This weekend, the dregs of right-wing Twitter tried their absolute darndest to "both sides" conspiracy culture by promoting a hashtag I will not repeat here for search engine reasons, which was meant to rhyme with "QAnon" but with "blue" replacing the "Q." They filled the hashtag primarily with things that were not "conspiracies" so much as things they personally disagreed with, things some people considered as possibilities before something was proven one way or another, and complaints that they couldn't get their cool new word in Urban Dictionary, which is actually hilarious.

These things are a wee bit different from claiming, apropos of nothing, that people are drinking baby blood to get high and then telegraphing this habit by wearing red shoes, possibly made out of said babies.

By sheer coincidence, surely, Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert — who expressed support for the QAnon movement early in her campaign and then later retracted it — also gave this a shot on the Judge Jeanine Pirro show on Saturday night. She accused Democrats of being "obsessed with conspiracies."

Which is sort of true, but not the way she thinks. It's more like we have to keep track of all the stupid shit conservatives believe.

Boebert's "proof" of this is that nothing happened on March 4, the day some Q people claimed was going to be Donald Trump's REAL inauguration day. This would be a great example of a conspiracy theory if it weren't based on things people were actually saying they were going to do. The fact that they didn't do it isn't our problem. If I were to announce my plans to commit a crime and then didn't go through with it, the cops wouldn't be "conspiracy theorists" for showing up at my door. That's not how that works.

Via Newsweek:

Speaking on Fox News' Justice With Judge Jeanine, Boebert told host Jeanine Pirro that Capitol security measures should be relaxed because she believes that the threats have subsided.

"No one on the outside can get into the Capitol, it is only staffers and members of Congress who are allowed at the people's house," she said. "At our nation's Capitol. This is complete bonkers that we are keeping people out of the U.S. Capitol. There's clearly not a threat. There was nothing that happened on March 4." [...]

"The Democrats are obsessed with conspiracy theories and they won't let them go," Boebert said Saturday. "We have a border fence around the people's house, with miles of razor wire. And Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi wants to keep it up."

Well, that's what happens when a bunch of people try to stage a coup — security measures get increased. It's like how one guy tried to sneak a bomb onto a plane in his shoe and now we all have to take our shoes off at the airport, or how one mystery person poisoned some Tylenol bottles and now over-the-counter medicine is packaged a particular way.

Taking threats seriously is not being "obsessed with conspiracy theories," but claiming the Equality Act is a secret plot to create an LGBTQ-supremacist society just might be.

This is not to say no one on the left believes in conspiracy theories or stupid things that could not possibly be true — I cannot even tell you how much time I devoted over the course of several years to trying to explain to some very insistent people that water does not have "feelings," and I don't think any of them were Republicans. There are kooky people all over, and I would actually argue that the process of believing something incorrect and then learning you're wrong is a really important part of our development as human beings. It shows us how easy it is to be convinced of something that isn't true, and that helps us build up our respective bullshit detectors. If it's something we've been through, we know what to look out for.

The difference between that and what the right has done with conspiracy culture is that they sometimes show up with guns. People who believe crystals have magic powers are not showing up with guns, people who believe unscientific things about GMOs are not showing up with guns. It also doesn't help that wacky conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are taken very seriously on the right. We at least have the decency to make fun of Gwyneth Paltrow.

We're also not going around accusing people of being child molesters without a single complaining witness. Republicans get mad when an actual human being accuses a public figure of sexual harassment or assault (because that's cancel culture!), but for some reason are totally fine with people insisting that all prominent Democrats and Hollywood celebrities are having child sex slaves shipped to them in Wayfair cabinets. That's weird.

When we start pulling shit like that without doing any self-correcting, when we start having our own Alex Joneses, conservatives can feel free to say conspiracy culture goes both ways. Until then, however, trying to push that conspiracy will make them look as silly as the Pizzagate people.

If they are not already the Pizzagate people, which they probably are.

[Newsweek]

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