The following conspiracy by David Haggith was published on The Great Recession Blog:

Conspiracy theories are like crime novels. You can create an infinite number of them, and all they require is a plausible plot built from real facts with enough twists to keep them interesting. That’s why I don’t spend my time trying to discern if any of them are true — though some may be — but now I’m going to write one of my own. I find it completely plausible, fully in line with all the known facts and neither more likely nor less likely to be true than all the other conspiracy theories ever told.

First, here are the elements I see to writing a great conspiracy theory:

• You must do all you can to work in all the known facts.
• You take the facts in a direction that you believe people’s naturally suspicious minds are willing to be led. (As good fantasy needs some willing suspension of disbelief, and you get that by going where people want to go because it’s a great ride.)
• You create some interesting plot twist for your big moment that grab the audience’s mind.
• In the best of theorie, you let your audience make the final leap of logic past the facts to where your arrangement of the facts is intended to lead. The most solidly believed leap of logic is the one listeners make on their own, just like in a great con game.

In this case, I’m going to reveal my tricks to show how a conspiracy theory is made credible enough to find a market-share of disciples who will spread it. That’s why I’m writing this. (Or is it?)

Trumping All the Democrats in Congress

Let us entertain the prospect that Nancy Pelosi and the entire Democratic side of congress just walked into the greatest 4-D election trap in history to see how that might happen, and let us consider that the trap is not fake but is a cluster of real facts that will all turn against the Democrats and bury their election hopes. It goes like this:

The president’s call to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was put on a classified computer for two reasons: 1) To lead Democrats to conclude on their own that the President is covering his own wrongdoing (the trap’s bait). 2) The call included actual information about President Trump’s chief opposition, Joe Biden, that his inner circle now knows to be true but that they don’t want Democrats to see … just yet.

In a game of 4-D chess, a master who understands cons, as Trump surely does, knows that the evidence against Biden will be far more damaging if all of it is brought to light by the Democrats, making it credible at a level that is virtually impossible for the Dem’s deny when they are the ones that wind up disclosing it through their own investigation … and investigation they cannot easily shut down because they have the whole world expecting them to land results.

What could the president know that the Democrats don’t know about Joseph Biden? What if Biden’s interactions in Ukraine that were of concern in the phone call had little to do with his son’s corporate interest in Ukraine and everything to do with a deep-state plot during the Obama administration that that Trump is ready to lay bear — a plot to create an insurance policy that would subvert a Trump presidency if Americans did actually elect Trump?

(Do you see what I did there? Threw in my first twist to make it intriguing to your mind, but did it as a what-if so you can make the conclusion for yourself, not me, which you might have been more apt to do if hadn’t just stopped you.)

Numerous articles have been written in past years claiming that the Obama administration backed a coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected leader, who was too friendly with Russia to suit America’s military-industrial complex. The coup supported a new president who is much more friendly to American interests.

If I were writing a conspiracy book, I’d lay out an entire chapter or even several chapters of mainstream and some not-so-mainstream articles providing details of America’s supposed involvement in said coup as a real conspiracy to form the backbone to my own conspiracy theory. Whether that conspiracy and intrigue actually happened under the Obama administration, I’m not weighing either for or against right now, but belief that it likely did is essential to my conspiracy theory. Since I’m not writing a book, I’ll trust that most readers have, at least, heard the theory in their own readings.

(This is the part where I said I’d lay open the bones of how conspiracy theories are created. If I were actually trying to create a conspiracy theory (or maybe I am and I’m conning you into believing I’m not so you make the conclusion on your own), I’d impress you with all the accounts that support US involvement in a Ukraine coup.)

The bottom line of the coup conspiracy within the Obama Administration is that the illegitimate coup is Russia’s justification for taking over Crimea and is Russia’s justification for claiming the US is the aggressor around its critical borders. The belief is that the US sponsored a coup and overthrew a democratically elected leader because the US only supports democracies when democracies do what is in America’s best interests.

So, maybe the real story with Biden involves 1) how he participated in setting up or supporting a coup; 2) how he later leveraged that support of the new government to get parties in Ukraine to retaliate against Russia by creating all the computer hacks that were, for a fact, later blamed on Russia. Consider that Ukraine is close to Russia physically, has many Russian people living within its borders and, therefore, many people who can write in Russian. There are ample people who, while from Russia, might be self-exiles in Ukraine from times when Russia was not friendly to their interests — people who might have abundant reason and ability to conspire in a sophisticated plot to smear Russia. Combine that with U.S. funding and U.S. technical support, perhaps from the CIA or other US agencies that have their own reasons to undermine Russia, and you could create some credible mirroring on the internet to make it look as if all hacking of the DNC and other election manipulation was done from Russia by Russia.

You get the new government of Ukraine’s full cooperation in all of that because they 1) wouldn’t have come into power without your support of their coup, so they owe you a favor; 2) they still need your support since they are now in a war with Russia; 3) they are outraged by Russia’s seizure of Crimea. What the Obama administration never disclosed to Ukraine is that all of this would be used to subvert the Obama administration’s own rival should Trump become president — that it wasn’t all just about making Russia look bad after the election because Ukraine’s presumption was that Obama’s administration would essentially continue under Joe Biden or, at worst, under Hillary Clinton if she beat Biden in the primaries.

Of course, the new Ukraine government would have to consider that Republicans might win and retaliate if they found out, but they are beholden to the Obama administration for getting them into power in the first place and desperate for the Obama administration’s support now that Russia has decided to fight a war against what it sees as the illegitimate government of Ukraine. The new Ukrainian government (and perhaps the Obama administration) had not anticipated an actual military response by Russia. Now that they got one, the upstart government in Ukraine desperately needed American support; so, of course, the new government cooperated with the Obama Administration to get military support and because it owed a huge favor to the administration.

So, they create a Ukraine-based, Russia-tagged, hacking operation to turn Russia into the bad guy in order to create the full justification the US would need before its own electorate to justify aggression against Russia in the form of higher sanctions, diminished political ties with the rest of the Western world, and most of all continued military support of Ukraine against Russia, which both Ukraine and the US wanted. (And now we have motive and lots of it.)

You might ask, why would the Obama administration help Ukraine create a Russia-mirrored attack on the Democratic National Committee when that attack hurt Hillary Clinton’s prospects of getting elected? (To create an enduring conspiracy theory, you have to anticipate objections that will be raised against it, and answer them before they are asked.)

I will ask in return, did the hacking hurt Clinton? What hurt Hillary Clinton was not the purported Russian hack but her own sloppy use of email on a personal computer, brought to the full attention of America by America’s self-aggrandizing spook, James Comey. It wasn’t what Russians did with it. It was just the fact that she was sloppy. When Comey rang his second brazen public alarm about Hillary’s emails, not being in on the conspiracy, just before the actual election, her poll numbers plunged about 8% overnight. When he came back out a week later and said, “Nothing to see here folks,” her poll numbers recovered six percentage points. That still left her down 2%, which is exactly the amount she lost by.

So, Hillary’s loss probably had less to do with any Russian hacking than with Comey’s statements about her emails. Many have suggested that Russian propaganda (whether put out via a Ukraine campaign to discredit Russia or actually put out by Russia) was minute when measured against all campaign propaganda by the two major parties and, therefore, probably limited in impact. The very fact that there wasn’t enough to be effective argues the real motive behind it may have not been to stop Hillary from being elected but to have an insurance plan, should Trump get elected.

The inner circle of the Obama Admin. may have felt they could deal with the limited impact of propaganda against Hillary, while the bigger gain would be in the way they could use it to thwart their competition when the claim was made that Trump was collaborating with Russia — something we all know to be patently untrue at this point since the Mueller investigation. That was arguably one of the largest investigations in history conducted with the help of agencies that claim to be the most potent investigative agencies in world; yet it didn’t turn up evidence as big as a speck of dust to prove those claims.

All the Mueller inquisition managed to nail down anyone with was refusals to cooperate with the Mueller team, and all they have remaining against Trump is obstruction of justice. One can reasonably ask, even if Trump did obstruct the investigation (far from proven), how can it be obstruction of justice if the entire inquisition was one of the greatest injustices of American history, in that it attempted for two years to undermine and subvert a duly elected American president and his administration with entirely concocted claims for which the accusers never produced a dust-mite’s lunch worth of evidence?

Suppose, presently, Biden really thinks all Trump has on him is the administration’s oft’ talked about claim that Biden was involved in pressuring the new Ukraine government to take pressure off his son, Hunter — a complete nothing-burger as far as Biden is concerned. Suppose the Trump administration spent months harping on that and only on that to lead Biden and other Dems to think that was all they had. Hubris often causes politicians to think their deeply buried secrets are safe because such secrets, guarded by the “deep state” usually are.

(Notice I put “deep state” in quotes because I’m not admitting it actually exists. If I were writing a real conspiracy theory, I’d take the quotes off, trusting a part part of my audience to just run with their natural bias of believing in the deep state. Thus, they would follow along with my theory, especially if their political bias also runs with Trump, giving me a large audience of potential believers. On the other hand, what if I really am creating a conspiracy theory here and want to put you off your guard by pretending I’m not, so you’ll think I’m just being objective? What if I want you to leap to the conclusion that I’m being so objective and fair in pointing out my tricks that I could not be really creating a 4-D conspiracy theory of my own while laying out something credible enough for you to choose to believe in your own … all the more strongly because you make the leap?)

Moving right along: This is where we come to greatest trap for Democrats in history as Trump plays 4-D chess with all of them.

As president of the US, Trump would have better access to information about the US-backed coup than anyone in the country. (Did you just notice how I went straight to using the definite article, “the,” when mentioning the coup in order to turn US sponsorship from supposition about “a possible coup” to a particular accepted fact? Or am I just tricking you by revealing my tricks into believing I’m being purely objective here?)

As I was saying, supposing President Trump, who has access to information about the Obama Admin’s involvement in a coup (if such involvement existed) and particularly Biden’s involvement in later orchestrating a Ukraine-based fake hacking operation (if such involvement existed), knows that the most convincing way to bring all this information to the attention of all Americans is to trick Democrats into being the ones to release it all.

Trump and all of his administration know Democrats are absolutely salivating for the opportunity to impeach him so are likely to leap at the next opportunity now that Mueller led them all nowhere. So, what if Trump made a call to Ukraine in which he actually did ask its latest president (just elected in May of this year when Trump’s accusations about Biden began in Ernest) to reveal information? That president’s recent election could mean he is not necessarily a part to all the foregoing. He might be more easily pressed to release information about Biden that Trump can use, being desperate for continued military support or if his own opponents were involved. What if all the information about Biden is real and proves the Obama administration backed the coup and supported a fake hacking operation to subvert Trump and proves Biden was at the center of it all?=

Suddenly, withholding all Ukraine military support so Russia can crush Ukraine becomes perfectly acceptable as a way of strong-arming the new Ukraine government into releasing what it knows about actual subversive American actions in all of this. Suddenly, it turns into something that is no longer just a reach for mud on Biden but a revelation of real subversive deep-state behavior that needed to be exposed, regardless of the fact there is an election going on. Do you think the public at that point is going to be more angry with Trump for going after his opponent or more disgusted with Biden for covering all this subversion and maybe with Democrats for whatever roll the rest of them had in it?

Now, what if the informants to the whistleblower are all plants — insiders that Trump and his inner circle used to feed out only the aspects of the call that would trip all the Trump-Derangement-Syndrome circuit breakers in all the impeachment-slavering Democrats into going full impeachment? Perhaps that is why notes were used (controlled notes?) and not an actual transcript of the entire call. In other words, what if all aspects of the call that contained absolutely true known dirt about Biden were kept confidential, even top secret since they involve deliberate subversion of a duly elected US government at top levels in the Democratic Party? What if only the bits that entice were leaked to a person known to be sympathetic to Democrats and against Trump?

Now, take the final step for yourself — without me spelling it out: What happens when all of the inquiries the Democrats start making during their impeachment hearings start turning up this deeper evidence of Deep State activity by the Obama administration in subversion of the Trump administration?

You do the math as to whether revealing this through a Democrat attack on Trump that makes a far more convincing revelation of the facts that Trump has learned than if the not-always-so-credible (or might I just say “incredible”) Trump puts forward these claims against his opponents? What if, in other words, the Democrats open a Pandora’s box they cannot close because no one would ever accept them saying, “Sorry Folks, Our bad. Nothing to see here.”

You have to admit that little turn put a bit of a shiver of excitement up your spine. (Or did I just trick you into thinking you made the final leap into thinking how all of that would play out for the Democrats if their impeachment only turns up deeper facts of state about the Obama administration than most of them are aware even exist?)

And that, my friends, is why I don’t spend time in my economic articles trying to chase down the truth about conspiracy theories because you can see how easy they are to create out of known facts and relatively accepted beliefs and how they play with your mind and tie your brain in circles when you try to figure out if they are true or not. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out which, if any, of them are true, which is why I choose to make my conclusions about where the economy is going based just on the trajectory of observable events. (Or am I just now trying to trick you into believing I would never entertain a conspiracy theory?)

Just sayin’.

(As a safety relief valve for your mind: the truth or falsehood of this conspiracy theory will be known one way or another by whether or not facts against Biden that go far beyond his son Hunter do come to surface in the next couple of months during the Democrat’s inquiries. If they don’t and Republicans don’t bring them up, you can probably go safe into the New Year knowing no such thing ever happened.)

One thing is for certain: Russian relations were reset alright.

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