Conspiracy Mongering
My list of friends on Facebook includes several MAGA conspiracy fans. The big issue for many of them presently is Joe Biden and Hunter, the evil son. My observation has been that they use similar language in regard to their allegations about the “Biden Crime Syndicate.” This suggests to me that they are getting their “news” feed from the same types of sources. I’ve noticed that Faux News viewers tend to use vocabulary and ideas that they pick up on that miserable channel or one like it.
Close behind the hatred for Biden is considerable anger about the border and immigration.
My experience with conspiracy-minded folk has been that when you challenge them to cite evidence, they will just rearrange the words and say the same thing, only louder. I remember conversations with such people way back into the 1970’s. In 1975 I ran into a group at the county fair where the John Birch Society had a booth. They were an ultraconservative libertarian group and were, at the time, predicting the impending collapse of the dollar, carping about the demise of the gold standard and the wrong-headedness of liberalism. There was very much a survivalist tenor to the group. Beneath their calm exteriors they were rabidly anti-government and had a stack of doctrines and literature to back it up.
The recent Tea Party quickly gave way to the MAGA movement, lubricated by the slippery QAnon, and has coalesced only recently into this particular lumpy mashup of politics. Before the internet conspiracy enthusiasts could only recruit followers by phone calls, pamphleteering, news paper ads and local demonstrations. The attention of big media was limited by the editors and producers who monitor the news content. Generally, public events like marches and a gathering of a dozen extremists at the state capital was given minimal if any media coverage. Little coverage was given because few seemed to care, advertisers in particular. Media is all about attracting eyeballs.
The popularity of Trump with a great many Americans may be that he appeals to certain features of their inner dark sides. Distrust of foreigners, the need for retribution and repellant reaction to the gradual trend towards broader interpretations of civil rights. There is a notion that someone must pay dearly for their unlucky lot in life or their discomfort. Some fraction of people are by nature bitter and paranoid. Trump and his ilk validate their hatreds and fears.
The politicization of protestant Christianity has certainly fed into the belief that any variation from their supernatural world views are worse than out of line, they’re evil. The staunch belief in their own righteousness renewed weekly by dramatic performances of preachers in Sunday services leads such people to take a world view that they are backed by supernatural forces leading to the inevitable onset of prophesied and apocalyptic events. Many express the view that Trump is in place to bring on the end-times.
Trump could actually bring on something like end-times, only everywhere but the Levant and with no chance of a rapture.
In the last several decades, the rise of the internet and social media has given fringe-dwellers a powerful platform from which to broadcast their messages all over the world. This has been a step-change in political influence. Far-flung individuals and groups can now collaborate instantaneously on messaging and plans. This subsurface activity has changed how world politics is conducted. Whereas before, many people were not privy to political information because of income, location or social circle and thus were not involved. Now communications are limited only by the speed of the internet and anyone with a computer or phone can have a presence. We of the internet are like a nest of baby birds, all with open mouths pointed straight up clamoring for the worm of attention.
The internet step-change in communications is an improvement overall in democracy in the broad sense. More voices in play to contribute to democracy. But what has come along with it is the explosion of shrill demagoguery and hysteria as well as new forms of criminal enterprise. We’re watching the effects of extremists frightening wide swaths of the public with fabricated threats. Pre-internet this was done with organized rallies, a well-established technique of fascist dictators both as they rose to power and as they maintained power. Such rallies are popular today as well. Look at all of the rallies Trump held during his presidency. While he was anxiously absorbing all of the love and adoration from his crowds, he was also keeping the Trump enthusiasm in play. Trump may truly be an awful human being, but he is quite good at working a crowd anxious for his kind of message.