“Conspiracy theorist” is one of the great insults of our day. It was thrown at me onstage the other night by the popular pseudo-guru and full-time intellectual fraud Malcolm Gladwell.
Debating in front of 3,000 people about the trustworthiness (or otherwise) of the mainstream media I brought up the Hunter Biden laptop story as an example of how much of the media cannot be trusted. “Oh my God,” wailed Gladwell, like an Upper East Side teenager, flailing his arms around in horror. His colleague — New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg — almost fell off her chair. Both rocked back and forth with laughter and forced histrionics. Fancy my bringing up such a nothing-burger of a story as that, they hooted. What a lot of “conspiracy theory” I appeared to have fallen into.
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