One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy

I posted this morning Jeffrey Epstein is the Kilroy of Our Time. I later came across this as a further example.


Double click to enlarge.

I then saw this exchange which seemed somewhat relevant.

The Deep State was a non-existent entity cooked up in the minds of conspiracy theorists right up until the evidence was far too great for the Democrat Party's communications arm (the media) to dismiss, and the media itself was revealed to have so extensively colluded with it https://t.co/w8Nffg81Ff

— Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) November 12, 2019

Click to see the comments.

Setting aside the partisan barbs, the underlying message is a sentiment of the public versus the establishment (as represented in this case by the conglomerate of the establishment Democratic Party and the Mainstream Media).

And perhaps that is the unstated message of the "Kilroy was here" and "Jeffrey Epstein Didn't Kill Himself" - it is a subtle message from the public to the establishment that we are watching and do not believe you. I wonder if other major countries have a similar phenomenon? In other words, a similar phenomenon of an amorphous, uncoordinated, and emergent messaging from the faceless public to its establishment that they are on notice.

This is a quiet form of Irish Democracy. The phenomenon is described in Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott. Emphasis added.

In the historical struggle over property rights, the antagonists on either side of the barricades have used the weapons that most suited them. Elites, controlling the lawmaking machinery of the state, have deployed bills of enclosure, paper titles, and freehold tenure, not to mention the police, gamekeepers, forest guards, the courts, and the gibbet to establish and defend their property rights. Peasants and subaltern groups, having no access to such heavy weaponry, have instead relied on techniques such as poaching, pilfering, and squatting to contest those claims and assert their own. Unobtrusive and anonymous, like desertion, these “weapons of the weak” stand in sharp contrast to open public challenges that aim at the same objective. Thus, desertion is a lower-risk alternative to mutiny, squatting a lower-risk alternative to a land invasion, poaching a lower-risk alternative to the open assertion of rights to timber, game, or fish. For most of the world’s population today, and most assuredly for subaltern classes historically, such techniques have represented the only quotidian form of politics available. When they have failed, they have given way to more desperate, open conflicts such as riots, rebellions, and insurgency. These bids for power irrupt suddenly onto the official record, leaving traces in the archives beloved of historians and sociologists who, having documents to batten on, assign them a pride of place all out of proportion to the role they would occupy in a more comprehensive account of class struggle. Quiet, unassuming, quotidian insubordination, because it usually flies below the archival radar, waves no banners, has no officeholders, writes no manifestos, and has no permanent organization, escapes notice. And that’s just what the practitioners of these forms of subaltern politics have in mind: to escape notice. You could say that, historically, the goal of peasants and subaltern classes has been to stay out of the archives. When they do make an appearance, you can be pretty sure that something has gone terribly wrong.

If we were to look at the great bandwidth of subaltern politics all the way from small acts of anonymous defiance to massive popular rebellions, we would find that outbreaks of riskier open confrontation are normally preceded by an increase in the tempo of anonymous threats and acts of violence: threatening letters, arson and threats of arson, cattle maiming, sabotage and nighttime machine breaking, and so on. Local elites and officials historically knew these as the likely precursors of open rebellion; and they were intended to be read as such by those who engaged in them. Both the frequency of insubordination and its “threat level” (pace the Office of Homeland Security) were understood by contemporary elites as early warning signs of desperation and political unrest. One of the first op-eds of the young Karl Marx noted in great detail the correlation between, on the one hand, unemployment and declining wages among factory workers in the Rhineland, and on the other, the frequency of prosecution for the theft of firewood from private lands.

The sort of lawbreaking going on here is, I think, a special subspecies of collective action. It is not often recognized as such, in large part because it makes no open claims of this kind and because it is almost always self-serving at the same time. Who is to say whether the poaching hunter is more interested in a warm fire and rabbit stew than in contesting the claim of the aristocracy to the wood and the game he has just taken? It is most certainly not in his interest to help the historian with a public account of his motives. The success of his claim to wood and game lies in keeping his acts and motives shrouded. And yet, the long-run success of this lawbreaking depends on the complicity of his friends and neighbors who may believe in his and their right to forest products and may themselves poach and, in any case, will not bear witness against him or turn him in to the authorities.

One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish democracy,” the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.

Perhaps the Kilroy/Epstein phenomenon is a precursor to actual Irish Democracy. It is a worded message rather than passive resistance. It puts the establishment institutions on notice. We don't believe you. We don't trust you.

Gallup has been showing steady declines in public trust of politicians, mainstream media, schools, big corporations, establishment churches, even the court system for decades since the sixties. Trust is at historical lows. The institutions which have been substantially immune from such loss of trust are the military and the police. To a lesser degree, small businesses.

In this view, there is an escalating progression of public action against establishment controls. An escalation of collective action by the public against the institutionalized interests of the establishment.

Polling indicating loss of trust.

Declines in voluntary support of institutions (declines in mainline church membership for example, or loss of students from public school systems to charter schools)

Shifts in voting patterns (Tea Party in the 2000s for the establishment Republicans, the Democratic Socialists for the establishment Democrats today).

Emergent and uncoordinated messaging (Gadsden flag earlier, "Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself" today)

Passive resistance.

Active resistance.

Or perhaps I am making a mountain out of an Epstein molehill.