The Conspiracy Congress by Kent Harrington

ATLANTA – Voltaire famously warned that anyone who can make people believe absurdities can make them commit atrocities. Two and a half centuries later, an insurrection at the US Capitol by those who believed Donald Trump’s lies confirmed Voltaire’s point. And now, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives is doing everything it can to “flood the zone” with even more absurdities.

Exhibit A is the new House “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which supposedly will show how the Democratic Party has used federal agencies to persecute Republicans and their supporters. Trump has long peddled such allegations, and now Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the new subcommittee’s chair, will create a spectacle of “investigating” law-enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Among other things, Jordan claims that the FBI’s investigation into death threats directed at local school board members was really a veiled attempt to crush parents’ right to freedom of speech. Though this charge has been thoroughly debunked, we can fully expect the subcommittee to revive all the old theories – still considered to be sacred truths among a shocking number of Republican voters – about “deep state” conspiracies against Trump.