Bad Faith And Loons

In the aftermath of the convincing Biden-Harris victory, the rotted out Republican Party sees its role as enabling COVID Donnie's delusions in order to protect his bloated but fragile ego -- not, of course, to shoring up faith in our democratic system (surprise surprise!):

It is not over.

The presidential election is certainly over, and the result was not particularly close. President-elect Joe Biden won a decisive majority of the popular vote and likely a considerable electoral college victory. Claims of widespread electoral fraud would be spurious even if they weren’t made by a prating fool in front of a Philadelphia landscaping firm. The 2020 election is done. Concluded. Finished.

What has not ended — what seems endless — is Republican bad faith and poltroonery.

I am not referring here to those voters for President Trump who have been misled into false hope. It is not hard to convince people who distrust elites and are prone to conspiracy theories that elites are plotting to deny “real” Americans their influence. It does not even matter if the vote-counters are Republicans, because that is exactly what a conspiracy would do to hide its nefarious work.

No, it is Republican leaders who are responsible for poisoning whatever wells of goodwill still exist in our republic. Having aided Trump’s autocratic delusions, they are now abetting his assault on the orderly transfer of power. Through their active support or guilty silence, most elected Republicans are encouraging their fellow citizens to believe that America’s democratic system is fundamentally corrupt. No agent of China or Russia could do a better job of sabotage. Republicans are fostering cynicism about the constitutional order on a massive scale. They are stumbling toward sedition.

Meanwhile, these are some of the "fellow citizens" we're supposed to cosset and defer to, in order to promote domestic tranquillity:

President Trump’s election loss and the week-long silence of “Q,” the movement’s mysterious prophet, have wrenched some QAnon believers into a crisis of faith, with factions voicing unease about their future or rallying others to stay calm and “trust the plan.”

The uncertainty has been compounded by the abrupt public resignation, also last Tuesday, of Ron Watkins, the administrator of Q’s online sanctuary on the message board 8kun.

Q has gone quiet before. But the abrupt lack of posts since last Tuesday — Election Day, which the anonymous figure had touted for months as a key moment of reckoning — has sparked speculation and alarm among the movement’s most ardent followers.

Some QAnon proponents have begun to publicly grapple with reality and question whether the conspiracy theory is a hoax. “Have we all been conned?” one user wrote Saturday on 8kun.

Wrote another: “HOW CAN I SPEAK TO Q???? MY FAITH IS SHAKEN. I FOLLOWED THE PLAN. TRUMP LOST!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT NOW?????? WHERE IS THE PLAN???”

Trump’s defeat threatens to undermine the tale that Q, a supposed top-secret government operative, has woven over years: that Trump and his allies would soon vanquish a cabal of “deep state” child abusers and Satan-worshiping Democrats, exiling some to the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

(Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee has previously discussed the mental pathologies that are affecting members of the Trump cult, of which QAnon rubes are the most deluded, conspiratorial and likely dangerous.)

Going forward, this is what the poltroons leading the Republican Party will own, through their refusal to pop COVID Donnie's alternate universe election bubble:

Rita Katz, the executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism, said she expects the QAnon following will continue to grow online, regardless of who created or operated its presence online.

“It’s a dangerous network. It’s a dangerous movement that truly believes that Biden and other Democrats are killing kids,” Katz said. “And now, with Biden’s projected victory, the QAnon movement believes with the same zealous certainty that the whole thing is a sham. And that’s a major problem, because … these aren’t a bunch of harmless keyboard warriors — they’re adherents of a movement that has resulted in real-life violence.”

The FBI said last year that QAnon and other “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” represented a major terrorism threat. Its supporters have been linked to kidnapping plots and violent threats, including in 2018, when an armed man in Arizona barricaded a bridge at the Hoover Dam with an armored truck.

Conspiracy theories have always been a part of the American political landscape, largely but not exclusively from the right -- from the Illuminati hoaxes to the John Birch Society's communist conspiracies to more recent birtherism, Sandy Hook and "deep state" slanders.  But, after four years of enabling a budding fascist fool, to now encourage the belief that a democratically- elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are somehow beneficiaries of a "stolen election," characterized by massive voter fraud, is perhaps the most brazen, un- American demonstration of cowardice and bad faith so far.  

But the year isn't over yet.

(Photo:  a perfectly normal QAnon "patriot" at an Arizona vote counting center last Thursday/ Dario Lopez-Mills, AP)