Some plays are daring but pay off.

Say you want to remove a sitting president, but your repeated efforts fail. And then it looks like you cannot even beat him at the ballot box — your favored stooges are unpopular. With actual voters.

So you attempt major electoral fraud, focusing on swing states, under cover of a pandemic released from a lab your side “just happened” to fund. This amounts to a coup, sure. Whatchagonnado? Well, when the president resists, you call his efforts a coup.

Long shot, right?

Not if you can get the bulk of the media to repeat the message, relentlessly framing the issue always narrowly — as a coup by the defender rather than a coup by you, the offense.

Helping to keep this going? The very notion that “conspiracies” are non-existent and only believed by nuts.

Only “conspiracy theorists” are stupid enough, you see, to believe that complicated machinations can be kept secret. When the folks floating the conspiracy conjecture return volley, and state obvious truths such as that most of the facts have already been revealed, you just laugh and deny the facticity in some cases, deny the relevance in others, and call those who dare break ranks anti-social.

This works for inattentive people who want to believe that their side, at the very least — and, generally, “the government” — is good. 

It also works for sophisticates, who want to believe that all major social processes are Invisible Hand processes, not Hidden Hand processes. They’ve been trained. Even #libertarians fall for this.

Especially libertarian intellectuals! It is very hard to be a libertarian, since libertarians oppose so much of what modern states do, and how half the population lives. Intellectuals yearn to be treated with respect. One way to do this is grant to statists their good intentions. But these libertarians forget that this grant is best seen as merely a dialectical convention, or a show of manners. And thus they pretend that the state really isn’t that bad, and its participants just misinformed. Nonsense, of course.

But the nonsense is truly believed by most libertarians, and they usually side with statist intellectuals against the Conspiracy Theorists, whom they lampoon as boobs and worse.

Which is one reason libertarians have been treated so gingerly treated by the Deep State establishment, despite libertarians’ obvious ideological menace.

Libertarians have served as a loyal opposition to the Deep State, not a disloyal opposition. For their key role in the success of the Deep State psy-op that has been running for 60 years or more, they have been granted a special dispensation.

But things are changing. As soon as the beltway libertarians open up their eyes and see actual conspiracies when in play, libertarians will be quickly Brennaned. “Even libertarians” are a threat, and Brennan has shown us the next level of play.

Meanwhile, the reflexive disbelief and mockery of conspiracy theories by libertarians helps actual, existing conspiracies (of whatever nature, whether grand or petit, meticulous-and-cosmic or improvised-and-local) carry on.

This attitude by libertarian intellectuals may be one of the chief reasons why libertarianism has scant practical effect.

It is kind of amazing to watch, as they witlessly refuse to see what should be obvious to any smart person: just as altruism will be the favored public ideology of committed egoists, scorn for conspiracy theories will be one cultural meme that actual conspirators will most actively support — if behind the scenes.

Of course the epistemic problems are just as obvious. Which puts us in a trap. But we should be able to think our way out of such traps. We should be able to entertain a conspiracy conjecture without the now de rigueur freak out, look at the evidence, and draw conclusions. The number of grand hoaxes now coming to light is perhaps daunting — 1,2,3,4: an election, a pandemic, a half-assed foreign policy, a UFO cover-up and its half-assessed disclosure — but smart people should be able to handle them without feeling anxiety.

Buck up, smarties.

twv