Joseph Wyatt: Trump, allies have become the hoax (Opinion)
Whether discussing QAnon’s predictions of a coming “storm” or Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about a rigged election, it is time that we replace the term “conspiracy theory,” and the gravity that the label implies, with a term more compatible with similar myths, such as bigfoot and alien crop circles. More accurately, the Big Lie and QAnon should be called “hoaxes.”
QAnon isn’t “theory.” It’s the bubonic plague of hoaxes, a jumble of nonsense missiles launched by a father-son duo living in the Philippines who let on that they were a highly positioned government insider. The pair thus gave, free of charge to each of their believers, a lifetime pass to the annual expo of flim-flammery.
“Q’s” cryptic messages have served as little more than inkblots for idle minds. Nevertheless, as with all hoaxes, QAnon ultimately will fade to nothing. Its number of believers will drop in proportion to the cumulative years to which Capitol rioters are sentenced.
Always, there will be new hoaxes to capture our attention, usually with simple and dramatic answers to complex questions. Recently, the “Italy-gate” stink bomb was flung into our midst to determine whether the politically naïve would give it a sniff.
The loony tale holds that people working for an Italian defense contractor connived with senior CIA officials to rig military satellites to switch votes from Trump to Biden. The evidence? It was on the internet and was repeated by Tucker Carlson of Fox News.
Carlson, whose primary talent is pretending to be sincere, also recently tossed viewers another Jan. 6 spin-off hoax. “FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol, according to government documents,” he said. CNN’s Brian Stelter contacted Fox, asking whether the network stood behind Carlson’s claim. Stelter received no response. Draw your own conclusions.
There is no evidence to support Italy-gate. But, as hoaxes go, one of its amplifiers has earned herself a 10 on the cheekiness meter. She is Michele Roosevelt Edwards, a realtor and failed one-time Republican House candidate. According to HuffPost, she spun out the story while sitting for an interview in “her” Virginia mansion. But the interviewer noticed that the house appeared to have been vacated. Its actual owner had moved and placed the residence up for sale. Edwards was pretending the home was hers.
Her election hoax echoes Trump’s claim that Dominion voting machines had flipped Trump votes to Biden. For relentlessly voicing that lie, Trump attorney Sidney Powell was sued by Dominion. In Powell’s defense, which she submitted in writing to the court, she said that “… reasonable people would not accept such statements [as she had been making] as fact.”
Perhaps she could team up with Rudy Giuliani, whose license to practice law in New York has been suspended because of his own repeated lying about the election. The pair could make quite a splash in the field of carnival barker, which is said to be wide open.
Sadly, it has come to this: Lady Democracy falters, impaled by election hoaxes. Will she rally and recover? Maybe. But it would aid her recovery if every Republican member of Congress would announce loudly and clearly that Donald Trump’s claims of a rigged election are lies.
However, that would take loyalty to their oaths of office and sufficient respect for their constituents to tell them the truth. Sadly, such merchandise seems to be on perpetual back order at the GOP store.
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