AMBER DUKE: The Rise of BlueAnon.

BlueAnon is a blanket term coined by some conservatives to describe liberal and left-wing conspiracy theories. It intentionally rhymes with QAnon, the arguably better-known right-wing conspiracy, and mostly arose in response to what many regard as the Russian collusion hoax, the idea that Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election. Several stories stemming from the Russian collusion hoax were outlandish and unverified yet embraced by prominent members of the media and people in high-level positions within the national security state and the Democratic Party. The claims were also the subject of a special counsel investigation into President Trump.

Jonathan Chait, a political reporter for New York magazine, has said that claims of Russia blackmailing Trump with a so-called “pee tape” are “perfectly consistent with what we know about both parties.” Propelled by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s claim to have evidence of collusion, and consistently false reporting from the media about Trump campaign contacts with Russia, left-wing figures like Rosie O’Donnell, Bette Midler, Spike Lee and the Krassenstein brothers pushed the hashtag #MuellerTime to insinuate that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump would lead to his imminent indictment and arrest.

Disinformation experts and media outlets have routinely placed the bulk of the blame for “misinformation” and “disinformation” online on right-wing sources. But they have mostly failed to acknowledge the breadth and impact of the Russian collusion hoax, plus other popular BlueAnon fake stories: that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was involved in a gang rape; that actor Jussie Smollett was attacked by two Trump supporters; that Trump failed to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville in summer 2017; that Trump told people to inject bleach during the pandemic and other stories that were shared — or are still peddled to this day — at levels as high as the presidency. Most also ignore the stories and ideas that were deemed right-wing misinformation but ended up being correct: the Hunter Biden laptop story; that Covid-19 likely came from a laboratory leak; that there were undercover federal agents at the January 6 riot; or that President Joe Biden was suffering obvious cognitive decline. All were labeled conspiracy theories; all turned out to be true.

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[David] Harsanyi, though, says BlueAnon has always been around. It just didn’t have a neat nickname until 2021. “The left has been pushing wild conspiracies and paranoia for decades. [In  The Rise of Blue Anon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists] I lay out that history,” Harsanyi says. “Are Democrats any more likely to accept the results of a presidential election? They haven’t done it in decades. After Trump won in 2016, they simply gave into their worst conspiratorial instincts. It’s a lot easier to convince people that their political opponents are crypto-Putin assets hell-bent on instituting The Handmaid’s Tale than it is to debate them.

Decades is indeed true. As Steve Hayward wrote in his 2007 review of James Piereson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:

That Kennedy was killed at the hands of a Communist should have had a clear and direct meaning: “President Kennedy was a victim of the Cold War.” Everyone had reasons for averting their gaze from this fact. For Lyndon Johnson, it would have carried frightful implications for foreign policy if it turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald had links to Castro or the KGB (which Piereson suggests is remotely possible). Liberals didn’t want to dwell on this fact for a mix of other reasons. In the early hours after JFK was shot, we didn’t yet know of Oswald’s Communist background, and the media jumped to the conclusion that Kennedy’s killing must have been the work of right-wing extremists. The day after the assassination, James Reston wrote in the New York Times that the assassination was the result of a “streak of violence in the American character” and that “from the beginning to the end of his administration, [Kennedy] was trying to tamp down the violence of extremists from the right.”

This “meme,” as we would say today, so quickly took hold that it could not be shaken, even after Oswald’s noxious background began to come out. Indeed, the notion of collective responsibility would be repeated five years later after Robert Kennedy was murdered by a Communist Arab radical who professed deep hatred for America.

As Brent Bozell has written, “Few Barry Goldwater backers forget 1964, when [Walter] Cronkite repeatedly smeared the GOP nominee:”

When Goldwater accepted an invitation to visit a U.S. Army facility in Germany, CBS hack Daniel Schorr said he was launching his campaign in “the center of Germany’s right wing.” Kurtz recalled that on the day of JFK’s assassination the year before, Cronkite nodded his head in thinly veiled contempt when handed a note on air that Goldwater said “no comment.” Never mind that Goldwater was attending his mother-in-law’s funeral that day.

Watergate is looking increasingly BlueAnon-adjacent in light of everything the left has thrown at Trump since 2016. (And speaking of Watergate and CBS…)

And the hits just keep on coming: How Trump assassination conspiracy theories went mainstream.

Finally, entering its fifth decade on the charts! Climate activist: “The next five years are make or break.”

UPDATE: Mike Lindell is A-OK.