Is there any way to drain the fever swamps so we can stand together on firmer, higher ground?
Hillary Rodham Clinton was the Democratic nominee for president in 2016 and served as U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. This column was adapted from her newly published book, “Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty.”
The rise of social media allowed white-power leaders to more easily reach and radicalize thousands of recruits. Hate-fueled memes and videos circulate online, evading detection in the dark corners of the internet with coded hashtags and innuendo. Things only got worse when Donald Trump publicly and proudly fanned the flames of racial resentment from the campaign trail and then the White House, emboldening white supremacists to emerge from the shadows.
I saw firsthand how fast conspiracy theories could spread and radicalization could take hold. During the 2016 campaign, a shocking number of people became convinced that I am a murderer, a terrorist sympathizer and the evil mastermind behind a child-sex-abuse ring. Alex Jones, the right-wing talk show host, posted a video about “all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.”
This was not the first time I was the subject of wild conspiracy theories or partisan rage that veered into mania. In the 1990s, supermarket tabloids used to splash headlines such as “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby” across their front pages. I was even burned in effigy by a crowd in Kentucky furious that I had proposed taxing cigarettes to help fund universal health care for all Americans. The president of the Kentucky Association of Tobacco Supporters chanted “Burn, baby, burn” as he poured gasoline on a scarecrow in a dress labeled “i’m hillary.” By 2016, I fully expected to play a starring role in the fever dreams of extremists at the margins of American politics.
But something had changed. The margins infected the mainstream. Social media gave conspiracy theories far wider reach than ever before. Fox News and other right-wing media outlets gave repeated outlandish lies “credibility.” And before Trump, we’d never had a presidential candidate — and then an actual president — who used the biggest bully pulpit in the world to be an actual bully and traffic in this kind of trash. The results were tragic but predictable.