Donald Trump's nominee to become the Director of National Intelligence, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), loves a good conspiracy, like his belief that Hillary Clinton used the Steele Dossier to steal the 2016 election from herself, and that the Mueller Report was really written by "Hillary Clinton's de facto legal team." But Ratcliffe is unfailingly loyal to Donald Trump, and that's why he's having a socially distanced confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee today.

Republicans seem to have overcome whatever qualms they had about Ratcliffe last year, when he withdrew his nomination because his resume was full of lies. His false claim that he arrested 300 illegal aliens in a single day probably won't keep him out of the DNI job. In the Before Times, that might have been a problem; now, it's just a minor detail. The same will probably go for the Daily Beast's discovery that Ratcliffe's official campaign Twitter account follows a bunch of insane conspiracy theorists, including a 9/11 truther and several accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy, which posits that a cabal of pedophile Democrats and Hollywood elites secretly run the whole world so they can eat children. If anything, other Republicans may be asking him to share the accounts with them so they can catch up on the real news.

The Daily Beast story explains Ratcliffe's verified blue-checkmark campaign account

follows several accounts on the political fringe, including a 9/11 truther account with just one follower besides himself and four promoting the outlandish QAnon conspiracy theory [...]

The conspiracy theorists followed by Ratcliffe, whose nomination for director of national intelligence goes before the Senate intelligence committee Tuesday morning, cover a bizarre range of beliefs. They posit that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death to help Trump to take down the Deep State. Others claim a Democratic sex dungeon exists in in a Washington pizzeria. But Ratcliffe and the QAnon promoters he follows have one thing in common: utter loyalty to Trump.

The piece does point out, a bit generously perhaps, that it's entirely possible that the conspiracy accounts weren't followed by Ratcliffe himself, but by some other person with access to the campaign account. If that's the case, then you only need to question Ratcliffe's judgment in hiring staffers who follow nutbag cultists, not whether he's a nutbag cultist himself. For devoted Donald Trump loyalists like Ratcliffe, it's not clear what the difference is, anyway.

The accounts followed by Ratcliffe pass along the usual QAnon idiocy depicting Donald Trump as the wise God-Emperor who will clean up the elitist pedophile ring through secret military tribunals and executions of all America's enemies, such as virtually all Democrats and insufficiently loyal Republicans.

In a graphic posted by one of the accounts, a screaming Trump rescues crying children from a demonic Hillary Clinton—accompanied by text accusing Clinton of conducting child sacrifices. Another posits that Vincent Fusca, a Trump supporter some QAnon believers claim is John F. Kennedy Jr. in disguise, conducted a secret arrest of former President George H. W. Bush.

One of the accounts identified in the article, "Hobbit Froggy," retweets crazy claims that the coronavirus pandemic is a media hoax (it's big on Gateway Pundit stories), but also retweets Donald Trump's tweets about what a great job he's doing of managing the crisis. That, and a very long thread about orphans rescued from Ukrainian sewers by a guy who Capitalizes Every Single Word Of His Tweets, and knows that all the world's problems are caused by a "Handful Of Bloodline Families" who secretly run everything:

Ratcliffe's nomination seems sure to be sent to the full Senate, although Democrats like Kamala Harris are at least trying to expose how unqualified he is, for whatever that's worth:

But what about the handful of Bloodline Families that really run things? Will anyone ask Ratcliffe about why he's following loonies like this, or hiring people to follow them for him? Oh right: no.

[Daily Beast / CNN]

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