Why wouldn’t you believe conspiracy theories?

Saturday was a symptom

Welcome to a Sunday night edition of Progress Report.

Whenever people ask me how I stay sane despite working in politics and journalism for a living, I laugh and shrug my shoulders and say something corny like “who said I stay sane?” But the truth is that as horrendous and dystopian as our civic society has become, it’s never been easier to keep a cool head. This is not a good thing.

Tonight I have some thoughts on the weekend chaos and a new video with Mayor Mamdani, and some reported interviews coming later this week.

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Within minutes of the news breaking that a gunman had run through the White House Correspondents Dinner at the Hilton in DC last night, my Twitter feed divided itself into six basic threads:

1. Annoyance that NBC had interrupted the NBA playoffs to show breaking news coverage from DC

2. Journalists in the room posting photos and detailed narratives about what it was like to be with other journalists in the middle of the danger

3. A screeching chorus of right wing influencers calling the incident evidence that Trump’s White House grandiose ballroom must be built

4. Other right wing influencers blaming liberals for their “violent rhetoric”

5. Jokes about how RFK Jr seemed to ignore his gobsmacked wife during the chaos while Stephen Miller used his pregnant wife as a human shield

6. Immediate suspicion that this third assassination attempt was staged to revive Trump’s flagging poll numbers.

You’ll notice that none of the immediate reactions were at all somber, measured, or anything resembling ways that people would have once responded to an attempted assassination of the US president. The intervening 24 hours have only hardened these reactions, a symptom of the larger cultural and political nihilism that has become the norm ofer the past decade.

There’s no reason to believe anything or take anyone seriously, because everything is a grift, a cynical con, or so undermined by bad faith political actors that sobriety is foolish and cringeworthy. CNN anchors and right-wing actors who now clutch pearls over the would-be assassin’s BlueSky-coded diatribes against the Trump administration ignore the role they play in delivering us to this cultural nadir.

Last night, the MAGA influencers got their marching orders before the public had any chance to make sense of the shooter news, turning an assassination attempt into a meme about the ballroom.

Today, as if there was nothing more important to do — like perhaps look into why the security was so lax at the Hilton last night — the DOJ spent its Sunday writing a letter urging the construction of the ballroom as a matter of national security. Worst of all, contemptible Butterball dipshit Randy Fine took a break from burping up racial slurs and cheering on genocide to introduce a bill mandating the ballroom’s construction.

It’s this kind of brazen and immediate exploitation that makes it impossible to take anything seriously, even when it’s dead serious. Trump and his flunkies have spent the past decade destroying any notion of objective reality, trashing the government’s credibility, and turning conspiracy theories into seemingly viable possibilities. Saturday night was another opportunity to hack away at our collective reality, and people reacted by asking for the basketball game to come back or with immediate skepticism because they’ve been conditioned to do so.

How do you trust the official story of an administration that is weaponizing the DOJ to pursue absurd allegations of interference in the 2020 election?

How can you trust the advisories of a White House that sets health policy based on the raving pseudoscientific beliefs of a fully unqualified raccoon penis collector?

Believe the legal briefings offered by a clusterfuck of skinheads that justifies murdering innocent people in the streets by calling them terrorists?

How does one buy the promises of a lifelong salesman who starts pointless, economy-wrecking wars and lies about everything from downed planes to peace negotiations?

Why would anyone not believe in conspiracy theories when it turns out that the one we laughed at the most — that the government and society are run in large part by a cabal of powerful pedophiles who can barely work a Blackberry — turns out to be more than a little bit true?

Epstein aside, this exactly what the Trump administration wants. If you can’t trust what you see and hear, you either tune out or subscribe to their alternate reality, consume their spoonfed dopamine, accept their simple version of events. You summon the indignation and moral outrage because it makes you feel something.

This isn’t all Trump’s doing; for example, it turns out that everyone in DC seemed to know that the leading contender for governor in California was a huge sex pest and just kind of kept it a secret. John Fetterman had a personality transplant. AIPAC and Peter Thiel have turned campaign ads into weapons of mass disinformation. The Biden era gave us the blatant lies about Israel’s genocide and crackdown on student protestors who just didn’t like seeing children blown apart. Why have faith in anyone?

Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I see memes almost every day that use 9/11 as a punchline — and after two decades of that horrible event being cynically exploited to sell disastrous wars, justify torture, and create a vast surveillance state network, not to mention be used as a cudgel to dominate our culture, force-feed us phony patriotism and silence dissent, it’s pretty hard to not see it as a tool of oppression, to not scoff and laugh at its invocation?

I don’t yearn for a more serious or sober politics; I think I abandoned my sense of earnestness somewhere in middle school. Gentility means nothing without humanity. That said, nihilism is an act of self-defense, because you’d rather feel nothing when nothing feels good. And when society stops caring, that’s when evil festers and people get hurt.

New York: Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke to supporters who spent the day canvassing for city council candidate Lindsey Boylan. I was on hand and caught the entire thing, so you can call this an exclusive:

The special election, for a seat located on the west side of Manhattan (Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, West Village) will take place on Tuesday.

California: Election officials confirmed that a strict voter ID and citizenship verification amendment will be on the ballot in November. The proposal would require voters to show ID in person or use a special pin number every time they vote by mail. Moreover, election officials would have to verify that every voter is a citizen, which is almost impossible to do; states do not keep citizenship databases, nor does the federal government.

Idaho: Activists seeking to overturn the state’s ultra-strict abortion ban are closing in on qualifying a constitutional amendment. They’ve collected over 100,000 signatures and hit its goals in 19 legislative districts, and if verified, that would be more than enough to get a reproductive rights guarantee in front of voters in November.

Missouri: Gov. Mike Kehoe visited a rural part of the state to promote his economic development agenda, including a hearty defense of data centers. He should keep it up, because if any issue will break the GOP’s lock on rural voters, it’s this one.

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