Thread by @MollyMcKew

Seen a lot of commentary on how “risky” it was for House team to confront Biden conspiracy.

The people who say this, respectfully, have no idea what they are talking about.

The conspiracy world supporting the counter-impeachment narrative is detailed, complex, & entrenched. /1

Some people woke up in Sept, saw the crowdstrike/Biden/it-wasn’t-Russia-it-was-really-Ukraine conspiracy narrative for first time & were like, “oh this is so obviously garbage, who would believe it?” (*many of these people are STILL RTing The Hill which amped the conspiracy) /2

Who would believe that? Lots of people. This narrative did not appear in fall 2019. It was specifically seeded by Russian propaganda and information operations (both online and human) beginning *before* the 2016 election.

Since then, it has been woven together/blended into .../3

... other conspiracies that began as far back as 2015.

Some of the other tentacle include the Clinton/Ukraine “collusion” & Clinton corruption narratives, which are well entrenched in the whole right/far right media ecosystem. The Biden stuff is just a lazy update on that. /4

If you don’t live in the Fox/Breitbart/Infowars/OAN/Federalist infoverse, you see this only occasionally when there is success planting these narratives via journos who should know better. /5

But if you are a Republican senator or staffer, say, this has been droning in the background of your office via Fox since 2016.

And sure, they should know better, and some do, though they are silent.

But they know Republican voters believe it b/c they hear it all damn day... /6

... and are never confronted with reality, intelligence reports, etc.

Lindsey Graham went to buy his caucus fidget spinners because of the deep subconscious pain of knowing that you too have fallen for the bullshit used to stoke the uninformed masses into believing conspiracy/7

Because they know — KNOW — that the POTUS posse will try to defend him in the trial by saying the president **believed** this conspiracy so fully that he was right to act against US interests in order to pursue proving it to was actually true. (It’s not) /8

So the only way for the House team to inoculate their infoverse against this onslaught of bullshit is to show how thoroughly it is bullshit in advance.

Saying it is a debunked conspiracy is never enough. The detail, unfortunately, is necessary. /9

This is why “fact-checking” is meh and doesn’t do anything to combat conspiracy and disinformation. A simple but plausible-sounding lie takes a lot of detail to shoot down. /10

Same people saying mentioning Biden conspiracies in trial was a mistake for the House team are the people who do not yet understand that much of the information landscape of this nation has been infiltrated, captured, and subverted by conspiracies they know nothing about. /11

The whole reason conspiracies work is they are isolated but deeply-believed. Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t important: just that you aren’t the target, or looking for them /12

On a non-debunking conspiracies note: making things more comfortable who would rather not understand that by ignoring lies they are purveying lies to the American public shouldn’t really be a motivating factor.

Make it cost something. /13