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Thousands of hacked e-mails from the account of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta were released by WikiLeaks in early October 2016, exposing the internal workings of the campaign to public scrutiny and fostering at least one new conspiracy theory pertaining to Clinton's master plan for political control. An e-mail that immediately caught the attention of conspiracy-oriented web sites was a message from Bill Ivey, a senior policy fellow for Americans for the Arts and trustee of the Center for American Progress (and former National Endowment for the Arts chairman under Bill Clinton), who wrote to Podesta on 13 March 2016 offering an assessment of the biggest challenges facing American democracy in the light of recent political developments: According to alarmist web sites such as Conservative Tribune, InfoWars, Natural News, and others, Ivey had proclaimed nothing short of a Clinton master plan for maintaining political control via an unaware and compliant citizenry. InfoWars summarized his message in particularly damning terms: A more objective reading suggests that Ivey was actually stating the opposite, however — that a lack of awareness and a tendency toward compliance on the part of the citizenry in recent years was the result of the conflation of entertainment and the electoral process (as exemplified by the rise of Donald Trump), and these phenomena present a problem for democracy which must be countered. Snopes.com reached out to Bill Ivey for clarification of his intended meaning. which he rephrased for us as follows:
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