Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Paranoia, and Occam's Razor
A cynic is a jaded soul predisposed to disbelief. but a skeptic neither believes nor disbelieves. His mantra (or hers) is "show me."
We live in the golden age of the tinfoil hat. Conspiracy theorists are everywhere- on both sides of the political spectrum, and even in the Oval Office. Now, conspiracies do exist. Cynicism about conspiracies is unwise. But skepticism is only reasonable, Common sense illustrates why.
Benjamin Franklin once observed that "Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." Most of us have had experiences that illustrate his point. Secrets are very fragile things. All it takes is one inadvertent slip, and the secret is out. If there are many people involved in keeping a secret, the chances against it remaining a secret are astronomical no matter how powerful and influential the conspirators. The secret is simply vulnerable at too many points, and there are always other powerful and influential people in whose interest it is to expose the conspiracy.
The movie Wag the Dog is probably the ultimate conspiracy film. In it, the President of the United States is accused of molesting a Girl Scout in the bathroom just off the Oval Office days before he is up for re-election. Facing disaster, his party hires a famous publicity specialist played by Dustin Hoffman to create and stage manage a fake war that isn't actually happening, complete with fake atrocities and fake heroes in a small European country that is actually quite peaceful.
In the real world, of course, it wouldn't work; news services all over the world with outlets in America would expose the hoax immediately. But in the movie, somehow it does work. The president's opponent actually takes out prime-time TV ads to placard the fact that no such war is being fought but to no avail. The president is re-elected despite the incident with the Girl Scout.
Again, in the real world, even if the secret somehow survived for the few days left before the election, it would come out very quickly and he would be impeached. But somehow, in the film, it doesn't. The hoax is so masterful that its architect, played by Hoffman, insists on it being made public so that he can take credit for it. That, of course, would ruin the whole point of the exercise, so Hoffman's character tragically dies of a "heart attack."
Conspiracies are exquisitely fragile things, and in the real world, they are easily exposed. Too many people have to keep too many secrets. There is an absolutely insane conspiracy theory that has been kicking around for years concerning the Clintons and the supposedly convenient and unnatural deaths of somewhere around 140 people who somehow "got in their way." The "Clinton Body Count" hoax has been thoroughly debunked and is based on manifest distortions of the known facts, including manipulation of events to create "suspicious circumstances" where none existed and false narratives assigning supposed importance to obscure people whose connection to the Clintons was either imaginary or absurdly remote. Yet in the wake of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's suicide, that old bit of nonsense taken at face value only by the hopelessly malicious or the unbelievably naive suddenly trended on Twitter. Not only right-wing writer Dinesh D'Sousa but- incredibly- President Trump quickly tweeted (or, in Mr. Trump's case, re-tweeted) innuendoes suggesting that the Clintons were responsible. Twitter was deluged by tweets from the malicious and the gullible to the effect that "the Clintons have done it again!"
Well, in one sense, maybe it wasn't so incredible that Mr. Trump bought into the nonsense. Donald Trump has never met a conspiracy theory he didn't love. Everyone remembers his continued insistence for years after the myth was completely debunked that his predecessor, Barack Obama, was born in Kenya. Probably fewer remember his insinuation that one of his opponents (and one of his current supporters), Sen. Ted Cruz, is the son of a man who conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to murder President Kennedy!
At the time, Sen Cruz accused Mr. Trump of being a "pathological liar." Apparently now he's become "our" pathological liar.
Espousing and advancing such nutty ideas is not the act of a responsible human being, and it should be obvious by now to anyone who is not hopelessly compromised by the effects of the Trump Kool-Aid that Donald Trump is not a responsible human being. Instead, he is a supremely irresponsible one who just happens to have his finger on the nuclear button and who knows every secret America has. And he has been known to blurt such secrets out to the very people from whom they ought to be kept if it made him, personally. look good to them, or served some other obscure purpose.
But the Epstein insinuation is especially bizarre, not only because it involves the president once again associating himself with a conspiracy theory no responsible person (and nobody outside the most pathologically malicious elements of the far-right) takes seriously, but because it is he, rather than Bill Clinton, who is the logical suspect if Jeffrey Epstein were, in fact, murdered in order to prevent him from revealing potentially damaging information. Both men had relationships with Epstein for decades. Both have extremely dubious sexual reputations. Both have been accused of outright rape. But Mr. Trump is the first self-identified sexual predator ever to occupy the Oval Office. Despite disingenuous attempts by his supporters to deny that he admitted to precisely that, he was recorded engaging in the following discussion
Trump: "Yeah that's her with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."
Bush: "Whatever you want."
Trump: "Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
You can't simply ignore the first line, and Mr. Trump does not deny saying it.
But from Mr. Trump's point of view, the worst thing about suggesting that it was Mr. Clinton who had Epstein killed is that Bill Clinton was not the President of the United States at the time. Donald Trump was. And contrary to the statement which Mr. Trump re-tweeted, Epstein was not on suicide watch; he had been taken off it. The precautions which should have been in place were not. It is perfectly reasonable to ask "why." But the fact remains that the inexplicable circumstances which led to Epstein's death came about because of inexplicable decisions made by Donald Trump's Justice Department, not Bill Clinton's. In fact, it would be difficult to explain how a former president would have had the "clout" to have pulled it off!
While I happen to be a Ricardian, even I would be skeptical of a theory that the Princes in the Tower were murdered by Henry VI! Of course, if one of Mr. Trump's accusers suggested that, and it was pointed out that Henry was dead at the time, he or she would probably reply, "How convenient!"
There are second-hand reports that screams were heard from Epstein's cell while efforts were being made to revive him (!), although another prisoner nearby says that he heard nothing. His lawyer says that the inmate in question, accused killer cop Nicholas Tartaglione, "knows a heck of a lot" about events surrounding Epstein's death (which would make sense since he was housed only a few cells away). That sounds ominous. And while an autopsy has been completed on Epstein's body, for some reason no cause of death has been released as of this writing.
But the reasonable course would be to follow Occam's Razor, also known as the "Principle of Logical Economy." The most probable explanation for anything is the simplest one which accounts for all of the known facts. And at this point, the simplest one is that the Trump Justice Department simply screwed up in taking Epstein off suicide watch and that Epstein was able to kill himself because of a bureaucratic blunder. I do not believe for a moment that either Bill Clinton or Donald Trump had him murdered, or that he was murdered by anyone acting on behalf of either president. Only the malicious and the sensation-seeking would jump to such a conclusion without some pretty serious evidence to support it. And at this point, the plain truth is that we have no such evidence.
Yet many have cheerfully jumped to that conclusion anyway. Conspiracy theories are useful to those who hate others, or who for some reason simply don't like the obvious explanation for things, or who just want to feel special because they possess secret knowledge others don't have, or because it fits a political agenda (usually a pretty dubious one with few better arguments to support it). Back when I was a freshman in high school and dinosaurs ruled the earth, the great American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an article called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" about why people on the political extremes are so fond of conspiracy theories. I commend it to you.
But in the meantime, it's best to remember that skepticism is a sword which cuts both ways. Yes, it's reasonable not to simply accept the "official" explanation for anything at face value, or to regard it as anything but a working hypothesis as one awaits contrary evidence. But it's also only reasonable to be skeptical enough not to accept just anything as constituting such evidence, especially when it can be shown to come from dubious sources or to be suspect itself. Mr. Trump's bad judgment in uncritically accepting and advocating bizarre conspiracy theories often without an ounce of evidence to support them is one of the many things about his behavior that has always made me, personally, skeptical about his psychological fitness to be president. But I am as little willing to seriously entertain the premise that Donald Trump had Jeffrey Epstein murdered as I am to consider it likely that Bill Clinton did, even though if either were true the former would be far more logical.
But paranoid conspiracy theories have always thrived on the political extremes. While they're more often identified with the crazy right, the lunatic left also has been known to engage in them. And this, a time in American history in which the center, if it hasn't disappeared from our political life, has little voice and is pretty much always drowned out by extremists with louder voices and bigger megaphones, is the golden age of the conspiracy theory.
Those of us who are intent on keeping our heads and dealing with matters in a fair and intelligent manner, however, will remember Occam's Razor, and not embrace them just because it might be politically convenient to so. In fact, we won't embrace them at all until they become the simplest explanation that fits the known facts- and only then provisionally, on the assumption that other, better evidence becomes available.
Ironically, cynicism can lead to credulity. Tinfoil hatters are more likely to turn out to be naive and easily fooled than the savvy ones who know what really is going on. Cynics are easily fooled. Better to be a skeptic regarding both the "official" story and widely-discussed alternatives regarding pretty much anything.
"Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." Secrets are, indeed, kept. Conspiracies do, on occasion, succeed. But it's actually quite rare because secrets are hard to keep and conspiracies are hard to keep hidden.
They're just not the way to bet. I'll put my money every time not so much on the "official" or "establishment" version of events as on Occam's Razor. I might be wrong on occasion, but I'll be right far more often.
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