Even before Josh Hawley, conservative conspiracy theories thrived in Kansas and Missouri
There is a rot at the center of our politics.
Most Americans watched last week’s storming of the U.S. Capitol with a mixture of shock and horror. The photograph of an insurgent sitting in the Senate was unthinkable — until it wasn’t.
Didn’t it seem familiar to us, though? This was the latest insight into a subculture of destruction and anti-government nihilism that has thrived here for generations, enabled by a cynical political class and protected by a firm resistance to facts and logic.
Kansas and Missouri, as well as their elected politicians, are at the center of the rot.
Sen. Josh Hawley is in the middle of the picture and deserves to be there. But the portrait also includes Republicans Kris Kobach, Tim Huelskamp, Mike Pompeo, Roger Marshall and others in Kansas. Missourians Eric Greitens, Eric Schmitt, Jay Ashcroft and a dozen lesser lights are part of this, too.
All have tacitly embraced the fringe elements in their states. We now know the consequences of doing that.
Right-wing extremists have a deep history in our part of the country. Robert DePugh, the Missouri-born radical, founded a “secret, paramilitary anticommunist group” called the Minutemen around here in the 1960s.
Anti-government compounds, where religious fundamentalists linked arms with neo-Nazis and bigots, flourished in the Ozarks in the 1980s. A deeply anti-Semitic mechanic demanded airtime for the Ku Klux Klan on Kansas City cable.
Timothy McVeigh cooked up parts of his terror bombing plot in Kansas. F. Glenn Miller, the racist who murdered three people in Overland Park, ran for the U.S. Senate in Missouri (to my shame, I interviewed him about the race without challenging his beliefs). Three men in southwest Kansas are in prison for plotting to slaughter Muslims.
It’s easy to dismiss these cases, and others, as the work of a lunatic fringe and nothing more. That would be wrong. They reveal a deeper disease you can still easily find at coffeehouses and courthouses across the two states.
In this world, money and the news are fake. Taxes are illegal. Jews secretly run the world. Guns are essential for the coming race war. Democrats and the media are partners in covering up a massive child sex ring based at a Washington pizza restaurant.
Sandy Hook was a government-sponsored massacre. Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Face masks aren’t essential to protecting public health; they’re a tool of socialist conquest. Leftists secretly infiltrated the Capitol riot.
Internet spreads zealots’ conspiracy theories easily
For most of the last 50 years, this crackpotism was evident in both states, but seemed somehow less dangerous to democracy. It simply meant a few fellows gathering on weekends to play army with real weapons, plan a march around the state capitol, wave a Confederate flag.
The internet has changed that forever. Now, like-minded zealots easily exchange unfiltered extremist conspiracies, each more outrageous than the last — building, mutating, regenerating hate and violence.
President Donald Trump’s greatest insight was to understand the nature of this audience and to appeal directly to it. There’s abundant evidence that he, too, shares this hateful worldview. On Wednesday, Trump told rioters to storm the Capitol. They did, and people died.
Hawley clearly sees himself as the heir to these cynical tactics — and to Trump’s audience. That’s what enrages much of the real world: Hawley’s raised fist confirms and endorses every ghastly conspiracy theory wafting through the conservative fringe.
Hawley knowingly loaded a gun, pulled back the hammer, took off the safety and handed it to a misanthropic mob.
It isn’t clear to me how the rot is repaired. The internet isn’t going away, and the First Amendment protects even the wackiest speech. Hawley is shameless, so appeals to his reason and patriotism won’t work.
But people of good faith — Republicans and Democrats — cannot give in to despair or fear. They also must not fall victim to false equivalence: Obamacare may or may not be a good idea, but it isn’t the opposite of QAnon.
Hawley and his co-conspirators must be denounced repeatedly, in every public setting. Sen. Mitt Romney suggested using the truth, which seems like a good idea.
Otherwise, Wednesday’s sad spectacle won’t be the end of the Trump era. It will mark the beginning of America’s collapse and Josh Hawley’s ascendance as the man who killed self-government.
