Trump Invites: Conspiracy Theorists & Far-right Agitators to Anti-Social Gripe Confab

Conspiracy Nuts я Us: Trump & His GOP

(Seems like a firm grip on DC and Reality)

Absolutely a must-read article – not hyperbole, either, but maybe the best analysis of what has happened in and to our country since 2016 and that whole election messy outcome – here from Wired.com.

I encourage you to read it with a fair and open mind with these two quotes, too:

“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” — Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY)

—

“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” — Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

My intro to that story is worth keeping forefront as we head into this 2020 major election year.

Recall and remember this dire warning from Dr. Fiona Hill, former NSC official and Russian expert, in her congressional testimony November 21, 2019:

“I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

Today's main story headline:

“The GOP is Mired in Conspiracies — and it's About to Get Worse”

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), and the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said: “The impeachment inquiry had poisoned the minds of fanatics.”

He was absolutely right — but not quite in the way that he meant. 

His comments, aimed at Democrats, instead came across in the hearing as projection, a sad summation of the intellectual rot that has spread through his own party during the Trump age. 

President Trump, his defenders, and the Republican Party writ large have increasingly tied themselves in tighter and tighter knots, piling one conspiracy theory atop another.

1.  There’s the “Russia Hoax.”

2.  The “Deep State” theory – GOP idea that our Intelligence Agencies had an insurance policy to keep Trump from winning in 2016.

3.  The crazy notion that the cybersecurity firm “Crowdstrike” is somehow hiding the DNC’s server in Ukraine (an idea BTW still being pushed by former Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI), who resigned from Congress last September and has since headed to K Street to become a senior counsel at BGR Group, a Republican-leaning lobbying firm that’s also home to former MS GOP Gov. Haley Barbour).

3.  Then there are two other widely discredited Ukraine-focused conspiracy theories that Trump himself appears to believe:

a. That Ukraine actually was responsible for the 2016 election attack carried out by Russian intelligence.

b. And, that somehow Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and the Ukrainian company Burisma are all wrapped up in some corrupt embrace worthy of criminal charges.

And, more:

That’s before you even get to the anti-Semitic trope that somehow George Soros is pulling all the strings of the Deep State and the Democrats, an idea advanced by none other than Rudy Giuliani on ABC News last September. Giuliani also had promoted the idea that the DNC hacked itself in 2016 to frame Russia.

Each conspiracy theory has been debunked in turn — through court records, indictments, and evidence; through testimony under oath; through the official assessments of our own and allied intelligence, and even through detailed bipartisan congressional reports in the House and Senate.

And yet they persist, each again in turn earning shout-outs and name-checks in the impeachment hearing, a clear indication that Trump’s GOP has become increasingly divorced from reality, its collective brain rotted by years of elevating as its national voices a rotating series of hucksters, grifters, con artists, fraudsters, and masters of malarkey — most of them more interested in personal profit than democratic political institutions.

Today, these conspiracies are being advanced not from the fringes but by the Secretary of State and the president himself. Betraying his profound misunderstanding of technology and facts.

For example, Trump still says: “I still ask the FBI, ‘Where is the server?’ How come the FBI never got the server from the DNC? Where is the server? I want to see the server. Let’s see what’s on the server.”

These conspiracies have become mainstream Republican talking points, the key intellectual foundation for the party’s inability to recognize Trump’s behavior with regard to Ukraine for what it is: a gross abuse of presidential power, and anathema to our national interests.

Note this from Trump’s loyal ally Mark Meadows this week, assuring the president's supporters that they can simply choose not to believe reality, saying: “I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.”

Complete story continues at the Wired.com link.

My 2 cents: Everyone on the GOP side (mostly) blames and bashes DEMS and says “Look what they done to America.” Ouch… 

I suggest they read this post and references herein while looking in the nearest mirror asking that same question.

In reality, they will see a reflection of the answers to all the wild speculation and conspiracy total nonsense. At least in my view.

Thanks for stopping by.