It's a Conspiracy!

Yeah, sure— these days what isn't a conspiracy?

But who’s pulling the Bratgirl’s strings…?

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Among the most annoying features of living in a country full of low-information voters is the prevalence of political conspiracy theories.

The cult of conspiracy theorizing has always been with us, of course. But since 2016 that cult has grown into a mania, with the most baroque fairy tales being fervently embraced across the political spectrum. And though in days gone by the most dedicated purveyors of conspiracy theories tended to be decidedly peculiar people, often exhibiting symptoms of mental illness, today there are countless people, otherwise quite normal, who believe that George W. Bush knew all about 9/11 in advance, that Donald Trump is a Russian mole, that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election, or that the recent attempt to assassinate Trump was faked.

Just recently on Substack Notes, I was chided for noting that the Democratic Party is “marbled with antisemitism,” as Van Jones put it. How could this be, my critic asked rhetorically, when the Democratic Party is controlled by the Jews?

It’s true enough that in certain cases, a colorable argument can be made for conspiracy. The Left’s campaign to undermine Trump’s presidency before and after he entered office did smack of subterranean plotting. But on the other hand, most of it happened right out in the open: The comrades and their media lapdogs made no secret of their desire to destroy him politically. Trump himself has spoken (all too frequently) of the “Russian collusion hoax,” and this is a more accurate characterization of the Left’s bad behavior than “Russian collusion conspiracy.”

More recently, there have been charges that the Democrats and much of the legacy media conspired to cover up the facts about President Joe Biden’s accelerating mental and physical decline. I myself have used the word conspiracy to describe this political scandal. But on reflection, no, the word doesn’t apply.

It’s not as if the American people were unaware that Biden was losing his marbles. Polling showed that a substantial majority of the American people—a majority of Democrats, even—believed that Biden was too old and too unfit to run for a second term. What the people around Biden, the wider Democratic Party, and much of the media were engaged in was a farcical effort to get us all to disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes and ears. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

When it became clear that with Biden at the top of the ticket, the party was headed for disaster in November 2024, the Dems decided that he had be given the boot. But how? It took some time for leading Democrats, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama prominent among them, to organize Biden’s defenestration. And then he was gone—just like that. This too has been called a conspiracy: a cabal of party bigwigs thwarting the expressed will of Democratic primary voters. But given Democrats’ near-universal relief at Biden’s replacement by Kamala Harris, the charge of conspiracy seems…dubious.

And now that Harris has closed her fist around the big brass ring, the Right has embraced a new conspiracy theory: The Bratgirl’s nothing more than a puppet, with Barack Obama, the sinister éminence grise of the Democratic Party, manipulating her strings. Once in office, she will do his bidding. Given Harris’ obvious unfitness for the presidency, this charge may be said to embody some plausibility. She’s such an empty pantsuit, after all—someone must be propping her up and programming the rhetorical pablum into her teleprompter. But this is to misunderstand the realities of American politics, and of the American presidency.

It may be true that the Obama faction of the Democratic Party is facilitating her ascent. But if Harris wins, the power inherent in the office of President of the United States will belong to her and her alone. Obama is certainly popular within the Democratic Party. His opinions are not to be disregarded. But no newly elected president—no, not even a dunce like Harris—would let a former president set her administration’s agenda. We’ve seen this before. George H.W. Bush sought to move beyond Reganism. There clearly was tension between Obama and Biden, based on the latter’s (accurate) feeling that he’d been ill-used: shunted aside in 2016, so that Hillary Clinton could become our first female president.

Gratitude ends at the Oval Office doorway. Assuming that Harris does become president, she’ll be the one giving the orders. If Barack Obama imagines otherwise, then he’s not as smart as he clearly thinks he is.

It may seem paradoxical that in this age of 24/7 saturation media, the belief in deep, dark conspiracy still thrives. Far more often than not, the truth does come out eventually. We now know, for example, that American government and the American public health establishment were grossly incompetent in their management of the COVID-19 pandemic—this despite a concerted campaign to cover up the facts. If that was a conspiracy, it was a dismal failure.

But the paradox is more apparent than real. If one thinks of conspiracy theorizing as client servicing, it all makes sense. Barack Obama and Victoria Nuland facilitated a coup that installed Volodymyr Zelenskyy as president of Ukraine; therefore, V. Putin was justified in his invasion of that country. The Left hates Donald Trump; therefore, he must be a Russian mole. Trump lost the 2020 election; therefore, the Dems stole it from him. In each case it will be seen that the conspiracy theory is a partisan exercise that targets and mobilizes some specific group.

And the fact that so many members of these groups are low-information voters makes it well worthwhile, politically, to exploit their various prejudices. If you’re opposed to capitalism, how easy it is to persuade you that the alarming size of your grocery bill is due to price gouging by the bloated plutocrats of Big Food!