By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

America is a country that both loves and hates its conspiracy theories. On the one hand, our popular culture is lousy with them, from cinema to the president’s goddamn Twitter account. On the other hand, we host an academic elite which not only views such cultural trends with disdain, but seems to see our history, their history, the “official story”, as some kind of irrefutable biblical fact. Few people make the connection between these parallel trends, the likelihood that the overly presumptuous and at times downright jingoistic orthodoxy of our ivory tower elites is precisely what drives pedestrian America to search for alternatives to their “truth”. That old adage, consider the source. The reality is that history in and of itself is not black and white science. At its most accurate it is a collection of narratives, different perspectives from the ground floor that could easily be described as conspiracy theories. What appears to be a conspiracy theory from Arlington or Manhattan, looks a lot more like bad memories from Hiroshima or Tuskegee. Any true revisionist historian must become a collector of conspiracy theories, viewing all available narratives with a healthy grain of salt.

Few modern historical phenomena have created a greater volume of conspiracy theories than the 2016 Presidential Election, a downright cataclysmic event that the entire nation is still reeling from, even as we approach the next election in 2020. 2016 didn’t just shake the unwashed proletariat, it shook our intellectual bourgeoisie to its very core. As the 2020 Primaries grind away, they, more than any others seem to be grasping blindly for answers. How can an insider’s insider with such impeccable credentials like Hillary Clinton fall so devastatingly short to an irate babbling imbecile from the tabloid gutter of the 1%? They still haven’t figured it out and they know it, and they know that victory will elude them until they do. So what did happen in 2016? Lets take a second look at the crime scene through the lens of three conspiracy theories. The first two, my own, and the last one, the product of our sacred elites, all admittedly equally presumptuous.

Hillary Clinton, regardless of how you feel about her vapid moral integrity, is a stone cold player, a sort of post-feminist supervillain. She accepted at a young age that if she was going to achieve the level of power she sought, she was going to have to game the system. So she married a dope-smoking hayseed with a fraction of her intellect and micromanaged his political career to put herself in the White House. Even as First Lady, Hillary clearly ran the show. She played Dick Cheney to Bill’s Dubya, pushing an agenda of international hegemony while silencing the women her silver-tongued hubby groped.

READ MORE