From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies
Jan 30, 2018 08:54:26 #
Has Nikita Khrushchev's famous 1960 proclamation, "the U.S. would be defeated without a shot being fired" almost come to fruition?
From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies
By Victor Davis Hanson| January 29, 2018
Not all conspiracy theorists are unhinged paranoids—even when they
insist there was a loosely organized if not sometimes incoherent
effort to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy beyond the bounds of
“normal” politics and later a renewed and unprecedented endeavor to
abort his presidency.
After all, did anyone believe that in the year 2017 the losing side in
an American e******n would immediately dub itself the
“Resistance”—channeling the World War II nomenclature of the guerrilla
campaign against the N**i occupation of France? Or that the defeated
candidate Hillary Clinton would formally embrace the imagery of
liberationist patriots fighting a N**i-like Trump’s occupation of the
United States?
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
e******n, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,”
v****g machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were
null and void.
The effort might embrace trying to subvert the Constitution by
pressuring state e*****rs not to honor their constitutionally defined
responsibilities to v**e in accordance with the popular v**e in their
respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce
articles of impeachment in the House.
A resistance might sue under the 25th Amendment to find the president
non compos mentis, 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—or to file suits with
cherry-picked liberal judges to delay and stop the president’s
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.
In fact, in just Trump’s first year we have seen all these things and more.
Pop Culture Provocations
Any “resistance” 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 k*****g 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 k**l 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.
We might also see and hear ad nauseam from actors and other
celebrities expressing desires to beat him to a pulp, or hang him, or
shoot him—all 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 “take a bullet” 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.
All that, too, t***spired in Trump’s first year.
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’s administration on everything
from immigration to environmental policy—such 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’s 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.
In fact, in just Trump’s first year, we have seen all those efforts
t***spire as well.
Control the Media, Control the Narrative
In historian Edward Luttwak’s semi-serious C**p d’état: A Practical
Handbook, control of the media is essential to abort a leader’s 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 f**e news reports, ranging from
stories that the president deliberately phoned a foreign leader and
threatened invasion, or in r****t 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
a******l. 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
f**e-news, tell-all book about the secret and private lives of the
Trump inner circle.
All of that happened in 2017. And it’s still happening.
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 “scandal” requiring a “special
counsel”—a gambit that worked to perfection when Comey’s close friend,
former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed.
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’s 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 t***h during
interrogations, or violating other statutes. As Peter Strzok—once one
of the FBI’s lead investigators in the Mueller investigation—concluded
of the “collusion” allegation to his mistress Lisa Page: there was “no
big there there.”
The FBI itself would have earlier trafficked in a fraudulent document
funded by the Clinton campaign to “prove” 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—again, in efforts to discredit, first, the Trump campaign, and
later the Trump t***sition 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.
In fact, all that and more has already t***spired.
Subversion as Plain as Day
Key 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 Jerusalem Post, assured a prominent
Palestinian government leader, “that he should stay strong in his
spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to
President Trump’s demands.” Kerry reportedly further assured the
Palestinian representative that the 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.
If any of 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—or given the Obama investigatory
treatment.
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’s sources were
prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. In 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 B******i. Still others were surveilled by using
fraudulent documents to obtain FISA court orders.
Everyone should be keen to distinguish conspiracies from conspiracy
theories. The above are real events, not the tales told by the
paranoid.
In contrast, unhinged conspiracy theorists, for example, might obsess
yet again over the machinations of multibillionaire and l*****t
g*******t bogeyman George Soros, and float wild yarns that he would
fly to Davos to assure the global elite that he considers Trump “a
danger to the world,” while reassuring them that the American
president was “a purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in
2020—or even sooner.” . . .
From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies
By Victor Davis Hanson| January 29, 2018
Not all conspiracy theorists are unhinged paranoids—even when they
insist there was a loosely organized if not sometimes incoherent
effort to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy beyond the bounds of
“normal” politics and later a renewed and unprecedented endeavor to
abort his presidency.
After all, did anyone believe that in the year 2017 the losing side in
an American e******n would immediately dub itself the
“Resistance”—channeling the World War II nomenclature of the guerrilla
campaign against the N**i occupation of France? Or that the defeated
candidate Hillary Clinton would formally embrace the imagery of
liberationist patriots fighting a N**i-like Trump’s occupation of the
United States?
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
e******n, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,”
v****g machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were
null and void.
The effort might embrace trying to subvert the Constitution by
pressuring state e*****rs not to honor their constitutionally defined
responsibilities to v**e in accordance with the popular v**e in their
respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce
articles of impeachment in the House.
A resistance might sue under the 25th Amendment to find the president
non compos mentis, 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—or to file suits with
cherry-picked liberal judges to delay and stop the president’s
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.
In fact, in just Trump’s first year we have seen all these things and more.
Pop Culture Provocations
Any “resistance” 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 k*****g 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 k**l 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.
We might also see and hear ad nauseam from actors and other
celebrities expressing desires to beat him to a pulp, or hang him, or
shoot him—all 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 “take a bullet” 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.
All that, too, t***spired in Trump’s first year.
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’s administration on everything
from immigration to environmental policy—such 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’s 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.
In fact, in just Trump’s first year, we have seen all those efforts
t***spire as well.
Control the Media, Control the Narrative
In historian Edward Luttwak’s semi-serious C**p d’état: A Practical
Handbook, control of the media is essential to abort a leader’s 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 f**e news reports, ranging from
stories that the president deliberately phoned a foreign leader and
threatened invasion, or in r****t 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
a******l. 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
f**e-news, tell-all book about the secret and private lives of the
Trump inner circle.
All of that happened in 2017. And it’s still happening.
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 “scandal” requiring a “special
counsel”—a gambit that worked to perfection when Comey’s close friend,
former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed.
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’s 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 t***h during
interrogations, or violating other statutes. As Peter Strzok—once one
of the FBI’s lead investigators in the Mueller investigation—concluded
of the “collusion” allegation to his mistress Lisa Page: there was “no
big there there.”
The FBI itself would have earlier trafficked in a fraudulent document
funded by the Clinton campaign to “prove” 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—again, in efforts to discredit, first, the Trump campaign, and
later the Trump t***sition 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.
In fact, all that and more has already t***spired.
Subversion as Plain as Day
Key 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 Jerusalem Post, assured a prominent
Palestinian government leader, “that he should stay strong in his
spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to
President Trump’s demands.” Kerry reportedly further assured the
Palestinian representative that the 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.
If any of 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—or given the Obama investigatory
treatment.
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’s sources were
prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. In 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 B******i. Still others were surveilled by using
fraudulent documents to obtain FISA court orders.
Everyone should be keen to distinguish conspiracies from conspiracy
theories. The above are real events, not the tales told by the
paranoid.
In contrast, unhinged conspiracy theorists, for example, might obsess
yet again over the machinations of multibillionaire and l*****t
g*******t bogeyman George Soros, and float wild yarns that he would
fly to Davos to assure the global elite that he considers Trump “a
danger to the world,” while reassuring them that the American
president was “a purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in
2020—or even sooner.” . . .
Jan 30, 2018 09:18:36 #
DIRTY HARRY
Loc: Hartland, Michigan
And how was the Conservative's response to the Obama Presidency any different? Eight solid years of interference and now undoing everything that was done under that administration. These actions are unprecedented in the history of our Nation... of course, we never had a Black President before either.
Jan 30, 2018 09:19:21 #
What is really problematic is that so many people just do not see that these things are happening. There is really a "dark state" in the government and it is out to turn America into a true socialist state.
Jan 30, 2018 09:25:30 #
Jan 30, 2018 11:42:05 #
ricardo7
Loc: Washington, DC - Santiago, Chile
If you read this in its entirety you have too much free time on your hands.
Jan 30, 2018 12:03:18 #
At 75 I got nothing better to do, I have plenty of time.
ricardo7 wrote:
If you read this in its entirety you have too much free time on your hands.
Jan 30, 2018 12:44:56 #
ebbote wrote:
At 75 I got nothing better to do, I have plenty of time.
That's why older people are smart, they take time to read!
Jan 30, 2018 13:12:20 #
Thank you Snap.
Sirsnapalot wrote:
That's why older people are smart, they take time to read!
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