The Left Is Pushing Conspiracy Theories To Feel Better About 2016

Hasn't the Left proclaimed that all conspiracy theories are dumb and stupid? Are feelings more important than facts to the Left? Who's really responsible for the 'post-truth' phenomenon?

http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/23/left-wants-us-believe-conspiracy-theories-make-feel-better-2016/

The Left Is Pushing Conspiracy Theories To Feel Better About 2016
These kinds of grasping-at-straws conspiracy theories are pushed by the same people who complain about the United States entering ‘post-truth politics’ thanks to Donald Trump.
Robert Mariani By Robert Mariani
DECEMBER 23, 2016
Was Sen. Joe McCarthy a bad guy? The answer to that question seems to be changing. Before late 2016, we were expected to believe that his attempt to root out communists in the federal government was a witch hunt stemming from a jingoistic paranoia about Russia.

Then Hillary Clinton lost. How could it be? Her being the most corrupt presidential nominee in U.S. history or running an embarrassingly disconnected campaign is a priori ruled out, because that would mean that a Democratic candidate was worse than a Republican one. The dialectic of a fundamentalist belief in democracy alongside the reality of losing elections results in a mental compromise: Republicans don’t win elections, they steal elections.


This election was so big that it couldn’t have just been Republicans, as dastardly as they may be. It was, uh, the Russians. Yeah! Remember those jerks? Donald Trump is their Manchurian candidate, and Vladimir Putin planted him in the White House by flipping 100,000 Rust Belt voters. This is a fashionable thing to believe, brought to you by the same people who called any scrutiny of Hillary Clinton’s health a “conspiracy theory.”

Sure, Soothe Yourself, But Don’t Tell Me Lies
As crazy as the Russia hysteria is, it’s understandable Democrats would push the narrative that voters having more information from hacked servers was a bad thing. Catastrophic losses demand taking a moral inventory when those who are suffering are also responsible. In context of politics, with all its inertia and moneyed ideological interests, moral accounting is particularly hard because it can imply that certain positions need to change. So what we get instead is a kind of deflective McCarthyism.

I am not entirely comfortable with that pejorative, though. McCarthy was proven to have been basically right by the time documents were declassified in the 1990s proving there actually were communist spies, such as Alger Hiss of the State Department and Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department, at very high levels of the U.S. government. But those are facts. Facts are not relevant to this discussion, because we’re talking about what we feel deep down inside. The narrative will fill in any space between feelings and the actual state of the world.

Googling “Russia” and picking out headlines at random, you’ll more than likely find one that is heavy on partisan paranoia and light on the facts. The Chicago Tribune went as far as to run a piece titled “Donald Trump, a modern-day Manchurian candidate.” Excuse me, “The Manchurian Candidate” is the name of a Hollywood thriller from 1962. Trump can’t be a modern-day version of something that never actually existed.

‘We Are No Longer a Sovereign Nation’

If it were only random people writing letters to the editor and accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being a Russian agent, this phenomenon wouldn’t be worth commenting on. But middle-aged men who have posts at once-respectable news outlets have been reduced to frothing maniacs.

Kurt Eichenwald, a Hillary Clinton advocate who writes for Newsweek, has been suffering what appears to be a slow-motion breakdown induced by Russia hysteria. It culminated in a surreal interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” where Eichenwald tried to filibuster a yes-or-no question about whether he reported that Trump had been institutionalized. Nine minutes of live television consisted him giving an Abbot and Costello-like routine of lashing out against the host for reminding him of how much time he was taking to answer such a straightforward query. Eichenwald later claimed the fictitious report of a Trump institutionalization was “just a joke.” This kind of frightening behavior is familiar to anyone who has been close to someone suffering from mental illness.

Paul Krugman might not be psychologically troubled like Eichenwald, but he is doing his best to make the public think otherwise. The award-winning economist has a column at The New York Times, which has largely morphed into a repository for Trump-centric conspiracy theories that would sound like they were written by Alex Jones had they revolved around Hillary Clinton.

Somehow, though, it’s GQ’s Keith Olbermann who manages to take the cake. I will just quote him, because Olbermann’s own verbatim rant makes him look more clownish than any paraphrasing, however uncharitable, possibly could. “We are at war with Russia. Or perhaps more correctly, we have a lost a war with Russia without a battle. We are no longer a sovereign nation, we are no longer a democracy, we are no longer a free people — we are the victims of a bloodless coup engineered by Russia with the traitorous indifference of the Republican Party.”


I’m not upset that these people hold policy positions different from my own. I’m upset that our media’s standards are so low that middle-aged men are paid to crank out Tom Clancy fan fiction and I’m expected to nod my head while holding back the urge to visit WebMD to find out which type of schizophrenia best describes their ramblings.

How ludicrous the content is doesn’t matter, because identities are the bottom line. Eichenwald, Krugman, and Olbermann are left-wingers who are considered to be “credible.” Is our country being controlled by shape-shifting lizard people that dwell in the hollow earth? They are just asking the questions, people. Don’t be so ridiculous as to reflexively doubt such a thing.

How Did ‘Post-Truth’ Happen? Oh, Yeah, the Left
The worst part is that these kinds of grasping-at-straws conspiracy theories are pushed by the same people who complain about the United States entering “post-truth politics” thanks to Trump. But a fact-averse environment isn’t new, not by a long shot. Facts have been reduced to the status of an occasionally useful but in no way necessary means to political ends since the rise of the postmodern left in the 1970s. Decades later it’s stronger than ever, perhaps even reaching a fever pitch in the wake of Trump’s victory.

News outlets everywhere reported that Muslim women everywhere were being attacked by suspiciously perfect Trump supporters. The New York Daily News, Gothamist, Yahoo, Slate, Talking Points Memo, and ABC all reported one instance of such a hoaxed story as fact. They took the story of an activist as fact, flaunting journalistic standards by using the words “allegedly” or “reportedly.”


Talking Points Memo, a left-wing advocacy website, doubled down on their sophistry when they were caught, saying that “one hoax” doesn’t discredit the “hate crime wave” that hit the country. Yes, that’s technically true, professor, but police information showing the nonexistence of any such hate crime wave does exactly that.

Ideological narratives beat facts. There is nothing above it except crude ideology that demands that Trump be painted as a hyperbolic evil. Police data may show that there is no spike in hate crimes at all, but activists think there could or should be. That’s the story we’re going to be hearing for the next four years, and it will be nothing more than happy accident if the facts end up aligning with it.

Robert Mariani is opinion editor at The Daily Caller. Email him at rjmariani0 AT gmail.com, and follow him on twitter at [MENTION=66562]Robert[/MENTION]_mariani.

 

Thank you space time.

 

You're welcome, Robert!

 

You have to understand that it is only a conspiracy theory if the conservatives come up with it. The ATF runs an operation that allows guns to be illegally purchased and transported to Mexico. A Border Patrol Agent is killed with one of these guns. The AG is briefed daily on the Operation. But the whole thing is a conspiracy theory.

The Director of the IRS admits that they were targeting conservative and Tea Party Organizations, but that too is a conspiracy theory.

The US Mission in Benghazi was attacked in a preplanned terrorist attack. A US Ambassador was killed in the attack. The President tells the country that there was a protest that got out of control, and that the protest was about a video that no one saw. They kept to that story for nearly a month. Well after they knew that there had not been any protest. Yet, that too is a conspiracy theory.

So, liberals never let the facts get in the way of a conspiracy theory label. But they will never allow their fact-less theories be called a conspiracy theory.

The fact is that if they did admit that the facts of the election, or the last 8 years for that matter, they would have to realize that changes would have to be made within the party. They would have to become more mainstream, and less extremist. But they are not going to do that. They reelected Pelosi as Minority Party Leader in the Congress, elected Schumer as the Senate Minority Leader, and they are looking to elect Keith Ellison as the DNC Chairman. In other words, their reaction to losing the Congress, Senate and White House is more of the same. Hardly a recipe for change. Heck, even Pelosi claimed that the country did not want change. So, the conspiracy theories allow them to not accept responsibility for their defeats, and to allow them to remain deluded on their future. This is why I firmly believe that they will be replaced by the Libertarian Party as the second political party.

Frankly, I don't see that as a bad thing for this country. The party that gave us the KKK, and fought against the Civil Rights Amendment should be relegated to a footnote in a history book.

 

I hope you're right. Our political system could use the shakeup...

 

Soon CNN will be saying that President Trump is a reptilian.

 

Here's more:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...rump-the-election_us_587ed24fe4b0b110fe11dbf9

The Domestic Conspiracy That Gave Trump The Election Is In Plain Sight
01/17/2017 11:19 pm ET | Updated 5 hours ago
16k


On November 4, Erik Prince used Breitbart to spread disinformation domestically. Mr. Trump rewarded him for it.
Seth Abramson

Attorney; Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire; Poet; Editor, Best American Experimental Writing; Editor, Metamodern Studies.
This post is hosted on the Huffington Post’s Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and post freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Information presently public and available confirms that Erik Prince, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump conspired to intimidate FBI Director James Comey into interfering in, and thus directly affecting, the 2016 presidential election. This conspiracy was made possible with the assistance of officers in the New York Police Department and agents within the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. All of the major actors in the conspiracy have already confessed to its particulars either in word or in deed; moreover, all of the major actors have publicly exhibited consciousness of guilt after the fact. This assessment has already been the subject of articles in news outlets on both sides of the political spectrum, but has not yet received substantial investigation by major media.

While a full summary of the Prince-Giuliani-Trump conspiracy would require a longer discourse, the actions of these men, along with multiple still-anonymous actors, can be summarized in five paragraphs. It will be for journalists with more resources than this writer to follow up on these leads—and, moreover, to see how this domestic conspiracy dovetails with the Trump-Russia controversy, though this too is briefly addressed below.

In addition to the paragraphs here, this article incorporates its three predecessors (I, II, III).

1. As reported by the New York Times, FBI Director James Comey released his now-infamous October 27th letter in substantial part because he had determined that “word of the new emails [found on Anthony Weiner’s computer]...was sure to leak out.” Comey worried that if the leak occurred at a time when the nature and evidentiary value of the “new” emails was unknown, he “risked being accused of misleading Congress and the public ahead of an election.” By October 27th, the FBI had had access to Weiner’s computer—which it originally received from NYPD—since October 3rd, during which interval the Bureau had both the time and IT know-how to determine that the “new” emails in its possession were in fact duplicate emails from accounts already revealed to the Bureau by Clinton, her aide Huma Abedin, and the State Department. However, when Comey was briefed on the case by agents from the New York field office on October 26th, he discovered that not only had this IT work not been done, but in fact no warrant to seize the full emails had been sought, no permission to read the emails had been requested from cooperating witnesses Weiner and Abedin, and indeed nothing but a summary of the emails’ “meta-data” (non-content header information) had been prepared by his agents. The result of this investigative nonfeasance was that Comey feared he would not be able to get a warrant for the emails and confirm them as duplicates prior to Election Day—a fact that would allow anti-Clinton elements within NYPD and the FBI, and Trump surrogates and advisers with sources in these organizations, to mischaracterize the “new” emails in a way that would swing the election to Trump. As long as the Clinton investigation remained open, Comey would not be able to respond to such misinformation; his only hope of keeping public discussion of the “new” emails within the sphere of reality was to use the cover of a prior promise to Congress to speak publicly about an ongoing investigation—and then close that investigation in short order.

2. The effort to intimidate Comey into publicly commenting on the Clinton case—a win-win scenario for Trump, as either a comment from Comey or silence from Comey (the latter coupled with inaccurate, Hatch Act-violative leaks by the FBI, NYPD, and/or the Trump campaign) would sink Clinton—began concurrent to Comey’s October 26th briefing on the Clinton case. In an October 25th Fox & Friends appearance and an October 26th appearance on Fox News with Martha McCallum, Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s closest advisers, began teasing an October “surprise” which, Giuliani said, would turn the tide against Hillary Clinton. He refused to say what the forthcoming surprise would be, but he indicated that it would be coming in just a few days. Meanwhile, Erik Prince—the founder of Blackwater private security, one of Trump’s biggest donors, a conspiracy theorist who’d previously accused Huma Abedin of being a terrorist in the employ of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a man who blamed Clinton family friend and former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta for outing him as a CIA asset in 2009—was positioning himself to play an important role. Just as Giuliani had boasted on the Mark Larson radio program on October 28th that he had sources within the FBI—active agents—who had told him of virulent anti-Clinton sentiment in the New York field office and an internal rebellion against Comey’s July decision not to indict Clinton, Prince claimed to have sources within the Weiner investigation who were illegally leaking information to him. In Prince’s case, the sources were within NYPD, and the information he relayed from them to Breitbart News on November 4th—when it was not yet known that Comey, the next day, would reveal the “new” Clinton emails to be duplicates—turned out to be almost entirely false. The full extent of Prince’s lies on November 4th, all of which were Trump campaign disinformation delivered by an adviser and major donor to the campaign, are too numerous and spectacular to list here. Two brief quotes from Breitbart’s interview with Prince should suffice:

Prince claimed he had insider knowledge of the investigation that could help explain why FBI Director James Comey had to announce he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server last week....”[NYPD] found a lot of other really damning criminal information [on Weiner’s computer], including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than twenty times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times,” he said. “The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress, was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments,’” Prince explained. “I believe—I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at One Police Plaza in New York—the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making in this investigation, and they’ve gotten huge pushback, to the point of coercion, from the Justice Department.”
Virtually all of this is untrue. Prince continued:

“So NYPD first gets that computer. They see how disgusting it is. They keep a copy of everything, and they pass a copy on to the FBI, which finally pushes the FBI off their chairs, making Comey reopen that investigation, which was indicated in the letter last week. The point being, NYPD has all the information, and they will pursue justice within their rights if the FBI doesn’t. There is all kinds of criminal culpability through all the emails they’ve seen of that 650,000, including money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play, and, of course, plenty of proof of inappropriate handling, sending/receiving of classified information, up to Special Access Programs....The point being, fortunately, it’s not just the FBI; five different offices are in the hunt for justice, but the NYPD has it as well....From what I understand, up to the commissioner or at least the chief level in NYPD, they wanted to have a press conference, and DOJ, Washington people, political appointees have been exerting all kinds of undue pressure on them to back down....This kind of evil, this kind of true dirt on Hillary Clinton—look, you don’t have to make any judgments. Just release the emails. Just dump them. Let them out there. Let people see the light of truth.”
Prince’s statements of November 4th—whether given with the knowledge that they were untrue or without any knowledge of their accuracy whatsoever—underscore the sort of disinformation Comey feared would be given to voters, and, more importantly, believed by voters, if he did not complete his investigation into the duplicate emails and announce his findings before Election Day. This alone explains his deviation from FBI protocol prohibiting discussion of open cases (and announcements regarding major investigations within two months of a general election).

3. It seems clear that Giuliani, who was the top surrogate for the Trump campaign and in near-daily contact with the candidate, acted under orders from Trump, and that Prince either acted under orders from Trump or Steve Bannon—well-known to Prince from their mutual association with, and financial investment in, Breitbart and its ownership, including Robert Mercer—and, moreover, that all those associated with the conspiracy were subsequently rewarded. Erik Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, was named Education Secretary by Trump, despite having no experience for the job other than advocating sporadically for charter schools in Michigan. Prince himself was named a shadow adviser to Trump, even though, by November 8th, the fact that his statements to Breitbart had been part of a domestic disinformation campaign was clear. Prince is so close to Trump that he appears to have been present at the election-night returns-watching party to which Trump invited only close friends and associates; Prince’s wife posted pictures of the event. Giuliani, originally assured a Cabinet position and then separated from the Trump team entirely—perhaps as punishment for his carelessness on Fox News—was then given a highly lucrative but substance-free position within the administration on the same day, January 12th, that the DOJ announced that the Inspector General would be investigating the sequence of events comprising the Prince-Giuliani-Trump conspiracy. Inspector General Horowitz noted that within his brief was investigation of the series of leaks that occurred between the NYPD, the FBI, and outside entities—including, we can surmise based on context, the Trump campaign.

 

Just an observation of mine over the years, but the left usually makes up and uses the conspiracy theories, then when they're done with them, the right picks them up.

 

Quite remarkable, coming from the liberal New Republic. It's quite long, please read the whole thing at the link:

https://newrepublic.com/article/142...al&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
The New Paranoia


BY COLIN DICKEY
June 8, 2017
Illustrations by Alex Nabaum
Late on Election Night in 2012, the nation watched as Karl Rove panicked on live television. Fox News, his post–Bush administration sinecure, had just called Ohio—and, by extension, the country—for Barack Obama. While the network broadcast images of jubilant crowds in Chicago, Rove refused to concede. “This is premature,” he insisted, ticking off various precinct figures from Ohio counties and warning that everyone needed to be “very cautious about intruding into this process.” For an embarrassingly long half-hour, Rove argued with the entire network, demanding that Fox retract its call on Ohio, to no avail.

What did Karl Rove know that no one else did? Why was he so certain that the numbers from Ohio were wrong? The left-wing web site Truthout thought it had the answer. A few days after the election, the site published an article asserting that Rove had been working behind the scenes to rig Ohio’s electronic voting machines, monkeying with the software to tilt the count to Mitt Romney, as part of a conspiracy to rob Barack Obama of a second term. He’d done this before, the site charged, back in 2004, to assure Bush’s reelection. That’s why Rove appeared “genuinely shocked” when Obama took Ohio, “because he knew the fix was in, just like in 2004, and there was no way President Obama was going to win reelection.”

So why hadn’t Rove’s ratfucking scheme worked? Because, Truthout claimed, the hacker collective Anonymous had learned of his conspiracy, and had secretly out-ratfucked the ratfucker. Citing a YouTube video released before the election, Truthout described how Anonymous had warned Rove not to act: “We want you to know that we are watching you, waiting for you to make this mistake of thinking you can rig this election to your favor.” Truthout, if correct, suggested an awful truth about our political system: A shadowy organization of superhackers was the only thing standing between us and a stolen election.

For the most part, this kind of conspiracy theory—the idea that sinister forces are secretly engaged in a host of elaborate plots to manipulate virtually every aspect of our lives—has been fairly rare on the American left. Sure, liberal nut jobs have engaged in all kinds of far-fetched theories over the years, wild ideas about the Trilateral Commission and the JFK assassination, that the government created AIDS to destroy the black community, or that George W. Bush had advance warning of the terrorist attacks on September 11. But most of these theories have remained cordoned off from mainstream media; the Truthout story, for example, never circulated much beyond a few fringe web sites. The left has generally presented itself as the sober, rational half of our political discourse, eschewing paranoid fables and histrionic bloviaters in favor of reputable, fact-checked reporting.


The right, on the other hand, has not only incubated conspiracy theories, it has thrived on them, become dependent on them, built entire media ecosystems and political careers around them. Glenn Beck, at his peak, commanded a daily television audience of more than three million viewers by arguing that the Obama administration had secret plans to implement a Second Bill of Rights, that the Arab Spring was the beginning of a worldwide Muslim caliphate, and that Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt orchestrated a 100-year conspiracy to establish a “socialist utopia” in America. Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars, has become an influential voice on the right by insisting that the Sandy Hook massacre was a government-led false flag operation to implement gun control, that same-sex marriage stems from a “eugenicist-globalist” worldview, and that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta ran a child sex–trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. None of this stopped Donald Trump from calling Jones for advice and appearing on his show. After all, the two men helped promulgate what is perhaps the right’s most influential conspiracy theory—that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, a racist fantasia that launched Trump’s political career and helped land him the presidency.

But since the election of the Birther-in-Chief, both the nature and the source of conspiracy theories has shifted dramatically. In recent months, the left has begun to rival Trump himself as an incubator for sinister musings and crackpot accusations. And like Trump, left-wing conspiracists are using Twitter to gestate and market-test their most outlandish forms of political insanity. Leading the charge has been Louise Mensch, a British former MP who seemingly overnight has become the main spokesperson of the paranoid resistance. Mensch has attracted more than 284,000 followers on Twitter, legitimate journalists among them, by posing ever more elaborate and ludicrous theories of the Russian conspiracy to elect Trump. She claims, for example, that Andrew Breitbart was assassinated by Russian agents to allow for the ascendancy of Steve Bannon, who took over the Breitbart web site after its founder’s death in 2012. Anthony Weiner’s sex scandal with a minor was, likewise, the work of Russian intelligence: Mensch claims that they invented a fake profile for a 15-year-old girl to entrap Weiner, planted files containing Hillary Clinton’s emails on his computer, and leaked the existence of those files to the FBI.

The left has begun to rival Trump himself as an incubator for sinister musings and crackpot accusations, with Twitter used to market-test the most outlandish forms of political insanity.
Another left-wing node of conspiratorial diffusion can be found at The Palmer Report, a once relatively obscure pro-Hillary blog that has built a large following with its wildly speculative theories about Trump. According to the site, Trump himself had Russian agent Sergei Mikhailov killed in December to prevent the release of the now infamous “pee tape” that purportedly shows the president-elect watching as Russian sex workers urinate on a bed the Obamas slept in. Vladimir Putin, the site maintains, is using the video to blackmail Trump—and the president “may have already acted on it in a manner which would be both treasonous and murderous.” The site’s founder, Bill Palmer, routinely blasts out stories that sound serious but are actually based on a single, unverified source. In May, Palmer reported that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had ordered Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch to recuse himself from all Trump-related Russia hearings. His source? A single tweet from an anonymous Twitter account under the name “Puesto Loco.”

Long quarantined in the furthest corners of the internet, these left-wing rantings have begun to find their way into mainstream political discourse. In March, Louise Mensch was inexplicably given space on the New York Times op-ed page to trumpet her theories, rattling off a list of Russian operatives she believed should be called to testify before Congress—a list that included Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg. Her tally of agents has since expanded to encompass everyone from Black Lives Matter to Sean Hannity to Bernie Sanders. In April, MSNBC’s Laurence O’Donnell echoed a Palmer Report theory that Syria’s chemical weapon attack had been orchestrated by the Russian government, so that Trump could appear to distance himself from Putin. (Like a true conspiracy theorist, O’Donnell offered no proof for the claim, insisting instead that “you won’t hear ... proof that the scenario I’ve just outlined is impossible.”) On Twitter, the Democratic Party’s deputy communications director retweeted Mensch’s unsubstantiated hypothesis that Russia had some form of blackmail on Representative Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who has since announced that he would resign. On May 10, Senator Ed Markey told CNN that “a grand jury has been empaneled up in New York” to investigate Russian meddling in the election; pressed by The Guardian, Markey’s staff said he got the information from Mensch and The Palmer Report. (A later press release claimed he’d received it from a “briefing” that was “not substantiated.”) When Ned Price, a former spokesman for the National Security Council, was asked why he retweeted a Palmer Report story, he insisted that a retweet was not an endorsement, but professed an openness to conspiracy theories. “Every once in a blue moon,” he said, “the tin hat can fit.”

Why has Trump’s election driven the left to embrace such transparent nonsense? Part of the reason lies in the public’s loss of faith in the mainstream media, which predicted an all-but-certain victory for Hillary Clinton. Part of the reason also lies in Trump’s willingness to lie in direct contradiction of the known facts, an extension of the right’s long-running assault on the very notion of objective, verifiable truth. But above all, conspiracy thinking has gained traction among liberals for a more prosaic reason: Liberals are human beings, and human beings get rattled when they’re afraid. If the left is succumbing to conspiracy theories, it’s because conspiracy theories are a way to manage anxiety.


Conventional wisdom has long held that there would never be a left-wing rival to Glenn Beck or Alex Jones, because liberals are just too damn smart to fall for that kind of stuff. “We believe in subtlety,” Mario Cuomo once explained. “We believe in telling the whole truth. We don’t want to exaggerate. Look, they write their message with crayons. We use fine-point quills.”

As it turns out, though, the left wasn’t smarter than the right; it simply wasn’t terrified enough. Waking up to a country run by a man who openly boasts of sexual assault, who has systematically targeted immigrants and Muslims for deportation, whose every utterance seems to bespeak some form of mental instability, liberals suddenly find themselves adrift in a world they never imagined possible. In a landscape this dystopian, conspiracy offers a salve. It promises an order behind the madness, some sort of rational explanation for the seeming chaos. It validates your paranoia, which paradoxically confirms you’re not paranoid. And most dangerous of all, it affirms your sense that things are hopeless, while absolving you from having to do anything about it. Conspiracy theories may temporarily allay our fear, but they ultimately exacerbate the very conditions that created that fear in the first place.

If there’s an aesthetic hallmark of this brave new world of left-wing conspiracy theorists, it’s the long, connect-the-dots Twitter thread. The purest and most overelaborated example of this new genre of paranoia debuted on December 11, with the publication of an unreadable, 127-tweet thread known as “Time for Some Game Theory.” Written by Eric Garland, a previously obscure figure who describes himself as a “futurist, keynote speaker, author, intelligence analyst, columnist, and bassist,” the thread veers between the sort of groundless conjecture and outright gibberish that form the basis of President Trump’s own late-night Twitter epistles. (“The Russians f**king rule at covert ****,” reads one Garland tweet. “Always have. Ask a cold warrior. Mucho respect for our adversaries. They do clever work!”) Yet “game theory” thread spread through the internet like measles in an undervaccinated population, garnering widespread praise and driving Garland’s following from 5,000 to 30,000 overnight.

Garland’s thread depicts how the Russians, reduced by the end of the Cold War to “Drunk Uncle status,” systematically used everything from George W. Bush’s recklessness in Iraq to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA to undermine confidence in the U.S. intelligence community. “DID YOU KNOW YOUR TOASTER IS SPYING ON YOU?” Garland tweeted, parodying the mind-set of an American duped by the diabolical Russian conspiracy. “THE GUBMINT! IT IS EVERYWHERE! THEY SPY ON (*controls snickering*) ALLIES! ALL BAD!” According to Garland, Russia’s long con led directly to our current political predicament: “Trump says he don’t need no stinkin’ intel agencies. Russia (BWA HAHAHAHAAAA) blames Ukraine! LOLOLOLOLZZZ.” The only way forward, Garland concludes, is to embrace his “game theory” in all its intricate zaniness. “To be American,” he tweets, “is to accept that unflinchingly and to soldier forth for future generations, and DO BETTER, ******N IT.”

 

If we must dismiss the JFK, 9/11 and Illuminati/Freemason/Reptilian Overlord conspiracy theories shouldn't we also dismiss the Patriarchy, Military-Industrial Complex and Hillary's 'Vast Right Wing Conspiracy' theories? Even though it's from cracked.com read the whole thing at the link: