"The diabolical criminals in power have done everything you say, but I quibble about the timeline you spoke of" is not a dunk like you might think.

I cannot abide. What is your point? That the last 5 years have seen _fewer_ true conspiracies and clownish gaslightings? Are you quibbling over the number 5 or something?

I'm writing this post for whoever is interested, so please don't take it as specifically directed towards you.

People who doubt the government and especially the fiat monetary system usually end up as "gold bugs", they start preparing for financial collapse by purchasing physical gold. Before the 2008 financial crisis, I was involved in gold circles online and everybody there knew a huge crisis was coming and they were buying as much gold as they could. Now, the price of physical gold (and many other commodities) are determined by the prices on the Comex futures exchange, which are under the control of an oligarchy of big banks.

During the financial crisis and the years after, most gold traders and gold bugs noticed that the gold price would drop every day about 09:00 on the New York Spot market, and everybody was talking about how the big banks were illicitly manipulating the gold price to try to keep it down. Of course this talk was dismissed by uninvolved as loony conspiracy theories, together with every other insulting and dismissing adjective that commenters here are so fond of.

But it turned out that the conspiracy was true, and in 2022 a couple of the bankers' fall guys were sentenced, and JP Morgan agreed to pay $920 million in fines[1]:

"The evidence at trial showed that between approximately May 2008 and August 2016, the defendants, along with other traders on the JPMorgan precious metals desk, engaged in a widespread spoofing, market manipulation, and fraud scheme. The defendants placed orders that they intended to cancel before execution in order to drive prices on orders they intended to execute on the opposite side of the market. The defendants engaged in thousands of deceptive trading sequences for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium futures contracts traded through the New York Mercantile Exchange Inc. (NYMEX) and Commodity Exchange Inc. (COMEX), which are commodities exchanges operated by CME Group Inc."

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-jp-morgan-traders-conv...

The same things are going on all the time, sometimes the perpetrators are banking giants, sometimes the government or parts of government, sometimes tech giants, sometimes it's all of them together, sometimes other perpetrators.