Why conservatives cling to conspiracies long after they’re debunked– www.dailykos.com

After director Christopher Nolan’s new film “The Odyssey” saw great success at the box office last weekend, it became clear that the campaign against the film’s diverse cast, led by racist multibillionaire Elon Musk, failed.

You’d think that the right would move on from this battle, choosing instead to tilt at another windmill. But a strange post from a right-wing influencer called “Mr. Obvious” shows that conservatives are going down a different path.

Instead of accepting defeat, Mr. Obvious claimed that the success of “The Odyssey” was a mirage, alleging that producers were “FAKING ticket sales” and buying up seats “to make the movie look like a success.”

None of this is really happening, but the lurid fantasy is a microcosm of a conservative phenomenon that has existed for a long time.

The right thrives on conspiracy culture. Since the era of the John Birch Society during the Cold War, conspiracies have been a core feature of the conservative movement. There’s a clear timeline from worrying about fluoridated water being a communist plot all the way up to President Donald Trump’s insistence of a Democratic scheme to attack Christmas.