They should believe in conspiracies. Because they’re conspirators.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote about election conspiracy theories:

Republicans should believe in an elaborate scheme involving thousands of individuals and hundreds of officials cooperating to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Because that’s exactly what happened.

Those thousands included those who stormed the Capitol. Over 600 have plead guilty, 124 have faced trials. They’re merely foot soldiers. Members of Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy. They are the followers. This week Michigan AG Dana Nessel charged the 16 people who falsely claimed they were Michigan’s electors in the 2020 election. In all there are 84 false electors from seven states. And many were prominent in the Republican Party in their state.

These 84 people aren’t just mid-level officers in the insurrection: They’re people who absolutely knew better. They weren’t people picked off the street, or even volunteers from a Trump rally. They were insiders. Those who showed up at the Capitol to scream and break windows may have been ignorant enough to believe Trump and the angry rhetoric flying their way. These false electors were fully aware they were lying when they signed their names to fake certificates while claiming to be duly appointed representatives of their state’s voting results. They were knowledgeable, willing participants in a scheme to overturn the outcome of a free and fair election for president of the United States.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, helped the scheme on other ways, such as showing video clips edited to imply election workers were committing fraud. We know who was at the top of the scheme: the nasty guy, Meadows, Eastman, Clark, Flynn, Powell, Giuliani and many others. They are the authors of the scheme.

Keeping Trump in power was the goal of the scheme, but Trump wasn’t alone. There were literally hundreds of Republicans who were aware of what was going on and took part in the efforts to defeat the outcome of a democratic election. They should believe in conspiracies. Because they’re conspirators. And they’re excited about giving it another try.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworking quoted Sean Illing at Vox discussing how racial resentment is killing white people.

Why do many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them? This is the question sociologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl tries to answer in his new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. The book is a serious look at how cultural attitudes associated with “whiteness” encourage white people to adopt political views — like opposition to gun laws or the Affordable Care Act — that undercut their own health. … “You can’t really understand why people might support those agendas if you just start the conversation today. There are long trajectories of anti-government sentiment that course through the South that Trump has tapped into. There are also concerns about what it means to have the government intervene in ways that equally distribute resources that working-class white populations fear might undermine their own sense of privilege.

That last bit reminds me of the story of a white man with a severe illness that could be cured with treatment through Medicaid. But his state has curtailed Medicaid. He supports that limited access, even though it dooms himself, because it keeps black people from getting it. His position in the social hierarchy is more important than his life. In the comments is a cartoon by Rod Emmerson of the New Zealand Herald. The cartoon shows a woman with a grocery cart and a long receipt on an ice floe. On an adjacent floe are two penguins and one says, “Personally, I’d say the cost of living is the least of your worries – but what would I know.” Kos of Kos discussed Putin pulling out of the grain deal. He noted the deal had also protected Russian shipping. If President Erdogan of Turkey wants to play hardball he could protect Ukrainian ships. If Russia attacked Turkey would likely win. But that brings NATO into the war. Putin would likely back down, but Biden has been adamant NATO avoid anything that might broaden the war, especially if most of this food goes to China and Africa. Europe does get a lot of Ukrainian grain – shipped by rail. NATO isn’t protecting the ships because at Ukraine’s request Turkey invoked the Montreux Convention which closed the Bosphorus strait. Warships may not pass unless returning to their home ports. That also means Russia can’t send ships from other ports. And neither can NATO. Russia said it would assume ships heading towards Ukrainian ports to have military cargo. Ukraine can flip it around – any ship headed to Russian occupied Ukraine may be assumed to have military cargo. And that is no longer an idle threat. That means shipping to Crimea is in danger. In a post from back in April Laura Clawson of Kos discussed the ideal retirement age. She was prompted by a piece in the New York Times that comes across as propaganda for raising the Social Security age. The piece says a worker should continue working as long as their work is not compromised – until the worker is no longer of use to the employer. The article then misuses life expectancy as part of its argument. Many discussions of retirement – going back to German Chancellor Otto von Bismark in 1881 – talk about life expectancy at birth. When it was difficult to survive childhood, having those deaths influence when an adult retires is dishonest. The Times article misrepresents – Clawson describes it as ragingly dishonest – that Social Security began as “political smoke and mirrors ... a symbolic offering, accessible only to the lucky citizens who managed to survive well into old age.” So, apparently someone with a desk job should work until their work is affected. It takes the article 15 paragraphs to admit that not everyone works at a desk job and has good health care. There are people who do manual labor. Black people tend to have lower quality health care and develop disabilities at earlier ages and fewer of them get Social Security.

The idea that retirement should not just be a matter of the convenience of employers, available only to those workers who absolutely cannot do their jobs effectively any longer, only shows up in the very final paragraphs of the piece. Nor does the article consider that, in a country that doesn’t require paid sick leave or paid parental leave, let alone paid vacations, for many people retirement is the only time in their lives they’ll have to relax and do things for themselves.

A subtext is that the question of retirement age applies only to people who need Social Security in retirement. Few people can live on Social Security alone – people do that because work has become impossible. The goal should not be, “How many more years of work could employers squeeze out of people without seeing the work product suffer too much?” Disclosure: I retired from a corporate job more than a decade ago. They nudged me out. I am not yet taking Social Security. I did spend five years in a career that would not have paid me enough to live on – I could indulge in it because I had the corporate pension.