I spent an hour writing an answer, then deleted it. Actually, there is an answer, but not a safe or short one.

It's a great question that I have also had to grapple with for more years that I care to admit. What I found, I cannot say on this forum, but it has stood hard scrutiny. I do not want to be banned from VOAT as I believe it is very important for everyone to put ideas here and spread research and information on pizzagate in all it's dimensions.

The VOAT safe answer is that I found the consideration of the following to be useful:

Primarily, if you are confronted with something that does not make sense (such as three empires and several countries suddenly at war out of nowhere over the shooting of an archduke, for example), then you know you are being lied to--that the story you are hearing is not true. This applies even more to examining sources, and applying knowledge of science, ecclesiology, medicine, intellectual history, and even art.

We cannot ignore the fact that the intelligence services employ 6 to 10 million people in the USA alone, so they have many who will go along with whatever program or face summary "elimination". Many intelligence services have no borders.

People can be bribed or threatened into not "spilling the beans"-- and there are echelons of control and knowledge of what's really happening. "Brown Cow" in the Boston hoaxathon, for example, might be told to "walk into this store" but she has no idea why. Later, at the so called trial of Tsarnaev, she has her leg in a cast, is limping on the wrong foot and incorrectly using crutches, while all the footage of the "bomb scene" she is in shows her to be just fine and nowhere near anything happening. So that's one echelon of information, then you have another one in the media which fails to point out what a fraud she is. And there are many more layers than that.

In some recent hoaxes, such as Pulse/Orlando for example, they use people who have long rap sheets and leverage that. They also count on the fact that most people have zero real medical knowledge, and that the ones who do are content with numbers of casualties/fatalities, and not with details of crime, too busy etc.

Satanism, and all that garbage is just a front for intelligence services and a distraction so people get hung up on numerology, astrology and further and further from any real knowledge or truth.

In the 24 hour news cycle, "events" are crafted in a certain way and then presented by media for effect. For example, people do not realize that the footage of planes hitting buildings aired as being "live" was, in fact entirely created at the MIT Media Lab (DARPA). It was badly spliced in before the explosions. But the explosions were live. This created confusion because all the New Yorkers who were talking about explosions were just integrated into the desired narrative. later when people analyzed the footage frame by frame, then they said "well the whole thing was CGI" and people laughed because they knew that there really were explosions, etc. so the CGI proponents were summarily discredited. (okay this is just a little bit of an example and I do not want to go long on it here) We are dealing with television being used as trauma based mind control. Even Nixon said people will believe anything if it is on television.

Third: if you look at the Manhattan Project then you realized that hundreds of people kept that secret for a very long time. No doubt money counts, which is why it is useful in any investigation to "follow the money" and notice who controls money as well. It helps to have a cohesive group with ostensibly the same goal.

Lastly, the killing and/or discrediting of those who speak the truth requires a closer examination of what those people are actually saying, as well as a scrupulous second look at evidence presented, and the incorporation of new evidence. All of that needs to be put into the big picture throughout history. It's getting harder to do that, but if you can--a clear picture will emerge.

Where do people get information from? Always consider the source.

Example: the ancient Egyptians kept meticulous records which have survived and are well understood. Paid, skilled workers, with health plans and social services, living in multi-generational communities, who were Egyptians built the pyramids. Americans, especially Protestants imagine that the pyramids were built by Hebrew slaves, maybe they are fans of Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments, which is a terrific movie, but it is not in any way factual. The Egyptians did not even call themselves pharaohs, but kings. There was no such thing as "Hebrew slaves" in all of Egyptian history--although at some point the Egyptians had colonized the Middle east up to Assyria--and here's the best part--although there are over 800 references to "Egypt"--a Greek name for that area---there is not one mention of any pyramid, yet this wonder of the ancient world was already very old at the time frame of the OT.

Please let me know when you have read this comment, so I can delete it.