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Today, Popular Information reports on the potentially illegal activities of Elon Musk in Pennsylvania on behalf of his convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist friend running for president.1 Musk, of course, who his friend has in the past mistakenly called “Leon,” is leveraging the huge social media network he purchased as an apartheid social network devoted to racism, mayhem, and carnage.
Hillary. She was so right all those years ago when she warned us about a vast right-wing conspiracy.
First, she said that she wasn’t the kind of gal who stayed home to bake cookies. That got her in trouble.
Then she told us about the vast right-wing conspiracy. That got her in deeper trouble.
Then she called Trump supporters deplorables. That got her in more bigly (biglier?) trouble, and probably cost her an election.2 Although looking back, The Deplorables would have made a helluva toy line. Or maybe a Pixel cartoon movie franchise. It still can once the cult leader is finally in prison.
This time last year, Hillary said that the cult of Trump should probably be formally deprogrammed.
It should come as no surprise that she got in trouble for that, too.
Turns out she’s been right all along.
I don’t know what kind of president Hillary would have made, but she has been right about the Republican Party for thirty years.
She was right about a lot of things from the very beginning.
Women were not born to stay home and bake cookies.
The right-wing conspiracy was in full bloom when she said it was. It was right under our noses.
We ignored it.
A large swath of Trump supporters were and are deplorable. January 6, 2021, was proof enough just in case other events like the attacks on FEMA after the tragedy in North Carolina, the Charlottesville riots, or the various senseless mass killings at the hands of MAGA incels with assault rifles weren’t sufficient.
Despite four indictments and countless felony charges3, plus a pretty convincing civil case involving sexual assault that he lost, Trump is neck and neck with Kamala Harris in many polls even after all we know about him.4
So she’s also right that some reprogramming is clearly necessary.
These problems have been around, and growing, ever since Hillary entered public life.
The ultra-right-wing Federalist Society, which led the charge against Roe v. Wade and paid for several Supreme Court justices, most famously Clarence Thomas, was founded in 1982 by students at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School to transform America into a Christo-nationalist state.
This was thirteen years before Hillary mentioned a conspiracy.
Ostensibly, the Federalist Society was started as a libertarian group, but in practice, from Newt Gingrich’s Contract For America to Dobbs v. Jackson, it has consistently supported and funded efforts to turn America into a Handmaid’s America.
The right-wingers have largely succeeded with their initial goals, but they want more. A lot more. We live in a gilded age that just might make even Ayn Rand blush, with historic income discrepancies and rich people throwing money at each other while the rest of the country burns to the ground.
But the far-right is not done yet. Their foot is always on the pedal. They want a national abortion ban. They’re going after contraception. Their Loon in Chief wants to shoot shoplifters on sight5 and imprison those who disagree with him.6
Cookies, anybody?
While she spoke in her affected southern accent in 1992 about cookies, right-wing activists were already in the early stages of trying to upend Roe v. Wade.
Hillary was reacting to a jab made by California Governor Jerry Brown, who was competing with Bill Clinton for the Democratic primary. Brown accused her husband of “funneling money to his wife’s law firm”.7
Hillary responded by saying, “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas.”
Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election way back in 1992 with that one remark. Why? Because it was the progenitor of media bias against her that never let up.
But it wasn’t her fault that the remark lost the election for her. It was the way the mainstream press reported on it that did her in.
You see, the context of the quote, the part that didn’t get carried by broadcast outlets, was much more important:8
“The work that I have done as a professional, a public advocate, has been aimed…to assure that women can make the choices, whether it’s full-time career, full-time motherhood or some combination.”
This part was rarely quoted. But she was a smart woman with a quip. This was not allowed in those days.9
As a result, her remarks, rather than becoming the soliloquy on women’s empowerment that it really was, became a permanent insult to any woman who still had her toe in the household chores.
The vast right-wing conspiracy
You may wonder how Hillary could be so prescient as to talk about something long ago that is finally becoming obvious to many of us: a right-wing plot to reverse everything we gained under FDR and LBJ.
She wasn’t so much prescient as a smart and keen observer. Her husband was fighting off Newt Gingrich. The Clinton Administration was also dealing with the so-called Moral Majority and the growing Federalist Society. Some of it, then, was staring right at her and Bill Clinton like a dark, malevolent shadow.
Hillary received her Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973. Yale grads stay connected to their alma mater the way some ex-presidents stay connected to serial lying.
So, she most likely knew perfectly well what those students were up to in 1982. It seems pretty reasonable to guess she had one eye on them while keeping the other on Gingrich and the Moral Majority.
Technically, the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” was coined by someone else in 1995, a fellow named Chris Lehane, a soldier in a group of shock troops brought into the Clinton White House to counter an array of investigations targeted by the Republican majority House of Representatives under the forerunner to MAGA, Newt Gingrich.
Hillary borrowed the phrase in 1998 when she complained that the allegations against her husband regarding Monica Lewinsky were part of a vast conspiracy to bring him down. She later discovered that Bill had indeed done strange things with cigars in the Oval Office with an intern.
But there’s a reason she had such a reflexive reaction. The phrase was top of mind for her. Two things could be true: Bill Clinton could be a scuz, and there could be a right-wing conspiracy right in the middle of his fall from grace.
In 1995, Clinton’s White House counsel office issued a 332-page report called, “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” written by Lehane10 that became the first formal recognition by Democratic operatives that a media “food chain,” in the report’s words, was orchestrated by a smallish cabal within conservative journals and think tanks.
The report created a term that should trigger a familiar concept to all of us these days. I’ll call it FantasyFact. This is based on the phrase, “Fantasy becomes fact” from the report.
It works like this. The cabal makes something up. Anything. Maybe a claim that the U.S. president is a citizen of Kenya or that FEMA is out to get you or that Haitians are eating your pets. Or that there is an immigration crisis (there isn’t).
The report argued that the media food chain builds from an initial launch pad of the cabal, and then the lie gets picked up by larger outlets. Back then the outlets were mostly The Washington Times and talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. Soon, Fox News became an additional key player, and arguably the most important one.
Now, with Leon Musk in the picture, Twitter has become the newest soulless part of the right-wing media empire.
The final step, as we saw getting played out by the endless headlines involving Hunter Biden’s laptop, takes place when Republican Congress Critters call for investigations.
Well, not quite final. Once a theme is established, the media chain hammers it home relentlessly until the lie becomes truth. This happened in the wake of Hurricane Helene with FEMA, whose workers recently faced enough of a physical threat for the agency to temporarily halt operations in North Carolina, and which finally led to the arrest of a MAGA cultist.11
The Clintons’ arch-enemy from those days, Newt Gingrich, is the charming fellow who almost single-handedly turned the Republican Party into a Christo-fascist entity. Hillary was aware of the dangers Newt Gingrich posed to the American body politic sooner than almost anyone.
Whereas her husband Bill frequently appeased Gingrich, I always got the sense that Gingrich set Hillary’s teeth on edge. If she had been president instead of Bill, it’s possible the political landscape would today look quite different.
Gingrich is why the Republican Party is what it is today, much more so than Trump. Trump is a symptom of a larger disease unleashed by Newt Gingrich’s Wuhan lab of political viruses.
Trump is only one transitory piece of the final product. He can be replaced. What began as a scary virus has turned into a multi-headed monster currently fronted by the raging Orange Puppeteer, backed by billions of dollars through the Federalist Society and its obsequious Supreme Court, and normalized by its propaganda arms, Fox News and Twitter12.
But Trump isn’t the head of the hydra. Most of us want to believe that the movement Gingrich created will be emasculated once Trump ends up in prison. But it won’t. Someone will take his place, and that someone will not be stupid enough to piss off his security apparatus by calling them names on TwitterX.
That someone may finally establish the totalitarian Christo-fascist state many on the right really want. God forbid we give them the keys to AI. If we do, it’s game, set, match. God forbid it is JD Vance, who is likely to replace Trump weeks after Trump’s inauguration under the auspices of the 25th amendment when Vance and the cabinet initiate their coup d’etat against an incapacitated idiot.
From vast right-wing conspiracies to media ownership
Thanks to the internet, today’s media food chain is lightning-fast. It took less than 24 hours for the various false hurricane narratives to take hold.
Republicans are so proficient at FantasyFacts that many Democrats believe a distressingly large number of their lies. The mainstream media supports their efforts in the name of “balance,” and don’t call out the lies for what they are. The majority of Americans now believe immigration is one of America’s biggest problems (it isn’t).
In many ways, then, Hillary’s vast right-wing conspiracy morphed into a formal takeover of the media by the Republican Party, which still rails about liberal bias, because they’re not done yet, and won’t be until Trump can get back into office and formally shut down MSNBC and any other cable outlet that annoys him (assuming Vance and the rest of the Cabinet don’t kick him down the road).
According to Mira Nalbandian13, of Parkway West High School (hey, why not — high school kids are people too!):
Just 37 years ago, there were 50 companies in charge of most American media. Now, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations: AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom. This means that just 232 media executives are calling the shots for the vast majority of the information we are presented with, controlling a total Big Six net worth of over $430 billion.
— From the Best of SNO, May 12, 202214
The same thing happened in Russia. Putin slowly but surely eliminated or oversaw the consolidation of mass media. It’s easy to look at Russia and say, “I’d sure hate to see that happen here.” Well, it’s already started.
The basket of deplorables
Hillary’s deplorables remark was also misquoted.
She made the remark during a 2016 presidential campaign speech at the LGBT for Hillary Gala, which was a fundraising event in New York City. It should come as no surprise that rather than focus on LGBTQ+ rights, the media instead focused on one word, which not only hit its target but, in view of the larger issues that were falling into place, was also prescient:
And there’s so much more than I find deplorable in his campaign: the way that he cozies up to white supremacists, makes racist attacks, calls women pigs, mocks people with disabilities — you can’t make this up. He wants to round up and deport 16 million people, calls our military a disaster. And every day he says something else which I find so personally offensive, but also dangerous.
As many of us know, Trump doubled down after he lost the election and began to collect federal indictments like Clarence Thomas collects vacation gifts. He treated the Oval Office like a latrine, dumping loyal personnel into the toilet with regularity, and then mocking and shaming them on social media.
Now, during the current presidential campaign, he’s talking about shoot-to-kill orders on shoplifters and mass deportation and imprisoning political opponents. His deplorable cult cheers this stuff on.
But Hillary didn’t call Trump supporters deplorable in a meta sense. Hillary pointed out that Trump’s supporters can be categorized into two main groups:
We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million.
He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
Then she went on to talk about the other group, the part of America that is still in pain:
But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from.
They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
Did you read that last sentence? Do you remember the mainstream press reporting on it? At all?
Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
This remains true. In fact, I wrote a letter to Kamala about this very thing just a few weeks ago:
As far as I know, she didn’t read it. Restack my articles enough, though, and maybe she’ll run into one of them. I’ve got more great ideas in my quiver.
Anyhoo, Hillary was right about deplorables.
Today, the deplorables worship an idol who is facing a quadzillion federal charges involving election fraud, vote tampering, withholding classified documents, falsifying business records, and more.
He also lost a pitched battle in the civil courts over a sexual assault involving E. Jean Carroll and is mired in a business fraud case in New York that has already led to a summary judgment that may ultimately cost him all or most of his New York business holdings. Part of Georgia’s legal system wants to bust him for election tampering, but the other half is a corruption machine that is more interested in maintaining its incarceration industrial complex against small-time drug users. So far, the prison industrial complex is winning.
Hillary nailed it a long time ago. Now, it is pretty much accepted that Trump’s followers are comparable to what you’d find in a cult.
Hillary looked at the polls, looked at the indictments, and wondered last October if maybe some deprogramming was in order. Who can blame her?
Deprogramming
The bonkers James Freeman, of the Wall Street Journal, calling Hillary an “election denier,” of all things, said recently15 she has a “totalitarian heart” for saying that the MAGA cult needs to be reprogrammed.
I guess poor James is imagining himself in a re-education camp that will be devoid of the Fox News feeds that fuel his addiction.
But the part of America that recognizes Fox News and Twitter for what they are, 24/7 propaganda arms for the far-right, can only look at her remarks and nod its collective head.
Hillary’s comment speaks to the single most important influencer on the American body politic (still): Fox News. It speaks to its oversize influence on American opinion in general, too. It speaks to the encroaching assault of Twitter, which is now in the hands of a South African apartheid goon.
Much of what we assume to be centrist thinking begins at Fox, then seeps down into the general political ether to the point where things like low taxes on the wealthy become a feature instead of a bug.
If Fox says crime is a big problem, guess what? It is, even though crime stats have improved since the pandemic and crime is down significantly over the numbers from a couple of decades ago. If Fox says that immigrants are crowding you out of your apartment, they are. It all seeps into the media ether.
Finally…
It pains me to consider what this country might look like if women had been empowered much earlier. Hillary was a seer.
She became something other than what she could have been as Bill Clinton’s wife, in part because of his very public dalliances, and in part because our society back then never would have been willing to give her a chance at being an outspoken woman who was smarter than most of us.
I won’t say she became corrupt, but a part of her broke, I think, by being Bill Clinton’s wife instead of Hillary Rodham, who, given a more egalitarian society, very possibly would have led this country toward great things if her political career had been hers from the beginning, instead of part of the tail, and tale, of someone else.
Maybe Americans can finally correct their mistake and elect Kamala Harris. And maybe instead of trying to “heal” the country, Prosecutor Harris will come in with guns blazing.
Notes
You can find Hillary Clinton’s chocolate chip cookie recipe here:
Hillary Clinton's Chocolate Chip Cookies
This is the recipe for Hillary Clinton's Chocolate Chip Cookies.www.allrecipes.com
What the hell, Hillary? Shortening instead of butter? No wonder I voted for Bernie.
Yesterday, Fox Propaganda Network (FPN) anchor and chief political editor Bret Baier tried to goad Kamala Harris into calling the adjudicated rapist’s followers a similar name, but instead, she hammered Baier into a million pieces with her prosecutorial style.
They are countless because the U.S. Supreme Court continuously makes it more challenging for Jack Smith and others to hold him accountable. What started as 91 felony charges has been whittled down to the point where I’ve lost track of the exact number. We can be sure they’ll go back up after this nightmare is over, if Kamala wins.
The polls are almost surely wrong. But vote as if you’re life depends on it, because, as they say on the interwebs, it does.
It’s fair to say we’ve made progress. Kamala Harris is a master debater who destroyed a Fox News anchor last night and ate Brett Kavanaugh’s keg-soaked lunch during his Supreme Court justice confirmation hearing. Jasmine Crockett is a walking quip machine. Nobody argues with her right to be this way these days.
No. Not X. Twitter. I refuse to play the game on Leon Musk’s terms.
I would like to point out that it was Bill Clinton's telecommunications act that made the media consolidation possible. It was one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed, creating the conglomerations we see today, eliminating a large number of independent voices, and pushing broadcasters across the country out of business and out of jobs. Having said that, Hillary was right.
Hillary was right. Not the best candidate in terms of handling what was unjustly thrown at her. She would have been a very able bureaucrat. Quite likely and outstanding President. We fucked up. Well, I didn't. I voted for her. We know who fucked up. I still blame Reagan more.