#strawmanning

It's a hotbed of right-wing conspiracy fictions where I live, it's true. I blame the fact that there has been a lot of very publicly prosecuted political corruption in Northeastern Pennsylvania. And Scranton and Honesdale are within easy driving distance of a lot of the die-hard actual cults that are aligned with MAGA. Bizarre iterations of rumours propagate even among liberals, who just don’t know the origins. That’s what prompted me to start following conspiracy theory news many years ago, to in\oculate myself, so I would recognize it. It is a problem. But whenever I tried to contact some of these Qanon researchers and people covering Qanon specifically back in 2018-2020, privately with local information; I found them to be not interested, or more interested in making people in my region seem like we're all backward dumbasses and that's why these conspiracy theories circulate here. As if this Qanon and MAGA stuff isn't everywhere really. And up until this last election, I had almost all Democrats as representatives in government from Mayor up to President. I live in a city that's so Democrat skewed that often conservatives run for office as Democrats, and everyone knows it. I have seen Trump signs in Scranton and in towns around here, but even in the countryside these days I see almost as many "Medicaid Saves Lives" signs on the rural roads as I do Trump signs. So it's frustrating to be patronized. Though I'm used to it I guess, because people from this area often move away for various legitimate reasons, and I don't begrudge them for it, but then treat those of us who live here like we're stupid for staying here, just because they associate the area with their past, or conflate their specific experiences. When of course many of us who live here have also moved with the times. Things aren’t necessarily like they remember just because they haven’t been here; time didn’t stop 30 years ago for all of us here. And shitty things happen all over the place, and I wish people would realize that if you're new to an area, chances are you just aren't privy to the gossip and the local insider information the way you were in the place you had a network of long-term connections. So you may have no idea if your new location is any better or worse with any of it. That's probably the case anywhere.

At any rate, I became very disillusioned in 2020 with the only people covering Qanon up to that point; the Qanon focused content creators who seemed like they weren't interested in real people believing really dangerous things or warning people. They were interested in the intrigue, connections and celebrity characters, and lambasting people for comedic effect. Sick burns and the rest of it. Of course we all know by now that the influencers are subject to attention incentives that are problematic.

The problem is that the real corruption is seemingly getting lumped in with the weird and ridiculous, even if dangerous, conspiracy fictions. And that's a problem. And it does seem like a convenient situation for corrupt people who have maybe committed actual crimes, doesn't it?

So many people in the media seem to trip right into this. Brian Beutler was on The Bulwark talking to Tim Miller, and this outlet hasn't been overall bad with their coverage of the issue generally, but Brian Beutler specifically referred to the "Epstein scandal" calling it a "gripping conspiracy theory".

This dangerously conflates 2 things.

Indeed, the widely pushed MAGA conspiracy fiction about blood libel related tall tales that smear all Democratic politicians as evil child abusers or their accomplices, that’s a lot of garbage, yes. Even though in some cases these narratives are demonizing regular registered Democrat voters as sinister people, which is very socially dangerous. The Pizzagate story was totally made up. There was no basement in the pizza parlor, and there was no secret code. And a lot of the people pushing it sure seemed like they were in on the joke and maybe didn't believe it themselves anyway. Although a lot of people were drawn in by having a very real sympathy for abused children.

But when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, this isn't just a scandal, it's a proven criminal case. It’s normal for people in a society to care about justice for victims. There have been actual crimes that are real and have been adjudicated in court. Jeffrey Epstein was convicted and served a sentence, however mild, and was being held in jail again when he died. Jeffrey Epstein's close associate Ghislaine Maxwell, British-French-American socialite, is currently in prison, a convicted sex offender for trafficking children. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's in the public record, it's been adjudicated. And Ghislaine Maxwell's father was up to his eyeballs in sketch, known as someone litigious and alleged to have worked for Mossod because he had a lot of high level connections, he died presumed to have fallen overboard on a yacht with the same name as his daughter. All this stuff happened. Obviously people speculate about the circumstances of Jeffrey Epstein's death, and they've speculated about Robert Maxwell's death too. And you can call that "conspiracy theory" because it's not proven, it’s speculation, and often involves conspiracy theorizing. But Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison because she was convicted of crimes. Jeffrey Epstein was in jail when he died because law enforcement had charges against him, and he'd already had an adjudicated criminal history. These things are not "conspiracy theories" - they happened.

And wondering if Donald Trump is implicated somehow is not something way out there. He’s seen in photographs and admits he was friendly with them.