These are the times that try men’s souls, as Tom Paine said.
They’re also the times in which conspiracy theories flourish.
While 79-year-old President Joe Biden bumbles and fumbles, inflation gnaws away at the innards of the economy.
COVID-19 and its offspring continue to cast doubt on the onmiscience government asserts in justification of its ever-expanding omnipotence.
An influx of illegal immigrants crosses the southern border by the thousands, a trend officially encouraged even though research shows it further suppresses the wages of Americans in low-paying jobs and strains school and social services budgets.
Meanwhile, censorship by both government agencies and their corporate allies erodes the First Amendment. (Of course, only views that are “dangerous” or “wrong” get censored, the censors hasten to reassure us.) American companies doing business in China, which holds $1 trillion of U.S. debt, routinely accede to Beijing’s demands that unwanted truths be altered or deleted.
In such a distressing atmosphere, conspiracy theories of all kinds spawn and proliferate. Should we expect otherwise.
Although hardly needed, here’s one more conspiracy theory going around: Given this volatile mixture of conditions, there’s a game-changing military clash in the works — one aimed at rallying folks ’round the ol’ flag.
According to this conspiracy theory, with U.S. warships steaming near Russia’s shores in the bathtub-size Black Sea, erratic Ukraine is the ideal powder-keg spot to advance the plot for some unifying military action. How long before there’s an “incident” in the enclosed, cramped confines of that highly militarized body of water?
A nutty conspiracy theory? Maybe. Maybe not. Stay tuned.
Does the suddenly increased output of stories warning of the menacing gathering of Kremlin troops on Ukraine’s border, — i.e., on Russia’s own territory — signal the anticipated, unifying, poll-reversing military irruption?
Wasn’t Ukraine in fact the very place to which President Barack Obama declined to dispatch any “lethal aid” whatsoever? And wasn’t it the very place VP Joe Biden, fretful about its rampant corruption, threatened to cut off U.S.
aid entirely?
Meanwhile, stories of the rally-’round-the-flag genre also are on the rise in TASS and Pravda, stories heralding Russia’s hypersonic missiles and other advancements in military materiel, chest-thumping accounts that all but bray, George W. Bush-style, “Bring it on!”
The problem-bedeviled Biden surely is wondering himself: How long are even the most loyally gullible Democrats going to put up with the green agenda when the price numbers on gas pumps keep racing further and further ahead of the gallons-delivered numbers? Ironically, the anti-carbon green agenda fortifies Russia’s world standing as a giant rich in oil and natural gas and as Europe’s crucial energy supplier.
Yes, it does seem just a tad “conspiratorial” to wonder about a timely, unifying conflagration being in the works to rescue the Biden presidency from the quicksand of its own ill-considered agendas. But desperate circumstances do tend to give way to desperate measures, as history seems to have illustrated repeatedly.
Can troubling questions be silenced by implying that they betray a conspiratorial, crackpot mindset? Rising censorship, now with the silent or nodding assent of liberalism — a censorship often mislabeled as “fact-checking” — suggests the answer is yes.
But for better or worse, the conspiratorial mindset is not quite so easily scorned and dismissed as it once was. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that our government connived to subvert the very law it claimed to be upholding in a case of grave importance. That is, we now know that the Kremlin collusion fuss — four years running and not entirely ceased even yet — was largely if not wholly concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee.
We now know that this occurred with the passive acquiescence, and sometimes active encouragement, of the Deep State bureaucracies. (“Deep State,” by the way, is a term left-wing in its origin.)
If Trump conspired with the Kremlin, how likely is it that the conspiracy would have been discovered not by any of our several intelligence agencies, or by any of the intelligence agencies of our allies, but sniffed out by a retired, mid-level British agent with a spotty record of reliability, a fellow once deemed a too-talkative loose cannon by the FBI, who hadn’t been to Russia in two decades and was now on the payroll of the Clinton campaign and DNC?
Now we know that an unquestioning, eunuchized media, dependent on those Deep State bureaucracies for a steady supply of leaks — leaks calculated to fortify the Deep State’s turf — forfeited their watchdog role in exchange for an “insider” status.
What feeds conspiracy-thinking more than the government’s excessive, circle-the-wagons secrecy? Records regarding the John F. Kennedy assassination remain in the government’s lock-and-key possession 58 years after the event. (It’s for our own protection, we are absurdly reassured.)
Is it really any wonder, then, that the assassination, more than half a century ago, supports a flourishing conspiracy cottage industry to this very day? Many of the conspiracy buffs point the finger, often in farfetched speculation, at the Deep State itself.
Conspiracy-thinking is even more tempting today than it once was thanks to a well-placed Department of Justice lawyer, a DOJ assistant general counsel named Kevin Clinesmith.
He pled guilty to doctoring crucial court evidence in the politics-driven Trump-Putin collusion case. He had once been hand-picked for a role with the Mueller special prosecutor team but was removed when right-wingers found anti-Trump tirades on his social media accounts and made a ruckus about it.
Clinesmith’s doctored court evidence — a CIA email he altered — directly enabled the government to obtain “national security” surveillance warrants from a secretive Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The Department of Justice then used the illegally procured warrants to snoop on Trump’s campaign and on his political associates.
In other words, the mouthy, blustery, fact-steamrolling Trump was fully correct in at least this one respect: The massive federal probe regarding his supposed collusion with the Kremlin was indeed a politicized “witch hunt,” with the media largely constituting themselves as a partisan cheering section rather than a skeptical, impartial observer.
Like wind spreading a prairie grass fire, the conspiracy-minded persist in wondering how likely it is that no other DOJ officials higher up the food chain, or perhaps White House officials, had any knowledge of the doctored evidence before it was forwarded under oath to a court.
Was a fabricated piece of potentially history-making evidence entered into a vital court proceeding on the say-so of a single lawyer, with not one other DOJ official (or White House staffer) ever involved in the vetting process? The conspiracy-theorists are inclined to borrow a favorite Joe Biden expression and say, “C’mon, man.” Can their suspicions be dismissed as outlandish?
The kid-gloves treatment that the offending DOJ lawyer received in federal court once he pled guilty only further encourages the conspiracy-thinking turn of mind. For the flagrant crime of fabricating phony evidence in a court case of utmost importance — a case involving potential presidential impeachment, no less — the offending government lawyer drew a sentence of probation. Probation!
And conspiracy buffs surely will only be further encouraged in their moonbat theorizing by an additional eyebrow-raising fact: The sentencing judge, one James E. Boasberg, himself once sat on the bench of the FISA court, the court that doles out search warrants to the Deep State as if handing out lollipops to children, virtually never rejecting a government request according to the court’s own data.
Ironically, although the word “conspiracy” is now pronounced with a dismissive sneer by our journalistic and political cognoscenti, by our high-minded progressive set, state and federal legal codes are crammed with conspiracy provisions. And prosecuting authorities are not hesitant in the least to invoke the powers these conspiracy provisions confer upon them.
Conspiracy-thinking is mocked and discounted, however, mostly when it is invoked against government itself — even though we now know as a certainty, thanks to the Clinesmith guilty plea, that government involved itself in an evidence-tampering scheme even an Oliver Stone or a Tom Clancy would be hard put to top with their fertile imaginations.
The big question to ponder now is whether a democracy can remain reasonably functional amid deep, widespread and justified mistrust of its institutions, especially its institutions directly responsible for securing the rule of law. Securing the rule of law surely entails, at a bare minimum, observing it yourself.