Quote (Goomshill @ Sep 8 2021 12:24pm)
If people want to start with an insane premise and they find as many connected dots as they can that don't actually support that premise but tangentially reference it despite being having clear, mundane explanations, they can keep reinforcing whatever silly conspiracy theories they want to come up with. 9/11 truthers, qanons, its the same thing. Its like Spicy said, if Trump had eaten Russian salad dressing that would be one more 'Russian connection' to the likes of Maddow.
It was always an unreasonable premise, it always had absurd leaps and required extraordinary conspiracies where every actor was required to be simultaneously a master of deception who keeps all his connections meticulously hushed up while also being inept and clumsy and giving away his secrets in public by his missteps. That's one of the repeated themes of these various conspiracy theories. How many of them assume that there is some secret plot that has been covered up by dozens of people who had access to it for years, without ever letting a clue slip, except for when people started theorizing about it and assumed they had all these clues out in public because of their own incompetence. Jeff Sessions was totally in cahoots with Russia and had secret dealings the whole election and only tripped up when he tried to cover up meeting with the Russian ambassador in full view of hundreds of people and logged on official, public white house logs!
When there are actual 'conspiracies', or at least, scandals people try to cover up after the fact, there are mountains of evidence right in the public view that make it overwhelmingly obvious. Because people in real life aren't super spies who construct flawless plans and leave no traces. When Ilhan Omar tried to cover up her marriage to her brother, there were years of social media posts between them, pictures, police reports, a marriage and divorce license, statements from family friends, apartment leases, immigration documents, social security records, business licenses, etc etc that all contradicted her cover-up story. She went on instagram and facebook and deleted pictures people had already archived. She's not some james bond villain or xanatos giving a narration of their own devious plan, she's a moron.
The conspiracy theories that require people to simultaneously be morons and masterminds are always wrong, the ones that require people to just be morons- often right
I agree with most of that. If the premise is that Trump had been groomed by Russian intelligence since the 80's, that Cohen met in Prague to pay off hackers, that Trump got peed on by hookers and Russian intelligence had a tape of it, that even guys like Sessions were involved in the plot, that's a pretty expansive theory, and it was unreasonable. On the other hand, if you set the bar much lower, and you consider the verified facts we know happened(which are a little more suspicious than a sandwich topping), it was never an unreasonable position to think there might've been something there.
But the revelations came out little by little over multiple years, and the goalposts kept moving, and now the whole episode has been retconned as a nothingburger. The *reasonable* position for anti-establishment figures on the left and right is that it was a nothingburger. They are wrong.
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