by Victor Davis Hanson
Since 2016, there has been a clear pattern to left-wing conspiracies — beyond the obvious fact that they traffic in lies, stereotypes, and paranoia to serve precise political agendas.
We now know that the conspiracy to cook up the Russian-collusion hoax — Donald Trump allegedly conniving with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 vote — was perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Its funding was hidden by the Democratic National Committee, the law firm Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS.
The Russian “disinformation” laptop hoax — the notion that the same Russians four years later created a fake Hunter Biden laptop to smear the Biden family on the eve of the first 2020 debate — was jumpstarted by the Biden campaign’s then-chief foreign policy advisor, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
There was never much evidence that a wayward bat or pangolin in a meat market birthed the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the efforts of China, Western and international health officials, and Dr. Fauci’s health bureaucrats to spread that lie.
The January 6th riot was certainly wrong and buffoonish. But the idea that it was an insurrection aiming to violently overthrow the U.S. government was also a left-wing myth fueled by the Democratic House leadership and the media.
All these schemes have their commonalities:
1) They are aimed at achieving political objectives.
False claims of Russian collusion likely drained millions of votes from the 2016 Trump candidacy.
A later conservative poll found that Russian disinformation may have swung enough voters to ensure a 2020 Trump loss. It certainly saved Joe Biden in the first debate when he faced the American people and flat-out lied about the laptop, quoting “experts” that his own team had rounded up to legitimize his obvious untruths.
The last thing the global health community wanted was to confront China about its culpability for killing millions worldwide. And what the Fauci health conglomerate most feared was the airing of the truth that U.S. “scientists” had helped fund and enhance quite-dangerous, understandably-outlawed, viral gain-of-function research at a Chinese lab soon to be run by the People’s Liberation Army. These functionaries’ clear hatred of President Trump was a subtext to their distortions and lies that only a complete shut-down of the U.S. economy could save America from millions of unnecessary deaths. In other words, for well over two years, anyone who dared suggest a laboratory origin for COVID was pilloried, while the accusers privately knew that it was likely true and that they were complicit.
The January 6th myth — that conservatives were violent insurrectionaries — led to the greatest militarization of Washington, DC, since the Civil War. Barbed wire and fencing around all the major tourist spots helped advance the myth of a besieged nation that Joe Biden, that old moderate, would heal from the existential threats birthed by the soon-to-be-impeached-twice Donald Trump.
2) These conspiracies involved the most powerful U.S. government agencies.
James Comey’s FBI altered a FISA warrant. Comey himself misled the president of the United States, lying that the latter was not the target of an FBI investigation while leaking confidential, if not classified, documents. The FBI hired foreign national Christopher Steele to compile dirt on a presidential candidate. The FBI’s Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, and James Baker were knee-deep in efforts to leak the dossier and other disinformation to ensure Trump was not elected. The CIA’s John Brennan and the Department of Justice’s Loretta Lynch were well aware of their own agencies’ involvement in fueling the slander.
Fifty-one former “intelligence authorities” brazenly lied in 2020 when they signed a letter claiming that the Biden laptop — then in the possession of the FBI, which knew of its authenticity — had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. Grandee signatories like James Clapper, John Brennan, Michael Hayden, and Leon Panetta had no evidence that the laptop had anything to do with the Russians. Lots of contacts in the FBI confirmed that it did not. Yet they signed their names and, in doing so, ruined their former agencies’ credibility, all for the short-term agenda of getting Joe Biden elected.
From 2020 to 2023, at the height of the pandemic, the main players in the U.S. health apparat — the NIH, the CDC, and the NIAID — all created narratives that were obvious lies, or at least had no evidence to sustain them. There was never clear-cut evidence for the bat/pangolin theory of COVID genesis, for state-imposed mass masking and social distancing as scientifically-proven effective tools to control the pandemic, for the assurance that a national quarantine would do far less damage than the virus, and for the idea that experimental mRNA coronavirus vaccinations and their serial boosters in the long term would prevent the vaccinated from being either infected or infectious.
The reaction to the January 6th riot was likely politicized by the Speaker of the House, the Pentagon and the Capitol Police on the theory that the small number of violent rioters, if left to run amok and then severely punished after show trials in federal courts, would do lasting damage to the conservative cause and Donald Trump in particular.
3) The media conspired with government agencies to spread the hoaxes.
On the eve of the 2016 election and in its aftermath, Buzzfeed, CNN, the Washington Post and other news outlets all rushed to leak the most salacious made-up smears from the Steele dossier, fed to them by the FBI and other government officials. Their unsourced yellow journalism soon ensured the ill-fated Mueller investigation that was designed, quite successfully, to derail or slow the early Trump administration agenda.
In 2020, top members of the FBI partnered with social media companies, especially Twitter and Facebook, to censor news that contradicted the yarn that the Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
While Anthony Fauci and his team, along with officials at the CDC and NIH, were furiously corresponding to tamp down any suggestion of a lab-leak origin for COVID or that their own policies were scientifically unproven, the media was fed their heroic stories and spread them as gospel.
As a result, the nation was assured that Fauci et al. stood for “science,” and their skeptics were little more than ultra-MAGA, Trumpist yahoos. The old time-tested, safe, and life-saving Ivermectin, well aside from the debate over its actual efficacy in treating COVID, was rendered a dangerous “horse dewormer,” while the mRNA vaccines were deemed perfectly safe for young, healthy men, despite being in little danger from COVID but susceptible to vaccination-caused myocarditis.
So effective were our bureaucrats in using the media in their propaganda that ancient canons of medical science — viruses can indeed provide valuable natural immunity; vaccines are of only temporary efficacy against the quickly-mutating coronaviruses; complete nationwide quarantines would lead to untenable social, economic, and political damage; viral pandemics are unlikely to be of direct animal origin if the virus has never been observed in an animal prior to human infections, etc. — were often mocked as self-interested pseudoscience.
The media ensured that reports of numerous FBI informants present on January 6 were suppressed. They also smothered evidence that the loaded January 6th congressional committee was manipulating evidence, suppressing testimonies, and deliberately not interviewing inconvenient witnesses.
Instead, the media ran with wild lies of violent and often-armed “insurrectionists” who had long planned a systematic takeover and who had succeeded in killing “five law enforcement officers” (only one, Brian Sicknick, died — a day later on January 7, from natural causes). The media smeared the name and reputation of the unarmed Ashli Babbitt, killed while going through a broken window into the Capitol, and then hid the name of the Capitol Police officer who had lethally shot her.
4) Few, if any, in the media or the government were ever punished for their conspiracies to create and spread such complete fabrications.
Few at CNN who spread the Russian collusion lie were ever permanently punished. No Pulitzer Prizes for such false coverage were revoked. James Comey (claiming amnesia 245 times while under congressional oath), James Clapper (previously lying under congressional oath), John Brennan (previously lying twice while under congressional oath), and Andrew McCabe (lying repeatedly to federal investigators) were never formally charged — unlike those who went to jail after falsely being indicted for collusion. All instead used their liberal notoriety to land lucrative network consultantships or book deals — and to persist in the Russian collusion hoax.
None of the 51 intelligence authorities who lied to the nation and thereby helped warp an election have ever retracted their statements, much less apologized. All knew then, and are currently without a doubt after the conviction of Hunter Biden, that his laptop and contents were not just authentic but proven to be so by the FBI. Barring apologies, the assumption remains that they believe their misinformation and disinformation led to the election of Joe Biden and, thus, that their noble ends were properly justified by any means necessary.
Dr. Francis Collins, Dr. Fauci and his lieutenants, Peter Daszak and a string of others have never been formally disciplined for their efforts to spread misinformation that likely contributed to tens of thousands of deaths from the unwarranted national lockdowns. Even to this day, Dr. Fauci insists U.S. funding for Wuhan had nothing to do with gain-of-function research and still does not concede that it is almost certain that the virus originated in the lab.
* * *
From the above, we can assume that conspiracies successfully achieve left-wing goals. The hoaxes are used by bureaucracies against conservatives and Republican candidates. They are spread like wildfire by a corrupt media and, when exposed and refuted, rarely lead to legal culpability or disgrace rather than publicity-driven lucrative post-scandal employment.
One chief common trait is projection. By accusing others of high crimes and misdemeanors, the conspirators become exempt from criminal charges.
Hillary Clinton and her campaign were never charged with illegally hiring a foreign national to draw on Russian sources to smear their 2016 campaign opponent.
The Biden campaign was never held accountable for conspiring to organize so-called retired intelligence experts to formally lie to the American people to influence an election.
High officials of the U.S. government lied under oath with impunity about their role in funding gain-of-function research after conspiring to circumvent U.S. law prohibiting such research.
U.S. elected and bureaucratic officials deliberately suppressed the use of law enforcement on January 6 despite the ensuing lax security, warped a U.S. House committee investigation, and used the Washington D.C. court system to convict hundreds for dubious crimes in order to use their convictions and prison terms for political agendas.
No wonder, then, that we should expect some sort of similar hoax to arise before the 2024 election. Do not be surprised when told of a “secret” Trump plan uncovered to round up critics in 2025 and send them to “camps,” or lurid revelations about “evidence” that Trump is in worse physical and mental shape than is a debilitated Biden, or some fantastic MAGA plot to implement “voter suppression,” or allegations that the Trump campaign’s “dark money” involves “collusion,” “disinformation,” and “sinister foreign actors.”
When we hear such things in the months to come, remember that these mythologies are usually a warning: what the left is alleging is, quite often, precisely what the left is already doing.
– – –
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
