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 election would immediately dub itself the “Resistanceâ€â€”channeling the World War II nomenclature of the guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupation of France? Or that the defeated candidate Hillary Clinton would formally embrace the imagery of liberationist patriots fighting a Nazi-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 election, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,†voting machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were null and void.
