We Need to Speak Honestly About the GOP's Evolution Into a Conspiracy Cult

[dajoki]

We Need to Speak Honestly About the GOP’s Evolution Into a Conspiracy Cult

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/90824

One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all.

But there comes a tipping point at which it becomes too dangerous to keep up the pretense. Most people left of center would argue (rightly, I believe) that we hit that point long, long ago and the time to re-evaluate journalistic norms and practices should have been decades earlier when the GOP was busy covering up the Iran Contra scandal and promoting the Laffer Curve as serious public policy. Or that any number of catastrophes of conservative public policy and norm erosion since should have sounded the alarms along the way, from the Bush v Gore decision and the Brooks Brothers Riots to the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, to the deregulation-fueled Wall Street crash, birtherism, the Benghazi obsession and the nomination of Donald Trump. Many would point with legitimate outrage to the abdication of responsibility in the face of climate change, yawning inequality, forced family separation policy, children in cages and so much else.

But even faced with awful consequences of all these horrors, a defender of traditional journalism might simply chalk them up to policy differences in a democratic society. They would be wrong to do so, but the position would be intellectually defensible in principle.

But recently there has been a shift among GOP voters that is different not just in degree of virulence, but also in kind. For a host of different reasons, core Republican voters have begun to reconstitute themselves as a conspiracy theory cult devoted to beliefs that were once relegated to the farthest fringe–fictions that cannot help but end in civil conflict and violence if they fully become canon among conservative voters nationwide. This process arguably began as far back as Glenn Beck’s prominence on Fox News, but it has now blossomed into a grandiose collective paranoid fantasy.

snip//

[pwb]

1. Fringe freaks.

All of it things we use to listen too. Not Anymore

[uponit7771]

2. K&R, 44% of Trump voters think Bill Gates is trying to MicroChip them (link). most of em have phones

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213474293

[sandensea]

3. For Big Business, it's the Mussolini/Hitler model of politics

Promote a rabid ape that will destroy institutions and govern the general public like a despot - while being a sweet, newspaper-and-slippers fetching puppy for the elite.

They've never given up on that idea.

[C_U_L8R]

4. Reality denialism.

It's a one way express right off the mortal cliff.
This weekend in the Ozarks is just the latest example.
These clowns will kill themselves out of selfishness, ignorance
and a meanspirited desire to pwn the libs.

No one will ever call them the smart party.

[underpants]

7. ? The Ozarks?

I’ve been out of the loop

[underpants]

9. Oh I see

https://www.kmov.com/news/watch-packed-pool-party-at-lake-of-the-ozarks-shows-crowd-ignoring-social-distancing-guidelines/article_5de50ce8-9dbb-11ea-bd46-6b8e99107093.html

[C_U_L8R]

10. Crazy, right?

[underpants]

11. Yeah. They are heard Trump's siren

I called this in February. I told many people that our “rugged individualism” was going to kill us on this. Literally.

[KentuckyWoman]

5. Nero influenced Romans with conspiracy propaganda graffiti on walls.

Yes, we should do all we can to put a stop to it, but the weak minded will always be among us .... and will probably always yell the loudest.

Sadly.

[tulipsandroses]

6. Trump Translators -re: the normalization of Trump's ramblings

This writer makes the same point another writer made in another article. Over time, the normalization of this nonsense. Instead of calling it the bullshit that it is. Going back to birtherism. Outside of Fox Noise, no other journalist should have given air to this nonsense. Don't normalize this crap and report on it as if its real news we need to be aware of. They should have called it bullshit and leave it at that. Here's what the other article had to say about Trump Translators.

Trump owes his success as a politician to his taking subtext and turning it into text. Previous Republican politicians stirred up racist animosity by using dog-whistle phrases like “welfare queen” or “inner-city crime.” Trump won the presidency by being much more explicit, decrying “Mexican rapists” and calling for a Muslim ban. By being so overt, he convinced an intense base of supporters that he was authentic in his bigotry in way that previous politicians weren’t.

One fascinating side effect of Trump’s crudeness is that it has led his surrogates and many in the media to whitewash Trump’s words. Ever since Trump emerged as a political figure, there’s been an abundance of Trump translators, people working full time to pretend that his vile and just plain bizarre comments mean something other than what they literally say

In 2016, Trump also described former president Barack Obama as the “founder of Isis.” Interviewing Trump, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt suggested that Trump was of course being figurative. Trump rejected this defense, saying, “No, I meant that he’s the founder of Isis, I do.” Trump did later walk back the remarks by saying he was being “sarcastic”—itself a defense that makes no sense.

It’s not just the right-wing media or Trump supporters that close their ears to what he is saying. Mainstream media reports routinely edit Trump’s incoherent speeches into something resembling lucidity.

[link:https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/sarah-cooper-trump-comedy/|

[underpants]

8. Oooh more reading

The first article was outstanding. This looks good too.

[tblue37]

12. An Australian journalist made this same point last year:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-foreign-journalist-lenore-taylor-garbled-syntax-vocabulary-press-conference_n_5d86f42de4b0957256b80412

Foreign Reporter Shocked By Trump’s ‘Alarming Incoherence’ On Border Wall Tour:
The Australian journalist wondered if cleaning up Trump’s rambling speech does the public a disservice.

[kairos12]

13. Reich Wing voters hate ambiguity. Conspiracy themes give them the

certainty that someone out "there" is controlling things. Randomness and existential themes scare the Wonderbread shit out of them.