Lindsay Beyerstein, Alternet

Conspiracist ideology has consumed the Republican Party. At his rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump pledged to demolish the deep state, drive out the globalists, and rout the fake news media. Speaker after speaker referenced the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, a dogma that was once confined to the manifestos of mass shooters, but which is now the Trump campaign’s closing argument for the presidency.

Former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who promoted the Great Replacement over 400 times on his now-defunct show, told the crowd at Madison Square Garden that the political class “despises [the people] and their values and their history and their culture and their customs; really hates them to the point that it’s trying to replace them.”

The former president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr, was even more explicit.

“The Democrat[sic] Party has forgotten about Americans. Rather than cater to Americans, they decided, “You know what? It would just be easier to replace them with people who will be reliable voters.”

"Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants are coming in, they're trying to get them to vote," Trump Jr., said last month.

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The Republican National Committee under Lara Trump is claiming that millions of undocumented migrants could vote next week. A vast body of research, including recent audits by Republican-controlled states like Georgia, has found that voting by non-citizens is essentially nonexistent.

By hyping this fake threat, Republicans are creating a pretext to challenge the election if Trump loses, putting a racist spin on their perennial allegations of voter fraud, and creating excuses for Republican governors to purge their voter rolls.

However, this obsession with noncitizen voting goes deeper than that. The lie of mass voting by undocumented migrants is the conceptual glue that binds the three major components of their conspiracist ideology: The Deep State, the Big Lie, and the Great Replacement.

Let’s review their delusional belief system:

The Deep State is a shadowy network of elites inside and outside of government who supposedly direct the course of history. This cabal is responsible for everything from Trump’s impeachments and prosecutions to voting laws and immigration policy. Some say it controls the weather.

The Big Lie is the debunked claim that voter fraud cost Donald Trump the 2020 election. Trump kicked off his Madison Square Garden rally by vowing to “totally obliterate the Deep State.”

The Great Replacement is the charge that the Deep State is deliberately importing migrants in order to replace white Americans, a process sometimes known as “white genocide.” The lie of massive noncitizen voting explains why the Deep State is supposedly importing all these migrants to commit election fraud.

These beliefs meld seamlessly into a paranoid whole. Trump told rallygoers in Atlanta that the Democratic immigration policy must be the result of evil or stupidity. “Well, they’re not stupid because anybody that can cheat on elections that good is not stupid,” Trump told rallygoers in Atlanta. “But I never really talked about the third reason because it’s so sinister, but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed.”

Trump has been blaming migrants for his political failures for years. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote and blamed it on millions of illegal voters. Incredibly, Trump claimed that he would have won deep blue California – a state he lost by 30 points and 4 million votes – if not for those improbably civic-minded migrants. Trump convened a special commission to investigate voter fraud, which fizzled without finding evidence of the conspiracy.

Conservative ideology as we knew it is dead.

Conspiracism is all.

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Judging by her 100,000-follower X account, Danielle Johnson was a typical astrology influencer. She chided Cancers to stop being chaotic and Tauruses to lay off the carbs. She burned candles, cast spells and peddled energy healing sessions.

It was your standard sunny apolitical pseudo-spiritual shtick, but her tone darkened abruptly in the days leading up to the solar eclipse.

Johnson started sharing antisemitic conspiracy theories and QAnon verbiage. She retweeted far-right conspiracy mogul Alex Jones, antivax loon Naomi Wolf and a Jew-hating flat-earther.

As an astrologer, Johnson was primed to believe that celestial bodies influence daily life, but this was different. She seemed to believe something terrible was coming and that real-life action was needed.

She begged her fellow spiritual healers to keep their people safe. On April 5, she tweeted, “WAKE UP WAKE UP THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE.” The coming eclipse, she said, was the epitome of spiritual warfare. It was time to pick a side.

In the early morning hours of eclipse day, Johnson plunged a knife into the heart of her boyfriend, threw her children from a speeding car, and plowed into a tree at a hundred miles an hour. Johnson is dead, as is her boyfriend and her infant daughter. We are left with grief and questions.

In light of her social media and the tarot cards strewn around the crime scene, investigators initially suspected that the apocalyptic anxiety may have been a factor in the killings, but now they say we’ll never know. Johnson and her boyfriend are dead and it’s hard to explain what went wrong. Neither Johnson nor her partner had a record of domestic violence. Johnson’s mother confirmed that her daughter had a history of postpartum depression.

Johnson’s case isn’t as clear-cut as that of Taylon Celestine who announced that God had commanded her to start shooting people because of the eclipse before she opened fire on I-10 in Florida, hitting two drivers.

Extreme apocalyptic rhetoric is everywhere. Most of us shrug it off and get on with our lives, minding our carbs and keeping the chaos in check, but some people are vulnerable. Maybe they’ve been spiritually or politically radicalized, maybe they’re suffering from mental illness.

Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, operatives like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, and clerics like demoted bishop Joseph Strickland flooded the zone with eclipse-related bulls—t. They spoke of martial law, demonic portals and the urgent need to repent before the judgment of God. Donald Trump routinely tells his followers that he is their retribution and promises to lead them in the Battle of Armageddon. This kind of talk has become so normalized it’s hard to draw causal connections between rhetoric and violence. That’s the point.

These far right eclipse influencers probably didn’t mean to incite violence — this time. The eclipse was just more low-effort content. They keep themselves rich and powerful by keeping their audience in a constant state of terror and rage. They’ll exploit whatever’s in the news to do it. Stoking this turmoil is useful because these people can be activated, like when the faithful were called to the Capitol on January 6 for “spiritual warfare” against the seat of American democracy.

Terrified true believers are a fertile field for stochastic terrorism. That’s when a demagogue with a huge platform demonizes an enemy knowing that in a country with any number of disturbed people and who knows how many guns, something terrible could easily happen.

The gym chain Planet Fitness has received bomb threats at 38 locations across the country after the anti-trans Twitter account LibsofTikTok (LoTT) put the establishment on blast for canceling the membership of a patron who photographed another guest in the women’s locker room and shared on to social media, accusing the person of being a man. Schools and hospitals have also been hit with bomb threats after negative attention from LoTT.

If someone follows through on one of these bomb threats, it will probably be impossible to prove that LoTT is to blame. That’s the nature of stochastic terrorism. It creates a climate of fear where people and businesses may not speak out for fear of being targeted.

It’s too late to help Danielle Johnson, or even to fully understand what drove her crime spree. But it’s not too late to repudiate the apocalyptic clout-chasing that she was tapped into.