Hillary Clinton laughs last

For all the storm of controversy over potential Russian interference in the U.S. election, the greatest threat to American national security looks increasingly like an inside nutjob. And a botched one at that.

All evidence now suggests that a rogue encampment of dude-bro FBI agents attempted to swing the election to Donald Trump. They were aided and abetted by former U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, who appears at minimum to have had an open pipeline to highly confidential internal FBI investigations and high level discussions. From which he could spread rumours, lies and innuendo on national television.

In interviews he's alluded to advance notice of FBI director James Comey's infamous letter to Congress, and inside information on the so-called investigation by the New York office into the Clinton Foundation. Which wasn't an investigation.

Comey's feigned innocence over last week's bombshell letter to Congress was just an act. It's now clear that he was fighting the rear-guard action of a number of agents who were simultaneously feeding the Trump campaign and threatening to go to the media in an effort to defeat Hillary Clinton.

This is what a coup looks like in a banana republic or failed state.

The subtext to this is instantly recognizable to Team Estrogen. While it’s widely accepted that Hillary Clinton has low approval ratings, it's more accurate to say she's a normal candidate in every demographic except for one. But that one is large enough to skew the overall results.

White guys.

Everyone else either likes Clinton just fine or are pretty much "meh." But overall, white men don't take kindly to her, and most of them despise her.

And as no one needs reminding, white fellas as a group are pretty used to getting their way in America (and around the world). They control law enforcement, technology and social media, and it turns out a bunch of them were not going to take a Hillary Clinton presidency sitting down.

FBI and WikiLeaks attacks are a digital strip-search of a woman candidate

If the birther issue was about forcing America’s first black president to produce ID, the FBI and WikiLeaks attacks on Clinton are the ritualized digital strip-search of a woman.

This isn’t disclosure, it’s revenge porn politics. Mrs. Clinton's gender has everything to do with it.

The 2016 election campaign has turned into some ghastly Groundhog Day torture spin-off, where every morning, Clinton's sworn enemies effectively break into her digital house. They rummage through her underwear drawer, flip through her diary and scroll through her phone before posting and leaking everything on Twitter, Facebook and national TV.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, try Googling Gamergate. In almost every respect the WikiLeaks and FBI attacks parallel the well documented swarming white male online abuse of women, especially anyone who identifies as feminist. It even features almost many of the usual suspects reprising their previous Gamergate roles: Reddit, 4chan, bots, and Breitbart News writer Milos Yiannopoulos.

Breitbart News is the crusading white male alt-right news website headed by Trump’s campaign CEO Steve Bannon. In a curious foreshadowing, when Twitter suspended Yiannopoulos for his targeted abuse of SNL’s Leslie Jones last summer, WikiLeaks attacked and threatened Twitter.

Then there’s Breitbart contributor Peter Schweizer, who published Clinton Cash, the conspiracy kook-book on the Clinton Foundation that drove Giuliani's FBI gumshoe pals in Brooklyn up the wall. That book might have been widely discredited in more rational circles, but it was good enough for them. When Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice lawyers kiboshed the whole thing, they flipped out and went on a rampage.

It was never the point to get real dirt on Hillary Clinton herself, which anyhow failed to materialize.

The point is to sow doubt.

Sowing doubt about a woman is easy as pie. Just lie about her every single day and promise that tomorrow you’ll produce the evidence.

Never before has a presidential candidate been so nakedly attacked by malicious actors whipping a baying mob into hysteria. All aided by a gullible media easily co-opted into collaborating in a criminal assault on ethics and fundamental decency.

And underpinning this entire drama is the theme of public entitlement—that we have an absolute unfettered claim to anything stolen from Clinton, and the right to pore over the entrails of any investigation, no matter how nutty. In the presidential debates, Clinton was forced to submit to questioning about what Wikileaks had obtained through criminal hacking by a hostile foreign government. Not a whisper of doubt over due process, fairness or privacy rippled over the public’s placidly un-furrowed brow.

That’s a gender thing, too.

The presumption of innocence and right to privacy are for white guys

Presumptions of innocence and a right to privacy are the preserve of white guys like Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Julian Assange, and Vladimir Putin, who shield themselves and their venomous armies from the disinfectant of sunlight.

No disclosure, no tax returns, no explanation, no plan.

Walled within a protective armed fortress of non-disclosure agreements, Trump himself hurls the boiling oil of hatred and abuse over the parapets at anyone who challenges him.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton has willingly acquiesced to the most intense scrutiny of any presidential candidate in history. She was objectively rated, by the Pulitzer-winning Politifact, as the most honest candidate in either party of the entire 2015-16 primary season. Edging out Bernie Sanders.

Donald Trump is a lot of things, but he has this going for him. You can’t be a casino owner—even a failed one—without becoming intimately acquainted with the darkest corners of human nature. Trump knows that facts don’t matter, emotions do.

That’s pretty much his only area of expertise, but it’s a huge one. Mistrust of women is Trump’s ace in the hole, and he knows it.

As a white male, Trump doesn’t have to justify the place which came to him as a birthright. In fact, as the least qualified, most manifestly unfit, fraudulent, racist, sexually predatory and dangerous candidate in modern American history, he thinks he only has to do one thing to defeat the most qualified, transparent, experienced and prepared candidate.

Call the woman a liar.

But today, women make up 53 per cent of voters, and they can spot this stuff at a thousand paces. If half the guys are emotional basket cases in this election, women voters can be counted on to size this thing up more calmly. Then pull the lever.

I'm calling this now.

When the dust settles on election night, the last laugh you hear will be Hillary Clinton's.