Is Hillary Clinton Running a False Flag Campaign to Elect Donald Trump?

This week, Democrats and leftists in America were bombarded with the disconcerting news that in the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, Donald J. Trump is either leading Hillary Clinton or locked in a dead heat. Worse, voters in those states consider Clinton less trustworthy than Trump by significant margins. Those numbers were corroborated by a New York Times/CBS News poll that came out today, indicating that 67 percent of potential voters think of Clinton as dishonest. Last month, that poll found that Clinton held a six-point lead over Trump; this month, they’re tied at 40-40. According to the Times, the drop is largely due to the FBI’s finding of “extreme carelessness” in her handling of a private email server, which has further eroded the public’s trust:

The investigation undercut many of Mrs. Clinton’s statements over the past 18 months to explain and defend her decision to rely on the private server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y…Mrs. Clinton and her campaign celebrated the Justice Department’s decision not to indict her as a legal victory, but the political fallout appears significant, at least for now.

Most surprisingly, the Times/CBS poll shows that as of today, only 28 percent of voters hold a positive view of Clinton. All of this has happened, it should be noted, at a time when Trump’s campaign seems to be in total disarray—if there was ever a time for Clinton to deliver a killing stroke, this was it. Instead, she’s somehow lost ground.

In a normal presidential election, Clinton’s metrics would be a recipe for a quick and decisive failure. History shows us that her unfavorability ratings—56.4 percent, in the latest average of polls—are higher than any major party nominee since at least the ‘70s, and possibly ever. Facing even a below-average opponent on the Republican side, a candidate saddled with these unprecedented handicaps would inevitably lose, and lose badly.

But this is not a normal election, and Clinton’s opponent is not a normal Republican. Instead, she’s facing Donald Trump, a man who routinely gets caught in intentional lies, blustering half-truths, and endless embarrassing episodes of political ignorance. And when I said that Clinton’s numbers were historically poor, I was leaving out a giant asterisk—the only major candidate with worse metrics in modern memory is the man she’s facing today. Trump’s unfavorability ratings are even higher at 59.8 percent, and as the Times’ Nicholas Confessore and others have shown, his appeal is based almost entirely on white anxiety and varying degrees of racism. He is widely considered a dangerous candidate, and some even believe he’ll usher in an era of American fascism. There has never been a legitimate contender for the White House who inspired so much fear in so many people, and in a different year, he’d be a fringe extremist with no prayer of winning.

So ask yourself this, as a mental exercise: What would it take to make a Trump victory possible? What circumstances would have to align to facilitate such a bizarre, anomalous result, for which there is no historical precedent?

The answer, of course, lies with his hypothetical opponent. It would have to be someone who is so loathed, so mistrusted, and so singularly unpopular that principled leftists would stay home, starving that candidate of base support, while independents could convince themselves that voting for Trump was a reasonable, lesser-of-two-evils act. You see where I’m going—that opponent, losing support on all sides and making Trump seem less and less deplorable by comparison, would look lot an awful lot like Clinton.

As we watch her unfavorability numbers approach Trump’s (at 56.4 percent, she’s closer than she’s ever been to his 59.8), and as we see polls roll in indicating that voters actually trust Trump more than her, we’re watching this nightmare scenario unfold. It’s no longer a mental exercise—this is game theory in practice, and the unlikely circumstances of fate necessary to elect a lunatic like Trump are actually falling into place.

You could call it extremely coincidental, but scientific minds are trained not to believe in extreme coincidences—especially when the reality they create is so mathematically and politically improbable. What are the odds of a candidate so despised that he or she would open the door to a cretin like Trump? Too long, I’d argue, to happen by accident. If someone tossed a penny in the air 1,000 times, and it landed on heads 1,000 times, would you believe that you’d just witnessed a miracle of chance? Or would you believe that the penny was, in some way, rigged to land that way? Occam’s Razor tells us that the simplest explanation is the best, and I’m not one to believe in the voodoo of the statistically absurd. These outcomes have to be intentional, and anyone who believes otherwise is self-deluding and credulous to a dangerous degree. Which leads to my theory:

Clinton is running a false flag campaign, with the secret goal of helping Trump win the presidency.

Your next question is an obvious one: Why would she do this?

Well, we don’t exactly know. There are myriad connections between the two—Trump and his family have donated more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, and she was a guest at his wedding—but the exact mechanics behind the alliance remain hidden in shadows. Knowing Clinton’s penchant for secrecy, it’s possible that we may never know.

Luckily, we don’t need to grasp the why in order to prove the larger theory. Instead, we just have to ask ourselves a simple question: If Hillary Clinton were a false flag candidate in service of Trump, would she be behaving any differently? If the answer is no, the overwhelming evidence of collaboration is enough to convict even without solid proof. And again, unless you believe in a series of coincidental longshots, each of which individually beggar belief, then we have to assume that the most straightforward conclusion is, in fact, the truth. Let’s examine the facts:

1. If Clinton wanted Trump to win, she would need to overwhelm his negative qualities with her own.

As previously discussed—Clinton’s lack of transparency, from her compulsive flip-flopping on key issues like the TPP, to her refusal to release the transcripts of her Goldman Sachs speech, to her documented lies throughout the course of the email scandal, all heighten the perception of dishonesty that is now held by almost two-thirds of Americans. She knew it would take multiple blatant examples in order for a pattern of lying to become clear and take root in the minds of voters, so she lied on matters both great and small, from gay marriage to immigration to whether she was under sniper fire in Bosnia. Even as she rails against Trump’s racism, her rhetoric is belied by her own support for policies that led to the incarceration state. This pattern of deceit can only be purposeful—even a consummately dishonest politician, over a lifetime, couldn’t attain this level of total insincerity. There was clearly a blueprint.

2. If Clinton wanted Trump to win, she would have to defeat his dangerous opponents in the primaries.

The bulk of this work was accomplished before the primaries ever began. Clinton rose to such high status within the party that there was no significant establishment opposition to her candidacy when she declared in 2015. The only real challenge came from the far left in the form of Bernie Sanders, and though he performed better than anyone expected, Clinton’s power within the system, along with her name recognition, gave her structural advantages (ie, superdelegates) that he couldn’t overcome. And when those advantages appeared vulnerable, she was able to rely on allies within the DNC to hamper Sanders in other ways, such as implementing a favorable debate schedule.

Effectively, she neutered all other aspiring candidates, to the extent that her victory was the only possible outcome. In doing so, she protected Trump from candidates like Sanders who would have had a much easier time defeating him in a general election. For Trump to win, it was absolutely critical that Clinton emerge as the Democratic nominee.

3. If Clinton wanted Trump to win, she would have to alienate a vast segment of the left.

This was thoroughly done, right up until the point last week when Clinton’s surrogates at the party meeting in Orlando refused to vote for anti-fracking or anti-free trade language in the Democratic platform—a non-binding document. With her long history of promoting fracking around the world, her hawkish impulses that led her to vote yes on the Iraq War and push Obama into the Libya conflict, and her ties to Wall Street, she has effectively established herself as a lifelong centrist who only holds a few narrow progressive values, all of which fall in the “social” realm. Nevertheless, it has been important for her to adopt these social stances—some of which, like gay marriage, came very late—in order to maintain her status as a Democrat, and eventually grease the wheels for Trump’s victory.

This alienation has been effective—she has low support among young voters, which is likely to depress turnout for the left in November, and a large bloc of Sanders supporters have vowed to either abstain from voting, write in Sanders, or shift their allegiance to a third candidate like the Green Party’s Jill Stein. This, too, smooths the path for Trump, and shows that Clinton’s false flag plan has already paid dividends.

4. If Clinton wanted Trump to win, she would have to perform poorly with independent and moderate voters.

In open primaries, which theoretically including more conservative or centrist voters, Clinton fared worse against Bernie Sanders than in strict closed primaries where only registered Democrats could vote. It is strange that these unaffiliated voters would choose the candidate that stood farther to the left, but that’s what happened, and it proves that Clinton has the rare ability to be shunned from both the left and right—with only the traditional Democratic base firmly behind her, she’s undermined her own support, which works out perfectly for Trump as he tries to poach the moderates that, in an ordinary election, wouldn’t support him even under duress.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. We don’t know the true extent of the conspiracy—is the entire Democratic establishment involved, or just Clinton?—and we don’t know when it began, or why. But the way she’s masked Trump’s weaknesses with her own leaves the truth of the conspiracy beyond doubt. Every move she makes is calculated to benefit her opponent. His lies vanishes in the face of her constitutional dishonesty. His incompetence is muted in the face of her endless reversals. His populist extremism appears less terrifying as she positions herself against the working classes and spoils for war. The horror of Trump is mitigated by the depressing alternative, and we have to admit to ourselves that only a premeditated plan could have placed our country on the precipice of such madness. Clinton’s false flag campaign is real, and it’s working.

(Editorial Note: Yes, this is satire—based on stories like these and prompted by the truly scary/awful/heartbreaking reality that the Democrats have nominated a candidate that could actually lose to Donald Trump. Carry on.)