Tag: Republican conspiracy theories

QAnon hasn’t gone away – it’s alive and kicking in states across the country

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By this point, almost everyone has heard of QAnon, the conspiracy spawned by an anonymous online poster of enigmatic prophecies. Starting with an initial promise in 2017 that Hillary Rodham Clinton would be imminently arrested, a broad group of interpreters divined a conspiracy that saw President Donald Trump’s Democratic opponents as a global cabal of Satanic pedophiles.

Perhaps the greatest success of the conspiracy is its ability to create a shared alternate reality, a reality that can dismiss everything from a decisive election to a deadly pandemic. The QAnon universe lives on – now largely through involvement in local, not national, Republican politics. 

Moving on from contesting the election, the movement’s new focus is vaccines. The influence of QAnon on pandemic denialism is significant, though the spread of Q in local politics is a source of conflict in many states. Continue reading.

Right-Wing Media Figures Promote ‘Antifa Arsonist’ Hoax

The latest right-wing “antifa” hoax—namely, the claim that leftist arsonists have been secretly behind the wildfires that have swept the West Coast this month—is now being broadcast to millions of people. It bubbled up from the fever swamps of the far right, broadcast widely by key figures atop the media food chain: Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, Fox News, and leading Republican political candidates.

Trump retweeted an alt-right-flavored anti-Biden video suggesting he was ignoring antifa arsonists threatening the suburbs. Rogan, a wildly popular podcast host, told his audience that “left-wing people” were responsible for the fires (and apologized for it the next day). Fox News appeared especially eager to blame antifa for the wildfires as a way of denying the role of climate change. And in Washington state, where the fires have hit hard, the Republican nominee in the governor’s race joined in spreading the claims through a campaign video.

The hoax—which originated with far-right conspiracy theorists in the Pacific Northwest already on the warpath with antifascists—has been denounced by law-enforcement and firefighting officials throughout the West Coast, notably in the rural areas threatened most by the wildfires. Sheriffs in most of these areas have taken to the same social-media platforms (particularly Facebook) where the false rumors have spread to plead with their constituents to stop spreading false information. Continue reading.

Here are 11 absurd conspiracy theories conservatives must believe in the Trump era

AlterNet logoAs Donald Trump and his conservative defenders begin to construct a conspiracy theory that Adam Schiff  personally orchestrated a massive conspiracy to entrap Trump in Ukraine, it’s worth noting just how many conspiracy theories you have to believe in just to be a standard Republican these days. Political parties in all eras have a number of questionable orthodoxies, but the sheer number of conspiracy theories that make up mainstream Republican ideology is remarkable. A quick rundown would include but not be limited to;

1. The belief that 10,000 climate scientists all around the world are either stupid, or engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy to concoct bad science in order to receive…more government grant funding. And that no other scientists are exposing it.

2. The belief that there is a giant conspiracy across all of news media to make Republicans look bad and elect Democrats–in spite of continually unfair press coverage of candidates like both Bernie Sanders *and* Hillary Clinton–in exchange for…what? It’s never really clear.

View the complete November 10 article from the Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.