American Conspiracy: Octopus Murders

I watched the new Netflix documentary miniseries called American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders. It seems to me that there is a lot of this kind of thing going around now; more conspiracy thinking. It’s always been there, but it’s more prevalent now and spreading more. It’s understandable—the Jeffrey Epstein thing kind of kickstarted it and made it more mainstream, and it’s just been building for the five years since he was very obviously killed in his jail cell.

This one is interesting because it’s about a conspiracy that I hadn’t really heard of before, and I follow this stuff pretty closely. It picks up the trail left by the journalist named Danny Casolaro, who was found dead under suspicious circumstances in a hotel room in the early 1990s; his wrists were slashed to the tendon, many times over; in a fashion that was too violent to be suicide. He was on the trail of a series of connections between two communities: organized intelligence (CIA, NSA, etc) and organized crime (the mob). The upshot is that the intelligence community needed the mob to help them launder money that they got from doing drug deals with international cartels (the Iran-Contra scandal, where the CIA was found to have been smuggling cocaine into the US). The “octopus” in the title of the documentary refers to a group of eight or so figures from the highest levels of the intelligence community (George Bush himself, former CIA director and future president) to lower level hitmen who achieved objectives that the elites wanted through violence.

There are a lot of names, but I won’t go into that. The actual conspiracy isn’t really much of a conspiracy—and that’s kind of the interesting thing about it; it’s just filling in some details and connecting some dots about a larger issue, the CIA drug running scandal, that has already been headline news (and largely forgotten about) for decades. The “octopus” is just the kind of mechanics of how exactly it all operated. But is that even that interesting, or surprising? The conspiracy has to operate somehow; there have to be people carrying it out. This isn’t even the conspiracy; it’s just like the details of how it happens.

But the most interesting thing in it to me was a bit where one of the hitmen, Robert Nichols, meets with another journalist who had been investigating the story. He shows her a video of the Zapruder tape, footage of the JFK assassination; but it’s different from the standard one; in this one, the driver of JFK’s car turns around and shoots him in the head. Nichols tells the journalist that this is the real footage, and the footage that she is familiar with, the mainstream one, has been doctored; he shows her as evidence that there is a tree in the background of the mainstream version, that appears to be floating in the air; as proof that the footage got doctored and there was an error made in the splicing of the footage. Nichols tells her “nothing is as it appears to be.”

But she is smart, and she doesn’t really buy it; she says that “he said nothing is as it appears to be; including him saying that.” Meaning that Nichols produced this presentation of a real and fake Zapruder tape, telling her that everything she thinks she knows is a lie, and to look beyond appearances to find the truth, precisely as a trap and a trick.

It seems to me that this is exactly what has been going on lately—conspiracy theories are being released and even sanctioned by the government; remember when they basically admitted that UFOs are real a couple years ago? Then there’s the Epstein thing, arresting him and killing him, fueling an endless rabbit hole of conspiracy. Those are just two examples, but it’s increasing, and endless now. The point is precisely to get everyone to question reality, to look for the “truth” beyond what they see—but to do it in a way that they control and dictate the parameters of; they want us looking in these directions that they lay out for us. They want us to spend energy looking for answers—but to questions they pose, and for answers they know we will never find.

And it seems to me that the system is pushing all these conspiracy things because they want us to think like journalists; to become journalists. Evil elites want journalists to exist, they need a class of people to get their message out, even if it’s a message that seems like it’s critical of the system, or seems to reveal secrets about the system, because that will just infect the masses with paranoia and schizophrenia. This is why someone like Elon Musk has maneuvered so much to turn every civilian with a Twitter account into a journalist, so they can follow bullshit stories, and conspiracy theories, many of which the government itself makes up, and in turn all become more schizophrenic. When every citizen is a journalist, and following all of these elaborate conspiracy theories themselves, the most exotic new varieties of schizophrenia get invented all the time, and truth becomes permanently impossible.