Expect to see a lot of enraged screeds about how Epstein being murdered is a conspiracy theory, that anyone who thinks it was anything but a suicide is unhinged, etc. This is to control the narrative and to squelch demands for justice that many of the powerful hope are killed with Epstein’s demise. Branding those who know that it was a murder or assisted “suicide” conspiracy theorists also allows outlets like the NYT to gaslight the entire public and attempt to re-assert their authority by denying what is most obvious. It’s like the old (perhaps apocryphal) country song says, “Who you gonna believe, me, or your lyin’ eyes?”
What’s notable is that they are using conspiracies that most certainly did not exist and conflating those with normal, routine societal interaction or even actual proven detrimental conspiracy-like actions and events — such as the lead-up to the second Iraq war or the offshoring of jobs to China. Matt Stoller goes into this a bit here:
In China policy debates today a good chunk of the China dove world denies that Clinton and Bush offshored factories in order to encourage democracy in China. It's well-documented they argued this. The old China hands say 'yeah but everyone knows they were lying.' Conspiracies!
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) August 10, 2019
And in this thread:
Since Bush associated Saddam with Al Qaeda to march us to war, I've been sympathetic to conspiracy theorists. It's not that they are right, but they are no more wrong than mainstream political thinkers and they are far less destructive.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) August 10, 2019
Many of the elites are in the early stages of panic mode at the moment. They realize they are starting to lose hold of the levers of control and they comprehend it will only get worse. Their actions are emblematic of people flailing around with no idea what to do. Since these people pull the strings of most journalism in the US, expect to see more stories changing the past — about how events that were once known to have been caused by elite ineptitude or incompetence were really the fault of someone, anyone, else.
By the way, it was common knowledge in many Twitter feeds and other sites that I visit that Epstein would never make it to trial alive. That was as early as his arrest weeks ago. Why would anyone allow that trial to occur who had any power to stop it? And trust me, all the billionaires Epstein had supplied with trafficked kids had the power to stop it — and they did.
Expect to be told that more and more things in the world that are obviously true and were known to be widely true in the past are conspiracy theories. The NYT piece to which I linked is the first wave of that. There will be many, many more as the elites and their myrmidons begin to lose control of the narrative. (And most of the people who will have their understandings willingly re-arranged will be Boomer types like Kevin Drum.)