{"id":10929,"date":"2018-01-31T16:17:18","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T00:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=10929"},"modified":"2018-01-31T16:17:18","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T00:17:18","slug":"from-conspiracy-theories-to-conspiracies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/from-conspiracy-theories-to-conspiracies\/","title":{"rendered":"From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness<\/p>\n

N<\/span>ot all conspiracy theorists are unhinged paranoids\u2014even when they insist there was a loosely organized if not sometimes incoherent effort to destroy Donald Trump\u2019s candidacy beyond the bounds of \u201cnormal\u201d politics and later a renewed and unprecedented endeavor to abort his presidency.<\/p>\n

After all, did anyone believe that in the year 2017 the losing side in an American election would immediately dub itself the \u201cResistance\u201d\u2014channeling the World War II nomenclature of the guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupation of France? Or that the defeated candidate Hillary Clinton would formally embrace the imagery of liberationist patriots fighting a Nazi-like Trump\u2019s occupation of the United States?<\/p>\n

One ingredient for removing a president would entail a nonstop effort by the opposition to use the courts, the legislative branch, the investigatory agencies, and the administrative state to discredit, undermine, and remove an elected government. In modern terms, that might entail opponents suing to challenge the legitimacy of the election, perhaps by charging in court that according to \u201cexperts,\u201d voting machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were null and void.<\/p>\n

The effort might embrace trying to subvert the Constitution by pressuring state electors not to honor their constitutionally defined responsibilities to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce articles of impeachment in the House.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A resistance might sue under the 25th Amendment to find the president\u00a0non compos mentis<\/i>, accompanied by a popular campaign to clinically diagnose the president as mentally unfit or physically decrepit. Or a resistance might use the courts to seek the removal of an elected president on grounds he was a rank profiteer and had violated the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution\u2014or to file suits with cherry-picked liberal judges to delay and stop the president\u2019s executive orders. On the petty side, an organized effort to discredit a president would range from boycotting the Inauguration to deliberately holding up and delaying confirmation of his appointees.<\/p>\n

In fact, in just Trump\u2019s first year we have seen all these things and more.<\/p>\n

Pop Culture Provocations<\/strong>
\nAny \u201cresistance\u201d aimed at removing a president would also involve the proverbial street and popular culture. A good way might be to implant to such a degree the idea of killing or harming the president that it would become something more than just a sick fantasy, but become contextualized as an act of near patriotism across the broader culture. Celebrities accordingly might dream out loud at rallies of blowing up the White House. Or a movie star might announce to his audience his hopes for a repeat of a John Wilkes Booth-style assassination. Or a state legislator might post hopes that someone would kill the president. Or a rapper might release a video in which the president is shown shot. Or a comedian on camera might hold up a facsimile of the bloody severed head of the president. Or a New York troupe might perform public plays in which the president each evening is ritually stabbed to death.<\/p>\n

We might also see and hear\u00a0ad nauseam<\/i>\u00a0from actors and other celebrities expressing desires to beat him to a pulp, or hang him, or shoot him\u2014all the insidious efforts not of those easily disregarded as unhinged, but of those with public personas, and with the effect of incrementally normalizing violence against the president. Late night comedians might vie with each other in their profanity and scatology, ridiculing the president with references to him fellating a foreign leader. Who knows, a secret service agent might even post a brag that she would not be willing to \u201ctake a bullet\u201d to defend the likes of this president. Or a left-wing zealot might think shooting Republican congressmen was doing his part to thwart the evil Trump agenda.<\/p>\n

All that, too, transpired in Trump\u2019s first year.<\/p>\n

Blue, anti-Trump states might seek to nullify federal law, in the fashion that the states of the Old South insisted that they were not subject to federal jurisdictions. California, for example, might declare itself a sanctuary state, a declaration that would forbid federal immigration agents from enforcing fully the law. Or the states might incessantly sue the president\u2019s administration on everything from immigration to environmental policy\u2014such that every two weeks California is ritually filing a new suit in a friendly court to curtail federal government jurisdiction over state residents. The California governor might declare the president an immoral agent who had no fear of God, as grandees in his state talked of Calexit, a secession from the president\u2019s United States. Or the California legislature might dream of subverting the new federal code curtailing state tax deductions in adolescent ways that would earn any taxpayer who tried such a con an IRS indictment.<\/p>\n

In fact, in just Trump\u2019s first year, we have seen all those efforts transpire as well.<\/p>\n

Control the Media, Control the Narrative<\/strong>
\nIn historian Edward Luttwak\u2019s semi-serious\u00a0Coup d\u2019\u00e9tat: A Practical Handbook<\/i><\/a>, control of the media is essential to abort a leader\u2019s term. Ideally, a resistance should hope to so influence or enlist popular television, radio, electronic media and print journalism to ensure that 90 percent of all coverage of the president would be classified as negative. Reporters would issue fake news reports, ranging from stories that the president deliberately phoned a foreign leader and threatened invasion, or in racist fashion had insulted minorities by removing the bust of a black civil rights icon from the West Wing. Some reporters would use on-air obscenity and scatology in expressing their hatred of the president, in efforts to normalize the once abnormal. The more theoretical would ponder the need to jettison disinterested reporting, claiming that the danger of Trump justified biased coverage. The deep-state media might brand as believable a fake-news, tell-all book about the secret and private lives of the Trump inner circle.<\/p>\n

All of that happened in 2017. And it\u2019s still happening.<\/p>\n

What better way to derail a presidency would there be than to allow a blank-check special counsel to search out alleged criminal activity on the part of the president? We have seen FBI Director James Comey confess that he deliberately leaked, likely illegally, confidential notes of a meeting with president Trump to the media, with the expressed intent of creating a \u201cscandal\u201d requiring a \u201cspecial counsel\u201d\u2014a gambit that worked to perfection when Comey\u2019s close friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed.<\/p>\n

To facilitate those efforts, the counsel would appoint to his team several attorneys who despised the very target of their investigation. In fact, many special investigators have given generously to the campaign of Trump\u2019s past political opponent Hillary Clinton and in at least one case had worked previously for the Clinton Foundation. Note that after nearly a year, the Mueller investigation has not indicted anyone on collusion charges and is unlikely to. Rather, in special counsel trademark, low-bar fashion, it is seeking to indict and convict suspects for not telling the whole truth during interrogations, or violating other statutes. As Peter Strzok\u2014once one of the FBI\u2019s lead investigators in the Mueller investigation\u2014concluded of the \u201ccollusion\u201d allegation to his mistress Lisa Page: there was \u201cno big there there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The FBI itself would have earlier trafficked in a fraudulent document funded by the Clinton campaign to \u201cprove\u201d Trump and his team were such dangers to the republic that they required surveillance under FISA court warrants and thus should surrender their constitutional rights of privacy. The ensuing surveillance, then, would be widely disseminated among Obama Administration officials, with the likely intent that names would be unmasked and leaked to the anti-Trump press\u2014again, in efforts to discredit, first, the Trump campaign, and later the Trump transition and presidency. A top official of the prior Department of Justice would personally consult the authors of the smear dossier in efforts to ensure that its contents would become useful and known.<\/p>\n

In fact, all that and more has already transpired.<\/p>\n

Subversion as Plain as Day<\/strong>
\nKey officials of the prior government would likewise weigh in constantly to oppose the subsequent Trump agenda and demonize their own president. Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Ben Rhodes would warn the country of the threats posed by their successor, but fail to disclose that they had previously requested to view FISA surveillance of the Trump team and to unmask the names of U.S. citizens which predictably soon appeared in media reports. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, according to the\u00a0Jerusalem<\/em>\u00a0Post<\/i>, assured a prominent Palestinian government leader,\u00a0\u201cthat he should stay strong in his spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to President Trump\u2019s demands.\u201d Kerry reportedly further assured the Palestinian representative that\u00a0the president may not be in White House for much longer and would likely not complete his first term. In sum, the former American secretary of state all but advised a foreign government that his own president is illegitimate and thus to be ignored or resisted in the remaining time before he is removed.<\/p>\n

If\u00a0any<\/i>\u00a0of these efforts were undertaken in 2009 to subvert the presidency of Barack Obama popular outrage might well have led to criminal indictments. If Hollywood grandees had promised to do to Barack Obama what they boast doing to Donald Trump, the entire industry would have been discredited\u2014or given the Obama investigatory treatment.<\/p>\n

Indeed, in many cases between 2009-2017, U.S. citizens the Obama Administration found noncompliant with its agendas became targets of the IRS for their political activity or monitored by the Justice Department. The latter included reporters from the Associated Press and James Rosen of Fox News. Many a journalist\u2019s sources were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. \u00a0In another case, a filmmaker had his parole revoked and was scapegoated and jailed to advance a false administration narrative about the death of four Americans in Benghazi. Still others were surveilled by using fraudulent documents to obtain FISA court orders.<\/p>\n

Everyone should be keen to distinguish conspiracies from conspiracy theories. The above are real events, not the tales told by the paranoid.<\/p>\n

In contrast, unhinged conspiracy theorists, for example, might obsess yet again over the machinations of multibillionaire and leftist globalist bogeyman George Soros, and float wild yarns that he would fly to Davos to assure the global elite that\u00a0he considers Trump \u201ca danger to the world,\u201d while reassuring them that the American president was \u201ca purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in 2020\u2014or even sooner.<\/i>\u201d . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Not all conspiracy theorists are unhinged paranoids\u2014even when they insist there was a loosely organized if not sometimes incoherent effort to destroy Donald Trump\u2019s candidacy beyond the bounds of \u201cnormal\u201d politics and later a renewed and unprecedented endeavor to abort his presidency. After all, did anyone believe that in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1156,1155,1154,1153,1152,1092,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Qh","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11763,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/with-mueller-hopes-gone-so-goes-progressive-unity\/","url_meta":{"origin":10929,"position":0},"title":"With Mueller Hopes Gone, So Goes Progressive Unity","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 4, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The Democratic Party has lots of radical new ideas, and lots of radical presidential candidates and politicos. 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The following day, on August 5th, the Egyptian newspaper\u00a0Al Masry Al Youm\u00a0reported that none other than Al Azhar \u2014 one of Sunni Islam's most authoritative institutions \u2014 agrees. 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On her current book tour, Hillary Clinton is still blaming the Russians (among others) for her unexpected defeat in last year\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "George W. Bush"","block_context":{"text":"George W. Bush","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/george-w-bush\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1457,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/conspiracy-theory-shuts-down-great-pyramid\/","url_meta":{"origin":10929,"position":3},"title":"Conspiracy Theory Shuts Down Great Pyramid","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 15, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Jihad Watch According to the\u00a0Associated Press, \"Egypt's antiquities authority closed the largest of the Giza pyramids Friday following rumors that groups would try to hold spiritual ceremonies on the site at 11:11 A.M. on Nov. 11, 2011\u2026. The closure follows a string of unconfirmed reports in local\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Egypt"","block_context":{"text":"Egypt","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/egypt\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11933,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-dream-team-loses-to-the-nobodies\/","url_meta":{"origin":10929,"position":4},"title":"The Dream Team Loses to the Nobodies","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 7, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review When figurehead Robert Mueller likely allowed Andrew Weissman to form his special counsel team to investigate so-called charges of Russian collusion involving Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign and the Kremlin, Washington elites became bouncy. The high-profile legal \u201cpowerhouse\u201d lineup immediately looked like a sure-thing\u2014an elite\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9608,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/9608\/","url_meta":{"origin":10929,"position":5},"title":"Comment from an Angry Reader:\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 15, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Comment from an Angry Reader: I\u2019m sure it was fun exercising your giant brain, but my surprise and I imagine most \u201cliberals\u201d was that enough Americans were willing to vote for what appears to be a sociopath. He disqualified himself for me when he openly espoused physical violence against those\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10929"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10929"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10931,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10929\/revisions\/10931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}