Richard Fernandez is skeptical, but nonetheless willing to take the establishment’s Russian-conspiracy theory and run with it.

The outbreak of unrest [of the rebellion of the commons against the elites from Britain to France to the USA] … is so vast …. that the Washington Post had an op-ed explaining it: Putin at work. The hand of Russian collusion is seen everywhere. “From Brexit to NATO and the shutdown, Putin is winning so much he might get tired of winning,” it said.

We don’t know exactly how much Moscow spent supporting influence operations to impact the U.K. and U.S. elections in 2016, but it seems hard to overstate how good the Kremlin’s return has been on what Western intelligence agencies believe was a relatively modest investment.

Russian efforts to manipulate American voters during the last presidential campaign have been aggressively covered in this space, but the Kremlin’s bid to boost Brexit was perhaps even more brazen. The Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a meaty report last week about Russian influence operations overseas, but it was entirely overshadowed by the latest bombshells stemming from special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation. The 206-page report outlines Russian disinformation campaigns across 19 countries. It highlights loopholes in U.K. campaign finance laws that might have allowed an influx of Russian money to boost the referendum. That’s not to mention the propaganda from Russian-run Twitter and Facebook accounts, plus state-funded media.

It’s worldwide conspiracy. If anything the problem with the Mueller investigation is it is too small — like sending a rowboat after a megalodon. If the op-ed is right then they’re going to need a bigger special prosecutor. The alternative explanation for the perfect political storm now rocking the West is that a substantial number of people actually voted for Brexit, Donald Trump and are angry with the policies of Emmanuel Macron, reflecting some kind of global revolt by the Western ‘have nots’ against the ‘haves’.

This possibility was advanced by Glenn Reynolds writing in USA Today. “Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad.” It’s the Deplorables versus the New Class.

Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. …

But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.

RTWT

Let’s see, this week, Donald Trump continued his public attacks on the family of a Muslim US Army Captain killed while serving in Iraq.

Trump made it clear that he is uninterested in GOP unity by announcing specifically that he is not supporting Paul Ryan or John McCain.

Airing of the famous Daisy political commercial by Democrats was made redundant when some source within the Trump Campaign leaked to Joe Scarborough the unsettling information that Donald Trump asked an unidentified foreign policy expert engaged in advising him, three times, why the US could not use nuclear weapons. That one made headlines all day yesterday.

The same RNC bigwigs who suppressed opposition and rammed the Trump nomination through the Convention two weeks ago, this week, are reportedly panicking.

Reince Priebus is described as “very frustrated” and “stressed,” because he is “running out of excuses” to offer party bigwigs about Trump’s political incompetence and indifference to basic political norms. Republicans are panicking because Trump is frittering away a chance to defeat Hillary Clinton amid “self inflicted mistakes” and “missed opportunities.”

Trump is sinking in the polls. Even Fox News is giving Hillary a ten-point lead.

And it’s only the beginning of August. The boxcar-loads of opposition research the Dems and their media allies have been saving up are still just sitting there, waiting to be unloaded and fired.

We are faced with two possibilities: either Donald Trump is such a spoiled and totally-deranged sociopathic narcissist that he is out of touch with reality, unadvisable and uncontrollable, and his personal dementia is causing him to self-destruct in the course of the campaign, or the Clinton-Trump Conspiracy Theory, the hypothesis that Trump was put up to all this by Bill Clinton as a diabolically-clever, Hail-Mary-Pass strategy to sabotage the Republican Party’s nominating process and elect the hideously-unpopular Hillary in what-ought-to-have-been a Republican landslide victory year, is really true.

(NYM contemplated the Conspiracy theory as far back as February and found further evidence in May.)

There is no way to know the truth at present, but it’s going to be interesting to watch events unfold.

Either way, whether Donald Trump is simply so nutsy-cuckoo that he can’t help sabotaging himself, or whether he is throwing the election deliberately and intentionally, it is a sad commentary on all those loco-in-the-cabeza Trumpshirts out there that they have been themselves barking mad enough to pin their hopes and lend their support to a totally-unqualified, ethically-challenged, blowhard millionaire, who is dubiously Republican and obviously anything but a principled conservative. Don’t blame National Review or the Conservative Movement for electing Hillary, when it was you who rejected all the decent, rational, conservative, and qualified GOP candidates and went whoring after a Reality-TV Celebrity Clown with a big mouth and a handful of airy promises and crackpot policy positions.