![]() ![]() Behind the tabloid headlines about Hillary’s emails or Hunter Biden’s laptop are the machinations of a malignant global elite, bent on the destruction of the United States and the creation of a New World Order. But a major-league conspiracy theory has to rest on a much more coherent intellectual framework, one that grows out of plausible if debatable complaints and critiques and then thrives and mutates in the fertile soil of unacknowledged grievances. But why? What did that say about the conspiracy theories that animated the rage of Trump’s most passionate followers? It turns out that there is a clear throughline connecting the grievances of right-wing military officers in the wake of the defeat in Vietnam to the conspiracy theories that erupted into full view in the weeks and months leading up to the Capitol insurrection.Īny talk of conspiracy theories these days tends to conjure the lurid delusions of QAnon, of Satanic child sex traffickers huddled in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor. And then, in one of the few moments of relative decorum, the mob paused to pose for selfies in front of the somber black flag that hangs in the Capitol Rotunda, honoring the nation’s prisoners of war and missing in action left behind in Southeast Asia.Įchoes of the war in Vietnam were everywhere that day. Watching the mob surge toward the steps of the Capitol on January 6, it was hard not to wonder whether the United States was any longer a nation or had degenerated into what a Turkish diplomat, speaking about the Middle East, once famously described as a warring collection of “tribes with flags.” The crowd seethed with flags and banners: Stars and Stripes as big as panel trucks, some with the superimposed head of Donald Trump the battle flag of the Confederacy the yellow Gadsden flag, with its coiled rattlesnake and its “Don’t Tread on Me,” first raised in 1775 by the Continental Marines and then appropriated by the Tea Party and the Republican base.īut there were other flags, too: the red and yellow stripes of the former South Vietnam Trump as Rambo with his rocket-propelled grenade launcher. ![]()
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