The Breaking of the Conservative Mind

"They can control the weather" and the obliteration of rationality on the right

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

It sounds too ridiculous even for the most ridiculous of right-wing Republicans: A conspiracy theory that “they” (the government? Democrats? Jews?) control the weather, and are sending hurricanes and other adverse events to conservative-leaning swing states in an effort to throw the election for Kamala Harris. There was this last week from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia:

And this week, Republican state party official Kandiss Taylor, who is also running for governor of Georgia, backed Greene up, tweeting:

This is all very bizarre, and it doesn’t make sense on the face of it. After all, the people who are the least likely to vote in the face of a massive natural disaster seem more likely to be Democratic voters, no? Young people, poor people, and so on will be the ones struggling the most to figure out housing, money, and safety, and will push voting to the back burner. If this is a plot to undermine Republican voters, it’s a pretty bad one.

But what I just did there — trying to make sense out of something entirely nonsensical — is part of the problem. Because the truth is that after years of stoking conspiracy theories and spreading lies for political gain, much of the pro-Trump right has just totally and entirely lost its mind. Meeting total divorce from reality with an attempt at rationality doesn’t work. And so I am not sure anyone really knows how to put conservatives back together again — or if we can put conservatives back together again.

Not every conservative or Republican is a bananas conspiracy theorist, of course. But those who have aligned themselves with the MAGA movement have, at the very least, decided to tolerate the widespread denial of reality. And even those Republicans who have broken with the party in recent years are not blameless. It’s easy to point to Donald Trump as the culprit here, and he is indeed the primary cause of the landscape of insanity in which Americans currently find ourselves. But the earlier, more reasonable iteration of the Republican Party primed the land.

Take the current weather conspiracy. It is objectively nuts to believe that Democrats are sending hurricanes to red states so that Donald Trump will lose. But the idea that the weather is political shot through with lies from “experts” is one forged by the old GOP, which dedicated decades to denying climate change — even still, as our world floods and burns, JD Vance refused to acknowledge the reality of climate change at the vice presidential debate. This scientific reality is not actually in question in any rational quarters; it’s not much of a political debate in most of the world. In the US, though, Republican big business interests joined forces with the irrational nutters of the religious right to deny a well-established scientific consensus, and to tell their followers: Don’t believe the experts; don’t even believe the changes you’re seeing with your own eyes.

Conspiracy theories are not just for the right. But I do think there is something about religiosity that makes religious populations easier to manipulate. That isn’t to say that the religious are stupid or pliable; it is to say that the Christian view, or at least the one dominant in the US, primes people for malleability. In this view, life is not supposed to make sense because it’s God’s plan. Followers should submit not just to the will of God, but to the word of church authority figures, most of them men. Faith is more important than reason or rationality — and among conservative Christians, faith is often set in opposition to science and rationality.

This is why we’ve spent years or even decades arguing over things like sex ed and contraception: There may be a strong consensus among researchers that comprehensive sexual health education is far more effective at keeping kids healthy than abstinence-only education, which does not work to decrease sexual behavior, but the evidence doesn’t matter because the right-wing side of the debate isn’t interested. Ditto contraception: It may be the most effective way to decrease the abortion right, but that doesn’t fit with the religious conservative worldview, and so reality is simply denied. In conservative churches, the idea that women are naturally more submissive and in need of both male guidance and male protection is pervasive. Even as women repeatedly refuse to submit and seek leadership roles for themselves, and even as these churches have instituted strict rules to prevent women from doing what men have long done, the belief remains that women are “naturally” one way — despite not only evidence to the contrary, but an entire system of regulations and penalties to maintain the supposedly natural.

Reality-denial has been baked into conservatism for a very long time. It is certainly baked into conservative Christianity. Anecdotally, I’ve seen the most conspiracy-theorizing in other conservative religious societies, and certainly not just Christian ones. The US conspiracies have gotten much wilder in the Trump years, and the dangerous combination of social media, right-wing take-over of various media outlets, the end of local news, the newfound ability to seek out only those sources that comport with one’s established views, and the utter cowardice of most people on the political right to stand up to the bullies and liars and charlatans has put us in this unthinkable place where “they control the weather” is probably not the craziest thing a sitting member of Congress will say this year. But this didn’t start with Trump, even though he magnified and mainstreamed the craziest of the crazy. It was long fomented by the Republicans we now laud as normal and sane.

In a nation where political policy was guided by rationality, research, evidence, and even just a good-faith effort to get it right, we wouldn’t have Marjorie Taylor Greene claiming that hurricanes are a nefarious left-wing plot, because someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene would have never made it into office. We wouldn’t have Donald Trump. But we wouldn’t have had the previous iteration of the Republican Party either.

That’s part of why I’m pretty pessimistic about the future in the US. I want to believe that Trumpism is a kind of temporary insanity, and when he eventually dies or disappears from public life, his entire MAGA movement will fall apart and the people who have descended into the craziness of QAnon and Jewish space lasers and InfoWars will either snap out of it or find themselves isolated on the fringes of the right. But Trumpism isn’t a fever that came on overnight and might break come daytime; it’s a disease that took root in a broken-down body with little immunity to fight it off. For that, we have the good old version of the Republican Party to blame.

Hurricane Milton threatens to bring death and mass destruction to Florida at the same time as Americans in swaths of North Carolina and the surrounds still struggle to find clean water, safe housing, and their loved ones after Hurricane Helene. FEMA is stretched to its breaking point thanks to Republicans refusing to adequately fund it. Climate change is continuing apace because Republicans refuse to acknowledge it, allowing big polluters to deny they’re causing it. Conservatives have been told for generations now, by their political leaders and their religious ones, to not believe what they see, to not trust their own eyes or their own brains, to be wary of intellectuals and educators and scientists and experts. Of course we’re here, in this bizarro land of weather conspiracies. And after decades of the conservative movement tunneling down into the worst and dumbest of reactionary politics, I have absolutely no clue how we dig millions of our fellow citizens out of this rabbit hole.

xx Jill