MAGA's and The Right's Frankenstein Monsters

Decades ago now when I was active in the Republican Party Christofascists were kept largely at arm's length and out of positions of power and far right conspiracy theorists and whack jobs were viewed with a wink and a nod and likewise kept from positions of power.  Those days are long gone and today the Republican Party resembles a psychiatric hospital being run by the seriously mentally disturbed  patients. It's almost as if the crazier one is, the more the GOP opened its arm for a warm embrace.  The end result is that the GOP has created its own Frankenstein monsters - which includes the Felon - whose stock in trade is lies and unhinged conspiracy theories. Indeed, many of these figures live in an alternate reality and with podcasts and far right outlets only too happy to disseminate insanity, the GOP leadership (which believed it could control the Christofascists and outright crazies) has both lost control of the psych ward inmates and, in numerous cases found themselves being pushed to the side, often being labeled as "RINO's" - Republicans in name only.  A column in the New York Times looks at one such Frankenstein monster, Candace Owens who, in my view, has more than a few screws loose, underscores the GOP's inability to rein in those they enabled.  Here are column highlights:

This week, Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, traveled to Nashville to meet with Candace Owens, a podcaster who has become the premier purveyor of conspiracy theories about her husband’s murder. If the summit was meant to convince Owens to back off her paranoid and fantastical speculations, it failed. On Thursday, Owens had on her show a man who claimed to have seen Erika Kirk at an army base the day before Kirk’s assassination, implying that Erika was somehow part of the plot against her husband. That plot also involves, in Owens’s telling, the French Foreign Legion, the federal government and leaders of Turning Point, Kirk’s organization, all somehow masterminded by demonic Zionists.

Owens musings are unhinged, but Erika Kirk’s trip to Nashville, brokered by the conservative star Megyn Kelly, demonstrates that they’ve become too influential for right-wing leaders to ignore. Kelly herself — a former Fox News host who’d never been known for her outré views — has refused to denounce Owens, insisting her ideas are legitimate. . . . . . she added, “many people believe there’s more to this story, that we’re being lied to by our F.B.I., that there are too many inconsistencies around the official story. And those people are more than entitled to that belief.”

The aftermath of Kirk’s assassination should have been a unifying moment for the right. The facts of the case — Robinson is said to have had a trans partner and was angry about Kirk’s demonization of sexual minorities — would have been easy for conservatives to exploit in their fight against gender nonconformists. But Robinson evidently wasn’t a grand enough enemy for some on today’s right, which is increasingly built on conspiracies and the content they generate. So Kirk’s killing, far from knitting the movement together in grief and anger, has precipitated a bitter, squalid internecine feud.

“Today the conservative movement is in serious danger,” Ben Shapiro said in a blistering speech on the opening night of Turning Point’s AmericaFest conference on Thursday, the first since Kirk’s death. That danger comes not just from the left, Shapiro said, but “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” He went on to denounce Owens by name, as well as his fellow Turning Point speakers Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

Shapiro, however, doesn’t have the power to excommunicate Owens. Maybe no one does. Her audience is simply too big. . . . . . In a world where traditional gatekeepers have lost most of their power, she’s a star.

This is partly a story about conservatives creating a monster they can’t control. Owens, after all, has been saying nutty things for a long time. In 2019, she left her job as communications director of Turning Point not long after arguing that Hitler’s real sin was globalism, not nationalism. . . . . Rather than ostracize her, however, powerful conservative organizations cultivated her. Republicans invited her to testify before Congress about why white nationalism wasn’t a problem. . . . . Having elevated her in large part for her willingness to say outrageous things about her opponents, people on the right are now surprised by her willingness to say outrageous things about them. . . . .Owens’s rise, and the damage she’s done to her erstwhile allies, also offers a warning about the danger of the influencer politics that conservatives have excelled at.

Clearly, liberals should try to figure out how to become competitive in all these mediums, since many Americans rely on them to learn about the world. The problem is that the influencer ecosystem rewards those who promise access to suppressed, esoteric truths, making viewers feel as if they’re part of real-life melodramas. The algorithms are optimized for illiberalism.

I was struck by a stray reference in Owens’s podcast this week to the “mommy sleuths and investigators” in her audience. She was announcing plans to provide these amateur digital detectives with photos of Kirk’s rental car, which somehow, in her telling, point to problems with the investigation of his death.

She packages her conspiracy theories in the slick conventions of true crime, allowing people following along on their screens to participate in the search for answers.

QAnon once offered its adherents a similar sense that they were taking part in solving a great mystery. Lately, however, that movement’s energy seems to have dissipated. There was always a strange optimistic streak to QAnon, since it posited that heroic “white hats” were working behind the scenes to set the world right. As one popular meme put it, “Patriots are in control.” But now, Donald Trump is firmly back in power, and no golden age is at hand. Rather than the cathartic unmasking of deep state pedophile networks, we’ve seen Trump struggling to keep the case files of his friend Jeffrey Epstein secret.

For at least some former true believers, disillusionment is setting in. Marjorie Taylor Greene mournfully referenced the QAnon movement’s tropes when she announced her resignation last month. “There is no plan to save the world or a 4D chess game being played,” she said.

If patriots aren’t in control, it raises the question of who is. Unsurprisingly, some entrepreneurial figures on the right have settled on a tried-and-true answer: the Jews. Owens especially has taken this most elemental of paranoid fixations and turned it into something between a soap opera and a live-action role-playing game. “It’s necessary for people to recognize how greatly evil these Zionists are,” Owens said on her podcast this week . . .

“Just asking questions, positing vague conspiracies, raving like Alex Jones about secret confederacies that control your life, none of it makes your life better,” Shapiro said in his AmericaFest speech, a cri de coeur against the direction of the movement he’s dedicated his career to. Unfortunately, when it comes to people trying to build an audience, he’s wrong.