Book Review: The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists, By David Harsanyi

Book Review: The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists, By David Harsanyi

It didn’t look like a Nazi rally. But that is what the Democrats and the media told Americans of all stripes they were lined up for outside Madison Square Garden in late October. Donald Trump’s sold-out event, they insisted, was really a Hitler-praising, racist, rally of hate.

Of course, none of that was true:

Worst. Nazi. Rally. Ever. pic.twitter.com/FNWqbu8EoR

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 27, 2024

But the truth never matters to the left. The Democrats needed a “real” explanation for why their own candidate was so deeply unpopular, a fact they had to face every time Trump took the stage, to thunderous applause. While Trump was turning fans away from his overflow events, Harris was struggling to fill the room.

If the candidates’ campaign rallies were any sign, Harris was going to lose in a landslide.

And losing is one thing the left can never countenance, political commentator David Harsanyi argues convincingly in his compelling new book, The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists.

Instead, “it’s gotta be something else … some unseen force pulling the strings.”

“BlueAnon” is a play on QAnon; it’s what Harsanyi calls the conspiracy theorists on the left.

Though we’ve been trained to associate conspiracy theories with the far right, Harsanyi makes the case that they’ve become the weapon of choice for the Democrats:

Over the past decades, the American left and its institutions have mainstreamed a unique brand of political paranoia. The modern Democratic Party’s policy prescriptions—even what it views as our most pressing societal problems—are increasingly tethered to groundless or sensationalized anxieties, myths, revisionist histories, pseudoscientific alarmism, and outright lies.

Ever since Russiagate, the left has been firing rounds of crazy talk to shoot down the chances of another Trump presidency: the Hunter Biden laptop story was “disinformation”; January 6^th was a coup attempt; and, less well known but my personal favorite, if Trump wins, he might “turn off the Internet” —to name just a few in the book.

For peak hysteria, Harsanyi sends us to The View, where Conspiracist-in-Chief Joy Behar announced that if Trump gets into office, he’s going use Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s suggested policy plan, to destroy the country.

“It’s the blueprint for a fascist regime,” she warned:

It’s a far-right plan for destroying democracy that Trump’s team wants to implement on day one. … They want to ban abortion, starve schoolchildren — eliminating breakfast and lunch for school kids… They want to have mass deportations of immigrants. They want to gut healthcare. ‘Everything is very disturbing because it’s a very dark, dark vision of what America could look like . . . it becomes a dictatorship and he becomes the king,’ added cohost Sunny Hostin.

That, of course, is projection. As Harsanyi explains throughout the book, it’s BlueAnon that has “created an environment that justifies authoritarianism. If stopping the opposition is the only way to protect the foundations of ‘democracy’ and the future of the planet, then surely anything one does to prevail can be rationalized and justified.”

In other words, according to the left, the only way to preserve democracy is to destroy it. That’s obviously “an extraordinarily dangerous way to conceptualize politics in a free country,” the author observes.

But there’s hope. In his conclusion, written before the election, Harsanyi predicted that the left would overplay its hand; “sooner or later, voters will wonder why none of their apocalyptic predictions ever come true.”

He was right, and it was sooner.

This November, regular Americans realized they could rely on their own eyes and ears—not the lies the press tells them—to decide whether Trump is a “threat to democracy.”

That’s what this voter did:

MICHIGAN VOTER: "I've heard so much about Trump being angry and he's a fascist and dictator — but problem is, when I listen to him, I don't hear any of that." pic.twitter.com/1iX2IAchs6

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 27, 2024

And that’s what the left failed to count on this time. Americans hadn’t only decided to trust Trump; they decided to trust themselves.

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