All of conservatism is at this point one interconnected conspiracy theory, part 200-ish:
Seth Rich, a 27-year-old data analyst at the DNC, was shot and killed early one Sunday morning last month in what police say was robbery gone wrong. He was killed while walking home in a Washington, D.C. neighborhood that has seen a recent uptick in crime.
Rich's murder quickly became a fascination of right-wing conspiracy theorists, including longtime informal Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone, who told NBC News that he has been in contact with WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange.
It sure feels like a year hasn’t gone by in which Roger Stone or one of his fellow lunatics haven't made the claim that Hillary Clinton Murdered Some Guy. It is the go-to theory when discussing the first lady turned senator turned Secretary of State turned presidential nominee. For 20 years, far-right crackpots have been insisting that anyone who's ever so much as gotten Bill or Hillary Clinton's signature on a hat will have only themselves to blame when they wake up dead five or 10 or 20 years later. Before the blogs ever became a thing, before newspapers were ever online, conservatives were sending each other badly xeroxed newsletters detailing the time Bill Clinton personally flew a plane full of cocaine across the Texas border, or the time Hillary Clinton staged the suicide of a White House staffer who "knew too much,” or take-your-fracking-pick. Thank goodness Al Gore invented the internet, allowing them to save stamps.
The usual stable of lunatics are getting some assistance this time around from the aggressively anti-Clinton Julian Assange, who's already made it clear he'll be releasing Russian-hacked DNC emails in a slow trickle from now to the election in an effort to keep the story alive. He's doing his best to suggest the now-dead staffer was a "source" of information, despite all available evidence suggesting not-that.
"Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks," Assange said in the interview, before bringing up, unpromoted, that Rich was killed "for unknown reasons." [...]
Asked what he was suggesting, Assange replied, "I'm suggesting that our sources take risks ... We are concerned about it."
Riiiiight.
On the other hand, there's a few odd details here. First, as the anti-conspiracy site Snopes notes, the rumors of the staffer's murder comes from a conspiracy site that, via RationalWiki:
usually includes a sensational headline barely related to reality and quotes authoritative high-level Russian sources (such as the Russian Federal Security Service) to support its most outrageous claims.
A Russian-connected conspiracy site is pushing the notion that Russian hackers weren't behind the leaks, it was just Some Guy? Well that's a heck of a coincidence. In response to even more elaborate conspiracy claims, Snopes also notes that Rich was not nearly as involved in DNC operations as the version conspiracy theorists have invented:
[T]he 27-year-old staffer worked in voter expansion, helping people "find their polling places"; Rich's age and the relatively minor scope of his duties made him an unlikely linchpin in a conspiracy involving election fraud or any purported testimony against Hillary Clinton.
None of that is likely to make much difference to a pro-Trump crowd obsessed with more separate conspiracy theories than can at this point even be counted. Because, we repeat again, the sort of conservatism that gave rise to Donald Trump, the one that cheers his "birther" claims and the supposition of Mexican rapists, secret threats from American Muslims, and so on, and so on, is patched together with nothing but conspiracy theories. There's no core ideology there, just a Jade Helm-of-the-week, an unending stream of "the United Nations is coming for our golf courses" or "Central American children fleeing violence are being sent by ISIS."
I think this will probably be the last time we talk about this, because the conservative operation of smearing dead people and their families with claims of foul deeds is nauseating and gross. It was during the 1990's, and when the same crowd supposed the Khan's fallen U.S. Army son was probably secretly in league with al Qaeda, and it is now. They are grotesque people who revel in saying grotesque things, so long as those things prop up their increasingly tenuous faux-reality, and they deserve only our mockery and scorn.