Swamped by Conspiracy Theories

Apparently, the media is swamped with conspiracy theories. Especially concerning Hillary Clinton.

Zeynep Tufekci fills us in on some of them:

Hillary Clinton has pneumonia. Did you know she has a body double? She was that blond woman waving at reporters in front of Chelsea Clinton’s apartment a few hours after Mrs. Clinton felt unwell and left the Sept. 11 commemoration at ground zero.

Did you also hear that Mrs. Clinton has Parkinson’s disease? Her coughing fits prove it, as does her latest bout of illness. She has epilepsy, as well as advancing dementia. She has managed to hide all these illnesses through almost a year and a half of a grueling campaign because the man the world thinks is the head of her Secret Service detail is actually her hypnotist. He’s also a medical doctor.

Why are we all so attracted to conspiracy theories? An Adam Gopnik, normally the voice of reason, declares that the fault lies with Donald Trump. You see, Trump once suggested—rather mindlessly, if I may—that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination.

Trump’s accusation was appalling, but it can hardly be counted as the basis for a proliferation of conspiracy theories. Even so, Gopnik has written a long column explaining that a disgruntled fame-seeker named Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin and that Jack Ruby was upset for Jackie Kennedy. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that does not mean that it isn’t true.

A recent television show, The Making the Mob: Chicago suggested that Kennedy was assassinated because his father had made a deal with the Chicago mob. Deliver the Illinois vote for JFK and I will ensure that Bobby Kennedy stops harassing and investigating the Chicago mob. 

Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana kept their end of the bargain. Bobby Kennedy did not keep his. It's a bad idea to double cross the Outfit. Ergo….

The show suggests that Accardo and Giancana might have been responsible but finds no way to connect them to Lee Harvey Oswald. On the other hand, Jack Ruby was a low level gangster, so one might wonder whether Oswald really was, as he said, a patsy. The show ends its speculation by noting that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination Bobby Kennedy resigned from his position as Attorney General.

If RFK had been warned by his father to lay off the Chicago mob and if he had ignored the advice, his resignationmight suggest that he knew he had made a very big mistake.

Returning to Hillary Clinton, Tufeki suggests that the media is awash in conspiracy theories because we live in a culture where people do not believe anything that they are hearing:

Conspiracy theories are like mosquitoes that thrive in swamps of low-trust societies, weak institutions, secretive elites and technology that allows theories unanchored from truth to spread rapidly. Swatting them one at a time is mostly futile: The real answer is draining the swamps.

Examine the notion of secretive elites. Are the Clintons secretive? Or are they open and honest… even transparent? In truth the Clintons are almost pathological in their ability to lie. They lie all the time, about everything. Why would anyone believe anything that they say?

Recall that Hillary lied about her email server over and over again. Recall that the head of the FBI contradicted many of her assertions. If you believe that she deleted over 30,000 emails because they were about wedding preparation and yoga, you win a special prize for gullibility.

The Clintons provoke conspiracy theories because they are fundamentally dishonest. If you imagine that when people gave money to Bill Clinton for speeches and to the Clinton Foundation to provide a slush fund for Clinton cronies their gifts had nothing to do with receiving special favors from the Clinton State Department, you also win a prize for gullibility.

And let’s not forget that Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

Clintonian prevarication is so bad that Paul Krugman, good soldier to the last, has been explaining that the media is in the tank for Trump and that Trump, for having hedged on when he opposed the Iraq War is the biggest liar in the history of the world. As you know, Krugman has no shame.

Panic is setting in.

If you think that the Clintons are bad, remember that we live in the Age of Obama. And that in the Age of Obama things are never what they seem to be. They are never what they are. Things are what Obama and his media flunkies say that they are.

I trust that I do not need to make a very long list. As you know, ransom is not ransom if the Obama administration says it’s not ransom. As for the money we gave to Iran to help them launch more terrorism, it was their money all along. When the Iranian Navy captured and humiliates American sailors John Kerry thanked them for being considerate. Reality check, anyone?

Want some more? When we see America’s cities—especially Obama’s home town of Chicago-- descend into a maelstrom of black-on-black violence, we are told that the fault lies with white policemen. If students admitted into colleges to fill diversity quotas cannot achieve at the same level as students who were admitted by fairer standards, the reason has to be white privilege and microaggressions.

If you dare to point out that the African-American community is doing worse under the rule of their favorite president, you are a racist and deserve to be shunned from polite society.

And, of course, if a human creature who has properly male genitalia decides that he is really a she, you are obliged to allow him access to girls’ locker rooms. And you must call him by the pronoun he prefers, lest you be declared a bigot and fined. 

Even the federal courts have been going along with this illusion. If your state passes a law designed to preserve something that no one, at any time or in any place in the course of human history, has ever really doubted, it will be punished and boycotted.

Vanderbilt University, which is not some backwater diploma mill, has recently recommended the following utterly useless waste of time and energy. Via Katherine Timpf:

Vanderbilt University is asking faculty to tell everyone they meet on campus which pronouns they prefer and to ask other people to tell them theirs, even when dealing with “familiar colleagues and students.” “When introducing yourself, offer your name and pronouns — even to familiar colleagues and students,” asks a poster created by the school’s Faculty Senate Gender Inclusivity Task Force. “Offer your name and pronoun in faculty meetings, committees, and other spaces where students may not be present.”

And also, in the Age of Obama, if an Islamist terrorist yells Allahu Akbar and opens fire on a group of servicemen, it’s not an act of Islamist terrorism. It’s workplace violence.

Any time a Muslim commits an act of terrorism the real problem—don’t you forget it—is Islamophobia. You must cleanse your soul of any inkling of prejudice against Muslims, because that, after all, Islamophobia is the root cause of all Islamist terrorism.

And, of course, when Obama said in late 2011 that the situation in Iraq was stable and that the Iraqis could run their own country, thus that it was prudent for America to withdraw from the region, what he really meant was that George W. Bush was responsible for everything that ensued. Including the conflict in Syria and the refugee catastrophe that is descending on Europe.

One can go on, but you get the picture. In an era where the executive branch of the federal government is running a well-oiled propaganda machine, where lying has become second nature, the rest of us have been habituated to thinking  that things are not what the government and political candidates tell us.

The habit has been rooted in the American political mind for decades now. It is not going to disappear tomorrow.