The malignant Tucker Carlson went on TV last night and said that the QAnon conspiracy theory doesn’t exist. To be clear, he didn’t say that the conspiracy itself is nonsense and doesn’t exist. He said there is no QAnon conspiracy theory at all. In other words, it’s a liberal hoax to make right wingers look bad. The term gaslighting is thrown around too much, but there has never been a better example than that.
Amanda Marcotte does a great job of breaking down the right’s next move and basically, that’s all they’ve got:
Donald Trump’s insurrection failed. While historians will likely debate for decades how close he really came to succeeding, one thing is for certain: His failure has put his most prominent defenders in a tough spot. Instead of lining up to sing the praises of President-for-Life Donald Trump, which is where they want to be, his sycophants are stuck trying to make excuses for, minimize, or deflect attention from Trump’s failure.
First, they tried to minimize Trump’s responsibility for the insurrection. That tactic fell apart after an impeachment trial where the prosecutors made such an airtight case for Trump’s guilt that even people who voted to acquit him pretended it was on a legal technicality, rather than try to argue for his innocence. Now, some folks on the right are trying a new tactic, one you might call the “go big or go home” strategy. Trump’s loudest defenders are now outright denying that the nation saw what we all clearly saw on January 6.
During a Tuesday hearing about the security failures that led to the Capitol riot, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin unleashed a bunch of conspiracy theories denying that all those people waving Trump flags while chanting “no Trump, no peace” were, in fact, there for Trump.
Johnson has also been rejecting the idea that the insurrection was a serious event because he falsely claims it wasn’t an armed insurrection. This, of course, is flat-out false. Law enforcement seized Moltov cocktails, bear spray, guns, and knives from insurrectionists. Others improvised weapons, often using flagpoles or fire hydrants, or seized weapons from the Capitol police officers they then attacked. The likely reason it wasn’t worse is D.C.’s strict gun laws prevented many would-be rioters from making it to the Capitol in the first place and discouraged others from carrying guns for fear of being stopped by police.
Johnson was echoing a narrative that has been percolating up, as these narratives do, from the right-wing fringes. And there’s every reason to be concerned that this will follow the same path so many other right-wing conspiracy theories do, where it starts from the fringes, gets amplified by people like Johnson, and eventually settles into the common wisdom of the Republican Party.
“There was no insurrection, there was no coup,” said Dinesh D’Souza, a fake historian, convicted criminal, and conservative pundit still in good standing enough to appear on Laura Ingraham’s show Fox News Tuesday night. Instead, he insisted the heavily videoed and photographed insurrection is “a false narrative” invented by liberals who want to say “Trump was presiding over all the social unrest so they could then try to blame on him.”
The “don’t believe your lying eyes” strategy was in full bloom on Tucker Carlson’s Tuesday night show in a segment where Carlson denied the existence of QAnon, the online conspiracy theory cult that many of the insurrectionists are engaged in.
“We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which, in the end, we learned is not even a website. If it’s out there, we could not find it,” Carlson said, insisting that “cable news” and “politicians talking on TV” are “the ones spreading disinformation to Americans” by talking about the existence of QAnon.
Of course, QAnon is very real and well-documented — more so than most cults, since it exists mostly online and thus has a lengthy written history across many websites, including 8kun, where the “Q drops”, which are believed to be authored by the people who own the site, are published. Indeed, Carlson is no doubt aware that a good deal of his own audience believes the QAnon conspiracy theory, and likely are taking this broadcast as a coded signal to play dumb about it.
The word “gaslighting” gets thrown around a lot, but this is very much the definition of the word. It comes from the psychology of abuse, and refers to the way an abuser might, for instance, beat his wife and then pretend the next day it didn’t happen, calling her hysterical if she insists it did. Gaslighting isn’t just lying. It’s denying an obvious truth, and insisting that anyone who disagrees is crazy or is making stuff up. It was a favorite tactic of Trump’s, who kicked off his presidency by gaslighting the nation about the size of his inauguration crowd. And now it’s being used by his allies, to argue that the evidence of our own eyes and ears isn’t real.
By the way: