“Hurr, Durr, It’s A Conspiracy Theory!”

Caitlin Johnstone
5 min readNov 3, 2017

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An excerpt from Donna Brazile’s upcoming book has been published in Politico, in which the corrupt weasel who’s been sleazing her way up the DC political ladder since the Dukakis campaign flips on Hillary Clinton and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to make herself look like a virtuous hero. The first rat to bail from a sinking ship.

Smart publishing companies will all be soliciting Wasserman Schultz, John Podesta, David Brock and Robby Mook for book deals about now, because the backstabbing will be spectacular.

Brazile’s melodramatic “oh I was so grief stricken” admission that Clinton had taken over DNC operations long before becoming the party nominee is just the latest in a long series of revelations confirming things Berners have been saying for over a year now while being dismissed as conspiracy theorists by Democratic party loyalists.

This is coming straight off the back of Twitter’s admission that it hid half of all #DNCLeaks mentions in the leadup to the general election despite the fact that only two percent were considered to have come from suspicious accounts. As The Young Turks’ Michael Tracey rightly notes, people who pointed out at the time that tweets with this hashtag seemed to be hidden from view by Twitter admin “were called conspiracy freaks”. The American people were trying to communicate with each other about a very real thing that had been revealed about their democratic process, and Twitter actively worked to prevent them from doing so.

This thread goes all the way back. The thing Twitter was keeping people from discussing was the undeniable revelation in the DNC emails that the Democratic National Committee had violated the Impartiality Clause of their Charter when the DNC Chairwoman permitted a clear us-vs-them culture in the Committee, as revealed by the content of their communications. Berners were called conspiracy theorists again and again for claiming that this bias was happening, and then it was proven to have happened.

After that came the Podesta emails, proving that then-Vice Chair Brazile had served as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passed multiple debate questions in advance to Hillary Clinton, showing Clinton campaign staffers conspiring with the DNC to schedule debates and primaries in a way that benefitted Clinton, and showing blatant collusion between the Clinton campaign and the supposedly neutral news media to get Hillary into the White House. Again, any suggestion that Hillary hadn’t won the nomination fair and square got you dismissed by Clintonists as a daffy conspiracy theorist, but it was proven to be a true and legitimate grievance.

In revelation after revelation, people’s suspicions that their will was being actively subverted by forces beyond their control have been confirmed as new revelations come to light. Mainstream official narratives repeated over and over again as fact in confident-sounding voices by professional pundits are proving less reliable in interpreting what’s going on in the world than our own independent research and perspectives. You hear what they want you to hear, and what they want you to hear is a narrative that bolsters the agendas of the plutocracy whose neoliberal neoconservative agendas the two establishment parties exist to promote.

Did you know that the majority of Democrats now have a favorable opinion of George W Bush? Nothing has changed since he was considered the scourge of the earth — the million Iraqis he butchered aren’t any less dead, the Orwellian surveillance program he helped institute in the wake of 9/11 hasn’t gotten any less Orwellian, the crony capitalist programs he bolstered haven’t gotten any less pernicious. The only thing that has changed is the narrative surrounding him. Democrats are being told that neocons are good because they oppose Trump, so they love George W Bush now.

This is a perfect illustration of how the narratives people are fed by the mainstream media have nothing to do with facts or reality; Bush didn’t get any better, Democrats were simply manipulated into liking him now. If the establishment pundits and presstitutes play their cards right they could get a workable majority of Americans to approve or disapprove of pretty much anyone. If it were in the establishment’s interests the plutocrats who own the media could have had Rachel Maddow and Chris Cuomo telling Americans every night that John Podesta was involved in a pedophile ring associated with a James Alefantis pizza parlor, and they’d be swallowing it just like they’re swallowing the evidence-free Russia conspiracy theories now. It really is that arbitrary.

What this all proves, dear reader, is that the mainstream consensus reality is considerably less reliable than your own personal assessment of things. Don’t listen to the confident-sounding assertions of pundits and politicians. Don’t believe what you are told by CNN and the New York Times. Don’t believe me, either. Trust your own inner sense-maker, because the people whose job it is to tell you what’s going on are proven liars and manipulators. You’re more likely to get close to the truth by stabbing for it in the darkness at random than you are by listening to people who have proven time and time again that their only job is to lie to you while selling your attention to advertisers. Your own intuition and information-gathering skills are infinitely more reliable instruments of truth finding, no matter how rusty they are.

Trust in your own sense of what’s happening, and speak your truth unapologetically. Don’t let them shut you down with scoffing and gibberish about conspiracy theory. That is not a legitimate tactic anymore, because the so-called conspiracy theories keep proving true. As far as you’re concerned, your assessment of reality is far more worthy and relevant than anyone else’s.

The people who speak consensus narratives in authoritative voices are not more clued-in than you are. Don’t let them silence you. Don’t let anyone silence you. Your voice is the most essential voice in your world, and your perspective is the most important. Speak your truth wherever you can speak it. Say it loud, say it like you mean it, and say it like you’re right, because you are.

The oppression machine is crumbling, but it’ll fall a whole lot faster if we all plant our feet and scream our truth.

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