An ever-shrinking world

Rightwingers’ return to more old-fashioned paranoid fantasies bodes ill

Back when I did a regular “rightbloggers” column for the Village Voice, I covered a few of the loonier rightwing conspiracy theories those folks promulgated. I didn’t make a habit of running them down, though. I thought the bloggers’ and web propagandists’ ridiculous interpretations of major events were loony enough themselves, and also more germane to way conservatives were polluting our political discourse and indeed our politics, than the occasional crackpot cock-and-bull story about, for example, Barack Obama’s secret gay life.

Back then, despite what Tommy Lee Jones said in Men In Black, what one might read in the supermarket tabloids or their web equivalents was not considered the best investigative reporting on the planet.

Not that I didn’t occasionally enjoy the spectacle of conservative writers working one of these obvious slanders for political advantage — as when, for example, a transparently fake claim that Michelle Obama had gone on a rant about “Whitey” was, during the 2008 Presidential race, circulated by operatives, promoted by rightbloggers, passive-agressively shoveled into the mainstream by National Review (“My guess is that even most Democrats recognize she’s capable of remarks like that”) and then, when it became clear no one was going for it, reimagined by some of these guys as a Democratic dirty trick against Republicans to make them look like credulous fools.

But by and large in those days I ignored the political-celebrity-specific conspiracy theories that were most popular among the rightwing rabble — such as the “Clinton body count” stuff about all the people Bill and Hillary Clinton had allegedly ordered killed. True, its first great effulgence was promoted by no less than the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which JAQed off to the rumor that Vincent Foster had not, as his suicide note indicated and two investigations confirmed, killed himself, but was personally ordered whacked by Bill and Hill.

But back in those days it was easy — easier, certainly, than it later became — to assume no one took these stories seriously — not even their promoters; they were just stirring the muck to muddy the waters, as it were, to raise vague suspicions rather than rouse true believers, and thus suppress voter enthusiasm. It stank, but at least it made some kind of sense.

Also, it seemed back then that the Clinton Body Count thing really had lost its effectiveness. When Clinton was making her big Presidential run, having already made the Congressional Republicans who tried to Benghazi her look foolish, the brethren pushed the hazy accidental death of a minor U.N. official as the latest of Red Hillary’s murders, and got approximately zero bites.

But Her Emails and other bullshit pushed President Hillary off-course, and she mostly went quiet — and, apart from the unending calls for her arrest by Tubby and his minions, so did the Clinton Body Count industry. Occasionally we’d get a Bill Clinton reference whenever someone ran the tape of Trump partying with Jeffrey Epstein, but the CBC theorists clammed up, which made sense — no Clinton would be running for anything anytime soon.

But as we’ve seen, in the MAGA era conservatives have gone bugfuck crazy for even weirder conspiracy theories. There are a lot of little ones — like the “Biden Orders US Dollar Replaced with Trackable ‘Spyware’ Version” gibberish I cover in my Hardcore editions — but it’s the big ones that are most alarming, like all the COVID conspiracy theories (that Democrats and Anthony Fauci worked with the Chinese to cause COVID, or that COVID isn’t real, or that it is real but that masks are just tools of repression and the vaccines are full of microchips), the Stolen 2020 Election, J6 as false flag, etc.

You don’t need me to tell you (though I often do!) that this endless series of Big Lies reveals a conservative movement and Republican Party increasingly unmoored from reality. But they’ve been returning lately to the smaller, political-celebrity-specific fantasies, and that strikes me as ominously extra weird.

The Joe Biden fantasies made vivid by the Republican House investigations are by now something any Democratic president would have to expect. But did you see the one about how Fauci burned down Rand Paul’s office?

Others have picked up the theme — and if you’re thinking, yeah, well, this is just a fringe thing just like the old days, be aware that Fash Beardo here has more than a million followers and none of them is going to be skeptical about this absurd insinuation.

Also you may have heard that Barack Obama’s chef died in a paddleboarding accident the other day, and if you follow conservative media, you will also “know” that Obama had him murdered:

QAnon conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin alleged that “it’s about time we start discussing the Obama Body Count” and asked of Campbell, “What did he know?”

Conspiracy theorist Roger Stone shared a screenshot of an article on Campbell’s death and implied that his death was purposeful, saying, “Clearing the decks for her 2024 candidacy. Tying up the loose ends #MichelleObama2024.”

White nationalist Stew Peters posted, “Clinton White House Chef: DEAD. Obama White House Chef: DEAD. If I’m Joe Biden’s chef, I'm quitting and getting FAR AWAY from that family.”

This story is now being spread by unaccountably-popular bullshit artist Benny Johnson (“The Obamas said they were nowhere near Martha’s Vineyard when the tragedy of Tafari Campbell’s death occurred…”), prominent conservative intellectual Catturd2, and the Washington Free Beacon (“Axis of Evil? Obamas, Clintons Linked by Suspicious Deaths”).

So it’s not just the little fish nibbling at this. Once upon a time conservatives of any prominence — and yes, calling these guys “prominent” may seem a stretch, but who in their movement is more qualified for the term? — would have been silent or at least a lot cagier about promoting this murder fantasy. But now it’s standard procedure: If a Democrat is popular and prominent, conservatives will declare them them the prime suspect in any crime that occurs in their vicinity.

Given my previous lack of interest in this kind of thing, and the larger and more consequential fantasy versions of national events to which conservatives are now devoted, you may wonder why I care about these alt Body Counts.

Well, for one thing, highly personal political fantasies have a way of turning into stochastic terrorism, as with the guy who got excited when Tubby reported Obama’s address, got his arsenal and went looking for him.

But it’s also, and I guess mainly, this: I’ve said before that Republicans and conservatives don’t have policies as such anymore — just sadism and paranoia and related pathologies. Back in the Clinton Body Count days, they at least seemed to know that they were peddling bullshit in order to achieve coherent political goals.

But now there’s only the slander, and increasingly their pitch for elections is that they need power so they can throw their opponents in jail, because those opponents are all groomers and murderers and arsonists — read about it in our tweets! — and what else can you do with supervillains like that?

This animates all of what we once would have called their politics. They’re trapped in this lurid cartoon version of reality, and they want to make us all live it out with them.