by Victor Davis Hanson
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?”
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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.
