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2020: Year of Conspiracies, Real and Imagined (Unpopular Opinions Contained Herein)
The word “unprecedented” is going to need to be replaced, don’t you think? At this point, it’s pretty much worn its welcome out with me. I could really stand to do with some good, old-fashioned precedent rather than the continuous string of horrors this year has served up.
But stressful times can have the effect of separating the wheat from the chaff, and this year is no exception. We’ve seen considerably greater quantities of chaff (such that my hide is chafed)this year, especially with regard to the emergence of bogey-men in the form of conspiracy theories. This may be unpopular, but this series (for which @westernchauvinist gets partial credit) is about airing your unpopular opinions in a sort of… annual vanity bonfire. And I’m burning with the desire to make myself unpopular.
Today I have unpopular opinions concerning three conspiracies: One true, one false, and one that is… possible. Let’s get this one out of the way right now:
Donald Trump lost the election fair and square.
Don’t give me your sad-sack, shop-worn-from-2004, Randi-Rhodes-wannabe conspiracy theories about Diebold – excuse me… Dominion – Voting machines and software stealing the election from Donald Trump. They didn’t. You have zero credible evidence for a vast conspiracy involving thousands of individuals spread across entire states, in multiple counties and municipalities who are all so clever and smart that they somehow changed only the votes of 5,000,000 or so Americans such that Trump lost… but large numbers of Republicans nonetheless won.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t individual instances of voter fraud that crop up where a cagey daughter of a dowager votes for their aged parent in the manner they perceive to be all that is good and right. Or random precinct captains who engage in hinky business at the margins in an attempt to put a thumb, toe, or elbow on the scale. These things happen. They are unjust and when uncovered need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
However: none of that occurred in sufficient quantity as to swing the election in favor of Joe Biden, and there’s no logical necessity that all such marginal fraud was pointing in the same direction, either. An elaborate conspiracy isn’t required to explain the President’s failure to expand his coalition beyond his fervid base. Watching the President tell people to inject disinfectant in response to the ongoing pandemic might have had some bearing upon their decision to not vote for him. Or was that a joke? I can never keep up with how many moves ahead of the game he is today and his many japes.
If you examine the results of the election, you’ll notice that in many places, the President ran ahead of the Republican Senate candidate in that state, and there are many places (like Maine) where he ran significantly behind which should tell you that people were plenty willing to split their tickets. Not at historically high levels, but at statistically believable ones which sometimes even favored the President. Nowhere is this more evident than a state like Georgia, where David Perdue received 49.73% of the total vote, compared to Trump’s 49.26%. In the Senate Special Election, Republicans received 49.37% of the vote in total, slightly ahead of the President.
This is not evidence of a fell conspiracy to turf Trump out. It’s evidence of the fact that the more suburban a State’s electorate was, the less popular the President was compared to down-ballot Republicans. The more rural the state? The President tended to pace ahead of those same Republicans.
This is a bad conspiracy theory that needs to die. The President lost. Republicans didn’t, however. Perhaps there’s a message there we can build on?
But if that’s a fake conspiracy, are there real ones to worry about? What if I told you…
There exists an international cabal of pederasts consisting of people placed at the highest levels of well-respected and powerful organizations who have for decades perpetrated their crimes under the nose of law enforcement officials and within the very framework of the legal system itself.
You’re probably thinking right now: “I know what he’s talking about! Buell is joining QAnon!”
Sorry to disappoint. The truth is considerably worse than that fake conspiracy twaddle. Unfortunately, this conspiracy turns out to be all too real, is extremely horrifying, and centers on none other than… the Catholic Church.
What’s even more amazing? They admitted the conspiracy was real. Don’t believe me? Read the report, issued on November 10, here. When I say “reading this document is unbelievable” I literally mean that it beggars the imagination. How something like this could happen in a modern, civilized society is truly beyond my capacity… until you consider that some conspiracies are true.
At the center of this web of lies (to the extent that this abomination has a “center”) are no fewer than five Popes, 4,000 priests, (that we know of) multiple Archbishops and a bunch of Cardinals, who acted in concert (either wittingly or no) over the course of five decades to protect and promote through its ranks, men like George Pell. Also, the subject of this report: one Theodore McCarrick, the Jeffrey Epstein of the Catholic Church, who rose from the rank of Monsignor all the way up to Cardinal whilst furling about himself a systematic and illegal conspiracy, involving thousands of victims across dozens of nations whose lives will never be the same.
If the Executive Summary is insufficient to turn one’s stomach, I recommend fast-forwarding to page 39 where what I can only describe as “textbook grooming behavior by a serial pederast in a position of trust” is detailed. Keep in mind: this behavior was known about and alleged by witnesses as far back as the ’70s yet routinely swept under the rug, principally because of McCarrick’s close ties to large, influential, and rich Catholic families. McCarrick was repeatedly described as intelligent, affable, and hard-working, but also as an important and influential fundraiser, so the possibility of him being a criminal of this nature — plying children with alcohol and brazenly molesting them in their homes and on overnight excursions or abusing fellow priests — was, shall we say, outside of the Overton Window?
What is striking about this is just how closely the experience of “Mother 1” described in the report was replicated in parishes across the country… almost as if many of these abuser priests shared knowledge of their illicit activities and covered up for one another in some sort of conspiracy of silence that only really began to come to light in 2002 and beyond.
If you’re a fan of irony, consider the contrast between this situation and the “Satanic Panic” of the ’80s and ’90s which saw a sort of mass hysteria over “ritual sexual abuse” supposedly carried out by secretive covens of Satanists. The accusations were lurid; thousands of innocents were allegedly slaughtered in the course of carrying out these ghastly rites, with the accusations culminating in the false prosecution and ruination of the owners and workers at the McMartin Preschool before the panic was, thankfully, extinguished. Imagine, if you will, the delight of priestly perpetrators of such non-ritual yet very real abuse as they watched this drama play out on television and just how convenient it was for them that the energy wasted on this fruitless exercise spurred on by overzealous Church Ladies (today we might call them “Karens”) likely had the effect of discrediting potential accusations against them. They probably laughed and laughed at the bizarre confluence of events in which the media in concert with their vocation ended up burying even deeper the stain of their evil.
I mentioned that the conspiracy involved the legal system itself, because of course it had to. The perpetrators – no doubt under the watchful eye and assistance of various authorities in the legal system whom they had cleverly coopted and befriended – devised a system of binding Non-Disclosure Agreements to go along with payments to victims doled out by the Diocese in which the abuses took place, forming a legal “hall of mirrors” from which the light of their perfidy could not escape.
In 2017, I eulogized my Grandmother on this very website. It was painful to contemplate her loss, but I was forced after reading the bulk of this report to think again about my Grandmother, who always gave the “widow’s mite” to her local parish. To be frank, I’m glad she’s gone if only because it would make me sick to think of her horror and shame at seeing what that mite, given for years, had a hand in perpetrating.
This conspiracy was allowed to exist and grow to monstrous proportions precisely because people wanted to believe the best. Not the worst. Just make sure that the power of belief doesn’t overpower your rational faculties.
I’m sorry to be so maudlin, so I’m going to end with something I’ve touched on before which is a bit more fun…
It’s very likely that secret agencies of the US Government possess definitive knowledge that non-human intelligences are in control of vehicles that routinely violate our airspace and harass our military fighter jets.
Maybe this opinion isn’t unpopular anymore, yet there it is. No matter how weird 2020 has been, one of its more striking scenes had to be when the admission by the government that UFOs are real was met with a sort of yawn from the general public.
The CIA clearly thinks something is up — this is a link to their listing of declassified UFO photographs, which is nothing particularly explosive, given that they’re low resolution, grainy photocopies of the originals.
I promised a conspiracy, but isn’t this one sort of “out of the bag” at this point? It would be hard to keep something this titanic secret for long even if you a) read in as few people as possible, b) enacted strict compartmentalization of information, and c) outsourced many of the secret parts to private-sector vendors who can control their workforces with strict NDAs… there’s that word again. And to the extent that these procedures seem to have been followed, it has nonetheless broken down.
We already know about the existence AATIP program from the 2017 NYT revelations featuring Lue Elizondo and Harry Reid, but what we don’t know is whether there were antecedent programs. We also know, for instance, that the government has claimed (rather obliquely) to be in possession of “meta materials” possibly from a crashed UAV (unidentified aerial vehicle) and that Navy pilots and vessels have unequivocally recorded encounters with UAPs in several spectra, including visible light, infrared and radar; vehicles which exhibit flight characteristics impossible to square with currently understood notions of aeronautical engineering. So where’s the conspiracy?
It should go without saying that possession of such technology would place its owner in the position of having a type of strategic superiority in geopolitical matters unlike anything we’ve seen in world history… so you’d better believe that somebody at the Pentagon is interested in looking into this, and with a secret budget of over $50 billion, a couple million dollars here or there falling in between the military’s couch cushions ending up funding these highly compartmentalized research programs doesn’t seem incredible.
I know, this isn’t much of a “conspiracy.” But that’s the best I can currently come up with given the evidence we have in hand.
For my part, I want to remain as agnostic about this question as possible. If somebody asked me: “do you believe in UFOs?” my response would likely be that my beliefs about this or any topic have nothing to do with it. The facts as I apprehend them are:
Craft displaying extreme flight capabilities have been reported and recorded by highly credible witnesses for decades;
World governments give contradictory answers about these phenomena, which means there’s probably little cooperation;
No private individual seems to have credible, physical evidence of one of these craft in their possession;
There is no direct evidence that the source of these craft is extraterrestrial and not merely a highly advanced US R&D project:
There is precious little evidence that these “craft” are even “craft” at all and not an exotic weather phenomenon we cannot explain;
The government knows about these phenomena and understands that it is something real but is trying to gain a better understanding before going off half-cocked and possibly causing a major panic, and lastly;
There seem to be national security implications from studying these UAP which prevent the government from candidly admitting what they are.
But there is some good news: If it is true that these craft are actually controlled by non-human intelligences it seems unlikely they’re all that interested in us. And who could blame them? Are we all that interested in the comings and goings of ants? Obviously not. Ants are lucky if, upon being sighted in my lawn, they are not immediately exterminated with extreme prejudice… and the difference in intelligence and technological know-how between ants and us and a race of beings capable of interstellar travel has to be about as great, if not greater.
To advanced intelligences, we’re probably not that interesting, and that’s an underappreciated blessing.
Bring on the unpopularity.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
I read it. It said “unless – they perceive that their electorate has a large number of people who find it inconvenient to use and ID to vote” which has nothing to do with the ability to engage in widespread voter fraud.
He will be around for a while. And he will probably retire under a Democratic President to preserve his legacy.
Well, if you read between the lines then perhaps it does.
I don’t trust the Democrats to be honest brokers when it comes to the application of Voter ID laws and certainly not when it comes to issues like “immigration” which they perceive as being the key to their ultimate victory.
Of course, that all backfired on them rather spectacularly in the case of Florida and even Texas, when it turned out that their left flank got them tarred as Central American Socialists.
Even so: I don’t know how to move the needle on a topic like Voter ID in a state like Illinois, NY or CA. In order to do that you need to first gain some semblance of political control. That means you need to have candidates and positions that aren’t poison to the people who live there, even if that means you might have some people in your party who you might otherwise consider “cucks…” Even if it’s only for the purpose of winning elections, which is after all, the point of politics.
@majestyk
Great post. It’s much easier for Trump supporters to believe that Trump’s re-election was stolen from him than it is to accept that Trump just plain lost.
Every time there is an election result, those who supported the losing candidate always have the fallback option of saying that their candidate didn’t really lose. This was the option supporters of Stacey Abrams had. Al Gore’s supporters and John Kerry’s supporters had this option too.
It’s like when a team loses in softball and one of the players says, “We didn’t lose. The refs stole the game from us. They blew so many calls. I wonder how much money those refs were paid to throw the game.”
If it makes those who supported the loser feel better, maybe the rest of us should just look the other way.
Or we can conclude that Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch know that the election was stolen but are too afraid of riots in the streets to due the Constitutional thing and overturn the election in Trump’s favor.
Conservatism has been replaced by a cult of Trump.
Well, at a minimum, it would require as honest media, which we don’t have.
This is the argumentum ad refereeum. “We didn’t lose, it was stolen!”
I remember a Packers game against the Seahawks with replacement refs where the Packers got absolutely jobbed on a call at the end of the game. In that case they really were screwed but they played the season out anyways because… well, you still have to keep your pecker up and fight the good fight.
Because there will always be another game. Another election. Another fight. And the point is to win the next one, not sit around and kvetch about why you lost the last one.
People really need to find some Reaganite optimism around here.
If allowed to cheat with impunity, the cheaters can always cheat enough to “win” an “election.” Whether this year, or next year, or two years from now, or four years from now…
To quote Hugh Hewitt: If it’s not close, they can’t cheat.
That depends on how much cheating they can get away with. And he wrote/said that several years ago.
P.S. Hugh Hewitt is not an expert on elections either. And even if he were, we’ve seen a lot of them fall into the same “trap” as people like Andy McCarthy, who are always “shocked” by misbehavior from people/agencies they worked with/for in the past, no matter how many times it gets repeated.
The problem is, the NeverTrumpers don’t care if Trump lost from cheating, they just care that he lost, so there is zero chance that they will now push for protections against voter fraud that almost certainly benefited them. They will just continue to say that we should investigate any allegation of crimes for which we steadfastly refuse to collect any evidence that would allow us to prove a crime happened and and say that if we can’t prove them in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt then complaining about it is nothing but a conspiracy theory.
Cardinal Pell was indeed railroaded, what happened in Australia was a serious, quite horrifying miscarriage of justice. I can read anti-Catholic bigotry for free elsewhere. It is extremely disappointing to see it here on Ricochet.
Please. Go read the McCarrick report and get back to me. I’m not hearing how relaying findings which the Church itself presented in an admission against interest manner is some form of bigotry.
Their actions and admissions are extremely tardy, however. This particular horse has been out of the barn for decades and they are just now coming up behind to try and shut the gate and make amends. They should be applauded for that honesty but that doesn’t serve as much of a balm to those who were victimized and ostracized over the course of those decades with the full knowledge of very senior figures in the Church, who hushed it all up when convenient.
The phrase “the rock of Clerical Credibility being shattered” appears in the text in addition to other statements expressing concern over the same several times, and concern for that breakage seemed to have overwhelmed concern for those harmed. That is a burden they must bear.
Potential Ricochet members: Please do not judge the Ricochet community by our management’s hotly debated editorial decision to keep the great majority of pro-Trump vote challenge discussions behind the member paywall because we have been told they are undeserving of promotion to the public feed. Ricochet is still an excellent place to have civil conversations, even though many of us are embarrassed by our management’s stubborn insistence that those of us seriously considering these legal challenges are unrealistic conspiracy theorists.
We want this wonderful online community to survive for as second decade as a meeting place for thoughtful conservatives with many differing opinions. Ricochet is thankfully not defined by its management, though, so I hope you will ignore their admittedly anti-Trump slant and join us as we continue to fight the good fight!
Shawn – what makes you an expert here? Ok nothing – so such another opinion piece. I’ll wait until the people who are working day and night to uncover the fraud that did take place – corroborated by at least five thousand and counting, signed and sworn affidavits, say there was no fraud. I know people that were poll watchers and they witnessed gross cheating – that times 49 more states?
I have to go back to thinking why cheat? If your ideas and policies are so positive and life-affirming, it will be clear cut. Everyone will follow the rules, no changing the rules in the 11th hour, or stopping counts, and resuming after doors were closed – etc etc. There are people who have legal careers at stake involved in the lawsuits, average citizens who are being harrassed and doxed, and standing up to that just to be heard, There have been death threats made to families of people working to uncover the truth, including attorneys, so you should allow the process to unfold. The best part is that maybe some of this malarkey will be cleaned up for future elections at the very least.
The very best outcome will show that Trump did win, and save us from a massive disaster called Obama 2.0 that may be looming.
I assume that they massively pad the vote even in general elections – to soften the ground, grease the way, demoralize even the thought of opposition on such a futile battle field.
I agree with this. However, Trump’s legal team has been beaten repeatedly in both state and federal court.
So, Trump’s legal team isn’t immunizing America against “cheaters” in future elections. In fact, by getting so soundly beaten in court, it is making the voter fraud issue appear like nothing more than excuse making for Trump’s inability to win a free and fair election.
When Trump lost the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz in 2016, Trump claimed that Iowa was stolen.
That’s the way Trump does business. When he loses, he says it was all rigged.
This is nothing more than a Trumpian temper tantrum.
I might ask the same of you.
Did you know that 6% of people in America think that the Moon landing was faked? What does that mean? Should we drag NASA officials out into the public square and flog them for having misled us as a result? 6% of America is a LOT of people. Many more than 5,000.
But sheer numbers of people believing a thing aren’t evidence for it. That’s a fallacy called the argumentum ad populum.
And let me ask as well: How are we still here? Still alive, after 8 years of Obama? Was it a near thing? Did we all perish and we’re just in “the bad place” now and just don’t know it? I don’t think so.
The good news is that unlike Obama, Biden has a rump of a House majority and probably won’t have the Senate. He’s a lame duck and he isn’t even President yet. A mandate? What’s that?
Let’s calm down here just a bit.
The nation’s institution’s are strong enough to survive a Democratic President, but they aren’t strong enough to survive a Republican President. Do I have that right?
Indeed.
I would add that he is shamelessly fleecing people to the tune of $150 million on his way out the door as he quietly packs his things in the White House.
His act is far past its sell-by date for me, even though I held my nose and voted for him in 2020.
They’ve proven strong enough to survive 4 years of Trump, haven’t they? They’ll survive Joe Biden as well.
But more specifically: No. You’re putting words in my mouth, honestly.
What our institutions won’t survive is Trump attempting to destroy them so that his ego is spared the agony of losing to Biden, apparently. Well, I’m not married to Trump and neither are you. Your fealty should be to the Constitution, not to Trump.
In 2018 many people had “evidence” that Brett Kavanaugh was a sexual predator. But it was all bad evidence.
Similarly, the Trump legal team has accumulated a pile of bad evidence that Trump had the election stolen out from under him.
Sure, but they wouldn’t have survived four more years of Trump, right?
The 2020 machines and software were descendants of the machines and software from 2006. Dominion is the next generation of Sequoia and Smartmatic.
Ha! Yeah Mark Kirk made so much headway in IL. Bruce Rauner was just what we needed as governor. More moderation! No, you need to bust up the machine. Good luck with that since all sides are part of the machine.
The purpose of politics is not to win elections. The purpose of politics is to govern instead of the other guy, according to your sense of right, good, and just instead of the other guy’s sense. So what amrbrosia do the Dems offer in opposition to hard line conservative poison? Endless covid restrictions, defund the police, critical race theory in the schools, more taxes, no school choice, identitarianism. Yeah, those middle of the road dems are the antidote to poison alright. We’d better work with them right away.
Majestyk, your prescription hasn’t worked in IL since the 90’s. I remember back then moderation and independents were all the rage too – yet we still slid into the deep blue right over the failed campaigns of all of those moderate squishes.
I’m not an EverTrumper, but I think Biden will be worse for the country that Trump would have been, and I say that as someone that didn’t vote for Trump in 2016.
As I continue to say, both EverTrumpers and NeverTrumpers have chosen personality over policy. That’s a fine choice, but it doesn’t gain my respect.
I think this was a delightfully well-written post.
Regarding the first conspiracy: while I also am (quite) skeptical that a coordinated effort — and, in particular, one involving voting machines — was undertaken, I am not willing to rule out the possibility that it was stolen by more quotidian means. It’s seems entirely plausible to me that multiple states were swung by fraudulent voting and/or vote counting. So I remain open-minded about that, and reject the notion that the implausibility of a vast left-wing conspiracy implies that Biden won “fair and square.”
Regarding conspiracy the second: I am agnostic about it. I can easily believe that people very high up in the Catholic Church believed that they were dealing with a problem in an effective way that best served the long-term interests of the Church and its members. I can almost as easily believe that some deliberately looked the other way and condoned continuing activity that was unconscionable. I suspect that either scenario could be spun either way.
As for UFOs…
I have no problem at all assuming that there is other intelligent life in the universe, some of it more advanced than are we. I can almost, but not quite, talk myself into believing that such a monumental secret has been preserved for decades. What I don’t find plausible is the actual presence of extraterrestrial vehicles, because, absent faster-than-light travel (and I’m deeply skeptical that that’s an option) it just doesn’t seem sensible for
anyoneanything to bother going so far, just to flit around out of sight and abduct the occasional soybean farmer (or whoever it is that gets abducted by these things).Having said that, and if indeed these things are out there, then Klendathu must be destroyed.
Would you like to know more?
Oh, I think they would if he had won.
It’s the means by which he is attempting to get those four years which might be less good for them.
Just quoted it because I can’t like it more than once!
Ok, but it is close. And there was cheating. Are we supposed to fight against that or not? If not now, then when?
Hard right conservatism has done much good for Republicans there as well.
Remember Alan Keyes?
There’s only so much that I can work with here. If you’re a person who thinks that “more cowbell!” is the solution to the political problems in a place like Illinois you’re probably never going to be happy. Are you ever happy?