Conspiracy theorists out to get each other
Trump’s crazy election theories come after the media has been peddling similar fare for years.
If I’d told you two years ago that Donald Trump and Stacey Abrams would be soulmates, conjoined one day as victims of a dark political conspiracy by a Republican Party intent on denying them their rightful status as popular winners, you’d have asked me to take a sobriety test. But here we are.
Ms. Abrams still insists she’s the winner of the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia. She maintains that her opponent, Brian Kemp — the man legally declared the victor after vote tabulations gave him a 55,000 margin — rigged the election in his own favor by suppressing Democratic voter turnout. This in an election in which turnout set a new record for the state in a nonpresidential year.
Two years on, Gov. Kemp — aided, it seems, by the entire executive leadership of the state, Republican loyalists to a man — has done it again. This time out of a nagging sense of fair play perhaps, he has fixed the presidential election in Georgia in favor of Joe Biden.
I don’t know about you, but Mr. Kemp sounds like someone I want on my side. I wonder if he does tax returns.
This vast — and confusing — right-and-left-wing conspiracy in the Peach State is a useful reminder that, while the media tell us that paranoid conspiracy theorizing is now the defining feature of the modern Republican party, the tendency to believe — or purport to believe — false things that are useful to your cause is no respecter of party or ideology.
Republican fantasies get most of the media attention, and it’s true there’s no shortage of GOP figures — from the president on down — willing to don the tinfoil hat of hidden knowledge and mount the grassy knoll of superior vision. At least one adherent to the QAnon belief system was just elected to Congress in the name of the GOP, also in Georgia.
But if you think it’s worrying that there are members of Congress who believe the nation is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles, don’t forget Sheldon Whitehouse. The Democratic senator from Rhode Island thinks the federal judiciary has been bought by a dark-money conspiracy controlled by the Federalist Society, as he memorably explained — with visuals — during the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett.
Mr. Whitehouse isn’t the only Democrat who can see through the thick timber of federal institutions to the dastardly plotters within. Remember the Great Trump Post Office Conspiracy? For a few weeks in the late summer we were told by supposedly serious politicians and excitable people in the media that the president was stealing mailboxes to stop people from sending in ballots.
And there was the widespread claim for much of the year, promoted by progressive politicians, commentators, entertainment figures and others that black people in America were being targeted for mass murder by police officers.
We haven’t even gotten to Russia yet. When the New York Post published its Hunter Biden story weeks before the election, much of the liberal-leaning intelligence establishment insisted it was probably a Kremlin plot. This was merely the latest installment in the vast Russian conspiracy that handed the election to Mr. Trump in 2016.
Many of the journalists who denounce the president’s efforts to discredit the election have been promoting these baseless assertions for years. it takes some chutzpah to declare that the Republican Party is in the grip of conspiracy theorists when you’ve spent four years spreading crazy stories to discredit it.
But their politically motivated embrace of anything that disparages him doesn’t excuse Mr. Trump’s disregard for facts. The Georgia claim is only a small component of the apparatus of fiction that has been constructed in the president’s head. What started out as garden-variety plot — powerful party machines in a few big Democrat-controlled states in the Midwest — has flowered magnificently. As judicial review after review has found insufficient evidence to support the claims, the list of people and institutions in on the scheme has lengthened. It now includes multiple Republican-controlled state election institutions, Fox News, several conservative members of Congress and, most shocking of all, William Barr.
The attorney general has distinguished himself for two years by a consistent refusal to bow to an unrelenting — and completely undeserved — campaign of vilification from progressives and the media for his supposed subservience to the president. Now, after all that, we discover that Mr. Barr was in on the conspiracy the whole time? Who else? Maybe Ted Cruz’s father knows something.
In his famous 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter noted that the conspiracy-inclined mind “produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.”
There’s nothing heroic about the striving of this president or his opponents to make the rest of us believe the unbelievable.
The Wall St Journal
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