This is your apparently now-daily reminder that the Republican Party has gone entirely off the deep end. There's nothing left of it but conspiracy theories peddled by, sweet Jeebus, possibly the dumbest collection of people to ever collect themselves. Case in point, the conservative effort to prop up the Trump campaign's newest invented theory: Maybe it’s not Donald Trump who’s erratic and [do not insert medical diagnosis-from-afar here]. Maybe it’s Hillary Clinton!
At the same time, the Drudge Report, WorldNetDaily and a small army of would-be Twitter sleuths tried to build the case that the Democratic nominee for president has serious health issues and only they had noticed. [...]
None of the evidence, often shared (or sent to reporters) with the hashtag #HillarysHealth, held up.
That is one way to put it. The other way to put it is that all the so-called "evidence" was blatantly fabricated. As in, the Great Conservative Movement cobbled together a collection of fraudulent stories, pushed them from places like the Drudge Report as if they were true, and demanded the media pick up their invented stories as if they were true. It was a pure propaganda effort—and peddled by morons. From the "tea party" movement onward, it's been an essential part of conservatism, and is precisely why Donald Trump is the Republican nominee today.
"Evidence" the first, as promoted by fraud site Drudge Report: A photo of Clinton being "helped up" porch stairs by two men, meant to demonstrate the candidate's "questionable health." Except that the photos didn't show what the promoters claimed they showed.
He left out the context: The photos were from February. As CNN's Brian Stelter first noticed, Getty Images had published the photos during Clinton's South Carolina primary campaign. The photo agency noted, in its caption, that Clinton had been steadied after slipping on the stairs.
A more blatant effort was promoted by conspiracy theory outlet WorldNetDaily. Rather than relying on dodgy context to make their case, they simply fabricated a tape, James O'Keefe style. So rather than the advertised "Hillary Clinton has seizure/convulsions," viewers were treated to a looped-tape snippet made to look like an extended seizure—providing those viewers were absolute morons. Lucky, all WorldNetDaily readers are indeed absolute morons, so it's not likely any of them noticed the footage was recut from a well-known clip of Clinton simply nodding her head.
The reporters, who had covered Clinton for a year, interpreted her exaggerated head-bobbing as a joke at how she'd been suddenly surrounded — and as a successful attempt at ending the scrum.
You can watch the tape yourself, and—not being an absolute, zero-degrees-Kelvin moron, you brave soul you—see exactly the few seconds America's Top Conservative Minds snipped out, looped, and packaged with an ominous soundtrack. Again, there are two stories here: The first, that actual supposedly serious people would create such a ham-handed fake tape. The second is that a goodly portion of the entire conservative movement is so astonishingly stupid as to fall for it.
Show us what else you've got, Dr. Nick Riviera!
Mike Cernovich, a self-help author best known as the attorney for a central figure in the "Gamergate" saga, seized on the speculation about Clinton to ask if Clinton traveled with a private doctor. [...]
Cernovich's speculation started with an incident from last week, when Clinton was campaigning in Las Vegas. Mid-speech, she paused and narrowed her eyes to look at protesters. Secret Service Assistant Special Agent in Charge Todd Madison rushed to her side, telling her that the situation was under control, and that she could keep talking.
Oh sweet Jeebus, they've gotten dumber. We may be reaching lichen levels of intelligence. Cernovich may, if he puts his mind to it, someday be able to at least master photosynthesis. But that day is not today.
That clip that you've been passing around showing the reaction to an oncoming protester from the cool-as-a-cucumber Clinton versus the skittish seize-the-podium reaction of Trump, as Secret Service agents rush to them both? That's right, Dumbass McGamergate here haz a theory:
To Cernovich, it was clear that Clinton was "completely frozen" and "lost control of her executive functions/pre-frontal cortex."
This led to some down-the-rabbit-hole theorizing that eventually proclaimed one of the Secret Service agents protecting Clinton was actually her secret doctor, and America's dumbest potted plants proceeded to descend on poor hapless reporters with all the energy one could expect from a movement that guzzles Miracle Gro.
All right, so there we see the making of a new conservative meme, in real time, from a muttered remark from the Trump campaign to faked footage to America's Dumbest Ideological Investigators. But here's what's important:
This is not an uncommon occurrence. It is part and parcel of the movement. Wrapping fake evidence into elaborate conspiracies is, in fact, the only consistent ideology the "movement" has left.
From Mexican "rapists" to every one of his subsequent fact-free assertions, Trump's dedication to conspiracy is at this point common knowledge. He would not be the nominee had he not first become the "birther" movement's pompous, self-promoting kingpin. He may well end his nomination declaring that the November elections were "stolen" from him by unspecified voter fraud.
He invented none of it. Imaginary "voter fraud," always perpetrated in conservative minds by shiftless American minorities, is the linchpin of voter suppression efforts in every Republican-run state. The complete absence of supporting evidence—as in, any evidence at all—has at no point slowed that movement. The birther movement was launched as soon as America's first non-white president took office; Trump's notion that crime is up despite crime being down was defended by Newt Gingrich at the convention is being true enough because it "felt" true to conservatives; the NRA and fellow conservative gunophiles have based a decade's worth of propaganda on the notion that the government is preparing to take your guns, or your ammo, or both at any moment, and that foreign terrorists are everywhere from your mailbox to your fridge.
Fake tape is the reason "baby parts" made it into the political lexicon, and why a murderer entered a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic afterward. Credulously propping up the dumbest conspiracy theories is why Fox News turned Cliven Bundy into a movement hero instead of a deluded crackpot, and why two Bundy-inspired cop killers believed their acts would finally result in the "revolution" Bundy and his armed conspirators were bleating about. Immigrants as being little more than criminals and drug runners is a Steve King theory, not a Trump theory. And so on. And so on.
Name a major conservative campaign-trail theme of the last few years that hasn't been either premised on a conspiracy theory or soon supplanted by one. Has there been one? Was there, during the Republican primary campaign, any theme or ideological position put forth by any other candidate that was not trounced neatly by Trump simply fabricating whatever version of reality he needed to fabricate in order to deny it?