Republicans in the Trump era regularly issued accusations they knew might be untrue.
Evidence
We saw in chapter 1 that bare assertions, innuendo, and ominous questions are enough to get the new conspiracism going: as Trump said about the putative connection between Senator Ted Cruz’s father and John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, “Even if it isn’t totally true, there’s something there.” And we saw Representative Bryan Zollinger perfectly capture the ethos of true-enoughness in his suggestion that the Democratic Party might very well have brought white nationalists to Charlottesville in 2017 to create a violent clash: “I am not saying it is true, but I am suggesting that it is completely plausible.” — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 107
Categorization
- XREF: Given this reader’s deep interest in small acts of decorum toward corpses, the ‘even if it’s not totally true, there’s something there’ ethos parallels how rumor and unverified communal narrative function around death rituals — plausibility outweighing verification. — connects to: The new conspiracism is uniquely and asymmetrically a right-wing phenomenon.; Conspiratorial accusations against a party rise the longer it holds power — Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 734; Partisan identity skews which conspiracist claims people credit — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 36 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Partisan identity skews which conspiracist claims people credit
#corroborates(0.78) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 36 - Some claims remain unbelievable no matter how often repeated
#contradicts(0.74) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 71 - Conspiratorial accusations against a party rise the longer it holds power
#expands(0.72) — Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 734