Andrew Prokop points out what is obvious, but seems generally to be ignored. The text messages between Virginia Thomas and Mark Meadows reveal not only that the wife of a Supreme Court justice conspired with the White House chief of staff to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, they also reveal that Ms. Thomas apparently actually believed Dump's lies about it, but a whole lot of Q-Anon level insanity as well. Furthermore, we should have noticed by now that a whole lot of prominent conservative activists, politicians and other elected officials do as well.
It isn't just a lot of uneducated yokels -- it's members of congress, probably some Senators (although most of them are likely faking it, but I dunno about Tuberville), state legislators, and lots of people who are running to be in charge of elections at the state level. I actually find this bizarre and inexplicable. I get going along with the gag in order to swindle the rubes and incite the True Believers, but there is no evidence for this whatsoever and in fact it's completely ludicrous. That the moon landing was fake is far more plausible than Trump actually won the 2020 election. Oh and by the way ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are completely useless against Covid 19, whereas the vaccines are safe and effective. Humans burning fossil fuel is causing the climate to change. Racism is a central fact of U.S. history. Not making wealthy people pay taxes does not benefit the working class.
The fact is that one of the two major parties in the United States has been taken over by deluded lunatics. But the corporate media can't actually say this aloud because it's a two party system, and therefore there must be two parties. Maybe that's desirable, but the actual fact is that one of the parties is terrifyingly unworthy of existence. This situation is dangerous beyond words.
No, it's not a fringe or a few wackos, it's the Republican party. Of Republicans polled, an overwhelming majority of them – 71% – still contest the 2020 election results. Only 21% believe Biden’s win was legitimate.
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I recently read the graphic book Sapiens by Yuval N. Harari. It brought into focus something that has long been nagging me. Yuval described it as humankind's ability to reify the myths it creates. We ordinarily equate myths with religious and origin stories, but we today are creating myths that are totally real for all practical purposes. They're also required for the way we currently live our lives..
In Sapiens Yuval uses the example of a "corporation" as an entity that has no material reality other than our acceptance of the claim that it does indeed exist. He gives a slew of examples of material things about a corporation (Peugeot in this case) that could be destroyed without eliminating the corporation itself. It disappears only when we agree that its gone.
Another example which resonates with me are "laws". One or more people sit down and assert that certain behavior is regulated by a set of rules they wrote, and those rules then do in fact apply as long as most of us (or the most powerful among us) agree that they do -- Even though there is nothing but a string of words behind the curtain. Putin seems to have trouble understanding parts of this particular myth.
"Money" now usually takes the form of patterns of bits in a database. Those bits are much easier to produce than the gold and silver they replaced, but even the value of those metals depended mainly on our consent; at least until technology found actual uses for them.
I have no quarrel with the modern myths just described; we depend on them. (However, I'd love to see us restructure our "corporate" myth.)
Perhaps those 'Nucking Futz' theories play a similar role for QAnon, et al., fanatics. Fantasies like these must exist for their world view to survive. (Not my kind of world though.) If this is so, the question may be "What sort of Weltanschauung could possibly make such crap necessary?"
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