"You don't need to invent an invisible shadow government to be mad at. You can just be mad at the actual government."
i think- i think the "invisible shadow government" conspiracies are a cope. if someone voted for the current government that is fucking things up (as the opposition said they would) then it might be hard to admit to having made the wrong choice whilst voting, especially if the current government claims to hold the same values as you "my wholesome christian government that said they'd help guys like me wouldn't be the ones making my life harder! it must be the secret cabal!!!"
An "invisible shadow government" is a crazy idea. Why would someone in charge of a black budget and it's secret infrastructure accept democratic oversight?
Why does one replace the other? Ever since 9/11 I've noticed a real push to discredit conspiracy theories to the point where the term now invokes images of lunatics with tin foil hats and insane ideas like lizard people and whatnot. It's been really effective too. Like, there's things out there that sound bat shit crazy until it turns out they were true - like operation Northwoods for example - but nobody seems to care because they are verified decades later.
Sure, there's visible people out there that can be blamed, but why is it so outlandish that there may be more who know how to hide from public scrutiny?
I've always wondered for example, what ever happened to the vast wealth of all these families that feature in every conspiracy theory like the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers etc? Are we to believe that they just faded away from public affairs, are no longer important and that the richest men in the world are the newbies, Bezos Elon etc? I've not looked into it or anything (Eddie Bravo style) but somehow I don't buy it, I bet they're still behind major things that are happening today. If anyone has an explanation I'd love to hear it btw. Would love nothing better than a good debunking.
As Naomi Klein said: Conspiracy theorists often get the feeling right but the facts wrong.
i have an ur-conspiracy theory that every elaborate conspiracy theory is a distraction from a simple and straightforward conspiracy. for every "trump is trying to uncover a vast child sex ring" there's a "trump fucks kids and our system of capital protects him"
That kind of sums up the difference Naomi Klein makes in Doppelganger about conspiracy theory and leftist critics: Leftists will look at the system while conspiracy theorists will assume the system is good but some people, most often Jews, have somehow corrupted it.
Im sure you know Cory Doctrorow already but i still wanted to share this little section from one of his recent blogposts.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/
Trump's conspiratorial base are hugely and reliably animated by stories about impunity for elite sex predators. As well they should be! Elite sex predators get away with all kinds of crimes – not just Epstein, but the whole universe of powerful men, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump, who systematically abused women for decades and got away with it – bragged about it, even!
But despite these very real abusers, the conspiracists in the Trump base are mostly concerned with imaginary abusers – Qanon's shadowy cabal of adrenochrome-guzzling pedophiles, tirelessly freighting trafficked children from one nonexistent pizza parlor basement to the next, packed inside of very mid Wayfair home furnishings:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ideomotor-response/#qonspiracy
This is the "mirror world" of right wing conspiracism described in Naomi Klein's Doppelganger:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine
It's the world in which real suffering children (kids in cages, children rotting in Alligator Auschwitz, kids working the night-shift at a meat-packing plant) don't matter at all, while imaginary children (unborn children, Qanon victims, etc) take center stage.
The general difference, though unspoken, is that the kids being "trafficked" in their heads are white middle class suburban kids. A lot of conspiracy simply leads back to antisemitism, white supremacy, or both.
Good king, eeeeeeevil nobility
If you're into literature and willing to explore the absurdity of conspiracy theorists then Foucault's Pendulum by Humberto Eco is a great read.
And somehow prophetic regarding the post truth world...
I think this sums up pizzagate. The actual evidence was woeful but some high up people got very scared and shut it down.
I mean there's definitely groups of powerful rich people that aren't widely known. That's just cuz they're smart enough to stay out of the Limelight. It's not a secret society though.
Like Thiel and Ellison. They are pulling the strings like a marionette on our government, but they aren't household names.
If the rich people control everything then it would be normal to put the spotlight on each one of them once in a while just for society to know who holds the power. Instead newspapers gossip about movie stars and a small group of rich people. That's more than smartness.
If the rich people control everything then it would be normal to put the spotlight on each one of them once in a while just for society to know who holds the power.
Ain't no "If". There is no need for the people to know who holds the power if they are perfectly capable of maintaining power without the spotlight, which they are. Being in 'the spotlight' would only hurt them because then people would know who to blame.
It's only the ignorant jackasses like Trump and Musk who gained their power by luck who brag about their power, the rest are cunning enough to know better.
I meant it differently. In a democracy, the entire population holds the power. Usually the population would want to know who to blame.
The beliefs of the poorest 90% of the population have zero impact on the outcome of public policy debates. We do not live in a democracy.
In the U.S. we supposedly have a 'Representative Democracy', yet the 'representatives' that keep getting elected are more concerned with what the corporations that 'lobby' them want. I agree, the population does want to know who to blame, but like I said the people in charge (the rich) are cunning enough to let idiot politicians be the scapegoats. Even the politicians are rarely face any consequences. If they happen to represent a constituency that is actually paying attention, they might not get reelected, but that is the exception not the rule here.
Even in some cases where people pay attention, a lot of people have been brainwashed by centuries of propaganda that the mega-rich are good and healthy for a society, and that business interests are more important than human interest, so people commonly vote against their own best interest.
Well yeah man who do you think owns the spotlights?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Rich people. That's why they are not just smart and stay out of the Limelight. They make the Limelight shine somewhere else.
It's an important distinction because it doesn't make the Limelight appear to be an objective source of truth.
Why not both?
You can't be widely known and not known at the same time
You know there’s more than one rich person in the world, right?
There are saddly toooooo many.
I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill 'em all!
The only good billionaire is a dead billionaire
Why not both?
The rich love being in a exclusive secret clubs and creating a secret club with dedicated buildings/rooms is not super difficult if you have money. They are still the same rich though.
It’s almost certainly both. It’s the ones we know about (all the stupid ones) and the ones we don’t know about (smarter.)
No meeting notes, and the participants are basically sworn to secrecy. But once a year the most obscenely wealthy individuals on the planet get together to discuss their own vision for the future. And the location is public knowledge, simply because the insane level of security ensures that nobody who wasn't invited will ever get in.
And whatever they decide, these fuckers absolutely have the power to make it happen. Bet they just fucking laugh their asses off at the various Illuminati conspiracies out there.
Exactly. There is a theory that those actually in charge are bored of Trump, hence why he’s suddenly getting thrown under the bus. They aren’t necessarily richer, just collectively have more money/power.
Yeah but who knows that’s all entirely speculation at this point.
Both. The smart works work behind the scenes like that anti christ looking mfer Peter thiel.
He looks like a fucking tweaker
no joke, he wants to live forever, he's into cryonics and wants to test some random ass not-yet-meds on people to that end (see his anti-FDA stance and enhanced games)
I don't really know how widely known Peter Thiel is. Like the circles I run in know him. He's known here. But does the average person on the street know who is? Not even that does the average news watcher/reader know who he is?
Secret group of rich people
Let me guess. Those rich people are Jewish?
No, they're secret. No way to know. Unless you got insider information. i lick it boom boom dem
What is it with people associating Judaism with secret power? Just because they win a disproportionate amount of Nobel prizes?
The argument that I heard was "historically, jews weren't allowed in many professions. But lending money was something they could do. So that's how they got rich and with money comes power." But I'm not sure whether that's the 'real' reason...
Secret Group of Rich People = Poor People, Migrants, and Minorities
I'm still trying to figure out if Bill Gates is good or evil.
Gates made his money off monopolizing technology. You can find memos where he specifically leveraged his contacts with manufacturers to ignore specifications (which Microsoft helped specify) so FOSS like Linux wouldn't work properly.
I truly believe in a world without Microsoft that todays software would be much safer, private and advanced by quite a few years.
Gates only became a philanthropist after he married, there's probably a very good reason she left, even excluding the Epstein connections.
And he's largely responsible for the "licensing" model for commercial software, ensuring we'll never actually own software we pay for. So not surprising at all he used 'scorched earth' tactics to impede the Foss movement.
There are no good billionaires.
Totally evil. His vaccine campaigns (covid and before) have the sole purpose to legitimize copyrights on life saving medicine and he gets the power to decide who lives and who dies. And he uses this to optimize for good headlines like "malaria extinguished in region X" where X is a region with barely any malaria in the first place but it sounds better than "medicine send to where it's needed most according to real experts" which is a region with a high rate and you will barely lower it but rather control which makes more sense but less headline. I hope I'm making sense.
I thought the Gates Foundation was almost universally deemed to be helping people.
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