Ben Sasse: Conspiratards Are Killing The GOP

For once, I more or less agree.

The Atlantic:

“Eugene Goodman is an American hero. At a pivotal moment on January 6, the veteran United States Capitol Police officer single-handedly prevented untold bloodshed. Staring down an angry, advancing mob, he retreated up a marble staircase, calmly wielding his baton to delay his pursuers while calling out their position to his fellow officers. At the top of the steps, still alone and standing just a few yards from the chamber where senators and Vice President Mike Pence had been certifying the Electoral College’s vote, Goodman strategically lured dozens of the mayhem-minded away from an unguarded door to the Senate floor.

The leader of that flank of the mob, later identified by the FBI as Douglas Jensen, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a red-white-and-blue Q—the insignia of the delusional QAnon conspiracy theory. Its supporters believe that a righteous Donald Trump is leading them in a historic quest to expose the U.S. government’s capture by a global network of cannibalistic pedophiles: not just “deep state” actors in the intelligence community, but Chief Justice John Roberts and a dozen-plus senators, including me. Now Trump’s own vice president is supposedly in on it, too. According to the FBI, Jensen “wanted to have his T-shirt seen on video so that ‘Q’ could ‘get the credit.’

Why are conspiratards thriving on the Left and Right though?

It is because we live under a neoliberal oligarchy in which the people no longer really have a voice in the two party system. As we are about to see again, there is more continuity than change between administrations. The system is rigged against ordinary people. They vote and nothing ever changes because the big donors buy the policy agenda and get served first. The lack of trust in everything is why conspiracy theories flourish. Why else would a mob storm Congress for the first time in history?