Jacob Siegel
Tablet, Jan. 19, 2023
“As of 2019, 4.2 million people in the U.S. held security clearances. That’s not a specialized core of security professionals; it’s the population of Los Angeles.”
On Wednesday morning, Jamie Lee Curtis was trending on Twitter. Earlier in the week, the actress had posted a photo on Instagram showing off the handsome set of black Pollock chairs that furnish her office. It was not the chairs, however, that landed her on Twitter’s front page, but the photograph on the wall behind them. The Instagram photo has since been deleted, after thousands of amateur investigators online tweeted at Curtis to ask why there was a photo of a naked child stuffed into a suitcase hanging on her office wall.
Here was a clue pointing to Curtis’ involvement in the globalist pedophile ring known to dominate the political and cultural elite of the United States along with who knows how many other Western nations. This particular conspiracy theory, which has branches in Pizzagate and QAnon, has two great strengths. First, it can’t be disproved by contrary evidence. To take one example, the image on Curtis’ wall does not, in fact, show a child’s body crammed into a suitcase. The photo, taken by the artist Betsy Schneider, is of a young girl in a tub of water. Creepy it may be, but bad taste and ritualistic child sacrifice are not necessarily the same.
The conspiracy’s other source of strength is its basis in reality. Jeffrey Epstein really was enticing some of the world’s richest and most powerful people to a private island where he kept a harem that included underage girls trafficked into the sexual service of a global elite. Yet Epstein’s arrest, rather than dragging his horrible crimes out into the light of day, only deepened their mystery. For one thing, his well-timed suicide in a New York prison put an end to the chance that he might spill his secrets. But the secrecy remains as the FBI stonewalls requests to release files related to Epstein’s work as a Bureau source.
Why does any of this matter? Because the outrage over Jamie Lee Curtis’ wall art and the far larger scandal over President Biden’s improper handling of classified documents are both products of an enormous, opaque system of secrecy—so opaque we don’t know how enormous it is—that has captured American politics. The principle of democratic self-governance is obviously incompatible with that system, but so too is the sanity of individuals living inside of it. Americans who want to join in their country’s civic life now find that the main way to participate is by following the trail of clues leaked by official sources while trying to solve elaborate, rigged puzzles about the nature of reality. It’s no surprise the country is going nuts. … [To read the full article, click here]
