“We must, indeed, all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
—Benjamin Franklin

I read a novel about a year ago called Conspirata, a semi-historical account of the life and political times of Marcus Tullius Cicero. The story centered on the attempted overthrow of the Roman republic by Catilina, and began with a grisly hook indeed: the murder of a boy. The slave boy had been murdered by conspirators as a blood-oath, binding them together. This may sound like voodoo magic, but is in fact game theory of the most elemental kind. If you participated in a murder, you can’t exactly go to the authorities to report on the murder or the conspiracy, or you would be implicated yourself.

The murder of  the boy is, as far as I know, unhistorical. But it illustrates something about the nature of secrets, power, and conspiracies in general: if you want to retain power within a group, you need to ensure loyalty. When the offer of power from outside the group is sufficiently alluring, you often need a stick as well as a carrot, and there is no better way to enforce loyalty than by binding the fate of the individual to the fate of the group. The sharper the Damaclesian sword, the tighter the bond of loyalty.

While fiction is often the best way to explain a point, we need not rely on invented stories to explain this kind of blood magic. The murder of the slave-boy in Conspirata may be fictional, but David Cameron fucking a pig’s head is not. Political organizations of the upper echelon make their initiates do all sorts of humiliating and degrading acts in private, so that all the members have dirt on each other. Gang initiation rituals often involve similar acts, but of incredible violence, desecration, and crime. Again, this is to bind the individual to the group and separate them from legal authority and the outside world. Cults often use less extreme, but no less effective tactics to isolate members and prevent them from going elsewhere, and possibly taking secrets of the group with them.

When you really think about it, the standard NDA (non-disclosure agreement) is a weak attempt at the same principle. At its root, it does nothing but say “don’t say this, or you’re a bad person and we’ll bring the law down upon you.” Why is this weak? Because the law is actually not a particularly harsh critic of moral wrongdoing. It punishes relatively innocent people and lets assholes go all the time. Besides, there are protections for whistleblowers. Violating an NDA is worse than jaywalking or speeding (also crimes), but not by a whole lot.

Being a murderer, however—or a rapist, a racist, or having once bathed in feces, urine, or blood—that’s hard to live down, to yourself if you leave the group, or to the rest of the world if the secret is let out.

What’s worse than all of this? Andrew Breitbart once said that “there is nothing in this country that is a worse accusation” than calling someone a racist. Others have argued that being a “rapist” is probably the worst label, but I tend to agree with Hitchens that child-rape is the worst, something that many would rather die than merely be accused of, “and if we were guilty, we’d kill ourselves.” In the battle of labels, “pedophile” is perhaps the hardest of all to beat, which means that in theory, pedophilic acts are among the strongest possible means of binding people to a group.

What this means is that the growing #PizzaGate scandal, alleging a massive child trafficking and abuse ring in the upper echelons of American political power, has both a historical precedent and a purpose, even in (perhaps especially in) a society in which only about 4% of the population have pedophilic urges, and as a whole, tend to show less intelligence than the average person. The potential of being exposed as a pedophile when you are not actually a pedophile, (merely having committed pedophilic acts in a Faustian exchange for power), would be far worse than being finally exposed as who you really are if you actually were a pedophile by nature. In the latter case, there’s at least a kind of liberation in being exposed, and therefore no longer having to hide who you really are. If you’re not a pedophile, there’s only absolute despair and horror in exposure.

There is no way to know if the actual allegations are true or not yet, but this does not mean that the charges are either unfalsifiable or unworthy of investigation. The history of political power itself, especially aristocratic power, intrinsically merits scrupulous attention and suspicion. When you look at what we already know of the intentions and methods of the sorts of people involved, they’re already pre-qualified for suspicion, having literally admitted to conspiracy, not in theory, but in fact.

“And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking – and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.”
—Bill Ivey, to John Podesta, March 13, 2016

Obviously, it would be stupid to attempt to pursue charges now, while the allegedly guilty parties could be pardoned by a friendly president, especially when preemptively pardoning the accused without allegations being advanced would be damning and probably functionally useless anyhow.

The important point to remember is that there is nothing intrinsically positive or negative about a “conspiracy theory.” All a conspiracy theory alleges is that coordinated intention is the best current explanation for a phenomenon or pattern of phenomena. It is true that this is sometimes dangerously close to “unfalisfiable,” but the inability to test something does not mean that it is therefore false, Q.E.D. For example, I could claim that I am feeling angry; there is no scientific evidence readily available to the average person which could test whether or not I really feel angry or not, but that does not even remotely make my claim false, or even likely to be false. States of mind are notoriously difficult to prove, which is what makes rape so legally problematic. Yet no one would say that “because you can’t prove a state of mind, rape doesn’t exist.”

Rape does exist, as do conspiracies. It requires a high threshold of proof to legally establish either, of course, and both will, by nature, have to be inferential at their root, which is why legal codes in the common law tradition often compare the actions of the accused to what a “reasonable person” in their situation would do. If they didn’t, then people who committed rape, or conspiracy, could simply summon the epistemological black-hole of proving a state of mind and walk free every time.

We have every reason to believe that a conspiracy on a massive scale, over the DNC, over the media, over the election, and over foreign and domestic policy in the United States, is underway. We have concrete proof and evidence of this ad nauseum, with the DNC rigging against Bernie Sanders, the collusion between the Democratic party and the media, and the attempted rigging of the popular election exposed in part by Project Veritas. Historically speaking, it seems unlikely that such a vast conspiracy, involving so many people, could have existed without a very sharp Damoclesian sword hanging heavily over all of their heads. If it seems impossible that a vast pedophile ring could exist in the upper echelons in politics, because there aren’t enough pedophiles, or because someone would have said something, then you’ve got it exactly backwards. If you held power, and desperately wanted to retain it, those are exactly the reasons why you would have a vast pedophilia ring in the very first place.

“How prog-guru John Podesta isn’t household name as world class underage sex slave op cover-upperer defending unspeakable dregs escapes me.”
—Andrew Breitbart, Feb 4, 2011