“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Delivered by Chico Marx as Chicolini in the 1933 Marx Brothers film “Duck Soup,” this quote is a classic question used to describe situations where someone is trying to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes.
When skillfully employed, deception proves highly effective in recruiting believers for Ponzi schemes, religious cults, political campaigns, and conspiracy theories. True believers are always shocked to find out they’d been duped.
Until December 2008, Bernard Madoff operated a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions. His investors believed in his BS. He hooked them with promises of consistent, above-market returns and used new investments to pay off early investors. The investors all were true believers in Madoff’s genius (and integrity) right up to his arrest.
Before its bankruptcy filing in December 2001, Enron was widely regarded as an innovative and highly profitable company. The believers in that story were many. The extensive fraud, which this false narrative covered up to keep the business afloat, ultimately devastated jobs, markets, and led to the demise of its auditing firm, Arthur Andersen.
In both cases, the true believers stuck with their beliefs until the bitter, painful end.
So it is with conspiracy theories. Many of these theories, like “who shot JFK”, seem to live forever. At least there was a real event at the heart of Kennedy’s murder.
Pizzagate, on the other hand, was a debunked conspiracy theory that emerged and spread widely during the 2016 presidential election cycle and had many believers. The theory was that a child sex trafficking ring, involving high-ranking Democratic Party officials, was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. The theory gained traction on-line, primarily on social media platforms. Except Comet Ping Pong didn’t have a basement.
Last week, believers in another conspiracy theory, known as the Epstein Files, faced a significant setback, which has left me laughing out loud.
Since he died in 2019, dozens of conspiracies have circled about.
People on the right assumed the feds, the “deep state,” were covering up Epstein’s crimes and his cronies. Many thought a second Trump administration would make it all public, exposing the complicity of the prior Biden-era Justice Department in protecting high-ranking Democrats.
People to the left were hoping the release of the Epstein Files would vindicate Democrats and identify high-ranking Republicans, including Trump, as Epstein co-conspirators.
Epstein was arrested on July 27, 2006, by the Palm Beach Police Department on state felony charges related to procuring a minor for prostitution and solicitation of a prostitute. This led to a controversial 2008 plea deal in Florida, where he pleaded guilty to two state prostitution-related charges and served a 13-month sentence with work release.
He was arrested again on July 6, 2019, at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, upon his return from Paris. This time, he was facing federal charges in New York for sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of underage girls, with alleged incidents occurring between 2002 and 2005.
He was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging. Numerous conspiracy theories have emerged that he was murdered by powerful politicians and businesspeople who didn’t want him to testify in court.
Two figures currently at the top of the FBI, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, became well-known in the last five years on conservative media, dragging out the Epstein conspiracy to bolster their attacks on Democratic politicians and law enforcement agencies. Both gave the impression they believed there was more to Epstein’s demise than we knew, and they would root out the truth and make the Epstein files public. Despite previously championing the idea of significant revelations from the Epstein files, both recently spoke out publicly that Epstein died by suicide. There is no “client list” or evidence to support further investigation into un-charged third parties. There was never any there, there.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi, just a couple of months ago, publicly stated the “Epstein files” were “sitting on my desk” and that “a lot of information” and “a lot of names” would be released. In a recent memo, which she oversaw in conjunction with FBI leadership, she contradicted these earlier statements by concluding that no “client list” existed and that no further disclosure was warranted.
Politicians, bureaucrats, influencers, and marketers make sport out of not telling the truth. We, as consumers and citizens, need to be skeptical and vigilant every time it comes to promises and conspiracies. Your eyes don’t lie.
I’m a firm believer in one thing–The truth will set you free.
