More musings on the logic of conspiracy theory

In a previous posting here (The Logic of Conspiracy Theory), I started the meandering ball rolling of this thought experiment; one which may involve several more installments in the months ahead.

I have a rather long and detailed posting in the works which I'm not yet ready to publish; but for now, I'll note one feature or facet of this logic, occasioned by a recent tragic loss for the still embryonic (if not larval) Anti-Islam Movement: the violent death of Philip Haney.

Haney was according to official reports found beside his car shot to death in the chest, his gun nearby, his car apparently parked on a country road out in farm country in California not far west of Sacramento (he lived in the San Francisco area), with the local coroner prematurely (and irresponsibly) speculating that it was "self-inflicted". Diana West has a good posting on this, where she shows graphically how this premature speculation by the coroner has morphed into a parroted echo-meme throughout the MSM-sphere.

A tweet has been retweetingly circulating the Twitterverse which calls suspicion on the official report (Diana West also includes this in her posting), apparently written by Jan Markell, head of the Olive Tree Ministries:



(By the way, this particular tweet is nowhere to be found on Jan Merkell's Twitter page.  We see a tweet by her on Feb. 21 -- the day before the above tweet -- and then no tweets until today, Feb. 25, of which there are four; none of them about Haney.)

I've written about Philip Haney a few times before on my previous blog, The Hesperado -- most notably in this essay (in which I link to most of the others):

"It's a kind of a psychosis..."

At any rate, my musing today runs something like this:  Let's say the official report's conclusion -- that Haney's mortal gunshot was "self-inflicted" -- is part of a cover-up of his assassination.  Okay, let's pursue this thread with questions.  Who assassinated Haney?  Obviously not a crazed loner or some criminals, for the Amador County Sheriff's department wouldn't be covering that up by lying about the cause of death. So now in our thought process we're embarking into the broad and vague territory of the Dastardly Cabal theory.  Now, if this Dastardly Cabal is powerful and has a lot of money and capabilities to get dastardly things done, why wouldn't they have fabricated a more  plausible suicide?  For example, why didn't they fabricate a back story with plenty of preceding indications that he was remorseful or depressed about something, or manufactured a sordid affair with a prostitute, or gambling debts, or any number of classic motives for suicide? Then, on top of that, why didn't they fabricate a scenario such as one where, for example, Haney is found at home alone with a gun in his hand (or tumbled onto the floor), perhaps with a half-drunk bottle of gin next to him -- or any number of other more plausible tableaux of suicide?  Would the conspiracy theorist try to argue, in response to this line of questioning, that the Dastardly Cabal was not capable of such fabrications?

That then moves us into the curious twilight of our exploration of conspiracy theory logic (which I probed to some extent in my above-linked previous posting), where we have a Dastardly Cabal/Swamp/Deep State that has apparently limited powers, leading to further questions: How limited are they?  Why are they so limited?  If one is to take seriously a sinister scenario to the Haney death, one must address these questions in good faith and rationally, not shirk them off, in order to dispel the appearance or implication of a kind of variant on the No True Scotsman Fallacy -- namely, that every time the facts indicate an odd limitation in the powers of the Conspiracy, we impute that to what we assume must be their limitation, without bothering to explain the How and Why of those limitations; as though the supposed (question-begging) facts of the Conspiracy readily palpate the actual contours of the Conspiracy.

It seems reasonable to assume that, if this were an assassination by some kind of Conspiracy that has at least the power and influence to compel an official County Sheriff's office to cover it up by fabricating a story about suicide -- and by extension has the ability to keep the real story under wraps so that others in the news media and/or in the government don't initiate any further investigations (let alone ask probing questions about it) -- it was a hasty, almost sloppy job, since it leaves questions open and looks somewhat suspicious.  This then directly indicates that whoever killed Haney had to do it quickly; they were forced by some circumstances or events to suddenly do it -- raising the reasonable follow-up question: What could those circumstances or events have possibly been, such that a Dastardly Cabal couldn't wait a while and take its time to get its ducks in a row in order to pull off a far more plausible, and less suspicious "suicide"...?