The Left’s
Great Russian Conspiracy Theory
By Brendan
O'Neill
March 08,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Spectator"
-
The chattering
classes have officially lost it. On both sides
of the Atlantic. Of course they’d been teetering
on the cliff edge of sanity for a while,
following the bruising of their beloved EU by
17m angry Brits and Hillary’s loss to that
orange muppet they thought no one except
rednecks would vote for. But now they’ve gone
over. They’re falling fast. They’re speeding
away from the world of logic into a cesspit of
conspiracy and fear. It’s tragic. Or hilarious.
One or the other.
Exhibit A: this week’s New Yorker.
It’s mad. It captures wonderfully how the
liberal-left has come to be polluted by the
paranoid style of McCarthyist thinking since
Trump’s victory. It’s a New Yorker for
a future, dystopian America that’s been captured
by the Evil Empire. The
mag’s masthead is in Cyrillic
and its famous dandy mascot — Eustace Tilley —
has morphed into Putin. It’s now
‘Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley’.
Inside the mag it’s even more feverish. A
13,000-word report, ‘Trump, Putin and the New
Cold War’, is accompanied by a drawing of a
deep-red, UFO-style Kremlin
hovering over the White House
and firing lasers into it. It’s CGI Hollywood
meets House Un-American Activities in an orgy of
liberal dread over Ruskies ruining the nation.
It used to be right-wingers who fretted over
Russians and Reds and pinkos colonising
Westerners’ lives and minds. Now it’s lefties.
Trump is regularly called
‘Putin’s puppet’.
He’s an
‘unwitting agent’ of Moscow,
we’re told. The New York Times even
called him
‘The Siberian Candidate’,
echoing the title of the 1962 thriller The
Manchurian Candidate, in which an American is
brainwashed by Korean Communists to become an
assassin. That’s how some seriously view Trump:
a Putin-moulded footsoldier of Russian interests
who’ll assassinate the American way of life, if
not American citizens. I mean, Vanity Fair
actually asks: ‘Is
Trump a Manchurian Candidate?’ These people need
a lie down. You have to get
deep into the
New Yorker’s prolix
report to discover that US officials
still haven’t provided evidence for their claim
that Putin ordered the hacking of Democrat
emails in order to hurry Trump to power: ‘The
declassified report [on Putin’s meddling]
provides more assertion than evidence.’
But that hasn’t stopped the left McCarthyists,
these Reds on the Web fearmongers, from buying
into all kinds of claptrap about Putin putting
Trump in the White House. In December, a
YouGov survey of
Democratic voters found that 50 percent of them
think ‘Russia tampered with vote tallies to help
Trump’. That is, White House-eyeing Putinites
actually meddled with voting machines or ballot
counts. There’s no evidence whatever for this.
In
YouGov’s words, it’s
an ‘election day conspiracy theory’. A kind of
delirium is spreading.
The spectre of Putinite meddling is now
blamed for everything that doesn’t go the
liberal elite’s way. Ben Bradshaw said it is
‘highly probable’
Russia interfered in the EU referendum. Here,
‘highly probable’ is code for ‘I don’t have a
solitary shred of evidence for this but I feel
it in my waters’. Even the concern over ‘fake
news’, which is a problem, is being bent to this
broader, swirling fear of malevolent foreigners
waging war on our apparently pristine politics
and media. It always uses the lingo of invasion.
Meet ‘the big data billionaire waging war on
mainstream media,’ said
a Guardian report
at the weekend, about a rich bloke who’s setting
up various news websites.
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
|
The Guardian piece talks about the
‘war of the bots’, including ‘Russian bots’ (‘organised
by who?’,
it asks, menacingly).
Apparently these ‘automated bots’ on Twitter and
other social-media sites — a bot being a
computer programme designed to say the same
stuff over and over — are pumping out political
messages and hashtags that have helped to
‘change the conversation’ and boost support for
the likes of Trump and Brexit. What’s really
being said here is that my mind, your mind and
the mind of anyone who doesn’t love the EU or
think Hillary would have made a good president
have been invaded by Russian bots — ‘organised
by who?’ You know who! — and made to believe
certain things. Richard Dawkins summed it up in
a tweet about the Guardian
piece: ‘Terrifying. Sinister
social-media bots read minds & manipulate votes.
Explains mystery of Trump & Brexit.’
Dear, dear me. What has become of these
people? They really believe Putin made Brexit
happen? That Ruskies tampered with vote counts
in the US? That Russian computer bots ‘read
minds’? They’ve lost it. They’ve gone. The very
people who for years talked about the problem of
conspiracy theories have become the keenest
spreaders of conspiracy theories. The people who
spent the past few months banging on about the
‘post-truth’ politics of Brexit and Trump have
shown they don’t have the first clue what truth
is. The people who posed as champions of logic
have revealed themselves as peddlers of
paranoia.
In his seminal 1964 essay
‘The Paranoid Style in American
Politics’, written in the aftermath
of McCarthyism, Richard Hofstadter nailed the
two elements of the fearful, fact-lite political
mind: first, the obsession with ‘patterns’ of
behaviour that might point to a conspiracy; and
second, the conviction that the entire political
order is under threat from some external force.
He noted that McCarthy often talked about the
‘baffling pattern’ of certain politicians’
antics, which seemed to compliment, at least,
‘the wellbeing of the Kremlin’. And he described
how political paranoiacs always think
civilisation itself is being menaced: ‘The
paranoid spokesman traffics in the birth and
death of whole worlds, whole political orders.’
This beautifully describes the situation
today. Those opposed to the current political
order now scrabble about for evidence of Putin-friendly
‘patterns’ of behaviour among Trumpites, tying
together every fleeting phone call or dinner
engagement into proof that the White House is
primarily concerned with the ‘wellbeing of the
Kremlin’. And they, too, wring their hands over
the end of America or the end of Europe — ‘the
death of whole worlds’, the end of everything.
They have vacated the world of reason. They’re
in the land of the paranoid now, and they don’t
even know it.
