The MAGAs have had to confront a reality that they never really anticipated having to face. How are they to process having Ivanka stare straight into a camera with those soulless eyes and say that when Bill Barr said there was no fraud, she believed Barr, which means the election actually wasn’t stolen and Trump actually lost, as Ivanka believes? That is one tough reality to swallow, and some have chosen to just not swallow it at all and pronounced that Ivanka was a CGI creation and Bill Barr was paid off by the voting machine manufacturers. Yes, that has to be it!
From York Dispatch [1]:
“It’s cognitive dissonance,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a Syracuse University professor who has studied how Trump used social media and advertising to mobilize his base. “If you believe what Trump says, and now Bill Barr and Trump’s own daughter are saying these other things, it creates a crack, and people have to fill it.”
Yes, okay, but one way that normal, well-developed people fill such cracks is that, upon hearing the truth, they just admit they were wrong and acknowledge the truth. Not the MAGAs, at least not these ones. They go further into the ground for grander conspiracy theories, according to the Dispatch:
One post that spread widely this week suggested Barr was paid by Dominion Voting Systems, a company targeted by Trump and his supporters with baseless claims of vote rigging. “From 2009 to 2018, DOMINION PAID BARR $1.2 million in cash and granted him another $1.1 million in stock awards, according to SEC filings. (No wonder Barr can’t find any voter fraud!),” the post read.
And then our favorite:
Some Trump supporters dismissed Ivanka Trump’s testimony entirely by questioning whether any of it was real. That’s another common refrain seen on far-right message boards. Many posters say they don’t even believe the hearings are happening, but are a Hollywood production starring stand-ins for the former president’s daughter and others.
“She looks different in a big way,” one poster asked on Telegram. “CGI?”
Look, there were many times when we at this very site doubted whether Ivanka was real, and parts of her almost have to be fake, so we have some sympathy for that last one.
But this is actually good news. It means that the message is getting out. Enough of the MAGAs are watching the hearings such that they at least have to question the reality that they’d come to believe. The fact that they’re fracturing into supporting ever more desperate conspiracy theories is a good thing.
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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, with Nicole Hickman