It appears the Republican Party is laying rubber in its flight to the extreme right wing as a Republican incumbent in Colorado is upended in the primary – by another QAnon believer:
Colorado Republican Rep. Scott Tipton lost his primary Tuesday to Lauren Boebert, a gun rights activist who has also been associated with the far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon. …
Unlike Tipton, Boebert ran television ads during the primary. A spot released at the beginning of June urged voters to reject the incumbent and tried to connect him to New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
President Donald Trump carried the district by 12 points in 2016. Tipton won a fifth term two years later, defeating Mitsch Bush by 8 points. It was his narrowest reelection since he unseated Democrat John Salazar in 2010. [Roll Call]
Is incumbent Tipton a Trump apostate? He currently has a TrumpScore of 94.8%, so it’s difficult to make that a plausible call. And Trump has endorsed him twice, according to Roll Call.
No, I think we’re seeing the continued metamorphosis of the Republican Party from the center-right party of the Nixon years to the accelerating hard right party of Gingrich and, now, splashing deeply into the right wing fever swamps of Trump, if I may borrow Hillary Clinton’s turn of phrase from years ago.
If you think about it, the QAnon conspiracy theorists are simply a reflection of the current philosophy of the current GOP. Remember my discussion of why Ryan, Paul, and other GOP officials reject expert opinion? A tool of the expert, a critical tool of science, is independent and objective lines of evidence that corroborate each other. This is called consilience. If I may take an example, in my recent reading I’ve been seeing astrophysicists attempting to verify the value of an important physical constant (I regret that I have forgotten which constant and am too lazy to try to figure it out) using independent procedures, and they’re getting fairly upset because the values each procedure results in are not within the calculated error bars for each other.
Actually, I think they’re more excited than upset – the potential for new physics is exciting to astrophysicists.
Back to my point, QAnon conspiracy theorists have no such procedures, more importantly no such concepts, and therefore no evidence nor need of it. As the Republican Party continues to move right, it’ll stray further and further from the rational end of the spectrum, characterized by the objective gathering of evidence and subsequent contingent acceptance of the results as truth, and towards the magical thinking that characterizes religious faith: no facts, just belief in whatever it is you want to believe, as modulated by your social group. Climate change doesn’t exist and is a Chinese hoax. Evolution is invalid and medicine must therefore function through magic. Acid rain is good for vegetation.
There’s this nasty deep state that’ll try to stop the Good & Wonderful President Trump from saving us!
Eventually, the Republican Party will follow this sort of thinking – a word I use very loosely – right off a cliff. The remaining occupants of that vehicle will be forever discredited, and almost certainly unrepentant. It’s much easier to cry about an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory than admit being wrong, because it’s hard to disprove a conspiracy theory: they’re designed to be undisprovable by, of all things, evolution, that blind force of nature. Those conspiracy theories that are easy to disprove don’t survive; it’s only the hard specimens that survive the tumble down the creek.
But only then, when the entire atmosphere of the Republican Party has been exposed as the fraudulent disaster it’s turning out to be, can it be burned to the ground and replaced with some rational conservatives. Don’t shake your head, because they are out there. They’re an important part of the American political landscape.
But they’re not Republicans. Not right now.
