Dan Bongino, the intense and voluble media personality tapped by President Trump to be a top F.B.I. official, appeared on Fox News last month to deliver news that should not have been news: Jeffrey Epstein, he said with glum resignation, had not been murdered after all.
“I’ve seen the whole file,”
said Mr. Bongino, sitting next to his boss, Kash Patel, the bureau’s director. “He killed himself.”
Investigations into Mr. Epstein’s 2019 death in a Manhattan prison cell found serious management errors but
no evidence of criminality. Yet Mr. Trump, once a friend of the financier accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, has long suggested Mr. Epstein was silenced by shadowy clients of his sex trafficking ring. In a 2023 episode of his popular podcast, Mr. Bongino, now the bureau’s No. 2 official, implored listeners, “Please do not let that story go.”.....
It has now fallen on Mr. Patel, Mr. Bongino and Attorney General Pam Bondi to make good on the promises explicit and implied — or show how hard they are trying. But they are running what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves, critics say.
“Patel, Bongino and the other leaders are caught in a trap of their own making,” said Russell Muirhead, a politics professor at Dartmouth College who has studied the role of conspiracy theories in American politics.
“The world they helped create, a world in which conspiracy destroys facts, is now the world they have to inhabit,” he added.
It seems that other conspiracy theorists turn on the former conspiracy theorists who are now in power and accuse them of being part of the conspiracy.
You see, we still live in a nation of laws where you have to prove your case. You can spout any inanity you want, but when it comes to proving it in a court of law, it is another matter.
You would think conspiracy theorists could convince other conspiracy theorists that their conspiracy theories are wrong, but you would be wrong because we live in a loopy time where conspiracy theories reside outside of fact and reality.
To paraphrase the great René Descartes, "I think, therefore, it must be true."
