Truthsmack #16: Murder Mysteries and Conspiracy Theories
Like many Americans, I grew up reading detective stories, and watching cop shows and murder mysteries. The formula has been worn pretty well: someone is murdered and the killer covers up the deed by lying, planting evidence to implicate someone else and engineering false alibis.
Our hero – whether it’s Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple or Charles-Haden Savage – is the one who pierces the deception by finding clues to the murderer’s real identity. These keen-minded folks unravel miniature conspiracy theories, using data and logic to deduce what really happened.
Being a fan of Sherlock Holmes, I recently re-watched the TV series Elementary, in which a modern-day Sherlock and partner Dr. Joan Watson (played by Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu) consult the New York Police Department on its most baffling cases. The series originally aired from 2012 to 2019.
When I got to an episode entitled, “Murder Ex Machina,” my jaw dropped. Here is Sherlock hot on the trail of Ukrainian assassins who gun down a Russian oligarch named Maxim Zolotov outside a New York City nightclub – in 2016. It was a fascinating snapshot of what the Russian-Ukrainian war looked like 6-7 years ago.
This absolutely prescient episode was written in 2015 by Robert Hewitt Wolfe, whose torn-from-the-headlines scripts also graced Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
“I read an article about how the NASA was still using Russian rocket engines for heavy lift rockets despite sanctions after the Crimean annexation,” Wolfe told me via Twitter. “I put that on my idea board and eventually combined it with a self-driving car hack.”
It’s hard to remember 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea following the ouster of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The Russo-Ukrainian War began then – eight years ago – despite current headlines indicating it’s in its fifth month. There was no rush to Ukraine’s aid, no massive military assistance, no social media awash in Ukrainian flags.
The fictional Sherlock Holmes discusses how a murder might impact secret peace negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
On the trail of the fictional assassins, Sherlock meets with the mysterious Cindy Park – a fictional “Under Secretary of State for European Affairs.” She characterizes 2015 Ukraine as corrupt and incompetent.
“The war has brought the Ukrainian government a massive increase in foreign aid,” she tells Sherlock and company. “It could be they don't want that to end, but they need to keep up their image as victims of Russian aggression.”
The real-life Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in 2016 was Victoria Nuland, whose resumé includes leading Ukraine policy for both the Obama and Biden State Departments as well as advising Vice President Dick Cheney and serving as President Bush's Ambassador to NATO.
Nuland may or may not have been negotiating a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine in 2015, but we know she was pushing a plan to have the Ukrainians fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. That December, then-Vice President Joe Biden leveraged promises of loans to get Shokin sacked.
One final scene from “Murder Ex Machina” deserves a mention: Sherlock and Watson meet an arms dealer named Soble in an effort to make sense of Zolotov’s murder. In a brilliant two minutes of dialogue, screenwriter Wolfe outlines how different businesses profit from war – and sanctions.
“Dutch natural gas, Azerbaijani caviar, Polish vodka, Norwegian lumber,” Soble tells the detectives. “The folks who make money are the ones who provide an alternative source for the things the Russians can't export because of the sanctions.”
A fictional arms dealer explains how different businesses profit from war and sanctions.
Sherlock solves the murder mystery by unmasking an American entrepreneur using assassination to create a market opportunity for his rockets. In our current context, I have to ask the question: who stands to profit from barring Russian oil and gas exports to the EU?
One winner is the United States. The government is selling more than a million barrels of Strategic Petroleum Reserve crude oil a day to refiners in the U.S., Europe, India and China. And Canada, Qatar, Norway and Algeria have been urged to increase natural gas supplies to Europe. Germany, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands are looking to convert gas-fired power plants to coal and Westinghouse recently inked a deal to increase nuclear-power capacity in Ukraine, which could then sell electricity to Europe.
Is everything a conspiracy or have I just watched too many murder mysteries?
MORE: Ukrainian Calculus: What to do when things don’t add up?
Q is back
On June 24, after about a year-and-a-half of silence, the notorious Q returned to 8kun with a new post: “Shall we play a game once more?” At this writing, five more “Q-drops” have been posted, alluding to the overturning of Roe v. Wade (“How do you control generations of a populace?”) and the Jan. 6 Committee testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson. Most posts are in the same style of asking questions and inevitably offering only one answer: “Trust the plan.” Documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback and forensic linguists at OrphAnalytics have identified Q as some combination of South African software developer Paul Furber; Jim Watkins, the owner of 8kun; and his son Ron Watkins, who moved to Arizona in 2021 to run for Congress. Furber and both Watkins have denied being Q, but Q-watchers suspect “QAnon influencers” on Gab, Truth Social and Telegram now run the show more than Q.
Who built the gallows for Mike Pence?
Speaking of Cassidy Hutchinson, watching reactions to the former White House aide’s testimony before the House Jan. 6 Committee was an interesting study in confirmation bias. Mainstream media embraced Hutchinson’s “bombshell” account of an enraged President Trump and speculated about criminal charges against him. Trump called Hutchinson a “phony” and “leaker,” and anonymous sources immediately claimed firsthand Secret Service agents would come forward to contradict her secondhand tale of Trump wrestling with his driver for control of the presidential SUV. What I found more intriguing was Hutchinson’s telling of White House chatter about lynching former Vice President Mike Pence.
Hutchinson said that then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone took a call from Rep. Jim Jordan about the chants of "Hang Mike Pence" coming from the mob. It went something like this:
CIPOLLONE: “Mark, we need to do something more. They're literally calling for the vice president to be effing hung.”
MEADOWS: "You heard him [Trump], Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn't think they're doing anything wrong.”
Despite nearly 1,000 pieces of video evidence and 14,000 hours of Capitol Police surveillance tapes, no one knows who built the wooden gallows across from the Capitol building. According to the New York Times, talk of gallows construction began on Dec. 19, 2020 after Trump’s tweet about adviser Peter Navarro’s election fraud report: “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
“Could be built very quickly with the right plan and the right people bringing pre-cut materials to the site!” wrote user sunlessmage74 on the pro-Trump online forum, TheDonald.win. “Anybody got a blueprint for a standing gallows like that? Who’s with me?!”
I’d like to see the gallows-builders testify under oath, as well as Navarro and Meadows. My guess is the latter two know exactly what happened on Jan. 6.
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