Next time you attack a "conspiracy theory", look back at how many years passed from first mention of Epstein to a final admission...all the while, people who spoke out were derided as cranks.
It's also unclear in this case what specific claims you are saying were widely derided. I saw a lot of claims based on observation that were not widely derided, and a few unreasonable claims that relied on unavailable specificity and were mostly just a political attack (X political figure knowingly committed Y specific crime). Again, your criticism appears to be predicated on a worldview where there are two immutable teams: People who completely believe all theories that involves conspiracy, and people who completely disbelieve all theories that involve conspiracy.
Provide a recommendation for a more neutral tone? That was the intent.
I was pointing out the purposeful use of the word "popularized" over "invented" or "created" or "made up", as it's written in poor reproductions of this conspiracy theory, because the verbiage a popular way to discredit the entire point.
Hell from 2008 onwards Epstein was a conflicted child sex trafficker. Hardly an unimpeachable target.
There really were some genuine conspiracies. P2 in Italy is a prominent one.
But that doesn’t make every conspiracy theory correct or even most of them.
It was not so much a conspiracy theory, but lots of people knew about him but were told to keep quiet.
"The Met stated that the total number of alleged victims was 589, of whom 450 alleged abuse by Savile."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scan...
Of course that's absolute nonsense there's a absolutely no organization out there that would benefit from elevating the most prominent and clearly nuts conspiracy theories in order to discredit other conspiracy theories by association.
One day around 2015 or 2016, I remember seeing a ton of "FLAT EARTH!" graffiti that appeared out of nowhere all over Emeryville. That's another one that's always struck me as weird and maybe astroturfed.
But yea, if you actually critically review them, some are more plausible than others.
It's very weird that a theory that involves a conspiracy is automatically (linguistically) linked to falsehoods imagined by crazy people. It seems to me that somebodies conspired to make all conspiracy theories look bad so that they can participate in even more conspiracies without people credibly calling them out :D
There's another comment in this thread saying that the CIA popularized the term or sth. I have no power of foresight to determine whether that's true or not. But it would definitely have been to their benefit.
Epstein is likely a real conspiracy. However I do believe most people he engaged with didn’t know what was going on. My best guess is that he was a CIA operative who was useful due to his reach.
No, for these things to be true is not necessary that everyone keep quit. They can just be discredited or labeled as "conspiracy theorists", or not heard and reproduced by the media. The ones with proof can be labeled as hackers and leakers and persecuted like Assange and Snowden. We see this happening all the time.
It's perfectly possible to be a "Tom Brady is the most amazing quarterback" crank. Hey, maybe you're right. But no one wants to hear about it and the vast majority of everyone is happy to live with a little bit of ambiguity, or they don't care.
Put concisely, "speaking out" without any knowledge is among the most annoying things a person can do.