Hillary Clinton temporarily overcame her severe allergy to press conferences after the final presidential debate, holding an impromptu gathering with members of the press on her plane, only to cut it short the instant someone brought up the bird-dogging scandal brought to light in James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas videos.

“I know nothing about this. I can’t deal with every one of his conspiracy theories,” said Clinton of the videos, Real Clear Politics reports. “But I hope you all have something to eat and drink on the flight back to New York.”

#cheers #conspiracytheory #vindication #redemption #eyesareopening #peopleareawakening #wakeup A photo posted by Joe Rosario (Aevitas) (@esoteric_enlightenment) on Oct 20, 2016 at 4:18pm PDT

Now, leaving aside for the moment the drop-dead hilarious claim that she “knows nothing about” a series of videos that even her propaganda syndicates like CNN have been forced to cover due to intractable public interest, two of the main figures featured in O’Keefe’s videos were fired. They were shown describing in lengthy, comic book supervillain-like monologues their involvement with a conspiracy to provoke violence at Donald Trump rallies in front of the media on behalf of the Democratic Party, and then when the videos surfaced, they lost their jobs. That’s not a “theory.” That’s just a thing that happened.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines conspiracy as “a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal,” so it is certainly appropriate for the Clinton campaign and its corporate media cronies to paint such things as conspiracies, since per definition that is what they are. But to describe a lengthy clip of video featuring a man bragging about something for which he is immediately made jobless as a “theory” is absurd.

A better example of a conspiracy theory would be the convoluted line of reasoning that leads people to believe that leaked documents can be both fake and stolen at the same time, simultaneously forged and pirated as a part of a grand conspiracy by Kremlin operatives that has yet to be substantiated or explained. That’s the sort of screaming-at-cars nutso theorizing you need to make a tinfoil hat to even think about.

But stuff like how leaked emails prove the DNC violated the Impartiality Clause of its Charter by conspiring to subvert the Bernie Sanders campaign and install Hillary Clinton as the nominee? Or how WikiLeaks has shown again and again the elites of the Democratic Party conspiring with the upper echelons of a wide breadth of news media organizations to manipulate public perception of Clinton and to elevate Donald Trump above the other candidates in the Republican primary? Those aren’t conspiracy theories. Those are conspiracy facts.

It’s not a “theory” that when the DNC leaks first dropped, the Committee issued an apology, the staff involved in the most egregious correspondences resigned, and Clinton and her media goons began painting Russia as the bad guy for showing Americans the truth. It is an undeniable fact that American democracy was assaulted in that way.

And yet every day we hear the Clinton campaign and its accomplices make use of the term “conspiracy theory” to try and invalidate such revelations, to try and gaslight everyone into thinking the folks shining a light on their misdeeds are the crazy ones, and to give themselves a raft to float on in the immense sea of cognitive dissonance they must surely be experiencing.

Cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced as a result of the effort required to employ conflicting perspectives at the same time, which the great prophet George Orwell called “doublethink.” A good example of Orwellian doublethink being employed in a manner straight out of the book 1984 today is how each shocking revelation by WikiLeaks is invariably greeted by a chorus of “That’s not news, that’s just normal politics, I actually like her more now that I’ve read that” from Clinton accomplices, who immediately prior to the leak drop were calling us crazy conspiracy theorists for saying that, for example, Donald Trump was deliberately pushed to the forefront of the Republican race in a conspiracy between the Clinton campaign and their corporate media subordinates. That’s some high-level mental gymnastics right there, and the effort required can put a high degree of strain on one’s psychological comfort.

The means by which Hillary supporters cope with this strain is called compartmentalization. In compartmentalizing two conflicting ideas, like the notion that Donald Trump is a scary lunatic who mustn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes when Hillary Clinton is the one who keeps pushing for war with a nuclear superpower, they set up a kind of mental barrier between the two concepts, refusing to allow them to interact on a conscious level. That’s why debating a Hillary supporter can be like trying to hold down a firehose, because they’ll twist and turn every which way to avoid looking at the conflicting nature of those two concepts.

And make no mistake, they absolutely have to do this in order to support Hillary Clinton. Their psychological comfort depends upon it; they’d drown in cognitive dissonance if they didn’t. The tribal dynamics of identity politics have made it more psychologically comfortable to compartmentalize and keep everything unconscious than the sense of alienation that stepping back from their ideological identifications would bring about. Humans, like all primates, are tribal creatures, and the prospect of stepping away from your tribe can be terrifying.

So in that sense their bizarre mental contortions aren’t really their fault; they’re just doing their best with the psychological equipment they’ve got. But let’s not let anyone get away with painting us as the crazy ones.

[Featured Image by Carolyn Kaster/AP Images]