The conspiracy theories were right

Break out the tinfoil hats

As you cruise around the internet, you may have seen the memes saying things like, “I Need New Conspiracy Theories Because All My Old Ones Came True.” While I think many of these claims were premature, I’m now prepared to say yes, the conspiracy theories are coming true.

I’m not talking about the Democratic ideas that Trump is an authoritarian who is abusing his power. That’s not so much a conspiracy theory as statement of reality. No, I’m talking about the right-wing conspiracies that go back more than a decade. Think about it: How much of what we are seeing today has the tinfoil hat crowd warned us about in the past?

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Take the most obvious example first. Since the days of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory before the 2016 election, the conspiracy right has been warning us that a dark cabal of pedophiles is ensconced in government. There is some truth to that.

Aside from the ongoing questions about Donald Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, the fact that for 241 days (and counting) of Trump’s second term, the Epstein files have not been released as promised and Matt Gaetz’s alleged scandalous behavior with underage girls, there have been quite a few Republicans have been forced to resign over scandals regarding sexual abuse of children. A few examples include a North Dakota legislator convicted in March, a South Carolina legislator resigned in August as he awaited trial, and in 2024, a Texas legislator was sentenced to more than 400 years in prison for child molestation. They are out there, and a lot of them are Republicans.

That’s not all. Remember Jade Helm? Back in the Obama era, many Republicans were convinced that President Obama was going to invade Texas and declare martial law. Under Donald Trump, the military occupies a growing number of American cities. The first deployments were to Los Angeles, which has since been ruled unconstitutional, and Washington, DC. Now the National Guard is going to Memphis while both Chicago and St. Louis are being threatened.

The legality of these new deployments is very much in question, but so far, Trump has stopped short of declaring martial law. The federal surge in Washington seems to have focused more on rounding up and deporting immigrants than anything else, and local grand juries are failing to indict in many other arrests made by the federals. That includes the infamous sandwich bandit. (I’d love to call him the Hamburglar, but the facts of the case don’t fit.)

Even without a declaration of martial law, the deployments are not good, and danged if there wouldn’t be rousing uproar on the right if Obama had done the same thing.

The military and the police have different missions. The military is there to protect the country from foreign aggression, while the role of the police is to maintain domestic law and order. Our laws reflect the distinction. Conflating the two undermines both readiness and trust in the military. If the cities need more policing, maybe don’t cut funding for policing and crime prevention.

Also related to Jade Helm were conspiracy theories about concentration camps being set up in abandoned Walmarts. I lived just down the road from one such Walmart, and I investigated it at the time. Nothing so crazy has happened under Trump yet, but Republicans have built camps that fit the definition of a “concentration camp” to house detained immigrants under reportedly harsh and even unlawful conditions (because the cruelty is part of the plan). Remember that concentration camps are not all death camps. The association of the two terms grew from the Holocaust, but not even all Nazi camps were purposed for extermination.

So far, Trump does not seem to be detaining American citizens in these camps, although lawful immigrants have been, but there is a possibility that may change. Back in April, Trump was heard to tell the president of El Salvador that more prisons would be needed for deportees because “The homegrowns are next.”

Past Jade Helm, I can remember when Rand Paul was outraged about the drone attack on Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki was an American member of al-Qaeda who was targeted by a drone strike on Obama’s orders in 2011. Obama ordered a legal review and ultimately added Awlaki to the target list because he was in Yemen, outside of US jurisdiction, and was actively plotting attacks against the US.

Contrast that with Trump’s strikes on Venezuelan boats. In one of his first actions, Trump fired the top judge advocates of the military, the people who make the calls as to whether attacks are lawful or not. This has been compared to purging the military of its conscience.

Now, a few months later, the president is ordering attacks on boats that he claims are smuggling drugs, but who really knows? These boats would normally be stopped and boarded by the Navy or Coast Guard rather than being sunk with all hands (and all evidence). There is no evidence that they pose an imminent threat to either the military forces in the area or the country at large. In fact, one had turned around before it was sunk.

There is no legal justification for these attacks, and I haven’t heard a peep from Rand Paul. The Trump Administration’s explanation is that the president designated Tren de Aragua and several other drug cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs),” but there was no imminent threat and no authorization for use of military force by Congress. Trump has also said that he is considering designating leftist groups as domestic terrorist organizations, so maybe Rand Paul can do the math on whether suspected Antifa members can be shot down in the streets with no warning.

I can also remember when Republicans were worried that Obamacare funded a secret police force. Spoiler alert: It did not, but many are similarly worried about ICE these days. The agency now has more funding than the US Marine Corps, and it operates in a particularly secretive manner, often pushing (or exceeding) the boundaries of the law. Could ICE be targeted on political dissent? We’ll have to wait and see.

A more recent conspiracy theory was the claim that Joe Biden was stifling aid to hurricane victims in Republican states. Aid was suspended, but guess who did it: The Trump Administration. At the same time, Trump is cutting FEMA funding and transferring FEMA personnel to ICE. Meanwhile, it has been a quiet hurricane season, but a storm that may grow into a massive hurricane is approaching.

At the same time, the Trump Administration cut cancer research and Medicaid funding. In not-so-pro-life moves, the cuts forced the closure of the maternity ward in a hospital that served my hometown and a treatment program for pediatric brain tumors, among a great many other lost services. I don’t have a conspiracy theory for that. I just wanted to mention it.

And then there’s the lawfare. Republicans who complained about the investigations of Donald Trump and the IRS targeting of the Tea Party are suddenly fine with Trump going after a member of the Federal Reserve Board on charges that turned out to be “trumped up.” The Trump Administration has also said that it plans to use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext for cracking down on leftist political groups, even though there is no evidence that any of these groups were involved in the assassination or any other crime.

And speaking of cracking down on speech, MAGA Republicans have found a newfound love for hate speech laws. Pam Bondi floated the idea of expanding prosecution of hate speech laws after Kirk’s death, while Trump said that he considers hate speech to be speech that treats him “unfairly.” Thankfully, a backlash that included many on the right prompted Bondi to back down for now.

There aren’t a whole lot of big right-wing conspiracy theories left at this point. Gun control is always a popular target for the conspiracists and, even before the Kirk assassination, Trump’s DOJ was floating the idea of banning gun ownership by transgender individuals. Once again, this idea was criticized from the right, but if Donald Trump does seize power completely, what are the odds that widespread lawful gun ownership remains as other constitutional rights wither? I’ve been told for years that one of the first things dictatorships do is confiscate guns, and Trump does have a history of supporting gun control.

I’ve never been a believer in conspiracy theories, but sometimes they do come to pass. I just never suspected that Republicans would use right-wing tinfoil hat concerns as a to-do list.

It’s the difference between partisanship and principle. Or yet another bastardized version of the Golden Rule in which MAGA does unto Democrats before the Democrats can do unto them. That’s another way of saying it’s a race to the bottom.

STATE OF THE TRADE WAR: China normally buys about 25 percent of the US soybean crop. This year, China is buying [wait for it] zero. Crop prices are collapsing with soybean prices down 40 percent and corn prices down 50 percent. Cue bailouts for Trump’s rural supporters in 3… 2… 1…

INTEREST RATE CUT: Donald Trump got a wish on Tuesday when the Fed announced a rate cut of 0.25 percent. The slowing job market, rather than Trump’s wishes, were the basis for the cut.

THANKS, STEVE! I’d like to give Steve a shout out for his recent courageous posts about Charlie Kirk and Tyler Robinson. These are sensitive topics and Steve handled them fairly and respectfully. Don’t underestimate the chilling effect that right-wing cancel culture has on bloggers and other writers, but then, that’s the point.

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