Incomprehensible

I've familiarized myself with the basic literature of right-wing conspiracy theory, from des Mousseaux to Revilo Oliver to Milton Cooper. Although I've agreed with none of these texts, most of them did possess the virtue of comprehensibility. Alex Jones' blatherings about Sandy Hook were vile and disgusting, but at least you could follow his argument from point A to point B to point C to the depths of Hell.

Lately, rightwing paranoia has taken a turn for the surreal. To prove the point, I call as my witness Devin Nunes.

Devin Nunes says it’s now clear the Democrats made it possible for Russia to subvert the 2016 election.

Transcript here.

So the people that made the Russians successful are the Democrats. And the people who have continued this nonsense over and over and over again, looking for Russians behind every tree, looking -- we continue to chase ghosts around and around this place.

This is akin to saying "Monkeys like bananas, therefore my computer is the reincarnation of Edward Everett Horton."

Maybe we're not supposed to understand Nunes' word salad, any more than we're supposed to make rational sense of "Swans Reflecting Elephants." Trumpism is, essentially, fascism -- and over the years, many fascists have tended toward surrealism (which began as an anti-fascist art movement), perhaps because both fascism and surrealism eschew logic and seek to manifest the unconscious. I wasn't surprised to learn that Alex Jones is a big David Lynch fan, although I was disappointed to see Lynch appear on his show.

So we should not be surprised to see Nunes extemporaneously indulge in a bit of literary surrealism. Perhaps he'll end his next interview with a hearty cry of "¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte!"

At least this section makes a kind of sense...

But it does appear like, if you take the Trump dossier at face value, that Christopher Steele was getting that -- this is the MI6 agent -- he was getting that information from Russian sources.

As seen in our previous post, the "pee pee" allegation does not derive from any Russian government source; according to the dossier, that bit of information came from two people close to Trump and from a hotel employee. At least now we have Republicans admitting that Steele really did meet with sources. For months, the Trumpists have been trying to convince us that the whole text was pure fiction.

Is this propaganda barrage gaining traction? I fear that it may have an impact. Many people who became incensed by Hillary's server would not be able to tell you what a server is, and those are the people who will find Nunes' nonsense quite persuasive. The first casualty of fascism is reason.