There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there at the moment. There is the now old one of Vice President Biden having intervened in Ukraine to help his son. There is the theory pushed by Rudolph Guiliani, that there is a link between the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and Ukraine in that the real intervention into the Democratic Party servers originated there. And, of course, there is still the lingering suspicion that somehow Russia had the goods on Trump and so Trump acts like Putin’s lap dog. Added to this is the most recent, which is the accusation by Hillary Clinton that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset, the Democratic primary candidates running away from that. How are we to evaluate these claims? Or are we just supposed to go on the basis of who backs them? Republicans will back pro-Trump conspiracies and Democrats will back anti-Trump conspiricies and it is too soon to tell who will back the anti-Gabbard theory. Is there no way out of this mess so that a rational person can decide on his or her own who to believe? I believe there is.
We have been through this before for those of us who are old enough to remember what it was like after JFK was assassinated. That was too important an event for it to have resulted from no significant cause, just from a deranged gunman. There were any number of conspiracy theories out there that credited, if that is the term, Texas millionaires, the Cubans, the Mafia, or even Lyndon Johnson, with having been responsible for the JFK assassination. I won’t bore you with the details, even if I could remember them, and I could chalk it all up to the grief over the assasination, people looking to explain why bad things happened to supposedly good people. One leader of the conspiracy theory folks was Jim Garrison, at the time the District Attorney in New Orleans. He was holding press conferences and interviewing witnesses who claimed knowledge of what had really occurred. I could never make much sense of what he said, but his views caught on with a number of people, including Oliver Stone, who made a movie based on Garrison’s speculations and evidence.
I do remember, though, that one night Johnny Carson had Garrison on his show as a guest who was allowed to expound for quite some time on his theories, “The Tonight Show” not quite the place where you would think there would be occasion to talk about such weighty matters. But Carson had done this before. Carson had been something of a magician himself in his early career and so he provided a platform on which Uri Geller, a magician, could perform his trick of bending spoons, but Carson had arranged the stage so that the usual means magicians use to allow their illusions to proceed were not present, and then gave Geller plenty of time to do his magic, which did not happen, and Carson then graciously accepted Geller’s excuse that sometimes magic didn’t work. Carson did the same thing with Garrison. He had been carefully briefed on Garrison’s theories and had a lot of good questions to ask him, but the main thing he did was provide Garrison with enough time to lay out a coherent story, which Garrison could not do, and that was the end of that as far as I and many others were concerned. Carson had served the public interest.
I suggest that we apply the Jim Garrison Standard (really, the Johnny Carson Standard) to the current conspiracy theories. How well do they stand up if their propounders are given the chance to lay out their cases in a logical manner, which means provide a clean and coherent narrative about what each of them think happened? I have not heard a clear cut pronouncement of any one of the conspiracies that Trump and his allies are evoking. Joe Biden is supposed to have used his influence to assist his son Hunter who was an officer of a Ukranian oil company. How this was done is never made clear. We know that Biden, voicing the opinions of the entire Western alliance, was calling for the ouster of the then chief prosecutor, but that was because he was not fighting corruption sufficiently and so not looking into whatever Hunter Biden might have been involved in. So Biden was not serving his family interests. Rudy Guiliani says there is something in Ukraine having something to do with the twenty thousand or more documents stored on Hill;ary Clinton’s server and so Ukraine rather than Russia may have been responsible for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. But what on Hillary’s server is all that important and why would Ukraine want to interfere in the 2016 election? You at least have to spell out your charge in a conspiracy theory even if you don’t at the moment have the facts to back it up. Barbara Garson at least had a motive available, back in the Sixties, for thinking LBJ was in on the plot to assassinate JFK. He wanted to be President.
Hillary Clinton has a lot of experience in the conspiracy wars. Remember that she thought there was a vast right wing conspiracy against her husband. She was wrong only in thinking that the conspiracy was vast. It consisted of a few people, backed by right wing money, that suggested that Vince Foster was murdered, that there was anything to Whitewater, that she had misbehaved when serving as a partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. The conspiritors finally hit paydirt when Linda Tripp passed on word to Kenneth Starr that Bill was involved with Monica, Monica too stupid or willful to keep her mouth shut. So Hillary is plausibly suspicious of plots against her interests. Those suspicions were realized in 2016 when the Russians were able to aim social media plants at voters in key areas so as to disabuse them from voting for Hillary, either by souring Blacks on voting at all, or by sowing hatred against Hillary. It wouldn’t take that much to settle a close race. Jill Stein is described by Hillary as a Russian asset because she took up enough votes to make a difference in the defeat of Hillary. An asset is not an agent, which is someone who knowingly takes orders from a foreign power. Rather, an asset is someone who has been cultivated so that on their own they will do what is in a foreign power’s interests. Trump may be a Russian asset without being an Russian agent because Putin has something on him that leads Trump to do what he does, though Mueller never got to the bottom of the story because he did not look into Trump’s tax returns or what was going on with loans from Deutsche Bank for reasons that I do not follow, those inquiries certainly relevant to his investigation of Russian meddling.
Now turn to Tulsi Gabbard. She is popular in white nationalist circles, supports the Putin position on Syria, and sounds Trump-like in saying the Democratic primaries are rigged. So she may indeed be someone setting out to be a third party candidate and so perform the Jill Stein role in the 2020 election, and Hillary may have adroitly put an end to that, forcing Gabbard to say she wouldn’t be a third party candidate, even if Gabbard might try to get out of that pledge. The trouble is that Hillary hasn’t provided evidence to support what is nonetheless a plausible story. Evidence would consist of Gabbard caught at a dinner with Putin or Putin operatives, or perhaps memos or emails which show her motives. As of now, there is no case, but we will have to wait for events to unfold.
Conspiracy theories are a bad way to understand the nature of American political life. They make political life consist of what goes on under the covers rather than in broad daylight. I trust more to the overt processes of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive agencies, and the electoral process than to the hugger mugger of unknown people stabbing one another in the back. To be overt is to be legitimate. I never did trust the FBI in the days of J. Edgar Hoover or the CIA in the days before and those that followed Watergate. Those secret agencies are not to be trusted, even if for a brief moment which went on for two years Liberals trusted that Mueller, the former FBI Director, would get to the bottom of things. I remember at the time of the Kennedy Assassination becoming so exasperated with all the plots and counterplots that I claimed I didn’t care whether the CIA had been involved in his assassination because the significance was not in who did it but what were its consequences. That was an overstatement because that corrupted a CIA would indeed be a threat to the Republic. But my point was well taken in that assassinations have consequences, as did the assassination of Rabin for the Palestine-Israel peace process, whether his assassin had been a left or right winger, an Israeli or a Palestinean. So stick to the obvious. The 2020 election will be determined by whether people are so disillusioned or frightened by Trump that they want to get rid of him even if the Democrats put up less than a perfect candidate or whether they are willing to push along with a President whose main instinct is to sense conspiracy everywhere, including the ones of his own devising.