What you've done here is called telescoping.

He said MAGA Republican, which means the portion of Republicans who describe themselves as MAGA Republicans, which means he hates at least 40% of the GOP.

When in reality he very specifically laid out the kinds of people he was referring to when he said MAGA Republicans, and made a point to say they are the fringe but carry outsized power.

Do better next time. You're smart enough to not use shitty fallacies.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Sep 2 2022 08:54pm

i want look further into this, no pun intended

wtf is telescoping

Telescoping is when you take an argument and blow it out of proportion by picking individual things to misrepresent one at a time.

So you could say something like

Biden said he wants to reduce inflation and businesses are the problem. That means he hates business and wants government to control things instead. That means he wants a full socialist state and hates capitalism. Capitalism is the only way you eat, so biden literally wants you to starve.

That's the extreme example anyway.

The smartest thing this guy has ever said.
Wasn't even close.

Sounds like an AI term


Science used to be cool

Yes, Biden praised them to draw contrast to Trump and his authoritarian supporters. Isn't that the point of the speech? That the majority of Republicans believe in democracy while Trump and the others don't?

As I've said before, Democrats aren't a monolith and plenty of Democrats have called the MAGA backing morons out. Those people are playing with fire and it could definitely bite them in the ass. However, I'm of the opinion that the Republicans are more at fault for not getting their house in order.

There are varying levels of support. You don't have to be the one who puts a gun in someone's face. You can also be the person who turns a blind eye or you can be the person who VOTES for people who put the gun in the faces of others. You of all people should know this given your nation's history. It's pretty clear that the vast majority of Republicans turn a blind eye and Biden is asking them to grow a pair and stand up to authoritarianism.

If Biden wanted to refer to a specific subset of Republicans, then Biden should have used a more precise term instead of a widely used umbrella term that like... half? of the Republican base identify with.

Also, it's not like he has shied away from labeling these (allegedly) extremist Republicans and their entire movement as, quote, "semi-facism". How are voters supposed to receive it when Biden calls the politics they support "semi-fascism"? If you support fascism, you are a fascist, right? So, there is really no other way for them to interpret Biden's words than to mean that Biden considers them (semi-)fascists too.






But that's the point of contention, isn't it? The vast majority of Republican voters disagree with the notion that Trump or his allies on Capitol Hill are a threat to democracy. Or they do, but think that Democrats are an even bigger threat.


What could they have done to get their house in order that wouldn't have ripped the party apart and handed Democrats supermajorities for at least two election cycles?


I understand the argument and even agree that the Republicans who are looking the other way are playing with fire, but so are Democrats when they prop up these extremists against mainstream Republicans in what will likely be a GOP-leaning year. Why should sane Republican voters feel bad about their own cynical political calculus and playing with fire (by not holding Trump accountable and trying to sweep Jan 6 under the rug) when they see Democrats engaging in similarly cynical and risky political calculus (putting authoritarian loons much closer to Congress while defeating Republicans who believed in democracy)?

Again: judge them by their actions, not their words. If the threat of the MAGA movement to American democracy was really as huge as Biden wants us to believe, Democrats would never support them with Democratic campaign funds, just to get a marginally more beatable general election opponent.

About the bolded part: you cannot seriously believe that Biden and his strategist genuinely expect his speech to make Republicans reconsider their vote. Anyone who's still siding with Trump and his Republicans after the past 6 years will surely not be swayed by the words of a Democratic president. This rhetoric is very transparently geared toward his own voters - he's trying to drive Democratic turnout by creating an existential threat that motivates his base.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 2 2022 10:07pm

Or you could listen to the speech.

Seriously this just comes off as being desparate. You are going out of your way to ignore the context so you can equivocate about what it means to be a MAGA Republican, when he spelled out exactly what he is referencing in the speech.

This is how essentialism rots your mind.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Sep 2 2022 10:19pm

Context matters indeed.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/25/biden-trump-philosophy-semi-fascism-00053831



Put 2+2 together and you have it: Biden respects "conservative" Republicans, disrespects "MAGA Republicans" and says that there are not many "real" Republicans anymore. The only logical conclusion is that he considers the majority of Republican elected officials to be of the MAGA brand - which he had just likened with semi-fascism.

So it's not a strawman that Biden called the MAGA movement semi-fascism and lumped it together with wide swaths of the Republican party a few days before his big speech in which he called out "MAGA Republicans" as a threat to democracy. But sure, he totally didn't mean the bulk of Republican voters, or elected officials, or the things they believe in... no no, we are supposed to believe that he was narrowly talking about just the most rabid TrueBelievers in the MAGA cause.