THE LAME CONSPIRACY-MOCKING CAMPAIGN
Interesting how "CONSPIRACY THEORIES" seems to be the CORE leit motiv of this farcical Trump/Clinton 'race'. It should be more than evident that the Nutwork / PTB clowns are trumping up their efforts to implant (into the general public's psyche) the notion that 'conspiracy theorists' are mentally unstable / paranoid /Alex-Jones-type social misfits - i.e. entirely untrustworthy fools who only deserve public contempt and ridicule. Not that this is any news to us - but the sheer scale of this ongoing, pathetic ploy is now reaching unprecedented heights (or should I say 'lows') as it appears to be a central / core theme of the current presidential campaign comedy.
The below news article propaganda piece is a prime example of this ongoing 'conspiracy-mocking' campaign :
Body double? Secret earpiece? Donald Trump fuels Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories
Donald Trump has encouraged his supporters to buy into a fictional world of dark and unfounded conspiracies.
Alex Jones, of the conspiracy theorist Infowars radio show, spoke to a crowd of Trump supporters at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 18, 2016. (HILARY SWIFT / NYT)
By DANIEL DALE - Washington Bureau
Wed., Sept. 14, 2016
WASHINGTON—The world saw Hillary Clinton walk out of her daughter’s apartment, waving and smiling, after her pneumonia-related health incident on Sunday.
Dave Wentworth Sr., a 67-year-old retired grocery store manager in California, and Francesca, a 45-year-old who splits her time between New York City and the Philadelphia suburbs, saw something else.
A body double.
“When I saw this thinner woman with less wrinkles come out of the penthouse, I about jumped out of my chair, and shouted to my wife,” Wentworth said Tuesday. “‘This woman is not Hillary!’” “The face, the tip of the nose, the hair,” said Francesca, who wanted her last name omitted to protect her job with a plastic surgeon. “Where did all the lines on her neck go?”
Hillary Clinton leaves her daughter's apartment building on September 11, 2016. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI)
Both of them believe the Clintons have had dozens of people murdered. Francesca also believes the Democratic presidential nominee was being fed answers through a hidden earpiece during a recent forum. Wentworth thinks it’s “possible.”
Their views might be funny if such claims weren’t being embraced and promoted by the Republican presidential nominee.
Explicitly and in barely veiled code, Donald Trump has encouraged his supporters to buy into dark and unfounded allegations about his opponent, the president and the world at large. With the help of right-wing media outlets, he has given an unmistakable blessing to the conspiratorial thinking that has been present in American political life since the Revolution.
“We just have never seen a major-party nominee embrace the fringe element in the way that we have with Trump. That is new,” said Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak. “I think he wants to keep that fringe element motivated and mobilized. I don’t think he’s probably 100 per cent comfortable with it, but I think he likes that they’re stirring things up.”
Trump was the leading proponent of the “birther” theory that falsely holds that Barack Obama was not born in America. His campaign rhetoric — “there’s something going on,” he likes to say — echoes the vague-but-threatening words favoured by nonsense-peddlers the world over.
And he has regularly been more specific: suggesting Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination, calling economic statistics fake, hinting, last week, that Clinton may have disappeared the man who set up her email server. In December, he appeared on the show of Alex Jones, America’s most prominent conspiracy theorist.
“(Jones) has a huge fan base, listenership, readership, but he’s always been regarded as fringe. And now, all of a sudden, he’s been mainstreamed,” said Kathryn Olmsted, a history professor at the University of California, Davis who studies conspiracy theories. “I mean, that’s the really terrifying thing.”
It is not clear that conspiratorial thinking is any more popular in America than it used to be. And Trump, of course, cannot be blamed for the existence of conspiracy theories around Clinton. The false claim that the Clintons are murderous criminal masterminds was the subject of a film in 1994.
Republican strategist Bruce Haynes said the political climate offers a “fertile breeding ground” for conspiracy theories. Trust in institutions is low. The public is unified in believing that the two nominees are liars, Haynes said, and Clinton has given them three decades worth of evidence.
“Does that forgive wild theories from propagating? No. We should all be more responsible. But does it explain why there’s an environment in politics in general, and with her more specifically, where these kinds of theories can take root? Yes, it absolutely does,” he said.
Research by University of Miami professor Joe Uscinski and others suggests conservatives are no more likely to buy into conspiracy theories than liberals. During the George W. Bush presidency, Uscinski noted, conspiracies swirled on the left about former vice-president Dick Cheney and about oil-services firm Halliburton.
And he said that top Democrats have themselves floated conspiracies. Bernie Sanders, he noted, called the entire economic system “rigged” and accused billionaires of “buying elections.” A Clinton ad in August suggested that Trump praises Russian leader Vladimir Putin because of hidden personal ties to Russia.
“Out of one side of her mouth, she was calling him a crazy conspiracy theorist. On the other side of her mouth, she was spewing her own conspiracy theories,” Uscinski said.
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016 ... ories.html