Conspiracy theories: betcha can't eat just one
An old joke I’m pretty sure I’ve told here before: two die-hard JFK assassination conspiracy theorists die in a car accident and go to Heaven. When they arrive they’re allowed to ask The Lord one question about any subject they want.
Obviously they ask him, “who killed Kennedy?” "God replies, “Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, of course.”
One theorist turns to the other and says, “this cover-up goes even higher than we thought.”
I thought about that when I saw that Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, now says the Republican Party itself is now part of the great conspiracy to deny Republican Donald Trump the presidency to which he was rightly re-elected in 2020:
MyPillow chief and 2020 dead-ender Mike Lindell has long promised that he would file an election-fraud complaint with the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning. But now he claims to have missed that goal because he was silenced by Republican National Committee Chairperson Ronna McDaniel.
It was a last-minute pressure campaign orchestrated by the RNC and McDaniel that prevented his case from moving forward and “saving the country,” Lindell now alleges.
“We believe that they have reached out to multiple [attorneys general] and put pressure on them, not to sign the Supreme Court complaint,” Lindell said Monday on his evening livestream, this time from aboard his private plane as he scrambled to lock down the signatures required to file his complaint with the high court.
With a poor WiFi connection marring his live-streamed rant, Lindell blasted McDaniel, alleging she orchestrated a vast Republican conspiracy against him when she finally acknowledged late last week that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
“How dare the RNC try and stop this case from getting to the Supreme Court. Shame on you, RNC! You are worse than Fox [News] now!” he stated, referencing his claims that the cable giant has silenced him. “You can’t tell me why Ronna McDaniel, the head of the RNC, made a statement saying Biden won three days before this Supreme Court complaint was supposed to go to the Supreme Court.”
“What about the timing of that, America!” he continued. “Why would she say that at that moment in time? She didn't have to say that. What, is she trying to get more donor money? Is she trying to get donor money from Democrats? She is as RINO as they come!” McDaniel did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
My advise to Ms. R̶o̶m̶n̶e̶y̶ McDaniel is that she shouldn’t take it too personally. Back in the day, Dwight Eisenhower himself was deemed a Communist infiltrator, too.
In 1962, some of America’s most influential conservatives met to talk about a growing threat: the rise of paranoid conspiracy theories on the right.
Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) was thinking about running for president. A mutual friend set up a meeting for Goldwater with William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the conservative National Review, and Russell Kirk, author of the 1953 book “The Conservative Mind.”
In a hotel suite in Palm Beach, Fla., Buckley and Kirk found themselves giving Goldwater advice about how to respond to the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society’s surge in popularity. The society, founded in 1958, was fiercely anti-communist — and fond of crackpot theories. Its founder, candy manufacturer Robert Welch, had accused most of the U.S. government — including former Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower — of being under secret communist control.
Yes, there was a time when the Republican Party actually purged its conspiracy lunatics, instead of coddling them. Though it took a while.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Rigid Thinking to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.