1. When the history of the Trump phenomenon gets written, the John Birch Society and its legacy will have to be a big part of the story.
2. In the early 1960s, the Birchers (and Bircher-adjacent people) comprised a significant chunk of the Goldwater-ite branch of the @gop. They were especially strong in Southern California, the heart of Goldwater country.
3. The things the JBS believed were totally bonkers, but they had hundreds of thousands of members and (more importantly) they had millions of self-described "conservatives" who thought "those Birchers might be a bit extreme," but at least they're fighting the good fight.
5. But the Birchers soldiered on, and the @gop establishment would occasionally throw them a rhetorical bone to keep them on the team, in the party's reliable base of voters.
6. The Birchers and other right wing conspiracy purveyors did most of their work on AM radio and with media streams that went largely unnoticed by people outside the semi-secret, quasi-cult-like world of conspiracy minded conservatism.
7. It's impossible to estimate, but I'd venture to guess that 15-20% of white Americans could be classified as Bircher-adjacent in the 1960s and 1970s...folks who heard right wing conspiracy theories and thought "hmmm, sounds possible."
8. In such circles, believing in the plausibility of those communist (or Jewish, or gay, or Mormon, or Catholic) conspiracies became an important feature of one's identity...it was important to be someone who will not get duped by "those" people.
9. It's this demographic that Fox targeted with their "I don't believe the liberal media" schtick in the 90s...a schtick that Rush Limbaugh, Paul Harvey, and Clarence Manion had pioneered over the previous decades.
10. Roseanne (both in her person & in her character) is EXACTLY the sort of person who would inhabit this worldview. By all outward appearances seems like a "normal" and "reasonable" person...but she secretly reads the National Enquirer and is more likely than not to believe it.
11. Those outside of Roseanne's close circles see only the quirky white lady who's kinda funny but also maybe not as nice to POC, queer people, non-Christians as she should be, but she's still a nice lady, right?
12. But in Roseanne's circles (& now Trump's twittererverse), she can let down her guard to admit that she believes Pizzagate even tho the snooty media look down on her 4 it. She can also subtly express her dislike of "others" of all sorts, & her fears that "they" will take over.
13. This is the link between the tribalism of Trumpist identity politics and conspiracy theories. The conspiracies tidily identify the "us" that is under siege by "them."
14. The semi-clandestine nature of these networks of conspiracy theory believers makes it easy for them to project secrecy onto their supposed enemies--just as Roseanne keeps her "real" thoughts mostly secret, so do her antagonists (she assumes).
15. So yes, Roseanne does reflect the emergence onto the public stage of something that had not been entirely open and public before--the approximately 1/5 of white Americans who give more credence to right wing conspiracy theories than reporting in the WaPo, CNN, or NYTimes.
16. They've always been with us, these folks...listening sympathetically to Coughlin to Manion to the Birchers to Limbaugh to Fox to Breitbart to InfoWars. Reading the Smoot report, reading books or watching films about the illuminati, sorta believing National Enquirer.
17. But what's different now is that they are no longer the far right edge of the @gop base that the leadership keeps tamped down. They are now the primary driver of the party.
18. They drive it by having rich conspiracy theorists like Robert Mercer funding their media outlets and candidates. They drive it by having Koch ideologues funding their think tanks and economics departments.
19. And they drive it by having a direct pipeline from @FoxNews into the President's psyche. Finally the conspiracy-adjacent folks have someone in the WH who really "gets" them. He's "one of us" they intuitively feel.
20. And they're right! Conspiracy-adjacent folks reject complex causal analysis and embrace a personalized, transactional vision of how the world works.
21. Why did a bad thing happen? Because "a very bad person" secretly plotted it all out. Why do good things happen? Because "very good people, people like us" were in charge and did it. The world as they see it is now Trump vs. Soros.
22. It's a view of the world without complex institutions with their own imperatives, without unintended consequences, without complex people with complex motives.
23. This is why the @gop establishment had long kept at arms length their conspiracy-adjacent comrades. Any professional worth their salt understands why conspiracy theories lack explanatory power.
24. But Trump is not a professional of any sort, and neither are the people in his Roseanne-esque base.
25. As we saw in 2016, he populist conspiracy theory message can inspire people to vote...but as we've seen since, it's a disaster when it comes to actually governing.
