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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’m not concerned about Trump being inaugurated in January. I’m more concerned about how flippant self-proclaimed NeverTrumpers are about voter fraud when it benefits them. But reasonable people can disagree.
Again, I’m not an EverTrumper or a NeverTrumper, which puts me in a small corner of Ricochet. But having lived in Chicago for 18 years, I’m fine with being very unpopular.
I actually agree with you on the first point, but it’s a close thing. These men are both awful in their own unique way, but at least Trump appointed 3 Federalist Society members to SCOTUS. That is an unalloyed good which we got from his Presidency.
Our job now is to make Biden a single term President and replace him with an effective Republican.
I’m confident that Kamala Harris will be President shortly after January 2022, if Biden can last that long.
My hat is off to you, sir. I admire your contributions as well. Really appreciated your appearance on the Clearer Thinking podcast. You utterly bowled over your counterpart, for which I was jealous.
The only thing I would say to this is that the report is fairly unequivocal in stating that despite repeated attempts by various persons to inform those in power, beginning as far back as the 70’s, McCarrick was deemed too valuable to have such accusations derail such a promising career, in addition to the collateral reputational damage the Church would have suffered.
Letters and accusations were both vanished or destroyed; verbal accusations ignored or covered up. Complainants were reassigned or expelled. This was a systematic effort and the rumors followed McCarrick all the way up the chain to the Holy See. But his personal charm seduced several Pontiffs. It is a genuinely tragic tale.
That is a stretch for me as well and for many of the same reasons. My skepticism is tempered by the fact that advanced civilizations that are a billion years old have time on their side. I.e., my suspicion is that such craft as we are seeing may not have any EBEs in them. They are likely autonomous drones with some form of advanced AI sent out into the universe for much the same reason we sent out the Voyager probes.
At any rate, it may take thousands of years to traverse vast interstellar distances, but sufficiently advanced technology wouldn’t have a lifespan in the way we do to concern itself with.
And yes: we must invade and destroy their home world.
Nonsense. It’s a good alloyed with awesome, tinged with double-awesome, and drenched in liberal tears.
It’s only close in a couple of states, and those are insufficient to flip the election.
Whether you like this or not, the President really drew an inside straight in 2016 to pick up WI, MI and PA. The odds of him running that table again were always low.
I conceded in the OP that minor forms of cheating are likely in any given election… but to limit that to a unidirectional vector is to misunderstand human dynamics.
The good people aren’t all on our side and the bad people not all on theirs.
The future is going to be awesome then. Because she is electoral poison the likes we haven’t seen since Hillary.
Sure, just like Obama in 2012.
But Obama wasn’t electoral poison, was he? Obama was extremely popular, personally.
What the lawsuits demand (particularly the Texas one) would set legal precedents you absolutely do not want. They would allow California or New York to sue other states for not enforcing their own laws on things to California’s interpretations. That would hull the Constitution badly – you have zero idea of the waves of court actions and interstate feuding that would follow. It is an insane suit.
It really is breaking the Constitution just to achieve a short term political game.
Trump attempting to destroy our institutions?!? After the last five years you can say that seriously? Shawn you’re lost. Do we really have to go through the list of major Dem attacks on our institutions again? Do you really believe that tweets and lawsuits are an attack on our institutions after all we’ve seen?
I’m not an EverTrumper, but I suppose some would insist that I am anyway. It’s not hard to be seen that way when half the country thinks a MAGA hat is a hate symbol. Of course Biden will be bad for the country. Of course Trump was good for the country. Not perfect, but darn good. Think how much better he could have been if he weren’t saddled with Resistance and BAMN at every turn, or with the timid/incompetent/duplicitous Republicans “backing him up”.
The key point that the GOPe can’t or won’t grasp is that the people who came in with Obama were willing to take an electoral spanking just to get Obamacare passed. In fact, for anyone who was listening, they said that if they passed it, it would never be repealed, and directly on cue, The Turtle was saying, “Repealing that will be hard to do.”
The only thing that will avoid a replay under the Harris administration is that, maybe, this crop of Demo-rats isn’t as dedicated, and possibly, Trump might have shown a few Repubs what it looks like to have a spine.
If you’re on the “there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats train” you are definitely talking to the wrong person, because I’m not interested in spending time pointing out all the ways this is wrong.
Many things can be true at once. In this case, Trump could be good for some things and very, very bad for others. For that reason, I was opposed to his getting the nomination in 2016, was more or less supportive of him after he took office because he did things I liked, and then became less bullish as it became obvious that he is a toddler who is not worthy of being President.
So, I can take the good, lament the bad and hope for better in the future. Is this really not obvious?
Maj, this is extraordinarily inaccurate reporting. The McCarrack report is over 400 pages long. On page 433, it describes a claim received on 8 June 2017 as “the first accusation against McCarrick of sexual abuse of a minor involving a named victim.”
If I’m reading the account of “Mother 1” correctly, a footnote seems to indicate that her sons said that McCarrack never sexually abused them. (This is on page 47). The mother claimed to have sent a letter in the mid-80s to unspecified Catholic officials; she had no copy; and there was no record of receipt. This is pretty weak, though the alleged activity is certainly creepy.
There were a series of anonymous and pseudonymous letters about McCarrick in the 1992-93 time period, alleging pedophilia, detailed on pages 95-105. They don’t seem to include verifiable details, and come across as unhinged.
There are allegations of homosexual activity with adult priests or seminarians, as well, apparently reported around 1989-1996. These are certainly serious in light of Catholic moral teaching, but not pedophilia.
The first-noted abuse accusation (above, the one made in 2017) was investigated and deemed credible in June 2018, at which time the Pope asked for (and got) McCarrick’s resignation. This is on pages 434-35.
After such public disclosure, it looks like many other accusations were made.
My impression is that there were no credible accusations of pedophilia made until 2017. Your claim about this being “swept under the rug” since the 1970s does not seem supported.
This looks like careless evaluation, Maj. I suspect that your opinion about the election issues is based on equally careless evaluation.
Think too how much better he could have been if he could have shut the hell up from time to time, not tried to hog the credit for everything, while blame shifting and conspiracy mongering everything that went against him.
I tried to listen to what looked to be an excellent reprise of this classic, but the damn orbs kept floating around in my ear drums!
That is dumb. Pell’s only crime was speaking out against the Global Warming Hoax and exposing financial corruption the Vatican. FYI, the Vatican financials are corrupt.
I like your post, but Cardinal Pell is innocent. If you want a conspiracy, there’s circumstantial evidence he was framed precisely because he’s one of the good guys in the curia.
Still working my way through the comments, so I may not be the first to raise this point.
There is nothing you can do about New York, Illinois or California. The Central Party controls those states. Had Californians not assumed that the 42% of registered Dems in Calif had persuaded everyone else to vote their way, but instead begun to understand that there was massive corruption going on such that by 2017, a San Diego court ruled the DNC had stolen a Presidential primary away from one Dem candidate and given it to the other, then in earlier days important activities might have occurred to stop this centralized “vote adjusting.”
But now it is just the way it is, and I see no way of going back. Especially given that these three states are now locking everyone down to the point of madness. ($17,000 fine to be imposed for anyone in an office caught not wearing a mask.)
“Extraordinarily inaccurate?” You are being needlessly pedantic. McCarrick’s sexual advances towards other priests were reported in the 70’s and summarily dismissed. McCarrick’s career as a serial abuser of adults and (apparently) children with a well-practiced pattern of grooming and seducing adults is similarly well established by the documents. This did not begin in the 80’s; it was first NOTICED and taken seriously then. That does not mean that the accusations regarding things which took place in the 70’s magically evaporate.
This was an ongoing and escalating pattern of abuses, as one would associate with criminal, predatory behavior from a person in a position of authority over others.
That is because if you read carefully, you will note that officials in various locations destroyed such letters as came in accusing McCarrick of such acts as a matter of course. Only after years of such accusations were heaped up were they taken seriously.
I will say only that due to the motivated reasoning I’m seeing here I won’t be retaining your legal services.
State legislatures. When state executives set the time and manner then the election is fraudulent.
Try this:
I want, for once, to try something other than cowbell. President Trump was not more cowbell. Heightening the contrast rather than blurring it, is not more cowbell.
Oh yes I remember Alan Keyes. Alan Keyes didn’t lose because he was too hard line or because he was offering poison. Alan Keyes lost because IL was on the down slope to deep blue and because he was Alan Keyes, essentially a carpetbagger who came in because no one else wanted to run after Obama prominently weaponized government by having his opponent’s divorce records leaked revealing how Ryan wanted to do kinky things with his wife Seven of Nine, and the media simultaneously amped up that news while not taking Obama to task for so blatantly injuring our precious institutions. Not only was IL on the road to deep blue, the new Machine was just about reconstituted at that time and ready to start sprinting after it molted the old Machine skin.
In 2010 we got Mark Kirk, and he won one term. I guess you think he was too hard line too? Offering poison to the electorate? Nah, he was offering Dem-lite stuff. The real poison. We’re no better off here in IL for it.
For that matter, I don’t believe that Trump lost because he was hard line or offering poison either. I believe he’s been the target of one of the biggest and brazen propaganda campaigns in history with just about all parts of the elite in on it. Despite that he got 70+ million votes and made inroads with Hispanics.
It is a fascinating and lurid tale. I would be shocked to think that members of the Roman Catholic Church would accuse a senior figure of pederasty. Wouldn’t you be? These are men of God, after all! What’s wrong with them?
Not for nothing: wouldn’t this just be the kicker? That Pell is innocent… but he was only convicted because the Church is so corrupt that members of its bureaucracy saw fit to send him up the river?
Hear, hear.
Isn’t swell how a post with six likes that mocks the evidence of voter fraud is fast tracked right to the main feed while the numerous posts with 30-70 likes which detail the actual evidence are spat on. We’ve learned so much this year about our leaders.
I’m still waiting for an answer to how we are to proceed.
How are we going to get Republicans elected in Illinois and change the culture there fundamentally? Oh – I just said it. Politics is downstream of culture. Culturally, Conservative Republicans are not going to fit in Illinois.
I would hope that this isn’t a shocking revelation.
It has nothing to do with what I like or don’t like about 2016. I’m not certain, as you seem to be for some reason, that where it’s close is insufficient to have made a difference. I think it’s likely that a difference was made in any number of ways from propaganda, information suppression, to actual cheating.
I was going to mention that too, but I thought it was more important to point out that Hugh Hewitt is not an oracle or something.
That’s speculation. The “media” didn’t cause fewer people to come out to vote for Trump in 2020 than in 2016 – he increased his vote total significantly.
He also increased the opposition vote total significantly. That’s what I think you’re missing here: Disgust with Trump – look, I get that you don’t see this or don’t want to – and negative partisanship are what defined the outcome of this election.
Perhaps, if as Skip said, Trump had acted slightly more normally than he did he wouldn’t have gotten so many people amped up to vote against him. I don’t know what else there is to say, here.