by Victor Davis Hanson
And how to shut them down.
It is easy to birth conspiracy theories.
All that is required is chronic government stonewalling of reasonable
requests for transparency. Then add in high officials serially lying
under oath, along with the blatantly unequal application of the law.
Institutionalize arguments from authority of politicians and bureaucrats
who refuse to adjudicate arguments empirically.
Include the weaponization of investigatory and intelligence
bureaucracies. Finish with the transformation of an obsequious media
into a mouthpiece of the state. And presto, you end up with a skeptical,
cynical public that learns to believe the very opposite from what it is
told by elites.
January 6th
Curiously. some conservative politicians, media and politicos often
remark of their surprise that so many of the Trump base insists that the
January 6 riot at the Capitol was in part a federally driven
conspiracy, or perhaps just a mere “demonstration” gone awry.
But whether true or not, why would some not believe that—given the efforts of the state to hide and warp facts?
Consider what drives rational people to embrace supposed “conspiracy” theories around the so-called “insurrection?”
One reason, of course, is that there was evidence of FBI informants present on January 6. Do not take the word of conservatives for such suppositions.
Instead, remember what award-winning New York Times’s reporter and keen follower of right-wing political activity, Matthew Rosenberg said of January 6, albeit in an ambush interview conducted by Project Veritas:
The left’s overreaction — the left’s reaction to it
in some places was so over the top. They were making it too big a deal …
that gave the opening for lunatics in the right to be like, ‘Oh, well,
nothing happened here. It was just a peaceful bunch of tourists,’ you
know, and it’s like, but nobody wants to hear that.”
Rosenberg then remarked that he spotted numerous FBI informants among
the crowd milling around the Capitol. Or as he put it, “There were a
ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol.” Cannot the FBI refute such allegations?
Apparently not. Given such speculation, one would expect that FBI
Director Christopher Wray might at least categorically deny such
inflammatory accusations.
Yet in congressional testimony when asked whether the FBI had
inserted informants among the protestors, sphinxlike Wray merely
shrugged, “So I really need to be careful here talking about where we
have or have not used confidential human sources.”
Then there is the mysterious case of Ray Epps, initially sought by
FBI “as a person of interest” for allegedly inciting demonstrators to
break the law and enter the Capitol.
But then oddly Epps was de facto exempted for some 30 months
from arrest—even as hundreds who urged no such action were indicted and
convicted of “illegal parading” or unlawfully “demonstrating in front
of the Capitol”—misdemeanors that ended up resulting in felony-type
sentencing.
In one video clip, as Epps attempts to gin up the stationary crowd to
move illegally into the Capitol, he is met with “conspiratorial”
accusations from skeptical bystanders calling out: “Fed! Fed! Fed!”
Epps filed suit against Fox News for defamation on grounds that
anchor Tucker Carlson had tied him to efforts to incite January 6
violence. Yet then suddenly Epps announced that he believes he will soon
be charged, after all, by the government for his role in the January 6
protests.
If true, such an arrest was long anticipated, since Epps is caught on
tape, unambiguously, on more than one occasion, urging demonstrators to
enter the Capitol unlawfully (e.g., “We need to go to the Capitol”).
If one would like to hatch an Epps conspiracy theory, then one could
do no better than quoting another Ray Epps braggadocious claim that he
had texted to his nephew: “I orchestrated it.”
It did not help the Left’s construction of a January 6 “insurrection”
theory that it serially misled the country about the actual loss of
life. At first, Democrats insisted, falsely, that Officer Sicknick’s
tragic death was due to protestor violence. Yet an autopsy revealed that
he died a day later from a stroke.
Then Democrat leaders pivoted to claim that any law enforcement
officer present on January 6, who for any reason subsequently committed
suicide, was to be counted a victim of protestor violence.
All the while, the media kept largely quiet about the fact that the
only unambiguously violent death that day was that of military veteran
Ashli Babbitt. She was unarmed as she was shot unlawfully entering the
Capitol through a broken window.
The name and identity of the officer, remember, were suppressed for
months—a protective protocol unlike any other accorded law enforcement
officers in the country who lethally shoot unarmed suspects.
Asymmetries
If all that was not enough to create suspicion about media and
political narratives, then there was the asymmetrical media coverage and
the reaction of the Justice Department to the 2020 summer riots.
Touch an officer on January 6, and one sat in jail for months. Club
an officer in summer 2020, and the offender was likely to become
certified as a member of the Antifa or BLM resistance, albeit acting up a
bit during the “summer of love.”
Unlike January 6, the violence of arsonists, murderers, rioters, and
Antifa and BLM mobs resulted in 1,500 injured law enforcement officers,
more than 35 violent deaths, nearly $2 billion in property damage, and
14,000 arrests. Yet most of the indictments were dropped, or plea
bargained down to minor misdemeanors by sympathetic leftwing city and
state prosecutors.
Note that the 2020 rioters also targeted iconic and government
buildings. Rioters attempted to burn down a federal courthouse, a police
precinct headquarters, an historic Washington D.C. church—all topped
off by the mob’s nocturnal effort to stampede into the White House
grounds to get to the president.
That failed assault precipitated a hasty Secret Service effort to put
Trump and his family in a secure subterranean bunker. Again, why was
such violence aimed at the White House largely unpunished given its
intensity matched or exceeded that of the Capitol riot?
Even more importantly, the investigatory January 6 committee also fed
rather than quieted conspiracy theories. The Democratic leadership in
the House of Representatives first denied nominated Republican
representatives any seats on the select committee.
Instead, they cherry-picked just two Republicans—on the apparent
requisite that both Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were a) die-hard Trump
haters, and b) politically inert and headed for forced retirement.
The committee neither called any contrarian witnesses nor subpoenaed
documents and videos felt to be antithetical to their narrative of a
rightwing violent and armed “insurrection.” Yet, again, they did not
produce evidence that anyone arrested inside the Capitol was in possession of a firearm.
Nor were any plans found of “insurrectionists” planning to occupy
government property for any length of time—in the fashion of, say,
Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) or (CHOP) “Capitol Hill
Organized Protest.”
In that case, rioters simply annexed government space as their own
for over three weeks, ran the sanctuary-like mini-revolutionary state,
forbid the police to enter, and were granted exemptions from city and
state authorities.
The January 6 narrative of continuous threats of an armed revolution
was leveraged to justify deploying 20,000 armed soldiers —the largest
militarization of Washington D.C. since Jubal Early’s Confederate raid
of 1864. Again, such use of federal troops stood in dire contrast to the
abject appeasement of the far more violent 2020 rioters, when
sympathetic mayors and governors resisted calls to deploy federal troops
to their jurisdictions.
Recall that the suspicions arising around January 6 followed a long
series of revelations about government misconduct that confirmed the
suspicions of once reviled “conspiracists.”
In numerous cases, the wild charge of conspiracists eventually were
proven, while the sober and judicious defense narratives of government
officials were exposed as outright lies, and occasionally themselves
conspiracies.
The True Conspiracists
There was no “Russian collusion” conspiracy.
There was a Clinton conspiratorial effort.
It sought to hide campaign money through three paywalls to hire
Christopher Steele to add to his ad hominem lies and to ensure that they
were disseminated throughout the media and government. The point was
solely to emasculate her opponent, Donald Trump.
As far as the first Trump impeachment phone call, given the
multimillion-dollar corruptions abroad of the Biden family syndicate,
and the boasts of Joe Biden about his past interference in Ukraine
politics to fire a bothersome prosecutor, any president would have warned Ukraine to clean up its act with the Bidens or face holds on American largess.
The Covid-19 virus did escape from a nearby Chinese virology
lab. It was a media and government fed lie that it was birthed
naturally in the wild by a bat or pangolin, part of a three-year long
effort to appease the Chinese communist party. And there was a
clear role of the NIAID and NIH in funding dangerous gain-of-function
research under the auspices of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
Most of what the government assured about the quarantines and
vaccinations proved eventually to be wrong or only half-true. That
reality proved ironic when those who warned of lockdown dangers were
eventually vindicated, but never received apologies from their accusers.
Given the blanket exemptions provided to Hillary Clinton for
unlawfully destroying subpoenaed material and using a home server to
transmit classified information, and the reduction of Hunter Biden’s
numerous felonies to minor misdemeanors, and the likely exemption given
Joe Biden for storing classified files for years at his various homes
and offices, why would anyone not believe that the government and the
media work hard to suppress the truth?
And why would any citizen believe the government or the media after
the Biden campaign solicited “51 intelligence authorities” to swear
falsely that the genuine Hunter Biden laptop was likely a product of
“Russian disinformation.”
The entire concocted lie was a Biden-campaign effort to use the
gravitas of former government officials and the complicity of the media
to promote a fantasy to influence the impending presidential debate. And
it worked to a tee.
Note as well that the FBI hired out Twitter employees to suppress
information concerning the Biden laptop. The truth was deemed
“disinformation” in order to mislead voters on the eve of the 2020
election.
Normally, distinguished government heads of hallowed bureaus
carefully weigh in on investigations to warn against idle speculations
and convulsed conspiracies. But who currently in Washington could be
sure of any such voice since our most esteemed intelligence and
investigative directors are admitted liars?
Former FBI Director James Comey feigned amnesia in congressional
testimony. He passed off a dossier he knew to be fallacious as genuine
evidence to a FISA court.
His successor Andrew McCabe lied on four occasions to federal
investigators. Current Director Christopher Wray has continually
stonewalled congressional oversight committees.
Special counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller preposterously
claimed he knew nothing of the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS.
Both John Brennan, former CIA Director, and James Clapper, Director
of National Intelligence, admittedly lied under oath to Congress. None
of these liars faced any legal consequences.
Anthony Fauci’s incriminating emails keep appearing in the public
domain, making a mockery of his earlier, ludicrous claim that he had not
channeled U.S. dollars to the Wuhan lab to ensure the continuance of
outlawed gain–of-function research.
Worse still, so often those screaming “conspiracy theory” are
conspiracists themselves. Hillary Clinton schemed with dark money and
paywalls to smear her 2016 opponent.
As election denialists Hillary Clinton (“He knows he’s an
illegitimate president”) and Jimmy Carter (“He [Trump] lost the election
and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his
behalf”) refused to accept the 2016 verdict, projecting such denialism
onto others.
So how does the government abort a conspiracy theory?
Simple: Quit the chronic lying and for once tell the truth.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-to-create-conspiracy-theories/
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