Treating right-wing conspiracy theories as smoking guns shows that Republicans are mostly speaking to their base.
When Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) had his turn to quiz former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during the hearing Wednesday morning, he came armed with what he seemed to think was a smoking gun: that neither Glenn Simpson nor Fusion GPS were mentioned in Mueller’s report.
Most Americans no doubt shared Mueller’s apparent confusion about the line of questioning. He said he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, a private strategic-intelligence firm, and that Simpson, the organization’s founder, was outside the scope of his investigation. Yet as the hearings wore on, Republican lawmakers returned again and again to Simpson and Fusion GPS, treating them like household names. And for conservatives on a steady diet of right-wing media, they are: the linchpins of a conspiratorial witch hunt to impeach President Trump.
The GOP’s laserlike focus on Simpson, Fusion GPS, former FBI agent Peter Strzok and other bits of right-wing lore probably played well in conservative media (and, as a consequence, in the Oval Office). But it was almost certainly inscrutable to any American who is not dialed into Fox News, right-wing talk radio or conservative-leaning Facebook feeds. That has real consequences for a party that, in learning to speak to its siloed-off base, has forgotten how to reach a wider audience.
View the complete July 24 article by Nicole Hemmer on The Washington Post website here.