As IF Times

link: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-justice-department-scrambles-defend-its-about-face-release-epstein-files-2025-07-08/

One of the hallmarks of American culture is the notion of the ‘conspiracy theory’. At every decade since the early sixties, there have been numerous events, often tragic, but not always, that have an official narrative, but whose facts didn’t stand up to intense scrutiny. People, especially Americans like to question things.  Not everyone will be satisfied the ‘official narrative’.

In fact, according to some theorists, the very moniker ‘conspiracy theory’ was coined by a member of the CIA in addressing the skeptics of the events surrounding assassination of JFK in 1963. Those of us alive at the time remember vividly the chaos and events of that day in Dallas, but just as significant were the unknowns as to who was responsible for his death. Sure, Lee Harvey Oswald was convicted of the shooting, but then from various quarters came the suspicion of the involvement of others, giving rise to the ‘grassy knoll’ and other theories of what really happened.  What gave credence to alternative views of the official narrative was that the JFK files were sealed until just recently.  Someone kills the leader of the most powerful nation in the world and they want to seal the facts for 75 years?  Sounds logical.

Another popular event with lots of controversy was the famous Moon landing in 1969. The official narrative is pretty much there for everyone to see since the networks all carried the event live ‘as it happened’.  Until recently, no one doubted this ‘greatest step for mankind’.  Now, with the aid of technology and some sober reflection of the events and technologies, the veracity of the event has come under great suspicion. The official footage of the event looks like very bad AI renderings today. The official narratives and the review of available technology at the time have fed into a growing pool of skepticism.

We all remember the events in New York in September of 2001.  The nation witnessed in real time the destruction of the two World Trade Center towers that day as 2 planes crashed into them.  There was little reason to question the official narrative; we all saw it. Except that while 2 planes crashed into 2 buildings, a third building, the Salomon Brothers tower 7, also collapsed spontaneously. As the years progressed, many professional engineers have cast doubt that aircraft alone would have caused the buildings to essentially implode, much less spontaneously.  But they’re sticking to the official narrative: 2 planes, 3 buildings, a virtual 7-10 split in bowling.

In 2020, a global pandemic emergency was declared in which a deadly virus was loosed upon the world that was so dangerous, that one of the symptoms was that there were no symptoms.  Masks became mandatory, sequestration was enforced upon the public and mandatory vaccinations were imposed on entire populations, except politicians. The official narrative was that only a 14 day containment was necessary and the virus would be contained.  They were only off by 3 years as the segregation and confinement became part of daily life.  One vaccination became two, then three, then a series of boosters to make sure. Common sense and rational thinking disappeared faster than crab legs at a cruise ship buffet. After almost 4 years, the charade could no longer be maintained and the edicts quietly died off.

Some may recall the mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017. A man opened fire from his suite at the Mandalay Bay hotel onto a music festival below, killing 60 people and wounding over 400 others. He was later found in his room dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.   The motive for the shooting was officially undetermined.  The logistics of how this one man could have moved so much weaponry and ammo up 32 stories came into question and of course, gave rise to various conspiracy theories.

Not to be outdone, Jeffrey Epstein, a well-known wealthy party guy to the jet set and politically connected, was arrested in 2019, accused of being the mastermind of a massive global honey-pot operation involving sexual activity with young children, murder, spying and political intrigue.  His partner Ghislaine Maxwell was tried and convicted and received a 20 year sentence.  After his arrest, Epstein apparently committed suicide in his high security jail cell.  So said the official narrative.  Just a few days ago, after the most publicized outrage and promise of justice for the children by all chest beating politicos-in-charge, it turns out that Epstein had no client list and the case was closed.  Thus, Epstein must have un-alived himself out of hysteria. The conspiracy theories will write themselves on this one.

link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram

Why do people in societies behave the way that they do? If you consider the myriad of choices that people must make on any given day, from the trivial to the consequential, it’s logical to assume that most will act in ways that would be most self-serving. That seems logical….but real life experience shows that this is not necessarily the case.

The societies I am referring to aren’t those run by notional despots with all kinds of surveillance and controls on their populace.  We can understand the motives of people in those states.  No, what’s more puzzling is the behavior of people in what are accepted as ‘free’ societies, ones in which citizens are supposed to expect some level of self-determination over their lives.  Aren’t people allowed to freely vote for their rulers here?

A quick survey will reveal that these types of societies are rapidly disappearing. Where once you could say categorically that ‘western’ nations were the ones with explicit freedoms, this is certainly not the case anymore. In Europe, both the UK and France have implemented strict prohibitions on what can be said both in public and online and in the case of the UK, even to thoughts! These kinds of restrictions were once thought to be characteristics of autocratic regimes such as China, Russia or North Korea.  In those surveillance states, citizens are spied upon, their speech is limited and the concept of personal rights is non-existent.

However this form of citizen behavior control has made its way into the toolkits of most heretofore free Western nations.  Canada is the most recent example of this erosion of freedoms.

Recently, the Canadians held an election after a prolonged period in which the previous ruler had destroyed virtually all the sacrosanct Canadian traditions of freedom and ethical behavior on the part of government. Finally, the nation could end their 10 year nightmare.  This nightmare included a collapse of virtually every metric of national performance, the skyrocketing of debt, the explosion of illegal immigrants, housing crises in every city, the proliferation of criminal activity and the crushing of personal freedoms.

But, thanks to the relentless and effective gas-lighting campaign by all media outlets (taxpayer supported) a large part of the population apparently voted to keep the same guys in office; the equivalent of ‘please sir, may I have another’.

Even casting aside the rumors of election manipulation, this kind of behavior is not organic.  It is planned.

Politicians and media may be un-liked by the majority of the population, but they are not guileless. At the very core of their being, they know what a very insightful psychologist named Stanley Milgram discovered over 50 years ago in a series of perhaps surprising studies on human behavior, especially in the field of obedience behavior.  He found that if a subject can be convinced that harmful actions on his part are not his fault, then he will continue to perform such actions and separate himself emotionally from those actions just because an authority figure instructs him to do so.  Thus, even as electric shocks applied to control subjects caused obvious distress, the subjects continued to apply them when instructed to do so.

His experiments were driven by an examination of the treatment of Jews by Germans during the Second World War, but what he discovered was that this behavior was not confined to Germans.  It had implications for all populations.

We saw this implemented on a large scale very recently with the massive Covid-19 psyop in the 2020-2023 period.  Doctors and other professionals continued to press on with harmful vaccinations because of the enormous pressure from peers and ‘authorities’.  What chance did the average citizen have of refuting the tidal wave of mandates?

In the case of the recent Canadian elections, naïve people were convinced that US President Trump imposed a more serious existential threat to the nation than 10 years of an inept Liberal government.  With the aid of virtually all media outlets, the story was effectively sold to a large part of the voters.  The knowledge derived from Stanley Milgram worked as it always has and the same government that had been applying electric shocks to the populace was returned to power.

We can expect to see more of this kind of incongruent behavior as time goes on because those in positions of influence are quite aware of Milgram’s work…even as the public is not.  Policies and laws don’t need to have any merit or make any sense, they just need to be sold. When you observe populations acting against their own existence, someone is harnessing Milgram.