Posted on Tuesday, December 17, 2024

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by Shane Harris

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It’s become the hottest new trend in American politics: today’s “right-wing conspiracy” is tomorrow’s breaking news.

In the latest entry into this genre, a Department of Justice Inspector General report last week revealed that the FBI had at least 26 informants in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol riot. According to the report, at least four informants entered the Capitol itself, while another 13 entered the restricted area around the building. Despite the FBI claiming that it did not give any informants permission to break the law, none have been charged with a crime.

“For those keeping score at home, this was labeled a dangerous conspiracy theory months ago,” Vice President-elect JD Vance wrote on X in response to the story in a post that has now garnered 59 million views. Indeed, until this bombshell report, the Biden administration and the corporate media had derided anyone who suggested that there were FBI agents or assets at the riot as “conspiracy theorists.”

But this case is hardly the only recent instance of a “conspiracy theory” turning into verified fact. Here are just a few other prominent examples.

The Hunter Biden Laptop

In perhaps the most blatant election-year censorship campaign in American history, the Democrat Party, corporate media, and Deep State actors in the intelligence community conspired to discredit details about the infamous Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian disinformation.”

On October 14, 2020, just weeks before Election Day, the New York Post published a bombshell story about the laptop’s contents. The emails on the laptop detailed Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China and pointed to the involvement of Joe Biden in those dealings while he was vice president.

Twitter and Facebook quickly blocked users from sharing the story, with Twitter banning the Post’s entire account. With no evidence, 50 intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the story was planted by Russia as an election interference scheme, a claim parroted by the rest of the establishment media.

Anyone claiming that the laptop story was legitimate was quickly branded a “conspiracy theorist.”

Only after Joe Biden was securely in the White House did The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major outlets admit the veracity of the laptop’s contents. In 2022, the release of “The Twitter Files” confirmed that federal bureaucrats had coordinated with Big Tech companies to censor the story – enshrining yet another “conspiracy theory” in the historical record.

Trump’s 2016 Campaign Was Spied On

Donald Trump himself earned the title of “conspiracy theorist” following the 2016 election for claiming that the Hillary Clinton campaign was working with Obama administration officials to spy on his campaign.

For years, the media openly mocked Trump and anyone who repeated this “conspiracy theory.”

Years later, however, we know that Trump was exactly correct. The Obama FBI used unverified and completely bogus claims from Clinton campaign operatives to obtain a FISA warrant to monitor Trump campaign officials.

In other words, as The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board put it in 2022, “Trump really was spied on.”

The COVID-19 Lab Leak Theory

In February 2020, The New York Times blasted Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton for repeating what the paper called a “fringe conspiracy theory” that the virus which caused COVID-19 may have escaped from a Chinese lab. The media similarly mocked Trump and any other conservative who defended the plausibility of the lab leak theory and demanded more transparency from China.

Democrats and the corporate media instead aligned with Beijing, focusing on discrediting Trump. Those who questioned the narrative that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan wet market faced backlash, were deplatformed, or even investigated by federal authorities. The Times suppressed a story by one of its own science writers that supported the lab leak theory, while other outlets dismissed the hypothesis as “debunked.”

Fast forward to February 2023, and the FBI concluded that a lab leak was not only possible, but the “probable” source of the pandemic, an assessment supported by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Democrats and the media have since been forced to change their tune on the lab leak theory, though apologies have been sparse to the so-called “conspiracy theorists” who called to investigate it in the first place.

Transgender Surgeries for Minors

One of the most pernicious left-wing lies to arise in recent years is the claim that doctors are not performing irreversible transgender surgeries on minor children. With rare exceptions, the corporate media has been happy to repeat transgender activists’ line that conservative outrage over transgender surgery on minors is nothing but right-wing fearmongering.

But according to a report out this October, at least 5,700 children underwent transgender surgeries between 2019 and 2023. Not only are transgender surgeries on minors happening, they are far more widespread than even many on the right previously believed. That shockingly high number also does not even include the thousands of other children as young as eight years old who have been placed on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

There are undoubtedly plenty of actual conspiracy theories out there with no basis in reality. But increasingly it seems as if “conspiracy theory” may have a new definition when it comes to American politics: an obvious truth that Democrats and their allies in the media don’t want the public to believe.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.