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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
This calls for a return of… (video flipped and slowed down a bit, but still enjoyable.)
Yes, but who is?
And Congress sets the time. Looks like strike two (in less than 16 words), Champ.
One reason JPII was tragically deaf to a lot of the abuse claims, was that the communist government in Poland was in the habit of delegitimizing dissident priests with false accusations of pedophilia, a tactic still employed by Putin against his critics. It doesn’t strike me as implausible that when the worst people in the Vatican could no longer hide behind that historical fact they started to copy it.
And Pell’s return to Australia to stand trial was a windfall to some of the most morally and financially corrupt people in Rone. I’m not usually a cui bono guy, but really, cui bono?
I doubt it. BLM, antifa, critical race theory, CHAZ, CHOP, MeToo, defund the police, looting, riots, covid authoritarianism, tech censorship, Kavanaugh-as-gang-rapist, unpredicated spying on Trump campaign, coverup of unpredicated spying on Trump, impeachment for asking about Biden corruption – none of this turned out to be electoral poison stronger than the full court propaganda press we saw the last four years.
Many things can be true at once. Who’s to say that ambitious and greedy members of the Curia, in possession of knowledge about payments made to abuse victims didn’t rat Pell out because he was both an abuser, and stood in their way?
I mean, why not both?
Speaking of “not interested in spending time pointing out all the ways this is wrong”. I don’t think your comment is a response to the one of mine that you quoted. Also it’s wrong in other ways, but whatever,
To answer more completely Jerry Giordano’s baseless accusations I provide this, from PP 283-284.
This is a completely shameful and evil situation, which went on for decades and for which McCarrick has never served a moment of jail time. (Emphasis and italics mine)
Always a joy to talk to you, Ed.
Maj, I think that what you say is incorrect. I am willing to be corrected.
Where in the report does it say that “McCarrick’s sexual advances towards other priests were reported in the 70’s and summarily dismissed”? Give me the page. I cited page numbers.
Where in the report does it say that “officials in various locations destroyed such letters as came in accusing McCarrick of such acts as a matter of course”? There is a reference to two letters having been destroyed, on p. 102. This appears to be referencing additional copies of letters that are in the file.
I am not engaging in motivated reasoning. I am not a Catholic, and actually have a negative view of Catholicism. From our prior interactions, however, I seem to recall that you are strongly anti-Christian and anti-Catholic, which would imply that you may be the one susceptible to motivated reasoning.
If you need legal services, I suggest that you retain a lawyer like me, who can analyze issues dispassionately.
Because Pell’s alleged crimes as described by his accusers were facially implausible, honestly much like the election fraud theories. Multiple witnesses familiar with the running of the parish deny that they could have been alone together for any length of time on that day. The room where the rape was said to have taken place was a semi-public area through which multiple priests and parishioners would have passed.
That and we haven’t seen the trickle of other accusers come forward as in most or all genuine cases.
Heh. Yeah, not shutting the hell up is much worse than The Resistance and BAMN and all the other genuine attacks on our institutions we’ve seen over the past five years all in an effort to make him shut the hell up one way or another. Sorry Skip, times ain’t normal and complaints about Tweets! and being undignified just don’t hold up. He was raped, repeatedly, and he didn’t deserve it even if he is abrasive. No one does.
Your view of the last four years seems to be off. i remember President Trump being quite generous with praise and shared glory. I remember there being quite a bit to blame others for. It’s funny that all you seem to remember is not liking President Trump.
I really don’t see how we’re going to get to unity without having some kind of common understanding of what happened these five years.
I concede that Pell’s accusers are less credible in this fashion.
The alternative being true does open the door to a larger conspiracy though, which is similarly fraught.
I am sorry for my earlier outburst, such that it was. I am attempting to maintain collegiality.
Please see my comment from above with associated page numbers.
Oh, did you ask me a question? I didn’t see it but I wouldn’t want you to wait too long so I’ll give you an answer anyway. Breaking the machine. The political machine and the media machine. Ground work. Contrast. There are conservative elements even in Chicago. We have to break through to them, though, because there are filters in place designed not only to prevent other messages from getting through but ot allow false messages to come through.
Conservatism doesn’t fit in IL? Maybe, but how can we tell with the filter of corruption sitting over everything? Maybe conservatism would do just fine if given a fair shot. Or fine enough, anyway.
Another way is by fighting literally everything. Don’t allow any narrative to go out as they plan it – force them to get to the point of CHO/CHAZ and Defund The Police.
Go around MSM. That happened effectively in 2016. The Big Techs made sure that wasn’t repeated this time around. So fight the Big Techs too. They want to be editors? Good, then let them be sued like editors. Who will lead that effort? We’ll see.
Many people cannot decouple criticism of their church from criticism of them. There is an upper bound to how much sensitivity I can approach these topics with.
It is true that I am an Atheist. But I am not a monster, interested in battering people’s emotions with the sins of their associations. I am also not going to spare that institution the grief which it deserves, when it has used its position in society – a position which we have privileged throughout the centuries – to shield itself and its members from the misdeeds of its worst adherents, against people who were frequently the weakest and least able to see to their own good under their nominal pastoral care.
I am interested in telling the truth to the best of our ability. Now: With that said, I have put in the time to read – not cover to cover, but in reasonable depth the bulk of this report. I did not read much of the correspondence between the Holy See and McCarrick because it provides neither truth or wisdom. What must be conceded from the tenor of this document is that very powerful people in the hierarchy knew a great deal about what was going on, but chose to do nothing out of fear of the reputational damage that would come as as result, and subsequently, McCarrick became a powerful member of that organization himself, capable of creating a self-perpetuating cycle.
Bearing in mind: This report is a product of the Church itself, which has a vested interest in making itself look, if not good, then at least not as bad as it could given the enormity of the consequences of the 2002 revelations.
Take that for what you will. As a lawyer, I am sure you would tell any of your clients to never admit to committing a crime in a public place and not to talk to the media. They come close on part one and can’t avoid part 2.
I’m disinclined to believe in conspiracies larger than five people. I don’t see how this one would require more than the two accusers, probably a go-between and either Cardinal Becciu or someone else.
I often get the feeling that a lot of people who claim to have historical perspective etc, seem to know what Cicero said back in 55 BC, better than they know what Obama said AND DID just a couple decades ago.
aaaaaaamen, @shawnbuell, aaaaaamen
You don’t see the possibility that Trump increased his supporting vote total DESPITE the major media – and maybe due to some people getting their information from other sources – while also increasing the opposition vote total BECAUSE OF the major media with all of its obfuscations and outright lies etc?
Does it help or hurt that Becciu plays a role in the McCarrick saga as well?
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
It’s all speculation! I’m not missing disgust with Trump; how could I possibly miss that there is disgust with Trump? What I think you’re missing is why there was so much disgust, that acting “slightly more normally” might have helped but the elephant in the room is the full court press of Resistance and Propaganda to the point of BS impeachment, spying and investigating based on political BS if anything at all, and constant lying about the President. You’re acting as if what happened the last five years aren’t major scandals on their own and that there are no common threads tying them all together in any case. I don’t buy that. Speculation? Sure, but what the hell do you think you’re offering?
We can’t prove counterfactuals. We can observe what happened, though.
Hey, I was quoting you. So this is just a reflection of the joy you’re putting out there to begin with.
But you’re right – this is neither fun nor edifying. Good night all
I’m not a lawyer so maybe I am not interpreting the following tweets correctly… I understand that, according to at least these two lawyers, the states do have a say in how the other states conduct Presidential election. So just because TX can sue PA over the election, it doesn’t mean that NY can sue GA on its speed limit. Am I misreading the quotes? Or are these lawyers wrong?
Robert Barnes: “Those baffled by the idea of states limiting other states in how they conduct Presidential elections might want to read the Electors Clause of the Constitution, which is where states dictated to each other how they would conduct Presidential elections.”
Jonathan Turley: “…Seeking judicial review is not subversion of the Constitution or a call to rebellion. It is using the constitutional process. If going to the courts is “seditious,” going to church must be atheism…”
Oh, I thought you asked who is he? Well, I already typed this up so no sense wasting it…
Currently radio talk show host, author of the book with that quote and a few others, occasional law professor, worked at OMB for… Nixon, I think… these days he seems to me rather like Mueller and a few others who still get trotted out for some reason although they basically were at their prime in the 70s and possibly 80s. I stopped listening/subscribing to his radio show/podcast for a few reasons. It costs as much per month just for that show, as it does for EVERYTHING on Ricochet… Their “comments section” has been broken for years and they don’t seem to have any interest in fixing it… Hugh has far too much interest in talking about Ohio and football and Ohio football and baseball and Ohio baseball… They used to have @jameslileks on at least once a week until what I think was the mistake of moving the show from afternoon (Pacific)/evening (Eastern) to early morning… They seem to take too much pride in their audience size while also saying that much of it is people who have been drinking since the night before…
There’s more, but I just realized you didn’t ask who he is…
Ha! Well, I definitely know who Hugh is, and in fact became familiar with @jameslileks through his appearances there.
22% of Democrats were Truthers once believed that W. was complicit in 9/11. About same percentage of Republicans were Birthers and believed that Obama was ineligible to be President. About the same percentage of Republicans are Krakener’s and believe that Trump won the election.
If Trump had simply governed conservatively, turned COVID over to Pence and keep his mouth shut, and had not flirted with authoritarian, and racialism, he would have been re-elected.
Thanks for the cite. I hadn’t seen that part — as I said, the report is over 400 pages.
The part that you reference, which is actually on pages 280-281, is from a 2008 letter from former Benedictine monk Richard Sipe. It alleges that seminarians reported sexual misconduct by McCarrick to him (Sipe), at some unspecified times while he was a professor at a seminary between 1972 and 1984. It does not allege sexual misconduct with minors (this is stated on page 281). As far as I can see, Sipe did not report this to anyone until 2008.
Sipe did claim, in 2008, that McCarrick’s misconduct was “widely known for several decades,” without providing details. The New York Times (here) reported that Sipe was an expert witness or consultant in about 250 trials on clerical sexual abuse.
So I still don’t see any credible allegation of sexual abuse of a minor, by McCarrick, that was reported prior to 2017.
I think that you have seriously overstated your case. You cite one report, with a small number of alleged victims, most of whom were adults, and claim that this proves that the Catholic Church has “admitted the conspiracy was real” and that:
I don’t see anything in the McCarrick report about five Popes, 4,000 priests, or a systematic and illegal conspiracy involving thousands of victims across dozens of nations. This looks, to me, like an overstatement of Trumpian proportions. I mean, like his claim that he won in a “landslide.” (He may have won, narrowly, if Texas can win its argument about irregularities in four key states.)
I do agree that there was a terrible, widespread sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, though it’s not clear to me that the rate of misconduct was higher than in other organizations. There are a lot of Catholics. The Boy Scouts had similar problems.