A few days ago I noted, as I probably have in other posts, that Republicans are big on projection, which in this context I’m defining as accusing others of one’s own crimes. I thought I’d pass on a few more examples.
Here’s a good discussion at the Guardian of the decades old right wing talking point that the left is authoritarian, when in fact it is the right that likes them some totalitarianism. As with many other right wing tendencies, Trump has served to make their love for authoritarianism more open. And, of course, it continues to be the case that if you’re looking for voter fraud, look no further than the nearest Republican.
Voter suppression is the flip side of voter fraud, and it’s a Republican monopoly. One of the things that I’ve run into in reading about the Trump campaign’s attempted theft is the fact that there are signature matching requirements in many states. The first thing that occurred to me when I read about such requirements is that I could not cast a mail-in or absentee ballot in such a state, since the probability is overwhelming that my signature on my ballot would not “match” the signature on the record to which it was compared. I have horrible handwriting, and a host of signatures. When I really want my signature to be legible I have to work at it, but it would be ludicrously easy to claim that two such carefully drawn signatures didn’t match. It appears to be a recipe for voter suppression. What a surprise.
On a different subject (which is okay, because look at the title), here’s an interesting article at Scientific American about the prevalence of conspiracy theories and their adherents. It’s good, so far as it goes, though I searched in vain for any mention of the fact that people are likely to embrace conspiracy theories if they are fed a steady diet of such thinking by what they believe are reliable sources, such as Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. The latter source, especially, serves to reinforce such thinking, because so many of its older viewers simply segued from watching Uncle Walter to watching Fox, and they grew up believing that they could trust TV news. They transferred that belief to Fox, which is understandable to a certain extent.
The Scientific American article does engage in a weird bit of both siderism, in support of a claim that people on the political outs tend to be more inclined to adhere to conspiracy theories:
Recently in the U.S., a number of unproved conjectures have come from political liberals as conservatives have ascended to control the government. These include the charge that the White House coerced Anthony Kennedy to retire from the U.S. Supreme Court and the allegation that Russian president Vladimir Putin is blackmailing Trump with a video of him watching prostitutes urinate on a Moscow hotel bed.
As to the first, if it’s out there, it’s neither incredible nor widespread, and it fails one test cited in the article for recognizing a false conspiracy theory: it is not self contradictory. As to the second, the dossier, which has been found to be generally fact based, makes exactly that allegation, and as to the more general point, Mueller confirmed that Putin has leverage over Trump, and Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence suspected that Putin had compromising material on Trump. Hardly comparable to Pizzagate, but that’s both siderism for you.Moreover, it’s fairly clear from the last four years of our history, that if being on the political outs breeds conspiracy theories, those theories are likely to be stillborn compared to the theories that spring up within the ranks of those who adhere to the majority party.
Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.
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