Noble left-wing ends always justify odious means, in this case projecting one’s own conspiracist efforts by smearing innocent others as conspiracists.
For the last five years, the
Left—defined as the fusion of the mainstream media, Silicon Valley, the
radical new Democratic Party, and the vestigial Hillary Clinton
machine—has crafted all sorts of conspiracies to destroy their perceived
conservative enemies.
Their method has focused on one major
projection: alleging conspiracy on the part of others, which is a kind
of confirmation of their own conspiracies to destroy their opponents in
general, and Donald Trump in particular.
Now they have been caught admitting
to such nefariousness. Apparently, they still are exuberant about their
slick shamelessness and simply can’t keep quiet. Or they believe
radically changed conditions, such as the implosion of the Biden
Administration, prompt necessary admissions.
Hillary’s the One
For nearly five years anyone who
objected that the partisan Christopher Steele and his “dossier” were
fraudulent, that Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS was a paid opposition hit
team, and their joint birthing of “Trump-Russia collusion” was a myth,
was smeared as a denialist or conspiracist.
But examine what has transpired since
2016. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation found
nothing. Mueller in congressional testimony was either addled or
disingenuous. He even claimed he knew nothing of Fusion GPS or the
dossier, the twin catalysts for his own investigation.
The more Mueller meandered, the more
it was clear that his henchman, partisan lawyer Andrew Weissmann, had
hijacked the left-wing “All-Star” and “Dream Team” of lawyers and was
running the charade. The more the Left boasted of the legal eagles set
to tear apart Trump, the more glaring their failure to find any such
evidence supporting their conspiracies.
Christopher Steele, once the object
of left-wing adulation who sought to warp the 2016 election by leaking
his smears, is now a pariah. Indeed, he is relegated to the clown-like
status of a Michael Avenatti. Steele has testified to what we already
knew: He has no notes or sources to substantiate his ludicrous file.
One of his two “Russian sources” turned out to be a left-wing minor researcher at the liberal Brookings Institution, Igor Danchenko. He
is now under indictment for lying. The other is a former Clinton
operative Charles Dolan. He now admits he has worked for the Russian
government and its affiliates for years.
So ponder that creepy circular firing
squad: Hillary Clinton paid for Christopher Steele to find dirt on
Donald Trump. She hid her checks by using the firewalls of the
Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion
GPS.
Steele, who had not been in Russia in
years, simply concocted the story, in part from the fantasies of a
Clinton employee! So in the end, Hillary sought to smear Trump with a
phony charge of Russian collusion by colluding herself with the Russians, albeit through various firewalls!
When the investigators found nothing
for their $40 million investment, serial leaking, and character
assassination, when the author of the slanders cannot even point to a
single source, and when his two informants are either under indictment
or worked for both Hillary Clinton and the Russian government, then the
accusers of conspiracy stand so accused.
Gasbags Gaslighting
When Donald Trump alleged that he had
been wiretapped—apparently tipped off by a whistleblower—the country
had a good belly laugh. Trump was deemed paranoid, a nut. Why would
anyone in the lame-duck Obama Administration bureaucracy or the Clinton
campaign have sought to monitor Trump’s communications? Who would even
have had electronic access to such top-secret confidential communications, the very Domain Name System logs of candidate and then President Trump?
But now we know that one Michael
Sussmann—working again for Perkins Coie, and being paid by the DNC, as a
front for candidate Clinton—contacted “techies” who as contractors had
access to Trump’s most confidential and private communications.
Sussmann then was told that a Russian
bank, Alfa, had a back-channel line of direct communications with
Trump. He then went to the FBI to substantiate to the media that his
inventions were worthy of government investigation. Everyone from the
ubiquitous Bruce Ohr to the Zelig-like Peter Strzok was somehow
connected to the hoax. In truth, the bought techies searched Trump’s
private logs for any and everything, and came up only with a Russian
bank likely sending one-way spam to a Trump server.
In other words, Trump was a recipient
of electronic noise. But it was useful pings that gave the media a
second life to “collusion”—another “bombshell” disclosure planted
roundabout by Hillary Clinton who was still slandering Trump as a Putin
puppet.
Again, this sorry tale is not some
allegation from the Right. We know the details from a writ of a federal
prosecutor who had indicted Sussmann for purportedly lying. Soon he and
his techie contractors will likely try to blame one another to avoid
indictments, and we should expect even more conspiracies to emerge from
those alleging conspiracy.
Conspiracy Cons
Most Americans concluded that January
6 was a buffoonish riot, in which hundreds of deluded protesters broke
into the capitol, vandalized the premises, and disrupted the government.
The public saw it as an embarrassment and believed the perpetrators
deserved to be punished.
But not the Left. They saw “conspiracy” in this keystone bunch. Soon they were screaming about an “insurrection” aspiring to a “coup d’etat,” and demanding over 20,000 soldiers to prevent a second wave.
Very quickly, however, discrepancies
in the left-wing narrative arose. “Five killed” proved to be one person
“killed,” conservative protestor Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed military
veteran lethally shot by a capitol officer with a checkered record,
whose identity was mysteriously concealed from the public for months.
The other four died from either
natural causes or the press of the crowd. Officer Brian Sicknick was not
murdered by insurrectionists as alleged. In truth, he died the next day
of natural causes. Anyone who complained that the government suppressed
communications concerning its preparations for the demonstration,
thousands of hours of videos, and widespread use of FBI informants among
the protestors was dubbed a nut, or perhaps an alt-Right traitor
himself.
Hundreds were arrested on trumped-up
charges. Many sat in solitary confinement without charges filed for
months. The Left cooed about a right-wing revolution foiled.
But do not believe just conservatives
that January 6 was a riotous charade trumped up into a politically
useful “insurrection.” Instead listen to a left-wing New York Times reporter, Matthew Rosenberg. As an “investigative journalist” he both whipped up public outrage at the riot and in private bragged on a hidden microphone to a female acquaintance that it was mostly a bad joke, a break-in by spontaneously rioting buffoons.
Or as Rosenberg put it of the supposedly violent insurrectionaries and the fear they instilled among reporters, “It
was like, me and two other colleagues who were there [January 6]
outside and we were just having fun! . . . I know I’m supposed to be
traumatized, but like, all these colleagues who were in the [Capitol]
building and are like ‘Oh my God it was so scary!’ I’m like, ‘f-ck
off!’”
And what did the ace New York Times reporter conclude of the trauma from the “coup”?
I’m like come on, it’s
not the kind place I can tell someone to man up but I kind of want to be
like, ‘dude come on, you were not in any danger . . . These f-cking
little dweebs who keep going on about their trauma. Shut the f-ck up.
They’re f-cking bitches.
And was the riot preplanned and
carefully orchestrated? Hardly: “They were making too big a deal. They
were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”
How about the “conspiracists” who
believed there were lots of FBI operatives and informants among the
rioters? They too were on to something: “There were a ton of FBI
informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol.”
Rosenberg is no conservative. He is not even a disinterested liberal observer. He is an activist New York Times
reporter whose official “disclosures” helped to feed the false
narrative of a right-wing coup—one that we now know he never even
believed in himself.
Laptop Lap Dogs
When Hunter Biden’s laptop turned up
just days before the 2020 election with incriminating emails outlining
how the Biden family had been shaking down foreign governments using Joe
Biden prominence as a past senator and vice president, the Left
screamed “conspiracy”!
Joe Biden swore it was “Russian
disinformation.” He attacked Trump for “collusion.” Fifty former
“intelligence officers” signed on to a public letter blasting the
mysteriously appearing laptop as a likely Russian disinformation plot.
We should have been suspicious for a
variety of reasons. The two chief signees were John Brennan, former CIA
director, and James Clapper, former director of national intelligence.
Both were infamous for two reasons. One, they were loud, paid cable-TV
pundits, hired to vent their hatred of Donald Trump. And two, both had
been previously caught lying under oath to Congress about intelligence
matters.
Anyone who read the communications,
listened to confirmations of Hunter’s onetime partner Tony Bobulinski,
knew anything about Hunter’s serial drug addictions and propensities for
losing drug paraphernalia, cell phones, and laptops, and digested the
left-wing outrage, knew the laptop was genuine.
No matter—the New York Times
and other media blasted them as “conspiracists.” And those smears
worked. Social media silenced the story. The mainstream media squashed
it as well. The usual mob of Democratic flunkies weighed in on the
damnable Ruskies out to get Joe and Hunter by planting a laptop in a
Delaware computer service shop.
Yet, after Joe Biden was elected,
after it seemed likely that Hunter might well be indicted, in part for
the accurate information on the laptop, and after Biden had imploded the
Democratic Party and thus might be seen as “expendable,” the Left now
confesses that that the laptop really was authentic all along.
Conspiracists’ Conspiracies
We remember the conundrum over the
2020 election. Most conservatives sensed that the election was “only”
rigged in the sense that the Left earlier had openly conspired to sue
states to drop or change balloting laws. They had sought to warp
bureaucracies to change protocols, to pour money into key precincts to
absorb the work of registrars, and to transition the nation to a
100-million early and mail-in ballots election. Mark Zuckerberg alone
poured nearly $420 million in what the Left used to call “dark money” to
alter the very way Americans vote.
It worked.
For the first time in our history,
well over 60 percent of the ballots were not cast on Election Day. That
fact alone rendered the second presidential debate irrelevant. More
mysteriously, the usual rejection rate of mail-in ballots fell from 3-5
percent in most states to a fraction of that normal percentage. So the
deluge of ballots meant not that more were naturally suspect, but fewer than ever before?
But again, don’t believe
conservatives. The Left was so giddy with their massaging of the
election that they wanted their skullduggery high-fived and
immortalized. So the “conspiracy” was lauded in detail in Molly Ball’s
infamous Time magazine essay, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”
Note what she boasted about:
This is the inside story
of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the
group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents, and interviews with
dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. . . . The
participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even
though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of
powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working
together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and
laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.
Their work touched every aspect of
the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and
helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They
fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers
and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They
successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line
against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral
smears.
Ball even bragged of a new
“conspiracy” between “left-wing activists” and corporate CEOs. The
former on cue were to taper off their post-George Floyd street violence
and the latter were to begin sounding off about social justice issues:
“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both
curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both
surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing
activists and business titans.”
If a conservative had written such a tale and serially used the word “conspiracy,” he would have been written off as insane.
Note that all of the above admissions
were either voluntary, or discovered through old “60 Minutes”-style
ambush journalism, or arose due to criminal conduct, or were the result
of likely political calculations.
But again, it matters little because
such exposés never come with apologies or efforts to atone for the
damage. You see, noble left-wing ends always justify odious means, in
this case projecting one’s own conspiracist efforts by smearing innocent
others as conspiracists.
Or as the late Harry Reid likewise
bragged of his own lying about Mitt Romney’s tax returns in the 2012
presidential race, “It worked, didn’t it?”
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the
Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior
Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American
military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar
of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale
College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in
2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing
raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of
social trends related to farming and agrarianism.
He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.
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