You can point the finger at individuals who believe the stream of conspiracy theories. You can point the finger at Internet "Wingnuts" who personally profit financially by coming up with these wacko ideas. More importantly, I think you can point the finger at elected officials, who for influence, pride, lack of ethics, or incompetence give these ideas credence because they want to curry favor with a segment of the population who believe these outright lies.
This latter group, the elected leaders, are the ones who trample on the truth for personal gain that are the root of the problem. If lies were not given legitimacy in the public place they would circulate on the Internet but not emerge into the halls of government buildings.
See this article, and I'll clip a few excerpts for you: “NY Times: G.O.P. Quiet as Pressure Mounts to Address Lawmaker’s Conspiracy Claims.”
First this:
“WASHINGTON — Marjorie Taylor Greene [A freshmen congresswoman from Georgia] had just finished questioning whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and flatly stating that President Barack Obama was secretly Muslim when she paused to offer an aside implicating another former president in a crime.
“‘That’s another one of those Clinton murders,’ Ms. Greene said, referring to John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death in a 1999 plane crash, suggesting that he had been assassinated because he was a potential rival to Hillary Clinton for a New York Senate seat.
“Ms. Greene casually unfurled the cascade of dangerous and patently untrue conspiracy theories in a 40-minute video that was originally posted to YouTube in 2018. It provides a window into the warped worldview amplified by the freshman Republican congresswoman from Georgia, who in the three months since she was elected has created a national brand for herself as a conservative provocateur who has proudly brought the hard-right fringe to the Capitol.”
Then there is this:
“Ms. Greene suggested in a 2018 Facebook post that a devastating wildfire that ravaged California was started by ‘a laser’ beamed from space and controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family with connections to powerful Democrats. She endorsed executing Democratic lawmakers, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She served as a prolific writer for a now-defunct conspiracy blog called ‘American Truth Seekers,’ writing posts with headlines including ‘MUST READ — Democratic Party Involved With Child Sex, Satanism, and The Occult.’ And she argued that the 2018 midterm elections — in which the first two Muslim women were elected to the House — were part of ‘an Islamic invasion of our government.’”
Ms. Greene has repeatedly claimed in multiple videos and social media posts that several school shooting massacres were “false flag” events perpetrated by government officials in an attempt to drum up support for gun control laws. In an October 2020 video surfaced on Friday by Mother Jones, she said that the “only way you get your freedoms back is it’s earned with the price of blood.”
Alright, a laser beam from space, started fires in California. Pacific Gas and Electric might like that cause to take root to get the heat off of electrical lines sparking fires, but I think a judge would toss the “laser beam” defense out on the first day of a hearing in court.
I suppose you can blame the voters who elected Ms. Greene and today you can blame House Republican leadership for failing to take action against one of their own. We only have so many fingers to point, you know.
Elected leaders have a personal responsibility to lead, to uphold the truth — no matter the personal consequences to their political careers. Otherwise we are being led by a bunch of self-seeking cowards only interested in their staying in office. It does not bode well for democracy or our national future if we don't reverse course.
