Conspiracy Theories, or a Credibility Crisis?

The right half of America’s false political dichotomy is a football field where a game is played to distract the audience away from taking its own side. The grass on this field didn’t grow organically. It was plastic turf installed by people with a disingenuous agenda.

The field is now bare for a couple reasons. First, there isn’t much remaining which they could purport to be conserving. Second, they’ve demonstrated themselves to be colossal liars by promoting things like the invasion of Iraq.

Once credibility is squandered, deceptions lose their effectiveness no matter how shamelessly one persists in their perpetuation. The bulk of fake conservatism’s audience might rightfully be characterized as credulous and naïve, but they’ve got their limits.

The odious fiend Bill Kristol is the most prominent of the failed maintenance men. Despite being persistently wrong, he continues to ply his trade with lavish funding from oligarchs. That’s an important thing to keep in mind if you’re still consuming mainstream conservative content. Besides Fox News, it wouldn’t be in business if it had to operate on revenue generated from their audience.

After closing shop at The Weekly Standard in 2018 because a deceitful publication isn’t worth subsidizing if there’s nobody reading it, he’s launched new Never Trump initiatives. Apparently, somebody finds them worth funding through the 501(c)(3) Defending Democracy Together Institute. It’s money ill-spent because this failed the last time around.

The effort centers on a new publication with the same cast of characters called The Bulwark. Most of the articles were covid hysteria so I clicked on one by Rich Thau (he’s not Asian): Meet the Swing Voters Who Embrace Conspiracy Theories. He’s running something called The Swing Voter Project.

The gist of the article is that his experience as a political operative tells him that the average voter is stupid and uninformed. At this point, however, they’re failing to embrace establishment narratives in favor of conspiracy theories. Some examples he lists are a woman who says the pandemic hysteria is overblown, a man who claims “Hollywood is full of pedophiles,” and a guy who believes that Biden was being fed answers during the debate.

Thau’s refusal to acknowledge these things as anything other than conspiracy theories is a testament to his class’s detachment from reality. The fact they’re in business demonstrates the sheer power of tribal nepotism. They’re not going to swing anything. If the Orange Man loses, it will be due to demographic changes.

The conclusion of the article says a great deal about the mindset of people like Thau and Kristol:

A liberal democracy can endure a great many tensions between the people: different races, different religions, different political views. But cohesion exists only if, at the bedrock level, everyone shares the same reality.

Liberal democracies haven’t endured any of these tensions. That’s why the entire Western world has been turned into a police state where discussion is censored and dissent is punished through collaborative public/private effort.

Fake conservative pundits seem to think the entire debacle can be stage-managed if everyone is brought on board with the false narratives they’re pushing. The problem is that people who aren’t alike can’t share a reality that doesn’t exist.

Tom Shackleford

I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.