Rachel Alexander — no slouch in manufacturing and promoting right-wing conspiracy theories — wants you to believe that liberals have more of them. She began her Oct. 9 WorldNetDaily column this way:
The left is always gaslighting and claiming that the beliefs of those on the right are conspiracy theories, in large part because the left commits a lot of crimes that the right has been unable to solve. The reality is the left is full of all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories. They’re able to keep them going and sounding legitimate by controlling Wikipedia entries and using their bogus fact-checking sites to “confirm” the crazy.
Hillary Clinton first popularized the phrase “vast, right-wing conspiracy” in 1998, claiming there were massive coordinated attacks against her husband, Bill, after he began running for president. Nothing much came of her accusation, and other than being ridiculed on the right for a while, the phrase has largely been forgotten. The MSM gave her a free pass and still does to this day, even though it should be known wide and far that she was the first really big left-wing conspiracy theorist of the modern era.
But that wasn’t a conspiracy theory. As Karen Tumulty wrote at the Washington Post: “Hillary Clinton had it right when she made her famous declaration that a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ was out to get her and her husband. The opposition was and is passionate. It is well financed. It sees dark — sometimes preposterous — motives in nearly everything the Clintons do.”
Alexander then clung to her right-wing conspiracy theories by pretending that they aren’t:
Some of their conspiracy theories they turn around and pretend are ours. January 6th is a classic example. They claimed that we made up the fact that the protest at the U.S. Capitol was infiltrated by leftist plants and feds, when plenty of evidence has come out since showing that was correct. The real conspiracy theory is claiming that protesters went to the U.S. Capitol to overthrow the government in an insurrection. Only due to complicit judges twisting the trials against the defendants and prosecutors scaring them into plea agreements has the left been able to pretend this was true.
But the links Alexander supplied do not prove her contention that rioters were egged on by “leftist plants and feds.” It’s not difficult to get a plea deal out of a defendant when their is copious video documentation of his offenses. She continued:
The issue of election fraud also has been turned around. Everyone has seen the compilations going around from 2016 showing top Democratic leaders, including Hillary Clinton herself, saying the presidential election was stolen. Yet they persist with “the big lie,” gaslighting us about 2020 election corruption, claiming we’re all a bunch of delusional crazies lying. Here’s what I don’t understand about that. If they let us have what we want, which is full forensic and other types of audits including investigating voting machines, won’t that debunk the “conspiracy theory” since they claim audits will show the Democrats really won?
You will not be surpised to learn that Alexander provided no evidence of “2020 election corruption” because there really isn’t any. Her “audits” link goes to an anonymously written pamphlet touting post-election forensic audits as a right-wing tactic to throw chaos into elections that didn’t go their way. We know that because the pamphlet states that “The Antrim Michigan Audit is a good example of a Machine PFA”; in fact, that audit — which falsely claimed that the county’s Dominion election system was “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results” — has been completely discredited. Alexander went on to pretend that QAnon had no real constituency on the right:
Even QAnon had elements of this reversal of blame. The left made the QAnon phenomenon out to be some widespread belief on the right, when the reality is most of us on the right don’t know anyone who was even involved in it. Even though much of Big Tech purged QAnon around J6, the left continues to accuse top Republicans on the right of being associated with it. It would be like taking Al Sharpton and pretending he represents the left-wing base.
Tell that to prominent QAnon adherents like Jim Caviezel; his allegiance to the conspiracy theory didn’t keep anyone from promoting the QAnon-adjacent film “Sound of Freedom.” And there are plenty of people (looking at you, Media Research Center) who want us to believe that Sharpton “represents the left-wing base.”
She then stated: “A conspiracy theory about race that has been thoroughly debunked is that ‘racist Republicans’ in the South were behind slavery and Jim Crow. But the left never stops pretending it’s true.” Her link to this alleged debunking is a PragerU video by right-wing historian Carol Swain, who falsely denied that that the civil rights movement spurred Democrats who opposed it to go Republican, and she suggested that Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” was irrelevant because he didn’t immediately see benefits from it (it didn’t start bearing right-wing fruit until the 1980s).
Alexander concluded by unironically claiming: “The problem is that even when the left’s conspiracy theories are completely debunked, they continue to repeat them.” Says the writer who’s clinging to election fraud conspiracy theories despite an utter lack of credible evidence to support them.