Loopiest far-right beliefs?

Politics & Elections
1

I wonder about the things these nutbags (say they?) believe to be true. Some, I must think, are things they don’t really believe in but they say they do to rile up the left, and there may be some I just don’t understand what they’re claiming to believe. But it does seem as if they’re deliberately claiming parts of their ideology that would be viewed skeptically by an intelligent kindergartner.

For example, the whole JFK jr. thing. They don’t believe in death? They don’t believe that the namesake of a Democratic President would probably find right-wing politics repugnant? I completely don’t understand why they picked him of all dead people, to obsess about.

Or the whole “vaccines are designed to kill you” thing. Sincere belief or trolling gone wild? I’d vote for the latter but a lot of them seem to think it’s actually true, with no basis whatsoever that I can see.

Do some of them really think that Donald Trump is the Messiah? Personally, I think this is trolling too–they’re actually saying that in response to sane people finding him an ill-read, boorish, creepy sociopath born into too much money, and they’re saying “No, we like him a lot” but maybe some of them actually believe he’s literally the son of God returned to earth. I don’t know.

What are some other of the crazier things right-wingers profess to be true?

2

They seem to be in some kind of mutual competition to see who can come up with the most outlandish things to believe, or pretend to believe, and who can freak out the libs the most.

I just read an article in New Yorker Mag by Jonathan Chait, focusing on the derangement of Trump’s lawyers, which he calls “Trump Brain illness” or something like that. He rates them on a scale of crazyness.

His #1 craziest is Sidney Powell, who is saying that CIA Director Gina Haspel personally went to Germany to find the server with all the evidence of the bogus Biden votes, and destroy the same, but she got injured somehow and captured by Germans, and we must now send a clandestine team to rescue her.

His #2 craziest is Rudy, IIRC. Or maybe it was Lin? I’ll see if I can find it again.

MyPillow guy didn’t rate because this list was just for Trump’s lawyers.

3

Okay, here’s Jonathan Chait’s taxonomy of degrees of Trump Lawyer Brain disease:

#3 : Bill Barr
#2 : Rudy Giuliani
#1 : Sidney Powell

(Lin Wood isn’t mentioned.)

4

Well, for one thing, there’s the association with his cousin RFK Jr., the crazy anti-vax dude. And there’s the trumpish Senator from Louisiana, John N. Kennedy. Lots of room for confusion and conspiracy theorizing there.

5

The loopiest behavior I see in right-wingers isn’t so much a particular belief as it is utterly unfounded, delusional optimism when it comes to election outcomes.

Prior to November 2020, there was one Trumper who was predicting online, in utter seriousness, that Trump would carry over 70 percent of the popular vote. More than one said Trump could or would win New York and California in the Electoral College.

6

I believe it goes something like this; in the '90s, there was speculation that John-John would run for the Democratic presidential nomination, and naturally that would make him an adversary of Crooked Hillary, so she had to have him killed because she’d clearly never be able to defeat him in a primary, but he realized she was going to kill him and so he faked his death and went into hiding, and when Loser Donald came around and challenged Crooked Hillary he realized that Don was the only person who could defeat her Deep State cabal once and for all, so he waited until a year after the election before he started posting on 4chan under the name “QAnon” to tell everyone about his Big Secret Plan to help the Biggest Loser win bigly.

Don’t ask why Hillary let Obama beat her. That was clearly part of the plan all along.

7

As unhinged from reality as that was, at least it was a thing that could have theoretically happened. Resurrections from the dead, however…

8

I firmly believe that you have to be dead before you can resurrect, nothing else makes sense.
I think I will start a pro-resurrection movement, there are some people I would love to see try.

9

The important question is : how can we monetize this ?

:supervillain:

10

To be clear, the JFK Jr. conspiracy isn’t that he was dead and was resurrected, but that he faked his own death and assumed a new identity. Or even that he may have lost his memory and took on a new identity.

As for why the far right is going in on these loopy things? A lot of them are existing conspiracy theories that are being exploited. Part of this is just that Republicans (and Trump specifically) started pushing conspiracies when reality wasn’t working. Part of it is that the alt-right (i.e white supremacists) both believe conspiracies and prey on conspiracy theorists. Part of it is the cognitive dissonance with Trump being worse than people could conceive, and thus they wanted to believe that things aren’t as they seem. Part of it is that people turn to conspiracy theories as a way to cope with tragedy and uncertainty, like the pandemic (or, yes, JFK’s death or 9/11). Part of it is using deliberate religious language to dress it up for those who already believe that invisible powers like Satan are at work in the world.

Whatever the start, conspiracy theories tend to accumulate. Once you start believing “reality isn’t what they say it is” and have any restraints lifted, it’s just natural for them to come together. Part of this just happens, and part of this is stuff that con-men QAnon know they can exploit. The long-running conspiracy theories are already very good at spreading amongst fertile minds, having built up strong defenses.

It was not surprising at all to me that the JFKjr still be alive conspriacy got folded in like the rest. I’m sure that flat-earthism will show up.

As for “vaccines designed to kill you”? Sure, maybe some people were just saying it to troll the libs. But really that all started with the antimask stuff creating reluctance around the vaccine (as why do you need a vaccine if the virus wasn’t harmful enough to need to mask?) and the anti-vax groups who have existed forever taking advantage of that reluctance. People were looking for reasons to believe the vaccine was bad. Also, people who are scared will sometimes seek out reasons to justify their reluctance.

Then there’s also the way social media makes it all easier to spread, of course. The way their systems focus on engagement and usage time tends to encourage this, as does the focus on controversy. And then they were reluctant to do anything too much about it because true believers are more passionate and get more engagement, and they didn’t want to scare off anyone.

Yes, the stuff you’re hearing seems too absurd that people could believe it. And, to be fair, there’s no clear answer on how many people really believe any individual part. But these beliefs are real, and you’re seeing the natural combination of echo chamber effects and what happens when people start rejecting objective reality.

The believers are so deep that it doesn’t seem so absurd to them.

11

It’s unfounded delusional optimism when it comes to anything. Wishcasting is a big thing with them.

The first point that I started getting genuinely alarmed about Trumpism is when he yelled at a rally “WHO’S GOING TO PAY FOR THE WALL?” and everybody shouted back “MEXICO.” That’s when I first grasped that this man is willing to say anything, no matter how stupid, and that his supporters are ready to believe it, no matter how stupid.

I think for many it started out as being facetious or trolling, but his words have this viral quality such that once you speak something, you believe it, no matter how ridiculous.

12

OK, just keeping score here. We have:

  1. JFK jr. still alive
  2. vaccines designed to kill
  3. Trump the literal Messiah
  4. Gina Haskell in need of rescue
  5. Trump popular with voters beyond all historical precedents
  6. FREE WALL! (at Mexican expense)

The absurdity, or inexplicableness, of these concepts seems to be the point of them: I wonder if this will come to a head when candidates the GOP nomination in '24 will be asked “Do you believe in Crazy Idea #1” or “…#7?” --some will choose to express tepid support for these nutty ideas, whole the others will simply change the subject, such as Chris Christie is now doing. But none will dare to alienate the fringiest of the fringe by denouncing them, no matter how crazy. The GOP base (5%? 25%? of GOP voters) supports much of this COMPLETELY INSANE stuff, and they can’t afford to turn those people away.

If you profess to believe this stuff, then believing that Trump won an election that he lost by millions of votes is easy.

13

There’s nothing new under the sun.

14

Let us not forget the child sex ring run by Hillary Clinton out of the basement of a pizzeria that doesn’t have a basement.

Honorable mention is an 8 month pregnant Stanley Ann Dunham taking a secret trip to Kenya from Hawaii to give birth, returning back to Hawaii and then choosing to alter records of the birth, including birth certificates and newspaper announcements, an act that has no impact on young Barak’s life except to make him, a black boy, eligible to be elected President.

15

I read an essay from the late 19th century where a man was arguing that women shouldn’t go to medical school. He couldn’t argue that women weren’t intelligent enough to attend medical school, there were already women in both the United States and Great Britain who had graduated, so he had to find another angle. He argued that women who devout such time to developing their intellect would see their womanly parts deprived and would thus shrivel up and they would no longer be able to bare children. As I read that, I could not help but wonder whether or not the author actually believed what he wrote.

16

I don’t know if these loopy beliefs can even be categorized as ‘far-right’, exactly. They’ve become their own weird thing at this point.

It’s been asked in this thread how JFK Jr. can be held up as this savior of the Q movement when he clearly was not a rightie in his time. But President JFK Sr. is also held up in the Q mythos as the last ‘good’ Democratic president-- after that, all Dem presidents and most Repub presidents were part of the ‘Deep State’ who were working for the ‘One World Order’. That includes both Bushes, of course. I think they consider Reagan ok. Not sure about Nixon.

And trump himself is hardly a traditional far-right politician. A lot of his policies and actions, like tariffs and kissing up to the Russians, are far from far-right. In fact, one of the big factors in his winning the Presidency was in capturing the ‘racist Democrat’ demographic with his (or more accurately, his handlers’) ‘America First!’ and ‘Build the Wall’ rhetoric.

It seems that where the Q BS and the trump BS intersect is in some addled set of beliefs, cherry-picked from traditionally Democratic and Repub beliefs, that things are wrong in this country, and the reason is due to this ‘Deep State’ cabal that is secretly running things, which is ultimately neither right nor left. There’s a misremembered belief that things used to be ‘better’, which I think they believe dates to up until sometime in the '60s.

17

Odd coincidence is last night’s Rachel Maddow show, that I had recorded but not yet watched when I wrote the OP, had its opening segment devoted to weird batshit right-wing conspiracy thinking.

Her explanation was that, ultimately, all these nutty ideas lead to revenge plots against “their” enemies (whoever “they” are) and JFK jr. & Trump &whoknowswho will be anointed as Kings of the World and slice the heads off all the bad people and justice will be ultimately restored to the universe.

Which makes sense, since it so closely parallels the fantasies that fundamentalist Christians adhere to.

18

I wonder how this same question would play out in Russia. What is their equivalent of far-right, and what would be their loopiest beliefs?

19

Oh, just remembered. Weren’t the Italians supposed to be switching Trump votes to Biden electronically or something? That’s as much as I can recall–don’t know if there was any more substance than that to this one.

20

I think the artwork by this McNaughton cat fall into this category, albeit loosely:

https://www.google.com/search?q=mcnaughton+works+on+trump&client=opera&hs=U7Q&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1uNzj4Z_0AhXB7Z4KHTmNDcQQ_AUoA3oECAEQBQ&biw=1536&bih=723&dpr=1.25