Conspiracy accusations don't need to be "true." They do need to be outrageous and memorable.
Stick Democrats with denying their candidate has a side-business running a pedophile brothel out of the basement of a pizza joint. Ha!
Let Democrats try to prove they don't kill children to drink their blood. Ha!
Even some smart people buy into the con. They want to believe.
Comedian Stephen Colbert invented the word "truthiness" and it became the Miriam-Webster "Word of the Year" in 2006. Truthiness is a seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true.
Truthiness is successful political entertainment.
Yesterday's post drew an unusual number of comments, mostly off-line directly to me. I was criticized for giving space to the retired doctor who is sticking so strongly to his conviction of election fraud and Biden's illegitimacy that he justifies sedition as both patriotic and Christian. He would install a dictator rather than believe our election and judicial system. What's wrong with him, people asked me? What kind of whack-job does Oregon allow to practice medicine, asked out- of-state readers?
The writer of the guest post is not stupid nor senile. He is deeply caught up in a web of political entertainment created by provocateurs on the political right. It is a popular and profitable business model in cable and social media. Conspiracy accusations have been around forever, but they got an accelerant via talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh, then Fox News, and in the last decade in social media. Limbaugh's extraordinarily successful show began with a big element of hi-jinx and humor with over-the-top name-calling and political insults. He knew he was being naughty, a provocative shock-guy, but people tuned in. In recent years, his show emphasized political trolling; less humor, more outrage.
Donald Trump mimicked that style. It caught the wave of rising populist spirit in GOP voters, who were deeply suspicious of "facts" as delivered to them by supposed experts and institutions. "Birtherism"--Trump's relentless accusation that Obama was born in Kenya and his Hawaii birth documentation was all fake--was trolling Obama. It was teasing. It was school-yard name-calling, a form of bullying, but GOP partisans liked it.Trolling works. Polls showed that Republican voters bought it. Republicans wanted to believe Obama was a fraud, so they did.
Fox opinion hosts, plus political entertainers Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Dinesh D'Souza and many others, make accusations, often in the form of questions of suspicions. Tens of millions of people tune in every day to this trolling. Did Hillary Clinton kill Vince Foster? How about the pedophile brothel she runs out of the pizza shop? What about Hunter Biden?
Trolling was the underlying purpose of Trump's famous phone call to Ukraine. He wanted to be able to say that Ukraine found something suspicious to investigate. They would be just asking questions. Trolling Democrats normally has no political cost. Republican partisans love it; Democrats hate it; Republicans love that Democrats hate it.
Democratic commentators assert and hope that Republicans will regret their growing association with Q-anon and its suite of conspiracies. That would be true if there were a limit to what accusations voters believe about Democrats. There may not be. Q-anon conspiracies are going mainstream. Q-anon accusations start with an over-arching premise that Democrats are led by a Satan-worshiping cabal of pedophiles who kill and eat children to extract blood from them to extend their lives. The cabal includes top Democratic politicians, Hollywood entertainers, religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, and the omni-present Jewish conspirator, George Soros. Under the conspiracy, the "Deep State" Democrats created COVID to derail Trump. Bill Gates was in on it, hoping to profit from creating and selling vaccines.
They are confounded in this work by Trump, the hero.
Some people are acting on these beliefs. The Nashville bomber may have believed one of the conspiracies, that powerful Democrats including Barack Obama are extra-terrestrials-lizard-beings disguised as humans.
Do Republican voters believe this? Some do, some don't. Many believe some of it; not all of it. It sounds suspicious--suspiciously right. It has truthiness.
If the lizard part seems a little farfetched, then maybe the part about Democrats working with liberal Jews to suck blood from children is possible. That idea has been around for centuries. That sounds like the kind of thing Democrats would do--George Soros, at least--even if there isn't exactly proof of it. He has the money to pull it off.
In the context of the many conspiracies circulating, the election fraud conspiracy troll is comparatively plausible. Maybe Democrats changed tens of millions of votes right under the eyes of Republican election officials, confounding auditors, creating paper ballots that match registrations and getting Republican election officials from County Clerks to Governors to deny it.The Deep State could have arranged it. That has truthiness.
Republican officeholders see a mindset and are loathe to contest it. They don't want to be outflanked in a primary election. Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri looking ahead to 2024, is not an idiot. It would insult him to say that he believes what he is doing in challenging the electoral vote. He is being strategic, playing to the base and protecting his conspiratorial-right flank. He doesn't say he believes the conspiracy; only that it could have happened, maybe, and it should be investigated because 75 million people did vote for Trump.
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Meanwhile Ben Sasse, the senator from Nebraska, also looking ahead to 2024, is not an idiot either. He is risking the other path, accusing Hawley of hurting Republicans with a dangerous, false accusation. Possibly with Trump sidelined, GOP voters will distinguish among the conspiracies, and assign the election fraud to the non-credible lizards and blood-drinking category.
Sasse has the harder path. He is choosing the Fox news reality and not the Fox opinion reality, nor the reality that spreads on social media. He is betting that without Trump, GOP opinion oscillates back toward more credible troll themes, and not one that requires hundreds of Republicans being in on the corrupt election conspiracy.
Conspiracies are good business for conservative media. Biden is boring but the conspiracies are not.
Yesterday's post was a matter of scorn, pity, and disbelief by many readers, but the author is not a big outlier. Believing is seeing. Election fraud has enough truthiness for that guest post writer to justify overthrowing an election and ending the republic. And it isn't like he asserted that lizard-people stole the election, just hundreds of Republicans in the Deep State helped Democrats do it. That's more credible.
3 comments:
I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Peter Sage and express my admiration for what I believe are 365 editions of "Up Close" in 2020.
This blog consistently delivers insightful commentary on current events and has never failed to elicit a thoughtful response from this reader. Moreover, its unique perspective has often brings clarity to this murky world we inhabit. The combination of clear reportage, restrained opinion, and entertaining style has been a daily pleasure during a year when such diversions have been few and far between otherwise.
My New Year's wish is that it will continue to prosper as we hopefully enter better times.
Thanks!
Donald Trump is actually a Russian spy. He also is being blackmailed by Putin over a video of prostitutes urinating on him. I know these “facts” are true because I read it somewhere on the internet.
I echo Rick’s praise for this blog. It’s one of the first places I go every morning.
These bizarre beliefs spring from a deep alienation. A huge part of the country accurately understands that the elites running the place don’t give a fuck about them and find their existence to be inconvenient, at best.
The average IQ in this country is, by definition, 100. A clinical psychologist once told me that you would be amazed at the questions you can get wrong and still score 100. Half of the people in this country are not even that smart. A lot of sorting has gone on over the last half-century, with higher-scoring people moving to the cities.
The city people tend to look down their noses at the rural people. They configure institutions and the economy to suit their interests, regardless of the effects it may have on the rural people.
The rural people are quite aware of this. It doesn’t take a high score on an IQ test to recognize contempt. “Learn to code” basically means, stop being like yourselves and become like us. Promises to retrain them for new, high tech jobs fall flat when the jobs are beyond their abilities and the jobs never materialize anyway.
We need to configure our society and economy to have good places in it for everyone all along the IQ scale. No one deserves a lofty position just because they were born with a high IQ. Our (high IQ) elites do not seem to realize this.
When the elites abandon a large portion of the population, it should be no surprise when those folks turn to those who seem to hold them in better regard for information and leadership. When what you might think of as accurate information is delivered with contempt, it should not surprise you that its targets reject it and accept, instead, information from sources that seem more friendly.
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