What a difference a week makes!
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., was gloating Thursday about how his star witness against Hunter Biden, the president's son, would prove the doubters wrong. In May, Comer — whose main role in Congress is churning out falsified evidence for arcane right-wing conspiracy theories — had admitted that his supposed "whistleblower" had gone missing. Sure, it was generally understood that Comer's elaborate mythology about President Joe Biden running some secret international crime syndicate was pure make-believe. So the "missing" informant caused much cackling on the left. It was widely assumed that Comer hadn't even bothered to prop up a flesh-and-blood person to pretend to be the "whistleblower," but instead just made this character up whole cloth. Comer was triumphant, however, exalting that he had a real human being with a pulse to stand up as this alleged "whistleblower." Talking to Newsmax, where Republicans go when even Fox News feels a lie is beneath their low standards, Comer crowed that "the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant" should "feel like fools right now," because "a credible witness that the FBI flew all the way to Brussels to interview" was a-coming.
On Monday, the truth came out. Cormer's supposed "informant," Gal Luft, is not preparing his dramatic exposé of the Bidens. No, he's actually on the run from the law, having been charged by the Department of Justice (DOJ) with illegal arms dealing and, oh yeah, being a Chinese spy.
The "missing" Hunter Biden witness the GOP was promising for a while there was just charged by the DOJ with being a Chinese spy. https://t.co/lLiVEmfrU1
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 10, 2023
Comer was right about one thing, though: Luft is, indeed, a biological human being who exists in the world. But so far, the folks at MSNBC don't feel chagrined. "Republicans have to make up their mind," anchor Willie Geist said Tuesday morning. "Is Joe Biden a doddering old man who can't find the door after a press conference, or is he the mastermind of an international criminal scheme?"
Of course, this egg on his face will not slow Comer down one tiny bit. As he understands all too well, what makes conspiracy theories such excellent propaganda for the right is that they are, by their very nature, impervious to debunking. Conspiracy theories are closed loop systems. When conflicting facts are presented, the conspiracist immediately declares not only are the facts fake, but the fakery is further "proof" of the conspiracy.
The complexity guards against people being able to point out the contradictions or implausibilities, allowing the devotees of the conspiracy theory to keep at it, without fear of being called out.
One could see this happening in real time the second the federal authorities announced the charges against Luft on Twitter. Underneath the tweet was a sea of MAGA diehards, easily identifiable by the $8-a-month blue checkmarks, declaring with confidence that Luft is an innocent man being framed by the deep state. Some augmented this with racist jokes, but mostly it was a knee-jerk assumption that this is a railroading job. Not one of these people could pick Luft out of a lineup or could say anything about his life prior to this moment. Yet the invention of a new conspiracy theory about Luft's arrest was not just automatic, it seemed as mindless as breathing.
It's not just randos on Twitter, either. Comer immediately folded the indictments up into the existing conspiracy theory, sneering on Fox News Monday night, "The timing is always coincidental, according to the Democrats and the Department of Justice." Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., was even less subtle with the nonsense.
"They are trying to silence our witnesses" -- Without a shred of evidence, Nancy Mace and Maria Bartiromo frame the indictment of one of Comer's "whistleblowers" as part of an ongoing DOJ effort to protect the Bidens pic.twitter.com/tHXe8JXEoP
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 11, 2023
It's critical to understand that it's highly unlikely that either Comer or Mace believes their own B.S. Indeed, Comer joked earlier this year to New York Times reporters about how he is just making it up as he goes along.
"You know, the customer's always right," Mr. Comer said wryly, of his approach to the people who elected him and now brandish conspiracy theories, vulgar photographs featuring the president and his son, Hunter, and other lies they expect him to act upon.
That's the reason it's so easy for not just Comer, but the entire GOP base, to reflexively roll up these charges into the ever-expanding conspiracy theory. Most of them don't believe any of this crap, not in the traditional sense of the word "believe." In my recent investigation into social media conspiracy communities, one family member of a conspiracist explained how the ostensible "belief" is always just a rationalization built around the actual belief, one which is often too shameful to be spoken out loud. As he pointed out at Medium, conspiracy theorists often contradict themselves in frankly comical ways:
At the University of Kent in 2012, social psych researcher, and core member of my crew, Karen Douglas found that "the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered." The more they "believed that Osama bin Laden was already dead when US special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive."
Throughout and since 2020, conspiracy theorists have said that Covid is at the same time a nonexistent hoax, a bug no more dangerous than the flu, and a deadly Chinese bioweapon. It didn't matter to them that these things can't be true at the same time.
For Comer and other MAGA Republicans, the actual belief is straightforward: They wish to destroy the legitimately elected president and replace him with Donald Trump, a wannabe fascist who attempted a coup. Just saying this plainly, however, is socially and politically difficult. It's an admission to having a fascist ideology, as well as a willingness to break the law and back a criminal as president in order to get their way.
The conspiracy theory about the "Biden crime family" is not a sincere belief, but a political weapon: A noisy distraction from their own fascism and criminality that allows Republicans to pursue their unspeakable agenda while pretending to have righteous motivations. To serve that purpose, the conspiracy theory does not need to be plausible or believable. It doesn't have to make sense. In fact, it's often more useful if it doesn't make sense. When a conspiracy theory is confusing, most people — whether they support the theory or not — can't be bothered to actually try to make sense of it.
With the Hunter Biden conspiracies, the most obvious aspect is that it's impossible for anyone, even those who made it up, to follow what exactly is being alleged here. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo recently gave it the old college try, explaining both one of the conspiracy theories and why it's not true.
According to a purported IRS whistleblower, U.S. Attorney David Weiss had been turned down when he requested special counsel status....
The claims centered on Weiss, who was now put forward as a sort of muzzled, reluctant whistleblower. Weiss, remember, was appointed by President Trump and left in place by the Biden Justice Department to avoid any appearance of an attempt to interfere with the Hunter Biden investigation. But now Weiss has stated unambiguously that none of these claims are true. He never requested to become special counsel (which is itself kind of an absurd suggestion) and he was never blocked from bringing any charges or investigating aspects of the Hunter Biden case.
If you're going cross-eyed trying to keep up, you're not alone. And that's the point. Not of Marshall's debunking, which is about as straightforward as you're going to get when it comes to this ever-more-deranged GOP conspiracy theory, but in even trying to figure out what the hell Republicans are talking about in the first place. This is all by design. If a conspiracy theory is easy to follow, it's also easy to see its flaws. But if it's so complicated that even efforts at straightforward debunking are bewildering, so it's hard to argue against it. The complexity guards against people being able to point out the contradictions or implausibilities, allowing the devotees of the conspiracy theory to keep at it, without fear of being called out.
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Keeping it impenetrable, convoluted and weird is especiallly important in light of the purpose all these lies serve, which is to protect Donald Trump. The vast majority of Trump's crimes are simple enough to explain on their own terms: Stealing classified documents. Tax fraud. Sexual assault. Attempting to steal an election. But the sheer number of Trump crimes is mind-boggling. What the average Trump voter needs in order to justify themselves is a claim that "both sides" are corrupt. With so much Trump criminality to distract from, the lies about the Bidens need to be overwhelming.
Not that it's a hard task to keep making crap up. After all, nothing Republicans say about Biden needs to make sense. It just needs to be noisy.
