be read as simply stating a fact about the night in question. Whether the procedures were often neglected does not change the fact that a procedure to avoid suicides was not followed when they could have made a difference.
The person who wrote that sentence is here on HN and can probably answer for themselves. No need for you to come up with convoluted possible interpretations.
I don't doubt that something fishy happened, but I also think that the repetition of those occurrences are something that fuels the fires of baseless conjecture. There is no comparison to a baseline. How scrupulous are the guards on a typical basis? What were the existing uptime statistics for the cameras?
Any statistics for noncompliance at any sizable organization are going to be non-zero due to the law of large numbers. That is just evidence that they exist and do things. The baseline for comparison here shouldn't be zero, it should be the normal statistics for compliance.
It's completely silly to use "how was a typical prisoner handled" as the baseline for what should have been expected with Jeffrey Epstein. There was extremely intense news interest, mainstream outlets were speculating that his testimony might bring down a huge swath of the U.S. ruling elite, and every conspiracy theorist in the world was predicting (correctly, as it turned out!) that he would never make it to trial.
I 100% agree that he should have been treated differently and that the whole situation overall was fishy. What I'm saying is that the anomalies may suggest different things in contexts of different baselines. Was compliance better than normal, worse than normal, or about the same? How did it compare to other places?
I just don't think it is good for public discourse to use out of context statistics, even (and especially) if they are right, because it emboldens others to do the same when they are wrong.
To put a little meat on the bone here in terms of what you're asking, this is the same prison that held El Chapo through his trial. If it was a sloppily run facility it seems unlikely it would have been chosen for that purpose. I don't have the exact numbers at hand but I believe successful suicide attempts at the MCC were also very rare, as in, Epstein's was the first in 20 years or something like that.
It doesn't really make much difference if those occurrences happened frequently, as it may well have been known that e.g. the guards often slept during their shifts and thus that prison was chosen to make it easy to get rid of embarrassing people.
I didn't mean that you were defending anything. I just think that the various events are indicative of problems whether or not they are anomalous.
As a bad analogy, if a murder suspect was found to be carrying an illegal weapon on the night in question, it would hardly work in their defence for them to state they often carried an illegal weapon.
From the same reference article about Epstein's Death :
"...In 2020, associate Jean-Luc Brunel was arrested and charged with the rape of minors by French prosecutors. He later died from an apparent suicide before his trial could proceed..."
"Two cameras in front of Epstein's cell also malfunctioned THAT night."
From what I've read that was debunked. Initial reports said two cameras could not recover footage but one of them was later restored. No one know how long it was malfunctioning. No cameras were ever pointed at his cell, these were just cameras in the vicinity and there was plenty of recovered footage for the corridor showing that no one approached his cell
That was the initial report. They later recovered footage from one of them. The tale has also been misreported as being "the two cameras" when it was really "two of the many cameras". The investigators said they had ample footage from the area to prove no one approached his cell.
This is the same Justice Department, that left the most important prisoner in the United States at the time, die under their guard. Their claim this is the correct, or only footage would be greatly enhanced if the FBI would publish the finding of this investigation:
Why would he be considered an important prisoner? Note that we as of yet have absolutely zero evidence he was doing anything for anyone besides himself and Ghislaine Maxwell. Everything everyone has chosen to believe about his massive pedophile web is based on hearsay.
a high security prison doesn't have any superfluous access corridors. there is usually one way to get somewhere and that way is highly secured and guarded. the people who would perform a stunt like staging a suicide certainly aren't regular guards but persons who usually do not walk around there. so, it makes a lot of sense to have also those main cameras accidentally fail.
You're making up the notion that the "main cameras" failed. We don't know which camera it was. And again, the investigators said they could clearly see all approaches to the cell in the recovered footage.
That is not what was written in the indictment document available from the Business Insider article you linked. What it says, is that there is video evidence the guards did not enter the tier where Epstein was housed.
I have seen enough Law & Order episodes to know contract killings are always done by a prisoner already inside the wing.
As this was a prisoner know to cajole with a past US President, and also the current US President at the time, a professional and competent police investigation would take it further.
Like say...Could it be possible the cell of another inmate was left open by accident? Any other inmates present at the time known to kill people by strangulation? Tracking the bank accounts and private life of the characters closely related to the events at the time? Like prison guards, lawyers, prison administrators and inmates? Anybody suddenly taking trips to Dubai and Vegas?
Lamentable - the careers of the officers involved will be stained.
On another topic, helping a monster to do the right thing is, in a moral sense, not that bad. Maybe by cashing out his holdings, the victims can be helped. So, much good will also happen.
Any reasonable review shouldn’t leave out the minor detail that Epstein had attempted suicide a month prior. Not saying that that should eliminate all suspicion, but it’s certainly a pretty huge piece of context to leave out.
Any reasonable review shouldn't assume any validity of the first "attempt" given the improbable series of "accidents" the night of his death. If anything, it is more likely it was fabricated or used to support the narrative. I mean, the guy had dirt on billionaires and ultra-powerful politicians and you want to be believe it was an actual suicide? That approach would produce such bad investigations.
Without the first attempt, we wouldn’t be talking about many of the suspicious procedural and technical failures that occurred with the successful attempt, because he wouldn’t have been moved and placed on suicide watch. Your explanation doesn’t make sense because it would have made the job harder and introduced more suspicion and none of it would have been difficult to foresee.
The crooked, drug-running cop who was Epstein's cellmate (and charged with murdering four people in a drug conspiracy) was quietly spared the death penalty in December last year, with no reason given: https://www.lohud.com/story/news/2022/12/14/nicholas-tartagl...
well, how do you know there was a first attempt. because there's a tape ... there was a tape. it got accidentally deleted due to a "data entry error" :)
These facts are alarming, but don’t we need to have some sense of the base rates for these events to determine how unusual their confluence is?
For example, how often are cell mates transferred? How common is it for a prisoner to go a night without a cell mate? How often do guards actually do mandated checks (versus what they say since apparently they falsify records at least sometimes)?
I can imagine this being a murder, but I can also imagine an environment where “mandated” checks are just a box on a form that gets checked with no connection to reality.
One base rate we might have is the number of suicides that happen at this facility (apparently almost none) which does lend some credence to the murder theory.
I feel the facts you highlight would be more convincing if there was public information we could use to put them in context (and hey maybe there, if someone knows about it, please share).
If guards never do their checks, an average prison camera fails once a month, and prisoners spend on average 1 night every 3 weeks without a cell mate, it puts the GPs facts in a certain light. If the base rates for those events are higher or lower, it puts in a different light.
The fact that Epstein was “high profile” is another fact to consider but I don’t see why it would obviate considering other data.
I think this headline is subtlety misleading. From the article:
>>> “William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency since 2021, had three meetings scheduled with Epstein in 2014, when he was deputy secretary of state, the documents show. They first met in Washington and then Mr. Burns visited Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan.”
It implies Epstein was meeting with the CIA chief, when the actual revelation was that he was meeting with the Secretary of State (which is probably equally noteworthy)
> It implies Epstein was meeting with the CIA chief, when the actual revelation was that he was meeting with the Secretary of State (which is probably equally noteworthy)
No, this isn't right. Burns was the Deputy Secretary of State. At the time, John Kerry was Secretary of State.
FWIW, when I first read the headline, I interpreted it to mean the current CIA director, as news headlines usually refer to former officials as "former" or "ex-".
The "well-connected financier" storyline generally falls apart on closer inspection. Of what is actually known and documented about how Epstein obtained his money, it was mostly through stock and real estate gifted to him by Les Wexner.
Exactly. Nobody really knows exactly what kind of "business" Epstein was doing. It is true that he presented himself like a financier, but the source of his money is actually unknown, other than the money that was provided by Les Wexner.
The point of the story is not why they were meeting is as a well-connected financier. Its why were they meeting him, when it was easy to find out he was not.
Do you really think billionaires don't know what kind of business people are in, when they start to talk to them? Even if he could fool a few of them, they would quickly figure out he was just show and no business. The fact that some of the most powerful people continued to visit him for so many years, and even after his crimes started to be discussed, is very strange.
I assume some of the meetings implied were for 'work business', it's rare that someone is so well connected without external help (incentive and actual help)
Very large number of politicians from all sides including Trump and Clintons, royalties like prince Andrew of UK, academia like MIT Media lab, business and tech tycoons like Bill Gates and Elon Musk were exposed to be involved with a guy proven to be a pedophile and supplier who conveniently died under the supervision of the law enforcement. Now we have the CIA chief. Not to mention the endless scandals among the religion power figures and institutions.
And yet, it's the "plebs" who are to lose their right to privacy to "save the children". At least we have the Reddit poweruser and Epstain colaborator Ghislaine Maxwell alive and in custody, I guess.
Maybe we should have open access to all communications of people with power?
Whitney Webb shows how deep the corruption goes in her two volume book "One Nation Under Blackmail". Glenn Beck's interview with Whitney is the best one I've watched. Disheartening and aggravating to listen to but it reinforces the suspicion that we are all being lied to on a grand scale. She also talks about circumstantial evidence that Epstein was working for or with the CIA.
There's something satisfying about seeing Chomsky on this list after he spent 2021 saying that people who didn't take the COVID shots should be removed from society and left to fend for themselves in obtaining food.
Why is that satisfying? I find it disturbing that someone who is otherwise well respected appears on this list.
I don't agree with his Covid vaccination statement (though I can relate to it), as there are always going to be parts of society that are not able to be vaccinated, so it seems unnecessary for those who abstain out of choice to remove themselves from society (N.B. his quote was that they should have the decency to remove themselves from society, not so much "be removed").
I don't respect Chomsky and think he has built a career out of building a "compatible left" which completely fails to meaningfully oppose and often even carries water for corporate and institutional power, of which their widespread support for various forms of COVID fascism like vaccine mandates was a particularly glaring example.
I fail to see how being on that list implies anything. Imagine for example if you are a person with some status which implies that you are socially/politically active, and some rich folk calls you and invites you to have a talk at a dinner, would you instantly decline it? For example even if you dislike this class of people, don't you at least feel curious how will this meeting pass? Isn't it an interesting, even useful experience even if you know that you are going to decline any offer he will propose there anyway?
Your notions of why Chomsky was meeting with Epstein are touchingly naive, especially given everything we know about how Epstein influenced other MIT faculty via funding. It certainly casts Chomsky's constant inveighing against any form of conspiratorial analysis from the left in a new light, just as Chomsky's meetings with Ehud Barak call his criticisms of BDS into question.
I keep seeing memes about Epstein's island, the lists, and generally a claim that no one has gone to jail who were on the lists, etc. I dismissed that for a while as just the Internet, but now this in the Wall Street Journal does have me wondering: A rich guy trafficked young girls to a private island which were visited by a lot of rich and powerful people.
There's the mundane answer: Because the wealthy and powerful are above the law and exempt from the normal mechanisms of accountability. And the more introspective, deeper one: Because enough of the rest of society believes that it has no choice or has something to gain by remaining complicit with a system run by Epstein & Friends, enough that that system can even reveal parts of its own nature to us and continue to chug along unabated.
Because Epstein wasn't just a sex trafficker. He did all of the normal rich guy stuff too, which involved meeting with a ton of people, and having a ton of people come to his island for the normal rich guy stuff that went on there.
The lists alone don't give enough information to tell which people on them were there for the normal rich guy stuff and which were there for the sex trafficking.
I can imagine the CIA being very interested in what went on on Lolita island, it wouldnt surprise me at all if it was a giant honeypot that that used to gather intelligence on prominent people.
There is nothing of news interest here except the WSJ doing the story.
The story itself is the only real story.
Who got this story done? What is the goal? Who is being thrown under the bus and who isn't? Is it anticipatory misdirection because something else is about to come out and can't be controlled?
This is a good thing to point out. I imagine there are some new names in here, but the Noam Chomsky connections at least were surfaced by left-leaning parapolitical Twitter accounts early last year. IIRC Chomsky even confirmed it via email. The stuff about him having dinner with Woody Allen seems new though.
Who else wants to believe that the current CIA Chief and the then Deputy Secretary of State, just took a meeting with a guy, scratch that multiple meetings without knowing anything about him? These people are in constant danger of being honey trapped, recruited, entrapped and they take the usual measures that are commonplace in dealing with strangers but all these fell by the wayside with Epstein.
The exact same script can be repeated for the person who is now Goldman's Chief Counsel and was the counsel at the White house. He was making her travel arrangements and we are told they are just casual acquaintances.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadOf course that's absolute nonsense there's a absolutely no organization out there that would benefit from elevating the most prominent and clearly nuts conspiracy theories in order to discredit other conspiracy theories by association.
One day around 2015 or 2016, I remember seeing a ton of "FLAT EARTH!" graffiti that appeared out of nowhere all over Emeryville. That's another one that's always struck me as weird and maybe astroturfed.
But yea, if you actually critically review them, some are more plausible than others.
It's very weird that a theory that involves a conspiracy is automatically (linguistically) linked to falsehoods imagined by crazy people. It seems to me that somebodies conspired to make all conspiracy theories look bad so that they can participate in even more conspiracies without people credibly calling them out :D
There's another comment in this thread saying that the CIA popularized the term or sth. I have no power of foresight to determine whether that's true or not. But it would definitely have been to their benefit.
Hell from 2008 onwards Epstein was a conflicted child sex trafficker. Hardly an unimpeachable target.
There really were some genuine conspiracies. P2 in Italy is a prominent one.
But that doesn’t make every conspiracy theory correct or even most of them.
Look at how the IRS treats the ultra wealthy. At some point it becomes very difficult to prosecute.
This isn't a useful generalization (I assume there is a reason you are generalizing this dramatically). E.g. Pizzagate seems more of the "I just hate my political/social enemies" variety, whereas "A wealthy guy has sex with minors" is very believable. The Epstein case is a particularly exaggerated/dramatic version of the latter, but still way more believable than the former.
As I pointed out in an earlier comment often times the outlandish conspiracy theories have a kernel of Truth at the center, e.g. pizzgate was an outgrowth of the fact if Epstein.
i have been following since the start on 4chan because this is my local pizza shop
The one doesn’t prove the other.
- Seth Rich, working for the democrat party, contacts Kim dot com.
- Kim declines the proposition of receiving the emails of Podesta and Clinton, and forwards Rich to Assange
- Assange gets the documents and release them
- Seth Rich is found dead in Washington, two bullets were shot in his back.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1649574074732154880
> False claim 6: Dotcom claimed that he worked with Seth Rich.
> Truth: Seth Rich contacted me and offered information about the DNC. I rejected receiving the data personally and forwarded him to someone close to Wikileaks. That’s how Wikileaks got the DNC and Hillary Clinton leaks.
More context: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/04/why-kim-dotcom-connect...
Kim's open letter to Seth Rich family:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3755366-Open-Letter-...
It's also unclear in this case what specific claims you are saying were widely derided. I saw a lot of claims based on observation that were not widely derided, and a few unreasonable claims that relied on unavailable specificity and were mostly just a political attack (X political figure knowingly committed Y specific crime). Again, your criticism appears to be predicated on a worldview where there are two immutable teams: People who completely believe all theories that involves conspiracy, and people who completely disbelieve all theories that involve conspiracy.
Provide a recommendation for a more neutral tone? That was the intent.
I was pointing out the purposeful use of the word "popularized" over "invented" or "created" or "made up", as it's written in poor reproductions of this conspiracy theory, because the verbiage a popular way to discredit the entire point.
Epstein is likely a real conspiracy. However I do believe most people he engaged with didn’t know what was going on. My best guess is that he was a CIA operative who was useful due to his reach.
No, for these things to be true is not necessary that everyone keep quit. They can just be discredited or labeled as "conspiracy theorists", or not heard and reproduced by the media. The ones with proof can be labeled as hackers and leakers and persecuted like Assange and Snowden. We see this happening all the time.
It was not so much a conspiracy theory, but lots of people knew about him but were told to keep quiet.
"The Met stated that the total number of alleged victims was 589, of whom 450 alleged abuse by Savile."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scan...
It's perfectly possible to be a "Tom Brady is the most amazing quarterback" crank. Hey, maybe you're right. But no one wants to hear about it and the vast majority of everyone is happy to live with a little bit of ambiguity, or they don't care.
Put concisely, "speaking out" without any knowledge is among the most annoying things a person can do.
- When Epstein was placed in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), the jail informed the Justice Department that he would have a cellmate and that a guard would look into the cell every 30 minutes. These procedures were not followed on the night he died.
- On August 9, Epstein's cellmate was transferred, and no replacement was brought in.
- The evening of his death, Epstein met with his lawyers, who described him as "upbeat".
- CCTV footage shows that the two guards failed to perform the required institutional count at 10:00 p.m. and recorded Noel briefly walking by Epstein's cell at 10:30 p.m., the last time the guards entered the tier where his cell was located.
- Through the night, in violation of the jail's normal procedure, Epstein was not checked every 30 minutes.
- The two guards assigned to check his cell overnight, Noel and Michael Thomas, BOTH fell asleep at their desk for about three hours and later falsified related records.
- Two cameras in front of Epstein's cell also malfunctioned THAT night.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jeffrey_Epstein#:~:te....
"I am in perfect health and have no intent of commiting suicide."
after one talks about a subject like this, lol.
The closest I can come is believing staff were paid off to let him do so, but I can only imagine the sorts of heads that would have rolled on his open and honest testimony. Yeah.
Which sucks, because there are very real conspiracies out there, and the others are very often employed for cover. See also MiB / LSD experiments, where you dress up as Hasidic diamond merchants and visit whistleblowers with gargantuan amounts of experimental psychedelics. "Ha ha this guy thinks aliens are probing everyone"
Epstein, for his part, yeah, I agree, probably was actually part of a conspiracy, a fall guy for an entirely government run honeypot. However, I don't have any reason to think this is all true.
What?
Conspiracy theories work specifically for seeing the trend over time.
For example, I have no memory for what I ate yesterday, but I can recall news stories from as far back as the 80s which corroborate malfeasance decades later.
Did you know that John McCain was a filthy grifting criminal who was involved in the savings and loan scandal, was a complete coverer for the Iran Contra debacle, and the CIAs BCCI money laundering scheme for their importing of drugs through Mena Arkansas, which was shielded by Bill Clinton, and for being a CIA minion was awarded the next POTUS position...
Look into BCCI and a name you might be familiar with, Khoshoggi not the dismembered journalist by MBS, but his relative who was the arms dealer that sold his yacht to... donald trump. Who bragged about the purchase on nightly entertainment TV.
"It's a big club, and you aint in it" -- George Carlin.
The CIA runs the USA, and the drug trafficking and child trafficking industry, and Israel runs the CIA... Guess who was handling Epstein ;; Maxwell (AKA mossad)
Damn, this is actually true. I just visited Wikipedia, and I did not expect what I learned there. I thought Jamal Kashoggi was just some journalist. I never looked into him.
Turns out:
-He worked at the Saudi equivalent of the CIA
-He's the cousin of Dodi Al Fayed (the billionnaire who died in the car crash with Princess Diana)
-He's the nephew of billionnaire arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi, who sold Donald Trump a $200M yacht
-His grandfather was the personal doctor of the king of Saudi Arabia
-Considering the amount of noise the US made about him, I also expected him to be a US citizen. But no, he wasn't even a US citizen. I've never in my whole life seen the US govt care this much about a foreigner dying abroad, even if they work for a US company.
-George Soros' Open Society Foundation sued the Saudi government over his death
I know HN is the sort of place where you get flagged for voicing your suspicions without linking some establishment-approved source that gives its blessing on a particular narrative. So I'll just say this: it feels to me me that this is a very surprising background for a mere journalist.
The next conspiracy will be AI code that is delivering information that cant be debunked regardless how (un)true.
Thats the AI we fear.
no, I'm neither from US nor overly informed about politics there but I would have expected to have heard about it from Trump's allies when the two where butting heads
And dont get me started on the group that GHWB ran in vietnam... whats that guys name from the massacre? oh yeah, the head of DHS after it was created.
according to this Fox News article [1] his suicide was the first in 21 years.
1: https://www.foxnews.com/us/epstein-new-york-lockup-suicides
The only remarkable coincidence here was that the cameras were malfunctioning. It's highly improbable that a jail camera system would be designed in a way that it can be switched off by frontline guards with no evidence of tamper.
/s
Highlights the focus being on the wrong part of the story (his death), when the events of his life are what need most scrutiny and tireless investigation.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Correctional_Cent...
"Epstein told lawyers that cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione ‘roughed him up’" -https://nypost.com/2019/08/14/epstein-told-lawyers-that-cell...
"Ex-officer who shared cell with Jeffrey Epstein convicted of quadruple murder" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/07/jeffrey-epst...
It’s also worth noting that it was the cellmate’s lawyer who asked that the camera footage of their cell be preserved.
Lastly, Epstein trying and failing to kill himself seems more likely than that particular cellmate trying and failing to kill Epstein.
I don’t think what really happened will ever be clearer than mud, unfortunately.
Were these procedure followed at every other time?
The clear implication of the sentence “These procedures were not followed on the night he died.” is that the procedures were generally followed at all other times. But it is only implied, not explicitly stated, which is the kind of weaselly language used when someone is trying to convince others of something when they don’t have enough facts to present.
> If that site was known to have guards that didn't follow procedure, then maybe that was the reason that it was selected.
Yes, that’t true. Was that site known for that? Also, that’s not the argument originally presented, as I explained above; you’re jumping from argument to argument.
I'd agree that it is one reading of it, but it can also be read as simply stating a fact about the night in question. Whether the procedures were often neglected does not change the fact that a procedure to avoid suicides was not followed when they could have made a difference.
If it had been written as "These procedures were not followed on just the night he died.", then I would agree with you.
Any statistics for noncompliance at any sizable organization are going to be non-zero due to the law of large numbers. That is just evidence that they exist and do things. The baseline for comparison here shouldn't be zero, it should be the normal statistics for compliance.
I just don't think it is good for public discourse to use out of context statistics, even (and especially) if they are right, because it emboldens others to do the same when they are wrong.
(again, I'm not saying you're wrong, just saying these arguments aren't statistically rigorous)
No idea.
It just seems a poor defence of the events of that particular night by also stating that it's a common problem.
As a bad analogy, if a murder suspect was found to be carrying an illegal weapon on the night in question, it would hardly work in their defence for them to state they often carried an illegal weapon.
"...In 2020, associate Jean-Luc Brunel was arrested and charged with the rape of minors by French prosecutors. He later died from an apparent suicide before his trial could proceed..."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/the-secret-cyc...
"At one point, a fellow-inmate beat him in his cell. (Armstrong suspects that it may have been an assassination attempt.)"
Martin recently wrote an interesting book about banker and politician meddling in Russia.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/russia...
I'm arguing that "two broken cameras" means nothing without context.
From what I've read that was debunked. Initial reports said two cameras could not recover footage but one of them was later restored. No one know how long it was malfunctioning. No cameras were ever pointed at his cell, these were just cameras in the vicinity and there was plenty of recovered footage for the corridor showing that no one approached his cell
They had a backup that incredibly also had a "technical problem".
"Jail CCTV erased by 'technical errors'" - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205
That seems like the only remaining "plot hole", from a technical perspective.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epstein-jail-cell-fo...
"FBI studies two broken cameras outside cell where Epstein died" - https://web.archive.org/web/20200622111206/https://www.reute...
You should make a new account titled "PlausibleDeniability".
At the very least, a very persistent Devil's advocate.
I have seen enough Law & Order episodes to know contract killings are always done by a prisoner already inside the wing.
As this was a prisoner know to cajole with a past US President, and also the current US President at the time, a professional and competent police investigation would take it further.
Like say...Could it be possible the cell of another inmate was left open by accident? Any other inmates present at the time known to kill people by strangulation? Tracking the bank accounts and private life of the characters closely related to the events at the time? Like prison guards, lawyers, prison administrators and inmates? Anybody suddenly taking trips to Dubai and Vegas?
On another topic, helping a monster to do the right thing is, in a moral sense, not that bad. Maybe by cashing out his holdings, the victims can be helped. So, much good will also happen.
You would think so, but: https://apnews.com/article/jeffrey-epstein-prisons-new-jerse...
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/09/795004811/video-outside-cell-...
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/09/795004811/video-outside-cell-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60443518
For example, how often are cell mates transferred? How common is it for a prisoner to go a night without a cell mate? How often do guards actually do mandated checks (versus what they say since apparently they falsify records at least sometimes)?
I can imagine this being a murder, but I can also imagine an environment where “mandated” checks are just a box on a form that gets checked with no connection to reality.
One base rate we might have is the number of suicides that happen at this facility (apparently almost none) which does lend some credence to the murder theory.
I feel the facts you highlight would be more convincing if there was public information we could use to put them in context (and hey maybe there, if someone knows about it, please share).
If guards never do their checks, an average prison camera fails once a month, and prisoners spend on average 1 night every 3 weeks without a cell mate, it puts the GPs facts in a certain light. If the base rates for those events are higher or lower, it puts in a different light.
The fact that Epstein was “high profile” is another fact to consider but I don’t see why it would obviate considering other data.
>>> “William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency since 2021, had three meetings scheduled with Epstein in 2014, when he was deputy secretary of state, the documents show. They first met in Washington and then Mr. Burns visited Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan.”
It implies Epstein was meeting with the CIA chief, when the actual revelation was that he was meeting with the Secretary of State (which is probably equally noteworthy)
No, this isn't right. Burns was the Deputy Secretary of State. At the time, John Kerry was Secretary of State.
FWIW, when I first read the headline, I interpreted it to mean the current CIA director, as news headlines usually refer to former officials as "former" or "ex-".
Which is why these people were meeting with him like he was a well-connected financier.
The people who were meeting with him weren't checking his bank account balances to see if he was really a billionaire or how he got his money.
Take it as you will
Very large number of politicians from all sides including Trump and Clintons, royalties like prince Andrew of UK, academia like MIT Media lab, business and tech tycoons like Bill Gates and Elon Musk were exposed to be involved with a guy proven to be a pedophile and supplier who conveniently died under the supervision of the law enforcement. Now we have the CIA chief. Not to mention the endless scandals among the religion power figures and institutions.
And yet, it's the "plebs" who are to lose their right to privacy to "save the children". At least we have the Reddit poweruser and Epstain colaborator Ghislaine Maxwell alive and in custody, I guess.
Maybe we should have open access to all communications of people with power?
I guess it's not a popular opinion.
https://youtu.be/w-d3jFIGxdQ
I don't agree with his Covid vaccination statement (though I can relate to it), as there are always going to be parts of society that are not able to be vaccinated, so it seems unnecessary for those who abstain out of choice to remove themselves from society (N.B. his quote was that they should have the decency to remove themselves from society, not so much "be removed").
.. Why hasn't someone been arrested yet??
There's the mundane answer: Because the wealthy and powerful are above the law and exempt from the normal mechanisms of accountability. And the more introspective, deeper one: Because enough of the rest of society believes that it has no choice or has something to gain by remaining complicit with a system run by Epstein & Friends, enough that that system can even reveal parts of its own nature to us and continue to chug along unabated.
The lists alone don't give enough information to tell which people on them were there for the normal rich guy stuff and which were there for the sex trafficking.
The story itself is the only real story.
Who got this story done? What is the goal? Who is being thrown under the bus and who isn't? Is it anticipatory misdirection because something else is about to come out and can't be controlled?
etc etc
https://twitter.com/gumby4christ/status/1491847630275629057?...
The exact same script can be repeated for the person who is now Goldman's Chief Counsel and was the counsel at the White house. He was making her travel arrangements and we are told they are just casual acquaintances.