Nothin’ matters and what if it did

Conservatives don’t believe in anything, including conspiracy theories

L.A. city councilwoman Nithya Raman’s second-place finish in the L.A. mayoral primary means that she’ll face current Mayor Bass in the runoff election, with rightwing former reality star Spencer Pratt running third and out of the money. As you may have noticed, many prominent conservatives have more or less declared Raman’s victory a (bet you already guessed!) stolen election.

Ah, for the dear, dead days when charges of election tampering would be either completely couched in ass-covering language or backed up with evidence. But we live in the tertiary stage of Trumpism, where lies and truth are interchangeable, so these guys just let fly.

Trump set the tone (“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had, 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!” Note: Pratt did not have a big lead.) His factota raced to back him up and, when challenged for evidence, said they didn’t need no stinkin’ evidence. “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove,” oozed House Speaker Mike Johnson. “But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise gave us this gibberish:

Elon Musk pimped these claims and the rightwing small-timers were off to the races. “Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that Nithya Raman really did, unlikely as it seems, got to second place in the LA mayoral race,” equivocated Rod Dreher. “The problem is that many, many, MANY of us simply cannot believe it. It seems for all the world like fraud. This matters, & is going to matter more.” Just The Tip Trumper status retained!

A few poor ink-stained editorial-side operatives put a smidge of effort into it. Kelly Sadler of the Washington Times claimed it was “simply not mathematically or statistically realistic” that Raman would get more of a boost in late mail-in ballots than first-place candidate Karen Bass — which is nonsense, because why wouldn’t one candidate get more mail-in votes than another? She also said “online buzz suggested that Mr. Pratt, an independent, could make the runoff and secure the No. 2 spot,” suggested that Raman got a lot of votes from Skid Row bums, and had as her subhead “Democrats just stole an election.” Well, you use the tools you have, I guess.

You could explain why this result was actually foreseeable in a city with very few Republicans to people who claim to believe it was fixed. But it probably won’t do any good.

But not because the MAGA people who repeat these stolen elections claims are conspiracy theorists, as people often say. I think it’s simpler than that.

I confess that my own first instinct has been, whenever I’ve seen these folks scream their alternative versions of what you, I, and other normal people see when we gaze upon objective reality, to assume that they’ve been mesmerized by some Pepe Silvia backstory they saw on the internet, perhaps involving the Illuminati, the CIA, Jade Helm, or such like.

Haven’t we all read The Paranoid Style in American Politics? Aren’t we always hearing about their vulnerability to conspiracy theories?

Well. I know there are a lot of people peddling conspiracy theories. And you might hear some of the MAGA peeps parrot those tropes, like the RFK Jr. fans who talk about 5G and microchips.

But I have come to the conclusion that these people don’t actually believe in those theories even when they repeat them.

I can’t prove it. (Maybe I’m paranoid and a conspiracist myself!) But though I think these people have made some political decisions that strike me as harebrained, experience — especially since they returned Tubby and his mob to office — tells me they are not confused or conspiracy-addled: They’re voting for what they were offered and wanted all along, namely official suppression and immiseration of minorities and women and a fun show of belligerence whenever their boy goes on TV. They’re also getting higher prices and foreign war, but hey, pobody’s nerfect. (I didn’t want Obama to bomb Syria either.)

I think that for them the conspiracy theories associated with MAGA are pleasing to repeat, like curse words and folk tales, but not articles of faith.

Conspiracy theory tropes are something they can say when people ask, or when they ask themselves, what they believe, besides “I just don’t like [insert slur(s) here]” and “I don’t have any real beliefs, only appetites.” (In this they’re like conservative op-ed writers, except they have sense enough not to put so much effort into the subterfuge.)

Think about one of the weirder types of Trump II initiative: The release, with much fanfare, of records pertaining to incidents associated with conspiracies, like the JFK files and the UFO files.

Neither of those has revealed anything very interesting. His fans were briefly excited, and then just sort of let it go. If they really believed that these files contained long-buried truths that only Trump had the guts to bring to light, and then they turned out to be a series of Capone’s Vaults, don’t you think they’d be livid, and loudly wonder who got to the President? I would have expected some podcaster to have launched a 2028 presidential exploratory on the basis of these cover-ups by now.

No. These conspiracy theories were just something to talk about instead of the things they didn’t want to say out loud.

Now, there turned out to be one conspiracy theory the Trumpkins dangled that got out of hand: The Epstein Files. Remember how excited MAGA was about that? Idiots like DC Draino and Chaya Raichik dancing around with boxed sets with the Presidential Seal they got from Pam Bondi? Unfortunately for them it broke containment, for one simple reason: While the Kennedy conspiracy and Area 51 are bullshit, Epstein really fucked kids and Trump was in there with him. Much safer to entertain the rubes with White House rasslin’!

So no, they don’t believe that Democrats somehow kept a Republican from winning an election in an 80-plus-percent Democratic city. Most of them aren’t that stupid. They’re just deceitful and justifiably ashamed.

Update, June 13;:And right on time, Tubby kicks out more boob-bait.