Remember the Nut

What’s a conspiracy theory that you find not only insane but hilarious?

I hope I’m not disappointing too many Fun Friday followers by veering from the Lively Arts topics to more goddamn politics in the prior edition and — you may as well know now — in the current one as well. If so, don’t worry, we’re heading into award season, and you know how I love to do the Oscar thing — you may notice that I have a Killers of the Flower Moon post and a The Holdovers post already — which should lead me back into aesthetics.

(I actually cut the acting part of my Holdovers review for length and balance, so I will briefly say here that, while I stand by everything I said about Paul Giamatti at the time of Sideways and his “raging schlub bit,” he has certainly learned a few things about the snaffle and the curb in the 18 years since; but he is still as emotionally available as ever, and in The Holdovers the glimpses he allows of the lake of sorrow under his frozen crust of bitterness really breaks your heart. The kid is great, and if he has more chops than this, great, but if he doesn’t or wants to be a chemical engineer instead, I think this portrait of a damaged teen still alive to all the possibilities will weather even better than Timothy Hutton’s. And I am delighted by Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s award run. It took me a while to see her character’s complement to Giamatti’s; she has a survivor’s stoicism that sort of matches his, but she’s better able to access her pain — partly because it’s a mother’s pain, partly because she doesn’t have his tools to push it away — so she has an easier transit, and even under the enormity of her pain she knows it. You know, the more I sit with that movie, the more I like it.)

Well, this week’s Fun thing is politics-oriented like the Kissinger bit, but I hope maybe a little easier to laugh at. What I’d like to know is: What rightwing conspiracy – past or present — you find not only nuts but hilariously nuts?

Conservative conspiracy theories go back a long way, even if we disqualify the Know-Nothings and the Anti-Masonic movement (though it’s easy to argue that these crackpot creeds, and others still older like the Counter-Enlightenment, are part of the seedbed of American conservatism). Those ideas, if we can thus dignify them, haven’t really gone away: As I’ve had occasion to notice, elements of the John Birch Society mania, with its toxic brew of racism and communist-conspiracy theories, persist in what must be considered mainstream conservatism today.

But there have been some amusing variants. I’ve been paying close attention for about a quarter-century, and I’ve seen some kookoo-for-cocoa-puffs shit. I recall, and maybe you do too, the “Whitey Tape” — one of the inventions of the 2008 campaign, when Republicans, terrified that not only a Democrat but a NI-clang would be coming to power, tried all kinds of bullshit to slur Obama.

Promoted by wingnut operative Larry Johnson, who alleged a tape existed of Michelle Obama yelling anti-white slurs at Jeremiah Wright’s church, it gave extra evidence (as if more were needed ) of the mendacity of the rightwing press, e.g., per me: “At National Review Online, Jim Geraghty declared himself a ‘skeptic,’ then offered a lengthy analysis ending, ‘My guess is that even most Democrats recognize she’s capable of remarks like that.’” Geraghty still writes for National Review, and has never gotten any better.

Since then, as Lorenzo Semple DuBois says in The Producers, they try, oh, how they try.  There have been thousands of wack-ass wingnut fantasies promulgated, in the press and in the haunts and klaverns where such people gather — Jade Helm, FEMA camps, the Clinton Body Count, Soros making you “eat bugs,” and of course the many COVID and COVID vaccine related fever dreams like “CDC Monitoring Residents for Sickness After Truck Carrying 100 Test Monkeys Crashes.”

It is even arguable (and I have so argued) that conservatives don’t even have policies or what we might call beliefs anymore — just conspiracy theories they probably don’t even believe but which present useful defenses against the encroaching realties of modern life that their constituents can’t bear to face. This would seem to be borne out by last Wednesday’s Republican debate, in which even the alleged moderate (lol) Nikki Haley found evidence of Hamas-Russian collusion in the fact that the October 7 attack on Israel took place “on Putin’s birthday.” Well, when you’re sharing a stage with Vivek Ramaswamy, who pretends to believe every nutcake conspiracy of the past three years (and had previously even worked a 9/11 truther angle), you have to (to paraphrase James Brown) give the dumber some.

But for me, the craziest conservative conspiracy theory that evinces more laughs than dread is JFK Jr. I’m not just talking about the base fantasy that John-John didn’t die in a plane crash in 1999 — and that, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, the still-living Kennedy scion is a key part of the Trump phenomenon — or the comical sequelae of this belief, like the recent death of its chief promulgator in a dirt-bike accident — but that the absolutely non-JFK-Jr.-looking Vincent Fusca (pictured up top) is accepted by the faithful as the man himself.

Seen from a certain perspective, it's the ultimate proof of the widespread theory that MAGA people don’t actually believe any of the things they pretend to believe, because what person not suffering from severe cataracts could look at this lumpy, unprepossessing goombah and think, Yes, this is the famously handsome son of our Boston Irish 35^th President?

But part of me wants to believe that they believe it, and that at events like the DC Trump rally where I took this picture Fusco would occasionally, after posing with female fans, grab one and duck into a porta-potty or a shrub and bang her, and the fan would come away believing she’d been fucked by John-John, and maybe a few of them have gotten pregnant from it, and that there is in some trailer park a woman who cuddles and dandles her little rally memento and tells him he’s JFK the Third and destined for great things, and maybe as he grows up she will even train the lad to speak in a Kennedy accent — Ahsk nawt what youh country can do for you — which he practices while Mom writes another letter to John-John, hoping this one won’t be returned Addressee Unknown, and the boy grows up to be galvanic and eloquent and sexually chaotic, and rises in school and in politics until one day, on the occasion of his first big state assembly victory, his mother in the audience and covered with 1960 Presidential campaign buttons, the boy, known to one and all as Cyrus D. Gunk, decides now is the time and tells the cheering crowd, “Ich Bin Ein JFK jünger-jünger!”

Well, it’s funny to me, anyway. What about you?