Saturday, January 27, 2018

ILOLminati

Now, this is an embarrassing little tidbit- conservatives, including Congresscreep Trey Gowdy (R-Uncanny Valley), have been promulgating a conspiracy theory that there is a 'Secret Society' in FBI that is attempting to undermine President Vulgarmort. Predictably, Fox has been pushing this narrative to a large extent.

Predictably, the whole conspiracy theory has been spun out of a joke between two FBI staffers:


"Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society."


Now, I am not a member of a secret society... well, maybe a not-so-secret one... I have a hunch that members of actual secret societies don't exactly yap about it through text messages. Even psychotic fictional bros know this:





As usual, the right-wing reverse Ouroboros (a snake with its head up its ass) has been played due to their wish-fulfillment fantasies. It's exciting to believe in secret societies arrayed against your heroes, to believe that you are playing a role to preserve what you hold dear, and that makes you susceptible to believing bullshit. It's not some grand conspiracy that is targeting Trump unfairly, just the normal, everyday law enforcement apparatus. Sometimes, even these SERIOUS PEOPLE need to blow off steam by snarking... they're not the Illuminati, but sometimes they're the ILOLminati.

ADDENDUM: On the Media had a pretty good distillation of this topic.

4 comments:

Harry Hamid said...

They don't believe there's a secret society.

The idea of two people who were together at the time making a joke by text on election night is something that ANYONE can understand. No one sincerely believes that it's a secret society.

People pretend to believe things when it helps their political side. You know, like how people pretended they didn't notice Sarah Palin was an idiot.

Aaaargh.

davidly said...

After musing over why the conspiracy theories believed are only ever ones thought to be arrayed against the respective believer, the author Robert Anton Wilson suggested that this amounted to following a loser script. He concluded that the Illuminati, or whoever, are as likely working with his interests at heart. There's a truism insofar as he'd posited a realistic model of the paranoid mind, but he was too aware of conspiring, uh, bastards (begging your pardon) who didn't have his interests at heart.

If you ask me, any conspiracy theory based upon a notion that pits one party or politician against another is too meh to be believed. But as HH says, one'd never convince a person of a political side that the putative target of their theory is an actual agent of conspiracy, if only useful idiot, working quite well towards interests against those worried about their latest object of admiration, who, in spite of however many recognized flaws, somehow manages to remain above reproach.

Professor Chaos said...

The people pushing this bs know it's bs, but I'll bet everyone's racist Facebook uncle believes it.

mistah charley, ph.d. said...

there's a song "secret society" recorded by utopia/todd rundgren that i really like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzYIXHp2UJI