Conservatism is dead. Conspiracism is dancing on its grave | Opinion
Conspiracist ideology has consumed the Republican Party. At his rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump pledged to demolish the deep state, drive out the globalists, and rout the fake news media. Speaker after speaker referenced the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, a dogma that was once confined to the manifestos of mass shooters, but which is now the Trump campaign’s closing argument for the presidency.
Former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who promoted the Great Replacement over 400 times on his now-defunct show, told the crowd at Madison Square Garden that the political class “despises [the people] and their values and their history and their culture and their customs really hates them to the point that it’s trying to replace them.”
The former president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr, was even more explicit.
“The Democrat[sic] Party has forgotten about Americans. Rather than cater to Americans, they decided, “You know what? It would just be easier to replace them with people who will be reliable voters.”
“Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” Trump Sr., said last month.
The Republican National Committee under Lara Trump is claiming that millions of undocumented migrants could vote next week. A vast body of research, including recent audits by Republican-controlled states like Georgia, has found that voting by non-citizens is essentially non-existent.
By hyping this fake threat, Republicans are creating a pretext to challenge the election if Trump loses, putting a racist spin on their perennial allegations of voter fraud, and creating excuses for Republican governors to purge their voter rolls.
However, this obsession with non-citizen voting goes deeper than that. The lie of mass voting by undocumented migrants is the conceptual glue that binds the three major components of their conspiracist ideology: The Deep State, the Big Lie, and the Great Replacement.
Let’s review their delusional belief system:
The Deep State is a shadowy network of elites inside and outside of government who supposedly direct the course of history. This cabal is responsible for everything from Trump’s impeachments and prosecutions to voting laws and immigration policy. Some say it controls the weather.
The Big Lie is the debunked claim that voter fraud cost Donald Trump the 2020 election. Trump kicked off his Madison Square Garden rally by vowing to “totally obliterate the Deep State.”
The Great Replacement is the charge that the Deep State is deliberately importing migrants in order to replace white Americans, a process sometimes known as “white genocide.” The lie of massive noncitizen voting explains why the Deep State is supposedly importing all these migrants to commit election fraud.
These beliefs meld seamlessly into a paranoid whole. Trump told rally-goers in Atlanta that the only reason Democratic immigration policy must be the result of evil or stupidity. “Well, they’re not stupid because anybody that can cheat on elections that good is not stupid,” Trump told rally-goers in Atlanta. “But I never really talked about the third reason because it’s so sinister, but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed.”
Trump has been blaming migrants for his political failures for years. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote and blamed it on millions of illegal voters. Incredibly, Trump claimed that he would have won deep blue California – a state he lost by 30 points and 4 million votes – if not for those improbably civic-minded migrants. Trump convened a special commission to investigate voter fraud, which fizzled without finding evidence of the conspiracy.
Conservative ideology as we knew it is dead.
Conspiracism is all.
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