“This never happened. It will shock you how much this never happened.”

– Don Draper, ‘Mad Men’

Conspiracy theories have provoked a lot of discussion lately. In particular, the president is supposed to be full of them.

Lately, we are told by the mainstream media monolith that the president has “promoted” a latter-day ‘birther’ conspiracy theory about Kamala Harris being ineligible to run for vice president. These same media warriors for truth and seriousness have used a press briefing to badger the president about the outlandish QAnon melodrama, in the hopes of getting him to say something flattering about it–or at least to catch him not condemning it strongly enough.

Similarly, Democrats have dismissed as a conspiracy theory the probe of whether the Russian collusion witch hunt was a calculated and coordinated effort by denizens of the administrative state to unseat a president they hated.

Why these widespread efforts to paint the president and his supporters as conspiracy kooks?

Because the Democrats’ grand strategy for the 2020 election is the flip side of a conspiracy theory: ‘It never happened.’

We might call this ‘no-conspiracy theorizing.’

‘It never happened’ has a rich and varied history. To pick just one juicy example, Muslim leaders and academics in the Middle East not infrequently explain that the Shoah (Holocaust) “never happened.” They dismiss the Shoah as nothing more than a canard leveraged by Jews to get sympathy and goodies from their gullible targets.

“Oh please!” they exclaim. “Do you really think a group of highly placed Germans hatched an elaborate, sinister plot to exterminate all the Jews? How gullible can you be?”

To paraphrase Don Draper, you would be shocked at how many average folks living in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries accept this dismissal of the Shoah. (Though most Americans won’t find it familiar, Russia has perfected the art of ‘It never happened’, starting in the Soviet era and running up to today–as in “Putin poisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny? Ridiculous. It never happened. Navalny just drank some bad tea!”)

Democrats’ strategy to win over low-information, undecided voters in the United States follows the Shoah- and Russian-denial playbook. The more the Democrats discredit the president and his supports as conspiracy kooks, the easier it is to use ‘It never happened’ to pull the screen in front of their own unconstitutional, unconscionable, and sneaky campaigns to remove President Trump.

Americans who have not studied the record of evidence closely–and most have neither the time nor the interest–find it hard to believe the Democrats have perpetrated the heinous transgressions against orderly government that are being uncovered.

Denial is a smooth downhill path, and most prefer it.

CONSPIRACIES: NOT A BINARY

The neat pair of ‘Everything’s a conspiracy’ and ‘It never happened’ amounts to a false binary. A wide swath of territory exists outside these black-and-white mindsets. Examples may be helpful:

Imagine that a cargo plane carrying pallets of currency from the US Mint explodes midair. A light rain of bills flutters down in the streets of a city neighborhood. Residents rush out and fill their pockets, then scurry back inside. When the Secret Service (a subsidiary of the Treasury Department) arrive to investigate … nobody took anything.

Nobody saw anyone take anything.

Nobody knows anything about anything.

Would you call this event “a conspiracy”? There was no meeting, discussion, or plotting, either before money fell from the sky or after. Rather, an opportunity sparked coordination among everyone in the neighborhood; and everyone understood what they needed to do without being told–grab the cash, then play dumb. Everyone wins.

Most shady or illegal group activities fall into this gray area: not an explicit conspiracy, but not random, either. Call it “tacit cooperation.”

A nerd comes waking down the hallway where two bullies are hanging around. One bully sticks out his foot, the other sees it and gives the nerd a shove. No conspiracy, just an opportunity both bullies recognized as soon as it presented itself.

Democrats have resorted to grubby tacit cooperation again and again since Candidate Trump came down the escalator. When an opportunity arose (e.g. public fears of Russian influence on the election), liberal bureaucrats, congresspersons, activists, and journalists sprung into action from their respective corners. One falsifies a FISA warrant; another unmasks targets; another lays a perjury trap; another leaks the Steele Dossier; another publishes the fabrications and legitimizes it as “news”; and still another starts a congressional investigation into the miasma of nonsense.

No explicit plan. No conspiracy. They know how the game works, that’s all. When one bully sticks his foot out in front of a nerd ….

And when a counter-investigation comes through to probe the wreckage of the coordinated assault, everyone plays dumb.

“What coordinated assault? That’s crazy talk. It never happened. He’s so stupid he probably just tripped himself.”

WHAT IF KAMALA AND WHAT’S-HIS-NAME WIN?

All the fluff and nonsense at the Democratic National Convention serves one overarching purpose: to distract the public from the campaign of tacit cooperation waged within the government since 2016 by Democrats–most recently, the tacit cooperation of Democrat mayors and governors with Antifa/BLM activists and thugs.

Their implicit agreement might be stated: “You agitate cities and intimidate the public, and we’ll hold back police, play dumb, and repeat ‘mostly peaceful protesters’ and ‘historic movement’ on a loop.”

But we ain’t seen nothing yet. If voters elect Kamala Harris (vice-)president, ‘It never happened’ will become official policy of the United States.

All investigations into Democrat shenanigans will snap to a halt. All the vandals arrested for setting fires and looting stores will quietly walk out the door free, with a whispered “Thank you for your service.” The statistics on COVID infections and deaths–collected and analyzed by overwhelmingly liberal bureaucrats and experts across the country–will suddenly and miraculous improve, and improve, and keep improving.

Democrat governors will decide (based on “the science,” of course) that they really should open businesses and schools right away and get life and the economy back to normal.

By March 2021, it will be like the virus, the riots, and the serial crypto-coups against President Trump never happened.

You will be shocked at how much they never happened.