There’s something really weird about the bad health rumor surrounding Hillary that keeps grabbing at my skirt and making me look at it.

Not so much the rumor itself, but the startlingly disproportionate effort to silence it.

Firstly, can I just say that when I first heard her health mentioned, it didn’t spark anything on my radar at all. She’s a 68-year-old woman, I thought to myself, of course things are going to be falling apart a little. I brushed it off as low-key sexism. A chance for Red Pill activists to photoshop demeaning pictures of women. As a feminist and a champion of women, I have a highly tuned ear to the echoes of insinuations and diminishments spawned originally from the furious trollings of the Men’s Rights Activists crowd whose only problem with any woman is that she exists.

I am relentless about keeping my eyes on the actions of those in charge, and not giving any weight to the stories around them, and I do not want my legitimate concerns about the pattern of Hillary Clinton’s actions being derailed and co-opted by a group of men whose only problem with her is that she’s a powerful woman.

My issue with Hillary Clinton, and the Clintons in general, has always been about their actual agenda; how their actions extrapolate to a dystopian and apocalyptic endgame vision for our future. I am vigilant about watching their actions and their patterns and extrapolating from there, and not being distracted by all the stories they, and other people, tell about those actions.

But something keeps drawing me back to these rumors. Not the stories themselves, but the disproportionate actions of some very powerful people to kill this story.

The Huffington Post fired a journalist and deleted his two stories that merely pointed to rumors about her health. He then got threatened. Google’s search algorithm on “Hillary’s Health” is suspiciously out of step with Bing and Yahoo.

Those actions seem very out of step with what I would have thought amounted to a bit of clickbait. She might be sick but the evidence is scant. The rumor is based on a hurtful and mean photoshop of a stain on her skirt, a photo of her helper holding something that might be medicine, some ripples in her clothing that may or may not be hiding medical devices or just bullet-proof clothing, and the word of an anonymous, unverified source that she sleeps 18 hours a day. The tweet of her “medical records” was never proven (although the doctor in question’s son died mysteriously after he tweeted it). There are videos of her manic and stressed, but I would be too if I was juggling that many pay-to-play requests. Keeping all those powerful people happy is hard work, and maintaining that kind of network of corruption is taxing. So many things to remember and you need to do it in your head mainly because you can’t have a paper trail, and there are so many promises and lies to keep track of; of course it’s going to stress you out. You are going to be snappy and terse and manic at times.

Whether all that intense stress has had long-term neurological consequences, I have no idea. But the actual evidence is scant and hearsay, and even if a few people believed she might be sick, of what consequence is that? This is the woman whose career has survived far worse factual allegations than that! The crackdown on this story is way out of proportion to its actual content and apparent consequences.

Which makes me very suspicious.

The story itself is nothing, it’s the effort to kill it that makes me think we’re hovering over something big here.

Because even if she is sick — so what? She’s 68! Of course she’s going to be a bit wonky in some areas. My mom is 68 and in good health for her age, but of course things are not what they used to be. Being a woman is very stressful on the body, especially one of their generation who were the first to take advantage of being able to work, but were expected to continue their considerable load of unpaid female work, too. My mother worked full-time and raised four kids (and the occasional stray) and several pets while helping out at church and at school, looking after the elderly family members, putting on all the family celebrations, keeping all the second-hand clothes circulating, bowling up three meals a day to us all, and keeping the house immaculate. She even ironed. The first flush of so-called emancipated women were more enslaved than we had ever been. “You can do anything” was quickly co-opted by the patriarchy into “You should do everything.” We tried to break free but the noose merely tightened.

Hillary Clinton is very much a woman of that generation. She has worked her guts out her whole life, enabling her husband’s every dream and desire, hiding his mistakes, and getting him to the highest office on the planet. In the meantime, she was in her own demanding career, fulfilling all her female duties including her duty to have children, and juggling a thousand different people’s wants and making them all happen. We all know women like Hillary Clinton. She keeps everyone happy in a giant juggling act. Most women are like her, just that the people we’re keeping happy aren’t usually so evil and their requirements aren’t always so obviously malicious and species-killing.

All that stress takes its toll. All that effort remembering who you told what and exactly what you promised them and using all your creativity to work out how to provide it — that’s very taxing. It was not surprising to me that her body might be trying to get her to slow down and take a nap occasionally. I feel some real sisterhood in that and, even though I don’t like where she’s taking us, I found myself saluting her in my mind occasionally and sending her my love. Being a woman is freaking hard work and I am not without empathy. I want her true emancipation as much as I want my own. We will all get out of here together, or not at all. I know that.

Which is why this worries me so much. If she is sick, and they are intent on hiding it, then to flog her relentlessly on the endless ghoulish carnival of the election circuit seems so cruel, and to make her pretend she’s fine as well is just extra torture. Of course, it’s fine if that’s her choice. But is it her choice? Something about all of this keeps nagging me.

And very sad. Let’s just assume for a second that she is really sick, and the powers that be don’t want anyone to know. So that means they are wheeling out this frail old body pumped up on the kinds of pharmaceutical drugs, the kind of life-shortening shots that are dubiously given to healthy young athletes to push through their body’s intense desire to stop and lie down and repair. This little old lady. Why? And why does she, in particular, need to do this? The establishment just needs someone to do their bidding, so why not let her drop out and install another friend of Wall Street et al? If we’ve learned nothing else in this horror show of an election cycle, it’s that those guys just do exactly what they want. It wouldn’t matter if the Democrat’s Charter expressly forbid installing a nominee outside of the primary process pool, it wouldn’t even matter if the Charter said in black and white that they must give the nomination to someone specifically named Bernie Sanders if someone drops out; they ignored the Charter by colluding with Hillary to get her the nomination, a little point of order like that is easily over-ridden. If she dropped out, we all know it wouldn’t matter how loud the protests were, the DNC would install whomever they liked as their nominee. And given all the promises they’ve made to various powerful interests in return for donations, they would install whoever was aptly subordinate enough to make good on those pay-to-play promises.

Here's Hillary's heavily redacted FBI interview: https://t.co/ZnaQwAfCqL

Summary: she doesn't recall, anything, ever pic.twitter.com/wQB1Cj8oGk — Pat the Berner (@SilERabbit) September 3, 2016

So, why do they need Hillary in particular? It’s weird.

I don’t have an answer for that. I feel so sorry for her right now. If the above is true, I don’t think she’s even allowed to drop out. All I can think is that they must be trying to wheel her past some sort of goal-post. If she was my mother, I’d be so mad at them. Chelsea Clinton made a telling slip-up very early in the campaign by calling Bernie “President Sanders.” That little tidbit popped into my brain unbidden just recently and keeps snagging my skirt whenever I walk past it. Maybe she knew back then that her mother didn’t have much time left? Maybe she’d thought through what would probably happen when her mother dies and her extrapolation was that Sanders would end up in the White House?

I don’t know, this is all hearsay, I’m just pointing at something and saying, “That looks weird, what is that?” and hoping the hive mind of the internet can unearth the truth.

What are we looking at here, internet? What do you think’s going on?

[Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images]