Seeing Things

The election's over, and undisputed. Trump's new term hasn't begun. What is there for MAGA right-wingers to spin conspiracies about? The answers are out there....

You have probably heard that there have been a bunch of recent drone sightings on the East Coast. You might have even adopted a theory about them—that’s not so strange. When presented something unusual without a clear explanation, human brains often seek to fill in a story where there isn’t one. Or, isn’t one good enough.

Perhaps it’s not strange or concerning that the right-wing marketplace, as I call it, has been especially conspiratorial about the drone sightings. MAGA conservatives are suspicious and distrustful of government generally, and the current federal administration in particular, and thus freer to imagine nefarious plots transpiring in the skies and covered up by authorities. Hence a spate of supposed sightings from conservatives—most amusingly, a photo posted on X by Pennsylvania Republican Doug Mastriano of a prop Star Wars TIE Fighter, which Mastriano later claimed was meant as na amusing meme—and a litany of theories, including claims of an Iranian “mothership” launching the offending equipment from just off American shores.

Could happen any time. But perhaps the timing is not entirely random. We are in a particularly fertile time for the right-wing imagination. The big Presidential campaign is over, and having won the election there is no call for obsessing over possible ways that the result was rigged. The new Presidency, and its accompanying conflicts and controversies, has yet to begin. Conservatives find themselves in something of a holding pattern, like spy drones circling over common workaday New Jersey suburbs. Calmer minds might relax and enjoy the holiday season, secure in the absence of suspicious activity. But, those who feel unfulfilled without lurking enemies will find them, however they may.

That might helps explain the right wing reaction to a Department of Justice Inspector General report issued last week on the FBI’s actions before and during the January 6 protest and insurrection. The report describes an FBI that acted appropriately in a supporting role, did not have undercover employees among the protesters, and if anything was underinformed and underprepared for the identifiable domestic terrorists planning to travel to Washington.

If you don’t wallow in the right wing marketplace, that’s probably what you heard about the report, if you heard anything at all. Within that world, however, the report was taken as vindication for all the most conspiratorial theories blaming the Deep State for somehow causing the riot. I won’t bother here to unravel the gross misrepresentations behind these conclusions; just thinking about it makes my brain hurt as the stupidity seeps in.

I felt much the same painful cerebrum depletion reading portions of Congressman Barry Loudermilk’s report, released this Tuesday, criticizing the work of the House select committee on January 6. Loudermilk, who wants his own select committee on the matter in the coming congressional session, reports that former Rep. Liz Cheney should be investigated by the FBI—wait, aren’t they corrupt Trump-haters?—for a variety of imagined crimes. J6 Committee chair Bennie Thompson said in a statement that Loudermilk’s report “is filled with baseless, conclusory allegations rather than facts,” which, from what I’ve read, is a generous interpretation of the report’s fever dreams.

Needless to say, the right wing marketplace was abuzz all day Tuesday with excited reporting on the contents of the report, and the very important work ahead of locking up everybody involved with the committee and exoneration of everybody involved with the assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Other baseless conspiracies—not all four years old, as the J6 matters are—have possessed these conservative minds during this interregnum period. As with the theories about J6 Committee members, many of these tales conflate “different point of view” with “corruption and criminality.” This is a dangerous and disturbing trend that I’ve written about previously, and is of course promoted by the President-elect himself. Trump has in fact called for all the J6 Committee members to be prosecuted, without much specificity into how any of them might have run afoul of any criminal statutes.

Trump on Tuesday likewise complained about the judge who ruled that the convictions for business fraud could stand despite the Supreme Court’s immunity decision. Not content to simply disagree on the merits, Trump posted on Truth Social of the “completely illegal” ruling in the “illegitimate case.” Judge Merchan “wrote an opinion that is knowingly unlawful,” Trump wrote, adding that due to “an illegal gag order… I cannot expose his and his family’s disqualifying and illegal conflicts.” Other MAGA influencers were quick to fill in those alleged illegalities, of course.

Previously, those influential right wing voices went digging in slop for anything they could use to sully Iowa Senator Jodi Ernst, who they saw as impeding the confirmation of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. The slime-slinging, accompanied by vows to support a primary opponent against Ernst in 2026, seemed to have the intended effect, as Ernst backed away from some of her critical rhetoric about the blatantly unfit nominee. And more broadly, Republican lawmakers appeared to accept their place on the path of least resistance in Trumpland, which for now means pretending that the nominees coming their way are fit for their chosen offices, and that insane accusations toward perceived Trump enemies are valid and probably prosecutable.

Hopefully, the imaginative search for conspiracies will slow a bit around Christmas and New Year’s Day, and then we’ll just have a couple of weeks to get through before Trump takes office and the fervid theorists have more focused, possibly relevant things to be angry about. Until then, perhaps it’s best that they distract themselves with imaginary things in the night sky.