Hillary Clinton Warned About the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy for Decades — It’s Here
Subjected to it for decades, she saw what was coming, and warned us
Hillary Rodham Clinton has had one of the most extraordinary lives in the history of American politics. From the Chicago suburbs, to Wellesley College and Yale Law School, her distinguished career as a young lawyer from going undercover in Alabama in the 1970’s to expose civil rights violations, to being one of the youngest lawyers to serve on the congressional Nixon impeachment investigation, she had always been destined for extraordinary things. Indeed, she rose to prominence before her husband Bill Clinton, when her Wellesley College commencement address in 1969 was featured in Life Magazine, where she notoriously called for people to rise to the challenge to “practice politics as the art of what appears to be impossible possible.” She had formed a path of her own, a rising star and a formidable and highly intelligent woman, who was a force to be reckoned with, she would change the future of American politics. She would make what it appeared to be impossible possible.
The right wing has always been obsessed with Hillary Clinton. From being attacked for refusing to take the last name Clinton as First Lady of Arkansas, to being vilified for advocating for universal health care as First Lady of the United States in the 90’s, she has always been the very public #1 target of the right. Hillary Clinton is arguably the most scrutinized person in American politics, from her physical appearance to her political positions when she was a teenager, no stone was left unturned in the attempt to smear and vilify one of the women they feared the most — because of her intelligence, political acumen, and star-power — she almost seemed destined to become the first woman to be the president of the United States, and she wasn’t on their team. One manufactured scandal after another, it’s no wonder that Hillary Clinton famously warned of a “vast right wing conspiracy” back in the 1990’s, and later on the 2016 campaign trail.
Now the QAnon movement — quite literally a vast right-wing conspiracy — has been deemed as a domestic terrorist threat by the FBI and was involved in an attempted overthrow of the United States government to install their own right-wing dictator. QAnon congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been stripped of all of her committee assignments after harassing children who survived a mass shooting at their school and promoted absolutely insane conspiracy theories and actions on her own Facebook page, such as executing Democratic officials. This level of vitriol and debasement of our politics has been decades in the making, and Hillary Clinton warned about them back in the 1990’s.
Some people mock the notion that Hillary was right and that she warned America, but she did. “Anyone could’ve seen this coming,” many people will smugly claim. Yes, everyone could see that Donald Trump was a total disaster, but Hillary Clinton warned about the manifestation of political radicalism and conspiracies decades before Donald Trump even ran for president, and many people viewed her as hysterical for it. She called Donald Trump the most dangerous person to ever run for president, to his face, on national television. She called out his ties to Russia. She warned about the type of rhetoric he was elevating, because she had experienced it personally for decades. While less people may have called her hysterical in 2016 after seeing what she warned about manifest before their eyes — there were still disillusioned people both on the left and the right who hated Hillary so bad that they couldn’t even entertain the thought of her being right. Being at the brunt of these attacks and conspiracies for decades, Hillary Clinton could see it coming.
In 2016, she warned that the “vast right wing conspiracy” has become better funded since the 90’s. In 2016, she dedicated an entire speech to denouncing the alt-right and warning of what was to come:
“A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far, dark reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.”
What is it about Hillary Clinton that attracts so much vitriol and discontent? It was the result of decades of vilification, conspiracies, and the suspension of all logic in pursuit of power. Hillary Clinton represented a serious threat to the power of the right-wing, they could see her star shining in the 90’s and watched her election to the Senate in 2000 with anticipation. They feared her popularity, her intelligence, her political abilities, and the very real possibility that she may become the first woman to serve as president. They did everything in their power to tarnish her name and assassinate her character, and it became easier to buy into it on both sides of the aisle.
This weekend, Hillary Clinton gave an interview to the New York Times in which she discussed QAnon and why they are so obsessed with her. Mark Rothschild, one of the pre-eminent researchers of American conspiracy theories who has a book coming out this year on QAnon, told the Times that QAnon really took off and proliferated because of their obsession with Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton had her own hypothesis about being a lightning rod for radical conspiracy theories:
“This is rooted in ancient scapegoating of women, of doing everything to undermine women in the public arena, women with their own voices, women who speak up against power and the patriarchy,” she said. “This is a Salem Witch Trials line of argument against independent, outspoken, pushy women. And it began to metastasize around me.”
The dangerous course that the United States has been placed on when it comes to conspiracy theories being increasingly prevalent in American politics had its origins in the attempted destruction of Hillary Clinton. To limit her power. To do whatever it takes to prevent her from becoming the first woman president. And this is where we are now.
It is a true tragedy that one of the most accomplished women in American politics did not ascend to the highest office, especially when she got three million more votes, and an utterly incompetent and unhinged man with no experience in government was elected instead. America will have to live with that mistake for eternity. The proliferation of conspiracies in the United States has now become a dangerous political tool to advance ideological agendas. It is going to take a long time for America to recover. But don’t say that Hillary Clinton didn’t warn you.
