Vast right-wing conspiracy

Last updated

"Vast right-wing conspiracy " is a phrase popularized by a 1995 memo by political opposition researcher Chris Lehane and then referenced in 1998 by the then First Lady of the United States Hillary Rodham Clinton, in defense of her husband, President Bill Clinton, characterizing the continued allegations of scandal against her and her husband, including the Lewinsky scandal, as part of a conspiracy by Clinton's political enemies. [1] The term has been used since, including in a question posed to Bill Clinton in 2009 to describe verbal attacks on Barack Obama during his early presidency. [2] Hillary Clinton mentioned it again during her 2016 presidential campaign. [3]

Contents

Earlier uses

While popularized by Hillary Clinton in her 1998 The Today Show interview, [4] [5] the phrase did not originate with her. In 1991 the Detroit News wrote:

Thatcher-era Britain produced its own crop of paranoid left-liberal films. ... All posited a vast right-wing conspiracy propping up a reactionary government ruthlessly crushing all efforts at opposition under the guise of parliamentary democracy. [Emphasis added.] [6]

An Associated Press story in 1995 also used the phrase, relating an official's guess that the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of "maybe five malcontents" and not "some kind of vast right-wing conspiracy." [7]

Popularization

1995 memo

A 332-page memo titled "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" was commissioned by Mark Fabiani and written by Chris Lehane in 1995. It was the first document to describe the conspiracies surrounding the Clintons. [8] It described how conservative media outlets such as The American Spectator spread conspiracy theories about the suicide of Vince Foster, the Whitewater controversy, and other events. According to the memo, these conspiracies spread from conservative think tanks to British tabloids, and then to the mainstream press. [9]

The Today Show interview

In response to ongoing accusations surrounding the Clintons' investment in a real estate development known as Whitewater in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Attorney General Janet Reno had appointed an independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, to investigate those accusations in 1994. [10] Starr's investigation began to branch out into other issues, from Filegate, to Travelgate, to Bill Clinton's actions in the civil case of his alleged sexual harassment of Paula Jones prior to his presidency. In the course of the last of these, White House intern Monica Lewinsky signed an affidavit that she had not had a relationship with Clinton, but Lewinsky's confidant Linda Tripp had been recording their phone conversations and offered Starr tapes of Lewinsky describing her feelings for, and alleging intimate encounters with, the president. Clinton was asked to give a deposition, and accusations that he lied about an affair under oath first made national headlines on January 17, 1998, when the story was picked up by the conservative-right e-mail newsletter The Drudge Report . Despite swift denials from Bill, the media attention grew.

On January 27, 1998, Hillary appeared on NBC's The Today Show , in an interview with Matt Lauer.

Lauer: You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle, and that one side or the other is going down here.
Clinton: Well, I don't know if I've been that dramatic. That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this—they have popped up in other settings. This is—the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.

Clinton elaborated by decrying the tactics "and the kind of intense political agenda at work here." Bob Woodward recounts in his book The Agenda (1994) that the first lady claimed that when her husband was making his decision to run for the presidency in 1991, he reported receiving "a direct threat from someone in the Bush White House, warning that if he ran, the Republicans would go after him. 'We will do everything we can to destroy you personally,' she recalled that the Bush White House man had said." [1]

Later uses

David Brock, a conservative-turned-liberal author, has said he was once a part of an effort to dredge up a scandal against Clinton. [11] In 1993 Brock, then of the American Spectator , was the first to report Paula Jones' claims. [11] As Brock explained in Blinded by the Right , after learning more about the events and conservative payments surrounding Paula Jones, he personally apologized to the Clintons. He documented his experience in Blinded by the Right, wherein he alleged that Arkansas State Police troopers had taken money in exchange for testimony against Clinton which Brock had published in a previous book. Adam Curtis also discusses the concept in his documentary series The Power of Nightmares . Brock has agreed with Clinton's claim that there was a "right wing conspiracy" to smear her husband, quibbling only with the characterization of it as "vast ," since Brock contends that it was orchestrated mainly by a few powerful people. MSNBC also described the comment as once-ridiculed but now taken more seriously by "many Democrats" who point "to the well-documented efforts by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife to fund a network of anti-Clinton investigations." [12]

Specific claims of such funding have been made against conservative Republican supporter and billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. [13] Scaife played a major role in funding the Arkansas Project investigating President Clinton; former Clinton White House Counsel Lanny Davis claimed Scaife was using his money "to destroy a president of the United States." Scaife claims to be public about his political spending (q.v. [14] ). CNN stated in a study the news outlet conducted on Scaife, "If it's a conspiracy, it's a pretty open one." [15]

Hillary wrote in her 2003 autobiography, "Looking back, I see that I might have phrased my point more artfully, but I stand by the characterization of Starr's investigation [regardless of the truth about Lewinsky]." [16] By 2007, her experiences caused her to say in presidential campaign appearances that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" was back, citing such cases as the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal. [17] On the stump for Al Franken's 2008 Senate campaign, Bill acknowledged his Air America Radio show by quipping that he had been taking on the "vast right wing conspiracy before others even acknowledged that it existed." [18]

Bill, when asked on Meet the Press (September 27, 2009) whether the "vast right wing conspiracy" was involved in the attacks on President Barack Obama, said "Oh, you bet. Sure it is. It's not as strong as it was, because America's changed demographically, but it's as virulent as it was … when they accused me of murder and all that stuff." [2]

Two other figures who have used the phrase are Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman and journalist Joe Conason. Conason, in an article called "The vast right-wing conspiracy is back," referring to the National Republican Trust PAC and Newsmax, which are run by former foes of president Clinton, and who made attacks on then-President Barack Obama. The National Republican Trust PAC sponsored a campaign commercials against Obama in 2008 which FactCheck.org described as "one of the sleaziest false TV ads of the campaign." One of Newsmax's owners "was among the most insistent endorsers of the Obama birth certificate myth" and a popularizer of the canard that Clinton's White House counsel Vince Foster did not commit suicide—as determined by five official investigations—but was murdered. [19]

In some of his books, Krugman has used the phrase ("Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy" [20] ) to refer not to a conservative Republican-leaning campaign against Clinton (or Obama), but more generally to "an interlocking set of institutions ultimately answering to a small group of people that collectively reward loyalists and punish dissenters" in the service of "movement conservatism." The network of institutions provide

obedient politicians with the resources to win elections, safe havens in the event of defeat, and lucrative career opportunities after they leave office. They guarantee favorable news coverage to politicians who follow the party line, while harassing and undermining opponents. And they support a large standing army of party intellectuals and activists. [21]

In Krugman's view, the network of foundations that fund conservative scholarship, the national and regional think tanks and advocacy groups, talk radio media outlets, and conservative law firms through which they pushed their agenda to move the Republican Party to the right, far surpass in funding, size, inter-connectedness or influence anything the Democratic Party or the American political left/liberal movement have at their disposal.

2014 reemergence

In April 2014, the Clinton Presidential Center published the original 1995 memo on the alleged conspiracy. [9] The memo's author, Chris Lehane, wrote, "As for the premise of the memo, I absolutely stand by it. Not only was it right about the right wing then, it is more accurate than ever today." [22]

2016 reemergence

In 2016, Hillary said she still believed in the "vast right-wing conspiracy ," adding that it was "even better funded" 18 years later. [3] [23] However, she opined, "At this point it's probably not correct to say it's a conspiracy because it's out in the open." [3]

In October, after footage of Donald Trump "boasting" about his sexual exploits emerged and multiple women accused Trump of sexual misconduct, Melania Trump defended her husband and said, "This was all organized from the opposition." [24] Writers for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post noted that Melania's response "echoed" Hillary's original use of the phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy." [25] [24]

After the release of a deposition Bill had given to the Independent Counsel, in which he perjured himself, some conservatives began to adopt the VRWC phrasing ironically. In 2004, conservative lawyer Mark W. Smith wrote the New York Times Best Seller Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy , which came with a "membership card" that made its owner an "official member of the VRWC." Similarly, a number of newspaper, magazine, and website articles have used the phrase to report on left-wing politics. [26] [27]

Eugene Volokh's blog The Volokh Conspiracy is said to have derived its name from as a reference to the "Vast right-wing conspiracy" statement. [28]

The term "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" continues to be mocked by conservatives. [29] [30]

See also

Related Research Articles

The Whitewater controversy, Whitewater scandal, Whitewatergate, or simply Whitewater, was an American political controversy during the 1990s. It began with an investigation into the real estate investments of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their associates, Jim and Susan McDougal, in the Whitewater Development Corporation. This failed business venture was incorporated in 1979 with the purpose of developing vacation properties on land along the White River near Flippin, Arkansas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clinton–Lewinsky scandal</span> 1998 American political sex scandal

The Clinton–Lewinsky scandal was a sex scandal involving Bill Clinton, the president of the United States, and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Their sexual relationship began in 1995—when Clinton was 49 years old and Lewinsky was 22 years old—and lasted 18 months, ending in 1997. Clinton ended televised remarks on January 26, 1998, with the later infamous statement: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Further investigation led to charges of perjury and to the impeachment of Clinton in 1998 by the U.S. House of Representatives. He was subsequently acquitted on all impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in a 21-day U.S. Senate trial.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Drudge Report</span> American news aggregation website

The Drudge Report is a U.S.-based news aggregation website founded by Matt Drudge, and run with the help of Charles Hurt and Daniel Halper. The site was generally regarded as a conservative publication, though its ownership and political leanings have been questioned following business model changes in mid-to-late 2019. The site consists mainly of links to news stories from other outlets about politics, entertainment, and current events; it also has links to many columnists.

David Brock is an American liberal political consultant, author, and commentator who founded the media watchdog group Media Matters for America. He has been described by Time as "one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party".

Joe Conason is an American journalist, author and liberal political commentator. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo, a daily political newsletter and website that features breaking news and commentary. Since 2006, he has served as editor of The Investigative Fund, a nonprofit journalism center.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Mellon Scaife</span> American Mellon family heir, and newspaper owner (1932–2014)

Richard Mellon Scaife was an American billionaire, a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, and the owner and publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In 2005, Scaife was number 238 on the Forbes 400, with a personal fortune of $1.2 billion. By 2013, Scaife had dropped to number 371 on the listing, with a personal fortune of $1.4 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Media Matters for America</span> Researches and contests conservative misinformation

Media Matters for America (MMfA) is a left-leaning 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and media watchdog group. It was founded in 2004 by journalist and political activist David Brock as a counterweight to the conservative Media Research Center. It seeks to spotlight "conservative misinformation" in the U.S. media; its methods include issuing reports and quick responses. Two example initiatives include the "Drop Fox" campaign (2011-2013) that sought to discredit Fox News' "fair and balanced" claims; and a 2023 report about X that highlighted antisemitism on the platform.

The Hunting of the President is a 2004 English-language documentary film about former US President Bill Clinton. Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton appear in archived footage. The film is based on the book The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, written by investigative journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, and published by Thomas Dunne Books in 2000. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, the film premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.

Judicial Watch (JW) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit American conservative activist group that files Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits to investigate claimed misconduct by government officials. Founded in 1994, JW has primarily targeted Democrats, in particular the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton's role in them. It was founded by attorney Larry Klayman, and has been led by Tom Fitton since 2003.

Troopergate is the popular name for a political controversy that emerged in the 1990s in which several Arkansas State Troopers claimed that they had arranged sexual liaisons for Arkansas governor Bill Clinton during his time in office and had helped deceive his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Arkansas Project was a series of investigative press reports, funded primarily by conservative businessman Richard Mellon Scaife, that focused on criticism of then-President Bill Clinton and his administration. Scaife spent nearly $2 million on the project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sidney Blumenthal</span> American political writer

Sidney Stone Blumenthal is an American journalist, political operative, and Lincoln scholar. A former aide to President Bill Clinton, he is a long-time confidant of Hillary Clinton and was formerly employed by the Clinton Foundation. As a journalist, Blumenthal wrote about American politics and foreign policy. He is also the author of a multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. Three books of the planned five-volume series have already been published: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel, and All the Powers of Earth. Subsequent volumes were planned for later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hillary Clinton</span> American politician and diplomat (born 1947)

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is an American politician and diplomat who served as the 67th United States secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a U.S. senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and as the first lady of the U.S. to president Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, becoming the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major U.S. political party and the first woman to win the popular vote for U.S. president.

<i>Political Fictions</i> Essay collection by Joan Didion

Political Fictions is a 2001 book of essays by Joan Didion on the American political process.

Deputy White House counsel Vince Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park off the George Washington Parkway in Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., on July 20, 1993. His death was ruled a suicide by five official investigations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Lehane</span> American political consultant (born 1967)

Christopher Stephen Lehane is an American political consultant and cryptocurrency executive who has served as a lawyer, spokesperson and expert in opposition research for the Clinton White House, Democratic candidates for public office and various business, Labor, entertainment and professional sports organizations. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, he was a lawyer and spokesperson in the Clinton White House where he and his current business partner Mark Fabiani were called the Masters of Disaster by Newsweek magazine for their part in a "rapid-response" team employed to respond to the increasing number of investigations of the Clinton Administration. In 2012, Lehane co-authored a book on damage control titled Masters of Disaster published by Palgrave, MacMillan's academic imprint. He also wrote and produced the film Knife Fight, a political satire acquired by IFC and released in January 2013.

"Clinton crazies" is a pejorative term in American politics of the 1990s and later that refers to intense criticism of United States President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton. The phrase refers to Clinton opponents who, according to Clinton supporters, "systematically ... sought to undermine this president with the goal of bringing down his presidency and running him out of office; and that they have sought non‐electoral means to remove him from office." Such intensity of feeling existed throughout the Clinton years, leading commentators to wonder what was at the root of it. The term was especially used in reference to people and media outlets that focused on all manner of Clinton scandals and controversies, some of which had substance behind them and some of which did not.

Rex Armistead was a private detective, Mississippi Highway Patrol officer, and the leading operative for the since disbanded Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. Later, he was heavily involved as an investigator for the Arkansas Project, a co-ordinated attempt in the 1990s to investigate then U.S. President Bill Clinton. The project was funded by conservative media billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Clinton sexual assault and misconduct allegations</span> Accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States

Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001), has been publicly accused of sexual assault and/or sexual misconduct by several women: Juanita Broaddrick accused Clinton of raping her in 1978; Leslie Millwee accused Clinton of sexually assaulting her in 1980; Paula Jones accused Clinton of exposing himself to her in 1991 as well as sexually harassing her; and Kathleen Willey accused Clinton of groping her without her consent in 1993. The Jones allegations became public in 1994, during Clinton's first term as president, while Willey's and Broaddrick's accusations became public in 1999, toward the end of Clinton's second term. Millwee made her accusations in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hillary Clinton's tenure as First Lady of the United States</span>

Hillary Clinton served as the first lady of the United States from 1993 until 2001, during the presidency of her husband Bill Clinton.

References

Notes

  1. 1 2 "First Lady Launches Counterattack". Washington Post . Retrieved June 14, 2009.
  2. 1 2 Meet the Press, 21 Sept. 2009, transcript
  3. 1 2 3 Condon, Stephanie (February 3, 2016). "Hillary Clinton: The vast, right-wing conspiracy" is "even better funded" now". CBS News. Retrieved February 5, 2016.
  4. ↑ Lauer, Matt (January 27, 1998). "Hillary Clinton speaks out on Lewinsky accusations" (Video). TODAY Show. NBC News. Retrieved March 26, 2017.
  5. ↑ Maraniss, David (January 28, 1998). "First Lady Launches Counterattack". The Washington Post. pp. A01. Retrieved March 26, 2017.
  6. ↑ Glowka, Wayne; Lester, Brenda K.; Dreiseitl, INA; Hicks, Kimberly; Moon, Tanya; Patterson, Heather; Sinski, William; White, Erin; Winkeljohn, Jill; Popik, Barry (2000). "Among the New Words". American Speech. 75 (4): 430–446. doi:10.1215/00031283-75-4-430. S2CID   201763860. at p. 444
  7. ↑ Safire 2008.
  8. ↑ Garofoli, Joe (October 24, 2004). "The Spinner / How Chris Lehane, revered by some and reviled by others, gets the campaign consultant job done". SFGate. Retrieved January 11, 2017.
  9. 1 2 Good, Chris (April 18, 2014). "Clinton White House's Conspiracy Theory of Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories". ABC News. Archived from the original on January 13, 2017. Retrieved January 11, 2017.
  10. ↑ Beers, Brian (March 14, 2022). "What Was the Whitewater Scandal?".
  11. 1 2 "Reporter Apologizes For Clinton Sex Article". CNN. March 10, 1998. Archived from the original on June 14, 2008. Retrieved October 17, 2008.
  12. ↑ "Clinton: Vast right-wing conspiracy is back". NBC News. Associated Press. March 13, 2007.
  13. ↑ Media Transparency, Aggregated Grants from the Scaife Foundations. Archived 2007-06-08 at the Wayback Machine
  14. ↑ "scaife.org".
  15. ↑ Jackson, Brooks (April 27, 1998). "Who Is Richard Mellon Scaife?". CNN. Retrieved May 27, 2010.
  16. ↑ Living History, p. 446.
  17. ↑ Clinton: Vast right-wing conspiracy is back, NBC News/AP, March 13, 2007
  18. ↑ Kane, Paul (October 21, 2008). "Hillary Clinton, Al Franken and the Return of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy". The Washington Post .
  19. ↑ The vast right-wing conspiracy is back. Salon.com Oct 5, 2009
  20. ↑ Krugman 2004, pp. 217, 269–71.
  21. ↑ Krugman 2007, p. 163.
  22. ↑ Lehane, Chris (April 27, 2014). "Yeah, I Wrote the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Memo". POLITICO Magazine. Retrieved January 11, 2017.
  23. ↑ Chance, Seales (August 14, 2016). "Hillary Clinton's affinity for conspiracy theories". WIAT.com. Birmingham, AL: LIN Television Corp. (Media General). ... Clinton holds an affinity for conspiracy theories little known to the American public.
  24. 1 2 Mehta, Seema (October 18, 2016). "Melania Trump echoes Hillary Clinton as she defends her husband". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 8, 2017.
  25. ↑ Tumulty, Karen (October 18, 2016). "Melania Trump takes a page from Hillary Clinton's playbook". Washington Post. Retrieved January 8, 2017.
  26. ↑ Bai, Matt (July 25, 2004). "Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy". The New York Times Magazine . Archived from the original on April 7, 2010. Retrieved May 27, 2010.
  27. ↑ "The Clinton-McFarland Connection: A vast left-wing conspiracy?". Archived from the original on May 4, 2007. Retrieved April 28, 2007.
  28. ↑ Rosenberg, Yair (April 3, 2014). "The Volokh Conspiracy Is Out To Get You". Tablet Magazine. Retrieved February 7, 2017.
  29. ↑ Levy, Collin (January 31, 2011). "Another Vast Right Wing Conspiracy". Wall Street Journal.
  30. ↑ Lillpop, John (May 9, 2013). "Another "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy," Hillary?". Canada Free Press.

Sources

Further reading

Media coverage
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.