THEC O NSPIRASPHERE

John McAfee had long predicted that he would be “Epsteined”, says NOEL ROONEY, so does his untimely apparent suicide reveal the hand of the Deep State at work again?

DEAD PEOPLE’S TALES

The death of John McAfee – malware pioneer, maverick exponent of cryptocurrencies, outspoken blower of the Deep State whistle – caused a chain of eruptions in the conspiracist magma. McAfee had long hinted that elements of the Deep State were out to get him (in his own memorable phrasing of it, in 2019, they were sending him subtle messages that, decoded, read, “We’re going to kill yourself”) and his death, apparently by suicide, in a Catalonian prison, has confirmed his suspicions for many in and outside the Conspirasphere.

In the period leading up to his death, McAfee posted a number of messages on various social media intimating that he might not have long to live and stressing that if he committed suicide, he didn’t. And his premonitions went back a long way; he had “$WHACKD” tattooed on his arm in November of 2019, apparently a reference both to his fear of being assassinated, and to the meme cryptocurrency of that name he launched after the similarly contentious death of Jeffrey Epstein. His prophecy about being “Epsteined”, as some commentators are calling his death, was posted at the same time.

He also managed the singular feat of posting postmortem on Instagram, and what he posted brought more theorists out of the woodwork. The post bore only a stark image of the letter ‘Q’, and most observers assumed immediately it was a reference to the now occulted author of the several thousand posts that gave rise to the QAnon community. He had occasionally tweeted hints that he knew the identity of Q, though he never got round to revealing it. The post was taken down a few hours after it appeared, and to date no one has admitted posting it on his behalf.

Most of the media reports on his untimely death started from the assumption that he had killed himself after the Spanish authorities had granted an extradition request from the US on charges of tax evasion; but curiously, although the Spanish courts had indeed signalled their provisional agreement to the US request, the matter had not been finalised, and he was still in a position to appeal the decision. So why would he kill himself if he still had a chance to thwart his adversaries in court? That question is likely to exercise the C-sphere for some time.

During his colourful life, he had more than one brush with the law. In 2009, he moved to Belize, where, he claimed, he was investigating the medicinal properties of certain plants on the land he owned. In 2012, he came to the unwelcome attention of the authorities; the Belize police force’s Gang Suppression Unit raided his house, allegedly looking for weapons, and found “blocks of something” that they claimed “resembled methamphetamine or cocaine”.

A few years later, in 2015, he was declared a “person of interest” in a Belize police investigation into the death of one Gregory Faull, a neighbour of his. News media suggested that there had been a dispute over McAfee’s dogs, and it had ended in a shooting. McAfee claimed that Faull was the victim of a professional hit gone wrong, and that he was the intended target. He fled to Guatemala, but was arrested for entering the country illegally and deported to the USA.

So by the time he ended up in jail in Barcelona, John McAfee had survived a number of encounters with law enforcement. His resilience in the face of these confrontations was legendary (if a legend of his own making) and again raises the question, with many observers, of why he would give up so suddenly now.

A whole bunch of other infamous names resurfaced with the story. Epstein, of course, but there was also a resurgence of interest in other dubious suicides – for instance, Vince Foster, former Arkansas attorney and one-time neighbour of Bill Clinton who became deputy White House counsel during the Clinton presidency, but apparently killed himself only a few months into his tenure, by shooting himself (twice, according to some accounts). Sceptical commentators saw a common thread in all of these cases; people who had crossed the Deep State and paid for it with their lives (one might say that being suicided is a meme cryptocurrency of the C-sphere).

Closer to home, the McAfee affair coincided with the re-emergence of a very British conspiracy. The UK government, after eight years of prevaricating, finally published a report on its enquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan in 1987. Morgan, a private detective, was found in the car park of a south London pub, an axe buried in his face and a large sum of cash in his pocket, though his pockets had been torn open and the notes he had taken during a meeting in the pub were missing. Despite six separate investigations, supergrass testimony and a series of botched court cases, no one has been convicted of the gruesome crime.

The web of corruption and intrigue around Morgan’s execution is spectacularly convoluted. It encompasses bent police offifificers, infamous villains (such as Kenneth Noye, the ‘road rage’ killer, and Clifford Norris, father of one of the suspects in the murder of Stephen Lawrence), the phone hacking scandal centred round the News of the World in the 1990s, pædophiles and government spin doctors. This is the kind of narrative that, when it’s presented as evidence by a conspiracy theorist, evokes derision from the mainstream.

Dead people do tell tales; they can remind us that society floats on murky undercurrents; that claims about the Deep State, or collusion between criminal elements and the Establishment, are not always the province of the mad.

He managed the feat of posting post-mortem on Instagram

SOURCES www.newsweek.com/johnmcafee-suicide-q-instagram-deadmans-switch-1603638; https:// nationalfile.com/john-mcafeerepeatedly-warned-he-wouldbe-suicided-in-jail-a-la-epsteincalled-out-deep-state-days-beforearrest/; https://cointelegraph. com/news/john-mcafeelaunches-whackd-an-epsteindidnt-kill-himself-crypto; https:// socialistworker.co.uk/art/51941/ Cover+up%21+How+the+state+h elped+hide+the+truth+about+the +murder+of+Daniel+Morgan