First the facts, then the alternative facts. Sean Combs — aka Diddy, Puff Daddy, and P. Diddy — no longer resides in his $19 million Star Island Miami mansion, but at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where the 54-year-old music mogul presently shares meals and sleeping quarters with crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried among other assorted felons. According to his Federal indictment, the founder of Bad Boy Records has been arrested for “creating a criminal enterprise whose members and associates engaged in… sex trafficking, forced labour, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice”. The tabloids have revelled in the story of days-long orgies, fuelled by alcohol, drugs and those 1,000 bottles of baby oil discovered on the premises.
The debauchery was like something out of The Great Gatsby, recalled Elisabeth Ovesen, best-selling author of Confessions of a Video Vixen: “Men in tuxedos, topless women in angel wings, champagne and synchronized swimmers on the outside, with group sex in the bathrooms, trays of hors d’oeuvres and drug pills being passed around on the inside.” One Diddy party allegedly took place on a private jet that flew around the world for days — an innovation which would have tickled the imagination of Fitzgerald.
While the rags blabber on about the sexual shenanigans, the international set of A, B, C and D-listers — from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lopez to Derek Jeter and Nicole Richie — have all grown eerily quiet, petrified of what might come out as details of the “freak off” sessions come to light at what promises to be the most sensational trial since Johnny Depp and Amber Heard debated whose faecal matter stained the sheets. That’s not to mention the scores of ex-Diddy friends and relations on tenterhooks in anticipation of the upcoming Diddy Abuse Netflix Docuseries — “A Complex Narrative Spanning Decades”, according to the headline of a Variety exclusive. Already, the tentacles of the scandal have touched some of the most powerful names in the music industry — from Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons to the legendary Clive Davis.
The unseemly circus has led comedian Bill Maher to conclude that “the music industry is this open cesspool of misogyny, and frankly, rape and sexual harassment, and somehow, the Angel of Death has flown over them”. And, as usual, Maher is onto something — albeit something unsettling. Traditional media may be well equipped to cover sex, drugs and celebrity downfall. But their training in what their professors deemed “verifiable truth” doesn’t help them much when it comes to supernatural evil dating back to the Knights Templars, much less the angel of death and his earthly consorts.
By contrast, the scandal has sent the far-Right conspiratorial crowd into a tizzy of “I-told-you-so” Satanic hysteria. The truthers now possess what they believe is positive proof that what they have been saying all along is true: there is a cabal of subversive elites whose stock in trade is trafficked children. The age-old idea has been given fresh life within the imagination of those individuals that FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver and Ipsos can never quite manage to get their minds around, the men and women who’ve suspected all along that Doja Cat, Megan Thee Stallion and every other rock star who has ever dressed in red are members of the diabolical Illuminati — along with Tom Hanks, Beyoncé and the British Royals.
Facts are facts: the Illuminati were a real thing. Its first meeting was on 1 May 1776, in the tiny Bavarian town of Ingolstadt, led by an obscure university professor of law named Adam Weishaupt. Within a matter of years, he would become one of the most reviled men in Europe, accused of adultery, murder, rape and conspiracy to overthrow the government.
Unlike Diddy, Weishaupt wasn’t much of a criminal. He created the Illuminati because he couldn’t afford the dues to be a Freemason. He kept his society a secret because the Enlightenment ideas he professed were unpopular among the Jesuits then in power: that women might possess intelligence equal to men; that a human from Africa might be as human as one from Europe; that there might not be an orthodox Catholic god.
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SubscribeYet another trash essay from this Kaufman clown. Let’s take the latest scandal and somehow magically make it about MAGA. What conspiracy theories is he talking about? I’m sure there’s a lot of wild speculation right now, because the scandal is two minutes old and it likely implicates some important members of the glitterati.
Not-so bold prediction. Virtually none of the people implicated in this scandal will be Republicans. Virtually all of them will be Democrats, and many will be donors. But ya, let’s throw shade on MAGA for being degenerates.
Yeah, there’s a kind of hysterical decadence in play among the liberal chattering classes now. With every new piece of accumulated evidence that the cosy ‘progressive consensus’ of the post-WW2 West was destructive, self-serving and full of sh*t all along, those most implicated in it and who continue to benefit most from it are now adopting an evermore contrived air of nonplussed, ironic befuddlement. It’s like catching redhanded some a*sehole ransacking your house at 2.00 am, only to have them chuckle sorrowfully and lament the dishonest times you both must live in.
It would have been useful and honest if this essay had simply part-quoted Maher – the music industry is this open cesspool of misogyny, and frankly, rape and sexual harassment – and left it at that. That it just can’t bring itself to do so goes a long way to explaining why so many Americans will choose to vote for a man who barely reads anything at all, rather than a woman whose entire public persona has been constructed from too-smart, too-smug wordplay like this.
TBF Christopher Lasch was writing about the hollowness of these people forty years ago.
as usual, Maher is onto something
‘As usual’? My impression of Maher is that he’s as credulous as everyone else on the left who thinks Kamala Harris is capable of being a competent president.
News flash.
Obscenely wealthy people often do some weird and crazy sh*t!
And get away with it.
Oh. And in other news.
Hollywood (and showbiz more broadly) has more than its fair share of degenerates.
None of this is news. Why?
Because it’s always been this way.
Yes, they should be investigated and sent to prison if found guilty, but this is not a new satanist phenomena. It’s just over indulged creepy people doing the same weird stuff they have always done.
And we are the ones who make them rich. In return we get their “art” and lascivious titillating scandals every now and then as a bonus. Then there are the parasites who make their living talking about them either exposing /condemning or defending. Amazing. This goose lays golden eggs for everyone. What if we just ignored them all even for a month?
True but the longer that bad behavior is indulged, the worse it becomes. This is true of anything that is tolerated from a child acting out to criminals getting a pass for theft up to a certain monetary value to wealthy people engaged in debauchery.
Debauchery??
So there’s ‘liberals’ on one side (the right side) and ‘far right conspiracy theorists’ (the nutters, obvs) on the other. Interesting framing.
We liberals like to shake our heads at the unfortunate circumstance, sigh, and leave it at that.
… or invent some utterly spurious narrative that deflects attention from the degeneracy of our class onto some other group as you’ve just done here, eh?
I read this odd essay twice. What does it even mean?
Some definitional clarifications:
Conspiracy: when people conspire
Conspiracy theory: a theory a conspiracy is occurring
Conspirators: those who conspire
Conspiratorial: in the manner of those who conspire
Conspiracist: one who (perhaps obsessively) suspects conspiracies are occurring
Editorial should take note.
A professor of English should write with more clarity than this unintelligible purple prose.
As usual, Kaufman’s writing is garbage. Fun-to-read garbage, but garbage nonetheless.
I think it was AI generated. If not it could be. Utterly predictable as we slide from one paragraph to the next. Slicker than baby oil! Right to the sweet finish an AI generated caricature of Mr Twump.
“creating a criminal enterprise whose members and associates engaged in… sex trafficking, forced labour, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice”. sounds like a US federal employee.
Once again, all roads lead to DJT, which is its own type of conspiracy theory. Also, Doja Cat, Cardi B and Diddy are not ‘rock stars’.
I was expecting better writing from my new unHerd sub. This is supercilious and self indulgent. I see the author is a professor of English. My goodness! It is neither informative nor entertaining. Shame on the author. He has no regard for the content or the story. He is not clever.
Last paragraph is a real treat!
1 it’s a conspiracy, that is, not true. 2 the left better take it seriously as such or 3 Trump will be elected and 4 Trump is a Diet Coke drinking moron or worse.
Note: take serious the power of conspiracies in general, not the possibility that there may be some truth in this one at least. Circle the wagons!
BlueAnon Kaufman, calling out QAnon is a trip through a conspiracy dark hole.
there is a cabal of subversive elites whose stock in trade is trafficked children.
Well, yes, there is such a group. Child trafficking is a monster business in the US alone, without even factoring in other parts of the world. There was a film made about the trafficking, a movie that Disney sat on for years until it reached theaters under a different label, and not one person has disputed the claims it made. This cabal is hardly a myth. Whether Puffy was part of it or not is a separate matter.
A tedious, insignificant, inconsequential non- entity, not worthy of interest on this medium
“[Weishaupt] kept his society a secret because the Enlightenment ideas he professed were unpopular among the Jesuits then in power: that women might possess intelligence equal to men; that a human from Africa might be as human as one from Europe…”
Since we’re discussing facts and alt-facts, I asked ChapGPT for an analysis of the above:
Two of the greatest minds in church history said their sister was smarter:
Kaufman’s historical ineptitude is astonishing. The Jesuit order was at its lowest point at the end of the 18th century, having been dissolved by the Pope in 1773 and expelled from many European countries. They’d been dismissed from professorships at universities like Ingolstadt, and while it’s certainly true that they were hostile to the Illuminati (a ‘secret society’ which had been founded partly in order to erase Catholicism in Europe), it’s ludicrous to describe them, as Kaufman does, to describe them as ‘the Jesuits then in power’!
Never mind the orgies. Concentrate on the fraud.
Ahh Sir Puffington Diddy, sure I shot with him on a Norfolk partridge day.. or maybe out with the Quorn?..
no.. I was wrong.. it was at The Tower Hamlets and Brixton Hunt point to point…
Smacks of a guy who desperately wishes he attended those parties. I have no idea how he pulled satanism out of his behind when people are just disgusted that wealthy people think it’s ok to drug people, rape them, pass them around to their friends and then film it. If that’s Satan’s influence, it sounds like this writer is going the devil’s work by claiming Puffy Diddy Puff Daddy was just a normal dude, doing what dudes do. Get. Over. Yourself.
–David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976)
Great article! I agree that the media should take “conspiracy” seriously, and that it is hard for them to do so. And that is because of the history of their collusion with the state. I am thinking of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, actual CIA agents on newspaper staffs, actual spies on cable new shows. How would you go about this remediation, practically?
How this world’s dark powers love to make gods of humans just to tear them down and expose the evil at their core. And for what? That you and I may stand around and gloat, telling ourselves that we are not like that. But the truth is that we are all the same. As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”